Film review

  • War on Everyone

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Michael McDonagh (2016)

    After seeing an advert on television for War on Everyone, I was a bit shocked to discover that John Michael McDonagh was responsible for it.  After seeing the whole film, I still feel the same way.  The poster for this crime comedy has the strapline ‘Bad cop, worse cop.’   The two principals, detectives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are partners in crime as well as in crime prevention.   Their exasperated boss (Paul Reiser) warns them they’re on the verge of losing their jobs, thanks to corrupt practices and generally outrageous behaviour.  The movie’s trailer includes the pair deliberately driving their car into a man dressed in Marcel Marceau costume.  They do so in order to satisfy curiosity as to whether a mime makes a sound if he gets hit by a car.  The cops’ names are Bob and Terry (which may or – more likely – may not be a nod to The Likely Lads).   They’re an odd couple of grouchy family man and loose-cannon lone wolf.  Bob (Michael Peña) is married with two kids.  Terry (Alexander Skarsgård) is addicted to drink, drugs and Glen Campbell songs.

    McDonagh’s debut feature The Guard (2011) was also a cop-behaving-badly comedy.  Part of the comedy came from the mismatch between the rural Irish setting and other major elements of the piece:  the abundant political and professional incorrectness of Brendan Gleeson’s Garda; the arrival on the scene of Don Cheadle’s smooth FBI special agent; the mega-bucks scale of the drug-trafficking these two join forces to thwart.  War on Everyone lacks any such incongruity: there’s no collision between characters and context in a crime story set in New Mexico, especially after Breaking Bad.  McDonagh’s first film also featured a discussion, among the members of the drug ring, about Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas and the distinction between psychopath and sociopath.  That exchange was virtually a one-off in The Guard:  in War on Everyone, nearly every significant character – however vile or insensitive they may otherwise be – has intellectual or literary pretensions or, at least, insists on linguistic precision.  Philosophy graduate Bob and his wife (Stephanie Sigman) routinely discuss Simone de Beauvoir et al.  Terry is keen to establish whether it’s he or Bob who’s pronouncing ‘Al Qaeda’ correctly.  (This makes for a moderately funny sub-‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’ routine.)

    The epidemic tendency to assert cultural credentials reaches a climax in a scene in which the detectives’ main antagonist, the suave, depraved ‘Lord’ James Mangan (Theo James), asks a man called Pádraic Power (David Wilmot) if he’s heard of Yukio Mishima. The question is pertinent because his lordship is about to end Pádraic’s life by beheading him with a large knife.  Before he does so, Lord Mangan explains to his victim how Mishima died by seppuku; before giving that explanation, he’s decided contemptuously that Pádraic won’t know about Mishima because ‘you’re Irish, aren’t you?’  That line might suggest John Michael McDonagh has a chip on his shoulder about his roots (he and his brother Martin, born to Irish parents, grew up in London).  It seems more likely that the recurring cultural oneupmanship in McDonagh’s screenplay is a way of reassuring himself that War on Everyone, beneath ‘its thin veneer of hipness and cynicism’, isn’t ‘smug, obnoxious, conventional and contemptible … a film with no redeeming features’ (both quotes from Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman).

    The garish violence of this movie, combined with the calculated offensiveness meted out by the people in it, makes it sometimes hard to stomach.  McDonagh may enjoy watching this kind of stuff and he seems to stage the set pieces well enough but War on Everyone isn’t just disappointing after Calvary.  It’s baffling too, such is the strength of McDonagh’s anxiety to convince himself and his audience that we’re not simply lapping up vicious swill.  For the most part, his verbal wit doesn’t get him out of the hole he’s dug himself.   The politically and racially incorrect cracks are often no more than did-he-really-say-that shock effects (although one or two of the visual jokes are better:  I liked a tennis doubles sequence, in which one of a burka-wearing pair, after hitting the winning shot, does a fist pump).  There are plenty of other things to dislike.  Alexander Skarsgård, more than Michael  Peña, is on the receiving end of potentially disfiguring violence:  it’s as if the director wants – or thinks the viewer wants? – Skarsgård to pay for his good looks but the facial damage turns out to be superficial and heals quickly.  (Brian Helgeland subjected Mel Gibson to something similar, and with the same result, in a 1999 crime movie called Payback.)  At the same time, McDonagh looks to be developing an appetite for physical extraordinariness of a less conventionally pleasing kind – in the form of, for example, Bob’s hugely obese elder son.  There are a few echoes of Todd Solondz in this film, both in some of the human faces and bodies on display and in details like a dog enthusiastically licking Terry’s bloody face.

