Squinting with your eyes open

Obviously, everything's going to be completely all right.

I don't have many observations to record about the chilly, dark spy picture Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011).  It seems to be less of a film, and more of a simulation of the experience of being a spy.  Nothing is stated outright, nothing is explained, no one is identified, no one reveals their thinking.  If anyone has feelings, you won't hear about it.

Even better, screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have dispensed with those two popular crutches of the modern spy film.  First, the voice-over of the protagonist, explaining the arcane non-verbal transactions going on.  You know the thing, "Sturgess gave me a glance that could only mean one thing" blah, blah, blah.  Second, the big explanation at the end, "You see, Collins, I knew as soon as I saw Verdoux wearing the ring, that Operation Fuzzball was going to be scrubbed, because..."  Clearly, the writers and director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In) decided to have respect for the audience and challenge them to lean forward and come to the film, instead of being overwhelmed by it, as in a Bond or Bourne film.

The story is often referred to as "complex", but it's not so much complex as it is sub-contextual. Here is a very visual film -- the soundtrack by itself would tell you almost nothing-- the very opposite of a standard spy film, which is all explaining and a couple of gunshots at the end.  But the story is relatively straightforward if you understand two things.  In LeCarre spy stories, there is no there there.  It's never about a secret that has to be stolen or protected.  It's about the process of security -- who works for whom, who is who really who they say, who can be trusted and who will betray.  What they are protecting is immaterial and never discussed.  Questions of loyalty are about the security force that claims your allegiance -- MI6, CIA, KGB, not the countries who have created and harbor these forces. And loyalty to the very idea of security and the discipline security requires.  And the time sequence shifts, but that is clearly laid out in the form of Smiley dictating a memorandum, so confusion as to time only lasts seconds at most--if you are paying attention.

The characters communicate in literal and dramatic code.  Information is conveyed by a look, a shrug, a cock of the head, or of the eyebrow.  But the film is not slow.  Information arrives rapidly and in profusion, once you understand how to interpret it.  It is quiet, but densely packed.

My favorite shot--a recurring sequence of a packet of papers rising, by itself, in a sort of document-dumbwaiter, acknowledging that information is the real protagonist, that data is more important than people in this universe, deserving of its very own private elevator.

The film has a wonderful visual uniformity, oddly reminiscent of Welles's The Trial.  It was interesting to learn that that uniformity was achieved in a similar way as it was in Welles's film.  Nearly all of The Trial was shot in a single abandoned railway station in Paris.  Nearly all of Tinker Tailor was shot in an abandoned military base in England.  This provided a number of structures with a wide variety of purposes and spaces, but a single gloomy aesthetic that supports the tone of the film perfectly.

That's really all I can say.  The film has been too brilliantly dissected and explicated by David Bordwell, and if you are a serious student of film, you have to read "Tinker Tailor:  A Guide for the Perplexed."

My own parting advice-- don't watch this for relaxation, but for stimulation.  Put away the wine and brew some coffee.  The film is worth a little lost sleep.

Stiff upper lip

The Internet hardly needs any more comment about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011), so I will try to keep this short.

The first word that comes to mind to describe this final film episode is discipline. The film is disciplined in length, in the use of effects, in the portrayal of sentiment and in its reinforcement of the importance of duty and self-sacrifice. Perhaps only the English could make such a restrained epic, for despite all the American money, the Potter films have remained fairly resolutely English (Chris Columbus and John Williams notwithstanding).

Compared to Return of the King's 257 endless endings, the Potter series ends on a quiet, austere note, a mere reassurance that life continues -- no guarantees, just continuation. The grand battles last as long as they need to make the essential points clear, resisting the Michael Bay-induced tendency for these sequences to go clunking on and on, with more and more bright flashes and loud noises from the soundtrack. Which reminds me -- Alexandre Desplat is emerging as one of the most thoughtful, character-sensitive, story-savvy composers working today. A look at his filmography will clarify what I mean. ("Emerging" after a mere 25 years!)

Everyone has remarked at how many distinguished British actors have appeared in the series. How do the excluded ones feel? Is Ian McKellen moping around with Daniel Day-Lewis, Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren because they never got a shot on the Hogwarts faculty? Is it hard not to be one of the Cool Kids? (Or is it cooler NOT to have been in the series?) Interestingly, the filmmakers deflected an opportunity for stunt star casting in the role of Dumbledore's brother Abeforth. Ciaran Hinds is a fine actor, downright brilliant in The Eclipse, but hardly a publicity or ticket-sales magnet.

