Neglected Gem #19: In America (2003)

Contains Spoilers

The main character in In America (2003), by the Irish writer-director Jim Sheridan, is Johnny (Paddy Considine), an actor from Dublin who brings his family – his wife Sarah (Samantha Morton) and his daughters Christy (Sarah Bolger – The Tudors) and Ariel (Emma Bolger) – to Manhattan after his son Frankie dies of a brain tumor caused by a fall down the stairs. The screenplay, which Sheridan wrote with his own daughters Naomi and Kirsten, is a sort of autobiographical collage. Sheridan and his wife Fran emigrated to New York, put in their time in a tough neighborhood like Hell’s Kitchen – where Johnny and Sarah bring their girls in In America – and Fran gave birth prematurely, just as Sarah does late in the film. But the lost child in real like, Frankie Sheridan, was Jim Sheridan’s kid brother and not his son, and the Sheridan character in the movie is really Christy, the older daughter, who tells the story in voice-over and who walks around with a Camcorder, preserving her family and her impressions of her new environment on videotape. No doubt the fact that so many of the incidents in the film are inspired by Sheridan’s own experiences enhances its authenticity, but his movies are almost unfailingly genuine, and he doesn’t seem capable of a banal impulse. In America is as wondrously unconventional for a coming-to-America movie as My Left Foot was for a triumph-of-the-spirit drama or In the Name of the Father for a prison picture. Not a single sequence in it looks like anything else you’ve ever seen.

Neglected Gem #98: Some Mother’s Son (1996)

Helen Mirren in Some Mother’s Son (1996). 

Some Mother’s Son proves that a movie doesn’t have to be well made to touch you – and that you can forgive a lot of mistakes when a filmmaker has both a sense of drama and an instinct for playing fair. The film is set is in Northern Ireland and built around the 1981 prison hunger strike by convicted IRA members that claimed the lives of its instigator, Bobby Sands, and nine other young men. It was co-written by Terry George and Jim Sheridan, who had collaborated on the script of In the Name of the Father three years earlier. But Sheridan, who’s a brilliant director, was also behind the camera on In the Name of the Father. Here the director is George, making his directorial debut, and he’s neither imaginative nor skillful: he makes sentimental choices, he uses close-ups like a crutch, and he lacks a sense of rhythm. There are many times in Some Mother’s Son when you wish Sheridan had taken over – scenes that call out for layering and nuance, moments that need to be framed and extended that George just bops past. What the picture has is a sensational story, and its vision is quintessentially humanist: it’s on the side of two grieving mothers whose sons are imperiled equally by Thatcher’s policies and by the pride and extremist stance of the IRA.

Portrait of the Artist, Part III: Aftersun and Armageddon Time

Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in Aftersun.

Aftersun was inspired by the Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells’s memories of her father. It’s a first feature by someone who has made only shorts before, and it has a distinctive voice and a hazy, meandering, experimental style; the angles are unusual and the images often seem off-kilter. The main character, Sophie (played by Frankie Corio), is an eleven-year-old girl who lives in Glasgow with her mother; her parents have split, and her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), has been trying to restart his life in England, so they seldom get to see each other. Just before Sophie goes back to school for fall term, her dad takes her on a trip to Turkey.  They stay, with other English-speaking tourists, at a vacation hotel called Ocean Park, where she hangs about the pool or the game room or the arcade when she and Calum aren’t on touring the shops or out on day trips. The movie isn’t linear, and as Calum lets Sophie use his video camera, especially when they loll around their hotel room, it’s meant to evoke the feel of home movies, like Jim Sheridan’s magnificent, magic-realist In America, which has an Irish video-camera buff heroine not much older than Sophie. But whereas Sheridan’s picture has a strong narrative, Aftersun is casual, anecdotal. Not much happens. Sophie plays pool with some British teenagers and observes them drinking and making moves on each other; a boy her own age spends time with her and they indulge in a little mild petting. And she and her dad work hard to make their time together count because it’s so short.  He wants her to have a good time; she wants to find out things about him that she doesn’t know, such as what he was like when he was eleven and what sort of future he envisioned for himself.