    Yet John Michael McDonagh is, almost in spite of himself here, an interesting film-maker and the movie does have redeeming features.  The mile-high Alexander Skarsgård and the short, almost square Michael Peña are an amusing physical pairing. (Even with the Neanderthal stoop Skarsgård has devised for the role, Peña seems to come up to slightly above his waist.)  They’re also good actors, able to suggest there’s more to Terry and Bob than their gross behaviour.  Bob’s taste for talking philosophy makes it easier for Peña to illustrate this but Skarsgård does so too, on an emotional level.  Terry’s soulfulness comes through in the scenes with his latest squeeze (Tessa Thompson, in a good performance) and, especially, in his passion for Glen Campbell.  This element probably works so well because of McDonagh’s particular feel for pop songs with yearning melodies and poignant lyrics, heralded by his use of ‘New World in the Morning’ in Calvary.   A song like ‘Wichita Lineman’ has these qualities in spades.

    Another Campbell song points up a persistent theme in McDonagh’s work:

    ‘Galveston, oh, Galveston
    I am so afraid of dying …’

    McDonagh seems horrified and intrigued by death.  He allows even the appalling Lord Mangan an arrestingly candid conversation with his children about what happens – what, in Mangan’s view, doesn’t happen – post-mortem.  While it would be daft to pretend that McDonagh’s morbidity justifies the lavish mayhem he puts on the screen, it does at least remind you that he’s troubled by the dying or dead bodies.  I was in two minds as to whether to go to this film:  I know little and care less about bad cop movies but I’d been taken with The Guard and very impressed by Calvary.  Because I had a few hours between London Film Festival screenings of La La Land and Toni Erdmann, I decided to spend them at War on Everyone.  The picture is, to a large extent, indefensible.  But after coming out of La La Land dreading Damien Chazelle’s next trick, I came out of War on Everyone impatient for what John Michael McDonagh does next.

    8 October 2016

  • La La Land

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Damien Chazelle (2016)

    Jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) can’t believe it when would-be actress Mia (Emma Stone) tells him she’s never seen Rebel Without a Cause.  They arrange, as their next date, to go to a screening at a Los Angeles picture house.  Mia is delayed (more of that later) and misses the start but she and Sebastian are both enjoying Rebel when the film breaks down – well, it is an old movie!  Undaunted, the couple drive out to the Griffith Observatory – located on Mount Hollywood, commanding a fine view of downtown LA, and the setting for two famous sequences in Rebel Without a Cause.  In the Observatory’s planetarium, Mia and Sebastian dance and float fantastically into the starry firmament.  This bit in La La Land looks set to become famous in its own right and Damien Chazelle’s ‘Comedy, Drama, Musical’ (the movie’s IMDB categorisation) is already an ante-post favourite for the 2017 Oscars.   The sequence at the Observatory epitomises La La Land, what’s charming critics and festival audiences about it, and why I find the film vexing.

