Film review

  • The Light Between Oceans

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Derek Cianfrance (2016)

    The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance’s previous film, had (unconvincing) pretensions to being a modern Greek tragedy.  There are lofty touches in Cianfrance’s latest too, which is set in Australia, mostly in the 1920s.  The melancholy, withdrawn Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender), recently returned from action in the Great War, takes a job as a lighthouse-keeper at Janus Rock, named for its dual aspect between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  (Janus Island is a real place off the coast of Western Australia although it didn’t in fact get its name until 1955.)  The pivotal event in The Light Between Oceans occurs when a rowing boat, containing a dead man and a live baby girl, washes up near the lighthouse.  It seems highly unlikely the baby would have made it through this ocean voyage when the adult male didn’t:  the only alternative to dismissing her survival as ridiculous is to accept it as a mysterious fact and the baby Anadyomene as kin to survivors in Shakespeare’s late plays.

    Tom Sherbourne weds Isabel Graysmark (Alicia Vikander) in 1921.  She suffers two miscarriages in the first years of their marriage.  Fearing she’ll never be able to have a child of her own, Isabel pleads with her husband to let her keep the baby the sea has brought them.  Tom refuses at first – he knows it’s his duty to report full details of the discovery to the authorities – but he capitulates to Isabel.  He buries the man’s body and the couple raise the child, whom they name Lucy, as their own.  Shortly before Lucy’s christening on the mainland, Tom sees a woman in the churchyard.  She is kneeling by a gravestone, which bears the names of a man and a baby lost at sea on the very day that the boat washed up at Janus Rock.  The baby’s original name was Grace.  Tom keeps his discovery a secret from Isabel but, three years later, the Sherbournes meet Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz) and her sister Gwen (Emily Barclay) at a ceremony commemorating an anniversary of the lighthouse.  They get into conversation with Gwen, who explains Hannah’s tragedy.  The truth becomes clear to the distraught Isabel.

    By this point, only the most optimistic viewers will still be entertaining hopes of substantial connection with classical mythology or Shakespeare:  it’s become clear that the unconvincing storyline is not a means of exploring rich and strange themes but merely a matter of narrative convenience.  We learn, in verbal explanations supported by visual-aid flashbacks, that Hannah’s husband Frank (Leon Ford) was subject to anti-German prejudice in the aftermath to World War I; after an argument with Hannah, he jumped into a boat and went to sea with the newborn baby.  As you do.  It’s hard to believe in the first place that the professionally conscientious Tom would give in to Isabel about burying the corpse and keeping Lucy – that he doesn’t suggest to his wife that they can try again for children.  (There’s no hint they ever do try.)  It’s harder still to accept that a man with Tom’s capacity for keeping his own counsel would, after seeing the gravestone inscription, risk intensifying Hannah’s distress by sending her an anonymous letter, which tells her that her husband’s dead but her baby’s alive and well cared for.  In view of Tom’s line of work, the fact that Hannah’s wealthy father (Bryan Brown) is some kind of sponsor of the lighthouse and their regular contact with Isabel’s parents on the mainland, it’s surprising the Roennfeldts’ sad story hasn’t come to the Sherbournes’ attention sooner.

    Unlike Derek Cianfrance’s three previous dramatic features, this new one is based not on an original screenplay which he wrote or co-wrote but on a different author’s work.  The Light Between Oceans was the best-selling debut novel of M L Stedman and published in Australia in 2012.  This may be unfair to Stedman but there’s a rising sense of mismatch between the daft plot and the seriousness with which Cianfrance treats it.  Anthony Lane in the New Yorker describes the film as ‘oddly old-fashioned’.  It certainly needs to be more thoroughly old-fashioned:  a Hollywood treatment of this kind of melodrama a few decades back would have gone with the grain of the source material, instead of straining fruitlessly for emotional depth.   There are awesome seascapes, photographed by Adam Arkapaw, and an Alexandre Desplat score that suggests surging passions but Cianfrance cleaves continually to creating a human tale that’s smaller and tougher, and at odds with these other elements.  The depth of characterisation of two of the three main actors serves to expose rather than conceal the story’s improbabilities and evasions.

