Monthly Archives: February 2017

  • 20th Century Women

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Mills (2016)

    In his previous film, Beginners, the writer-director Mike Mills made a comedy-drama out of his own recent past.  Beginners was based on Mills’s late start in getting a love affair to last and the old age of his father, for whom gay life began at seventy (or thereabouts).  Five years on, Mills has drawn on earlier autobiography:  20th Century Women, set in 1979, is about a mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening), her fifteen-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) and his sentimental and cultural education.  The principal educator is Dorothea but there are contributions from two others:  twenty-something photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig), who rents a room in Dorothea’s big, dilapidated house in Santa Barbara; and seventeen-year-old Julie (Elle Fanning), a neighbour.  Mills has described the movie as a ‘love letter’ to the women who raised him – his mother and sisters.  20th Century Women is only his third feature:  you’re bound to wonder, given the sources for this and Beginners, how much ‘original’ material he has left in the locker.  (His debut feature, Thumbsucker (2005), was an adaptation of a novel by someone else – Walter Kirn, who also wrote Up in the Air.)   No matter:  20th Century Women’s benevolent wit and first-rate ensemble acting – everyone’s on the same, right wavelength – make it an entertaining and richly appealing film.

    The title is multiply misleading.  The picture’s tone is anything but portentous, its timeframe much narrower than centennial.  While there are three substantial female characters, Dorothea is by far the most important and there are two significant males too:  a second lodger, fortyish William (Billy Crudup), as well as Jamie.  The question of whether Dorothea, Julie and Abbie are representative of their gender and time is less of an issue.  Although Mills and the actresses make the characters so individual that you’re disinclined to see them as typical, an exchange between Dorothea and Jamie re-echoes in your head:  he says, ‘I’m not all men, OK?  I’m just me’ and his mother replies, ‘Well, yes and no …’  Dorothea likes William, a free-spirit car mechanic and a potter on the side, but thinks it might benefit her son to be mentored exclusively by women in the matter of growing up into a properly modern man.  (Jamie’s father departed the scene years ago.)  She enlists Julie’s and Abbie’s help.

    Mike Mills describes Dorothea’s scattershot unconventionality, in flashbacks to Jamie’s childhood and in the present.  In the opening scene, as she and Jamie are in a supermarket shopping for her fifty-fifth birthday party later in the day, they watch her motor burning in the car park outside:  Dorothea invites the firemen along to her party that evening as if it’s only polite to do so.  Checking share prices has been part of her morning routine for decades; it’s one that Jamie follows from an early age and we see Dorothea having cross words with a bank manager who won’t let the small boy open and manage his own account.   In another brush with authority, she suggests to Jamie’s teacher that, if her son doesn’t feel like attending school, he may have a good reason for doing so that the teacher should be prepared to accept.  The teacher drily replies that the least he expects is an absence note signed by Jamie’s mother and subsequently gets more than he bargained for.  Dorothea’s eccentricity acquires substance and escapes cuteness thanks to her sense of getting vulnerably older – and old-fashioned:  I was taken with the film’s suggestion that both are equally inevitable and that an unorthodox past is no protection against future superannuation.  Unbeknown to Dorothea, Jamie and Julie already regularly share the same bed (though Julie insists, in spite of Jamie’s increasing carnal curiosity, they keep to their respective sides of it).   It’s the hard-line feminist reading list and tutelage Jamie gets from Abbie which is a bigger problem and enlarges Dorothea’s anxiety about her son’s growing distance from her.

    Other than Meryl Streep and Judi Dench, there’s no living film actress I enjoy watching more than Annette Bening.  In a way, she’s more easily enjoyable than those other two:  I’m a dyed-in-the-wool admirer of Streep to the extent that I always feel a bonkers responsibility for what she does; seeing Dench brings with it a persistent sense of regret that she made so few films until she was in her fifties.  Bening has complete command of the screen without a trace of taking charge in a self-assertive way.  Her physical and vocal precision has an almost special effects quality:  it gives the viewer the impression of witnessing intelligence in high definition.  As Dorothea, she’s combative, funny and melancholy in beautiful combination.   As long ago as The Grifters (1990), Pauline Kael described Bening as a ‘superb wiggler’.  In 20th Century Women, she confirms she’s also an all-time-great smoker.  It’s an amusing irony that Dorothea’s movie idol is Humphrey Bogart, especially in Casablanca.  Bening outclasses Bogart in the way she holds a cigarette, in the range of moods she conveys in lighting up and stubbing out.  When William asks Dorothea what was good about the man she was married to, she explains that he was left-handed and she’s right-handed and so he could scratch her back when they were in bed looking at the financial pages together.  ‘Is that all?’ says William.  ‘I loved that!’ replies Dorothea.  Annette Bening’s delivery makes you laugh; because it’s passionately heartfelt, it’s thrilling too.

