Film review

  • Doctor Dolittle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Fleischer (1967)

    It already had its place in film history as a vastly expensive flop and a particularly notorious example of how money could buy a Best Picture Oscar nomination.   I wanted to see it because of the key role that was consequently played by Doctor Dolittle in Mark Harris’s book Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood.   Since I read Harris’s great and gripping story of the road to the 1968 Academy Awards, I’ve kept seeing ‘Doctor Dolittle’ in television listings and getting briefly excited.  It had always turned out to be the Eddie Murphy version – until the last day of 2010.

    If you drew up a list of essential ingredients for a successful family musical in the 1960s, you might include:  well-defined and engaging characters; comedy and romance; decent songs, well sung and choreographed; amazing or at least appealing visual effects.  Doctor Dolittle – based on books by Hugh Lofting, which were reckoned in their day to be classics of children’s literature (but which I never read) – fails on all counts.   Leslie Bricusse, who ended up with the credit for the screenplay as well as for writing the music and lyrics, was nothing if not conscientious:  you can hear in several tunes an anxious attempt to repeat the success of a recent screen hit (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music) or hit performance (although the genuinely jolly, Oscar-winning ‘Talk to the Animals’ is actually rather undermined by the fragmenting effect of Rex Harrison’s speak-singing).  Herbert Ross had a long and successful career as a choreographer and director but his work here wasn’t part of it:  the dance routines are lost in the elephantine picture’s relentless lack of rhythm.  Most sequences in Doctor Dolittle look to be executed as if getting them in the can was the extent of the film-makers’ ambition.  You can understand why Richard Fleischer was under pressure to show the huge expense of the production and that’s often all he appears to be doing.  There are pointless long shots of tiny figures in a landscape or aerial shots of crowd scenes that might be expected to preface or conclude a scene but which are shoved into the middle of numbers.  The two-headed llama, the Pushmi-Pullyu, would have been fine in a provincial rep pantomime of the time but it’s ludicrous as a pièce de résistance in a Hollywood blockbuster.  The eventual appearance of the Great Pink Sea Snail, which the doctor and his team go sailing the high seas in search of, is breathtakingly anti-climactic.

    The romantic strand is bewildering.   The doctor’s sidekick Matthew Mugg carries a torch for the beautiful Emma Fairfax but Matthew’s a humble Oirish working man and Emma, niece of the blustering, bullying General Bellowes (Peter Bull), is posh so you have to wonder if they can end up together (Doctor Dolittle is set in an English village called Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, in 1845).  Emma is antipathetic towards Dolittle in a way that must be the prelude to falling for him but there’s a thirty-year age difference between the actors playing the pair.  By the closing stages, simple Matthew seems simply to have forgotten he was keen on Emma.  She parts from the doctor – not sure she’ll ever see him again – but while Emma is tearful Dolittle seems pretty indifferent.  The film ends with the news that they’ll be reunited back in Puddleby but we don’t see the reunion (perhaps just as well).  The hook of the material – the Noah’s ark of animals ranging from domestic to exotic – is, to an extent, foolproof, but only to an extent.  Dolittle’s conversations in animal language are unimaginative, to say the least, and the voicing of his parrot Polynesia (by Ginny Tyler) is pathetic.  Thanks to the clumsy, let’s-just-get-through-this desperation that suffuses Doctor Dolittle, the animals often look as if they’re being wheeled on and off just to have their presence recorded, although the chimp Cheeta does arguably the best acting in the film.

    The humans are depressingly charmless and Rex Harrison isn’t the worst of them.  I was looking forward to loathing him all over again but his playing is so relatively accomplished and unstrained in this company that Harrison is occasionally a relief:  even when he’s reprising Professor Higgins, he’s inoffensive.  The downside of his effortlessness is that he fails to animate Dolittle’s eccentricity.  Anthony Newley is a performer who, when he’s not centre stage (and his histrionics on screen are scaled for the back row of the upper circle), might not be there at all:  playing unobtrusively interesting is out of his range.  As Matthew, Newley sings abominably (with the trademark blaring whine on the long notes).  But at least he can do a character – even if, most of the time, he overdoes it:  after two and a half hours, I didn’t understand what Samantha Eggar and William Dix were supposed to be playing.   Dix, who was never heard of again, is stunningly unappealing as a young lad called Tommy Stubbins.  He’s maybe meant to be a sparky village urchin but his diction is that of a comedy toff (he pronounces ‘boat’ as ‘bait’ etc).   Eggar, whose brief flirtation with the big time ended with this film, makes Emma snotty and dissatisfied even when she’s meant to be falling in love with Dolittle:  it’s a baffling (and very stiff) performance.  As Willie Shakespeare, the super-cultivated leader of the ‘savages’ on Sea-Star Island, Geoffrey Holder looks understandably uncomfortable.

