Deserving Better: The Film Adaptation of Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version

In Charles Foran’s Mordecai: The Life & Times, his new biography of author Mordecai Richler, Foran makes mention of the fact that noted Canadian producer Robert Lantos optioned Richler’s last novel Barney’s Version pretty much as soon as it was finished in 1998. The initial plan was for Richler to write the screenplay with his friend, director Ted Kotcheff, behind the camera. They had already worked together on two other Richler adaptations, the superb The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), and the uneven, but still highly engaging, Joshua Then and Now (1985). I’d like to think that in some alternate universe that pairing did indeed come to pass where the film adaptation of Barney’s Version came out before Mordecai died in 2001 and garnered praise as one of the finest Canadian movies ever (and picking up a slew of awards, besides). But, alas, in our real world, Lantos wasn't happy with Richler’s drafts and after the writer died, the movie took a long time coming before finally seeing the light of day in 2010. Unfortunately, it did so saddled with a mediocre director, a neophyte screenwriter, and with far too many significant and damaging changes made from the book.

Year-End Movies I: The Holdovers and Ferrari

Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers.

The review of The Holdovers contains spoilers.

In The Holdovers a prodigiously bright but desperately unhappy teenager with a checkered academic history and the sour, supercilious Ancient Civilizations teacher at his boarding school are stuck with each other’s company over Christmas week of 1970, when the campus, a few hours’ drive from Boston, is deserted except for these two, the cook and the caretaker. Initially there are four other “holdovers” but the screenwriter, David Hemingson, employs a wobbly plot twist to scatter them so that he and the director, Alexander Payne, can home in on the teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), the boy, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), and the cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).

Win Win: Thomas McCarthy’s Moving, Memorable American Tale

Paul Giamatti and Alex Shaffer in Win Win.

Win Win, the latest film from writer-director Thomas McCarthy continues in the same pleasing vein of his two previous movies, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2007). It, too, is concerned with the lives of ordinary people who sometimes do extraordinary things, much like the recluse (Peter Dinklage) in The Station Agent who affects a motley group of people when he moves to their neighbourhood; to the lonely college professor (Richard Jenkins) in The Visitor who changes lives, not least his own, when he befriends a pair of illegal immigrants in New York. Win Win revolves around Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), a lawyer/wrestling coach in New Jersey, who reluctantly takes in Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a young man  who has left his Ohio home to be with his grandfather Leo (Burt Young). The only problem is that said relative, suffering from early-onset dementia, is now in a nursing home, which leaves Kyle with few options but to move in with Flaherty and his family. What McCarthy does with this seemingly thin tale is nothing short of miraculous.

All the Maybe-President’s Men: A Trek on the Campaign Trail

“I’m all goosbumpy about this guy,” admits Ryan Gosling as Stephen Myers, an idealistic press secretary working for an inspirational candidate.

“He will let you down sooner or later,” predicts Ida Horowicz, a crafty New York Times reporter played by Marisa Tomei. This comment is reminiscent of what Shakespeare had a soothsayer tell Julius Caesar about the danger inherent in a certain date. The Ides of March, a new film that borrows its title from the mystical line written by the Bard in 1599, suggests that we should beware politicians of every stripe and their minions.

Parental Discretion Iz Advised: Straight Outta Compton

Neil Brown Jr., Aldis Hodge, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell and O'Shea Jackson Jr. in Straight Outta Compton.

Here’s a film I never thought I’d see. While seminal rap posse N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes, for the uninitiated, made up of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren, DJ Yella, and others) made their careers – and changed the rap genre from the inside out – by describing the harsh reality of their South Central Los Angeles upbringings, that same shocking honesty wouldn’t seem possible in a film produced by the rappers themselves. Would they really be willing to show the seedier parts of their rise to wealth and cultural significance? Would they be willing to throw it all out there, the way they did with their music, warts and all? Well – sort of. Director F. Gary Gray takes the conventional prestige-type approach to his unconventional, prestige-averse subject, which means we get a depiction of the genesis of g-funk and West Coast gangsta rap that humanizes and softens and even lionizes its contributors, but – and this is no doubt due to the real Ice Cube and Dr. Dre’s involvement in producing the film – it also forgets, omits, or otherwise glosses over many of the group’s less flattering pieces of history. It’s a biopic with excellent casting and strongly realized performances that wants less to tell the truth of N.W.A’s challenging story and more to act as a time capsule for posterity: a loving self-written paean to their massive cultural impact and not a cutting exploration of the problems and contradictions that defined their lives and work. But I’ll get into those in a bit.

