Halfway through 1917, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay) comes to, after a blow to his head, only to discover that the whole world around him is on fire. Thomas Newman’s grand, ambiguous score corkscrews upward; it seems almost to fan the flames this village is writhing in—the medieval edifices humbled by German shells. I can describe no emotion to attach to the grandeur. The lonely foreigner has reason to believe he’s died and gone to hell, or that he’s been there all along; what can this inferno possibly tell him when this is what he was sent to the Western Front to protect? I can’t name the emotion, and yet it is there, surging against interpretation.
1917 wobbles in the no man’s land between humanism and mechanism. It was shot, by Roger Deakins, to simulate a single take, and tells the story in real time. Though Sam Mendes, the director, based it on stories told to him by his grandfather, a First World War veteran, the movie is less a personal journey than it is a guided tour. The Germans are luring the British into an ambush—and the only way to notify the vulnerable battalions is to deliver the news to them by hand. Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) was not picked for this mission out of the blue: his brother will be among the victims, if it fails. That leaves Schofield alone with the bitter clarity that those troops are more faceless numbers for a war that digs uncountable graves.
But it isn’t Schofield’s lot to learn the patriotism that was made stirring in Dunkirk—prelude to the “good” war. 1917 is like Dunkirk deconstructed and straightened out. But it is also a crash course in sensory impressions, with details that flow past like foam down a river: registered but rarely lingered on. The momentum is breathless but its effects are supple—a hand dipped into a cadaver’s wound plays as black comedy; a drunk soldier’s lurches as horror; a hymn rising in a glade as fantasy. When Mark Strong cautions against “men [who] just want the fight,” it isn’t dialogue, it’s texture.
Toward the end of Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an elusive double-agent, who’s betrayed British state secrets to the Soviet Union for over 20 years, defends his decision to have done so on aesthetic grounds. And you can hardly blame the bloke, considering the portrait of early-’70s London that the director paints from the start. Let the Right One In, his Swedish sleeper hit, covered some of the same well-trod Transylvanian ground as Twilight, but was enveloped in the ghost-story fog of an adolescent daydream rather than the pulpy throes of paperback romance. Atmospherically, T2S2 doesn’t disappoint. It’s almost lusciously wretched: Sartorially, the establishment seems to have given in to the dressed-down 1960s rather than embraced it. Hair is longer and skirts are shorter, but the Swinging London façade of the Beatles and Blow-Up has all but corroded; it’s been reabsorbed into An Education-era tattiness like a mouse in Mountain Dew. Nowhere is the closing gap between generations more visually odious than among agents of the Mi6—referred to here as “the Circus”—who felt their oats fighting the Nazis, but have since lost their grain, and purpose, to their burlier American counterparts. The wall of their cramped conference room is brazed with burnt-orange acoustic tiles; at their Christmas party, they’re regaled with a chintzy disco cover of “La Mer.” Victoria’s Empire has gone to seed. And as fascinating—visually—as that is to behold, it undercuts one’s interest in the plot—as if the production designers were double-agents, too. Alfredson cites The Conformist as an influence; but Bertolucci rhapsodized Mussolini’s Italy, even its moral ugliness, whereas this look at pre-Thatcher England is drenched with boredom.
Le Carré’s hero is a veteran spy named George Smiley. The character is often described as anti-Bond; a paunchy, patient, middle-aged martinet, he’s more-than-anti-Lisbeth Slander. As embodied here by Gary Oldman, he’s been plucked from forced retirement to finish an internal-affairs investigation initiated by his now-deceased boss called Control (played, in flashbacks, by John Hurt—who looks ready to pull a coronary from his pocket at a moment’s notice). To say that the story is about Smiley unearthing the above-mentioned style-conscious mole is to untangle a corn maze and torture it into a straight line; but, at each twist and turn, this labyrinth is chocked full of mannered British gents pecking away at Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s dialogue as if it were their elevenses. The main problem confronting the filmmakers—more than paucity of action and density of plot—is the fact that most of the relationships between the characters are sketchy; by design, these Circus performers are less like acrobatic secret agents and more like lions brought in from the wild, their urge to escape all but tamed. (The irony here is wicked, but it isn’t necessarily involving.) What may be meant as reserve comes across more as resignation—as if, with the depreciation in value of British national security, everything else has gone belly-up.
