last night's double feature: bonjour, tristesse and johnny eager

My DVD player, my trusted companion for these many years, has gone the way of all things mortal. One day it hesitated to open its drawer; soon it was refusing entirely, as if it were terribly weary and needed to sleep. I stuck coins on its little metaphorical eyes and put it out for the vultures to strip.

So until the new one shows up, I'm digging through my stacks of old VHS tapes while my Netflix languish on the coffee table. My original idea was to watch Bonjour, Tristesse and Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane as a sort of coming-of-age evening, but Johnny Eager was too inviting and I couldn't pass it up.



*SPOILER ALERT*

I am far fonder of Bonjour, Tristesse than it deserves. Otto Preminger took a slim, cool, Electra-tinged and gallic hipster-novel and bloated it up to Hollywood size, saturating its colors, softening its sociopathic edges, pushing the very central sex at least out of the frame so that its constant pressure did not feel so very French. In fact, un-Frenching it sort of sums up Preminger's mode of operation.

The plot in a nutshell is this: the teenaged Cecile and her father are rich, beautiful, and live for fun along the French Riviera in the 1950s, using people for amusement and discarding them easily when they begin to bore or demand. When her dead mother's friend comes to marry her father and rearrange their lives, Cecile takes action, and tragedy ensues.

The very French Raymond who today would be played with lip-smacking gusto by Vincent Cassell is here presented with British charm and good humor by the very British David Niven, and the imposing, doomed, aging beauty Anne who ought to be played by Catherine Deneuve at age 47 is instead given to the unimpeachably British Deborah Kerr. There's something wonderfully earnest in the way Kerr listens to people onscreen which makes her palatable even when miscast, and of course Niven is always the soul of affability, important since his character is so shallow that in the wrong hands our sympathies might be lost entirely, and Niven never allows it.

The real centerpiece of course is Jean Seberg as Cecile, so ravishingly hip that if you saw her in a club today she'd STILL be the hippest girl in the room. My favorite part of the movie, in fact, is a b&w framing device Preminger uses to contrast the melancholy present with the vivacious and colorful flashbacks. Although Seberg's voiceover narration is wooden and uninspired, Preminger lets us gaze into her beautiful eyes for long stretches and follow her around Paris in the fifties while she deftly avoids emotional entanglement. My favorite bit is in a little underground dance club peopled by obvious bohemians (a young artist wearing the horizontally-striped shirt which was the stereotypical garb of the Bohemian Frenchman in Bugs Bunny cartoons, a lesbian dressed like Brando in the Wild One, et al). The painter and Cecile's more elegant escort begin fighting over her; without missing a beat, her face goes slack and she walks without a word into la chambre des dames to suffer her bad memories (which is what she does when she's alone) until they've sorted it out. My other favorite bit, also in the b&w frame, is when Cecile dances with her garcon-du-jour while Juliette Greco sings the cool, melancholy theme song. My OTHER favorite bit is the last shot, when Cecile finally shows us some genuine emotion. That's my favorite. We're building up to it, all film long, and the fascination of Seberg does not let us down.

In the end, it works for me despite the clenched-teeth, forced gaiety of the "fun" times, a fun which consists of gambling, eating out, drinking, and the occasional conga line; in short, a "fun" which is stripped of all truth or spontaneity and contrived by a scriptwriter under orders from a director that there's a big, epic party-scene needed and what can you come up with at short notice? It works in spite of clunky, cinemascope editing which lets the story lapse for long moments to show the epic scale of the set-pieces. It works against all odds because even when miscast, these actors know their chops. The awkward scene in which Anne overhears her lover betraying her, adeptly elided in the book and clumsily spelled out here, works because Kerr's face so easily and completely becomes the momentary embodiment of horror and shame.


Then there's Johnny Eager. Brilliantly written. Never predictable. Lana Turner is impossibly luscious, and, it turns out, not a bad hand in the way of acting, or movie-starring, anyway. Robert Taylor does what is demanded and carries it alright, and Van Heflin steals the damn picture with his sad-sack intellectual sidekick, a role for which he took home one of those rare well-deserved Oscars.

This is not your everyday gangster picture. It's not only the script, it's the cinematography, too: unobtrusive but stunning choices about where to put the camera, how to frame, what face to show and when. There are big hunks of conversation during which Heflin's face is far too fascinating to ignore even though he's not talking at all, and Harold Rosson knows it.