Salvation: Love & Mercy

"The Beach Boys propagated their own variant on the American dream, painting a dazzling picture of beaches, parties and endless summers, a paradise of escape into private as often as shared pleasures...Yet by the late Sixties, the band was articulating, with less success, a disenchantment with that suburban ethos, and a search for transcendence."

–  Jim Miller in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll (Random House, 1980).

Is it any wonder that Los Angeles is known as "the City of Lost Angels"? It's the place where sellouts go to bask in the sun, and shady deals get made under palm trees. Never mind that L.A. was the corruptible home of Raymond Chandler's incorruptible detective Philip Marlowe, it was also where Annie Hall was seduced away from Alvy Singer in Woody Allen's hit comedy. Los Angeles may be a tinsel town, a superficial jewel and pleasure palace, but its endless summers hold out a paradoxical promise. Songwriter Brian Wilson successfully depicted the seductive charms of that promise in The Beach Boys' best early music ("I Get Around," "Fun, Fun, Fun," "California Girls"), but when he tried to grow past the adolescent whims of what Jim Miller called that "paradise of escape," even calling it into question in the aching "Don't Worry Baby," Wilson was unable to take the band successfully into adulthood. The hedonistic thrill of The Beach Boys would, by the end of the Sixties, ironically become associated with the apocalyptic horrors of Charles Manson.

Helen Mirren's Thrilling Countess: The Last Station

The Last Station is not a great movie by any means but Helen Mirren’s performance as writer Leo Tolstoy’s wife, the mercurial Countess Sofya, is certainly great acting. It’s also a timely reminder that sometimes it’s the acting alone that makes a film worthwhile.

As the film begins, in the early 20th century, Sofya, who has been married to Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) for nearly fifty years, is warring with writer Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), who as Tolstoy’s secretary, has become the writer’s premiere acolyte. Devout followers of Tolstoy, Chertkov and many others call themselves Tolstoyans, and influenced by Leo Tolstoy’s writings, espouse vegetarianism, the sacredness of all life and advocate for a world free of war. Sofya doesn't buy into any of the Tolstoyans’ new age beliefs, nor does she even concede that they bear any relation to anything her husband, who is widely known for his novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, has ever written. More significantly, she is convinced that Chertkov is pressuring Tolstoy to change his will so that his royalties will go the Russian people and not to her and her children. Her fear of losing the family mansion and not having anything to live on, after Tolstoy dies, sends her on a trajectory of rage, hysteria, duplicity and finally a nervous breakdown, even as her worst fears come to fruition.

2015: My Cultural Year in Review

Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons in the second season of Fargo.

It’s been a long year. We’re coming close to the end. As Mr. Lennon said, “So this is Christmas, and what have we done?” Well we’ve listened to a lot of music, and read a lot of books. Watched some movies. And some TV. Maybe my favourite TV show has been Fargo, Season 2 of which I have just finished, and I have to say I loved every minute of it. The first season was interesting, had a few surprises, like when Officer Molly got shot but the second season was where we found out just what happened at the Sioux Falls massacre. The concept of going back twenty years to explain this was sheer genius. If you haven’t watched Fargo, I recommend you start from the beginning. See the movie first and marvel at the work of Joel and Ethan Coen. Next try the first season to see how beautifully the television producers have translated North Dakota and environs to the small screen. Billy Bob Thornton was the perfect villain, and Allison Tolman as Molly Solverson was extraordinary. Her expressive eyes just captured the viewer and never let you go.

Great Feats of Recitation: Cosmopolis (2012)

Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis (2012).

Fresh off filming the final Twilight film (2012), Robert Pattinson jumped straight into portraying yet another nearly affectless, pale leading man with stylish hair in Cosmopolis (2012), adapted by director David Cronenberg from the Don DeLillo novel. Rarely have I encountered a film with such single-minded focus: everything here, from production design to camera angles to score, is in service to the dialogue. As it should be.

All Creatures Great and Small: A Movie That Growls “Merry Christmas”

There are several moments in We Bought a Zoo that may be reminiscent of a far better film also about a man with a plan who arrives in a remote town and is charmed by the eccentric people living there. Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, which came out in 1983, was set on the coast of Scotland. Peter Riegert played a conflicted oil company executive way back then and he appears all too briefly as a newspaper editor in the current release, directed by Cameron Crowe. The star this time around is Matt Damon, portraying a recently widowed journalist named Benjamin Mee fleeing Los Angeles and arriving somewhere in rural Southern California with his two children.