    Sebastian and Mia are falling in love, it’s some enchanted evening on Mount Hollywood, why shouldn’t they be literally swept off their feet into a heavenly dance?  Because – in the cine-history world within which La La Land exists (it has no life beyond that world) – this is the wrong place for euphoria.  The first episode at the Observatory in Rebel Without a Cause describes a high-school trip to the planetarium, where James Dean and the other kids hear a lecture from a space scientist:  he calmly but chillingly describes how the Earth will eventually, inevitably die.  (The scientist’s voice is just getting to this when the film of Rebel goes phut in La La Land.)  The second episode is the climax to the movie:  the Sal Mineo character barricades himself inside the Observatory and, when he eventually emerges, is shot dead by the police.  The connotations of the place, as it features in Nicholas Ray’s picture, are, in other words, bleak.  Sebastian in La La Land is, in matters of jazz, nothing if not a purist; as a cinemagoer, he’s evidently less discriminating.  A movie is somewhere you go for a good time and the settings of a ‘classic’ movie – even when unhappy things occur in them – are Elysium.  More often than not, Sebastian is a miserable fellow but silver-screen stardust makes a blithe spirit of him or, at least, turns him to jelly.  Damien Chazelle probably shares his hero’s fond enthusiasm for Hollywood past but Chazelle is also canny and clever:  he knows he’s far from alone and he knows how to work the audience.

    It’s refreshing for a picture to come along that demands to be seen on a big cinema screen but isn’t an action or sci-fi blockbuster.  The last (non-animated) hit musical devised directly for the screen was Moulin Rouge! but that, as a jukebox musical, could hardly be termed ‘original’.  Against this background, it’s not surprising that Chazelle’s film is being viewed as a kind of miracle.  Its success will be welcome if it encourages the creation of other musicals; if that does happen, though, it’s to be hoped they amount to more than this formidably assured and artful recycling.  I didn’t try for a ticket for La La Land when booking for this month’s London Film Festival opened:  it was already clear from its reception at Venice and Toronto that the movie was going to be a big deal once it was released (December in the US, January in Britain) – there was nil risk of missing out on it.  Then, on the opening day of the LFF, an email arrived announcing further seats would be available for the upcoming Saturday morning screening at the Leicester Square Odeon.  I decided to apply for a ticket and am not sorry I did:  I didn’t enjoy the experience but it would have been worse seeing La La Land once the awards season is underway and it’s officially all the rage.

    Damien Chazelle wrote and directed Whiplash, only his second feature, with scary confidence:  it was only to be expected his confidence would increase in the light of Whiplash‘s success.  In an early scene in La La Land, Mia is in the bathroom of the apartment she shares with several other girls.  She wipes the steam from the bathroom mirror – not casually but in a way that draws attention to what a cute, deft detail Chazelle has devised.  The supply of curlicues like this is relentless; for this viewer, their effect was always distancing and often alienating.   This movie is very explicitly preconceived.  Chazelle has shot the musical numbers using 1950s-style CinemaScope:  in case you don’t notice this – and in order to get the audience immediately into an I-❤-movies frame of mind – the word ‘CinemaScope’ is emblazoned across the screen at the very start of the film.  La La Land is set in the present day and one of Mia’s and Sebastian’s romantic numbers is aborted by a mobile phone ringing.  It’s an apt, even charming, modern touch but Chazelle plays characteristically fast and loose with mobiles to suit his immediate needs.  When the couple’s outing to Rebel Without a Cause turns out to clash with a dinner date Mia had forgotten about and can’t get out of, she’s no more able to make quick contact with Sebastian than her counterpart in a movie musical of half a century ago would have been.  This allows her eventual escape from the restaurant and dash through the streets to the cinema to be staged in the traditional way.  (Later on, Mia, acting and romantic hopes in tatters, has returned to her family home in Boulder City, Nevada.  The phone rings in Sebastian’s LA apartment, where he’s now alone:  it’s a casting agent on the line and she wants to speak to Mia.  The agent asks Sebastian not if Mia has a mobile but to pass on a message if he sees her.  He drives to Boulder City.)

