The Mother

We watched a BBC film the other night called simply, The Mother.  Two things occurred to me after watching it.  Firstly, I was yet again struck by the fact that many actors are cast for the kind of face they have.  They can be the best actors in the world, and given the chance they'd be great in a wide variety of roles, but at the end of the day, if you work for TV or the movies, you are likely to be cast in a role that fits your face.

There were two particular examples here.  Anne Reid (known from a long way back as Ken Barlow's first wife in Coronation St) played the downtrodden mother of the title.  Downtrodden was written all over her face, and all Anne had to do, in a sense, was play to that look on her face, and she'd express everything the director and scriptwriter wanted.  (She does do a lot more, but that doesn't negate my point.)

Steven Mackintosh also appeared.  Mackintosh is unlikely to play a trustworthy character; there's something about the shape of his face and the ways his eyes look at you that tells the audience: if you're suspicious of this bloke, you have every reason to be.  In his role as the Mother's son, he was playing an ordinary ambitious family man - but you could see there was something sneaky going on.  Mackintosh didn't need to do anything in particular to convey this; it's written in his face.  (I don't know what Mackintosh is like in real life - he's probably a delightful person - but his face, on screen, says something different.)   I couldn't remember where I'd seen this actor before, and of course IMDB was its usual helpful self and reminded me that Mackintosh had been the villain in one of the Prime Suspect episodes.  He'd played a man who had cut himself off from emotions, who had no qualms about his villainy or his control of weaker people, and who seemed able to bring even the imperious Helen Mirren to her knees.  Mackintosh played this role brilliantly...his face helping not a little.

The second thing was that it was hard to gauge what the author of the screenplay was trying to say: was it that everyone, underneath, is basically selfish, and as a result will bring out the selfishness in others? That certainly happened: even the seemingly gentle Mother turned out to be selfish in her own way, though you might have credited her with some good reason for being so, given what her life had been like up until the time her husband suddenly died (early in the story).  There wasn't a character in the film who wound up eliciting our sympathies completely.  The Mother's daughter vacillated between blaming her mother for all her problems - and causing them herself (I'm not sure that the script helped the actress here: the part didn't seem quite to know who it was).  The son gave a pretence of being concerned about his mother's sudden widowhood - until the pressures of business called him away.  His wife didn't give her mother-in-law the time of day, and, without concern that her mother-in-law was listening, said that she hated her in-laws being in the house.  The man who was putting a new conservatory on the son and daughter-in-law's house was happy to have sex with both the daughter and the mother - for his own ends.  When he discovered that the Mother wasn't going to give him the money she'd offered in the way he'd expected, he flew into a fearful, foul-mouthed self-centred rage.  This character was played by Daniel Craig, in the days before he became the most uptight and edgy James Bond we've seen.  He's brilliant in the role, but after feeling sympathy towards him early in the piece (he and the mother do get on well as people) you hate him at the end.

So what was the point of this unpleasant exercise?  Does seeing it encourage us to want to be kinder to our ageing parents?  Perhaps, except that the parent in this piece finishes up not worrying about whether her children care about her any more.  It certainly shows that selfish children are a menace to older people (especially when their own children are just as selfish), but the writer of the script hints more than once that the Mother was selfish herself from way back.  We never quite know whether this was because she was controlled by her husband, who cut her off from friends and other relationships (and that would seem to be the obvious reason) or whether she was just naturally not cut out to be a mother.  Her behaviour towards her own daughter's lover can be seen on one hand as a natural need to be loved by someone - anyone; or it can be seen as a bizarre kind of continuation of hurting her daughter.  That's assuming that what the daughter says about her mother is true, and this aspect of their relationship never quite makes sense.

An open-ended piece and thought-provoking.  You would probably not want to know any of these people (you'd be likely to come out of it worse off), but perhaps they teach us something, if we're willing to stop and think about it.

The Debt

Note: some spoilers here...