Newspapers throughout the nation are withering away, plus Benjamin’s adventure beat becomes too difficult to maintain because it requires a lot of traveling. With two kids to raise on his own, he simply quits the job. Meanwhile, his brooding 14-year-old son Dylan (Colin Ford) has just been expelled from school for stealing and their city home is plagued by noisy neighbors. A real estate agent shows several properties to him and his precocious daughter Rosie, (Maggie Elizabeth Jones, cute enough to stop mugging for the cameras already!). But none are right for them until they spot a ramshackle country house on 18 gorgeous acres – and adjacent to an almost-defunct Rosemoor Wildlife Park, in dire need of renovation and revival. The family also desperately in need of revival suddenly must contend with lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my.

The Troubling Nature of Love: Before Sunset & Sideways

No two films about the troubling nature of love better bracketed the latter half of 2004 than Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset and Alexander Payne’s Sideways. Both films, long available on DVD, are worth watching again over a rainy weekend in August (if we have one), because both are without question masterful if not masterpieces.

Both expertly deal with ‘damaged’ people trying to find their way through pain, depression, self-loathing, what-have-you, to that place where they can let themselves be loved again. Both also happen to be deeply moving and painfully funny. The fact that one of them, Before Sunset, happens to be a sequel to the tiny, perfect Before Sunrise (1995) is just the icing on the cake.

From Stage to Screen: Peeking at a Political Underbelly

John Gallagher Jr., Chris Noth and Kate Blumberg in Farragut North.

As a “press advance man” for former Vermont Governor Howard Dean’s presidential bid, Brooklyn playwright Beau Willimon spent the last three months of 2003 crisscrossing Iowa. So it’s hardly surprising his gripping make-believe account of a modern campaign would be set in that Midwestern state. Farragut North, which opened off-Broadway in late 2008, was about back-room machinations and dirty tricks among political operatives.

Yet Willimon, who had stumped for other Democratic candidates in the past, made it clear in an interview three years ago that his piece was not a Deaniac docudrama. “I drew on all those experiences to create a fictional but authentic world,” he said, while sipping orange juice at a cafe in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. “My intention is to present a universal story about power and ambition.”

It also seemed to be a story appropriate for cinema. The action has been relocated to Ohio in the script Willimon wrote after Farragut was optioned by Warner Bros, in conjunction with George Clooney’s production company. Clooney co-adapted and directed the film, now titled The Ides of March, and he also stars, along with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, Paul Giamatti and Evan Rachel Wood. It will open the Venice Film Festival on August 31, before an October 7 release.

The dynamic original version, under the aegis of the Atlantic Theater Company, featured Chris Noth of Law & Order fame and John Gallagher, Jr., who won a 2007 Tony Award for his performance in the hit Broadway musical Spring Awakening. The cast included Olivia Thirlby, Ellen Page’s sidekick in Juno, and Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., perhaps best known for HBO’s The Wire. Doug Hughes, the director of Farragut, had earned a 2005 Tony Award for Doubt.

Paradise Almost Lost: George Clooney Elevates a Mediocre Story

In The Descendants, fans of Alexander Payne may be hoping for the blackest of black comedy, the tone with which the director first made a name for himself. But the equal opportunity satire of Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999) was already on the wane in About Schmidt (2002), a rather snide effort that simply belittled most of the characters. Despite admirably offbeat performances by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in Sideways (2004), too much sentimentality crept into a film that’s periodically lovely in other ways – especially if you’ve imbibed some of the Napa Valley wine that’s central to the plot. But the new project, set in Hawaii, offers a far more conventional story than all of Payne’s previous works put together.

That said, it’s not without charm, thanks to the almost always charming George Clooney in the lead role as a cuckolded husband and somewhat absentee father who must assume primary care of their two daughters when his wife goes into an irreversible coma after a boating accident. He is Matt King, a multicultural real estate attorney whose ancestor, King Kamehameha the Great, united all the islands of the archipelago under his rule in 1810. This contemporary man of royal lineage has trouble uniting with his children – 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), a typically alienated teenager – so together they can endure the absence of a hospitalized mother who is unlikely to survive.

Eleanor Roosevelt through Different Lenses (Part 1): Ken Burns' The Roosevelts

Eleanor Roosevelt speaking at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. (Photo: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

Since Ken Burns adapted David McCullough's book, The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, to an Academy Award winning Brooklyn Bridge (1981), he has produced and directed numerous masterful feature length documentaries for PBS. His signature trademarks are a combination of still photos, archival film footage, unseen actors reading the words of historical characters, apt American music and an array of historians, journalists and (if possible) surviving contemporaries who offer compelling anecdotes and insights into the era, an issue and the characters. Burns avoids dramatic re-enactments. His oeuvre includes The Statue of Liberty (1985), the iconic The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), The West (1996), Lewis & Clark (1997), Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1999), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Dust Bowl (2012), The Central Park Five (2013). Most recently PBS has aired Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015), a six-hour treatment of Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography of cancer, the one film Burns did not direct because he was so personally connected to the subject: his mother died of cancer when he was a young boy. In 2016, he returned to directing and producing the thrilling Jackie Robinson that excelled in weaving together sport, politics and race.

