Toa Fraser (2008)

A truly charming film – it’s a great pleasure to see eccentric material done so intelligently.   And a pleasure that it’s found its way into cinemas at all:  Dean Spanley’s commercial potential is modest and it might have been judged more easily packaged for television as a ‘quality’ drama-comedy ‘starring’ Peter O’Toole – its U certificate and the Scrooge-style redemption of the central character making it seem natural Christmas fare.  If it had been, the piece would have been trailed so often that it would have been over-hyped – and possibly disappointing – by the time it was aired.   Without any such publicity, the film (a British-New Zealand co-production) has slipped into filmhouses unheralded.  That seems appropriate to its scale and unpretentiousness – and enhances the enjoyable surprise that it turns out to be.   (In any case, the picture is probably too subtle to be entirely successful as a family film.)

The screenplay, by Alan Sharp, is adapted from the short novel My Talks with Dean Spanley by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany (who was writing in a range of literary forms in the first half of the twentieth century).  The main characters are the narrator, Henslowe Fisk (‘Fisk junior’), and his misanthropic father Horatio (‘Fisk senior’), whom he visits every Thursday.   The son engages in uneasy and unavailing attempts to find pleasurable things for them to spend the day doing.  We learn there was another Fisk junior – Henslowe’s brother, Harrington.  He was killed in the recent Boer War (the film is set in the first decade of the last century); his grief-stricken mother never recovered from the loss and died shortly afterwards.   One Thursday, father and son attend a lecture by a visiting swami on the transmigration of souls.   Also in the small audience is a local clergyman, Dean Spanley, whom Fisk senior disparages, vaguely but vehemently (‘Not quite sound, Spanley’).  After the lecture, the Fisks go for a drink at the old man’s club; Spanley is there, imbibing tokay (‘Hungarian treacle’, according to Fisk senior).  When Fisk junior asks for the same, he’s told that it’s unavailable – that Spanley orders tokay from a private collection of the stuff he holds at the club.

Fisk junior is struck by Spanley’s open-mindedness about reincarnation then, on his way home that same day, by seeing the Dean taking a keen interest in a cat up a tree in the grounds of the Dean’s church.   (One of the questions from the audience at the lecture has been about the souls of pets.  The lady questioners, cat owners, are disconcerted by the swami’s assertion that it’s dogs which have a special place in the spiritual scheme of things because they ‘amplify’ man’s perception of himself whereas cats ‘diminish’ it.)  Fisk junior persuades Spanley to come to dinner, clinching the deal with the offer (‘Not so much a lie as a truth deferred’) of a bottle of 1891 tokay.   It transpires that tokay can be purchased only with the permission of the Hungarian royal family; Fisk junior turns to Wrather, a resourceful Australian dealer in all sorts (and another member of the lecture audience), to supply the goods.  At his first dinner with Fisk junior, the Dean rhapsodises about the aroma of tokay; once he’s started to drink it, he starts to talk in equally enthusiastic terms about canine sense of smell.  (He says that dragging a dog away from sniffing at a lamp-post is tantamount to parting a scholar from his book in the British Library.)  With two glasses of tokay (his self-imposed limit) under his belt, the Dean begins to reminisce more expansively – about his past life as a dog.

The presences and acting styles of the small cast are strongly complementary.  Peter O’Toole is still only in his mid-seventies but his skeletal thinness and blue eyes, now as startling for their rheumy look as for their colour, make him appear ancient.   O’Toole may have a few years in him yet but his performance here – and the way that Toa Fraser photographs him – isn’t quite free of what was a larger problem in Venus two years ago:  the sense that the actor is being commemorated before our eyes.   (It’s true that decrepitude is essential to the part he’s playing here, as it was in Venus – but O’Toole seems a bit too self-aware on this score, and his reverential directors are underlining it.)  O’Toole rather telegraphs the broken heart that lies beneath Fisk senior’s heartless irascibility but he’s very funny delivering his anti-social putdowns and in his velvety, pedantic carping in his early scenes with his son.  You get a sense that the old man feels he may as well insult the world with élan because that’s as much pleasure as he’s going to get out of life now.  And O’Toole’s final scenes are worth waiting for as Fisk senior listens to and comes to understand Dean Spanley’s story, and in what then follows.   (When Fisk junior puts his hand on his father’s arm to restrain him emotionally at the climax of the Dean’s narrative, and when Fisk senior then puts out his hand to Spanley, it’s touching in both senses of the word;  it makes you realise the lack of physical contact there has been between the characters up to this point.)

