James Toback (2013)
Although it claims at one point to be sui generis, Seduced and Abandoned is a documentary – one that includes a large element of larky put-on but still a documentary. It begins with quotes from Orson Welles and Woody Allen and ends with one from Norman Mailer, whose eldest son Michael produced the film. The Welles quote is: ‘95% of the time I was looking for financing for my movies and 5% of my time I was actually making movies – that’s no way to live!’ The Woody Allen one-liner, familiar but cherishable, is, ‘I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens’. Mailer opines that ‘film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long’. The main narrative of Seduced and Abandoned describes the attempts made by James Toback and Alec Baldwin to raise $25m for a movie they want to make together: they visit numerous prospects at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival but none will stump up more than $5m for a political/erotic thriller set in Iraq, with Baldwin in the lead and Neve Campbell his co-star. Welles’s words are obviously pertinent and Toback repeats them more than once – or, at least, puts up more than once on the screen the relevant percentages. The mortal aspect, beyond the Allen quote, isn’t, for the most part, so salient in Seduced and Abandoned: the Mailer insight comes in handy, however, because it links the two opening quotes and announces the nearly final section of the film, in which Toback asks many of the people he and Baldwin have interviewed – famous actors and directors, as well as potential backers of ‘Last Tango in Tikrit’ (the working title for their project) – whether they fear death.
One of the interviewees is Ryan Gosling. The conversation with him is one of the best for several reasons, including the fact that Gosling, at the outset, affably clarifies what he thinks Toback and Baldwin are up to. This is welcome because Seduced and Abandoned is an odd concoction. It explores the perennial tension in film-making between artistic ambition and commercial imperative. It’s a potted biography of the Cannes Festival (Toback’s film is evidently named for Sedotta e abbandonata, a Pietro Germi movie that was shown at Cannes in 1964). It’s also a celebration of cinema – so Toback tells Gosling, while Alec Baldwin compares repeatedly returning to work in movies (not that he’s really been away) with going back to a former mistress, always in the hope of rekindling the old magic. Split-screen images – often combining one of the talking heads with illustrative clips from famous movies or photographs of famous film people, and legends identifying both – come thick and fast and are hard to keep up with. They may be meant to convey the richness of James Toback’s moviegoing frame of reference and the discursive style of Seduced and Abandoned may be what he was after creating but the film is variously and increasingly irritating. The history and character of Cannes are dealt with perfunctorily – the lfe story of the festival is nothing more than a set-up and the place becomes merely a glamorous backdrop to the conversations between Toback and Baldwin and their big-name or deep-pockets interlocutors. ‘Last Tango in Tikrit’ is supposedly ‘inspired’ by Last Tango in Paris: Toback uses clips from the film and interviews Bertolucci, who’s now in a wheelchair. But surely, in the world of film financing, no one could pitch a movie with the title Toback gives his without the prospects, be they ever so crass, assuming that it’s a spoof. This makes you wonder if the contributors to Seduced and Abandoned are in on the artifice.
The money men’s responses to Toback and Baldwin aren’t, for the most part, enraging or ridiculous enough to keep you entertained. It’s one of the few women prospects who comes up with the funniest way of saying no: ‘I don’t usually get involved in [pause] … things that I’m not involved in’. In contrast, Toback’s interviews with Bertolucci, Coppola, Scorsese and (to a lesser extent) Polanksi about their film-making are frustrating because you want to hear more. Coppola’s financial struggles are notorious: he needs only to appear to remind you of them and watching and listening to him is affecting – especially when the man who made several of the greatest films of the greatest decade of American cinema says that, while he’s proud of some of his work, he feels he’s never succeeded in expressing on screen the things he most wanted to express. (I didn’t understand the references to his recent movie Twixt and what I took to be self-recrimination over the death of his son, some twenty-five years earlier.) What the other major directors have to say about getting money to make films, although Scorsese is interesting enough, is less involving: you get the sense that Toback, reasonably enough, wanted to hear more about their art but then remembered why they were meant to be having a conversation.
Among the actors, Bérénice Bejo, Jessica Chastain and Diane Kruger are all charming but their interviews are unremarkable. James Caan seems to be in mourning for a career that didn’t last as long beyond The Godfather as might have been expected. He’s so automatically nostalgic that he laments the lack of financial success of Johnny Depp movies unsupported by the commercial heft of the Pirates of the Caribbean series – and compares this with the days when, Caan suggests, there was a guaranteed audience for any film starring Marlon Brando. The comparison is bizarre: Brando had one of the longest (and best-known) box-office slumps of any major star in Hollywood history. Ryan Gosling is enjoyable – funny and incisive – from start to finish: on multiple takes and the loss of freshness that results from using close-ups that always get shot last; on auditions as a young hopeful, aware that believing he had a career in movies was ‘either a premonition or a delusion’; on preparing for death – which Gosling thought he was doing when a plane he was on briefly seemed bound to crash. Rather than trying to bond with the person in the next seat, Gosling says he concentrated on trying to finish his steak in the few minutes of life he had left. (It’s a well-told story whether it’s true or not; and it fits with the line Gosling has been taking throughout the interview: that the business of making movies is doomed to failure but worth keeping on with because it has satisfactions too.)
Along with Ryan Gosling, Alec Baldwin himself is the most interesting actor in evidence in Seduced and Abandoned – not least when a menacing glint in his eyes, familiar from some of his dramatic performances, appears as he listens enviously to what Gosling has to say. Baldwin seems to be sometimes part of the hoax element of the film and to be lampooning the pretentious things that movie stars can say, sometimes genuinely rancorous about the budgetary limits of what he can command as part of a film package. The Shostakovich music that accompanies Seduced and Abandoned, although it gives proceedings an amusing flavour of self-importance, is a bit overused but, in the closing mortality sequence, Baldwin is right to compliment Toback for his superb reading of one of John Updike’s last poems, in which Updike anticipates his own death.
14 November 2013