    Elle Fanning and Greta Gerwig are nicely complementary as Julie and Abbie:  Gerwig’s idiosyncratic, abandoned dancing gives the film a few welcome jolts of physical energy and her humour leavens the gloomier parts of Abbie’s story.  It’s good to see Billy Crudup acting freely and imaginatively so soon after undergoing his thankless role in Jackie.  Lucas Jade Zumann copes very well in this strong company – he’s gently witty and the fact that his voice seems more or less to break in the course of the film is touching.   One of my favourite moments is when a male work colleague asks Dorothea if she’d like to go out with him.  She accepts and he says, ‘That’s good because I wasn’t sure if you were a lesbian’.  Dorothea is briefly speechless at this.  ‘So you do want to go out?’ the man persists – almost impatiently and oblivious to the possibility that what he’s said since the first time he asked the same question might have made a difference.  You can see why Dorothea is so keen for Jamie to turn out a newer man.

    Although it has a clear storyline, 20th Century Women is essentially fragmentary.  Mike Mills has to step outside the narrative in order to inject surprise and urgency:  halfway through, Dorothea’s voiceover previews her own death twenty years in the future.  The editing is occasionally awkward and I can see that, if you find Mills’s pacific benignity exasperating, Roger Neill’s matching score will make matters worse.  I liked the film, though (more than I did Beginners).  It’s emotionally fluid and expressive of usually well-meant, often messed-up notions of how to live – hard at present not to be nostalgic about that kind of zeitgeist, even if it wasn’t the whole story of 1979.  (As Anthony Lane noted in the New Yorker, that year also saw the coming to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Margaret Thatcher.)  And 20th Century Women isn’t soft-hearted in a falsifying way.  Dorothea and Jamie have a climactic conversation that’s also a rapprochement.  Jamie’s concluding voiceover says that he thought at the time this marked a new beginning in their really talking to each other.  In the event, he admits, it marked an end.

    14 February 2017

  • Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ang Lee (2016)

    ‘I salute Ang Lee for making the best film of his career’ is how Armond White concludes his National Review piece on Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.  White is a contrarian first and a critic second so his ringing endorsement gives a good idea of the largely negative reception of Lee’s latest by reviewers in North America, where the film, which opened in November 2016, has also fared poorly at the box office.  It will be surprising if its release this side of the Atlantic marks a sea change in its fortunes.  Billy Lynn, although eagerly anticipated, has been conspicuous by its absence not just from awards nominations but, in the UK anyway, even from cinemas:  it opened on 10 February in only a handful of London picture houses.  (I saw it at the Odeon Studios in Leicester Square.)  It’s clear from watching the film that something went wrong.  It’s less easy, for a while anyway, to put your finger on what that something is.

    Ben Fountain’s debut novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, published in 2012, won several prizes, including a National Book Award.  The main action takes place over a twenty-four-hour period in November 2004.  A group of Iraq War veterans are hailed as heroes back in America, thanks to a firefight with insurgents being recorded on camera.  The courage of nineteen-year-old Specialist Billy Lynn, who dragged a wounded colleague to safety (although the man subsequently died), has received particular public attention.  On their return home, ‘Bravo Squad’, as the media have dubbed them, have been sent on a ‘victory’ tour which will culminate at the Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving halftime interval show.  Billy Lynn is increasingly dismayed by the commercialised exploitation of military heroism that he and his unit are caught up in – a travesty facilitated by the American public’s lack of interest in the realities of war.  At the end of the story and in spite of his sister’s desperate efforts to arrange for him to receive an honourable discharge, Billy is set to return to Iraq.  His strong sense of fraternity with his fellow soldiers offers him comfort in that prospect.

