Immigrants: Brooklyn and In Jackson Heights

Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is a sweetheart of a movie. Written by Nick Hornby and directed by John Crowley, it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Colm Toíbín’s lyrical award-winning 2009 novel about the emigration of a young woman named Eilis (pronounced “Aylish”) Lacey from Ireland to Brooklyn in the early 1950s. In a still-depressed post-war Irish economy, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is stuck: her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) has a job as a bookkeeper, but Eilis can’t do better than land work at a small-scale grocery run by sour, stern-faced Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan), who lectures customers who show up on Sunday to buy items she considers non-necessities. Enniscotty in County Wexford is a narrow, parochial community, but it’s all Eilis knows, so when Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), an Irish priest in Brooklyn with whom her mother (Jane Brennan) is in touch, arranges lodging and employment for Eilis, she leaves with trepidation. The movie is about how she adapts to her new surroundings and makes Brooklyn her home and how it alters her.

Overkill: Joe Wright's Hanna

Saoirse Ronan as Hanna

Director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement) might display an abundance of skill in his new espionage action adventure thriller Hanna, but there is little in the way of sense and sensibility. Working from a script by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, Wright abandons the lyricism of his earlier work for the steely visceral rush of pictures like The Professional, La Femme Nikita and Run Lola Run. But he goes at this pulpy material with such earnest intent that the movie collapses under the weight of its own artful seriousness.

The story, which has the fairy-tale overtones of Little Red Riding Hood and (more explicitly) those of Grimm's, is about the coming of age of a teenage killing machine. The 16-year-old Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) lives alone with her ex-CIA father (Eric Bana) in the remote mountains and forests of Finland. While he trains her to kill wildlife to survive, perform martial arts for self-protection, and to memorize languages for adaptability, we soon learn that this hermetic education is also to prepare her to go out into the world and kill his former CIA handler Marissa (Cate Blanchett). Years earlier, when he tried to flee the Company, Marissa took aim to stop him and killed his wife and Hanna's mother. When Hanna finally sets out to seek vengeance, she ultimately intends to lock horns with her father's nemesis.

Produced and Abandoned: Death Defying Acts (2008)

There are few directors who can capture the fragile nuances of human emotion quite like Gillian Armstrong. In Mrs. Soffel (1984), she dipped into the deep well of longing that a repressed wife (Diane Keaton) developed for an incarcerated man (Mel Gibson). In High Tide (1987), Armstrong elicited, with great subtlety and sadness, the unrequited yearnings a young daughter (Claudia Karvan) had for a mother (Judy Davis) who had abandoned her years earlier. In her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1994), Armstrong went even farther than the previous adaptations of the classic novel. She captured, with both compassion and insight, the strong family bond of the March family while delicately illustrating the diverse desires and hopes of the growing sisters. In her best work, Armstrong’s great gift is for working between (and within) the lines of the story.

Her latest film, Death Defying Acts (2008), is also about emotional bonds – between mother and daughter; men and women – only it’s not nearly as cohesive, or as satisfyingly worked out. Yet there is still something shimmering about this picture, something ghostly that helps compensate for some of the movie’s dead spots. Part of the picture’s alchemy has to do with the fact that the story is about magic – both what is real and what is fake. Magician Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) is visiting Edinburgh, Scotland in 1926 to offer $10,000 to anyone who can help him contact his dead mother and reveal to him her last words. Thirteen years after her death, Houdini is still possessed by the fact that he wasn’t at her side when she passed away. Meanwhile, two con artists, Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her daughter Benji (Saoirse Ronan), have been desperately making their living fleecing customers with a bogus psychic show. (While Mary performs the tricks, Benji sneakily gathers information from the audience needed to help her mother pull off the scam.) When Houdini comes to town, they immediately zero in on the possibility of winning the money. What ensues is a romantic entanglement between Mary and Houdini that’s interrupted by the knowledge that Benji may possess magical gifts that go far beyond scamming.