    Rachel Weisz is particularly strong but the reality she gives to Hannah’s grief makes it a worse omission that she’s denied the opportunity to rail at the Sherbournes for what they’ve done to her life – especially since Lucy-Grace (Florence Clery), when she’s returned to Hannah, understandably wants Isabel back.  Tom feels guilty at having survived the war when so many others didn’t and that he is bound to pay for the added good fortune of loving and living with Isabel.  Michael Fassbender is almost too convincing as a man who expects the worst to happen; at least this ensures that we share Tom’s experience of rare moments of pleasure or high spirits as an unexpected gift – when Isabel first brings him out of his shell as they sit and talk, or when Tom plays games with Lucy.   The film ends with an unexpected reunion between the late-middle-aged Tom and the adult Lucy-Grace (Caren Pistorius, confirming the good impression she made in Slow West), who now has a child of her own.  The widowed Tom, though no longer a lighthouse-keeper, still lives in complete seclusion:  Fassbender, with the help of some fine aging make-up, is especially convincing in this epilogue.  As in The Danish Girl, Alicia Vikander switches quite abruptly from initial girlish charm to all-out suffering.  The former is nicely done but Vikander doesn’t create much connection between the two versions of Isabel.   When she pleads with Tom that they keep the baby, it would be good to be reminded that this is the same girl who, earlier in the story, urged Tom – with the same surprising and wholehearted impulsiveness – to marry her.  There’s no such reminder:  Alicia Vikander has by now changed tack to tragic mode.   She’s an unexpectedly good runner, however – she proves it in a couple of sprints from the lighthouse to the seashore.

    Each of the three big European actors deploys an Australian accent that might kindly be described as restrained.  The real thing is supplied by a supporting cast whose naturalistic playing is often impressive.  Jane Menelaus and Garry McDonald, as Isabel’s parents, are excellent:  the dynamics of the dinner-table conversation at the Graysmarks’ home, when Tom visits for the first time, are beautifully achieved by Derek Cianfrance.   Even the actors playing law officers and others who bring Tom Sherbourne to ‘justice’ are less crudely vengeful than you’d expect.  There are plenty of talented people involved in this movie but their taste and discretion are ill-suited to the task in hand.  Asked how she can find it in her heart to forgive the Sherbournes, Hannah recalls her late husband’s reply, when she asked him how he could forgive the locals for their racist abuse:  you need forgive only once; you have to remind yourself to resent every day.  This appealing idea is so patently untrue that even Frank Roennfeldt forgets about it when he makes the fateful decision to row out to sea.  We seem meant to accept it, nevertheless, as the uplifting moral of the story of The Light Between Oceans.    This might have been a more successful film if more of those involved in making it had been infected by the hokey shamelessness that shaped Frank’s motto.

    3 November 2016

  • Weiner

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg (2016)

    This is the latest high-profile documentary of recent years to end up with a story dramatically different from what the film-makers expected when shooting began.  (The Queen of Versailles and The Armstrong Lie are others in the series.)  Anthony Weiner was elected for seven consecutive terms as a Democrat Congressman in New York before his resignation in 2011, in the light of a sex scandal that involved his sending lewd photos of himself from his public Twitter account to women he’d met online.  Weiner launched a comeback by running for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York in 2013; Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg started making a fly-on-the-wall documentary about his mayoral campaign.  Weiner is riding high in the polls until the emergence of evidence of his online sexual activity after his resignation from Congress.  His poll ratings plummet; he’s encouraged by some advisers to pull out of the race; but he keeps going to the bitter end.  (He finished fifth, with a measly 4.9% of the vote, in the primary election poll topped by Bill de Blasio.)  And Kriegman and Steinberg – except for just a couple of occasions when Weiner asks them to leave the room – keep the cameras rolling.  One of their questions prompts him to remark, with witty irritation, that he didn’t expect flies on the wall to be so talkative – but Kriegman and Steinberg seem as surprised by their continuing access to behind-the-scenes Weiner as most viewers of their film are likely to be.  Late on, we hear Kriegman’s voice ask, ‘Why have you let me film this?’  There’s no direct response to the question from the leading man.  Weiner, in effect, invites the audience to supply its own answers.

    Anthony Weiner is evidently a narcissist-masochist and foolish in ways that only a clever person can be.  He’s determined to win arguments and highly satisfied when he does so, without seeming aware of quite how Pyrrhic his victories are.  With the new sexting firestorm raging, he does a live television interview with the political journalist Lawrence O’Donnell and wipes the floor with him.  Back home, Weiner watches the interview on playback and delightedly analyses his triumph – although the whole context of the exchange with O’Donnell seems inevitably damaging and Weiner’s disputative relish makes matters worse.  On the campaign trail, he gets into an argument with a heckler in a Jewish deli.  Weiner overpowers this adversary only in terms of noisy invective:  he shocks the other man by the force of his anger but the latter, sticking quietly and doggedly to his conviction that someone who’s done what Weiner’s done shouldn’t be running for public office, is rather impressive.  We hear as a postscript to this showdown a claim on a news report that what started it was a sotto voce racist insult from the other man, who jeered at Weiner for being ‘married to an Arab’.   If that’s true, you think better of Weiner’s hot-headed reaction – as a rare instance of his trying, however cack-handedly, to do right by his wife, Huma Abedin.