O’Toole is the centre of attention but his magnetism doesn’t obscure the performances of Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill, although Northam’s, in particular, is likely (not for the first time) to be underrated.  He’s doing something difficult – animating the first-person narrator of a novel, a narrator whose job it is to record extraordinary events and colourful characters but who, because these other elements absorb our interest, is himself is a relatively undefined, neutral presence.  (I’m guessing at this but, if the screenplay is anything like a faithful adaptation, it seems obvious.)  Northam does this with typical sensitivity and skill.   He reads the voice-over narration with a perfect blend of humour and melancholy, which immediately draws you into the story and tells you that it’s going to be amusing but something else too.  Northam, who’s now forty-seven, looks middle-aged in a way he hasn’t been on screen before; Fisk junior, it turns out, is an art dealer and publisher, a well-to-do and not unsuccessful man, but he wears an air of defeat.  (Northam has been skilfully dressed – in a hat and a coat down below his knees that seem to depress him physically.  I guess this is the same sartorial trompe l’oeil that was used to diminish Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.)  As with his masterly performance as Knightley in the 1996 Emma, Northam is quiet in his effects and patient enough to avoid doing anything obvious;   I expect this quietness will seem to some indistinguishable from dullness – but holding himself in like this really pays off at the picture’s climax (as in Emma), when his character expresses emotion.  (Northam keeps you aware of Fisk junior’s native restraint even in these moments.)

Sam Neill is a good actor but I wouldn’t have expected him to engage with this kind of material so fully and wittily.  Perhaps Neill’s portrait of the Dean in his everyday persona could use a touch more satiric edge – but perhaps not;   maybe it’s the fact that Spanley is so innocuously pompous that makes old Fisk’s antipathy to him more puzzling – and the Dean’s dinner monologues so engaging.   Neill’s olfactory transports are not just entertaining but also convincing as an expression of Spanley’s thought processes; he moves between his past and present incarnations with a nice imperceptibility.   And this role allows Neill to bring out what has tended to remain implicit in roles he’s usually been cast in – the comical aspect of his good looks.   Bryan Brown is a much broader actor than either Northam or Neill and a much less flamboyant one than O’Toole but Brown’s easy, amused down-to-earthness as the canny Wrather gives flavour to the film.   (Whether the colonial Wrather is a reincarnation of the dog-Dean’s mongrel pal is an increasingly enjoyable question that is never fully resolved.)   If Judy Parfitt sometimes seems a bit too busy and effortful as the housekeeper, Mrs Brimley, she more than delivers at the emotional cruxes of the story.  Art Malik, as the sharply-dressed swami, looks better than he acts, as usual.   In the small part of an elderly waiter at Fisk senior’s club, Dudley Sutton has a good bit as he offers his sympathies to the old man and is brutally rebuffed.

There’s a risk, when you like a small film as much as I like this one, that you’ll praise it too highly – in a way that’s false to the spirit of the piece.   But I do think Dean Spanley is eloquent about a particular kind of failure to communicate between father and son.  When Peter O’Toole determinedly cranks up the vitriol engine to make sure Fisk junior knows he’s discontented and Jeremy Northam registers and suppresses exasperation, you get a powerful sense of the impacted, unhappy routine of their lives – and how long this could go on without anything really being said.   And Toa Fraser, directing his second feature, brings out the comic potential of lack of communication at this human level when another character is speaking from two different lives.   The themes of missing loved ones and post-mortem communication are built up through the signs that the two Fisks, in their different ways, are grieving their wife/mother and son/brother; in Fisk senior relating how, years ago, his favourite spaniel Wag disappeared, never to return (in canine form); in Mrs Brimley, sitting with her sewing on one side of the fire and chatting familiarly with the empty chair – on the other side – in which her late husband used to sit.    Dean Spanley also offers a likeably different take on the dramatic convention of revealing an event in a screwed up character’s past life which explains the person he’s become.

According to Wikipedia, Toa Fraser was born in Britain in 1975, of a Fijian father and a British mother, and emigrated to New Zealand in his early teens.  He’s written three plays and directed a screen adaptation of one of these, No 2, in 2006.   What’s so pleasing about Fraser’s direction is that he doesn’t see the whimsical basis of the story as dictating a self-consciously humorous approach; he directs almost as if this were a straight, character-driven drama.  As a result, Dean Spanley is almost entirely free of the archness which might seem implicit in the plot and emotionally rich – and funny – in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise have been.  (The versatile music, written and conducted by Don McGlashan, both reinforces the moods created by Fraser and his cast, and has a sprightliness which the director otherwise steers clear of, and which is palatable as a supportive counterpoint to what’s on screen.)   Sometimes Fraser seems to treat the material with almost too much integrity; it’s never less than pleasant but it’s occasionally slightly boring.  The Dean’s revelations under the influence of tokay keep you smiling but, until O’Toole joins the dinner party, they don’t build; the flashback at this point to the dogs’ adventure is uninspired; and the film’s heartwarming ending is a bit too extended.  Not all the details seem right – I wasn’t sure, for example, that it was correct, according to the social structure of Edwardian England, that Fisk junior regularly kissed the housekeeper when he arrived at and left his father’s home.  But these aren’t major faults.  Fraser’s avoidance of the potential pitfalls and his success in sustaining a blend of surreal comedy and human truthfulness amounts to a considerable balancing act, and he has a sure and sensitive touch with the actors.   Dean Spanley is one of the most satisfying films of the year.

13 and 23 December 2008