high gothic strangeness: the wyvern mystery

J. Sheridan LeFanu is what my acting teachers used to call "culturally bound". (Adam Sandler and Lindsay Lohan are culturally bound; Cate Blanchett and Gary Oldman o'er-leap caste, temporal and ethnic barriers with ease and grace.) Although very much products of their time and culture, there is something about a Bronte or an Austen novel that allows it to make the leap; not so the LeFanu. His heroines are too obsequious, too passive to please us; his villains are so particularly the sons and daughters of the opium habit that they seem, despite all their glorious evil, weirdly passive as well. Anyone who wends his way through the entirety of a LeFanu ("Carmilla", weighing in at a svelte 152 pages, doesn't count) realizes early on that it's probably not going to take him where he wants to go, or anywhere that a modern sensibility has come to expect. There's nothing for it but to relax the critical faculty and drift as far into his dream-state as possible.

Screen adaptations, then, are a perplexity of Gordian intricacy, and the Wyvern Mystery is a singular case. Directed for television in 2000 by Alex Pillai ("Wire in the Blood", "Touching Evil II"), it was obviously made with great care and with a genuine regard for the author, yet the story is entirely changed, and for good reason. The result is a beautiful lesson in the filming of an unfilmable novel.

Intact are the book's laudanum-soaked eeriness, its pastoral landscapes, its encroaching claustrophobia as our heroine is entangled in her slow-closing net. The book, however, loses its focus about halfway in, as if LeFanu has changed his mind about who exactly dunnit and what exactly was done. He jumps back and forth as fancy takes him from one character's head into another until he loses interest at last and abruptly leaves off. Screenwriter David Pirie ("Poirot", "Murder Rooms") takes the threads unspooled in the first half and spins from them a surprisingly stalwart tapestry, plumping characters up from two dimensions into three, from Dickensian blacks and whites across a subtle palette of moral greys. A fellow who looks like a straightforward black-hat in the first minutes may not be by the end and the same, sinisterly, is true amongst the white-hats. Pirie has taken the most daunting obstacle in his path, our heroine's naive credulousness, and shaped it into a lens through which we very slowly see the world around her move into terrible focus as she passes from innocence into adulthood. And because it's Naomi Watts playing the role, throwing herself into the melodrama with laudatory whole-heartedness, the thing comes off smashingly.

I've seen the dramatization dismissed as muddled (the Videohound calls it "confused and stodgy"), but LeFanu must always be approached sideways rather than headlong. It's not a straight tale; it's an opiate nightmare, with dark passages that lead into dead ends and rooms glimpsed through smoky glass that never do come clear. This fellow Pirie has done wonders, pulling the dark velvet of the story across a solid frame, and in doing it he's managed to create at least one absolutely masterful character.

In the book, she is the dark and almost buffoonish Bertha Velderkaust, your fairly standard Madwoman-in-the-Attic. In the film, she becomes the formidable and chilling Vrau, her name spoken from the chest like a growl, and she is the monster from the id. Played brilliantly by Aisling O'Sullivan, Vrau is blind, insane, addicted to opium, disfigured with burn-scars and driven by lust for vengeance, a homocidal maniac. When she must wait, she waits patiently, stock still, a beast of prey; when she attacks, it is with terrifying ferocity. She is one of those rare characters who are both symbol and human and work flawlessly on both levels. The last time we see her she is sitting quietly, lost in thought and drenched with blood, as dignified and compelling in her silence as any Monte Cristo who has realized a vengeful dream only to find it hollow at the core.