Small Delights Along the Mainstream

A scene from Disney's John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch

Back in the heyday of the big Hollywood studios, when every major company prepared an A picture and a low-budget B picture for each week of the year, no one expected that every movie would be a major event.  Movies provided a variety of pleasures, and it wasn’t a big deal if you caught some of them on the fly – a lightweight vehicle tailor-made for a beloved star, a disposal musical showcasing a few terrific dancers or a handful of inventive production numbers, an ingeniously plotted murder mystery or film noir, a romantic comedy or an action picture with a smart, wisecracking screenplay. And though there are far fewer choices now and the vast majority of releases aren’t worth any intelligent viewer’s time or money, movies still provide a spectrum of pleasures.  The problem is that the economics of filmmaking has taken many of them off the radar. Studios put the weight of their publicity machines behind only a selected few of the movies they bankroll, theatre owners play along, and, good or bad, a media event like Marvel’s The Avengers literally crowds other, smaller pictures out of the megaplexes.  If you don’t live in a big, art-house-friendly city like New York or Boston or Toronto, you don’t get a chance to see anything that isn’t given a wide release, i.e., anything that isn’t groomed to be a hit.  The only chance that a terrific little movie like Of Gods and Men or 50/50 or Margaret has of finding an audience is by word of mouth once an adventurous or lucky viewer stumbles across it on DVD.  (Margaret, which was cheated of any chance at awards from critics’ groups by a studio that stubbornly refused to send out screeners of it at the end of last year, is finally coming out on DVD in July.)

But even mainstream pictures that might offer audiences some entertainment – movies that moviegoers in most locations can actually get to – often fall by the wayside.  When so much emphasis is placed on box office receipts, the stink of failure comes off movies that don’t make an immediate mark.  And even movie reviewers, whose job is supposed to be to guide the public around the distractions, to persuade readers of viewers or listeners that the movie with the loudest media coverage or the biggest numbers isn’t necessarily the one worth putting down twelve or fifteen bucks for, aren’t immune to the smell. Critics don’t generally reserve their nastiest barbs for a loathsome hit like The Hunger Games. They save them up for modest programmers like Man on a Ledge or expensive box-office bombs like John Carter.

The School for Scandal at the Barbican, Butley in the West End

Ensemble members in various states of dress and undress stride cheekily up and down in a runway-style pre-show before settling down to the text in Deborah Warner’s production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s unbeatable comedy of manners The School for Scandal at the Barbican. This opening promises fun, but after about ten minutes of the actual play you realize you’ve been led down the garden path. Lady Sneerwell (Matilda Ziegler), who presides over the metaphorical school of the title, a crew of self-involved gossips who pick the reputations of London high society like vultures pecking at corpses, makes out with Snake (Gary Sefton) and shares a line of coke with him; that’s about the level of Warner’s invention. The hip-contemporary underwear-dominated costumes supervised by Binnie Bowerman quickly give way to the eighteenth-century outfits you see in most versions of the play, though every now and then someone walks onstage with an anachronistic costume piece, or someone pulls out a cell phone, and the transitions between scenes are flashy strobe-lit video projections that operate as Brechtian interruptions. It makes perfect sense to update the setting of The School for Scandal (originally produced in 1777), but I don’t get the nervous, ADHD shift between the play’s real setting and modern day – though Warner is hardly the first director to try this sort of post-modern theatrical trick.

Neglected Gem #12: Nothing Personal (1995)

It’s a funny thing about movies. They may get critical acclaim, even score some box office success and years later they’re barely mentioned by anyone or even remembered. And there’s often no discernible reason for their fates. I really can’t tell why Neil Jordan’s terrific and accessible heist movie The Good Thief, which got good reviews when it came out in 2002, has pretty much vanished into the ether. Or why Steve Jordan’s powerful documentary Stevie (2002) failed to match the impact of his earlier 1994 doc Hoop Dreams. Or even why The Lord of the Rings’s Peter Jackson’s mock 1995 documentary Forgotten Silver didn’t become the cult hit it should have been. In any case, here is the latest entry in a series of disparate movies you really ought to see.

In Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, a truce was called between the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defense Force. As Nothing Personal makes abundantly clear, peace doesn't mean old hatreds are forgotten; as exemplified by a traitorous Protestant power-broker (Michael Gambon), it can be even unclear who the opposing sides are.

John Lynch and James Frain in Nothing Personal

 At first, it's hard to tell Nothing Personal's characters apart, because director Thaddeus O'Sullivan simply picks up everyone's lives in flux, revolving around family, socializing and politicking. Of course, that's the point: the Protestants and Catholics aren't that different from one another but, like the artificial boundaries that divide their Belfast neighbourhoods, the crevice between the creeds seems insurmountable. When Liam (John Lynch), a Catholic single father, discovers his young son has entered the ‘dangerous’ Protestant sector, he sets off after him, precipitating a confrontation with his enemies – most notably with Kenny, a young Protestant hit man (Ian Hart, who's chilling).

Loosely plotted, but very visceral, Nothing Personal gets at the constant tension, fear and potential for violent outbreak that was and still, to some degree, is the Northern Irish reality. But it also allows for the presence of decency. Nothing Personal is also concerned with the sins of the fathers becoming the sins of the sons, like the similarly themed In the Name of the Father, but, to my mind, even more so than Jim Sheridan’s movie, it better balances the personal and political.