    I stayed for only a few minutes of the Q&A that followed the LFF screening.  I hadn’t intended to stay for any of it and was in the gents’ when I heard the gales of cheering and applause that welcomed the ‘surprise guest’ whom Damien Chazelle had promised in his introduction would be joining him on stage once the film was over.  Curiosity – as to which one of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling had materialised – got the better of me.   (It was Gosling.)  I went back into the auditorium just in time to hear Chazelle explaining how important it was to him for the film to be ‘grounded in real people’.  This is just what La La Land is not:  it’s substantially artificial, intermittently real on the surface.  Mia and Sebastian are required components of a Hollywood price-of-fame story.  This is disguised by some naturalistic acting and a few passages of Chazelle’s dialogue, but you’re always aware of the subterfuge.

    Sebastian accepts an offer from an old friend, Keith (John Legend), to join his mainstream jazz combo.  Although he has mixed feelings about going on the road to play a type of music he doesn’t believe in, Sebastian soon finds himself earning money as he’s never done before.  He takes a one-night break from touring and comes back to LA to prepare a surprise romantic supper for Mia:  the well-written, well-played argument between them that overwhelms the occasion introduces a welcome asperity to proceedings for a few minutes.  The argument is one of the stations of the cross in this type of story, nevertheless – so too, later on, is Mia’s crucial audition, which will transform her immediately from nobody to major film actress.  The film’s catchy title perfectly captures both its geographical and its world-of-make-believe settings; and the counter to some of my objections to La La Land will be that it’s a ‘fairytale’.  But that doesn’t square with Chazelle’s professed determination to make a movie ‘grounded in real people’ – and, when he makes this claim, he’s well aware of what his leads bring to the party.

    Many of the audience for the LFF screening of La La Land looked to be in their twenties and the youthfulness of the main contributors to the film could be important in ensuring it’s a hit with this age group.  Damien Chazelle is thirty-one; Ryan Gosling, although he’s been a star for nearly a decade now, is still only in his mid-thirties; Emma Stone is twenty-seven.  For plenty of people, the modernity of the two stars – in terms of their public personas and their acting styles – will be enough to give their characters contemporary credibility.  Stone, who is being tipped for the Best Actress Oscar for her performance, is endlessly capable and likeably resourceful.  She’s especially strong in Mia’s audition sequences (there are several) and Chazelle really showcases the one that will change Mia’s life.  Ryan Gosling’s air of arrogant dissatisfaction gives Sebastian’s early scenes a semblance of grit.  His flair for comedy serves him well in sequences like the one in which Sebastian is resentfully plinking out a medley of Christmas favourites on the piano. On the whole, though, Gosling’s and Stone’s acting turns out to be perfectly attuned to the spirit of La La Land:  highly accomplished yet synthetic.  Except for Mia and Sebastian, characters tend to be dispensed with once they’ve served their often one-scene purpose. (The film seems much more indifferent to minor characters than the musicals on which it draws.)  J K Simmons has an honorary cameo as the manager of the bar where Sebastian plays the Christmas medley.  Rosemarie DeWitt is wasted as the hero’s sister.

    The dichotomy that La La Land presents between authentic and adulterated jazz – between Sebastian’s artistic idealism and Keith’s hollow commercialism – also struck me as phony.  (It reminded me of Richard Brody’s contempt for Damien Chazelle’s definition of echt jazz drumming in Whiplash:  ‘The protagonist, Andrew Neiman, [is] nineteen and idolizes Buddy Rich.  Buddy Rich?  A loud and insensitive technical whiz, a TV personality, not a major jazz inspiration …’)  The ‘bad’ jazz played by Keith’s combo didn’t sound to me like jazz at all:  I actually quite liked it.  (Not as much, though, as a supposedly hopeless rendition of A-ha’s ‘Take on Me’, early in the film, by a band hired to provide the entertainment at a Hollywood poolside party – with Sebastian on keyboards.)  The tolerability to me of Keith’s music made me wonder if the ‘good’ (boring) jazz Sebastian plays might actually be ‘bad’ to jazz aficionados.  The best of the original songs composed for the film by Justin Hurwitz achieve, through repetition, a thin wistfulness.

