Back to the art house
Movies seen autumn 2007.
Originally written: June 2007
The Singer (Quand J'etais Chanteur)
History Boys
Half-Nelson
Curtin
Bastard Boys
Starman
You know that there is nothing much decent coming out of the major studios when the movies you are watching are all at the art-house cinema, rather than the multiplex. We've been members of the Palace Club for many years but have gone through a period where we have been to the Leichhardt cinema only infrequently in the past year or so. In the past two months, as we have received the tail end of the northern winter and spring output, there has been little incentive to go to the suburban multiplex. Even the first gasps of the northern summer blockbusters (or the three-peats as they are being called as Spiderman, Shrek, Pirates and Ocean launch their second sequels within weeks of each other) have dragged us there - although we will see the third Pirates movie and may see the third Shrek. But the fact remains that the only three movies reviewed below from cinema release are, in fact, art house movies and they represent three different strands of alternate cinema: traditional French cinema; British stage adaptation; and independent US cinema. The two-month period has been made more acceptable by two of the better made-for-television Australian dramas of recent times - both historical dramas and both on the ABC of course.
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When I was overweight
Gerard Depardieu is one of the great screen actors of the modern era. He's been in semi-retirement and, unlike his Anglo-Celtic analogs, has seen no reason to maintain an emaciated frame. So a new movie from him is always worth seeing, even if he looks a little too well-fed. The Singer (its original title, Quand J'etais Chanteur, translates as the more interesting and revealing "When I was a singer") is a romance in which an aging singer woos a much younger woman. She in turn is somewhat reticent, largely because her background includes a failed relationship that has left her to raise alone a young son. Depardieu does his own singing; the metier of his Alain is the French lounge-song of the seventies and eighties. He has a loyal following in the provincial area he serves, and provides his patrons with good value. But it can hardly be said to be a stellar career, with him teetering on the edge of irrelevancy. Nonetheless he gives value for money. Marion is interning at a real estate agent's office, trying to establish a career to support her son. The agency owner, Bruno, might also be a suitor and he provides the introduction to Alain. Alain pretends to be searching for a new house in order to keep seeing Marion and their rather sweet fumblings towards romance are entertaining. There is nothing startling nor original about Quand J'etais Chanteur, just a good well-fashioned story that reaches a natural denouement and doesn't try to tie everything up in a neat bow. I expect that the movie will be remade in a few years with casting like Patrick Swayze and Lindsay Lohan in the leads and it won't work nearly as well. Sweet.
One thing after another
Stage plays adapted to films sometimes work. Most film-makers want to open them out to make them more 'cinematic' and change them markedly. They want to replace those that created the roles on stage and populate the set with film actors. Mostly such films destroy the essential drama that worked so well on stage. The makers of The History Boys went the other way. In between taking the cast from the West End to Broadway, the writer and director of the play filmed it, using the same cast that had created the roles, and augmenting the stage production with very little external shooting. As I didn't see the stage play I cannot comment on how the film compares with the stage play but, in my view, the film works remarkably well. Largely this is because the adult cast is so adept and the kids are sufficiently good. But mainly it is because Alan Bennett's script retains its incisiveness. The story is set in a northern English grammar school during the early years of Thatcher. Eight senior students are back at school for some additional tutoring before taking Oxbridge entrance exams. To prepare them, the headmaster has brought in Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a recent Oxford graduate, to supplement the history lessons of Dorothy Lintott (Frances de la Tour) and the general studies of Hector (Richard Griffiths). Where Lintott is very fact based, Hector is much more free-wheeling, with poetry, drama, film and modern culture intermixing in his anarchic classes. Irwin brings a third, much more cynical perspective, stressing that success will not be necessarily based on knowledge or background; they need to find a different voice to make themselves heard. The kids are more sketchily drawn, although four come more into focus that the others: Posner is gay, Jewish and earnest - and in love with Dakin; Dakin plays on his looks, is screwing - or trying to screw - the head's secretary, and is fascinated by Irwin; Scripps is Catholic and religious, as well as Posner's confessor; and Rudge is the jock and generally inarticulate (his definition of history is "It's just one fucking thing after another, isn't it?"), whose future no-one has much hope for. There is in addition a class clown, a token black, a token Moslem and a guy with badges on his uniform. While the story centres on the boys' tutoring, and their reactions to the various teachers, there's a sub-plot in the background, arising from Hector's questionable habits. This brings the interactions of the adult characters more into play. With the exception of the headmaster, a stereotyped Thatcher-era bureaucrat, the adult characters ring true. De la Tour is a stand-out as the waspish history teacher and Griffiths brings out both the joie-de-vivre and the pathos of Hector. Moore's portrayal of Irwin, especially as his own weaknesses are exposed, is multi-layered and affecting. Samuel Barnett (Posner) is the most successful of the younger set and Jamie Parker does well with the development of Scripps. I liked the use of music and songs, the interpolated literary references and the fun that they all have with the conflicts among the students and between the students and the staff. I didn't like the final scene - an anti-climax - so much; it seemed to introduce Americanised bathos into what had been a very British scenario. Nonetheless The History Boys stands up well as a film. Recommended.
