Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • My Week with Marilyn

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Simon Curtis  (2011)

    At the time she came to London to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe was (allegedly) described, by Queen Elizabeth II, as ‘the most famous woman in the world’.  This film and its source material – Colin Clark’s 1995 memoir – depend on an understanding of who Marilyn was and what eventually happened to her; on the traction between Clark’s unique personal experience, as third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl, of Marilyn and our own experience, as filmgoers.  Simon Curtis is able to make this clear from the start:  Colin’s first encounter with Marilyn is from the stalls of his local cinema.  The youngest son of what he describes in his opening voiceover as ‘a family of overachievers’, Colin is film crazy and gets a junior job with Olivier’s production company.  (It’s a typical screen recruitment – a mixture of mild persistence, happy accident and wishing will make it so.)   Working with Olivier destroys what little self-esteem Marilyn has at the start; once she reads what Arthur Miller, her husband of three weeks, has written in his notebook (presumably his early ideas for After the Fall), she’s falling to pieces,   Twenty-three-year-old Colin Clark, on his first film assignment, becomes her confidant.  Thanks largely to him, Marilyn gets through the film.  She then returns to America and Miller and, as the closing legends remind us, Some Like It Hot.

    It follows that My Week with Marilyn also depends critically on the performance of the lead actress, and Michelle Williams is terrific – especially when there’s just the one screen between us and her.   Holed up in a big house in the country for the duration of the filming, Marilyn seems imprisoned in its rooms:  her sense of freedom when she and Colin are outdoors is palpable yet she still seems to be driven, in search of something.  These moments are perfectly satisfying because Williams’ lovely, desperate sense of abandon corresponds with what we think of as the ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe.  In fact, the Marilyn mythology is so strong we may feel we know that’s what she was really like – and that makes it tough for anyone playing her.   Unless the script is clever enough to get us to see her in a different light – and this one isn’t – Marilyn’s interpreter, if she doesn’t accord to our expectations, may seem to be acting ultra vires.   (I’m struck writing this how natural it seems to call her ‘Marilyn’ rather than ‘Monroe’, how unusual that is, how it seems to say something about our sense of a close relationship with her.)   An actress can only do so much with Marilyn Monroe but Michelle Williams does a great deal.       

    In the sequences of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, Williams’ recreation of Marilyn is very fine – especially the bit when Marilyn’s character Elsie does a jiggling dance and sings to herself.  When we watch Williams as an image projected from a screen within the screen (when Colin watches Marilyn in the cinema or Olivier looks at rushes), she’s a beautiful, appealing performer but she isn’t Marilyn Monroe.  No amount of skilful make-up can replicate the peculiar quality of flesh that made Marilyn seem carnal and ethereal at the same time (especially in black-and-white films).  Williams doesn’t have either the original’s unique presence – which was overpowering in a remarkably unself-conscious way.   In the offscreen sequences, however, she’s very successful both at getting across Marilyn’s strange combination of lewdness and innocence, and at suggesting that Marilyn was well aware of the power of her vivid sexiness without being able fully to control, let alone explain it.  She wants to be loved:  you see it in her instant reaction to the fans who spot her outside Asprey’s on a Saturday afternoon; you see it again when she wiggles down a flight of steps at Windsor Castle to the delight of a fleet of lackeys there.  But the pleasure in Bond Street turns quickly to terror as she’s mobbed. (Marilyn’s entourage think it will be quiet as it’s ‘early closing’ day.  It seems astonishing now but I can remember that much of central London was close to becalmed on Saturday afternoons even a quarter-century later, in the early 1980s.)   At one point, Marilyn asks Colin why people want to get close to her but, when they do, want to leave her.  She’s thinking of husbands rather than crowds but the mobbing suggests, albeit very baldly, that she likes drawing people to her but gets scared when they’re too close.