Story Time: Neil Jordan's Byzantium

Gemma Arterton & Saoirse Ronan in Byzantium

More than a quarter of a century after he made Mona Lisa, Neil Jordan’s movies still have a mesmeric narrative pull – the pull of stories out of The Arabian Nights. He doesn’t command the respect he once did: no one went to see Ondine, his marvelous update of the legend about the romance between a fisherman and a water spirit, and his latest, vampire tale Byzantium, opened in only a handful of cities. (It’s now on DVD.) But that’s not Jordan’s fault – he’s never stopped being a master filmmaker and a master storyteller. Byzantium, adapted by Moira Ruffini from her play, is astonishing. Its protagonist is Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), who travels with Clara (Gemma Arterton), whom she describes in her voice-over narration as “my secret, my muse.” They’re mother-and-daughter vampires, which means that they look like sisters – Clara hasn’t aged since her early twenties, Eleanor since her adolescence. Clara is the pragmatist who supports them by whoring and thievery, while sensitive Eleanor is at odds with the life she’s been thrown into. Clara gave birth to her when she was working in a brothel in the early nineteenth century and had to give her up (or kill her, which she didn’t have the heart for), so Eleanor was raised in a Catholic orphanage where she was taught not to lie. Clara thrives on lying, and she’s brilliant at it, while her daughter is haunted by the fact that her entire life is a lie built around a secret she’s forbidden to reveal. But she can’t help herself – she writes the story of her life and her mother’s on sheets of paper and then lets them float away on the wind.

Fakery: Lady Bird

Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird.

Written and directed by the actress Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird is the coming-of-age story of Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan), a Sacramento teenager whose quirks include her insistence on renaming herself Lady Bird. At the Catholic school she attends, she’s an underachiever, though she’s smart and creative; her social circle is pretty much restricted to her best pal Julie (Beanie Feldstein), who’s overweight and as much an outsider as she is. At home she’s constantly at odds with her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf), whose anxiety over money since Lady Bird’s dad, Larry (Tracy Letts), lost his job has turned her into a sour, one-note nag. The movie covers Lady Bird’s senior year, when she falls for two boys (Lucas Hedges and Timothée Chalamet), one after another, both of whom disappoint her in different ways, flirts with social acceptance by fibbing her way into a friendship with a cool kid (Odeya Rush), and, behind her mother’s back (but with the collusion of her sympathetic father), applies to NYU, a college beyond the family’s financial means. It is, like most coming-of-age narratives that focus on the high school experience, about the protagonist’s figuring out who she is (and who she isn’t).

Four Period Pieces

 Saoirse Ronan in Mary Queen of Scots. (Photo: Liam Daniel)

This piece contains reviews for Mary Queen of Scots,The Favourite, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and At Eternity’s Gate. 

The promise of a movie about the struggle between Queen Elizabeth I and her Scottish cousin, Mary Stuart, who claimed her right to inherit the throne of England and wound up with her head on an executioner’s block, is the chance to see a dramatic clash between two charismatic actresses. But so far it hasn’t worked out very well for the Elizabeths. In the 1971 Mary, Queen of Scots Vanessa Redgrave’s lyrical performance as Mary made a far stronger impression than Glenda Jackson’s Elizabeth (a role that she played later – and famously – on television), and in the new version, Mary Queen of Scots without the comma, Saiorse Ronan’s Mary is pretty much the whole show. That’s not the fault of Margot Robbie, who plays Elizabeth, but of Beau Willimon, who wrote the screenplay (based on John Guy’s book Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart), and the director, Josie Rourke. They’ve chosen a dopey faux-feminist take on the historical narrative in which it’s the manipulative men in the two queens’ lives who keep messing everything up. (As if you had to transform the conflict between two female monarchs into a feminist story!) That point of view makes some sense for Mary, who is, at various times, at the mercy of the whims and power grabs of her half-brother James (James McArdle), her protector, Bothwell (Martin Compston), her homosexual husband, Henry Darnley (Jack Lowden), his father, the Earl of Lennox (Brendan Coyle), and the Protestant reformer-minister John Knox (David Tennant), who uses every opportunity to proselytize against the Catholic Mary. (He manages to rev up the Scottish populace against her “whorish” ways, though she scarcely gets to sleep with anyone.) But the notion that Elizabeth, the most powerful woman in the history of England – perhaps the most powerful monarch after Cleopatra – has to buckle to a bunch of men who are in every way her inferior is dumbfounding. This unfortunate reading of the part diminishes Robbie, who is a fine actress (especially, I think, in The Legend of Tarzan and Z for Zachariah). When these two monarchs finally meet, clandestinely, spark should fly. Instead Rourke stages their tête-à-tête so that they’re not even facing each other until halfway through the scene.