It is, however, Burns’ 2014 mammoth seven-part, fourteen-hour The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, on the private and public lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, that is the one I will be discussing today – focusing mostly on the second generation of Roosevelts. As with many of the films cited above, Burns collaborated with biographer and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, who wrote the elegant and accessible script and is one of the historians – along with Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Jon Meacham and journalist George Will – who offers trenchant insights. Actor Peter Coyote won an Emmy award for his compelling narration. The stellar cast of actors’ voices include Meryl Streep for Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Giamatti for Teddy Roosevelt, and Edward Herrmann for FDR, an astute choice since he persuasively played the role in the television series Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977).

Love Affairs: The History of Sound and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound. (Photo: MUBI.)

In The History of Sound Lionel Worthing and David White fall in love over a song. Drinking in a bar on a Saturday evening in 1917, Lionel (Paul Mescal) hears David (Josh O’Connor), a fellow student at the New England Conservatory of Music, play a plaintive folk ballad Lionel has known all his life and he drifts to the piano. David, an orphan raised in privilege in Newport, Rhode Island, is a competent musician whose passion for American folk obsesses him. Lionel is a singer whose gifts have taken him off the Kentucky farm where he grew up and all the way to Boston, and he knows at first hand most of the tunes David has been collecting in his brain. The night they meet, they play and sing until the bar closes; then Lionel walks David back to his apartment and they become lovers. After they graduate, David goes off to Europe to fight in the Great War while Lionel returns home to the farm and his family. When the war is over David takes a job as a music professor in Maine. He reaches out to Lionel, inviting him to join him on a trip through the forests and islands of the state recording music on wax cylinders to preserve it for posterity, and the two men pick up their relationship where they left off. But David is now prone to spells of melancholy, and after they leave each other at the end of their journey Lionel stops hearing from him. He continues to write monthly letters to him until he finally gives up trying, in 1921. It isn’t for years, after Lionel has become first a singer in a world-famous Italian choir and then, driven by his own unsettled nature, a choir director back in the States, that he finds out what happened to the man he fell in love with in that Boston bar.

The Disney Treatment: Saving Mr. Banks

Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson in Saving Mr. Banks

The idea of a movie about Walt Disney persuading the English author P.L. (Pamela) Travers to let him adapt Mary Poppins to the screen is so tantalizing that you keep rooting for Saving Mr. Banks to work, long past the point where you can see it isn’t going to. Disney had been wooing Travers for twenty years before he finally got her to come to Los Angeles to collaborate with the screenwriter he’d chosen, Don DaGradi, and the songwriting Sherman brothers. But she kept putting off signing the contract, and her demands were plentiful and persnickety. In Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith’s screenplay, Travers (Emma Thompson) only agrees to make the trip because she hasn’t managed to write anything in years, and her agent convinces her that she badly needs the money. And still she arrives in Hollywood apparently determined that nothing Disney (Tom Hanks) can promise her will challenge her notion that he and his team are going to turn her 1934 children’s classic – a childhood favorite of Disney’s daughters – into something cutesy, sentimental and blandly commercialized.

Stay Up Late: V/H/S, The ABCs of Death, John Dies at the End

Chase Williamson, as Dave, in John Dies at the End

One of my favorite movie books is J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Midnight Movies, which was first published in 1983 when the midnight movie as countercultural phenomenon was about to go the way of all flesh, displaced by the convenience and insular charms of home video. Hoberman captured the special appeal of midnight movies when he wrote of “epic, environmental films – really crazy ones,” that “instead of dreaming, you could spend the night with these visions.” One of the earliest and most prolific creators of midnight hits was George Romero, whose Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968 and played the international midnight circuit for years, and who followed it up with both the sequel Dawn of the Dead and his riff on vampire mythology, Martin. And the midnight horror movie reached an apotheosis in 1985 with Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, which, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, was probably ultimately seen by far more people who caught it on video than in a theater. Not all the major midnight hits were horror movies, but most of them – Eraserhead, El Topo – were nightmares of some kind, and even the congenial, geek-show vaudeville of early John Waters and the communal-utopian The Rocky Horror Picture Show, drew much of their appeal from their fans’ sense that they were identifying with people who could have starred in their parents’ nightmares.

