1999 Film festival report, part six

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 1999)

This is the sixth and last of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival

My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog)

Herzog directed actor Klaus Kinski five times in the 70s and 80s (most memorably in Aguirre: the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo), with almost uniquely obsessive and fiery results: both megalomaniacs of sorts, they enjoyed perhaps the ultimate love-hate relationship. Herzog relives their collaborations in this memoir, much of which consists of fundamentally conventional straight-to-camera dialogue and archival footage, but which given the subject matter makes for rollicking weird and wonderful results. Kinski was capable both of fierce irrational rage and almost childish tenderness; he could be both courageous and cowardly, virtually simultaneously; he believed himself a genius, and sometimes seemed like it. Given the evidence presented, it’s not surprising that Kinski is no longer with us; looking at the astonishing clips from their films, one’s primary mourning is likely to be for Herzog’s apparently burnt-out fiction film career.

Happy Texas (Mark Illsley)

Two escaped convicts hide out in a small Texas town, masquerading as gay pageant organizers. The movie has been praised as something fresh and distinctive, but I can’t really see why – it’s a fragmented, flatly directed series of mainly familiar set-pieces and relationships. The film substantially dispenses with its “gay” theme pretty early on, and also underexploits the central pageant concept, limiting Steve Zahn’s transformation from rough-edged incompetent into inspirational leader to not much more than a few montages. Instead, it spends most of its time meandering through such unexceptional plot strands as Jeremy Northam’s falling in love with a woman who fixes on him as a confidante, while he simultaneously plans to rob her bank. There’s a rather touching performance by William H Macy as the local sheriff discovering his own homosexuality, but his character is fuzzy as everything else in the film; Zahn, although his work here has been widely acclaimed, relies entirely on a bizarre stream of senseless mannerisms.

The Limey (Steven Soderbergh)

In this triumphantly experimental film, Soderbergh sets out to evoke the elliptical existential style that flourished in the 60’s (in the work of Antonioni and Bertolucci and, more genre-specifically, in John Boorman’s Point Blank). The Limey casts two icons of the decade, Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda, in a sparsely plotted thriller about a hard-edged British criminal (Stamp, naturally) who comes to LA to investigate, and likely avenge, his daughter’s mysterious death. Fonda plays the high-living record producer who, as her lover, becomes the main object of Stamp’s suspicion.

Los Angeles as seen here is a strangely desolate, hazy, yet spatially engrossing environment, and lends itself ideally to the film’s temporal experiments. In virtually every scene, Soderbergh flashes forward to episodes yet to come or back to images from those already elapsed, or to fragments of memory (using footage from Poor Cow, which Stamp made in 1967), or to alternative possibilities. It’s an in-your-face technique, and at first it’s a little unsettling and not particularly productive: one realizes, with some sadness, how easily the radical experiments of 30 years ago led to stylistically hollow hyperactivity – what’s often called an MTV style. In its opening stretches, The Limey merely resembles an elegant application of a chaos theory to filmmaking.

But it quickly calms down and coalesces. Stamp is wonderful as the calmly focused limey Wilson, who’s spent most of his adult life behind bars, offering no concessions: no one can understand his Cockney-slang saturated talk. His considerable limitations, as an effective player in the seedy LA underworld, actually invest him with a serene sense of liberation: there’s one excellent scene, when Stamp cuts loose with a beautifully fluid but highly vernacular monologue, knowing that not a word he says will be understood by the cop who’s interrogating him. If such serenity is emblematic of a certain strand of sixties culture, then it’s as if Wilson’s long confinement has left him relatively unscathed by everything that’s happened since: in his morally gray way, he’s an ambassador of integrity and stability (exemplified by Stamp’s almost spooky failure to age very much).

The Fonda character, by contrast, captivates his jailbait-aged girlfriends with indulgent memories and echoes of the sixties, while positioning himself on the cutting edge of the nineties – he’s an apparently perfect survivor and synthesis whom, we find out eventually, is actually just a sham: involved in a shady deal to keep himself afloat, hopelessly passive and dependent on his guns for hire. As the classic Easy Rider rebel who’s lately reinvented himself as ever-smiling, genial Oscar-nominated reincarnation of his father, Fonda is also perfectly cast here. So the film’s style, as it goes on, seems ever more eloquently questioning and disruptive as it wraps itself around these two enormously resonant antagonists, always emphasizing the fluidity of time, the echoes of moments just elapsed and premonitions of those yet to come.
 

In addition to all that, The Limey has a number of fine supporting performances, several truly exciting action sequences, some exquisitely funny lines. And at only 90 minutes, it has a concision that’s to be admired – in any decade.

Summary

That’s the last on this year’s film festival. To summarize, while acknowledging I could necessarily see only a small percentage of everything on offer (and am therefore no doubt grandiosely extrapolating on the basis of an unscientific sample), it was a pretty good festival – one with fewer truly high notes than some previous year, but with widely distributed, solid quality. I saw only a few movies that can’t be recommended in at least some respect (All the Rage may be the only one I’d actively urge people to avoid). My favourite – and I know I’m in a severe minority here – was L’humanite (the controversial Cannes award-winner which, sadly, seems unlikely to be commercially released here). Runners-up: The Limey, American Beauty, The Emperor and the Assassin, Dogma, The Wind Will Carry Us, Tumbleweeds, 8 ½ Women. The first two of those are already in release – see them now, and look out for the rest!

Friday escape

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2002)

Sometimes, if I can manage it, I try to take off a little early on Friday afternoons to catch a movie. It’s not much of a transgression because I usually come back into the office on the way home and end up just about making up the time. Even if that wasn’t the case, it still isn’t much of a transgression: colleagues know I do this and no one thinks anything of it. But the other week, sitting there by myself around 5 p.m., I started to feel distinctly guilty and uneasy. And this tells you about the success of the film I was watching – Unfaithful.

Unfaithful

The movie is being positioned as an “adult” alternative to the big summer blockbusters, but it belongs there with them – it’s a theme park ride through the mythic landscape of adultery. It has the accidental meeting, the initial attraction, the deepening flirtation, the sudden capitulation, the enveloping passion, the public sex, the obsessiveness, the anger at catching him flirting with another woman, etc. Adrian Lyne directs with an atmospheric, composed eye; he never lets a plain shot pass through the camera.

In a nutshell, Diane Lane plays a seemingly happily married suburban wife, living prosperously and affectionately with husband Richard Gere. One day, struggling against a movie-strength wind, she literally bumps into a charismatic Frenchman (Olivier Martinez) outside his apartment. He invites her in to clean up. She comes back another day, then another, and they’re soon in the sack. After that she rapidly loses it, neglecting the kid, getting cold on Gere, and getting sloppy in her cover stories.

