Talking ‘bout an Evolution: When a Movie Twosome Grows Ever More Tiresome

I thought that One Day would, at the very least, provide some eye candy with footage of Edinburgh, Paris and London. The film certainly flits between those gorgeous European cities while tracking its two protagonists as they continually relocate over the course of 23 years. The conceit is that Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess), just after their 1988 university graduation in Scotland, have an unconsummated sexual encounter on July 15. According to British legend, the weather on that particular date will last for 40 more days. This annual holiday is dedicated to St. Swithin, a Saxon monk who died in 862.

You might ask what a 9th-century celibate priest would have known about romance but the characters never do. For another two decades, Emma and Dexter remain best friends separated by miles and life choices who continue dancing around the fact that they’re obviously soul mates. It’s a 108-minute cinematic tease. Exhaustion sets in. July 15, intended as some kind of mystical touchstone in their existence together and apart, keeps popping up on inter-titles that are ever more meaningless. St. Swithin, be damned. The weather is totally ignored.

American Plays in London: Machinal and Long Day’s Journey into Night

Rosie Sheehy in Machinal. (Photo: Foteini Christofilopoulou)

The English director Richard Jones did a fine job with Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, which began at the Old Vic and was showcased at the Armory in New York seven years ago. But his take on another 1920s expressionist classic, Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, which just closed at the Old Vic, is a mistake pretty much from beginning to end. Machinal, inspired by the Ruth Snyder murder trial, is a feminist take on the protest play that was more or less forgotten for decades after its 1928 premiere and rediscovered when the Public Theatre revived it in 1990. (Arthur Hopkins directed the original production on a set designed by the legendary Robert Edmond Jones, with Zita Johann in the leading role.) Like other signal American expressionist screeds of the era, The Hairy Ape and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, Machinal lashes out at the mechanized society that squashes individualist impulse and wrecks the soul, but Treadwell was the first playwright to identify that society as specifically patriarchal. The protagonist, known for the first half of the play only by the emblematic title the Young Woman, slaves in an office until her boss proposes marriage; she accepts him because he can make her life and that of her widowed mother comfortable (and, we assume, she’ll lose her job if she turns him down). But he’s insensitive and self-involved and he repels her physically. She finds childbirth torturous and doesn’t feel any love for her baby; Treadwell is the first dramatist to put post-partum depression on the stage. It isn’t until the Young Woman, finally referred to her by her name, Helen, goes to a speakeasy with a friend and is picked up by a handsome young adventurer who takes her to bed that she experiences any semblance of freedom and happiness. When the affair is over she kills her husband and is sentenced to the electric chair.

Neglected Gem: Friends with Benefits (2011)

Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis in Friends with Benefits (2011). (Photo: David Giesbrecht)

The title is a cliché, and there are half a dozen other movies with the same one. But the movie itself, a romantic comedy co-starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, is a charmer with a distinctive voice. Will Gluck made it in 2011, the year after he released Easy A, a startlingly fresh teen comedy that featured one of Emma Stone’s first major roles. Stone plays Olive, a smart, imaginative young woman attending high school in Ojai, California who is overlooked by most of her peers until her best friend (Aly Michalka) insists that she must have lost her virginity while her parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) left her alone for the weekend and, weary of denying it, Olive pretends it’s true. The head of a Christian group (Amanda Bynes) dedicated to preserving their and their classmates’ chastity overhears the conversation and spreads it around, and suddenly Olive finds herself with a scandalous reputation she hasn’t earned. To complicate things, a gay male classmate (Dan Byrd) begs her to pretend she’s gone to bed with him, too, to put an end to the torment he puts up with at school.  Witty and savvy, Easy A is one of the best teen comedies of the last twenty years, and it feels as if Gluck and the screenwriter, Bert V. Royal, have shaped it around their charismatic star.

Fizzle and Pop: Easy A

Emma Stone in Easy A (2010).

 

The filmmakers of Easy A have a clever idea working Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter into a comedy about the impact of high school gossip. But they don’t seem to know what to do with it. Clean-cut Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) gets overheard saying that she recently lost her virginity (although she hadn’t) and, within hours, it’s all over school. Her reputation is both sullied and enhanced (depending on who you ask). But her false confession leads several boys (including a gay friend who desperately wants to be recognized as straight) to seek her out and pretend that they lost their virginity with her – they’re so desperate they even pay her. Before long, the benefits of being perceived as the school sex queen pale when she begins to resemble Hester Prynne (even leading to her affixing the scarlet ‘A’ to her clothing).

Scorsese's Labyrinth: Shutter Island

 

Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is less an adaptation of author Dennis Lehane’s mystery thriller than it is a virtual funhouse of the director’s favourite film noir tropes – only there’s no fun in it. As he did in his ridiculous re-make of Cape Fear (1991), Scorsese gets so absorbed invoking the work of various film stylists - including Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) - that he can’t find a style of his own to take us inside the drama. Working from a dense but convoluted script (by Laeta Kalogridis), Shutter Island is a cluttered labyrinth that begins as an ingenious detective story but slowly shifts into a psychological character study. However, Scorsese gets so jazzed on creating a surreal atmosphere, aided by the atonal sounds of Ligeti, Penderecki and John Adams, that he clouds the clarity of the story. If it wasn’t for the good work by many of the performers, desperately breathing life into their stock roles, the picture would sink under the weight of the director’s B-movie fetishes.

