J A Bayona (2016)

It begins with the boy protagonist, Conor O’Malley, having a nightmare – we soon find out it’s a recurring one.  Although the foundation of J A Bayona’s fantasy drama is anything but fantastic, it might well be described as a continuing nightmare:  a child struggles to cope with his mother’s terminal illness.  A Monster Calls is based on true stories in an unusual sense.  The author and activist Siobhan Dowd wasn’t herself a mother but this story is her brainchild.  Dowd died from cancer, aged forty-seven, in 2007.  She was denied the time she needed to bring her ideas to fruition as a novel but she had discussed them with her publisher, Walker Books.  After her death, Walker invited another author in their stable, Patrick Ness, to develop Dowd’s material, and his book A Monster Calls, with illustrations by Jim Kay, was published in 2011.  (The following year, both men won the Carnegie Medal and the Greenaway Medal for children’s or young adult fiction.)  The part of Conor in Bayona’s screen version of the novel is played by Lewis MacDougall, whose mother died from multiple sclerosis when he was eleven.

A Monster Calls is set in present-day England but Conor’s bedroom in the house where he lives with his dying mother overlooks a time-honoured landscape of mortality – a church graveyard, sheltered by a yew tree.  Although the time at which the monster – a giant human shape, formed from the branches of the yew – repeatedly calls on Conor is shown on a digital clock with an LED display, the appointed hour is also traditional:  a few minutes after midnight.  The monster isn’t simply scary, however – at least, Conor isn’t scared by it.  The main purpose of its visits is to tell the boy three stories.  While these contain characters and events that wouldn’t be out of place in traditional fairytales, the message of the stories is that human beings, their motives and behaviour are more complicated, less morally black-and-white than Conor may have been led to believe.  Figures in the monster’s tales seem to correspond to people in the boy’s own life:  a witch not as black as she’s painted may be his grandmother; a parson, who unwisely prefers the apparently easy option, suggests Conor’s father.  The monster insists that, once he has told his three tales, Conor must, on pain of death, tell a true story of his own.  I was puzzled by the premise of the film, for which Patrick Ness wrote the screenplay, that Conor is a complete innocent.   Wouldn’t this twenty-first-century twelve-year-old already be familiar with moral complexity and troubling uncertainty – in both his own life and his cultural experience?  This is a boy whose parents have split up and whose father has started a new family on the other side of the Atlantic.  I admit that my knowledge of contemporary children’s fiction is negligible but if Disney Pictures are now encouraging young audiences to apprehend shades of grey and themes of loss – in movies like Maleficent, Cinderella and Inside Out – it seems a safe bet that tougher-minded, less commercially oriented writers for children will have gone before in doing so.

J A Bayona’s two previous features were The Orphanage and The Impossible.   The Orphanage is a supernatural ghost-horror story, in which, as the title suggests, children who’ve lost parents feature strongly.   In The Impossible, the survival of a family – a woman, a man and their three sons – in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 hangs by a thread; the relationship of the mother and her eldest son is at the heart of this story (based on real events).  Bayona’s CV sounds tailor-made for A Monster Calls but the film suffers from a surfeit of gloomy style.  Jim Kay’s illustrations for the book are the inspiration for the movie’s beautiful and ingenious artwork, which appears in the form of animated illustrations to accompany the monster’s telling of his tales and as examples of the artistic talent Conor has inherited from his mother (we learn that she wanted to go to art college until the unplanned Conor came along).  These images connect with each other effectively.  They’re the visual highlights of A Monster Calls, despite unrelenting competition from collapsing buildings, imploding landscapes and other CGI manifestations of the psychic uproar the hero is battling with.  Óscar Faura’s lighting, indoors and out, is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Conor’s fearful misery.  Even when he goes with his briefly visiting father to a funfair, the place is Stygian and deserted.  We accept the bleak outlook as the boy’s perspective, just as we accept his lack of school friends as an expression of his feelings of isolation, but the pervasive gloom limits the emotional range of the narrative:  there’s virtually no sense of a happier land from which Conor has been exiled.  Bayona should be grateful to the actors who suggest a more normal world and who thereby place Conor at a poignant, tantalising distance from it:  Toby Kebbell, as the affable, somehow useless father; and, especially, Ben Moor, who underplays skilfully and sensitively as a teacher at the boy’s school.

Lewis MacDougall is an inspired choice for Conor and not just because he gives a convincingly felt performance (I wasn’t aware of his own bereavement until after I’d seen the film).  MacDougall’s troubled, questioning face is right for someone forced to grow up before his time while his slight build reinforces Conor’s vulnerability.  Although he’s already at comprehensive school, Conor is bullied there by a trio whose leader (James Melville) stands head and shoulders above him. As Conor’s mother, Felicity Jones is particularly good at conveying Lizzie O’Malley’s selflessness in letting Conor express his fears without letting him see her own.  These reminders that a loving mother gives protection and comfort to her child, even when she’s in desperate need of both, are perhaps the most uncompromising element of the film.  In the role of Lizzie’s uptight mother, Sigourney Weaver is probably miscast and certainly uncertain – especially with an English accent.  In the scheme of the story, the grandmother verges on wicked stepmother – she’s set to replace Conor’s mother as the woman running the house he lives in.  Weaver’s imposing presence works in realising this idea (and chiming with the putative villainess of the monster’s first story).  But Conor’s complaint that his grandmother’s house is ‘full of old person’s stuff’ (she forbids him to touch any of it:  he trashes the place) draws attention to how wrong Weaver is in other ways.  I got the sense from the dialogue and the plotting that grandmother was meant to be an out-of-touch oldie – someone who’s forgotten what it was like to be a child and how to handle one.  Sigourney Weaver doesn’t suggest this at all.  (Even without make-up, she’s a very glamorous granny.)  Geraldine Chaplin’s cameo as Conor’s head teacher lasts only a minute or two but she’s a confusing presence, too.

The monster is incarnated, through motion capture technology, and voiced by Liam Neeson.  I found him an underwhelming storyteller though this may be the fault less of Neeson than of the technical trickery that upstages him – and which, for me, detracted from the emotional power of A Monster Calls more generally.  There was sustained sniffling in the row behind me at the Richmond Odeon but tears came to my eyes only once, during Felicity Jones’s deathbed scene; and I knew they were caused by things that have happened in my own life which the scene reminded me of.   When Conor asks why his parents’ marriage failed, his father tries to explain and the boy says, smiling but ruefully aware, ‘So you didn’t live happily ever after?’  This may be a blatant feed line but it gets an interesting response:  ‘No, but that’s all right – most people just get messily ever after.  That’s life …’   It may be life but it isn’t death – it isn’t what Conor’s mother gets.  The  monster forces Conor to tell the truth of his feelings about his mother’s illness; when he does so, the effect is meant to be cathartic (as it conventionally is in screen dramas when the psychoanalyst gets to the bottom of the patient’s problems).  What the monster doesn’t do is prepare Conor to cope with his impending loss.  Although he assures Conor (BFG-style) that he’ll-always-be-there-for-him, the platitude doesn’t convince.  This unusual movie is in my head more today than it was when I came out from seeing it yesterday but that’s largely because I think the technique in A Monster Calls is ‘distract[ing] from distraction by distraction’.  I don’t feel it gets to grips with its awful subject – that, when a child’s much-loved parent receives a death sentence, it’s a case of a monster calling and refusing to go away.

5 January 2017