Johnny Eager is one for the ages. It's easily one of my favorite gangster pictures: this despite a certain uncomfortableness I suffer with Robert Taylor, which has to say something, since he's in virtually every scene. I don't hesitate to call it one of the greats.

glorious 39: bold choices come to little

Glorious 39 is a strange, engaging, ultimately disappointing but ridiculously well-acted period-piece set in England during that last, golden summer before the war. I went in expecting one of those "Our Innocence is Lost; Our Ignorance was Bliss" nostalgia pieces, never thunder-striking but always worth a watch when brought to life by those marvellous British character actors. Instead, this turns out to be director/writer Stephen Poliakoff's well-polished stab at a historical thriller, along the lines of the Wyvern Mystery, in which the heroine feels absolutely loved and at home in the world and then something happens to pull the rug out and she winds up inhabiting a nightmare of doubt, wondering if she can trust anyone at all.

In the DVD extras, David Tennant describes Poliakoff as a British national treasure, which I think is rather generous; certainly two of the others I've seen of his (Close My Eyes and Perfect Strangers) are no great earthshaking pair. He does have a way of turning up the topsoil of British family-life in previous eras, particularly enjoying the company of the rich and landed, and presenting it in a palatable and often educational fashion. This time, he's exploring the idea that Neville Chamberlain's government was so certain England would lose a war with Germany that there was a campaign of intimidation and assassination against any poor sod who spoke out in favor of Churchill's bellicose plans. Although few of us today would scoff at the idea of a government acting cold-heartedly against its citizens (I'm speaking of Tories and Republicans, obviously) while justifying it as the means to an end, the thing as presented is pretty far-fetched. Poliakoff was apparently leaning so far towards the thriller aspect that he lost interest in logic.

The most chilling bit for me is when our heroine (Romola Garai) is detained at a roadblock without an identity card and the soldier explains with some po-faced Schadenfreude that Habeas Corpus has been suspended, and as soldiers they can now do what they like with whomever they please. The other effectively dread-inspiring moment is when the creepy young cousin warns her in hushed tones that her family doesn't love her. The grand pieces which are apparently meant to be the most chilling (at the eerie veterinarian's and at the diplomatic party) come off as forced and untrue, saved only by the (ridiculously) high quality of the acting. In fact, David Tennant gives such a magnificent turn that I resented his early exit. Bill Nighy is, as always, a complete master of all to which he turns his wonderful hand, and Hugh Bonneville and Eddie Redmayne hit just the right notes, without misstep. Poor Christopher Lee has the worst bit: he's part of an unfortunate framing device which culminates in one of the clumsiest pratfalls of an ending that I've ever had the bad luck to see.

It's too bad. Applying Hitchcock twists and darknesses to a historical piece is a grand idea. Casting all brilliant actors is another grand idea, and more folks ought to do it. Jeremy Northam as the aristocratic henchman of the evil government is perfect, and there's a wonderfully sinister shot in which he's eerily lit in the back of his car as the young folks watch him pull away, their instincts telling them he is a malevolent influence but their cheerful British common-sense arguing that the idea is rubbish. There's a stash of incriminating records disguised as foxtrots, cats stand in as mirror-images of those well-honed but often-quashed instincts, and every piece of furniture and prop is finely chosen and well placed. If only the story were better shaped. If only the plot turns were not so often forced and hard to swallow. If only the ending weren't an unpalatable cup of turgid tea.

All that said, all my complaints logged, I might still watch this again, just for the acting, and for the pleasure of living for another few hours in England before the War.

rowlands and cassavetes: a love song

Cassavetes films are agonizing. I've always found them so. I watch them at a rate of about one every three years; it takes that long to absorb one properly, and that long to recover from the experience. They're not agonizing in the way that, say, a Lars von Trier is, or, God forbid, a Gaspar Noe; HIS films set out to be agonizing first and foremost. Cassavetes tortures us not for the sake of sadism but because he has a massive hunger for cutting into life until he finds the gristle of truth. His movies are shaped like nobody else's, incorporating an extraordinary unpredictability, because his first concern is to gaze without flinching at the painful parts of life until unexpected honesties unfold and drop like gifts into our laps. His actors use an improvisatory style and the editing is unusual, often cutting away in the middle of what we would expect to be a much longer scene once the prospect of new truths has drained away from it, or, as in the bar scene in Husbands, staying three times longer with a scene than any other director on the face of the planet would have done. It's excruciating, but, as with any Cassavetes film, by the end of it one feels as if one has had one's old skin peeled away to expose a shiny, new one emerging from beneath the wounds.