The film’s biggest asset by far is Lane’s performance. She perfectly conveys the character’s loss of control. It’s one of the best examples of sexual acting in memory – sometimes surpassing Halle Berry’s Oscar-winning work in Monster’s Ball – and she’s the primary reason why the film is often so unsettling. Actually, Lane must be an early favourite for this year’s award. The biggest problem is that her performance isn’t sustained – in the latter part of the film she recedes from us, becoming blander and more inscrutable.

But that’s the film’s fault – not hers. The film takes the logic of the affair to its nerve-wracking peak, in the process bringing Gere to the edge of a breakdown in what may be one of his own best scenes ever. Then it abruptly changes direction, and surrenders to much more mundane mechanics. Later on it coalesces somewhat, but Unfaithful runs distinctly out of steam. I liked the inconclusive climax more than many reviewers have, but there’s no doubt it’s rooted more in mild artistic desperation than in a coherent vision of where the movie’s going. I read that Lyne shot six different versions of the ending, which I suppose will be a selling point for the DVD around Christmas time.

I’m not sure the conception of the lover works for the best either. Olivier Martinez is so alluring he could make straight men turn gay, but he’s barely realistic – he hangs round with supreme pouty self-confidence, always saying the right thing, pushing all the right buttons. And Lyne’s trademark soft-focus style too often blunts the material. Still, at its best I found the film more striking than, say, In the Bedroom.

Spider-Man

Kirsten Dunst in Spider-Man (and by the way, I saw this one on my own time) is no Diane Lane, but she’s probably the most alluring challenge to a superhero’s fidelity to duty since Margot Kidder in Superman. This sums up the course of mainstream cinema over the intervening 24 years – Dunst now is ten years younger than Kidder was then. Everything about Spider-Man seems young – even the token old timers look artificially aged, and Willem Dafoe sheds all his gravity in his role as the villain. Dunst aside, the film’s greatest asset is probably Tobey Maguire, who keeps his performance nicely nuanced and grounded. Maybe too grounded, for the film always seems interesting rather than actually dramatic. That’s partly because Maguire’s plausibility has the effect of pitching everything at the same level of excitement as a slightly diverting homework assignment. Also, the plot about the Green Goblin is unspeakably lame.

To me, the best part of the movie was Danny Elfman’s opening theme music, accompanying an elegant title design. Elfman’s music was also the best part of Planet of the Apes, and probably of more other movies than I can remember. His Spider-Man theme has an insinuating power and drama that the film seems uninterested in matching. Maybe Elfman was actually a bad choice, and the film would have been better served by something lighter and jauntier. Some have found the film’s computer-generated effects a bit much – Roger Ebert for instance commented on how the scenes of Spiderman swinging from one skyscraper to the next didn’t evoke a real person. But I liked the idea of a man transformed into almost abstract energy and movement. If you’re going to watch something created on a computer screen, zip and panache help. Anyway, I think the ideal superhero movie has yet to be made, Maybe Ang Lee’s forthcoming Incredible Hulk film will be the one.

Son of the Bride

The day after watching Spider-Man (i.e. still on the weekend) I watched the Argentinean Son of the Bride, which was a surprisingly similar experience. It’s pleasant and diverting, but never deeply engages, and the main attraction is again the hero’s lively girlfriend. It’s another story of an early mid-life crisis, except this time it’s a man who gets tired of his cellphone-hugging life running the family restaurant, and tries to strike out in a new direction. The new direction looks little different from the old one, which would be a nice touch in a more subtle film. As it is, the movie meanders incredibly for two hours before reaching an utterly predictable outcome.
 

The movie was nominated this year for a foreign-language film Oscar which, given the submitted films that weren’t nominated, may be the best recent evidence that it’s true what they say about the Oscars. The character’s mother has Alzheimer’s, but her long-time husband remains devoted to her, accepting all her problems with serene equanimity. The film’s attitude on the condition seems much more lazy than it does liberal, but it’s consistent with how the movie avoids showing real pain or hardship (when he has a near-fatal heart attack, it’s glossed over so quickly that I’m not sure his condition gets mentioned by name). For that matter, I wonder how plausible it is that a film set in Argentina can so consistently turn its back on economic hardship? Assuming you want the film to which you sneak from work to be an easier experience than just remaining at your desk, Son of the Bride would have been a better candidate than Unfaithful for an early departure.

Artistic decisions

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2002)

With hindsight, of course, we can identify all the major wrong moves of cinema history. Peter Bogdanovich has been profiled a lot lately, on account of making a modest comeback with The Cat’s Meow. It once seemed impossible a comeback would ever be necessary. In 1973, after The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc and Paper Moon, he ought to have been unstoppable. Three years, three bad films, and much obnoxious behaviour later, it was all but over. How much has he wondered since then about the road not taken?

Michael Ritchie is a less dramatic and perhaps more interesting example of how the course of a career can change. In 1978, James Monaco’s book American Film Now profiled him (along with Cassavetes, Altman, Coppola and Mazursky) as one of five leading contemporary directors. The Candidate, Downhill Racer and Smile had established him, but Monaco noted with mild concern that Ritchie’s most recent film, Semi-Tough, was blander and less stimulating. After that, Ritchie made a few films in which you could vaguely see thwarted ambition (The Island, Diggstown) and a whole bunch of pandering, silly work (The Golden Child, Cops and Robbersons, A Simple Wish). The decline appears inexplicable, and almost deliberate. To my knowledge, Ritchie never expressed regret over it.

Career Lows

On the other hand, it’s long forgotten how Steven Spielberg stumbled early on with 1941 and then recovered his footing within a couple of years with Raiders of the Lost Ark. For that matter, just about all the big directors have a flop in there somewhere, but they get over it.

I remember someone saying that it’s incredibly hard and soul-destroying to make any movie, even a bad one, and then just a relatively little bit harder to make a good one. I’ve often wondered what it must feel like to invest yourself into a film for a year or more, to traverse all the thousands of decisions that go into it, and then to have it rendered instantly dead by a few bad reviews. I bet you didn’t know that Johnny Depp directed a movie some years ago. Called The Brave One, it even had Marlon Brando in a starring role. The film premiered at the Cannes festival in 1998, but got a horrible reception and has barely been released anywhere. But if those initial viewers had reacted differently, then maybe Depp would have gone on to direct again; maybe he’d be known now as much for directing as for acting.