LeFanu chose the marble and had the vision, leaving a tantalizing half-sculpture for this crack team of Brits to finish. The result is one damn fine evening of old-fashioned, blood-and-laudanum, virgins-in-nightdresses-running-down-dark-hallways, Gothic delerium.

things i've been watching: september edition

the Man Who Would Be King: (1975. dir: John Huston) By God, I love this movie. I loved it when it came out and, by God, I still do. It had to be one of the last from the politically incorrect side of the Empire, or, anyway it cast nostalgic eyes back toward Empire while making shrewd comments about it. Never have Michael Caine or Sean Connery done anything to match it, and as a pair, they are unstoppable. Extrapolated from a surprisingly lean short story by Kipling, Huston fills it out and his telling is spectacular. It's got the old '70s epic feel without ever losing itself in the impersonal. The sense of foreboding that arrives with the lovely Roxanne (played by Caine's wife Shakira) and her ululating entourage is one of the eeriest things I know on film.


Vicky Cristina Barcelona: (2008. dir: Woody Allen) When's the last time you thought a new Woody Allen film was funny? Matchpoint had me on the edge of my seat, but no chucklefest that. So here he is, at last, ladies and gentlemen, the man you've been pining for all these years: please welcome, in a special return engagement, the Old, Funny Woody Allen. He's still preoccupied with the hows and whys of human relations. He's come through some bad habits with the camera (that shaky-cam phase in his middle period, for one) into a place of elegant inconspicuousness. I had two worries in the first few scenes: that the narration was too extensive, and that the actors might be getting ready to fall into that old we-all-want-to-talk-like-Woody-talks thing which can be so cringe-inducing. The actors manage in the end to avoid the hero-worship trap, and the narration allows us to circumvent the exposition that bores Allen so he can get to the bits that don't, so it all works out.

As part of my Spontaneous Christian Bale Film Festival I sat through Captain Corelli's Mandolin (which, once I accepted it as big, color-saturated sentimental hogwash, was not as excruciating as I'd expected. Christian Bale gives one of his always intriguing performances, for one). It brought up the old Penelope Cruz enigma. She's not just good, she's crazy good: genuinely, poetically, with a physical grace and subtlety of expression that are to be treasured. So why don't I like her? I never enjoy her company. The time I came closest was in Abre Los Ojos, so maybe it's a language thing, because HERE, in Barcelona, she's won me at last. She's not only perfect as a self-obsessed artist and crazy ex-wife, she's hilarious. When she and Javier Bardem have the last two of their wild-eyed, half-Spanish, half-English scenes, the timing is so spot-on you don't even need to know what they're saying. You could switch the subtitles off and still they'd have you laughing.

Another great find is Rebecca Hall as Vicky (Sarah in the Prestige) who manages the ultra-intellectual, neurotic Woody Allenisms without getting anywhere near caught in the sticky web of Woody Allenishness.

Also, as a Spanish coworker of mine pointed out with misty eyes, it really, really makes you want to go to Spain.


Firecreek: (1968. dir: Vincent McEveety) McEveety's resume reads like a TV guide covering twenty years. He had his fingers in several of the classics, from Star Trek (this is the guy who gave us "Balance of Terror", in which we were first introduced to Romulans and their pesky cloaking device, "Patterns of Force", which pitted Kirk and Spock against the Nazis, and "Spectre of the Gun", that shining piece of absurdity which set them down in the midst of the gunfight at the OK Corral) to Gunsmoke, none of which would have prepared me for this creepy, awkward Western from the late sixties. With one foot in classic cowboy mode and the other in the impending existential spaghettis, it plays like a post-Kitty Genovese commentary about the criminality of standing by protecting oneself while atrocities are committed. Although its violence is Disneyfied compared with its Italian counterparts, it's not an easy film to watch. The humiliations of the townfolks are discomfitingly photographed in long, invasive camera shots, and the rape of a townswoman by the horribly giggling James Best is awful.

Jimmy Stewart is the part-time sheriff in over his head among outlaws who take over his town. Henry Fonda takes on a difficult role as the tenuous gang-leader and makes gold of it, not by finding the truth of the character, but the way he always does: by remaking the character into Henry Fonda, a man so fascinating in his quiet charisma that we don't care that there are loose ends which make no sense.