Monthly Archives: March 2017

  • Get Out

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jordan Peele (2017)

    In the prologue to Get Out a young African-American man (LaKeith Stanfield[1]) is walking through a suburban neighbourhood after dark.   It looks to be an affluent area; it’s clear, from what the young man says into his phone, that it’s a predominantly white one.  When a car pulls up close behind him, he’s right to be apprehensive:  a few moments later, he’s been bopped on the head by a masked assailant and bundled into the vehicle.  The sequence is accompanied, oddly and rather intriguingly, by ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, sung by Flanagan and Allen.  By the time the opening credits are over, we’ve also heard ‘Redbone’ by Childish Gambino and a piece called ‘Sikiliza Kwa Wahenga’, the main theme of Michael Abels’s original music for Get Out.  The quickly eclectic soundtrack is a kind of foretaste of the unusual mixture of ingredients concocted by Jordan Peele in his debut feature – a racial social comedy that turns into a racial horror movie.

    Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) and her photographer boyfriend Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) go to spend the weekend with her parents, whom Chris hasn’t met before.  He’s concerned that Rose hasn’t told them he’s black but Rose insists their interracial partnership won’t be an issue.  In plot terms, Get Out is basically the story of how Chris comes to realise he should have been more concerned with what Rose hadn’t told him, about her and her family.  The Armitage parents – neurosurgeon Dean (Bradley Whitford) and psychiatrist Missy (Catherine Keener) – are impeccably liberal and alarmingly huggy.  Rose has assured Chris that her father, given the chance, would have voted for Obama a third time – a fact Dean is impatient to confirm during the tour that he insists on giving Chris of the large and impressive family home.  Pointing out his collection of ethnic objects, Dean remarks what a pleasure it is to be able to partake of different cultures.

    Chris’s introduction to the Armitages also includes some more disquieting elements.  On his and Rose’s drive over, their car (with her at the wheel) hits a deer; when they mention the incident, Dean inveighs against the intolerably increasing deer population – a view which makes the antlered head mounted on a wall in his house even creepier than such trophies usually are.  The sustained conscientious welcome Chris receives from Rose’s parents is qualified by the joshing, racially provocative contributions of her younger brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), a medical student, at the dinner table on the first evening of the visit.  And the Armitages have two black servants – the maid and cook Georgina (Betty Gabriel), the groundsman Walter (Marcus Henderson).  ‘I know how it looks’, Dean tells Chris, with a guilty sigh, before explaining that Georgina and Walter cared for his elderly  parents; when they died, he and Missy felt morally bound to retain these loyal retainers.

    Although the social comedy of Get Out isn’t especially surprising, it’s well observed and played, and consistently amusing.  It continues into the second day of the weekend, at a social get-together where the Armitages’ guests are mostly elderly.  But Jordan Peele sows enough early seeds of unease to make it clear he means to reap a sinister harvest (and Abels’s score largely underlines that intention).  When he says ‘I know how it looks’, Dean isn’t referring to the unnaturally smiling faces of Georgina and Walter or the servants’ zombified quality but these are as hard to miss as the colour of their skin.  Even if you don’t know beforehand that Get Out will use the tropes and traditions of horror films to attack the myth of ‘post-racial’ America – and the movie’s huge success (commercial and critical) has already made it hard not to know that beforehand – you soon start wondering how the story’s journey to the dark side will be accomplished.  Jordan Peele manages it in ways that keep his film entertaining throughout, even if the echoes of other movies and the generic familiarity of the eventual gore-fest risk obscuring the socio-political points Peele is making.   How successfully the white characters in Get Out can be said to transition from well-meaning figures of fun to evildoers is a trickier question.

    The Armitages have discovered the surgical secret of eternal life or, at least, pseudo-immortality.   The process starts with Missy hypnotising young African Americans and relegating their mentality to a ‘sunken place’.  Dean then performs ‘transmentation’ – brain surgery to transfer the consciousness of aging white people into the bodies of their physically healthier black hosts.  Dean’s parents aren’t dead but sort-of alive inside the heads of Walter and Georgina.  That young man at the start of the film turns out be one Andre Heyworth, whom Chris knew through his best friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery).  Andre’s disappearance from his home in Brooklyn several months ago has been unexplained until Chris meets him, as the companion of a much older white woman, at the Armitages’ gathering.  Andre now has a new name, Logan King, as well as a senior citizen’s dress sense.

