Film review

  • American Honey

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrea Arnold (2016)

    In his interview with Andrea Arnold in Sight & Sound (October 2016), Simran Hans writes as follows:

    ‘Each film is kind of where my psyche is at the time, and often through each film I’m trying to work something out that I don’t fully understand,’ she tells me, but snaps shut when I press her on what she was trying to figure out while making American Honey.  ‘I kind of know the answer to that but it’s so personal that I don’t know that I can actually say it,’ she says …

    Arnold takes plenty of time to work out whatever she’s working out in American Honey:  the film, at 163 minutes, is by some way the longest of her four features to date.  (They’ve been getting progressively longer but her third feature, the adaptation of Wuthering Heights, was a good half-hour shorter than this new one.)  American Honey is a rare spectacle but Arnold doesn’t tell us much more on screen than she does in interview.  This, in combination with the greatly excessive length, makes the movie frustrating and a bit tiring to sit through.

    Somewhere in Oklahoma, a teenage girl called Star (Sasha Lane) is in Walmart with two young children when she first sets eyes on Jake (Shia LaBeouf).  He invites Star to join his ‘mag crew’:  they travel from town to town, peddling magazine subscriptions from door to door.  It’s not an irresistible offer and Star doesn’t accept immediately – but she is immediately taken by Jake’s edgy come-on and her life as it is hasn’t much to recommend it.  In the opening scene of American Honey, Star and the two kids are seen retrieving a shrink-wrapped chicken from a dumpster.  After the Walmart sequence, we see her at home being pawed by an older man, who may or may not be her father.   Her young charges certainly aren’t Star’s kids:  she returns them to their mother (who could also be Star’s mother) once she decides to go on the road with Jake and his colleagues.

    Andrea Arnold goes along with them wholeheartedly.  She is enraptured not only by American landscapes that she’s experiencing for the first time but also by the travelling cast of youngsters, most of whom have never acted in a film before.  The newcomers include Sasha Lane, whom Arnold found ‘on a beach in Panama during spring break’, only a fortnight before the film went into production. (Arnold then tells Simran Hans in the S&S interview, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you what she was doing when I saw her’:  American Honey really is a top-secret movie.)   It’s not surprising that Lane caught Arnold’s eye.  This twenty-year-old has an unusual beauty – big dark eyes, a thick, truculent upper lip that gives her a look that’s often challenging and sometimes vulnerable.  Sasha Lane is a strong screen presence but it’s asking too much to expect her to carry this long film:  a tyro actress, she doesn’t shape her performance and the director doesn’t help her in this.  Andrea Arnold is so smitten with Lane and others as camera subjects that she seems to content just to watch.  Her laissez-faire direction makes the acting of the more experienced members of the cast – Shia LaBeouf especially but also Riley Keough, as jealous, manipulative Krystal, who heads up the mag crew – look like overacting.   Of the other first-timers, McCaul Lombardi makes the best impression, in the role of the sparky exhibitionist Corey.

    Arnold’s script was inspired by an account that she read in the New York Times of kids living and working as the characters in American Honey do.  Door-to-door selling isn’t, however, naturally conducive to exciting screen action: after Jake’s and Star’s opening pitch together, when he’s showing her the ropes, the film concentrates largely on the group dynamics and pecking order, on the erratic relationship between Star and Jake, and on Star’s brief encounters with a succession of other men.  Arnold has an eye for arresting compositions but isn’t so good at placing them in believable contexts.  The opening pitch is made at a house whose front door is opened by a pre-adolescent girl.  She obviously likes the look of Jake.  Her mother comes to the door to find out what’s going on and tells her to go back inside – to the friends that the girl has round.  Her daughter promptly obeys.  The mother (well played by Laura Kirk) is made fun of as a self-righteous Christian:  the fun consists in Jake stealing from under her nose, and in the daughter and her friends dancing provocatively in the garden, as the mother yells at them in vain to stop.  The dancing makes for a fine, comical image but it sharply contradicts, without explanation, the daughter’s doing as her mother tells her earlier in the scene.  Besides, the Christian mother is too narrow-minded and too houseproud to have let a pair looking like Jake and Star over the threshold in the first place.  (A female dance – this time cross-generational – was also a standout moment in Arnold’s second feature, Fish Tank:  it made its point over-explicitly but at least it made sense.)

