Film review

  • Lost River

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ryan Gosling (2014)

    The directing bug that actors get seems not only infectious but to be striking people down increasingly early in their careers.  Warren Beatty, Paul Newman and Robert Redford were all past forty when they directed their first feature.  So was George Clooney but his contemporary Sean Penn was only thirty-one when The Indian Runner was released in 1991 and Ben Stiller not quite thirty when Reality Bites appeared in 1994.  In 2006, Jamie Bell was quoted as saying that, once he’d got a couple more years of acting under his belt, he wanted to start directing movies:  he was twenty at the time.  Nine years on, Bell hasn’t yet moved behind the camera but bigger acting stars like Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck have.  (These two have bucked the trend in different ways.  The yearning to direct seems to be a largely male phenomenon – or perhaps it’s just harder for women to get the money needed to make a film.  Affleck, who’s not a great actor, has so far been a consistently effective director.)  Now Ryan Gosling has written and directed Lost River, which was screened at Cannes in 2014 several months before his thirty-fourth birthday.  Why do these people want to be directors while they’re still in demand, doing interesting work, giving pleasure and earning large amounts of money, as performers?  The motives are probably somewhat different in each case but you can’t help suspecting that movie actors proud of their intelligence feel that, within contemporary celebrity culture, they need to become less visible in order to prove themselves as artists.

    On the evidence of Lost River, Ryan Gosling doesn’t want to be merely a movie director: he wants to be an art-film director – an auteur, and from the word go.  It must be a particular disappointment to him that his movie has been mauled, and deservedly so, by most critics.  Gosling scores high on obscurity here.  I supposed the film’s main theme was dispossession – cultural and geographical, of family and memory – but, for much of the time, I had little idea what was going on.  I’m more than usually indebted to the Wikipedia synopsis:

    ‘A single mother enters a dark lifestyle after facing economic difficulties. Meanwhile her eldest son has to take care of his younger brother because of the absence of their mother and gets into trouble with the town’s feared bully, while trying to help to get some money to help his mother. Afterward, he uncovers a road leading to an underwater utopia.’

    Lost River‘s incomprehensibility doesn’t get in the way, though, of understanding that it’s no good – and the determined incoherence of the narrative doesn’t disguise the fact that Lost River is, in every sense, a vanity project.  The film looks to be designed for viewers who can spot references to other films, even other oeuvres.  The most obvious influence – by which I mean the source Ryan Gosling draws from most crudely – is David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.  The title song of Lost River, by Johnny Jewel, is a skilful pastiche of a smoky, mysterious, old-time ballad but whereas the night club in Blue Velvet was a distinct location, the different worlds of Gosling’s film bleed into each other (sometimes literally – there’s a tendency towards extravagant gore).  Everything seems to be taking place either underwater or in what Peter Bradshaw accurately describes as the ‘entirely ridiculous nightclub specialising in horror-porn cabaret’.

    It’s a semi-irony that actors-turned-filmmakers often do their best work handling the cast.  (Robert Redford’s Ordinary People is an obvious example and Sean Penn, in The Pledge, achieved something exceptional:  he got from Jack Nicholson a fine and fully felt performance in the role of a man who was essentially and increasingly depressed.)  Ryan Gosling gets convincing characterisations from Saoirse Ronan (luminous as the girl with whom Iain De Caestecker’s elder brother develops a relationship), Ben Mendelsohn (as a bank manager – his best moment comes doing a compellingly awkward solo dance routine) and Landyn Stewart (the younger brother).  Christina Hendricks (as the single mother) conveys a sense that it’s all too much for her:  she would be more persuasive if she hadn’t given a similar impression in other film parts, when she wasn’t meant to be doing so.  Still, Hendricks is a magnetic and touching image and works better here than she did in another recent actor-directed movie, John Slattery’s God’s Pocket.   Matt Smith is ‘the town’s feared bully’ and Eva Mendes the headliner at the nightmarish night club.