    There’s a twist to the transmentation process:  a sliver of the black host’s consciousness persists in the brain alongside the dominant white parasite mind.  This explains two striking moments in the film.  As Chris and Georgina lock eyes, hers fill with tears that contradict the glazed contentment of her expression.  When Chris takes a photograph of Andre-Logan, the flash on his phone causes Andre to freeze, suffer a nosebleed and urgently instruct Chris to ‘Get out!’  That turns out to be easier said than done.  Chris is, of course, the next intended transmentee.  While he and Rose take a break from the increasing stresses of the gathering, Dean holds an auction for Chris and Jim Hudson (Stephen Root), a blind art dealer, makes the winning bid.  The transmentation project is a family business, as Chris discovers in video footage of Dean’s supposedly late father Roman (Richard Herd) extolling the merits of staying alive forever.  Jeremy’s medical studies allow him to assist Dean in their home operating theatre.  Rose’s role is to bring black boyfriends home to meet the parents:  a cache of photographs Chris comes upon makes clear that, contrary to what she’s previously told him, he’s far from the first African American that Rose has dated.  I didn’t understand why Andre had to be physically abducted (or who abducted him) rather than lured by Rose.

    Jim Hudson, when he explains to Chris what he has bid for, suggests the Armitages are using African-American subjects just because blackness is currently fashionable.  Chris doesn’t buy this and nor would anyone watching the film:  Get Out is saying that, in terms of racial exploitation in America, black is always the new black.  Jordan Peele strongly and shockingly implies – first through the remarks of one of the Armitages’ guests (as she feels Chris’s muscles and her gaze drifts down to his crotch), in due course through the larger storyline – that whites may admire and even covet, black bodies but regard black mentality as inferior and disposable (though Jim’s longing for Chris’s eyes, hardly race-based, rather confuses the issue).  The immortal longings of the Armitages and their like reflect white America’s determination to rule the roost forever.

    Peele presents these urges as the shadow side to liberal white feelings about race but there’s a difficulty in translating that into the film’s narrative.  According to Lanre Bakare in the Guardian, ‘The thing Get Out does so well – and the thing that will rankle with some viewers – is to show how, however unintentionally, [white middle-class liberals] can make life so hard and uncomfortable for black people’.  The film certainly does show this in its comedy opening but not in its horror story aspect: since the Armitages are entirely conscious of what they’re doing, they are – as Bakare also labels them earlier in the same paragraph of his review – the ‘villains of the piece’.  While Jordan Peele is understandably slippery about the inherent conflict between the Armitages before and after they’re unmasked, the actors playing them can’t avoid the issue so easily.  The layers of personality that she brings to a role enable the brilliant Catherine Keener to solve the problem:  you know there’s more to Missy than meets the eye.  In comparison, Allison Williams and Bradley Whitford are less suggestive, switch more abruptly and expose the fault line in Peele’s screenplay.  Jeremy Armitage is more evidently dodgy from the start and Caleb Landry Jones, an attention-seeking actor, gives a performance to match.

    The black performances are more satisfying.  Samuel L Jackson’s complaint that a non-American is playing Chris suggests that nativism of more than one kind is at work in the US in 2017; I can hardly overstate the pleasure I get from seeing Daniel Kaluuya in this starring role – it makes me feel vindicated as a talent-spotter.  It was obvious from Harry & Paul back in 2010 that Kaluuya was something out of the ordinary:  his Parking Pataweyo – sly, smilingly sadistic, charismatic – showed a depth of characterisation remarkable for a bit player in a comedy sketch show.   Here he shows a brilliant repertoire of reactions, as Chris moves from a social unease that others don’t feel, to disorientation under Missy’s hypnosis, to all-out terror.  Armond White, whose notice has supplied the only green splodge among the two hundred plus critic reviews of Get Out posted on Rotten Tomatoes to date, complains that Kaluuya’s ‘dark-skin/bright-teeth image inadvertently recalls the old Sambo archetype’ .   I’m not sure that is inadvertent on Jordan Peele’s part:  it’s this association, in counterpoint to the evident intelligence that Daniel Kaluuya gives Chris, which helps make the character so successfully discomfiting.  Kaluuya’s natural warmth ensures that Chris is intensely likeable too.   (The same warmth made Parking Pataweyo confoundingly engaging.)  Although Andre-Logan doesn’t make complete sense, LaKeith Stanfield’s acting is, as usual, excellent.   Lil Rel Howery delivers a robustly funny, crowd-pleasing turn as Rod, the pal who looks after Chris’s dog during the meet-the-parents weekend away and who, thanks to his day job in transportation security admin, turns out to be his friend’s eventual saviour.