Neglected Gem #40: Joe Gould’s Secret (2000)

Stanley Tucci and Ian Holm star in Joe Gould's Secret

Joe Gould’s Secret (2000) tells the oddball story of how, in 1950, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell (played by Stanley Tucci, who also directed) finds his muse, an alcoholic, half-mad Greenwich Village eccentric named Joe Gould (Ian Holm) who lives off the generosity of his friends – and off panhandling in the streets and in restaurants – while he claims to be completing a book, an oral history of the world that he refers to as “the O.H.” It reportedly exists in a series of notebooks that Gould deposits all over town, entrusting them to his supporters – like Max Gordon (David Wohl), the producer who runs the Village Vanguard. Mitchell first encounters Gould at a Village lunch counter. Intrigued, he interviews him and talks to the people who seem to know him best: Gordon, Alice Neel (Susan Sarandon, in a lovely small performance), who painted his portrait during the early days of the Depression (she says she gave him three penises because he seemed to require the excess), the gallery owner Vivian Marquis (Patricia Clarkson), and Freddy (Allan Corduner), who runs a poetry club called The Ravens and wears his coat the affected-theatrical way, hanging off his shoulders. They’re an entertaining crowd, though Tucci depicts them a mite quaintly. (You think, by contrast, of the treatment Mazursky gave this setting in his valentine to the Village in the 1950s, Next Stop, Greenwich Village.) 

Toiling in the Trenches: For the Love of Movies

People who toil in the trenches of film criticism know what it’s like to be courted or dissed by publicists and festival organizers. There’s also that love-hate thing with readers. Moreover, it’s a lonely line of work to sit for hours in a darkened theater and then tap away on a keyboard while staring at another screen. Your eyes and tush begin to ache.

Boo hoo.

Obsessive-Compulsive: Don Jon

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Scarlett Johansson in Don Jon

In Don Jon, writer, director and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives us a comedy about sex as tightly compartmentalized as the life of its main character. Jon is a New Jersey bartender who takes a different girl home from the club every Saturday night and shows up for Catholic mass with his parents the next morning – the center that holds it all together is the hard-core porn he watches addictively on his computer. There’s something disarming about a movie this willing to be lighthearted about sexual compulsion, but Don Jon is not exactly Portnoy’s Complaint. Gordon-Levitt only shows us the clean surfaces of Jon’s obsessions – we don’t get a peak at the tension or the fear underneath, or even a taste of the pleasure principle that drives them.

I always thought that pornography appealed to people for similar reasons; it indulges the mechanics of sex, its kinks and fetishes and its carnal veneer, but it doesn’t get curious about what gets people into bed together in the first place. There’s nothing particularly subversive about two people fucking. On screen, as in life, eroticism is in the drama of emotional risk. Don Jon opens with a promising romantic comedy mis-en-scène when Jon, disillusioned by one-night stands, tracks down Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), a woman whose refusal to go home with him after an evening of dance floor foreplay makes him think she can supply the depth he’s been missing. Their incompatible sexual fantasies – his based on pornography (which she abhors) and hers on weepy romantic pictures (which he disdains) – is the smartest and funniest idea in the film, but Gordon-Levitt doesn’t follow through on its romantic possibilities; instead he sells out Barbara by turning her into an exploitative prude. When Don Jon turns out to be a small-scale redemption story about a guy who learns to stop jerking off and fall in love – and to give up his porn junkie lifestyle – you realize the movie’s not taking any chances. It gives in to erotic phobias instead of dramatizing them.

Mixed Media Report

This round-up includes reviews of Adolescence, Good Night, and Good Luck and Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, as well as a tribute to Charles Strouse.

Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper in Adolescence. (Photo: Netflix.)

It’s a confirmed truth that British actors can do just about anything, but the consistency and range of performances in the recent four-part English series Adolescence (streaming on Netflix) is so impressive that it may have set a new standard. The style of the limited series, created and written by Stephen Graham, who plays one of the principal roles, and the prolific playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, is documentary realism, and the characters are etched in such precise psychological detail that they register more as figures in an Impressionist group painting come to life than as actors at work. You carry them away with you; I watched the first half at the end of the evening and woke up early the next morning with them still crowded into my brain. (I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d finished the series.) My praise is meant to extend to the young performers, who give performances of unwavering authenticity on a par with the adults. Those of us who love watching English TV drama – and that includes almost everyone I know – have our favorite actors, but the only member of the cast of Adolescence I recognized was Graham, whom I’d admired as the captain of the whaling ship in The North Water and as Jamie Bell’s brother in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. I assume that my lack of familiarity with the others enhanced the freshness of the experience, but then British actors are chameleons anyway.