Of course, this kind of speculation applies as much in any walk of life – we can all pinpoint key moments of fate or choice where, with retrospect, the direction of our lives shifted. It’s just that cinema, even more than the other arts, seems to have a remarkable number of under-achieving careers festooned across its history. To me this reflects its collaborative nature, the logistical challenges in realizing a vision – compared with say writing novels, it’s much more likely that one might simply run out of energy, or suffer plain bad luck.

Behind the Sun

Which brings us to Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending. Although it seems by now as if Allen has been in decline for as long as anyone can remember, it’s only this film and his last, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, that truly scrape the bottom of the barrel. Through his glory days in the late 70s and 80s, Allen communicated his dissatisfaction with mere comedy, letting it be known that his ambitions lay in greater things. He seems to have given that up now, but the flair’s all gone. It’s not just the movies – his recent humour pieces in The New Yorker struck me as unreadable, and his brief return to stand-up at the Oscars wasn’t much of anything.

One can stab at explanations – for example, he’s not working with the same creative team that sustained him for years. But you only need to look at Woody himself. He’s not even in touch with his own film. He gesticulates and stammers and does his shtick, but it’s sealed off in a vacuum. Hollywood Ending has the gimmick of Woody playing a director who goes suddenly blind, so he can’t look anyone in the eye. It’s appropriate in more ways than one.

That’s already enough on that. Walter Salles directed Central Station a few years ago – a Brazilian film about the relationship between an old woman and a little boy. The film was sensitive and well-handled, although somewhat soft-centered for all its grit (recent South American smashes Amores Perros and Y tu Mama Tambien have made this even clearer with hindsight). After that, I kept reading how Salles was going to make an English-language project, though nothing’s come of it yet.

His latest film Behind the Sun looks largely like marking time, although it also has a pandering quality about it that makes you wonder if it wasn’t conceived as a calling card for the studios. Two poor farming families carry out a deadly blood feud that gradually depletes their ranks. An eldest son is granted a month’s truce until the other family comes to kill him. He runs away and falls in love with a traveling circus performer, but then feels he must return. The film is baked in acrid yellow dust and glistening skin – it’s undoubtedly handsome.

Pull the plug?

But nothing in it really matters. The film attends to its grand mythic scheme at the cost of much immediate electricity. It has a distinctly flat quality, and lacks much of a pay-off. I’m not saying it’s a failure exactly – I think it’s possible that Salles achieved almost exactly what he was going for. Behind the Sun is substantially better than Hollywood Ending – it’s immaculately professional. But maybe, of the two, its failure leaves you the more somber. At least one can rationalize Allen’s film as coming at the tail-end of a career, after dozens of better memories gone before. Even if Hollywood pulled the plug on him now (and they haven’t – he has a new project shooting currently), we could be confident we’d had the best already.
 

And yet – it’s not that long since Deconstructing Harry and Sweet and Lowdown – not Allen’s best, but not disastrously far-off either. If Robert Altman can make Gosford Park at 76 and Manoel de Oliveira can make movies at 94, should we give up on Allen yet? True, he feels further gone than Altman ever did, but cinema is full of surprises.

Movie weekend

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2002)

My wife knows a couple whose son is a movie producer, and he recently produced a family film called Virginia’s Run which had its Toronto premiere at the Sprockets film festival – that’s the annual kids-friendly offshoot of the Toronto film festival. They gave us a couple of tickets, so we went up to Canada Square on Saturday afternoon. Virtually everyone in the theatre seemed to be connected to someone in the movie, and this wasn’t entirely a good thing (the grandmother of one of the actors was sitting behind us, and she yapped away through the whole film) – on the other hand, it made the experience seem much more immediate and tangible than a conventional trip to the movies.

Virginia’s Run

That same week, Toronto also had a Jewish film festival, a documentary film festival and a black film festival, and in the past week or two there’d already been a minority images film festival and French film festival. There may have been others. When we saw Virginia’s Run, the theatre was vibrant and buzzing. There were signs in the lobby for some kind of animation display, and before the film, someone stood up and described where we should stand afterwards in the event of being parted from the people we came with (a practice the Scotiabank theatre might usefully adopt on Friday nights). Just like at the film festival proper, the movie was introduced by the producer and a “starlet” (that’s the term he used) from the film, but they seemed much more light-spirited and relaxed than the people who introduce the adult movies every September.

This was a great reminder of cinema’s effectiveness at forging communities and sub-cultures, even if they only exist for a few shining hours. Going to the Carlton for instance, the makeup of the audience doesn’t seem to vary much whether it’s a Taiwanese movie or an Iranian one or a French one. It’s an “art film” location, and that’s the audience it gets. I assume most festivals market themselves more strategically and get the word out to their target audiences. I’d love to visit all of the Toronto mini-festivals at some point, spend some time soaking up their different nuances and ambiences. At one or two a year, I’ll be through by 2060 or so.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Virginia’s Run itself did very much to galvanize the audience, not even the kids – it’s just too shapeless and shallow (horse lovers will like it more than others will). Anyway, that was that, and then (maybe feeling in need of something more adult) we spontaneously decided to go to Changing Lanes, the Ben Affleck-Samuel L Jackson urban thriller. I do the double bill thing relatively often, but my wife never does. It was so exciting to have her along – we even went to Taco Bell first.

Changing Lanes

There’s nothing too esoteric about the Varsity Saturday afternoon audience, and there’s nothing about the movie that would have required it to be. I don’t think Changing Lanes is quite as deep or as subtle as some reviews claim. The movie is about a rich lawyer (Affleck) and a struggling insurance salesman (Jackson) who get involved in a fender-bender, from which the lawyer bolts. Arriving at court, he finds he left a crucial file at the scene of the accident. Jackson has it, but won’t give it back. Affleck pays a crooked computer hacker to have Jackson declared bankrupt; Jackson retaliates by loosening one of the wheels on Affleck’s car.

When I describe the plot that way, it sounds like the tit-for-tat of a Laurel and Hardy duel, and the movie does have a blackly comic quality to it. It also has a rueful moral quality, as both men reassess their values and behaviour. But since the action is all confined to a single day, the picture can’t escape the feeling of contrivance and excessive compression. The portrayal of the business world is particularly superficial, such as the scene where a senior corporate lawyer, on hearing a crucial document may have gone missing, takes about ten seconds to blithely come out with a scheme to forge a replacement.

Changing Lanes is a fair-sized hit and it’s being viewed as a cut above the formulaic melodrama. I think that only illustrates how much standards have slipped. The film certainly evokes and refers in passing to a range of serious matters, but it hardly pauses for contemplation.

Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner

The following day I went alone to Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner. The film runs over three hours, and at one point I had to get up to go to the bathroom. I’d never noticed before, but the Cumberland 2 has an emergency exit right next to the main entrance, and I went out through the wrong door. I found myself in a corridor that clearly wasn’t the way I’d come in, but I had no idea how that could have happened. I felt more disorientated than I have for a long while, as though something fundamental had changed.

I think this speaks to the effect that the film was already having on me at that point. Arguably the most notable Canadian film in years (well, you can argue it’s the most notable ever made), it’s a tale of the Inuit, spanning generations. The film forges its own narrative and visual language so comprehensively and successfully that you feel it’s mere coincidence that something occasionally looks familiar (a shot outside a tent, capturing a silhouette of a couple making love, is the sole example that I registered as a potential cliché).

Yet we can recognize the rivalries and emotions and joys and frustrations, even if the culture within which they manifest themselves is governed by radically different expectations. These are nomadic people whose lives shift based on the movements of the caribou and the seal. Their destinies are inextricably linked to the environment, but the film seldom shows the animals – it sticks close to the people, rendering them vivid and detailed even as they’re perpetually dwarfed by the ice and snow. But Atanarjuat is forged as much in legend as in conventional narrative. It seems simultaneously both real and imagined.
 

When I went to see Atanarjuat, the audience was almost completely quiet, almost mesmerized. Maybe this is all one really needs to know about how cinema creates communities. You put something unprecedented, unimaginable on the screen, and the world will thereafter be divided forever between those who’ve experienced it and those who haven’t.

 

Battle of the actresses

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2002)

This week we have films featuring three of my favourite actresses, all in good form and making up to some extent for the flaws or limitations of the films themselves.

Human Nature

Being John Malkovich was greatly admired a few years ago, and I enjoyed watching it, but I always felt I was missing something. I didn’t write a review of it – couldn’t think of anything to say. Now the film’s writer, Charlie Kaufman, has written Human Nature, which has the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative bounds. Tim Robbins plays a scientist who marries Patricia Arquette, a social outcast because of a major body hair problem. Hiking in the woods, they encounter Rhys Ifans, who was taken into the woods as a child by his deranged father and has grown up ape-like. Robbins abandons his experiments with mice (he’s trying to teach them table manners) and sets out to civilize the wild man.

Human Nature, like Malkovich, is a film of enormous invention. Truth is, it would have been more effective with less invention. To the very end, it concocts twists and reversals and crazy concepts, which means it never gets close to dullness, but it’s like a girl who teases you to the point where you decide to transfer your affections to someone else. The film usually seems to be about the malevolent effects of civilization – how it quashes our better natures – but it also hints cynically that we may not have a better nature. You wish for a more consistent perspective, even if a more limited one.

The film’s funniest moments come from an inspired silliness. Robbins’ notion of civilization is about a hundred years out of date – he trains Ifans how to behave at the opera, how to sit by the fire like a country gentleman, and so forth (making for visual tableaux reminiscent of the best moments in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums). But this just illustrates the film’s broader incoherence, since Robbins doesn’t generally behave in a way consistent with these anachronistic notions, and the vague depiction of “the real world” dulls our sense of the (presumed) injustice that’s being done to Ifans. There’s a certain flabbiness to the concept too – the Arquette and Ifans characters are both variations on the same narrow theme, and the fourth major character, a conniving woman who poses as a French seductress to win over Robbins, makes very little sense.

The movie couldn’t be as affecting as it is if not for its actors. Robbins is rather bland, but Ifans has a crazy grandeur about him. Readers may remember that I went to school with him in North Wales. I often find him a bit strained on the screen, but maybe I have too much of a sense of the man. On this occasion, his messy, abstracted persona is exactly what the character needs.

As for Patricia Arquette – she’s often very touching. She’s frequently naked in the film, and her sturdy voluptuousness has an appropriately primitive air about it. She strikes me as an actress who needs strong direction – when that’s lacking, she seems to drift and recede (see for example her work in Matthew Broderick’s Infinity). That almost happens here too from time to time, but in a film that’s purportedly about the quashing of instinct, it’s not such a bad thing.

Murder by Numbers

Murder by Numbers has a much more concentrated and in part familiar view of human nature. It’s the Leopold-Loeb story all over again – two smart-ass teenagers team up to commit the perfect murder, complete with a trail of clues that will lead the police to the wrong suspect. Except, of course, that the detective is smarter than they had any reason to expect.

She’s played by Sandra Bullock, which seems like proof of a soft centre. Surprisingly, Bullock is the primary savior of this largely conventional film. Her character is hard-edged, stubborn, cynical – none of that is new, but the movie takes her into territory that’s unusually raw and fragile and sexually explicit. At such times, it’s pleasingly reminiscent of Clint Eastwood vehicles like The Gauntlet or Tightrope, cranking the genre wheels while exploring the edges of its star image. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t take this half as far as it might have done, but it’s intriguing while it lasts.

The film’s director Barbet Schroeder last directed the low budget Our Lady of the Assassins, about a middle-aged writer observing a child assassin on the streets of Medellin, Colombia. That was an extremely bleak, nihilistic work, consisting for long stretches of little but desolate wandering punctuated by random killing. It sometimes seemed contrived, but you couldn’t easily shake it off. It’s a rather ridiculous distance from that chilling depiction of murderous youth to the teenage melodrama of Murder by Numbers. They say history occurs first as tragedy and then repeats itself as farce – maybe movie careers sometimes take the same form. But at least Schroeder is too much of a pro not to make a smooth film, although even that much seems in doubt during the rickety, cliff-hanging climax.

Triumph of Love

I suppose Triumph of Love, Claire Peploe’s adaptation of a 17^th century play by Marivaux, is the most commercially marginal of these three projects. The film doesn’t really try to have it any other way. Set on a sumptuous country estate, it involves a princess who dresses as a male to win the heart of the man she loves – a man who views the princess as a mortal enemy. She also wins the heart of her beloved’s guardian, a famous philosopher who immediately sees through her disguise, and the guardian’s sister, who doesn’t.
 

The movie isn’t really ingratiating enough to be a popular success – it’s fairly repetitive and narrow, and Peploe follows her own idiosyncratic instincts, sometimes emphasizing the theatrical aspects, sometimes over-emphasizing the cinematic. But it’s an entertaining romp, and the final scenes are particularly sweet. In a cast that includes British heavyweights Ben Kingsley and Fiona Shaw, it’s especially commendable that Mira Sorvino as the princess is the film’s single greatest charm. Sorvino was hot for a couple of years after she won her slightly generous Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite, but a series of bad pictures put paid to that. She’s not the most technically compelling actress, but when she’s cast properly she has a combination of intelligence and winsomeness that I find very appealing (Lulu on the Bridge is probably my favourite of her performances).