    Perhaps because Simon Curtis and the screenwriter Adrian Hodges don’t find a way to convey the incredibleness of Colin Clark’s experience – how the stuff of fantasy became part of working life – Eddie Redmayne as Colin can’t quite either.  But maybe that’s right:  if you’re as inexperienced and unassuming as Colin is shown to be and you find yourself in sudden, unforeseeable proximity to a legendary sex symbol, you might well lose a sense of her particularity.   Redmayne is perfectly cast here  Although he’s nearly thirty, he passes easily for the twenty-three-year-old Colin; in fact, he passes for someone younger and Colin’s faint irritation with people thinking he’s younger is one of the many likeable things in this intelligent and nuanced performance.  (It’s also touching, given the chasm between them in other ways, that there’s not that much age difference between Colin and Marilyn, who’s thirty.)   Redmayne’s charm was enough to eclipse my prejudice against Colin Clark’s family (his father was Kenneth and his elder brother Alan).  There are moments when it’s enough to throw the film off balance – occasionally his open, handsome face makes him a more luminous camera subject than Michelle Williams.   When Colin, besotted with Marilyn, pleads with her to give up her film career and live happily with him, it’s hard to tell whether this is clever or clichéd writing:  is the film fanatic Colin coming out with a line he’s heard plenty of times on screen or can’t Adrian Hodges come up with anything better?  Redmayne convinces you of Colin’s sincerity so it doesn’t really matter.  He’s extremely good at showing us how Marilyn turns him on – whether he’s watching her on screen or she’s skinny-dipping with him (Colin remains a gent – polite and protective – even when he’s having an erection).  Redmayne’s main successes to date have been on stage, including an Olivier award and a Tony for Red.  He may prove to be too lightweight for leading roles on screen – unless the structure of the role is as particular as this one (Colin, although he’s the central consciousness, isn’t required to carry the film).  But there’s no doubting that Eddie Redmayne is impressive as well as engaging here.

    Kenneth Branagh’s jowels and portliness blunt the sharpness of Laurence Olivier’s egotism but the casting is apt because of Branagh’s ‘new Olivier’ cachet of twenty years ago and it’s a richly enjoyable impersonation.   The vocal mimicry is accomplished and very witty:  if there are moments when Branagh seems to be concentrating so hard on achieving a particular technical effect that he comes over as clever but hollow that’s hardly a fault:  it gives him a kinship with the man he’s playing.  Simon Curtis concentrates on Olivier’s exasperation with Marilyn’s hopeless timekeeping, her failure to remember or understand her lines, her lack of ‘craft’:  when Branagh and Williams are playing their scenes in The Prince and the Showgirl, you don’t feel the brutal competitiveness of Olivier’s acting in the film.   But when Marilyn’s manager, watching rushes with Olivier, mutters that once she’s on song you don’t notice anyone else on screen, Branagh shows how deeply the remark hurts.   Hodges’ dialogue is serviceable but you often want the script to be more penetrating than it is.  When Colin tells Marilyn she’s a great star who wants to be a great actress, and Olivier’s a great actor who wants to be a great star, and The Prince and the Showgirl won’t help either of them, you’d like her to respond more vigorously.  When, later on, Colin tries to persuade Marilyn to leave her bed and her bottles of tablets, go back to Pinewood and ‘show everyone you’re a great actress’, you want her to remind him what he said before.   Marilyn has Paula Strasberg with her in England (though at one stage she yells that she wants Lee instead); the mostly sarcastic remarks about Method acting are pretty feeble and Zoe Wanamaker can’t do much with the role of Paula but Branagh has a particularly good bit when Paula insists that Marilyn ‘can’t believe her character would do that’ and Olivier spits back, ‘Then tell her to pretend to believe!’

    As Sybil Thorndike the woman, Judi Dench’s characterisation is deft and precise; when she plays Thorndike acting in The Prince and the Showgirl she’s busily, fruitlessly theatrical – as Thorndike was in the picture.  At first it seems that Sybil Thorndike is just being kind to Marilyn but, when she tells her she knows how to act on camera in a way that eludes the British acting aristocracy, Judi Dench leaves you in doubt this is meant to be the honest truth.  It’s an irony, of course, that Dench, a great film actress, delivers this line.  (And when Sybil Thorndike scolds Olivier for bullying Marilyn and he doesn’t answer back, you sense a resonance with Kenneth Branagh’s admiration of Judi Dench.)  I’ve concentrated even more than usual on the acting but different kinds and qualities of acting are a main theme of My Week with Marilyn and in evidence on screen.  It’s quite a cast – well-known faces in even the smallest parts.  Simon Russell Beale creates a complete character with half a dozen lines (and an amusing hairdo); Toby Jones and Michael Kitchen do well in slightly larger roles; Derek Jacobi, as the Windsor Castle art historian (Colin’s godfather), is better than he’s been recently – you can see how Marilyn’s charming him.  Jim Carter is the landlord of the inn where’s Colin staying during the shoot – and sceptical that his guest is really hobnobbing with film stars.  Carter is broad as usual but gets a good payoff when Marilyn calls into the pub to say goodbye to Colin.   I was pleasantly surprised by Emma Watson as the girl in wardrobe whom Colin takes a shine to until Marilyn absorbs him.  Julia Ormond is disappointingly bland as Vivien Leigh, though, and the few people you expect to be weak are:  Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller (he looks more like William Holden) and Dominic Cooper, who’s abominably crude and one-note as the manager ‘who owns 49% of Marilyn’.