In black and white
When Ryan Gosling was nominated as Best Lead Actor at this year's Oscars for his role in Half Nelson, you were entitled to say "Ryan who?" and "half what?" It's taken a while to get to the antipodes and is playing in only a very limited number of art-house cinemas but Half Nelson is a film well worth seeing not only for Gosling's performance but that of Shareeka Epps, as well. Like The History Boys, this film is set in a high school, in a poor area, but the look and feel is completely different, even if both involve teachers reaching out for students to try and help them. Gosling is Dan Dunne a thirty-something history teacher with a middle school class of largely Afro-American students, teaching them about contemporary American history (with little regard for the curriculum). He is single and has a substance abuse problem. While his behavior and the reasons for it are never explicitly outlined, such is Gosling's performance that you get to understand how Dan Dunne arrived at this point and what he needs to survive past it. It is an acting job worthy of recognition. Drey (Shareeka Epps) lives with her mother; the father has buggered off and her elder brother is doing time, taking a fall for Frank, a local dealer, who is determined to "look after" Drey and her family (and maybe exploit her youth for his own ends). She is Dan's student and a part of the basketball team he coaches and, after she discovers him shit-faced in the girls' loos after a game, they sort of adopt each other. Given her choice between the drug-fucked teacher and the exploitative dealer, Drey has limited options, but she comes across as perhaps the most mature character in the piece. Shareeka Epps was 17 when she played Drey, a thirteen year old, but she is incredibly convincing - a performance that almost matches the lead actor's. Interspersed between the developments in the Dan-Drey-Frank triangle are scenes from Dan's history class, where he is shown to be an effective and inspiring teacher, highlighting the rise of the civil rights and anti-war movements in the US, and getting his students to actually think for themselves. The conflict between his success as a teacher and his self-destructive behavior outside class makes for an effective drama that keeps you riveted. The script by director Ryan Fleck and co-writer Anne Bolen is based on a short film they did a few years previously and makes sense all the way through. There is little money spent on production values here and the subject matter is quite daunting at times. But if you like smaller, independent voices in US film-making who are prepared to avoid the glossiness and superficiality of the studio productions, you'll find much that is rewarding in this film.
Telemovies and miniseries
Given the magnitude of history programming being made overseas, especially in the UK and the US, televisual Australian history has received relatively short shrift. Despite the on-going battle for cultural hegemony between the black-armband and the white-blindfold historians, we haven't seen anything to rival a Ken Burns or a Simon Schama or a World at War. On the other hand, Labor history at least has been well-served by a dramatisations such as The Dismissal and True Believers. To that number can be added Curtin, a 90-minute docudrama about the early days of John Curtin's Prime Ministership in 1941-42. While the film is episodic, it captures much of the pressure that came upon Curtin when he took over as Prime Minister. And it conveys the heroic struggle of Curtin and his associates to ensure that the country was adequately defended. He had to confront the machinations of Winston Churchill, who regarded British interests as superior to Australia's and was prepared to sacrifice the Antipodes to ensure the survival of British interests in north Africa and, subsequently, in India. William McInnes' portrayal of the eponymous character is quite brilliant. He is matched by Noni Hazlehurst as Elsie Curtin and Geoff Morrell's Chifley, with good support from Dan Wyllie as Curtin's media man, Don Rodgers, and William Zappa as the under-rated General Vernon Sturdee. We need more such dramas (or docos) to throw light on the great characters of Australian history.