    A more extended bit involves three Stetson-wearing, white-shirted, middle-aged men.  They stop in their car just as Star is running away from Jake, after the pair have had a falling out.  She accepts a lift from the cowboys and they take her back to a ranch.  While they prepare a barbecue, Star drinks mezcal.  She plunges into a swimming pool and gets one of the cowboys in the water too.  Jake turns up with a gun to break up the party and steal the men’s car.  This entire episode holds your attention:  Arnold and her cinematographer Robbie Ryan keep up a flow of absorbing things to look at.  The actors playing the Stetsons are good too but the writing of their roles is perfunctory.  What is their motivation in picking Star up?  They don’t obviously intend any harm.  Richard Brody in the New Yorker says they get Star drunk but that’s misleading:  she’s eager to drink and one of the men expresses concern at how much mezcal she’s downing.  Star’s subsequent scenes in a passenger seat – first with a pleasant family-man trucker who gives her a lift, later with an oil-rig worker who pays her for sex – carry more tension and clearer meanings.  But the cowboys seem to be in the film purely as facilitators of Arnold’s image-making.

    Richard Brody is right enough when he takes Andrea Arnold to task for not giving the young characters of the story sufficient voice and for thereby perpetuating the:

    ‘… cliché that afflicts many movies about poor people … they’re depicted as being poor in language, poor in thought – as if people who don’t have money talk about their lives any less, or any less well, than people who do.’

    As Brody says, Arnold opts in place of spoken words for sung ones:  she pours pop and rock songs onto the soundtrack.   When she talks vaguely in the S&S interview about ‘these kids coming from these fairly difficult backgrounds’, I assume Arnold’s referring to the kids she read about in the New York Times piece that was her starting point.  She gives no idea in the film of how her characters have been marginalised, of whether this was the result of different factors in different cases.

    Whatever those three aging cowboys may have had in mind, they observe Star’s behaviour at the ranch as if she was a curious new species.  Sasha Lane does have an intriguing animal quality about her and the natural life of the landscapes through which the story moves is a powerful motif.  A bear and a turtle both make important appearances; Jake does strategically-timed wolf impressions; but it’s the insect population that takes the lead.  Star has a striking compassion for the bugs:  not only would she not hurt a fly, she actually saves the life of a wasp.  (Wasp was the title of Andrea Arnold’s first film, which won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short for 2005.)  On the debit side, Star swallows the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle.

    Robbie Ryan’s lighting gives the often-changing locale a consistent lustre and dynamism.  Perhaps there’s more shaky hand-held camerawork than is necessary but the visuals are certainly American Honey‘s most eloquent feature. Arnold is so enthralled by the people and places she’s shooting that she gives an exultant charge to everything in the film:  even that shrink-wrapped chicken has a weird vitality.  In the closing minutes, Star walks into a lake and disappears under the water.  She’s had such an up-and-down time over the previous two-and-a-half hours that you wouldn’t be astonished if she drowned herself – not least because this would be a way of Andrea Arnold finishing off the movie, which has been threatening never to finish.  But – as in Red Road and Fish Tank – Arnold steps back from letting the worst happen.  This seems less of an evasion than it was in the earlier pictures, thanks to American Honey‘s persistent joy-of-being-alive-and-young quality.  Star emerges from the lake and we’re meant to conclude that she’s come of age.  This was not a suicide but a baptism.