    I’ve not read the novel but the storyline suggests a withering attack on how George W Bush’s America used and abused its war heroes.  I increasingly got the impression from the film that Ang Lee’s sensibility was in conflict with the material or, at least, with Jean-Christophe Castelli’s script.  (This is Castelli’s first screenplay credit although he worked with Lee, in various capacities, on Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm and Life of Pi, as well as on other projects involving James Schamus, Lee’s longstanding collaborator.  Schamus wasn’t, by the way, on the Billy Lynn team.)  Lee’s versatility is well proven but he may be too benign a humanist to work with the grain of Ben Fountain’s ‘sharp satire’ (Wikipedia).  Some of the visual elements at the football stadium convey their sardonic message without needing much help from the director:  Bravo Squad as a quasi-chorus line behind the halftime show headliners, Destiny’s Child; the growing animosity towards the soldiers of the stadium security guards, who, at the end of the evening’s entertainment, set upon them.  The individual satirical targets are a different matter.  Characters such as the veterans’ craven, bullshitting agent Albert (Chris Tucker), making hopeless attempts to seal a movie deal based on the soldiers’ story, and the egregious ‘patriot’ Norm Oglesby (Steve Martin), who owns the Cowboys team, are one-dimensional in the way they’re written.  The (somewhat) more nuanced playing that Lee appears to have encouraged from the actors concerned makes for the worst of both worlds:  the caricatures remain inescapably caricatures but are less lively than they might be.  Crosscutting between fireworks in the football stadium and bombs going off in Iraq makes an unsurprising sarcastic point about Bravo Squad’s demeaning absorption into showbiz spectacle. It might still be an effective point if Billy Lynn had a sustained caustic energy.  Since it doesn’t the juxtaposed explosions are an obtrusive highlight – it’s as if they’re meant not to be obvious at all but a rather brilliant insight.

    The acting is patchy.  Joe Alwyn, a Londoner in his mid-twenties, was (according to Wikipedia) cast as Billy Lynn a matter of a few days after graduating from the Central School of Speech and Drama – an astonishing opportunity and responsibility for a complete newcomer to the screen.  Alwyn has a likeable open face and sensitivity but he isn’t a strong presence; he often seems to be acting up, rather than radiating, quietly thoughtful innocence.  As Sergeant David Dime, the dynamic and articulate leader of Bravo Squad, Garrett Hedlund again impresses with his vocal range and colour.  It’s not Hedlund’s fault that a press conference – at which Dime, in response to questions, first says what he’d like to say then what he’s expected to say – feels uneasy in the wrong way.  Here too, Lee’s naturalistic style doesn’t seem to make sense:  if Dime really did voice controversial statements to journalists, they would surely have found their way into press reports.  When Billy visits his family in small-town Texas en route to the Dallas Cowboys engagement, his mother has prepared an early Thanksgiving meal because he won’t be at home on the day itself.  Mrs Lynn is meant to be het up and too anxious to please but Deirdre Lovejoy, who plays her, overacts these qualities.  This often happens, of course, when an actor wants to make the most of a small part but you don’t think of it happening in Ang Lee films, and Deirdre Lovejoy isn’t the only offender here.  At the opposite extreme and more unfortunately, the other members of Bravo Squad barely register.

    The interesting performances, along with Garrett Hedlund’s, come from Kristen Stewart and Makenzie Leigh, even if the interest results largely from the polar opposition of the two girls they play.  Stewart is Billy’s much troubled sister, Kathryn; Leigh is Faison, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader with whom Billy falls in love virtually at first sight.  Kathryn is deeply disappointed that Billy will return to Iraq; Faison, when Billy says he wishes he could run away with her rather than resume active service, is momentarily alarmed by this implied dereliction of a hero’s duty.  Makenzie Leigh thoroughly embodies a stars-and-stripes stereotype, while giving the cheerleader a spark of individuality.   Faison moves at cartoon speed (and Leigh with ease) from eyeing up Billy, to telling him of her deep Christian faith, to having sex with him.  Kristen Stewart is reliably worth watching though she isn’t given enough to do as Kathryn, most of whose communications with Billy take the form of texts.  (He appears to be the only member of Bravo Squad with a mobile phone.)

    The sequences in Iraq centre on Billy and the sergeant Virgil ‘Shroom’ Breen (Vin Diesel), a convert to Hinduism, who imparts his beliefs to Billy, though not in a proselytising way.  The firefight and its aftermath, although they’re staged well enough, are uninvolving.  Ang Lee’s singular visualisation of Billy’s efforts to pull the mortally wounded Shroom out of further harm’s way overrides any emotional response to it.  Complaints have been voiced widely about the larger technical innovations of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which David Sims in The Atlantic explains as follows:

    ‘[Lee filmed] it in a super high-definition format (120 frames per second, five times the speed of a normal film), an odd approach for a film that largely takes place in a football stadium. There are some flashbacks to Iraq, and moments of far grander spectacle during the halftime show, but it’s still a curious choice given that high-definition filmmaking seems to suit CGI creations and fantasy battle sequences far better than ordinary moments of dialogue.’

    Ang Lee has been quoted as saying that he opted for the unusual format in order to make the picture a more ‘immersive’ and ‘realistic’ experience for viewers – but how many viewers?  The most puzzling thing about the technical approach here is that, as David Sims goes on to say, Lee’s ‘film mostly won’t be seen in its intended format, since few theaters are equipped with the proper projectors’.

    13 February 2017

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