Neglected Gem #106: Bad Timing (1980)

Art Garfunkel and Harvey Keitel in Bad Timing (1980).

The feeble pun of its title is the least of several apparent strikes against Bad Timing, the once-controversial psychological thriller directed by Nicolas Roeg. (At one point it carried the subtitle A Sensual Obsession, which didn’t help.) Among its other off-putting elements are dialogue that often evokes bad New Yorker fiction; a soundtrack which, while wide-ranging (Pachelbel, Tom Waits, Billie Holiday, Keith Jarrett, The Who, Harry Partch), is intrusively, even obnoxiously, employed; and a star, Art Garfunkel, whose presence places a question mark at the center of the movie. But for all that, Bad Timing is gripping and lasting, a steel trap whose fingers close slowly but surely. Roeg’s choices, though they often jar against the unwritten rules of psychological thrillers, dramatic realism, or simply agreeable narrative, never feel confused or hedged. The movie knows what it is doing; you may take it, leave it, or, like me, come back every few years to look again.

Donald Sutherland, 1935-2024

Elliott Gould, David Arkin, and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (1970).

Even in a roster as quirky as the list of actors who dominated American movies in the late sixties and early seventies, Donald Sutherland – who died at the end of June, just a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday – was an outlier. Of course, he was different from his cohort in an obvious way: he was Canadian, born in the Maritimes and educated as an engineer at the University of Toronto, though he went on to train as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. And he carried his Canadian identity with him always, through nearly six decades of a career in the U.S. – he never lost his accent or his elocution-class diction, and his acting virtues included distinctly Canadian qualities like modesty, gentleness, understatement and an ironic wit that you might miss if you weren’t listening closely enough. His skill at conveying the interior conflicts of decent men amounted to a sort of genius, and his best roles permitted him to move that skill, which has generally been relegated to supporting performances in Hollywood pictures, into the foreground. His slender six-foot-four frame made him appear paradoxically slight and imposing at the same time, as if he’d slipped off a hanger in a closet, and he had rather a goonish face (which his frequent beard tended to offset). He looked like a small-town Canadian square, but he was as much a hipster as Elliott Gould, who partnered him memorably in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, the film that made them both famous. And, defying movie conventions, he was sexy at the same time, opposite Jane Fonda in Klute, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Misfire: A Haunting in Venice

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot once again, in A Haunting in Venice.

A Haunting in Venice is the third Hercule Poirot adaptation written by Michael Green and directed by Kenneth Branagh, who stars once again as the impeccably mustachioed Belgian detective. This one claims to be based on a late (1969) Agatha Christie called Hallowe’en Party, but Christie’s plot has been uprooted and replaced with a completely different one; in fact, aside from the name of the murderer and the Halloween fête that opens the story, there’s no overlap. (The book doesn’t take place in Venice and it contains no haunting.) That’s rather weird but no loss, since it’s not one of her better mysteries. The problem is, the film alters it without improving on it. It’s a disappointment after last year’s Poirot, a juicy remake of Death on the Nile.

Childhood's End: Revisting Coraline, Pleasantville and Watchmen

When I was a kid, I used to love those pop-up books where, when you turned each page, the characters (and their peculiar characteristics) would jump out at you. In Henry Selick’s animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s SF fantasy novel Coraline (2009), he elegantly employs 3-D to essentially invoke the same effect (as Martin Scorsese would later do with wondrous aplomb in his 2011 Hugo). Yet you don’t find yourself thinking about how Selick (A Nightmare Before Christmas) achieves the kind of macabre splendour he does here, but rather, you become saturated by the tempest of a young girl’s runaway imagination. Coraline Jones (voice of Dakota Fanning) has just moved into Palace Apartments with her socially-conscious parents, Mel (voice of Teri Hatcher) and Charlie (voice of John Hodgman), who are so busy working on their new gardening book they don’t notice that their precocious daughter could care less about foliage and dirt. Due to her parents’ neglect, she becomes curious about a tiny door in their living room wall. Although she initially fails to find out what’s inside, one night, a small mouse leads her behind the door where she encounters a replica of her family – except these parents are “perfect” and cater to her every whim and desire. What Coraline soon realizes, though, when she sees that her “other” parents have buttons for eyes, is that things aren’t as perfect as they seem.

When Things Go Bump in the Night: The Novels of Andrew Pyper

Novelist Andrew Pyper

Lost Girls (1999), Andrew Pyper’s terrific debut novel, an updating of the nineteenth century Gothic, in the guise of a courtroom drama, contains elements reminiscent of a Henry James ghost story and to Bram Stoker’s infamous denizen from Transylvania. A Toronto law firm has dispatched Bartholomew Christian Crane, a lawyer willing to go to any length to win a case, to cottage country to defend Thomas Tripp, a former school teacher who has been charged with the murder of two young girls who have gone missing; their bodies have never been found. Crane learns that his spaced-out client attributes the girls’ disappearance to the legendary ghost of a woman who drowned fifty years ago. Crane, a loner with a cocaine problem, becomes increasingly obsessed with the legend that awakens a long-repressed personal tragedy and the aftermath he experienced twenty years before. The setting, both at the lake and in the town populated by eccentrics and the bizarre, forces him to confront that tragedy leaving the case increasingly secondary. Pyper is very good at weaving the Gothic tropes of doubling – Crane becomes a mirror image of Tripp – and the uncanny – the Goth girls who shadow Crane in his addled mind become interchangeable with the lost girls who drowned. At one point as Crane disintegrates, in part fuelled by his drug intake, he muses that he is surprised he “can see [himself] in mirrors at all anymore, the way [he has] come to live like a vampire; [doesn’t] eat regular food, awake most of the night, fingernails the yellowed sharpness of talons, a feeling a little monstrous too, in the baffled way of the walking dead.” In the end, whether Tripp is guilty seems irrelevant because it is the Gothic elements that most engage the reader.