Even without an actual, theater-going subculture for the movies themselves to tap into, there remains a special, hip allure to a horror or fantasy picture that can generate a plausible “midnight” vibe – that seems as if it would be a natural to tap into that audience, if it still existed. The Toronto International Film Festival, which has managed for years now to cling tight to a reputation as the premiere film festival for that select group that actually attends film festivals to see movies, still programs its “Midnight Madness” lineup every year, and now that several of last year’s entries have trickled into theaters (and onto Video On Demand), civilians and people who couldn’t schedule their vacations for September can get a taste of what passes for hip horror these days. The ABCs Of Murder and John Dies at the End, and another recent horror picture, V/H/S, may provide some hints about the current state of the midnight movie gene and how today’s indie-genre filmmakers are trying to tap into it.

The Usual Mixed Bag: Summer Movie Roundup

Over the years, the meaning of summer movies has changed. As a teen, I remember that about the only films released in hot weather were the blockbusters, the James Bonds, the Star Wars etc. Then things began to change and serious, foreign language, subtitled movies also were sent out to the populace. Nowadays, it’s a veritable smorgasbord of movies on view, though the biggest box office and attendant media coverage still accrues to tent-pole films like The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. And while it seems like the kids rule the roost because of all the publicity given to the younger skewing  movies (though many adults go to them, too), there really is a choice for all film tastes. Here is a look at some recent summer releases in Toronto, most still in our theatres and probably in yours, as well. It’s the usual mixed bag when it comes to quality.

Vicious Circles: The JFK Conspiracy Films

Immersing oneself in the conspiracy mythology that has grown up around the assassination of President Kennedy means hearing, again and again, confident assertions of things that have been repeatedly shown to be untrue. Oswald couldn’t shoot straight, they say, and no one could get off the number of shots he supposed fired in the space of time he had using the weapon he would have used. There's also exhaustive, detailed arguments that completely unravel upon close inspection (such as all the mocking elaborations on the impossible trajectory of the bullet that passed through the bodies of Kennedy and John Connally that fail to take into account the fact that, as you guess just from looking at photos of the two men riding in the presidential limousine, Kennedy’s seat was a few key inches higher than Connally’s).

There was never any valid intellectual reason for doubting that Lee Harvey Oswald was the president’s killer, just as there’s never been any valid intellectual reason for doubting that the plays and poetry credited to William Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare. Arguments that somebody else wrote Shakespeare’s work always come down to snobbery; they’re emotionally necessary for people who can’t deal with the fact that the greatest English writer was a mutt. The belief that Kennedy must have been the victim of a conspiracy must be very reassuring to people who can’t wrap their minds around the idea that some mutt with a mail-order rifle changed the course of history. That helps to explain why high-profile conspiracy proponents – people who claim to think that powerful forces, maybe even the government itself, murdered the president and got off scott free, never seem to be as furiously angry and despairing as you’d expect them to be. Given the chance to spout off, an Oliver Stone or Mark Lane is more likely to come across as remarkably at peace, even smug. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t live in a world where chaos reigns and things are out of man’s control. They know something you don’t know.

Curtis Hanson: A Career in Perspective

Eminem and Curtis Hanson (right) on the set of 8 Mile in 2002. (Photo: Eli Reed)

Film director Curtis Hanson, who died in September at the too-young age of seventy-one, was stuck in B-movie territory for a decade and a half before he graduated, in 1987, with the thriller The Bedroom Window. (One of his last B-pictures, Losin’ It, about three SoCal high-schoolers who drive to Tijuana to get rid of their virginity, was coarse and chaotic but very likable. One of them was played by Tom Cruise, just months before Risky Business made him a star, and I’ve never enjoyed watching him as much since.) Once he made it to the majors, so to speak, Hanson made eleven pictures, and I like all or part of every single one except for his first hit, the witless 1992 Gothic The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – it was efficiently directed, but the dunderheaded script was insurmountable. What made him so reliable a filmmaker was a combination of his bred-in-the-bone understanding of genre conventions, his transparent love of actors and his undervalued gift for getting fine work out of them, and his relaxed finesse as a storyteller. This last is no surprise: from his first days in movies, the early seventies, he was a screenwriter as well as a director, penning the compulsively watchable, enjoyably amoral Canadian mystery The Silent Partner (directed by Daryl Duke and starring Elliott Gould, Susannah York and Christopher Plummer) in 1978 and contributing to the scripts of Samuel Fuller’s White Dog and Carroll Ballard’s Never Cry Wolf in the early eighties. And he kept his hand in: he wrote The Bedroom Window and co-wrote the best picture he ever turned out, L.A. Confidential, with Brian Helgeland, as well as one of his last movies, Lucky You, with Eric Roth.