    His script and characters may not be entirely convincing but Jordan Peele, best known until now for his work in US television sketch comedy (MADtv, Key & Peele), shows great assurance for a first-time director, and justified confidence in the basic idea he’s come up with – one that’s all the more effective because it’s so versatile.  Nick Pinkerton in his Reverse Shot review accurately describes the premise of Get Out as ‘a malleable metaphor for just about any racial anxiety you please: the white coopting of black cool … ; the ongoing use of unwilling black bodies to perform white labor from plantation to penitentiary; and the pressures of conformity borne by the blacks living among white affluence’.   Peele works out more specific motifs ingeniously too.  The deer that collides with the young lovers’ car on the way to the Armitage home anticipates the hypnotised Chris’s description of his mother’s death in a hit and run accident.  (In a flashback to this source of enduring trauma and guilt for Chris, his eleven-year-old self is played by Zailand Adams.)   We’re on the verge of seeing Chris himself as a wounded animal until, through his quick thinking, he uses the antlers of the stuffed head on the wall to take lethal revenge on the Cervidaephobic Dean Armitage.  Calling Dean’s father Roman sounds like a nod both to the name of the coven leader in Rosemary’s Baby and to the director of that famous film.  References of this kind – simply because they situate Get Out so explicitly in a movie tradition – have the effect of giving viewers who understand them a bit of distance from the startling implications of Jordan Peele’s material.  Even so, the film is potent because of the force of the political cynicism you feel coming from behind the camera.  This picture has arrived at a time when America is exceptionally ill at ease with itself and its traditional allies are sharing that unease.  It’s no wonder Get Out is a hit.

    21 March 2017

    [1]  He was credited as Keith Stanfield in Short Term 12, Straight Outta Compton and Miles Ahead.

  • Against the Law (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Fergus O’Brien (2017)

    In 2007, Channel 4 ran a series of programmes to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act.  These included A Very British Sex Scandal, an eighty-five-minute documentary drama ‘which chronicles the experiences and actions of Peter Wildeblood which eventually led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Great Britain’ (IMDB).   In July this year, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Act, the BBC will screen Against the Law, an eighty-four-minute documentary drama about ‘Peter Wildeblood’s affair with a handsome serviceman he met in Piccadilly during the time homosexuality was a crime and the devastating consequences of their relationship’ (IMDB).

    So what else is new?  I can’t answer that comprehensively:  I know I saw A Very British Sex Scandal but recall little more than the protagonist’s memorable surname.  The rather short, nearly identical running times of the two films and their inclusion of a documentary component might suggest the Wildeblood story is dramatically thin – Against the Law, which opened this year’s ‘Flare’ (LGBT) Festival at BFI, is certainly that.  But there may be another explanation for the docu-drama structure – of Fergus O’Brien’s version, at least.  Although Peter Wildeblood is reasonably commemorated as a gay rights pioneer, his personal views about homosexuality now seem old-fashioned, not to say benighted.  As Matthew Parris wrote, when Wildeblood died in 1999, in a Times piece included in the BFI programme note for the opening gala screening of Against the Law:

    ‘The modern gay establishment has been no kinder to him than the 1950s, regarding his plea for tolerance for ‘good’ homosexuals as Uncle Tomism.  Like so many human bridges between eras, he is charged with insurrection by the old, dismissed as a compromiser by the new.’