    My Week with Marilyn is nothing special – and you’re always aware of that – but it’s interesting and entertaining and full of good things.   Because Marilyn Monroe’s story is an unhappy one, the ending of the film has a sadness beyond the tone of regret in Colin’s voiceover (I liked it that he was remembering with the voice still of a young man – the real Colin Clark died in 2002).  There’s also a good joke in the film, which Simon Curtis doesn’t overplay.  In all the closeness between Marilyn and Colin, we never lose sight of the fact that it’s actually Roger Smith, the detective hired to look after Marilyn during her time in England, who’s the constant presence in her life there.  Humorously lugubrious Philip Jackson is just right for this all-seeing, never-smiling officer of the law, who, when he gets the assignment, hasn’t even heard of Marilyn Monroe (‘I’m not much of one for the pictures’).  The exchange between Colin and Olivier is uninspired when Olivier tells Colin that John Osborne’s written a role for him and Colin says, ‘But I thought you hated all that Royal Court stuff’.  However, when Kenneth Branagh looks at his face in the mirror as he’s applying his Ruritanian prince make-up and observes that ‘I’m dead behind these eyes’, the moment has a real charge – whether or not it’s actually true that Olivier gave Osborne one of Archie Rice’s most famous lines.

    3 December 2011

  • Hyena

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gerard Johnson (2014)

    Hyena opened this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) and the screening in the Festival Theatre was preceded by words from Chris Fujiwara, EIFF’s artistic director, as well as the film’s writer-director Gerard Johnson.  Both warned that Hyena was dark and shocking but they justified these characteristics in very different terms.  Fujiwara saw the piece as ‘emblematic’ of the essential quality which he said the Festival programme strove to represent, namely ‘intensity of aesthetic experience’.  He also stressed that Hyena was not a lowering experience but rather a reflection of the EIFF’s aim to show the wonder, richness and mysteriousness of the world.  Johnson, more Jack-the-Laddish, said he hoped the audience had had a few drinks beforehand and advised us to keep reminding ourselves, when the going got tough, that ‘it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie …’.  Perhaps that was ironic but it got a laugh and that’s all that counts, isn’t it?  I did think of walking out and afterwards felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t.  But, if I had, I would also have felt frustrated (and I’d have heard in my head Gerard Johnson chuckling that I couldn’t take it).  There were several walkouts – from what I could see, all women (of various ages), and I was glad they walked, given what’s done to the main female character in Hyena.  I had a seat near the back and I think I was first out of the Festival Theatre when the film ended – too soon to know whether silence in the auditorium, as the closing credits began, indicated shock and awe or disapproval or if it was the prelude to applause.

    Hyena is set in present day London.  (The production design by Marie Lanna is entirely convincing.)  Its main character – I assume the title character – is Michael Logan, who heads a police drugs squad team.  The other members of the team eventually desert him, leaving Michael the singular hyena (an animal which runs with the pack but is despised by other beasts).  Conceiving the London underworld as a ‘jungle’ isn’t strikingly original but the scheme of the film is at least coherent in following this conception through.  There are four species in the jungle.  The first, Michael and his colleagues, is corrupt and/or racist and/or criminal:  they’re prepared to cut a deal with international drug traffickers – benefitting financially, enjoying the traffickers’ product but also succeeding in making arrests.  The traffickers are the second species:  an ‘international’ dealer in this context means a foreigner, usually of swarthy, brutal aspect and, at least in the case of two Albanian brothers whose appearance on the scene triggers much of the plot, with sadistically misogynistic tendencies.  The third species comprises other cops who are plotting, either through career ambition fuelled by long-standing enmity towards Michael or pure malevolence, to destroy his team and its work.  The moral distinction between the second and third species is that the latter lacks the former’s propensity for expressing its nastiness through cutting people into pieces.  The fourth species are women – an endangered species on the evidence of their small number in Hyena and the way in which the few that appear are treated.  The only ones who are safe are the wives and children of species two and three – there’s an ethnic family get-together involving the Albanians and Michael’s nemesis Nick Taylor has a cigarette lighter inscribed ‘World’s Best Dad’.  (This struck me as an unlikely gift nowadays from kids to their father, even if he is a disreputable cop, but it echoes the irony-for-a-laugh attitude mentioned above.  There’s another pathetic example of this in the closing stages of Hyena when two women and the Albanians holding them captive sit in a room with the Norman Wisdom police comedy On the Beat playing on the television.[1])