    The film comprises five sections.  The first four are consecutive seasons, from winter one year to autumn the next. The final section is winter five years later. Mia:  now an international movie star, makes a trip back to LA with her (non-Sebastian) husband and infant daughter.  A traffic jam, a brief echo of the one that supplies La La Land ‘s bombastic and gruesome opening number, prevents her getting to a film premiere.  She and her husband decide to get a drink and have dinner instead and find themselves in the crepuscular basement of ‘Seb’s’, the jazz bar that Sebastian always longed for:  the sign on the entrance has the logo that Mia designed for the club of his dreams when dreams were all the couple had.  As he takes to the stage, Sebastian catches sight of Mia in the audience.  It’s only their eyes that meet but this is enough to generate a pyrotechnical what-might-have-been episode:  a high-speed summary of the relationship that could have developed if one of their first brief encounters had gone differently.  Then ‘reality’ resumes; Mia walks out of the club and Sebastian’s life forever.  Both have got what they wanted professionally but not the person they love.  (In order to make the position emphatically clear, Mia has married a pointlessly handsome suit (Tom Everett Scott).)

    There’s a potentially interesting element to the love story:  what happens when a relationship, dependent in large part on a couple’s assumption that they’ll continue to be frustrated in their ambitions, is threatened by unexpected success?  Damien Chazelle chooses not to explore this theme, however.  Success is merely useful to him as a device for driving the lovers apart: first when Sebastian is on the road with Keith’s combo while Mia is preparing her one-woman stage show that hardly anyone goes to see (except for a big-time talent-spotter); then once Mia goes to shoot a movie in Paris.  The endless touring with the band that causes the dinner-table showdown between Sebastian and Mia comes to an abrupt end – he’s around to take the crucial phone call from the agent, to travel to Boulder City on consecutive days, etc.  As soon as there’s a sniff of instant fame for Mia in the air, Sebastian is ready to revert to playing the kind of pure, uncommercial music he really wants to play.  He, in effect, passes the baton of success to Mia – so that it can continue getting in the way of their happiness together.

    The ending of La La Land isn’t the only thing in it that recalls Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977).  Rooted, like Chazelle’s film, in love for both the physical reality and the mythology of the city of the title, New York, New York charted the relationship between an obsessive, avant-garde tenor-sax player (Robert De Niro) and a popular big-band singer (Liza Minnelli).  Scorsese set out to juxtapose, and explore the tensions between, the stylised features of movie musicals of the period in which he set his story (it begins on V-J Day) and what Pauline Kael called the ‘dark side that was left out of the old cliché plots’.  The latter aspect took the form of an ‘improvisational, Cassavetes-like psychodrama … between the stars’ (Kael again).  Although New York, New York went wrong, Scorsese’s passionate struggle to bring the conflicting elements of the piece to life was admirable and the contrasts between De Niro and Minnelli were fascinating:  their presences and performing styles reflected both the musical idioms at odds with each other in the story and the incompatibility of the protagonists in marriage.

    New York, New York’s serious attempt to dramatise the complexities of success in the world of popular music and cinema of the era in which it was set is light years away from La La Land.  The Wikipedia article on the latter seems right enough in citing as main inspirations two screen musicals from the 1960s:  Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort.  The article seems righter still when it goes on to say ‘especially the latter’.  While The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is individual and charming, The Young Girls of Rochefort purports to be a homage to Hollywood musicals:  the casting of Gene Kelly in a key role was designed to prove what Demy was after but the resulting movie was both flimsy and flabby.   Damien Chazelle’s film – a homage to a homage that was inauthentic in the first place – is an altogether sharper piece of work than Jacques Demy’s but the thoroughgoing tricksiness of La La Land makes it less entrancing than enraging.

    8 October 2016

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