    23 October 2016

  • I, Daniel Blake

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Loach (2016)

    Louise Osmond’s recent documentary Versus prejudiced me against I, Daniel Blake but it’s a strong and effective film – even as it also exposes Ken Loach’s ingrained limitations.  Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty make their political points largely through focusing on two individuals, both of whose stories are emotionally involving and dramatically compelling.  Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) is a fifty-nine-year-old Geordie.  A joiner by trade, he recently suffered a major heart attack and his doctors don’t consider him fit to return to work yet.  The ‘health professional’ who assesses his eligibility to receive Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) takes a different view, on the basis of Dan’s answers to a standard set of questions.  Pending an appeal against the ESA ruling, his only option for an income is Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA).  The conditions attached to JSA require Dan to spend a minimum number of hours each week seeking employment:  Catch-22 is that, if he’s offered a job, he’ll have to turn it down – on the advice of a consultant cardiologist, a physiotherapist and his GP.  Katie Morgan (Hayley Squires) is a young single mother of two small children.  They’ve recently moved from London to Newcastle because of a lack of social housing in the capital.  Katie doesn’t yet know her way round her new environment:  she gets on the wrong bus and arrives late for an appointment at the job centre.  As a result, she receives a ‘sanction’ – which means she won’t receive her benefits for the week ahead.  It’s at the job centre that Dan’s and Katie’s paths first cross, and they strike up a friendship.

    A mixture of kindliness and loneliness draws the widowed, childless Dan to Katie and her family.  He can get about and is able to do bits of DIY:  he helps Katie fix up the flat she’s just moved into.  He enjoys her company and that of her children, Daisy (Briana Shann) and Dylan (Dylan McKiernan).  Dan keenly misses his wife, whom he nursed through a long illness.  One way he remembers her is by playing ‘Sailing By’, which he tells Daisy was one of his wife’s favourite tunes.  (This is the music that introduces and concludes the BBC shipping forecast, just before Radio 4 closes down and as soon as it resumes in the early morning.  You naturally assume that Dan and his wife came to know ‘Sailing By’ through sleepless nights during her illness but Ken Loach and Paul Laverty don’t labour the point.)  The marine connection with his wife is reinforced by the small wooden fish that Dan fashions at home and makes into a mobile for Katie’s flat.  The fish delight Daisy in particular.  The relationship between Dan and Katie is persuasive, and the domestic scenes involving them and Katie’s kids are beautifully observed.

    Loach and Laverty use the unfairness and procedural absurdity of the current benefits system as their central means of exposing the dehumanising effects of austerity politics in today’s Britain.  The ESA assessor is literally a faceless bureaucrat:  we hear the interview before her and Dan  but don’t see it.  (The opposition of the disembodied voices intensifies the confrontation between them.  Dan’s increasing, witty exasperation is useless against the assessor’s petty imperturbability:  she grinds on with her checklist of questions, pausing only to tick Dan off for questioning the questions.)  Dan receives a letter confirming the outcome of the ESA assessment but isn’t allowed to initiate an appeal until he gets a telephone call telling him what the letter says – a call that takes weeks to arrive.  His patience exhausted, Dan resorts to action that is the film’s comic high point.  He spray-paints the wall of the job centre with the words, ‘I Daniel Blake demand my appeol [sic] date before I starve – and change the shite music on the phones!’  The police are called but no charges are brought against Dan and an appeal date materialises soon (at least in terms of screen time) afterwards.

    The last few words of the graffiti pick up another maddening and inhuman fact of modern life – the sense of not being listened to that’s reflected in the automated, your-call-is-important-to-us culture of companies and government agencies alike.  This sub-theme of I, Daniel Blake has a strongly generational flavour (as it also does at the start of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – not a Ken Loach-like movie in other ways), although it’s inflected too by Dan’s social class and line of work.  This yields a few good jokes.  Struggling with a computer for the first time, Dan remarks that the cursor has a ‘fucking apt name’.   Informed at the job centre that the Department for Work and Pensions is ‘digital by default’, Dan replies that he’s ‘pencil by default’.  There’s also a heavier side to this element:  Dan’s protest that ‘I’m a carpenter – I’ve never used a computer in my life!’ has a Luddite ring to it.  Perhaps the octogenarian Ken Loach is, through his protagonist, expressing a personal frustration with IT but you feel it’s the larger political connotations of Luddism that count for more.  Katie’s daughter Daisy’s mixture of bafflement and curiosity when Dan produces a cassette player (to play ‘Sailing By’) is just right but Adam Mars-Jones, reviewing the film in the TLS, may have a point in claiming that Loach and Paul Laverty:

    ‘… underestimate the centrality of life online to children of school age … a modern schoolchild without social media suffers something like ostracism by default.  Someone like Daisy, uprooted from the digital soil, wouldn’t even be able to stay in touch with her London friends.’