    The only person I enjoyed watching or listening to was Richard Attenborough, in a brief appearance as the bluntly mercenary circus owner Albert Blossom.  When Blossom claps eyes on the Pushmi-Pullyu, he sings ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It’ with mounting, rapacious glee.  The look of the creature hardly justifies the routine but Attenborough gives a vivid demonstration of what a first-class character actor can do with very little material (even if it’s obviously not him doing the dancing at the end of the number).   The commercial exploitation of the Pushmi-Pullyu brings (more) censorious words from Emma and there’s the odd moment in the film – Dolittle’s criticism of fox-hunting is another – that makes the whole enterprise seems momentarily less obsolete  than the film otherwise appears.   The expensive box-office failure of Doctor Dolittle is widely regarded as sounding the death knell for big, popular musicals although it’s worth remembering that, just a year later, Oliver! made a lot of money and won six Oscars, including Best Picture – and presumably without Columbia resorting to the kind of bribery that 20th Century Fox tried with Dolittle.

    1 January 2011

     

  • Creed

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ryan Coogler (2015)

    Creed is notable for being made by Ryan Coogler, for Michael B Jordan in the main role and for not having ‘Rocky’ in the title.  This second collaboration of the director and lead actor – following Coogler’s debut feature, Fruitvale Station – is the seventh film in the Rocky series.   It’s the first one not to be written by Sylvester Stallone (who directed four of the previous six, for good measure).  As well as appearing again as Rocky Balboa in Creed, Stallone has produced for the first time – along with two other founder members of the Rocky team, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff.  The latter died in June 2015 but a new generation of Winklers and Chartoffs is now part of the franchise too.  Charles and David Winkler and Billy Chartoff are also producers of Creed – as they were of the film’s immediate predecessor, Rocky Balboa, in 2006.  (Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff executive produced that one.)  This new film, because it’s not a bad movie, is a reminder that the first Rocky in 1976 wasn’t a bad movie either.  In order to be more enthusiastic than this about Creed, you probably need to be a dyed-in-the-wool Rocky fan and/or to have seen worse Rockys in between, to allow you to appreciate the relative superiority of Ryan Coogler’s contribution to the canon.  I’m not in either of those groups.

    Michael B Jordan plays Adonis ‘Donnie’ Johnson.  Donnie’s the son, from an extra-marital affair, of Apollo Creed – the flamboyant, Muhammad Ali-inspired champion who gave Rocky his first chance to fight for the world heavyweight title in the original film, who then became the hero’s friend as well as adversary, and who died in the ring in Rocky IV.   Donnie had a tough start in life:  his mother died when he was a kid; he’s serving time in a youth detention centre in Los Angeles when Mary Anne Creed (Phylicia Rashad), his father’s widow, takes him in hand.  We next see Donnie in a boxing ring in Mexico but, though he’s won a series of fights there, it’s not how he makes his living – he has a high-powered job in the financial world.  No sooner has he appeared in Creed in a white collar and tie, however, Donnie resigns, to become a professional fighter.  He seeks out Rocky in Philadelphia, where the old-timer is still running the restaurant he opened in Rocky Balboa.  Rocky also keeps in touch with his fight-game contacts at the local Front Street Gym.  Soon Donnie is training there and Rocky is his trainer. To cut a long story short (and Creed, at 133 minutes, is a too long story), Donnie ends up fighting for the world title, light-heavyweight division.  Against a controversial, undefeated champion, Donnie loses on points and heroically – just as Rocky did against Apollo Creed, four decades ago.