Some while back I walked in on a movie that was showing on TV late one night.  Helen Mirren was fighting for her life with some elderly man who managed to stab her a couple of times.  Last night I watched the rest of the movie, which is a taut thriller based around three Israelis kidnapping a German doctor. They believe he was a Nazi who committed various 'research' atrocities on Jews in one of the concentration camps.  These three also appear, played by different actors, in sequences that occur thirty years later: this is where Helen Mirren is involved.

The film, The Debt, is primarily concerned with the decision the three younger people have to make when their prisoner escapes, and how they live with that decision for the next thirty years - until the doctor is apparently found again.  Jessica Chastain and Helen Mirren play the main female character in the story, with Sam Worthington and Ciarán Hinds pairing off as the Israeli whose conscience plagues him, and New Zealander Marton Csokas and Tom Wilkinson sharing the role of the other man who is able to put the past behind him very easily, even when things go wrong. 

So while it's a thriller, in that there are some excellent suspense sequences, it's also a story about relationships, people caught up in close quarters and struggling with the consequences of a botched kidnap.  The doctor is played by Jesper Christensen; he's brilliant in his role of a man still capable of winding up the Jewish psyche and coming out on top.  

The end of the film, which in some ways undercuts the values of the rest of the movie, is a bit of a female Jason Bourne sequence: not quite believable and all relying on split second timing.  Helen Mirren is, as always, superb in her role, but she's asked to make credible the stealing of documents from a newspaper office, the tracking down of the evil doctor, and a subsequent fight to the death with him.  This is Hollywood stuff that's not quite comfortable with what's gone before.  

Nevertheless, as a thriller this is well done.  Hinds doesn't get enough screen time - his character is killed off in the first few minutes, seen again quite a bit later on and then lost again.  Sam Worthington is the quieter of the two young men, a man with a mission who struggles to see beyond the borders of his intents.  Czokas is the wild man and fills the part easily, and strongly.  Chastain, with her tight angular features, has the major role, and does very well. 

Treasure and Emma

Just watched National Treasure: Book of Secrets - in other words, the sequel. Worst thing about is Nicholas Cage's dreadful hair style. I presume it's some form of wig or toupee to make him look younger; whatever it is, it's so unsightly, it's a wonder Cage himself didn't have it banned. It has a definite front line, unlike normal hair, and he's lacking even a hint of sideburns, which makes it look as though a cap's been stuck on his head. Unbelievable.
Apart from that the story is so thoroughly far-fetched that you just have to take it as it comes - and with Cage, Helen Mirren, Jon Voight and Ed Harris in the cast, not to mention Diane Kruger and even Harvey Keitel, it's certainly not going to fail on the acting side of things. It sends itself up gently on a number of occasions, and is mostly as good as the first movie.
On a different line altogether, I went and saw Emma last night at the Fortune Theatre. It had had rave reviews, and a number of people had said they were going to it or had been. I can't explain why I was disappointed, because the actors did their utmost, particularly Mel Dodge, who played a shy and awkward Harriet Smith, a tottering and verbose Miss Bates, and a dragon-like Mrs Elton, each with such delineation of detail that she captured the show.
And the direction was energetic and busy, laughed at itself and threw in some marvellous non sequiters. Perhaps it was too busy - and yet the subtle moments came off beautifully.
I think I was just very tired, and the seats were uncomfortable (no arm rests between people, which means you have to sit up straight), and I came away feeling somewhat grumpy that I hadn't enjoyed it.
It had the same approach as Jane Eyre, which I saw at the Fortune last year (but don't appear to have mentioned in this blog): a small cast playing a wide variety of characters, one basic set that was manhandled by the cast, various props picked up and used for different reasons, a sense of reinventing the original while still telling the story. Only here the actors played with the audience as well, giving them knowing looks at certain points, or being very aware of something silly happening to them, and so on. Which can work, but can also be rather twee. It was also a play within a play - five young people perform Emma for themselves, in an attic amongst all the family's no-longer-needed clutter - and at time revert to their non-Jane-Austin roles.
These reinventions are all very well, but the curious thing is that they still work best when the straightforward dramatic elements are allowed to run without any authorial or directorial interference - as in the last scene, where Emma finally realises her foolishness (it's a wonderful scene in the book too - and in the movie), or where Emma insults the nattering Miss Bates and has to be told off by Mr Knightly.