    Loach and Laverty’s answer to this would probably be that Katie doesn’t have the money to allow Daisy access to social media.  Whether or not this is true, it suits the film-makers’ purposes.  (There’s a kind of playroom Luddism in Daisy’s preference for the simple beauty of Dan’s homemade wooden fish.)

    A sequence in a food bank in I, Daniel Blake sees Ken Loach at his best, fusing documentary-style social commentary with piercing individual experience.   I took this to be an actual food bank and most of the people there – both the helpful women who run the place and the users of its supplies – to be non-actors.   The scene is absorbing – sobering but also encouraging, thanks to the woman who shows Dan and Katie round, and who is particularly likeable.  The scene becomes something else when Katie – who, as Dan knows, has been eating too little in order to keep her children properly fed – suddenly opens a ring-pull tin of baked beans, shoves her hand in and starts wolfing down the contents.  Hayley Squires plays the moment wonderfully, showing how Katie’s acute awareness of shaming herself in public is still not enough to subdue her hunger.  Loach’s camera maintains a discreet distance, as if to respect Katie’s shocked embarrassment.  Squires is admirably nuanced throughout, in spite of what her character has to do in later scenes (see below), and Dave Johns, best known as a stand-up comedian, is increasingly strong.  There are times early on when he seems to be overdoing Dan’s reactions to the mad bureaucratic tyranny he’s up against; but the hectic quality of the stress he’s feeling comes to make complete sense in the film’s climax.  Johns’s performance isn’t in the class of Vincent Lindon’s in The Measure of a Man, which covers some of the same ground as I, Daniel Blake, but he’s highly convincing.

    Pamela Hutchinson in Sight & Sound (November 2015) praises the ‘austerity palette of beiges, greys and blues’ which ‘evokes a life stripped to the essentials’.  I’m not sure how remarkable this is – you wouldn’t expect a day-glo colour scheme for the centre of Newcastle.  What was remarkable was to see this film and the visually extraordinary American Honey on consecutive days and to admire the versatility of Robbie Ryan, who photographed them both.  Adam Mars-Jones commends the colouring in similar terms, while noting too that ‘Strong colours make an appearance only when their absence would be glaring, in the lurid yellow-green of high-visibility workwear, the red highlighting on a final demand’.

    I, Daniel Blake proceeds sometimes clumsily along its predetermined route.  In view of Dan’s friendly relations with his neighbour China (Kema Sikazwe), it’s hard to believe he’d take as long as he does to avail himself of the younger man’s IT savvy and equipment.  Dan must delay, of course, in order for the film to get full mileage out of his own unfamiliarity with computers.   A bigger problem is the plot strand that illustrates how lawbreaking and the black economy may be the only means of escape from the knotty rules of the benefits system, and of making ends meet.  This part of the story sees Katie resort desperately first to shoplifting then to sex work.   Ivan (Micky McGregor), the minimart security man who catches her out, sends her to the store manager, who lets her off with a warning.  As Katie comes out of the manager’s office, Ivan gives her a bit of paper with his name and number on it.  He invites her to get in touch if she needs to earn extra money.  Ivan is a dual-purpose bad lot:  thoroughly unsympathetic when he apprehends Katie, he then turns instantly into her exploiter.