Similarly, writer Sue Smith and director Raymond Quint found drama the way to portray the 1998 waterfront dispute in Bastard Boys, shown as a two-parter involving close to four hours of screen time. The complexities of the various manoeuvring a decade ago mean that, even today, some of the activities remain unclear. So drama rather than documentary suits the purposes. The problem is of course that the protagonists are still alive and some are more than ready to say that the screenplay got it wrong when it comes to stuff about them. Leaving aside questions of balance and accuracy, the mini-series works as drama. The structure is roughly chronological but each of the four sub-sections is told from the perspective of one of the players - ACTU heavy Greg Combet, union lawyer Josh Bornstein, shop steward Sean McSwain, and company boss Chris Corrigan. Despite his centrality to the dispute and its settlement MUA head John Coombs (Colin Friels) does not get to be one of those highlighted in this way. In addition to Friels' performance as the nuggety MUA boss, I'd single out Geoff Morrell's Corrigan and Jack Thompson old-time unionist, Tully, as the outstanding acting jobs. Not that there is a weak part in the piece, except perhaps Francis Greenslade's caricature of Bill Kelty. Surprisingly, for what is largely Labor history, Corrigan emerges quite sympathetically; unsurprisingly Peter Reith and the government do not. You're left to wonder who the real bastard boys were: the unionists who had been exploiting a system that was in need of reform and modernisation; or the employers, who were willing to ignore morality to achieve their ends. I'd personally nominate the Howard Gang as the main bastards, but that's a personal prejudice. Good entertainment nonetheless.
From our DVD collection - reviews of good and great movies not previously reviewed
Starman is ET - The Extra-Terrestrial done well. An adult and interesting version of a similar story, but told with restraint and with passion. And with logic. Like the critter in Spielberg's 1982 illogical weepfest (if ET had the powers he demonstrated at the end, why didn't he just levitate to the departing spacecraft at the beginning?), Jeff Bridges' starman in John Carpenter's 1984 film is stuck on Earth, and is looking for a ride home. He is a non-corporeal alien who has come in response to the invitation sent out with Voyager. But, as soon as he's within firing range, the military shoot him down and the security community is after the body for dissection. He takes the form of a dead house painter, using DNA from the guy's hair to grow a body. Kidnapping the guy's widow, they set out on a drive from Wisconsin to Arizona to meet his rescue vessel, pursued by the security chief. Unlike ET, the scientist role is divided, so that the two contending aspects of "Keys" are separated: the antithetical aspect which wants to dissect the alien and find how he ticks, played by Richard Jaeckel, a very hissable villain, prepared to shoot first and autopsy later; and the more sympathetic chief investigator, Mark Shermin (Charles Martin Smith), who wants to talk to the alien and feels that good manners, at the very least, require humanity to hold fire until we know the creature's intentions. But the outstanding performance, perhaps the greatest piece of acting ever in an SF movie, is Jeff Bridges' alien. From his early adjustments, getting to know how his fleshy encasing works, through his fumbling attempts to absorb both the language and culture of the place he's visiting, it is a fascinating acting process, made all the better by the long stretches of the movie where you forget that it is a process and you accept the alien who is living within his body. Bridges is almost matched by Karen Allen (what ever happened to the queen of the 1980s f/SF movie?) whose Jenny Hayden has actual character development as she comes first to have empathy with, and then love for, the alien in his late husband's body. Starman is an exciting SF idea, original to a movie, rather than derived from a book, developed into a cogent script and well directed by Carpenter. It has elements of the road movie and the episodic nature of such films, but the 'message of hope' at the end is far more affecting than that at the end of either of Spielberg's alien movies (ET and CE3K). Starman is very near to the top of my all-time favorite SF movies.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]