That includes the patchy narrative. If you’ll permit me a SPOILER ALERT, the issue of the double-agent’s identity is dramatically null: If more attention were directed at that character, it would be too obvious; but since there’s so little attention given to him (other than the big red flag that he’s played by Colin Firth), or our hero’s feelings of betrayal—since this mole has also burrowed into Smiley’s wife—the revelation comes at the cost of anything like suspense or emotional attachment. (The celebrated 1979 BBC-TV version, starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, wasn’t immune to this, either; though, strangely enough, it made a richer sound when striking its psychosexual chords.) But even if, in terms of intrigue, Alfredson can’t beat, say, the first few episodes of Homeland, he can impart a sense of imperial longing that American audiences can connect with right now—in the way I think they connected with An Education. The irony, of course, is that members of the Homeland Security department—and those that have benefited financially from its de facto privatization—are among those least likely to feel the pinch. But anyone else who was ever once assured of our national top-dog status, and now has his doubts, might be advised to watch how Smiley, after a brandy or two, recounts meeting his Soviet adversary Karla at a time when the latter’s position was politically vulnerable. Oldman—whose bullfroggy jowls make him live up to his surname—pantomimes this interaction for a junior officer, going through a tired West-is-best spiel that sticks to the Red idealist like grease on a Teflon pan. (This is much more effectively handled than it was in the miniseries, which flashed back to Guinness interrogating Karla. But since Guinness played Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Patrick Stewart (the future Captain Picard) played Karla, and, on top of that, Oldman is telling this story to an agent played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was just cast as the villain in the next Star Trek prequel—it’s enough to coldcock the space-time continuum.) Oldman says that he saw Smiley as someone coming from a position of “moral certainty,” which may explain why his impassive stare looks vaguely pompous whereas Guinness’s seemed slightly abashed. In short, Oldman’s frowny Smiley is the kind of Brit that Sid and Nancy fought to break free from. He’s a fine mascot for the film’s mood: There are so many secrets lurking behind these spies’ wrinkled poker faces; but all that their dedicated stoicism has amounted to is their birthrights being washed away. Call it a royal flush.
What is The King’s Speech saying? Is it about the importance of symbols, like the British royal family? Or is it about the importance of another kind of symbol: the little golden statuette that the whole movie seems to be gesturing “call me” to? I hope it picks up for Colin Firth. He’s tremendously eloquent as the stuttering King George VI; one can sense his every repressed thought, even the ones that good taste, psychosomatic trauma, and crippling propriety impede him from enunciating. It’s a more sustained performance, I think, than the often-brilliant one he gave, as another person suffering from multi-vectorial repression, in A Single Man; and it’s better-humored than much of the regal portraiture we get: He’s even a bit of a goofus. In a smaller role, as the Queen Mum-to-be, Helena Bonham Carter also shimmers like a royal jewel; one can see how the human resources that she devoted to her husband informed the public figure who was revered until her death, in 2002. (At the very least, she was more popular with her people than Carter’s screeching monarch in her real-life lovey’s Alice in Wonderland.) As a hammy, hardscrabble Shakespearean actor, Geoffrey Rush is also quite good, though he puts in the “gravitas” that Firth was so kind to take out; at times, he could be mistaken for an eroded statue.
Rush plays the catalyst: Lionel Logue is not only the king’s speech therapist, but also his psychologist and cheerleader; ergo, The King’s Speech is basically Ordinary People—but with extraordinary people! As a subject, the film is beautifully conceived; it has a great real-life basis; an excellent angle for viewing history; and the kind of transatlantic cunning that lets audiences identify proudly with the low-born Logue’s democratic know-how while still adulating the royals—in a somewhat classier way than the tabs that psych us up for the forthcoming nuptials of Edward’s great-grandson, Prince William. (It also avoids perturbing the present sitters-on-the-throne by only skimming the surface when it comes to the scummy abdicator George VIII—played by a multivalent Guy Pearce—and his alleged Nazi sympathies. For Edward, his brother was a royal pain in the ass; but, these days, the scandal that sooted George’s marriage to the divorcée Wallis Simpson can be made to seem very archaic.)