This week’s winner – Mira Sorvino! Next time – battle of the movie caterers.

 

A new discovery

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2002)

John Cassavetes made intensely personal films with a recognizable style, and he put himself on the line for his art. He turned down a lot of commercial work, allegedly including the Barbra Streisand A Star is Born. But at the end of his career, he needed money, and accepted an offer from his friend Peter Falk to take over the troubled production Big Trouble (a farce co-starring Alan Arkin, about an insurance salesman who gets caught up in a wacky fraud scheme). According to Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, he worked hard on it for a year, but the film was edited in ways he didn’t agree with (he said the only scene that reflected his wishes was a scene in which Arkin gags on Falk’s sardine-flavoured liquer). After that, Cassavetes became too ill to work any more, so Big Trouble weirdly stands as his last work.

Cassavetes antennae

I finally got to see it the other day. Priding myself on my Cassavetes antennae (I’ve seen Love Streams maybe five times and most of his others at least twice), I was convinced I’d sniff out some subtleties, some hidden personal touches. But the movie really is as bland as everyone says. In a few scenes, bits of behaviour are allowed to run unusually long, or there’s a particular deadpan feel to the camera work, or there’s a peculiar moroseness. I think I felt Cassavetes behind the camera at those moments, shrugging and thinking what-the-hell and letting it go a certain way. But for most of the time, he perfectly sublimated his instincts, which is presumably what he was hired to do.

Still, just the knowledge of who was behind the camera made Big Trouble far more engrossing than an off-the-shelf comedy with a lesser pedigree. It pays to know your directors. Now, a recent film presented me with a very different problem. Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira is 93 years old. The Internet Movie Database lists his first film as being made in 1931. There are some big gaps in his career – nothing between 1942 and 1956. But he’s sure making up for it now – he’s made a film every year since 1990, and has another at this year’s Cannes festival.

Let me emphasize what I just said – de Oliveira is 93 years old and he’s making a movie a year. We may be in an aging society, but it’s still generally regarded as “wonderful for his age” if a 93-year-old can even string a coherent sentence together. So de Oliveira is a miracle indeed. But are the films any good? It’s hard to know – because it’s hard to get to see them. To my knowledge, they’re never shown here except at the film festival – and it’s never worked out for me to see any of them there. So the recent commercial release of his I’m Going Home marks my introduction to him.

I’m Going Home

It’s fair to assume a 93-year-old director would have established his creative personality by now. I’m Going Home feels like a summing-up; it feels self-referential. From such an aged filmmaker, it’s hard not to read the title as a metaphor for the end of a broader journey. The film supports that interpretation. Michel Piccoli stars as an esteemed actor whose wife, daughter and son-in-law are killed in a car accident. We don’t witness his grief directly – the film takes place mainly three months after the tragedy, as he goes about his life. He discusses new projects, reads the paper in his local café, buys new shoes, plays with his grandson, eventually accepts a new film (the director of which is played by John Malkovich). This is all presented in a very simple, elegant manner – often viewed through a window or from a distance. Liam Lacey in The Globe and Mail summed it up this way: “The film’s point is, as W H Auden wrote of Breughel’s portrait of Icarus tumbling from the sky while farmers kept ploughing their fields, that the superficial business of life rolls on, while personal catastrophes happen mostly at the periphery.”

I think that is indeed the film’s point, more or less. But I was taken by Lacey’s rather strenuous importing of the Auden/Breughel reference to make his point. Lacey doesn’t indicate in the article whether he’s seen any of de Oliveira’s other work, so it’s tempting to think he hasn’t, and rather like me, he’s rather lost for a frame of reference. As such, one is drawn to read the film through whatever off-the-shelf artistic framework is handy. At various times the film’s style might remind the viewer of Angelopoulos or Chantal Akerman or Jacques Rivette or Antonioni. But maybe all I mean is that it has a manner we recognize as distinctively European and associated with a taste for restraint and ambiguity and elegant characterization (the casting of Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve and Malkovich is archetypally arthouse too). The film feels inherently ethical – Piccoli uses that word in turning down a lame-sounding action series – and the measured, poised style avoids any possible sensationalism or cheap gratification.

Familiarity

Among the many things I wish I knew about de Oliveira is how deep his sense of humour goes. Near the end of I’m Going Home, Piccoli accepts a part in an adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses. He plays a character much younger than himself, and fails completely to make his French accent sound even remotely Irish – I found the whole thing extremely funny. The fact that Malkovich seems generally pleased with the performance, correcting words or mispronunciations here and there while letting much else go by, makes it even funnier. More broadly, de Oliveira appears to use this cultural absurdity to drive home the incoherence or absence at the centre of Piccoli’s life. This is reinforced by the way de Oliveira presents the film-making process – the action takes place off screen while the camera stares unblinkingly at Malkovich, watching, correcting, occasionally reacting.

The Carlton is to be praised (actually, barely a week goes by when the Carlton’s not worth praising for something or other) for bringing us this film. Still, seen in isolation from de Oliveira’s other work, it can hardly avoid seeming like something of a curio. At various points, we may feel that our ability to engage with it gathers strength and then recedes, but we can have little confidence in these quivering assessments. Familiarity counts for so much in cinema – so much so that a broken-backed formulaic work like Big Trouble may carry as much resonance and impact as an objectively much finer work.

Affluence threatened

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2002)

I’ve often planned to count up the number of positive reviews I’ve written over the years (six years now, believe it or not) versus the number of negative ones. It’s not a high priority, which is why it never gets done. It’d probably only be depressing anyway – too many pans and caveats. I truly wish I only wrote good reviews, if only because presumably it would mean I was only seeing good movies. In recent years, I’ve become better at avoiding the true stinkers, but I don’t get bowled over as often as I wish. Maybe it’s just me – maybe I need a diet, more vitamins or something.

Fight Club

The bad reviews I wish I hadn’t written because it would mean I hadn’t wasted time seeing the movie – that’s one thing. But if any of this kept me up at night (and it doesn’t, but if it did) it would be the thought of the bad reviews I wish I hadn’t written because I now think I got it wrong. A few months ago I changed my mind big time on Pulp Fiction, and I felt honor-bound to write about that (it consumed half my article on The Shipping News – my mind wanders sometimes). At the same time, I started thinking again about my review of Fight Club – a movie I was quite nasty about. It felt somehow logical that a liking for Pulp Fiction would be largely correlated with a liking for Fight Club, meaning I might have another major recanting job to do.