– Shlomo Schwartzberg is a film critic, teacher and arts journalist based in Toronto. He teaches regular courses at Ryerson University's LIFE Institute, and is currently teaching a course on American cinema of the 70s.

Belfast: Memories of an Irish Childhood

Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe in Belfast.

Watching the black-and-white trailers for Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s fictionalized memoir of growing up Protestant in the titular city at the peak of the Irish Troubles (the film begins in the summer of 1969), I feared that he’d been caught in the trap of turning his childhood into self-conscious neo-realism, like Alfonso Cuarón in the strenuously overrated Roma. I needn’t have worried. Haris Zambarloukos’s cinematography opens in almost hallucinatory color that reveals Belfast in all its complexity, modernist and glittering as well as enshrining gorgeous old buildings. And when the color morphs into black and white, it’s the bustling, lived-in black and white of the Parma Bertolucci and his photographer, Aldo Scavarda, captured in his the 1964 Before the Revolution or, as a friend observed, the black and white of the pictures Tony Richardson made in the late fifties and early sixties out of the great English New Wave dramas Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer (both shot by Oswald Morris) and A Taste of Honey (shot by Walter Lassaly). Belfast isn’t quite up to those movies – or the other movies I thought of while I sat through it, John Boorman’s 1987 Hope and Glory (based on his memories of a childhood in London during the Second World War) and Jim Sheridan’s 2002 In America (a too-little-known magic-realist marvel about a struggling Irish family living illegally in Hell’s Kitchen). But Belfast is plenty good enough. It’s vibrant and vivifying, and I was carried away by it.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool: A Farewell to Gloria

Jamie Bell and Annette Bening in Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool.

The stunning blonde character actress Gloria Grahame brought more than just her trademark pout to movies like Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (where Lee Marvin throws hot coffee in her face), Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (for which she won the 1952 Supporting Actress Oscar), Crossfire and In a Lonely Place. She made her characters’ vulnerability touching and sexy at the same time. But her Hollywood heyday lasted only about a decade, though she continued to work, on screen and on stage, until she died at fifty-seven of stomach cancer and peritonitis in 1981. Annette Bening, who plays Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, is inspired casting, just as Michelle Williams was as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, and like Williams she gives a magnificent performance, on par with her best work (Bugsy, The Grifters, In Dreams). The movie is about the last two years of Grahame’s life and her relationship with an aspiring young English actor named Peter Turner (Jamie Bell), whom she meets when he’s only twenty-eight. (Matt Greenhalgh’s screenplay is based on Turner’s memoir.) It begins when she collapses in her dressing room during rehearsals for a production of The Glass Menagerie in the English provinces and Peter, no longer involved with her, shows up to bring her home to Liverpool, where his adoring parents (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham) take her in and care for her. It’s clear from Peter and Gloria’s reunion that their romance ended badly; we see it in a series of flashbacks to London in 1979, where they met while staying in the same boarding house, and Los Angeles and New York, where he visited her. Her reappearance in his life reactivates his feelings for her, just as he learns what she carefully concealed from him when they were lovers: that she’s dying.

Susanne Bier's Trite and Middlebrow In a Better World

In a Better World/Haevnen

Twenty years ago, I happened to catch a debut feature at the Montreal World Film Festival called Freud Leaving Home. I was so impressed by Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier’s powerful and caustically funny tragedy of a very dysfunctional Swedish Jewish family that I, and another film critic, called the head of the Toronto International Film Festival to strongly urge that, if there was still room, they add Bier’s movie to their upcoming festival lineup. The call was to no avail and for awhile, at least, Bier’s films didn’t find their way to TIFF. I caught her third movie, Like It Never Was Before (1995), in Montreal, too and appreciated the provocative and moving tale of a middle-aged man who leaves his family for another, younger man, at least in part to recapture his youth. So, by the time, Toronto’s film festival began showcasing Bier’s work, with Open Hearts (2002), she was something of a known quantity to me. Toronto has chosen to feature her work since then, including presenting her eleventh film, In a Better World (2010), which won this year’s Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. But something’s been increasingly lost in recent years. As Bier’s critical and popular star has risen, conversely her films have diminished in impact and quality. In a Better World continues in that disappointing vein.

Bad Dates and Una: Bad Dates and Worse Ones

Haneefah Wood stars in Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates at the Huntington Theatre Company. (Photo: T. Charles Ericson)

Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates was a hit for the Huntington Theatre in 2003, so the company has elected to resurrect it this season on its mainstage, which means that it programmed two one-woman shows back to back. (Mala closed last week in its South End space.) Bad Dates is by far the superior play – and the superior performance, by the bright-eyed, charismatic L.A. actress Haneefah Wood. It’s enjoyable if not memorable entertainment. I knew I’d seen Julie White in the show fifteen years ago but couldn’t recall a thing about it except the premise – a middle-aged single woman tells the audience about a succession of eagerly anticipated evenings with men that, one after the other, go wrong. The play hails from the Sex and the City era and the character shares with that series’ narrator-protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw, an obsession with expensive footwear and a frankness about life in Manhattan for an attractive thirtysomething with a career who’s trying to find the right man – though in this cases Haley Walker, who manages a relatively high-end restaurant for some shady people, is also raising a teenage daughter on her own.