    Abedin, born in Michigan to parents who emigrated to the US from India and Pakistan (so ‘Arab’ is pushing it), is the woman of whom her boss Hillary Clinton said that, if she’d had a second daughter, ‘Huma would be that daughter’.  Weiner, twelve years his wife’s senior, launches his mayoral campaign with Huma at his side:  she tells the media they’ve managed to get through a difficult time in their marriage and that she believes her husband is the best man to run New York.   Weiner expects Abedin to continue devoting herself to the role of loyal candidate spouse regardless – of the revelations that derail his campaign, of her own busy political job as Clinton’s right-hand woman.  (The year 2013 may have been an intermission between the end of Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State and the launch of her Presidential campaign but Abedin was still very active at the time, in work for the Clinton Foundation etc.)  Weiner’s determination to keep telling his wife what she ought to be doing gives added poignancy to Huma Abedin’s long-suffering, increasingly silent dignity. (The closing legends on the screen inform us that she and Weiner separated after further sexting revelations came to light around the time the film was completed.)

    Weiner remains similarly in charge in discussions with his shocked campaign staff.  He appears to see it as his leadership role not only to issue instructions but also to raise spirits, even though he’s the cause of demoralisation. He has a habit of raising a thorny subject then sliding away from it, as if articulating an issue is as good as wrestling with it personally.  He muses on whether people are drawn to political careers to compensate for an inability to sustain satisfying close relationships – to ‘make contact’ with people – in their private lives.  He suggests at one point that what drives him to engage in online sex is the same part of his make-up that enables him to weather the ensuing scandals.  He doesn’t say what this quality is although it’s hard to see it as anything other than pathological self-interest.  At the end of Weiner, in spite of everything, he’s still playing to the camera.

    Asked to summarise the reasons for his downfall, Weiner replies, ‘I’ve a funny name, I lied, and they don’t do nuance’ – ‘they’ being the news media.  It’s not clear how press and TV ‘nuance’ would have helped in this case but he’s right about the other two things; and the bizarrely apt names in the story – names you’d never believe if this were fiction – don’t end with his own.  Weiner sexted in late 2012 and early 2013 under the alias Carlos Danger but the correspondent/co-respondent in the affair really is called Sydney Leathers.  Although she’s physically imposing (to put it mildly), you’re not convinced of her reality even after you’ve seen Leathers.  Her human reality, that is:  she’s irrefutable as a tabloid self-creation and self-publicist.  She may have the look of a cartoon dominatrix but Leathers presents herself as a wronged woman, though not in the traditional sense.  Her passion is for politics and Anthony Weiner was her political hero; her tragedy was the discovery that her hero’s anatomical features included ‘feet of clay’.   In fact, Leathers is hugely pleased with herself:  the film achieves a startling polarity between her grinning face and Huma Abedin’s stricken one.

    Kriegman and Steinberg open with a montage of archive film that speeds us through its subject’s political rise and fall up to 2011.  The exaggeratedly rapid editing and the music on the soundtrack suggest a madcap comedy to follow.  The film is sometimes grimly funny, especially in the climax, on the day of the Democratic mayoral primary.  Huma-less Weiner seems to spend much of the day wheeling their young son’s buggy round New York streets:  the child appears to symbolise the only conventionally endearing thing the candidate may still have going for him.  As night falls, Sydney Leathers attempts to confront Weiner in person, with a camera crew in tow.  His team gets wind of what’s afoot and farcically frenetic efforts to prevent the encounter happening eventually succeed.   The symbolic charge of this episode is stronger even than that of the child in the buggy:  Weiner’s nemesis arrives from cyberspace to run him to earth in the real world.

    Weiner made depressing viewing, largely as a result of when I saw it.  The film was screened in British cinemas this summer but I watched it in the BBC 4 Storyville slot, two days before the Presidential election.  The emails that sparked the renewed FBI investigation announced in late October were reportedly sent by Huma Abedin and obtained from a device belonging to Anthony Weiner.  (As it happened, the news that the FBI had finished trawling through these emails and found no reason to change its earlier conclusions about Hillary Clinton broke on the BBC website a matter of minutes before Weiner aired.)  Donald Trump makes only the briefest of cameo contributions, via a news clip (‘We don’t want perverts in New York!’), but I found him haunting the film – because anxiety about the Presidential election was uppermost in my mind, and because of resonances between Trump and Anthony Weiner.  Those resonances include similarities and differences between them.  Both are native New Yorkers with pejoratively suitable surnames.   Weiner’s political views, as summarised in this film at any rate, are as appealing as Trump’s are appalling.   Many Trump supporters felt the ‘You can do anything’ tape didn’t matter and it wasn’t long before he and his team were diluting the expressions of regret:  you wondered if they were worried contrition might actually be a vote-loser.  Kriegman and Steinberg show a few Weiner supporters angrily insisting that what the candidate does in his private life is irrelevant to his public one.  We watch other people looking as if they enjoy seeing him – and being seen with him – in the street:  now he’s so notorious, Weiner is a bigger celebrity.  This comparison shouldn’t be pushed too far, of course.  If only Donald Trump had received 4.9% of the vote on 8 November 2016.

    6 November 2016

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