So I got round to rewatching it a couple of months ago, and was relieved that I didn’t really feel obliged to do any recanting at all. At best, I’d soften my review a bit. I think my original vitriol was as much directed at the excesses of local critics than at the film itself. Fight Club is skillful, but its constant criticism of our dubious values and deficient self-actualization quickly becomes repetitive and murky, and (unlike Pulp Fiction) the film gradually becomes almost entirely consumed by plot mechanics. I didn’t dislike the final twist as much the second time though – I was better able to step back and take it metaphorically (although the ending still doesn’t seem to me to mesh very well with the more immediate social satire at the start of the film). And the visual style and imagination are admirable – it’s quite a compendium of ideas and images and moods. But it still doesn’t do a lot for me.

Panic Room

Fight Club director David Fincher has now followed it with Panic Room, a thriller with Jodie Foster. Panic Room is nowhere near as ambitious as Fight Club was. It’s set almost entirely inside a single house – a huge New York brownstone where newly divorced Jodie Foster moves with her teenage daughter. The house contains a “panic room” – a virtually impenetrable stronghold in which the owners can hide in the event of a home invasion. On the first night in residence, Foster wakes up to find strangers in the house, and she and the kid bolt into the panic room. The problem is, the previous inhabitant left several million dollars hidden in there – which means the thieves are determined to get in.

This entails numerous twists and turns: the men try various ways of luring the women out; Foster and the girl try to contact the outside world; the daughter gets sick and Foster has to leave the room to retrieve her medicine. Foster’s ex-husband calls by and promptly gets beaten by the invaders. It’s all efficiently executed. In particular, Fincher magnificently exploits the contours of the house, constructing numerous seemingly unbroken camera movements that travel effortlessly through the interior space (although by now these look like a Fincher “staple” – Fight Club had several such effects).

There’s a pattern emerging in Fincher’s work. Se7en was a highly creative thriller that claimed to see only wretchedness in the world. He followed it with The Game, an almost equally creative film that wallowed happily in its rich protagonist’s milieu. Then came Fight Club, seemingly a repudiation of the complacency of the film that preceded it. Now comes Panic Room, and Fincher’s comfortable again with the trappings of great wealth. His social conscience seems like a suit of clothes, slipped on and off at will, and already seeming a little threadbare even when it’s on. Although I will say that I saw Se7en lately again as well, and that film still seems almost as darkly insinuating and chilling as it did the first time.

By myself

Admittedly, some writers do see more to Panic Room than I do. Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that the film is “not so much scary as endlessly worrying; the movie was designed, propitiously, to suck in all the insecurities that you can imagine, and a few that you can’t.” Which makes it sound like an extension of the Fight Club agenda. But the premise depends so completely on wealth and privilege that most viewers’ identification with it (and the extent of its disturbing effect on them) will be strictly superficial.

I doubt I’m giving much away by saying that the protagonists of Panic Room survive the ordeal (with such films it’s not a matter of whether, but merely of how). And in the end Foster and the kid lounge on a bench in Central Park, reading the ads for other attractive Manhattan properties (albeit smaller ones). I searched hard for some irony there, but it sure looks like a straightforward image of affluence and order restored, subject to only minor modification.

Finally, thinking again about those virtuoso Fincher camera movements, digital technology has really killed much of the magic of the mobile camera. Effects like Hitchcock’s dizzying plunge into the clocktower in Vertigo, or Antonioni’s glide through the window at the end of The Passenger – they’re child’s play now. But those shots had a physical immediacy (if only because you could feel the work that went into them) that no amount of computer-generated flourish can equal.
 

Another favourite example of mine is from The Band Wagon – the unbroken tracking shot of Fred Astaire as he glides along the railway platform singing “By Myself.” There’s a beautifully intuitive marriage of style and content there – it’s as appropriately eloquent as you could possibly wish for. And within a film of deep and consistent richness. It’d be great to review new movies as passionately as you’d review Vertigo and The Passenger and The Band Wagon, but that’s just not being earned.

Five films

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2002)

Did you realize that most weeks, six or seven movies open in Toronto? Even if only one or two of those were worth seeing, it’d be pretty hard work. Most weeks I go at least twice, and I always feel I’m missing out on something. But lately I crammed in a few more than usual (long weekends are a blessing). So here’s a departure from the norm: capsule reviews of no less than five recent movies.

Death to Smoochy

A satire of children’s television, with Robin Williams as an embittered, fired kiddie TV host vowing to get even with the good-natured guy in a rhino costume (played by Edward Norton) who now fills his time slot. The movie doesn’t go much further than the concept – there’s no particular satiric point to it, and it doesn’t come close to the kind of territory that would make it memorable on its own terms. The big set pieces – like Norton’s inadvertent appearance before a Nazi rally – are all either reminiscent of other, better films, or else indifferently executed, or often both. And this is one of those movies where the bad guys suddenly turn nice, men and women who hated each other fall in love, and the world turns out almost as pleasant as a Barney song. The film should have been at least twice as convinced of its own nastiness. Still, it’s appealingly put together in a brash, hermetic kind of way, and if the obscenities aren’t half as creative as in a Kevin Smith movie, the odd one still gets an easy laugh.

Festival in Cannes

Henry Jaglom has made a string of small-budget, intimate, intriguing but somewhat rambling movies (detractors consider them whiny and trivial). He also deserves some appreciation from movie-lovers for his steady championing of Orson Welles – although you’d be hard-pressed to see much direct Wellesian influence in his own work. Jaglom fans (and I’m one) should be delighted with this new film, and others will find it a pleasant time-killer. A tale of deal-making (both financial and of the heart) during the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, the movie is a bit more focused than usual for the director – the long philosophical exchanges and direct-to-camera talking heads are sidelined here. But the movie feels like his – sometimes strident actors like Ron Silver are coaxed into the director’s distinctive style of leisurely, amiable naturalism. The plot seems to run out of steam toward the end, but maybe that’s Jaglom’s comment on the sustainability of such a crazy industry. With more than 12 films in the last 20 years though, he’s obviously not being treated too badly by the financial fates, and indeed has the taste not to bite the hands that feed him.

L.I.E.

The title stands for the Long Island Expressway, a grim stretch of highway saved from anonymity only by its high celebrity death count. In the faceless surrounding neighborhoods, a teenage boy negotiates ambiguous relationships with his wealthy but possibly corrupt father, his sexually ambivalent friend and the jovial local pedophile (an intriguing characterization by Brian Cox). This is mildly daring material, declining to pass obvious judgment on its numerous flawed characters, suggesting that this cold face of American life may demand a severe reassessment of conventional morality. Ultimately though, it wraps up rather too neatly (how many films have this fault I wonder?) – and it may not be too much more at heart than an oblique manifesto for better-integrated families and communities (the end of the film could be read as a mere sweeping away of deviancy). The film is sternly crafted and always engrossing, although it’s never as intellectually bracing as it intends, and the frequent symbolic return to the highway seems more limiting than liberating.