The movie is also careful to dodge any theme that history lobs at it, except for such commonplaces as patriotism and overcoming adversity—and all that crap. Though there’s something to be said for the doctor-patient rapport; and the film is genuinely affecting when it deals with a rather ambiguous virtue: a people’s need for a strong leader (albeit a figurehead) to unite them in troubled times. Its wit, narrative charge, and performances make The King’s Speech engrossing for the ears, if not for the eyes. With a rich, bold, and modulated color palette, Danny Cohen’s cinematography is quite lovely; but, the director, Tom Hooper—or whoever it is who can be blamed for the blocking—stages the shots ludicrously. Beethoven helps him out during the rousing climax, but Carter should sue the director and editor for mishandling her introduction to Mrs. Logue (Jennifer Ehle). Even Westminster Abbey seems like a set (or worse, a computer simulation); maybe it is. The visuals make inexplicably extensive use of wide-angle lenses in a way that’s suggestive of the weirdo work by the expat photographer William Klein and the thick-skinned formalism of Stanley Kubrick. Everything is either dead-center or so imbalanced that I waited for some little wanker to fill the negative space and make lewd faces in the foreground. God save the King.
Howl is a hardcover CliffsNotes of Allen Ginsberg’s poem. It may not have its own legs to stand on, but it has a handsome body, albeit one assembled in an unusual way. A mishmash of styles, it’s Frankenstein’s monster as a svelte if suave hunk, and though it can’t seem to find its own voice, it speaks thoughtfully and intelligently, in affable, dulcet tones. The only time it ever howls is when the poet, played by James Franco, débuts his work at the historic Six Gallery Reading, in front of a finger-snapping Beat klatch in San Francisco, on October 7, 1955. He has an amateur’s bout with nervousness, but—as he builds—a jazzman’s staccato, and, eventually, a standup comic’s exasperation. While it may look like an experimental film, Howl is, at heart, a message movie—even if it is a very scrupulous appeal to one’s high-mindedness. Its defense of freedom of expression may seem, these days, quaint—almost square; but if you take into account that the script is taken, verbatim, from interviews with Ginsberg and the transcript of the obscenity trial that the poem’s publication sparked, you begin to appreciate how mid-century society might have beaten the Beatnik, and how his howl has reverberated through the years.
The film is a series of small victories. Considering that the figures in the legal imbroglio seem to have even less of a personal life than the attorneys on Law & Order, the reenactors give the impression that these people existed beyond this courtroom—one that suggests the unity of place in classical theater. David Strathairn, who plays the prosecutor—and always exudes a dogged rectitude—gives a studied elegance to the cadences of a modest philistine; Bob Balaban, as the judge, is cinematic Quaalude (in a good way); Mary-Louise Parker, who provides the only glimmer of femininity that isn’t twinkled by Ginsberg, suggests someone who’s jittered half her life away, locked in an ivory tower; and Jeff Daniels (who might be the twin of Colin Firth’s English professor in A Single Man) suggests the person who wielded the keys. Jon Hamm projects his full-bodied charm, though his defense attorney isn’t substantially any different from his East Coast contemporary, Don Draper. Since the animation (by Ginsberg collaborator Eric Drooker) that the filmmakers have set the poem to is already much maligned, I’ll only say that it seems at odds with the testimony of an expert witness who snaps that poetry cannot be translated into prose—that is, be taken “literally.” (Though Drooker does retain some of the poet’s bawdy sense of humor, as well as some pleasantly Hammy jokes—like a billboard for Lucky Strike, proclaiming that “It’s Toasted.”)