Rowlands and Cassavetes are the only couple I've ever fallen in love with. As an actor, I find him so captivating that the only way I can look away from his face is if she is onscreen with him, and then I forget to watch him at all. This began in 1982 when I showed up early for a double feature and accidentally caught the last half hour of Paul Mazursky's Tempest. I knew who they were, of course. I'd seen Rosemary's Baby many times, and she'd just been up for the Oscar for Gloria. But it was Tempest where I watched them interact as husband and wife, and in that last, strange bit of that strange, small movie I saw something in the chemistry between them that made me stay over and watch it in its entirety.

And it IS a strange movie, with moments of utter brilliance competing against others of dismal, horror-show kind of failure, but Gena and John (may I be so affectionate?) are nothing short of stunning together. The thing that's hard to get past, -- the reason it's not for all comers, even Cassavetes fans, -- is that it carries about it a distinct I-Love-New-York-Musical-Theatre pong, a grating thing. The other difficulty, and this is a corollary to the first, is that the clowns (most notably Raul Julia's Calibanos) seem to inhabit an exaggerated, absurd theatricality which only makes sense in a Musical Theatre context. In Julia's defense, after repeated viewings I can say he really put his back into finding the truth in the emotional transitions, and I think no one in the world could have made a truer stab at this impossible task than he did.

But then to the good: Tempest has scenes which rank among my favorite moments in all of cinema. When the architect Phillip Dimitrius (Cassavetes) quits his job after watching his doppelganger jump from the top of a building site. When he tells his wife (Rowlands) that he wants out, a scene which includes a wonderful, merciless rant about everything he hates ("I hate this cat. I hate its face, with those whiskers..."), a rant which might be funny if it wasn't so devastating, and which winds up in the conjuration of a storm, a beautiful moment. The painful, protracted bit in which Dimitrius destroys his wife's (admittedly annoying) musical theatre party by showing up drunk and making a scene; the great part comes after the guests are gone. He falls on his knees in mock apology and she walks right past him, pushing him away by the forehead. The first time I saw it I thought, "This is the first real marriage I've ever seen in a movie." Then there's the long endpiece, the Tango of Forgiveness, in which relations get sorted out if not tied up, and which escapes a tang of the maudlin through its own embrace of the ridiculous and through that perfect emotional tone which Cassavetes and Rowlands seem to find with such astonishing constancy and effortlessness in everything they do.

That's what Opening Night has: excruciating as it is, as the Rowlands character goes through her nervous breakdown very much in public, there's that ebullient end-scene in which the show finally goes on, and we watch the two of them, husband-and-wife actors playing estranged-lover actors playing troubled spouses, improvising in front of a full house and doing it with such warmth, familiarity and plain good fun that it brings the house down. It's a great film, and a spectacular performance by Rowlands.

I could go on, but I won't. Suffice to say that I will watch these two in anything. One day, when they've finally mastered the principles behind time-travel, I'll produce a Reality TV series in which we go back and plant a camera crew in the Cassavetes/Rowlands household, and that will be the only Reality TV show I ever watch.

finding neverland: madly subversive

SPOILER ALERT

Finding Neverland is an apparently typical, child-friendly, utterly mainstream movie. It has quality performances (by old favorites Depp and Winslet and Radha Mitchell especially), pretty production values and heart-warming sentiment enough that folks emerge from it using words like "sweet" and "charming", and determining to bring the kids. And it is, indeed, all those things, except utterly mainstream. It is, rather, at its core, fascinatingly subversive.

Its story follows JM Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, the sons of which inspired him to write his masterpiece, Peter Pan. In the film there are four boys, their father is dead from cancer, their mother slowly ailing towards early death while a romantic but unconsummated bond forms between her and the unhappily married Barrie. In truth, there were five boys, their father was very much alive and not pleased to be replaced in his brood's affection by the meddling Barrie. There was no romantic bond between Barrie and the mater; in fact, one of the boys in adulthood said he thought Barrie was completely asexual in every direction (see Birkin, below). In addition, once you've read the ultimate fates of these Lost Boys, "sweet" and "charming" become so overwhelmed by the louring darkness as to become inapplicable.