    In the early 1950s, Peter Wildeblood (born in 1923) was a Fleet Street journalist, writing for the Daily Mail.  His circle of friends included his near-contemporary Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.  In 1953, the latter was accused of having underage sex with a fourteen-year-old boy scout.  Montagu stood trial, denied the charges and was acquitted.  The verdict did nothing to stop the momentum of what Montagu called a ‘witch hunt’ to convict him for homosexual activities.   He returned to Winchester Assizes the following year, charged with performing ‘gross offences’ at a weekend party on his Beaulieu estate.   Two young RAF men – one of them Eddie McNally, with whom Peter Wildeblood had been having an affair – turned Queen’s evidence to testify against the host, Wildeblood and another party guest, Michael Pitt-Rivers.  The evidence included, as well as oral testimony, a cache of love letters between Wildeblood and McNally.  Each of the three defendants was found guilty and received a twelve-month jail sentence.  The high-profile trial, which caused a backlash among some church leaders and politicians, was widely seen as instrumental in the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee, which convened in late 1954 and reported in 1957.   Whereas Montagu continued to protest his innocence, Wildeblood, following his release from prison, published a memoir, Against the Law, in which he wrote candidly about his sexual orientation and the grim conditions he had experienced in Wormwood Scrubs.  He was the sole openly gay person to give evidence to the Wolfenden Committee.

    Scripted by Brian Fillis (The Curse of Steptoe, An Englishman in New York), Fergus O’Brien’s Against the Law moves to and fro between 1952, when Wildeblood (Daniel Mays) first meets ‘handsome serviceman’ McNally (Richard Gadd); the trial with Montagu (Mark Edel-Hunt) and Pitt-Rivers[1] in January 1954; Wildeblood’s subsequent time in prison, release and appearance before Wolfenden in 1955.  The documentary element of the film is interspersed throughout.  This comprises interviews with several gay men:  the youngest is in his mid-sixties; the oldest is ninety-odd; all can well remember life pre-1967.  As well as these gay testimonies, there are contributions from a retired police officer who recalls enforcing the laws of the time and a former psychiatric nurse, himself gay, who administered supposed ‘cures’ to homosexuals.  The emotional variety of these recollections – humour, pain, anger, relief that it’s history now – is hardly unexpected but quite eclipses the meagre drama of Against the Law.

    Fergus O’Brien stages the seduction and sex scenes between Wildeblood and McNally in standard love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name fashion:  Johann Perry’s lighting and Roger Goula’s music supply an atmosphere of crepuscular foreboding.  But while the clichéd style of the piece is merely weak, the presentation of its main character is bizarre.  In the trial part, Wildeblood displays a naivete that’s startling for a man who, after wartime service, resumed studies at Oxford and ‘gravitated towards a homosexual circle in the theatre and arts’ (according to his obituary in the Independent), before a career in journalism that took him to Fleet Street while he was still in his twenties.  He says he can’t understand why Eddie McNally is telling lies in court.  (Montagu sharply explains that McNally and the other serviceman are acting to save their own skins.)  Wildeblood tells his co-defendants ‘I didn’t believe this could happen in England’ and you wonder why.  A few screen minutes previously, he was taking an understandable interest in Montagu’s earlier trial.  At the start of the film, Wildeblood is brimful of apprehension in a pub as he asks another man if he can buy him a drink; and obviously anxious when he bumps into McNally for the first time in the street.  Matthew Parris quotes Peter Wildeblood  as writing in Against the Law ‘I did not believe such things could happen in England, until they happened to me’.  By that stage, however, he was obviously reflecting on his recent experiences more largely, including his treatment in prison.

    In that opening pub sequence, the protagonist is buttonholed by an effeminate gay, Fanny (Paul Keating), who asks if he’s a ‘queen’; Wildeblood replies, by way of correction, that he’s a ‘homosexual’.  Fanny is baffled by his use of the term – ‘I thought only doctors called us that’ – and, though it’s one used consistently by Wildeblood, this viewer too was sometimes puzzled as to quite what he meant by it, at least until his eventual appearance before the Wolfenden Committee.  While it’s possible that Wildeblood was in the process of clarifying things in his own mind during the period covered in Against the Law, I got the sense rather that the film-makers were cagey about giving too much prominence to the more problematic aspects of  his views and, as a result, confused things.  During his trial, Wildeblood tells the prosecuting counsel (Richard Dillane) that he’s attracted to men and that he was in love with McNally but denies there was anything physical between them.  We know he’s lying about the latter – he’s pleading not guilty, after all – but why then take the risk of a witness-box apologia for platonic love between males?   Is this another instance, like ‘I didn’t believe this could happen’, of taking words from Wildeblood’s memoir and putting them in his mouth, to improbable effect?