    You wouldn’t have expected Ryan Coogler’s second feature to be this project but he does a creditable job:  Creed is largely workmanlike but has enough fresh details to assure you it’s not the work of a hack director.  The mostly standard descriptions of preparing for a big fight are occasionally enlivened – for example, in a dynamic sequence in which Donnie is on a training run with an escort on either side of kids reared up on their motorbikes.  The score by Ludwig Göransson (who also did the music for Fruitvale Station) evokes Bill Conti’s famous Rocky music.  Just when you think Göransson’s score is going to turn into Conti’s, Coogler keeps pulling back.  The effect is tantalising, until we get the Rocky fanfare at the start of the climactic title fight.   This takes place in Liverpool, home city of the defending champion, ‘Pretty’ Ricky Conlan, and where the ‘Con-lan, Con-lan’ chant of the crowd ringside sounds right.  (Conlan is played by Tony Bellew, a former world champion and still the EBU champion at cruiserweight.)  The big fight is straightforwardly staged and gruesomely involving.   There’s nothing smart-aleck or meta about Ryan Coogler’s approach.  At the same time, Creed avoids accusations of being formula thanks to the Rocky series being that already: formula is a large part of the fabric Coogler’s working with.  Rocky is diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and eventually persuaded to have chemotherapy.  The description of his treatment is so cursory that it verges on the offensive to anyone who’s been on the receiving end of chemo.  Coogler, who wrote the screenplay for Creed with Aaron Covington, has the wit to redeem this – a bit – in a scene in the hospital room where Rocky is receiving treatment.  It’s so spacious that he encourages Donnie to do some fitness training there while he’s visiting.

    As Donnie, Michael B Jordan is easily expressive and very likeable:  he has a real emotional fluidity.  Tessa Thompson is good as Bianca, the aspiring singer-songwriter who becomes Donnie’s girlfriend, although a bust-up at her big-chance set is one of the cruder episodes in the film.  The playing of Creed’s widow by the honoured stage actress Phylicia Rashad is too deliberate for my taste.  Now in his seventieth year, Sylvester Stallone is oddly dignified and occasionally touching in his latest outing as Rocky, though I find it hard to be swept up in the sentimental wave that may land him the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.   This isn’t just a matter of a veteran star enjoying renewed, more or less unexpected attention.  In this case, the actor is so closely identified with the role, they’re indissoluble:  if Stallone wins, it’ll be the Academy giving a lifetime achievement award to Rocky Balboa.  I might feel differently if Rocky was Stallone’s only long-running fighting-man role but he’s played Rambo four times too.  He’s also a more dominant presence in Creed than I expected (and nearly outstays his welcome).  This isn’t any fault of Michael B Jordan’s but the plotting of Donnie’s story is pretty skinny.  The motivation for his becoming a boxer doesn’t amount to more than the fight game being in his blood.  It’s only as he prepares to enter the ring for the world title fight that Donnie explains that he’s driven by wanting to prove he ‘wasn’t a mistake’.

    Creed is hardly a political movie yet Stallone’s Academy Award nomination – as the only one the film’s received – has taken on a political significance in 2016.  Several black film-makers and actors will be boycotting the Oscar ceremony because, for the second year running, all twenty acting nominees are white.  In the circumstances, it’s hard to forget either that Ryan Coogler’s only previous feature was a political movie on a racial theme or that, back in 1989, an emphatically racial-political movie was made by one of this year’s leading boycotters, Spike Lee.  Do the Right Thing comprised, like Creed, a mostly black cast.  As with Creed, a white actor, Danny Aiello, was the only member of the cast who was Oscar-nominated, also for Best Supporting Actor.  (To be precise: the only member of the cast nominated for an acting award.  Spike Lee, who had a leading role in Do the Right Thing, was nominated for his screenplay.)  In the event, Aiello lost to an African-American actor, Denzel Washington in Glory.   Washington went on to win Best Actor (for Training Day) in 2002 – the same year in which Sidney Poitier, the only previous black winner of that award (for Lilies of the Field, in 1964), received an honorary Oscar and Halle Berry became the first and, to date, the only black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar (for Monster’s Ball).

    I’ve mixed feelings about the controversy clouding this year’s Oscars.  Although the lack of diversity in the acting nominees sounds wrong, I’ve not yet seen a performance by an African-American in a 2015 film that I’ve thought among the best five in any of the four acting categories. (That includes Idris Elba’s work in Beasts of No Nation although not Will Smith’s in Concussion, which hasn’t yet opened in Britain.)   It’s also worth noting that news coverage of the affair has so far tended to emphasise the predominantly white, elderly make-up of the Academy as a whole, without making clear that the acting nominations for Oscars (as distinct from the eventual awards) are decided only by the actor members of the Academy.   Whatever the extent of the problem, it’s depressing and, you’d hope, wrong-headed to suppose that adjusting the ethnic balance of Academy membership is the solution.  The thinking seems to be that this will, in itself, result in a more diverse list of nominations – as if the point of involving more non-white voters is to hope they’ll cast their ballots in a racially prejudiced way.

    21 January 2016

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