Andrew Birkin's book JM Barrie and the Lost Boys quotes Robert Boothby, later a Lord of the Realm and a friend at Eton of Michael's, who was Barrie's favorite of the boys: "It was an extraordinary relationship between them -- an unhealthy relationship. I don't mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection. Barrie was always charming to me, but I thought there was something twisted about him... He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie; and when all is said and done, I think Michael and his brothers would have been better off living in poverty than with that odd, morbid little genius." Nico, the youngest of the clan, responds: "I am quite unable to admit that JMB's influence was 'unhealthy': oppressive maybe and over-constant..." In the end, only two of the boys survived into a peaceful old age. One died in the trenches of Flanders in WWI, a second threw himself under a subway train, and the golden Michael, whose classmates lauded him as touched with grace and genius, drowned at 21, another possible suicide.

None of that has anything to do with this movie, though, which sidesteps history almost entirely, as is Hollywood's wont and god-given right. Depp hits just the right levels as Barrie to deliver a man whose secret with children is that he treats them as equals, as ready to learn from them as teach them. The sentiment is underplayed and even the maternal death avoids the quagmire of the maudlin.

The extraordinary thing about it is its message, which is very plainly stated and reinforced throughout: that life is nasty, brutish, short and filled with pain, and the way to be happy is to retreat from reality into a world of dreams. If that sounds sweet, then you haven't thought it through. Every so often this philosophy will shape a brilliant mind which creates a Peter Pan; far more frequently you'll get opium addicts, full-time gamers, or anti-ambitious, layabout film critics. In America today, stillness and introversion are tolerated only on the understanding that these periods of gestation will lead to later flurries of activity which will in turn (and this is crucial) result in the acquisition of wealth. Dreaming for its own sake is still, more than a century past the Victorians, suspicious behaviour just this side of the criminal. Because Barrie is earning a living and the respect of his peers through his dreaming on paper, the message gets an implied sugar-coating, but it doesn't take much scratching to get through the veneer to a radical vision: retreat however you can, escape however you can, and spend your life in dreams.

centurion: titanic amongst the picts

SPOILER ALERT

Centurion is a madly disappointing action film inspired by the disappearance of the legendary Ninth Spanish Legion, a powerful armed command originally led by Julius Caesar himself which disappeared from history, swallowed up without a trace, ostensibly in the wildlands of Britain early in the 2nd century.

The Ninth has an almost unbelievable legacy, beginning with a brilliant run in Gaul, Hispania and Africa, after which Caesar disbanded them into retirement in 46 BC. After his murder, though, Octavian recalled them to duty and they fought beside him against Antony and his Egyptian Queen at the Battle of Actium. Skip ahead seventy years, and the Emperor Claudius sends them north as part of his bid to invade Britain. There they suffer a bad defeat in 61 AD during Boudica's uprising but are still there building a fortress at York in 71. And here they will stay, in what has to be one of the longer and more depressing postings in military history, for half a century. The city as we know it today, in fact, was built with their fortress at its heart. Petergate was one of its main thoroughfares; York Minster is built on the spot where the massive Roman Headquarters squatted.

We know the Legion is no longer in existence by 161 because Marcus Aurelius ordered a sort of official inventory of the Roman military and our boys are nowhere listed. Evidence as to their mysterious end is scant, compelling and contradictory: some theorize the Ninth wound up in Judea or Persia, but the most alluring myth, the one which will not release its grip on our collective cultural imagination, is that the nemesis of the Ninth was Britain itself, with its gloomy climes, untamed Picts, and Gordian Knot of tangled forest and swamplands.

The mystery has inspired other filmmakers and writers. A few years ago the Ninth made an appearance in a loose and fantastical restructuring of events called the Last Legion: with a great cast (John Hannah, Colin Firth, Kevin McKidd) and an engaging plotline describing the Roman origins of King Arthur, it's quality fare for kids but has nothing really to do with history.