Is Daniel Radcliffe's improved performance in this installment attributable to greater maturity, the accumulation of skills or his well-publicized abstention from alcohol? Or some combination thereof?

Finally, I'm a schoolteacher, so I can't leave the subject without summarizing the educational impact of the Harry Potter series, books and films. To me, the stories are built on a wonderful metaphor of the process of maturing, of leaving family and familiar places, developing one's powers and venturing into the world. Harry is almost a perfect Joseph Campbell hero, which could make him a valuable gateway to meeting Odysseus and our other long-established heroes. But it was all summed up in a lovely open letter to J.K. Rowling which can be read in its entirety here. Here is the passage that I found most striking:

You are...responsible for turning a whole generation of kids into avid readers, and you used your books to teach important lessons. Your readers learned about things like how much harder it can be to stand up to your friends than standing up to an enemy. There were civics lessons about the important role free press plays in a society, particularly how it lets the public know about the actions of their government. You have showed us that it's important to fight for the disenfranchised, even if no one understands why you're fighting. You showed us what can happen when nearly absolute power is put into the wrong hands. Most importantly, you've taught us that it's up to each of us individually to make the choice between doing what is right and doing what is easy — and it is that choice that really determines who we are.

Bye Harry and company. Maybe I'll meet you again in the company of my grandchildren. Rob, Sam -- no pressure!

Madame Tussaud School of Film

A film like Nowhere Boy (2010), the John Lennon portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man film requires the viewer to bring a picture of the artist to the film with them: the filmmakers haven't time for that. But the question is never resolved, and barely even raised as to what the crisis depicted in the film means to the artist and his body of work, which in turn raises the question of the purpose of the film.

In essence, Nowhere Boy is a lower-middle-class kitchen sink family drama of the type Britain started producing in the era of Lennon's young adulthood, the late 50s and early 60s. It is the battle between two sisters about how to live one's life, how to raise a child and how to show love. John's mother Julia is what might euphemistically be called a "free spirit" who was not committed to parenting when he was born. It has fallen to her older, conventional, "responsible" older sister Mimi to raise the boy. Then, in a scene reminiscent of the opening of Kazan's East of Eden, John is invited to walk a few blocks to meet his mother.

The rest of the film settles into a sort-of triangle with John's devotion to rock and roll pushed into the spiritual background. And that is the tug-of-war that pulls this film apart, both from itself and from the audience. Because we want the Beatles. To want to see a film about John Lennon is to want to spend a little more time with the Beatles. But neither the screenwriters have figured how to integrate the development of the Quarrymen with John's choices between freedom and safety as represented by his mother and his aunt, even though such a conflict would seem to be easily extended. In time Paul and George would become as formidable rivals to Mimi as Julia had been, but Nowhere Boy never goes down that road, and the Beatles remain a sideshow in a story which should have pointed to them inevitably.

Curiously, the film does not even attempt to limn the spirit-crushing grey dullness of the rations-and-rubble world of post-war England, as contrasted with, say An Education, in which the heroine's bad choices are driven as much by the constrictions of the greater world of England as by her own family's misplaced priorities. Thus, we miss what a big thing it is for John to attend a private school, to receive a guitar, and then a better one, given the general tightness of money and resources. (His fellow Beatles always scoffed at John's pretensions to working class status, albeit this film demonstrates that the middle class is just as proficient at forging broken families.)

Given that he never has to portray the well-known public John Lennon, Aaron Johnson is free to just be a conflicted and troubled teenager. Anna Mouglalis and Mads Mikkelsen have no such flexibility as the respective title characters of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2010), a film no more imaginative than its generic title. Despite a promising opening depicting the famous riot at the premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," Stravinsky and Chanel are quickly covered in wax by the filmmakers, and we not only don't get a sense of their personalities, it becomes dubious that they even have personalities. Chanel seems to be "about" being cool and unflappable. Stravinsky seems to have acquired a wife and many many children without his knowledge and participation, and has no relationship with them whatsoever. Chanel and Stravinsky are naked at the same time and appear to be having sex although they do not seem to have a relationship other than hostess and houseguest. It is as if the film was made by off-world aliens who observed that humans enjoy proximity but had not bothered to observe why. It is true that Chanel and Stravinsky are known to history as fairly cold characters, but this entire film is an iceberg itself, concealing whatever potential drama there might have been under a ton of costumes, locations and production design. I can't imagine who the intended audience is for Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky; perhaps robots taking an art appreciation course.