Lost Treasures: Shaun Cassidy's Invasion (2005-2006)

“Mommy. You smell different.” (Rose Varon to her mother, Mariel, on Invasion)

According To Jim was on the air for eight seasons featuring 'fat guy, hot wife.' Two and a Half Men? It’s now plowing through its eighth laugh-free season. CSI: Miami? We've been nine years and counting watching David Caruso put on his sunglasses (or is it taking them off ... or is it both?). These shows are drivel. Uninspired, insipid, poorly scripted and acted. How many seasons did Shaun Cassidy's completely brilliant show, Invasion, get? One.

I'm not going to condemn the viewers for their lack of taste (that's too easy, because smart shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Big Love, True Blood, Battlestar Galatica, etc., had or continue to have long runs – albeit on cable). Rather, I just shake my head at Invasion's bad timing. It came on the air about a month after Hurrican Katrina destroyed New Orleans, and, as if the hurricane was the show's fault, the media took it to task. High production costs were another factor. At the end of its only season, Invasion's ratings were no worse than According to Jim's, but ATJ cost a buck ninety to produce, while Invasion ran over $2 million per. It died due to economics and the blindness of the ABC studio heads.

Invasion was about the world we live in now: blended families (divorced couples still attached because of children) attempting to cope with each other; trying to maintain ones individuality in a world that wants you to conform; coming to terms with changes in your body as you age; the painful struggles of teenage boys and girls growing up too fast; the dangerous post 9/11 world where terror can come from abroad, above or your next-door neighbour. It just happened to be wrapped in a science-fiction frame.

Pete Postlethwaite: The Value of the Character Actor

The untimely death of British actor Pete Postlethwaite, at the age of 64 of cancer, was a loss for moviegoers, not least because Postlethwaite (In the Name of the Father, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Usual Suspects) was one of those skilled character actors, who often enliven dull or mediocre movies when they appear on screen.

William Demarest in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

It’s a tradition that goes back to the beginning of the talkies, when stalwarts like Edward Everett Horton (Trouble in Paradise, Top Hat, Shall We Dance), William Demarest, (best known as Uncle Charley on TV’s My Three Sons, but a delightful regular in most of Preston Sturges’s stellar comedies, including The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero) and Thelma Ritter (Pickup on South Street, Rear Window), amongst many others, often stole the film whenever they appeared on screen.

In more recent years, Dan Hedeya (Blood Simple, Clueless), Tony Shalhoub (Quick Change, Galaxy Quest), Hank Azaria (The Birdcage, Mystery Men), Oliver Platt (Pieces of April, Frost/Nixon), Richard Jenkins (Flirting with Disaster; Me, Myself & Irene) and Parker Posey (Kicking & Screaming, A Mighty Wind) have filled that bill nicely. Last summer, we also lost Maury Chaykin (War Games, Unstrung Heroes), one of the great character actors of all time.

Spotlight: The Virtues of Craftsmanship

Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight.

This review contains spoilers for Spotlight.

The writer-director Tom McCarthy takes a leap into the big time with Spotlight, his extraordinary chronicle of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigative team breaking the story of the clergy sex-abuse scandal in early 2002. (Their reporting won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for journalism.) McCarthy’s first two pictures, The Station Agent (starring Peter Dinklage) and The Visitor (starring Richard Jenkins), are poignant, small-scale dramas that share a theme: the protagonist is a man who has absented himself from the world and, by chance, gets pulled back in. Both are beautifully drawn – perfect short-story movies – and beautifully acted. What’s amazing about Spotlight is that McCarthy, working in collaboration with Josh Singer, a one-time staff writer on The West Wing who most recently penned the script for The Fifth Estate, is able to apply the same focus and the same skills for working with actors to such density of material. The filmmakers’ approach, a combination of intimacy and specificity, approximates the thorough, step-by-step process by which a team of four journalists – Spotlight editor Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), who report directly to the paper’s assistant managing editor in charge of investigations, Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery) – set on by the Globe’s newly hired editor-in-chief, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), uncover a story of thundering resonance and breathtaking immensity. The movie has breadth and depth; a newspaper picture that flies in the face of the idea that we’re in the twilight of the newspaper business and a social-problem drama that never for a moment slips into melodrama, it is, I think, a classic.