As for Centurion, director Neil Marshall wrote the script, and that's always a warning sign. It flashes me back like a bad acid trip to that debacle of badly-written, masturbatory self-indulgence called Titanic (I spit the word; I do not speak it). And, although nowhere near as bad (what could be?), this one suffers from a similar inherent structural deformity, the Titanic Malady, if you will, which sets in when there's nobody standing by to tell the director/writer that his script is no damn good.

In the closing credits, Marshall thanks Walter Hill and Xenopohon for inspiration, implying that he was trying to make something like the Warriors, a comic book movie that Hill made in 1979, and one which has aged remarkably well. It takes Xenophon's Anabasis, one of the great adventure stories of all time, and resets it in a sort of timeless New York in which rival gangs divide the city. One gang, caught far behind enemy lines after a peace-conference gone horribly wrong, has to fight and sneak its way back to safety in its own territory. The result is golden, a classic for all time. Marshall takes the same story: the remnants of the Ninth are caught in wild Pictish territory, without weapons or hope and pursued by vengeance-driven berserker Picts (including one gorgeous, mute, woad-covered, unstoppable warrior-girl who was raped and mutilated in her childhood by Romans. She is unstoppable, that is, until she is inevitably stopped in that misogynist, Beautiful-Girl-Killed-In-Lingering-Swoony-Embrace shot that Hollywood loves so passionately). It's an adventure/fantasy, and therefore not much is to be expected of it, but even by those lowered expectations, the promised adventure never manifests into anything much.

First off, the lighting is wrong: flat, metallic light that looks nothing like anything I've ever seen in Britain. The colours are wrong. The film is full of good, very good and wonderful actors, all of them playing nobodies. They each have qualities which delineate them, one from another, but only in the broadest strokes, because character has been sacrificed to action, a choice which is only valid when well-executed, and this one is not. Michael Fassbender, a man so talent-crammed that I was beginning to fear him as a sort of demigod, fails here because he's playing a non-character who stands at the epicenter of a story peopled exclusively by non-characters. There is one powerful performance: Dominic West's. He busts the screen wide open with sheer strength of charisma as the well-loved and ill-fated Roman General Titus Flavius Virilus. Once he's dead, there's nothing but chase scenes, not very well filmed, and plot "twists" (they've lifted the Butch Cassidy cliff-jump scene straight, even down to the "Who ARE those guys?" brand of wonderments), not anything ingenious. The ethics are simple and never tested (do we desert the fellow who's too wounded to swim? Whoa! He got shot by the bad guys in the nick of time, so we don't have to explore our own moral ambiguity!), the good guys being unequivocally good and the bad guys cold and heartless. The violence is unrealistic; the sound is pumped way up and the cuts are, as usual these days, too quick to allow the fighting to feel life-like, which seems to be the point.

Because this is an adolescent boy fantasy, there is the de rigeur Beautiful Woman Living As Witch And Outcast across whom they stumble in the course of their wanderings. I understand the appeal of the trope, but I begin to long for a witch who is old, or homely, or lesbian, not spending her life waiting for this man, or at least not wearing lip-gloss. It is never fully explained, either, how Quintus Dias (Fassbender) knows how to speak flawless Pictish, or how the witchy-Pict girl knows how to speak flawless Latin (although she claims it's due to the proximity of the Roman fort, she also claims she keeps up the witchy facade to keep the Romans away, and that it's always worked). Dias was captured by the Picts, but apparently only for a week or so before he escaped, and I doubt anyone took the time to teach him his letters while he was chained to the rack. This is the kind of detail that clues you in to the fact that it's an adolescent fantasy instead of a true stab at bringing a particular time and place to life (as in, say, Jeremiah Johnson, in which language barriers are respected).

Since the thing is filmed with good to wonderful actors, and since only a single stab at humour comes off, I have to lay the fault at the editor's doorstep, after the scriptwriter takes a second drubbing, that is. (The only joke I remember working is when they make it at last to the Romans and one of the non-character soldiers says, "THIS is Hadrian's great plan? A WALL?")

Still, not to worry. There's another film in the works: the Eagle, due out this year and based on the classic novel the Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe which began the resurgence of the Legion's popularity. It'll have Jamie Bell and Mark Strong and will focus on a son of a legionnaire trying to solve the mystery and find the Ninth's totemic bronze eagle.