Bernard Rose (2012)
Since he made Anna Karenina in 1997, most of Bernard Rose’s films have been adaptations of Tolstoy. Whereas the Anna retained the original period setting, the subsequent pieces have been relocated to present-day America – Ivansxtc (based on The Death of Ivan Ilyich), The Kreutzer Sonata, Two Jacks (from The Two Hussars), and now Boxing Day. This latest is adapted from Master and Man for which the Wikipedia plot synopsis reads as follows:
‘In this short story, a land owner named Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to the house of the owner of a forest. He is impatient and wishes to get to the town more quickly ‘for business’ (purchasing the forest before other contenders can get there). They find themselves in the middle of a blizzard, but the master in his avarice wishes to press on. They eventually get lost off the road and they try to camp. The master’s peasant soon finds himself about to die from hypothermia. After leaving his peasant to die, and returning to the same place he had fled from, the master attains a spiritual/moral revelation, and Tolstoy once again repeats one of his famous themes: that the only true happiness in life is found by living for others. The master then lies on top of the peasant to keep him warm through the cold night. Vasili is too exposed to the cold though and dies. Nikita’s life is saved, but he loses some of his toes to frostbite.’
In Rose’s adaptation, Basil Fenton-Smith (Danny Huston), an American in spite of his English-sounding name, leaves his wife and two kids during the Christmas holiday to make a killing buying and selling foreclosed properties in Colorado. He reckons no one else will be working at the time. He travels from the warmth of Los Angeles to snowy Denver and hires a driver – Nick (Matthew Jacobs), a middle-aged man whose marriage has recently ended and whose day begins with his pleading unsuccessfully with his ex-wife to let him see their children. Nick is English. Rose is essentially faithful to the Tolstoy plot but he turns the short story into a film which feels much longer than its 94 minutes. It’s almost amusing that a movie like this should be released just in time for Christmas (and it’s to be hoped that no one goes thinking it’s the next in the Garry Marshall series after Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve). The Colorado landscape is made beautifully bleak as the car travels further into the countryside outside Denver. Rose’s visuals are powerfully expressive of both the soullessness and the increasing futility of Basil’s mercenary quest. As daylight fades, the film’s dialogue thins out too (Huston and Jacobs have obviously been improvising a lot of their lines but they do it well). There’s a brief interlude in a roadside bar – the lights and the noise and the people there become a distant memory once Basil and Nick and the car are stranded after nightfall, in the middle of a snowbound nowhere where a Satnav can’t help them. Their attempts to get the car moving and to snatch a few minutes’ sleep before trying again are presented by Rose in something close to real time. The movie becomes punitive: the bright sun of the next morning (I was never clear whether the story began or ended on Boxing Day) and the appearance of an ambulance-helicopter offer salvation for the audience as well as the characters.
As in the original, the greedy man dies and the subservient man survives. Unfortunately, I’d grown so anxious for the film to end that I missed Basil’s moral transformation, assuming that he has one. Once he’s returned to the car (after going round in a circle), Basil lies on top of Nick but I didn’t realise he was doing this to protect him – I thought they were just huddling together to keep each other warm. And, by this stage, the men are so numbed by cold that it’s hard to make out the words in their desperate mumbles. Even though I’m to blame for losing concentration, I think two other things were blinding me to the possibility of redemption for Basil – Danny Huston and Tolstoy’s Christianity. Huston is a constant in Rose’s Tolstoy films and the effect of watching him here might well have been different if I’d seen any of the other adaptations but his Basil seems too crude a predatory capitalist type. Matthew Jacobs, by contrast, makes Nick individual and more interesting than Basil: you wonder just how this unprepossessing, overweight Englishman has come to be working as a less than competent chauffeur in Colorado. While Tolstoy’s Christianity, with its emphasis on living for others instead of yourself, may seem still relatively accessible a century on, I’m not sure that Bernard Rose is capable of realising the ‘spiritual’ element of the ‘spiritual/moral’ revelation to which Wikipedia refers. Tolstoyan religion, although highly socially oriented, was based on a belief in a God which it’s increasingly difficult for a modern filmmaker to express cogently.
The dawning of the new day at the end of the film may provide a visual analogy for supernatural agency but it’s hard, without any other kind of evidence that the director believes in such agency, to see this as much different from dazzlingly made commercials which can make applying a deodorant a quasi-religious experience. If Basil Fenton-Smith has a Damascus moment on the outskirts of Denver, what does that mean to Rose? (And if Basil doesn’t have such an experience, why make the movie? Telling audiences that American moneymen are beyond redemption is preaching to the converted.) There’s no doubt, however, that Bernard Rose is a pretty miraculous character. As well as directing and writing the screenplay, he’s also credited as cinematographer and editor for Boxing Day, and he co-wrote the score with Nigel Holland. The soundtrack includes a variety of other music, including a compelling bit of Schubert and the ballad ‘Michael Finnegan’ (in an arrangement by Holland, who also did the sound design and editing). In the smaller roles, Jo Farkas is the standout as an elderly woman trying to raise funds for a church, whom Basil swindles. The voice of Julie Marcus makes an increasingly strong impression as ‘Cynthia’, Nick’s name for his Satnav.
27 December 2012