Love in Excess: Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

Keira Knightley stars in Joe Wright's adaptation of Anna Karenina

If you’d asked me last year which contemporary director I’d most like to see adapt Anna Karenina, I would have named Joe Wright. David Yates, who made the last four Harry Potter movies and directed the majestic BBC miniseries of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, would have been a close second. Yates has a magical feel for the epic scope of Victorian fiction – a quality he excavates out of J.K. Rowling’s already Dickensian material – and perhaps more than any other recent director he has succeeded in transmuting the addictive pacing of the capacious novel form to the seriality of television and the film series, capturing the velocity of the novels rather than trying to outdo them. But it’s Wright’s films that distill and remediate the pleasure that novel reading can give us. In Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), the experience of reading as both subject and visual motif suffuses the movies with a gently expressive awareness of the translation from page to screen.

A Consideration of The Lovely Bones

I grew up in Parry Sound in the 1960s. I was part of a big pack of kids who would play outside until after dark throughout the summer, completely unconcerned about our safety, not oblivious to it, just unconcerned. However, we also all knew to 'stay away from Johnnie'. Johnnie was probably a pedophile. He was a man in his forties who lived alone in a big house up the street from our home. We would always see him walking quickly through our neighbourhood, a hand always in his pocket, watching the kids as we played. We nicknamed him Johnnie Walker (no offense to the fine scotch producers). We just all knew to stay away from him. Creepy and weird, he certainly was, yet our parents were seemingly oblivious to him and what he might be, but we weren't. Yet we sure as hell never told our parents about him. We wanted to be able to play unfettered. Granted, he didn't, that we know of, ever actually act on his obvious compulsions, so the light of adult suspicion was never cast upon him. These reflections came to mind as I watched Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, because there is a major character in the film that reminded me of Johnnie.

Random Notes on Recent Performances

Nina Hoss in The Audition (2019)

The focus of the German actress Nina Hoss is so precise and intense it’s almost freaky: when she levels her gaze at someone she’s a little like Sissy Spacek as Carrie choosing a victim for her revenge. That isn’t to say that Hoss brings a sinister quality to her performances, just that her concentration is so unencumbered that it can be unsettling. She burns holes in the screen. Hoss has mostly been associated with the director Christian Petzold, who directed her in Barbara (where she plays an East German doctor in the days before the Berlin Wall fell, sent to a remote rural village as punishment for her attempts to escape to the West) and Phoenix (where she’s a Jewish nightclub singer, a Holocaust survivor still in love with the non-Jewish husband who probably turned her in). North American viewers would recognize her from Homeland. In the recent German picture The Audition she’s a violin teacher at a conservatory whose determination to see a student she fought to get admitted shine in his probationary audition triggers all the troubled corners of her life – her own paralyzing perfectionism as a performer, her inability to make simple decisions, her relationships with her husband and her teenage son (who’s also a student at the conservatory). The movie, directed by Ina Weisse, is very good, despite an ending that seems to shift it into some other movie altogether. But Hoss is its undeniable raison d’être. She is a master of ambivalence: one of those laser looks can uncover two or three layers of meaning. Her scenes with Simon Abkarian as her husband, an instrument maker who either suspects or has worked out that she’s sleeping with a colleague (who’s also one of his customers), carry contradictions of meaning and intention like invisible splinters.

