Nick Murphy (2011)
Anyone who thinks The Innocents gets better as the ghosts get more noisy and aggressive and the character of the governess is laid bare may well go a bundle on The Awakening. But it’s unfair even to compare Jack Clayton’s fine film with this, the first cinema feature by Nick Murphy (who’s done plenty of television). This was its world premiere (an LFF screening) and, before the film started, Murphy, his co-writer Stephen Volk, his producers and the film’s lead, Rebecca Hall, lined up at the front of screen 7 in the Vue Leicester Square. I joined in the round of applause for their appearance but not the applause for The Awakening as the closing credits came up. As a ghost story, this is an academic exercise and not a good one at that. It could be argued that, with belief in the afterlife at an all-time low, there’s little for film-makers to do with this kind of material except be stylish but, in that case, why bother? And it’s not a strong argument anyway: a director doesn’t need to believe in the supernatural to create a satisfying ghost story – he or she needs only to make us believe in the belief (or indeed the uncertainty) of the people on screen.
The main character in The Awakening is a young woman called Florence Cathcart. It’s 1921. England is dazed by the scale of casualties in the Great War and the influenza epidemic of 1918. The country’s stunned credulity means a burgeoning, desperate enthusiasm for contact, through séances etc, with the millions who have died in recent years. Florence Cathcart’s mission is to reveal psychic charlatans in their true colours. In the film’s opening scene, we see her do that with angry aplomb. In the next scene, she receives a visit at home from Robert Mallory, a master at Rookwood, a boys’ boarding school. He believes the school has ‘a ghost on our hands’ and asks Florence if she’ll investigate. The experience of doing so will mean that the intolerantly rationalist Florence is forced to change her mind of course. That’s fine; but Nick Murphy and Stephen Volk set things up poorly. I didn’t understand, even by the end of the film, why they chose to show us so soon that Florence’s self-assured exterior concealed emotional and psychological fragility. When Mallory first arrives, Florence asks for a few minutes to get changed before they talk and, while she’s in her bedroom, she breaks down.
The Rookwood ghost is that of a boy who was murdered in the private house that the school used to be in the early years of the century. The recent, mysterious death of one of the schoolboys – who, shortly before his death, reported seeing the ghost – is what precipitates Mallory’s visit to Florence. But why does he approach her as if she was a ghost hunter rather than someone who exposes hoaxes? In their first interview, he annoys her and she asks him to leave – so why does Florence decide, it seems without further ado, to travel from London to Rookwood, deep in the English countryside? (The film was actually shot in Berwickshire.) The answer to the first question is to get the story underway. The answer to the second becomes clear in due course – the house holds a personal fascination for Florence – but Murphy and Volk don’t, in the meantime, supply a surface motive for her compulsion to take on the assignment.
The script is too thin to sustain any sense of real mystery. The apparition of the murdered child is conspicuous by its absence so, when the school term ends and all but one of the boys leave Rookwood, it comes as no surprise that Tom, the single child remaining, is the ghost. Murphy and Volk also withhold information unconvincingly. If it’s well known that a boy was murdered at Rookwood, there’s no good reason why Mallory doesn’t also know, and doesn’t tell Florence, that a woman and a man died violently in the same place at the same time. Once Murphy and Volk start explaining the situation, however, there’s no stopping them. I admit that, at the very end of The Awakening, I wasn’t sure whether Florence was alive or a ghost but, until then, the last half hour is loaded with exposition. People enjoy being scared by something they don’t really believe in and there were sounds in the audience to suggest that was happening here but I found the ominous atmosphere of The Awakening so artificial and monotonous that it soon lost its grip (along with Daniel Pemberton’s overused score).
In spite of the main characters appearing to be in states of continuous emotional extremity, The Awakening is uninvolving. Perhaps none of this matters to the film-makers but it’s not enough to supply merely the paraphernalia of British middle-class ghost stories – the house with a long past and shadowy corridors, a housekeeper/nanny type who knows more than she lets on (in this case, the school matron), spooky chanting of nursery rhymes, sinister toys – and a distinctive look. Rookwood, the people in it and the surrounding landscape all look bleached – but this can’t be the result of too much sun: the skies are relentlessly colourless. (The cinematographer is the appropriately named Eduard Grau.) Of course this gets over the glum, valetudinarian state of the nation but a legend on the screen at the start has clued us into that too. Once we’ve got the point, what purpose is served by refusing to vary the visual scheme – when that scheme is just about all there is to the film anyway? Mallory was physically wounded in the 1914-18 war, and mentally scarred by it; and we’re led to believe that Florence’s private grief – and her professional motivation – is the death in action of the man she loved. This is then eclipsed by the revelation that Rookwood was her childhood home. The eventual, tired moral of the story seems to be that we-all-live-with-the-ghosts-of-our-own-past.
Nick Murphy’s cocky intro got on my nerves but I do agree with what he said about Rebecca Hall – that her engagement with a part is so strong that she seems physically transformed on screen from one role to the next. She’s a fine actress but it’s too early in her career for a film to be designed largely as a showcase for her talents, which this seems to be. (It’s arguably always too early in someone’s career for that.) Hall certainly has her moments – especially when Florence is telling the boy Tom (well played by Isaac Hempstead Wright) about the death of her lover in the war – but, for the most part, you’re conscious of her skill rather than drawn to her character. Dominic West has been on screens plenty in recent months; although he’s good, I’m beginning to get the sense that he’s always a beat behind. That quality paid great dividends in The Hour; as Fred West in Appropriate Adult, West had the Gloucester accent down pat but he rarely seemed on the character’s wavelength. As Mallory, he has to spend a lot of time staring in bewilderment about the turn that events are taking; he becomes rather ridiculous without being particularly interesting. West really can connect, though, with the actress he’s playing opposite – Romola Garai in The Hour, Emily Watson in Appropriate Adult, and now Rebecca Hall: a pity, given the sexual spark between Hall and West, that their progress to the bedroom is as laboured as Nick Murphy makes it.
Playing another teacher, Sean Dooley, a reliably excellent television actor, seems overawed by his big screen opportunity: he just acts intense. But Joseph Mawle, as a Dolge Orlick-ish handyman at Rookwood, shows how the move from television to cinema can be done: Mawle’s meant to be merely vile but he has more human reality than anyone else on screen – the one time I jumped was when his character was on the receiving end of a shock. Imelda Staunton is strong if unexciting as the school matron with a backstory and an occasional tendency (shared by Mallory) to make significant pronouncements like, ‘I don’t think anyone knows the true meaning of loneliness until they’ve been in this place’. The supernatural elements I experienced watching The Awakening were largely accidental. I had one of the end seats in Vue7, where the sightline left a lot to be desired. All the bodies on screen were elongated, so much so that even Imelda Staunton had a Modigliani look.
25 October 2011