Between Howl and 127 Hours, I feel I’m becoming—mais non!—a Francophile. (There’s a spiritual kinship that urbane Ginsberg—with his antsy sensitivity, awkward physical presence, and terribly twee attempts to flirt with Kerouac—shares with rustic Aron Ralston.) Franco’s emotionality used to be so gelatinous that he might as well have been harboring unrequited love for Spider-Man; it seemed only right for him to play gay in Milk (where he twerped too much like Tweety Bird), and gay-ish in Pineapple Express (in which his birdsong was loonier—and more convincing). Now he’s really earned his wings. When Ginsberg is being recorded by an unseen interviewer in his dingy Village apartment, supposedly during the trial—though this dialogue comes from a later period—he still flirts a bit with the camera; but by now he’s found lasting love (with Peter Orlovsky), and fame, and freedom from institutions (mental and otherwise). It’s the come-on of a lusty poet, no longer ashamed of being lusty. That’s really what Howl—and “Howl”!—is about. That may also be what makes the filmmakers—documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman—a little too lusty in their approach: lovesick, perhaps, with their subject. They exult in sharing their heartfelt message, but haven’t quite thought out their thesis. Ironically, they’re at their weakest in the black-and-white “documentary” flashbacks—Franco’s camera presence and Edward Lachman’s color imagery might have overwhelmed them. The yummy golden glow of the courthouse seems to douse the litigants in honey; their outlines smudged into haloes, they’re all of a piece with Drooker’s doodling. Scenes set in Ginsberg’s flat are even more timelessly beautiful, with the blue-green wallpaper glowing in late-afternoon light like a lazy cat sunning its belly. These images have the stress-free, student-film look I love—they’re aqueous.
I disagree somewhat with Fred Kaplan’s suggestion, in his otherwise informative refresher course in Slate, that Howl doesn’t adequately “capture [its] entire milieu”; personally, I think I can better comprehend, after seeing the movie, the period that left Godard so Breathless. Yet the film’s relationship to the present day is somewhat more suggestive. There’s a continuity between its scene and the one examined in “What Was the Hipster?”—an insightful, if alarmist, exhortation by the aptly named Mark Greif that ran in New York magazine this fall. He sees, somewhat optimistically, the decline and fall of the modern-day “fauxhemian”: one who “aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.” This is distinguished from the “White Negro” of Ginsberg’s generation—“defined by the desire of a white avant-garde to disaffiliate itself from whiteness, with its stain of Eisenhower, the bomb, and the corporation,” which Lester Bangs identified with as late as the 1980s—and the “alternative” culture that rejected consumerism in the ’90s.
In A Single Man, fantasy and reality blend—with more concord than the filmmakers perhaps intended. We’re once again in the An Education period—1962—though, this time, the British protagonist has swum across the pond, and then some, to Santa Monica. George (Colin Firth), a middle-age professor of English, has only recently become single; his partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode—the fruity übermensch from Watchmen), has died in a car crash. The bulk of the film is set a few months later—on the day that George has designated as his last.
Until 40ish minutes had crawled by, I wondered if I was being engorged by a glossy fashion magazine; pages’ worth of glittering eyeballs and dishy male forms—slowed down so that the movement of each tendon was perceptible—lapped at me like an unwelcome tongue. Lest one prematurely exclaims “homophobe!,” allow me to qualify: What palled on me was not the movie’s blatant homoeroticism, but its sexualization of everything. If everything’s sexy, then nothing is. When the pigtailed girl next door and a hound that resembles a pet that the couple once owned are given the same erotic charge that the shirtless members of a college tennis team get, the professor’s devotion to true-love-forever seems reduced to a hard-on for anything that crosses his path.
One might assume that the first-time director, Tom Ford—the quondam couturier—is interested less in capturing George’s emotions than he is accolades for artiness. But the direction of A Single Man isn’t flashy—or trashy—the way that it was for, say, Inglourious Basterds. When George makes his suicidal intentions apparent to the audience by cleaning both his pistol and safe-deposit box, the purple haze begins to clear. And when he decides to spend his last night drinking gin and tonics, puffing pink cigarettes, and grooving to Bossa nova with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), the movie hits its stride. She’s been waiting—to no avail—for her “poof” to switch teams; they fooled around when he was a free agent. Moore gives a wonderful slinky quality to this “available woman” who drinks too much alcohol and gets drunk on regret—another noxious solution. She brings out something in Firth that nobody else in the cast does: a spiky, peakish irony that usually lies dormant beneath his rigid, academic mask. She asks what his plans are for the weekend; he says it’s going to be quiet.
Firth gives a good, restrained performance; but, sometimes, the Moore, the merrier. In several of his scenes without her, such as those of him on campus, he too easily embodies that ennobling cliché of the rock-hard prig with a soft and gooey core. If it doesn’t belittle his pain, a sense of proportion can be appropriate. So, when straight-faced George labors to pinpoint the most Feng Shui way to blow his brains out, and gets anal about which way his corpse should be discovered, one can relax—things really aren’t as bathetic as George thinks.
Movie Monster 