    When Dan discovers what Katie’s up to, he doesn’t try to reason with her in private (as he surely would do).  He goes round to the brothel, passing himself off to the madam as a customer, in order to confront Katie.  Ken Loach and Paul Laverty may well want to show Dickensian poverty in twenty-first century England but this garish, melodramatic scene is Victorian in the wrong way.   Beyond a sweet intervention by Daisy, the script is sketchy on how the breach between Dan and Katie is healed – it just has to be, in order for them to be together in the climactic appeal hearing.  Believing in Dan and that he’s deeply shocked by Katie’s ‘escort’ work makes it harder to believe he could easily forgive and forget it.  This is a good example of the inextricable tension between Loach and Laverty creating credible characters on the one hand and, on the other, pressing ahead with their underlying political agenda – they do this as implacably as the health professional with her ESA checklist.

    It’s no less a requirement of the schema that Dan dies from a heart attack, in order to expose the lethal heartlessness of the system that’s ensnared him.  He collapses and dies in the gents’, shortly before he’s due to go into the appeal hearing that his representative has just assured him he’s sure to win.  In this instance, though, the political anger and the human truth of I, Daniel Blake reinforce each other:  Dan’s death is as enraging as it’s upsetting.  At his funeral service, Katie reads the piece that Dan had prepared to speak at the appeal hearing and the words are a polemical highlight of the film.   Unlike the graffiti, they’re too polished to convince as words that Daniel Blake would have written but this isn’t the problem it might have been if he’d read them himself.  The very fact that it’s a voice other than his own speaking the words somehow helps to validate them as the film’s political testament (and it’s rather appropriate that they’re spoken in a church).  Hayley Squires’s skilful, sensitive delivery helps a lot too.

    In an interview with Radio Times in the week of the UK release of I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach deplored the ‘fake nostalgia’ of television period dramas, epitomised by Downton Abbey:

    ‘This rosy vision of the past, it’s a choice broadcasters make … Don’t bother your heads with what’s going on now, just wallow in fake nostalgia.  It’s bad history, bad drama.  It puts your brain to sleep.’

    While it’s hard to disagree with the thrust of Loach’s criticism, it’s no less difficult to ignore his own capacity for ‘rosy visions’ of the past and the present.  The Spirit of ’45, even though much of it comprises news film of the period, expresses an idealised view of Britain at the end of World War II.  In I, Daniel Blake, you can’t help noticing the absence of racial tensions in Ken Loach’s Tyneside:  there’s no suggestion that the area’s economically dispossessed believe they’re suffering the consequences of increased immigration.  It was the combination of the results in Newcastle and Sunderland that gave the first, strong indications of which way the vote was going to go in this June’s EU referendum.  By then, of course, Loach’s film was in the can and had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but I suspect that, even if he’d made it a year later, he’d have turned a blind eye to the reasons so many working-class voters supported Brexit.

    Although I, Daniel Blake, like much of Loach’s work, is angrily clear-sighted in some ways, it also reflects his sentimental and tendentious tunnel vision.   With one exception, the staff at the job centre are presented as unkindly inflexible and benighted (and the exception gets into trouble with her line manager for deviating from the rulebook).  There’s no sympathy shown for these people’s being stuck in tough, unrewarding jobs.  It’s hard too to see as accidental the fact that all the obstructive people that Dan and Katie encounter are white.   If this is Ken Loach’s way of illustrating his belief that a multi-racial society is an absolutely good thing, it’s counterproductive.  By refusing to let non-white characters have negative qualities, he denies them the human possibilities extended to their white counterparts:  he’s guilty, in effect, of racial discrimination.   And there is, as usual, the nagging question of who Loach thinks his audience is.  It’s not simply a matter of preaching to the converted.  This is a film-maker who wants his work to drive political change yet he must know that few of those who buy tickets for I, Daniel Blake will be Tory policy-makers or members of social classes C2, D or E.  When Dan sprays his message on the job centre wall, a drunken Scotsman embraces him euphorically.  On the opposite side of the street, passers-by, including a giggling hen party, gather to watch and applaud.  Perhaps it’s the fault of the TV schedulers who put ‘brains to sleep’ but this is as close as these people will get nowadays to a Ken Loach film.

     

    22 October 2016

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