Coming of Age as an Apologue – and the Reverse

Elliott Heffernan and Saiorse Ronan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. (Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Apple TV+.)

Steve McQueen’s film Blitz, set in September 1940, in the early days of Hitler’s incessant bombing of London, is an obvious labor of love. It takes place over just a couple of days, during which Rita (Saiorse Ronan), an armaments factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), on a train bound for the countryside with other children but he jumps out and tries to make his way back to Stepney, the working-class neighborhood where he lives with Rita and her father (Paul Weller); he never knew his father, who is African and was deported unjustly after a street fight. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s recreations of the period are gorgeous, as is the cinematography by Yorick Le Soux, the favorite collaborator of the French director Olivier Assayas. The editing by Peter Sciberras is masterful: it actualizes McQueen’s remarkable sense of rhythm, which was showcased in his Small Axe series and especially in Lovers Rock. The film is propelled forward, moving back and forth between Rita and her wayward boy with remarkable fluidity and from one London location to another so that the continuity is simultaneously whole-cloth and fragmented. It contains a number of beautifully constructed setpieces that rank with the finest work that has been done with this period in film. And along the way McQueen takes care to pay homage to some of its predecessors: Hope and Glory, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Atonement. (There’s also a subplot out of Oliver Twist and a speech in an underground shelter by a left-wing character, played by Leigh Gill, who seems to have been inspired by Agate in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty.)

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.

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.

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).

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!”