Suspicious River

Canadian director Lynne Stopkewich’s follow-up to Kissed screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2000 and opened in the UK long ago – it finally creeps out onto a single screen at the Carlton. How could we treat our own filmmakers so badly? It’s a good movie and deserves to be seen. The story of a small-town motel receptionist who prostitutes herself to the guests initially seems rather thin and monotonous (and it takes a while to appreciate the subtlety of Molly Parker’s performance), but gradually expands into more complex, gripping territory. A subplot about a little girl who observes her parents’ unhappy marriage holds the surprising key to the film. Its last twenty minutes almost have the feel of Mulholland Drive about them – life and death, fantasy and reality intertwine disquietingly, and it’s not clear exactly where the film ends up. That’s not a complaint though – the film feels intuitively right, coaxed from a troubled but defiant psyche that alternates between idealism and pessimism about female sexuality. It occasionally carries an almost zombie-like quality, perfectly capturing the deadening contours of the small town. Kissed received more recognition and praise, but I found Suspicious River more deeply felt and compelling overall. Admittedly I’m overpraising it a bit here, but that’s just my token attempt to remedy the way the film’s been treated.

Last Orders

The best of the films covered here is Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of a Graham Swift novel, about three aging drinking buddies (Tom Courtenay, Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings) mourning the death of a fourth (Michael Caine). With the dead man’s son, they spend the day driving his ashes to the seaside, to be scattered off the end of the pier. Around this journey, the film blends in an astonishing array of flashbacks to various parts of their lives. It could hardly look and feel more authentically drab and desolate – there’s very little misplaced romanticism or nostalgia here – and yet it gradually takes on the expansive, limitless feel of a Bertolucci film. The film skillfully finds moments of hope, of extreme possibilities squandered (Caine remarks that only Courtenay seems satisfied with his lot in life – he’s an undertaker), of faith and longing. It allows us both to feel the impact of those moments and to appreciate that they don’t amount to much from sixty or seventy years on earth. A similar duality applies to the film’s conclusion – Caine’s passing allows a long-delayed renewal for two of the other characters, but we’re not drawn to overestimate what that might amount to at this late stage. The actors are all great to watch, and I think this film will grow in one’s memory.

And I saw Panic Room too! But more on that next time.

 

The human spirit

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2002)

I was writing the other week about how director Jacques Rivette has challenged normal notions of how long a movie should be. Soon after that I went to the Cinematheque Ontario on a Sunday afternoon for a five-and-a-half hour screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s France Tour Detour Deux Enfants (actually a series of twelve half-hour TV programs, shown here in one block). I’m often surprised how few people seem aware of the Cinematheque – it really is one of Toronto’s artistic jewels. I go there maybe thirty or forty times a year, but it should be way more often (life involves tough choices). I get a bit irritated by fair-weather film festival attendees who make a big deal for that one week in September of avoiding the commercial and seeking out rare films, while ignoring the Cinematheque for the rest of the year.

Five and a half hours!

I envy anyone who can watch a five and a half hour movie with the same concentration I can apply for ninety minutes. I nodded off at least three times; I was almost as preoccupied with spacing out my candy as with the film itself. And of course, that big a chunk of time couldn’t help but screw up the other things you’d normally do with your day. Still, it was a sublime experience. The film itself is endlessly fascinating and provocative. Of course that’s partly a function of the possibilities allowed by so much time, but the length itself, quite separate from the content, forms an intertwined yet somehow distinct experience. Maybe it’s partly self-aggrandizement – you’re impressed at your own resolve and fortitude. But it’s also purer than that.

I’m usually skeptical about the common claim that a particular feel-good hit represents the “triumph of the human spirit.” Part of my skepticism is that for such movies (A Beautiful Mind is one of the most recent) the feel-good dosage goes down all too easily – the film itself involves little suffering or striving. The ultimate “triumph” of the human spirit usually seems muted to me because we were spared the pain or full complexity of the earlier obstacles. I doubt anyone’s ever reviewed a Godard movie in such terms, yet the “lighter” moments of France Tour Detour seem more liberating and more meaningful than any number of standard happy endings, because of the encyclopedic context from which they emerge.

Of course, I’m not saying a film’s value always increases in proportion to its length (at this point we can all insert our own bloated examples of why that wouldn’t work). And I’m not saying either that its emotional impact necessarily depends on how difficult it is. Without being particularly long or particularly difficult to watch, the current film Monster’s Ball seems to me to illustrate a triumph of the human spirit quite well. Again, I’m not sure anyone has described it in those terms. It’s certainly been praised though – Roger Ebert called it the best film of 2001. That’s going a little far, although not as far as his citations of Eve’s Bayou and Dark City in previous years. But it’s a moving, enveloping film that earns its happy ending in sweat and blood that you can smell and taste.

Monster’s Ball

It’s basically the story of an unlikely relationship between a prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) and the widow (Halle Berry) of a man he escorted on death row; set in a small Southern town. These are small-scale lives, moving between home and work and the local diner; sons unthinkingly follow the career paths of their fathers (and, as shown in a witty juxtaposition, even adopt the same sexual position with the same local prostitute); casual racism’s still part of the fabric.

Like several recent movies, Monster’s Ball owes an awful lot to its actors. Halle Berry deserved the Oscar for Best Actress for this performance. The moment when she initiates sex with Thornton is shocking in the intensity of its emotion and in the completely unexpected way it tears open her grief and loneliness. And Thornton is almost as amazing. He starts out almost as a dead man walking, embodying racist attitudes and family hatred that he doesn’t really feel deeply, but doesn’t think of questioning. By the end of the movie, he’s worked his way to real tenderness. The characterizations are so good that they almost break loose from the rest of the movie, into some transcendent, psychologically acute bubble.

The film is distinctly marred though by excessive melodrama and schematicism in its plotting. In its first half, both characters are visited by Job-like misfortune; they both lose a son, she loses her husband, they both all but lose their souls. It’s too much, although I’m not suggesting this is unconscious. I suppose the film aims to place itself on the edge of Biblical tragedy, and then to claw back through the sensitivity and imagination of its artistry. Somewhat incredibly, it largely succeeds in this.