    12 April 2015

  • Who Done It?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1956)

    In 1951, T E B Clarke had his biggest success as a screenwriter, with The Lavender Hill Mob, for which he won an Oscar.  In 1959, the producer-director team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden made the worthy racial crime drama, Sapphire.  In between, this trio joined forces on Who Done It?  One of the last Ealing comedies, this strange film also saw the big-screen debut of Benny Hill.  He plays Hugo Dill, an ice-rink sweeper who dreams of becoming a private investigator.  The dream immediately comes true when Hugo wins first prize – cash and a bloodhound – in a pulp crime fiction magazine competition.  As a sleuth, Hugo turns out to be as daft as he looks.  To quote Wikipedia, ‘His confused efforts to solve a crime lead to him becoming entangled in cold war espionage’.

    It’s a puzzle how Benny Hill landed the starring role.  It’s easy in retrospect to see the film as the fag end of Ealing comedies but the series was hardly in decline at the time Who Done It? was made:  its immediate predecessor, released only three months earlier, was The Ladykillers.   Benny Hill had worked on stage, radio and television but, on the evidence of his IMDB and Wikipedia entries, without becoming a big name in any medium.  Just turned thirty, Hill can hardly have got the part thanks to good or even comically eccentric looks.  Yet Charles Barr, in his book, Ealing Studios (1977), describes the picture as ‘a dull slapstick vehicle for Benny Hill’.  What’s he like an actor?  As Hugo Dill, he’s basically competent but bland and impersonal.  The convoluted plot of Who Done It? requires Hugo to get into a succession of disguises.  Doing these turns, Benny Hill is much more comfortable and amusing.

    Who Done It? is a film of its time in several ways.  A key location in the story is the venue for ‘The Radio Show’, an annual event which, for forty years, showcased the British radio industry.  There’s an ‘as Himself’ appearance by Jeremy Hawk, a short-lived high-profile television personality of the 1950s.  Well-known popular entertainments are in the picture to be laughed at, however.  The stars of the Holiday on Ice-type show that opens proceedings have to make fools of themselves; later on and more briefly, the Dagenham Girl Pipers are treated (although gently enough) as a bad joke.  The most interesting reflection of contemporary thinking – and anxieties – comes in the Cold War plotting strand of the story.  The bungling-nefarious lot that plans to destroy the British way of life, and which Hugo eventually thwarts, are a conspiracy of Eastern Bloc-heads and German scientists (David Kossoff, George Margo, Denis Shaw and Frederick Schiller).  There’s a truly bizarre sequence in which the ‘Royal Scientific Study’ of London (with Ernest Thesiger as its president) is given a vivid demonstration of how one of the scientists has devised means of changing the weather – from sun to snow and storm, from summer to winter and back – at the flick of a switch.

    The numerous slapstick sequences are always too long and the sort-of love interest element is really weak.  This is partly because Belinda Lee isn’t much of an actress but, to be fair to Lee, she’s not helped by the script.  Her character, Frankie, is a ‘strong girl’ – a female equivalent of a strongman – but T E B Clarke doesn’t exploit this inventively.  (Because Hugo – even though he’s already seen a show of her strength during the ice rink episode – mistakes Frankie for a physically weedy female, she takes a shine to him.   I think that’s the idea anyway:  it’s hard to see otherwise what Belinda Lee might see in Benny Hill.)  The broad acting in Who’s Done It? often makes it enjoyable, though.  Garry Marsh is alarmingly apoplectic as the police detective driven to distraction by Hugo Dill.  (Charles Barr describes the casting of Marsh as ‘reinforc[ing] the sense of a 20-year throwback to the [George] Formby days’.)  Much of the fun comes from spotting people in uncredited parts who went on to better or different things – Arthur Lowe especially but also Terence Alexander, Ronnie Brody, Harold Goodwin, Irene Handl, Glyn Houston and Ewen Solon.  Others in the cast, who do get credits, include Peter Bull, Charles Hawtrey and Thorley Waters. The bloodhound is called Fabian:  we wait a long time for a joke on this and it’s not worth waiting for (‘I’ve had to leave Fabian in the yard’).  IMDB records that the dog is played by Champion Appeline Hector of West Summerland.

    27 January 2016

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