The Clearing

Just watched The Clearing, with Robert Redford, Helen Mirren and Willem Dafoe. Superb cast; not so superb a movie. It's a bit slow for its own good, and even though a lot of it is character-based, the writing isn't sharp enough to make the characters interesting. All three do excellent and subtle work with what they have, but it's not quite enough. Only Mirren makes the thing work; without her it would be altogether a dud. The lack of depth in the characters is most evident in the two adult children who appear: Alessandro Nivola and Melissa Sagemiller struggle to find anything to work with, and none of their scenes actually give them any reason to be in the movie at all.
The time-shifting is clever, and works. The photography is excellent - even allowing us to see every chink and crevice in Redford's aging face. He was 68 when the movie came out, and he looks it. It's almost as if the moviemakers decided for once not to pretend that he was anything but the age he is, which makes it a bit odd that he's still going off to work each day. (For the record, Mirren was 59 at the time, and Dafoe, the baby, was only 49.)
In the end the thing is disappointing. You're hoping for some denouement. It never quite comes, and it's almost as if the movie hasn't made up its mind whether it's a clever psychological thriller or a love story. It seems to opt for the latter in the end, leaving the thriller out in the cold.

Thus Saith The Queen

We went to see The Queen tonight – not herself in person, quite, but a remarkably good imitation of her by Helen Mirren. In fact, without Mirren, the film would have stood little chance of success, I suspect. The script is moderately good, the camerawork okay, but the colour is rather washed out at times and there is little depth to the focus. The other actors, for the most part, look only a little like their counterparts. Sylvia Sims as the Queen Mother has none of the warmth that woman exuded in public, and James Cromwell brings all the nastiness he usually commands in villainous roles to that of the Duke of Edinburgh, turning that mildly unpleasant man into an impatient, single-minded character who has no warmth at all. That may be the some people see him, but it seems a little one-sided.
Michael Sheen makes a good fist of Tony Blair, producing a warm smile with frequency (a smile not often responded to by The Queen, or responded to with frostiness), but seems a little thin for the part or lacking in physical stature. I don’t know how big Blair is, but he comes across as seeming to have more presence and weight than Sheen can give him.
Diana, of course, plays herself, as only she could, through a barrage of news clips and still shots, and dozens of other clips and shots are integrated seamlessly into the movie. Only at the end, when the Royal Family attend the funeral at the Abbey, does there seem a curious distance between the real life arrivals of celebrities, and the actors posed in chairs with seemingly very few extras in the background.
That wonderful actress, Helen McCrory, who brings both a kind of seediness and some underlying grittiness to her roles (she always seems to play people who are rather too selfish for words), here plays Cherie Blair as a warm character, but one with quite a deal of bitchiness about her – especially in regard to the Monarchy. She’s been woefully underused in movies – it always seems as if the editors cut her parts down in preference to others – but she was unforgettable in a tv mini series called, The Fragile Heart, in which she played the daughter of a doctor who was himself all selfishness, and had to unlearn a lifetime of thinking of himself first. She followed in her father’s footsteps, in contrast to her brother, who, also a doctor, had gone along a more generous line. Nigel Hawthorne was the father, in one of his many great roles.
Overall The Queen is entertaining, moving, cringe-making in its presentation of the Royal Family, and a star vehicle for Mirren, who can pretty well never put a foot wrong in whatever she does. She has the Queen down pat, her speech inflections, her tone, her body language…you name it. The film is undeniably worth seeing for this performance alone.
At the same screening the theatre presented a trailer of Judi Dench’s latest movie, Notes on a Scandal. It looks like a marvellous film – anything Dench is in will have at least one great performance in it – but the trailer virtually showed the entire story, leaving out only the ending. You’d go to it now knowing almost everything that was going to happen. Why do they do that?