    As Hannah McGill noted in her good piece in The List, Gerard Johnson’s film is ‘more nihilistic than polemical’.  It would be worrying if people enjoyed it – as Johnson said he hoped we would – but it’s hard to see that many people will.  It’s more likely they’ll take Hyena, in spite of the only-a-movie playing down, as a fearless exposé of how bad things are.  Johnson isn’t trying to change the minds of his audience, few of whom will naturally have any sympathy for the drug traffickers or be predisposed to think well of the police.  On the contrary:  the biggest laugh in the Festival Theatre was heard when one group of cops got arrested by another.  At the start of the film, Michael’s team carries out a raid on a night club.  Before doing so, they put on items of police uniform that suggest fancy dress – perhaps it’s only the violence of their attack on the lawbreakers in the club that’s meant to convince you they really are cops.  They and the other police are nearly all mindless:  Johnson’s script allows only Michael Logan any kind of conscience or divided feelings about what he’s doing.  Peter Ferdinando brings great commitment to the role – he’s especially strong in Michael’s reactions to the grisly deaths that he witnesses first hand – but the characterisation is monotonous since Ferdinando is given no opportunity to suggest that Michael or anything in his life could once have been better than they are now.  When Stephen Graham arrives on screen as Michael’s ex-colleague and old enemy David Knight, brought in to head the investigation into the Albanians, the film improves for a while.  This is due in part simply to the reverse of the fresh-face-on-screen syndrome:  it’s because Graham is familiar and has given good and varied performances in films and on television in recent years that he evokes a world outside that of Hyena – in the fetid atmosphere of the film, he’s a breath of fresh air.   But the effect is also due to his skill.  Graham shapes the character in a way that none of the other actors does:  he shows you David Knight’s resentment, his determination to be in control, his wariness in what Knight continues to see as competition with Michael.  Some of the acting in smaller parts – from MyAnna Buring as Michael’s girlfriend Lisa, Thomas Craig as his boss, and Richard Dormer as Taylor – is just bad.

    As well as the warnings from Chris Fujiwara and Gerard Johnson, there were notices in the theatre entrance about strobe effects and it was these, rather than most of the violent bits, which caused me to avert my eyes.  My ability to tolerate the violence wasn’t because it wasn’t revolting.  It’s rather that the pretentious lack of intelligence behind this ‘uncompromising’ film has a curiously diluting effect:  Gerard Johnson, as a purveyor of bloodshed and dismembering, is no Quentin Tarantino.  This isn’t just a matter of (questionable) flair:  the violent acts in Tarantino’s films are at least usually grounded in character.  The only strongly offensive sequences in Hyena – although these are more than enough – are those featuring Ariana (Elisa Lasowski), a young woman bought and sold into and out of sex slavery.  Although Hyena is all about physical and sexual abuse, it ends before what looks set to be the climactic scene of violence, when the Albanian brothers have been released from police custody, hold Ariana and Lisa captive and, in doing so, lay a trap for Michael to step into.  The brothers are released, as far as I could see, only in order to allow this to happen.  The script relies considerably on lazy plotting – such as the delay in the brothers’ finding out that Ariana has escaped from the house where she was previously being kept prisoner, and Michael’s getting hold of, in improbable circumstances, crucial and revealing conversations recorded by David Knight.  This abominable film’s most disturbing after-effect is the thought of Chris Fujiwara, who seems a pleasant man, relishing its aesthetic intensity (in fact the ‘intensity’ is almost entirely sonic, in the form of Matt Johnson’s bludgeoning score and whatever the sound people have done to emphasise its thunderous pulse).  When he watches Ariana having a razor drawn down her arm with something then sprayed onto the wound to make it more painful, or being drugged then raped by a hairy Turk to whom the Albanians have sold her (as Hannah McGill suggests, Hyena may appeal to UKIP supporters), does it really remind Fujiwara of the rich, wondrous mystery of the world?

    18 June 2014

    [1]  This may be even more brilliant than I realised because, according to Wikipedia: ‘Wisdom gained a celebrity status in … many Eastern Bloc countries, particularly in Albania, where his films were the only ones by Western actors [sic] permitted by dictator Enver Hoxha to be shown.’

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