Judgments of racism

When the two get together, the film narrows its focus, allowing the numerous seeds sown in the first half to come to fruition. This allows the film’s essential softness to come to the fore, which is a mixed blessing – for example, Thornton’s developing friendship with a black man he scorned at the start seems too easy a symbol of his inner transformation. That friendship also strikes of calculation – as if the filmmakers were worried that the audience would suspect the motives of a white man who sleeps with a black woman, unless it were clear that he gets on with other black people as well.

It’s amazing to reflect how few films depict a sexual relationship between a white man and a black woman – so few that to some the images inherently convey paternalism and exploitation. Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail, for reasons I found a little bizarre, accused Monster’s Ball of coming close to racism. This judgment, as he frames it, seems to depend less on what’s in the film than on a preconceived opinion on what constitutes acceptable rules of engagement across colour lines. Monster’s Ball certainly supports a debate on that point, but I don’t think it’s diminished by it.
 

I can report that Monster’s Ball has a happy ending, something that seemed highly in question throughout the movie. It’s tinged by impermanence, but as the film ends, the characters have something workable in place. It definitely wouldn’t have been a surprise if the film had ended in gloom – the fact that it doesn’t is a relief, a minor joy, and seems frankly like a matter of optimism on the part of its makers. So there’s your triumph of the human spirit. Monster’s Ball is flawed for sure, but it’s one of the rare movies that scores the double – worthy of both the multiplex and the Cinematheque.

Iris' defeat

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2002)

Alzheimer’s disease is tragic whenever it strikes, and I doubt many of us can watch a film on the subject without descending into morose speculation about our own futures. My grandmother had it, and my only personal consolation is that I was probably too young to appreciate the full extent of what had happened to her. Ronald Reagan is probably the most famous current sufferer, but his family and the media have been discreet in not telling or showing us too much of his condition. The one I always think about is Rita Hayworth – one of the most beautiful women who ever appeared on the screen. She was no more than 60, and could have achieved much more.

An awful reckoning

It’s a long time since I started on article on such a personal note, and it’s not necessarily a tribute to Iris, the film that prompts this beginning. If the movie were better, I would want to write about the movie. Since it is what it is, I find myself thinking more about the disease.

A few months ago I quoted a writer who criticized the movie Ali for not depicting Ali’s Parkinson’s disease – he called the impairment of the champion’s unique gifts of movement and speech “a reckoning that might have come out of Greek tragedy.” I wrote that I didn’t see how a depiction of this period of Ali’s life could have avoided morose irony and reductive metaphor, falling far short of Greek tragedy. I now feel even more confident in this judgment, because Iris has a very similar “reckoning,” and the film’s impact is almost exactly as I anticipated.

I’ve never read any of Iris Murdoch’s work, although I feel I’ve always known about her. But like many others I assume, my view of her now has been largely defined by her Alzheimer’s. It’s a shame it’s that way, but her husband John Bayley’s memoir of her decline has been hard to avoid. In addition to Bayley’s book, there’s been at least one widely reviewed biography of Murdoch, not to mention numerous articles and obituaries that attended her death and the run-up to the new film. These articles all discuss her youthful promiscuity, her charisma and intellect and interest in ethics and morals. But most of all they discuss her Alzheimer’s.

Dimming the light

The film’ success or failure probably depends on your reaction to its one major structural decision. It intertwines the young Iris, meeting Bayley at Oxford, embarking on a relationship with him despite continuing to sleep with other men; and the old, long-married couple as her disease takes hold and eventually consumes her. The contrast heightens our sense of the ultimate tragedy, and as I mentioned already, there’s an obvious irony in the dimming by Alzheimer’s of an intellect as vibrant and forceful as Murdoch’s.

But the film shows us nothing at all of her creative prime. There’s a scene of the young Iris spellbinding a dinner group with her wit and verbal agility, and a fascinating one of the old Iris and Bayley in the supermarket, chattering away in an idiom that’s simultaneously brilliant and batty. We see her delivering a speech on the importance of education. But we never learn anything tangible about her books or her ideas. We see her working on her last novel, but the film makes so much of her difficulties in concentrating that it’s frankly incredible, on the basis of what’s shown, that she could ever have completed it. (In reality, and as shown in the film, by the time the book was published she couldn’t recognize it as her own work, and reviewers noted a distinct decline in clarity and quality.)

Such deficiencies are common of course in films that purport to portray genius – A Beautiful Mind is another recent example where we must take Nash’s brilliance largely on faith. But that film has a more obvious populist intent, not least because it leads toward personal triumph rather than defeat. Iris takes an approach that seems much more reductive and unsatisfying. It’s quite a short film, lasting just an hour and a half, and yet still feels rather protracted and repetitive. Occasionally the juxtaposition of the young and the old Iris produces some frisson or grace note. But the artistic point is usually obscure.

Indeed, the structure does more to reveal Bayley than Iris. In one scene, lying in bed beside her, he rages against her for her promiscuity. Even though she’s far beyond comprehension, she moves closer, as though to comfort him. It’s a striking moment, and the effect of it is certainly deeper for the numerous earlier scenes of the young Bayley just watching her, time and time again, as ego or life force or sheer delight lead her desires temporarily away from him.

Sop to sentimentality

The film owes a lot to its actors – hence the Oscar nominations for Judi Dench and Kate Winslet as the old and young Iris, and the win for Jim Broadbent as the old Bayley. It also owes a lot to the art and set directors who constructed the eye-poppingly messy house of the couple’s later years. But in the end, it’s no more or less moving than its subject. I didn’t like the midway twist of A Beautiful Mind (in which we learn that some of what we’ve seen to that point has been a product of Nash’s imagination, and therefore realize the depth of his self-delusion) as much as many people did. But I couldn’t help thinking that Iris needed something like that – some kind of cinematic springboard, even if one in danger of seeming over-facile.

Early on in the progress of the disease, Bayley speculates for the doctor that maybe Iris hasn’t left language behind, maybe there’s still meaning in her behaviour that they must try harder to locate. Nothing in the movie supports that hypothesis, and I don’t suppose studies of Alzheimer’s would bear him out. And yet, the film would have benefited had it surrendered to that idea, even for a few minutes. Even if it were merely a sop to sentimentality, I wish that one of those scenes of Murdoch just existing, her lights having long dimmed, could have zoomed in through her eyes via some kind of digital technology flourish, flowed down the optic nerve and tumbled into the cerebral cortex, where we’d find intact her memory and analytical power and wordplay and books not yet written. Sure, it’s a “grass is greener”-type thing to say: if the film had done just as I suggested, maybe I would have criticized it for losing its nerve. But as the movie stands now, I rather wonder why anyone wanted to make it at all.