The Seagull: Desecrated Drama, Fake Cinema

Saoirse Ronan and Corey Stoll in Michael Mayer's film adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull. (Photo: IMDB)

Of the four Chekhov masterpieces – The Seagull, Uncle Vanya,Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard – the earliest,The Seagull, seems to be the hardest to pull off. For years I thought the toughest challenge was the last one, The Cherry Orchard, because it has the most abrupt tonal shifts and because in a few odd places the playwright stretches his usual naturalism toward something else – symbolism, perhaps, though not the way Ibsen infuses realism with symbolism in parts of The Wild Duck. (I’m thinking especially of the unsettling sound effect in the second act of The Cherry Orchard, the dissonant chord of the stringed instrument the characters hear in the distance as they sit in the wood.) But I’ve been fortunate to see a couple of superb productions in the last few years, one at the Shaw Festival in Ontario and one at the National Theatre in London. The Seagull continues to fox directors, though it’s such an appealing play, with its two generations of bohemians and its tragic young lovers, that it’s easy to see why people are determined to stage it – to figure out how to get past the obstacles, like the overstated symbolism of the dead bird and the way Chekhov fast-forwards two years between the third and fourth acts. And it’s not as though it never works.

Kings of War: Shakespeare’s War of the Roses

 Ramsey Nasr (on screen, and right) in Kings of War. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld, Barbican Theatre in London)

Though the Belgian director Ivo van Hove has been a vital force in European theatre for the last quarter of a century (he’s fifty-eight), New York theatregoers have only recently had a chance to sample his work. Over the last year, though, they’ve been blitzed with it, and he’s developed a zealous fan base. Last season he mounted Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Broadway while his version of Miller’s A View from the Bridge was at the Young Vic transferred from London. At the beginning of this month, the Brooklyn Academy of Music included his four-and-a-half-hour Kings of War, produced with Toneelgroep Amsterdam, of which he is general director, in its Next Wave Festival.

Independence Day: Resurgence – Definitely Bigger than the Last One

Well, let’s not waste any time: Independence Day: Resurgence would have been far better with Will Smith in it. He’s been replaced by a gaggle of charisma-free B-listers and a host of returning faces who gamely try to fill the void, but they can’t save the film from its asinine script and its lack of interesting action. It’s a ridiculously, overtly, willfully stupid film, and it knows it; this is both bad (because we should not forgive a work its sins simply for making confession – I’m looking at you, Jurassic World) and good (because self-awareness helps the comedic aspects, intentional or otherwise, land on their feet, and is really the only reason the film works at all). Thank our malevolent alien overlords for Jeff Goldblum.

Little Women: Temporal Bigotry

Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Greta Gerwig's Little Women.

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women is the first movie version in which almost none of the charm and poignancy of the beloved Louisa May Alcott novel, published in 1868 and 1869, comes through. Not counting the lost silents – there were two, in 1917 and 1918, one in England and one in America – Gerwig’s is the fourth major adaptation for the big screen. George Cukor’s 1933 film, with its picture-postcard visuals, came out from RKO, though it's in the mold of MGM’s vellum-bound, studio-set approach to the Victorian classics. It’s beautifully adapted (by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman, though imdb.com lists nine other uncredited contributors, including Charles Brackett) and meticulously detailed, with an A-list cast that features Spring Byington as Marmee, Joan Bennett as Beth, the stunning beauty Frances Dee as Meg and Douglass Montgomery as Laurie. And in Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of Jo it touches greatness. It was Hepburn’s second year in Hollywood and her fourth picture, and no one has ever been more ideally suited to the role of Alcott’s feisty, ambitious, iconoclastic – and autobiographical – heroine. In the early scenes she overplays Jo’s gawkiness and tomboyishness, but she seems to find her stride as her character does, her grandiose romantic flourishes taking on the shape of Jo’s discovery of the world and her place within it. Hepburn shows us how Jo grows up, and I can’t be the only viewer who has never forgotten the moment when her Jo, after rejecting Laurie’s marriage proposal, confesses to Marmee in an anguished moan, “I feel as if I’d stabbed my best friend in the heart!”