    It’s clear at least that Wildeblood sees his ‘inversion’ as a disability and is willing to be medically treated for it, until a prison interview with a doctor (Mark Gatiss) whose creepy nastiness is enough to deter him from further exploring this option.  When he finally appears before Lord Wolfenden (David Robb) and his colleagues, Wildeblood distinguishes three types of homosexual:  ‘men who want to be women’, ‘pederasts’ and men like himself, who seek lasting, loving relationships with their own sex.   As in court, Wildeblood makes a plea for understanding and acceptance of the last group without evincing great sympathy for the other two groups, or saying much about the physical component of love.  To underline how unenlightened  the hero’s attitude is, Fergus O’Brien cross-cuts between the committee room and Fanny – the exemplar of a ‘man who wants to be a woman’, in Wildeblood’s terms – getting beaten up by a queer-basher.

    Presumably it’s Wildeblood’s narrow-mindedness – as it seems sixty years later! – that causes Daniel Mays to describe the character he’s playing (in a piece about Against the Law on the BBC website) as ‘flawed’, as well as ‘fascinating, complex’.  Mays is a good actor but his Peter Wildeblood isn’t, unfortunately, either fascinating or complex:  awkward, unsophisticated and transparently vulnerable, he seems more a pen-pusher than the diplomatic correspondent for a national daily.  It’s believable that, as interpreted here, he really was unaware of the kind of ‘parties’ taking place in Chelsea and Kensington that the sinister doctor asks him about:  this Wildeblood is not a party animal.  The disappointing performance serves a purpose, though.  Mays makes Wildeblood such a sad sack that he keeps his victimhood in the foreground and – in combination with the power of the real-life memories of contemporary gay experience – his ‘flawed’ views relatively in the background.  The prison scenes are designed to illustrate, very obviously, Wildeblood’s feelings of humiliation and isolation.  When he first arrives at Wormwood Scrubs, we see him, under the scornful gaze of a prison officer, strip naked (as all new prisoners in British prisons are still required to do?)  Fanny is also doing time in the Scrubs while Wildeblood’s there; another of his fellow inmates tells him it’s not too bad being inside because there’s plenty of sex (‘mostly the receiving end’).  There’s a repeated shot of the prisoners at exercise with Wildeblood always standing apart and alone.

    Richard Dillane deserves credit for his intelligent, measured playing of the prosecuting counsel at the trial.  The supporting actors are otherwise unsurprisingly unsurprising (especially Charlie Creed-Miles as a police superintendent).  As already indicated, the cast are largely upstaged by the elderly testifiers.  One of them delivers a good punchline with the believe-it-or-not revelation that, at the time the Wolfenden Committee was sitting, he was having an affair with the chair’s son, Jeremy.  Another makes the worthwhile point that the Sexual Offences Act, for all its importance as a legal milestone, wasn’t a big deal for men who felt unable to come out.  It has to be said that Against the Law‘s subject matter is poor excuse for the lack of female roles in the film.  There are a few shots of a woman sitting beside Wildeblood in a car but she doesn’t get to deliver a line.  (Is she ‘Iris’, whom a disparaging prison officer assumes to be a man, and picking Wildeblood up from Wormwood Scrubs when he’s released?)   If Fergus O’Brien wanted a silent woman on the screen, he might have done better to recreate the following, described by Peter Wildeblood in his memoir:

    ‘She was a respectable looking, middle-aged, tweedy person wearing a sensible felt hat.  She was standing on the pavement as the car went by.  I saw her suck in her cheeks, and the next moment a big blob of spit was running down the windscreen. … She looked thoroughly ordinary to me.  But what I did look like to her?  Evidently, I was a monster.’

    16 March 2017

    [1] I don’t know the name of the actor playing Michael Pitt-Rivers.  At the time of writing, the credits on IMDB list only six members of the cast of Against the Law.  The BFI programme note lists only seven.

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