I suppose I should offer some observations or analysis of the technique of the film, or perhaps some interesting moment in it, but at this moment, a few days after seeing the film I can remember literally nothing about it to observe. So let's move on, shall we?

Persistence of vision (and families)

For regular filmgoers, award season is like the best film festival in the world. This time of year it's possible to move from one excellent film to another over the course of a week or so, and yet I suspect you will not read another piece this month that compares The King's Speech (2010) with The Fighter (2010).

The superficial resemblances are easy - both are Little Movies That Could, extremely low-budget projects that attracted top-level talent due to the excellence of their respective scripts and the dedication and integrity of the producers. Both are based on actual events. Both deal with overcoming of physical challenges - stammering and getting beaten in the hand, respectively. Both confront problems with communication - in one case literal, and the other interfamilial communication breaking down.

But at a deeper level, both are films about overcoming the limited expectations and horizons that families can place upon an individual, especially the second son. Bertie was never expected to be king, and was specifically trained for the task, though it turns out his sense of duty and honor -- the most important attributes of a modern constitutional monarch, were more developed that his older brother David's. And Dickie Eklund was supposed to be the Pride of Lowell, not his younger half-brother Mickey Ward. Both succeed through hard work and persistence that their seniors are incapable of.

Not all second sons are literally second. Although chronologically younger, Jeb Bush was spiritually the first son of his family, the promising one, marked for success; George was the disappointment, the screw-up, the one for whom the bar was lowered. The second President Bush's story was about overcoming those family expectations, which may be one reason he is such a sympathetic person for so many Americans. Clearly, it's a story with a lot of power, as the reception for each of these films demonstrates admirably.

Both films are also about teachers who break through with their students not just by dint of skill and tenacity, but through transformative love. Many times -- too many times -- it is a teacher rather than a parent who can see through the shell a child builds around himself to see the real person inside and the real potential locked in that shell. There is no great teaching without love, and that may be the greatest lesson we take from these films.

A couple of specific observations about each. Much has been made of the fact that at one time the screenplay of The King's Speech took the form of a play. It is not clear how serious the writer was about having the story produced in that form (there was one public reading), but the real aim seems to have been to focus the storytelling on the two principal characters and the confined setting in which much of Bertie's transformation takes place. Conventional thinking suggests that this is uncinematic storytelling -- two people locked in a room. Hitchcock of all people proved that a limited group of people in a confined setting is exactly the sort of pressure cooker situation that makes for great film. He boasted to Truffaut that he could make a film in a phone booth (which, I suspect the reason the film Phone Booth was written and produced, despite its then-anachronistic situation -- just to answer Hitchcock's dare).

But in order to pull this off, director Tom Hooper takes a page from Sidney Lumet's book (specifically with regard to Twelve Angry Men) and rarely uses the same set-up or the same lens in any two scenes set in Logue's office. In addition, Eve Stewart and Netty Chapman have made the space, supposedly barren and dilapidated, fascinating and complex to look at, especially the wall which displays multiple layers of paint and wallpaper, with the result being a rich mosaic that one might pay a lot of money to have created from scratch. Hooper uses a variety of short lenses to emphasize the confinement and the strange distortions of life in the royal bubble, most obviously in a scene in which Logue first encounters members of the court and we see them loom in a bulging way reminiscent of a FedEx commercial of the 1980s. Conversely, as Bertie and Lionel stroll through the fog into what will become a rift between them, the lens is very long, minimizing the distance between the royal and the commoner who follows a step or two behind him.

I was not surprised by the humor and wit of the film, nor the skill of Firth, Rush and Bonham-Carter. What was utterly surprising was the intensity of emotion I felt during those coaching scenes. At the risk of cliche, I felt myself present in the room, and I ached for Bertie to succeed and to triumph. I will be interested to see the film again to see how that effect was achieved for me, whether it be the agonizing set-up in the first scene, the callousness of Bertie's father and brother, the generous love of Bertie's wife or the rooting interest developed for Logue -- or, most likely, the confluence of those forces. This is not to slight the great presence of charisma of Colin Firth, who we treat as one of those good Reliable English Actors, but is in fact a movie star of the order of Peter O'Toole or Richard Burton, without the alcohol, wives and bad taste. Which is not to say he's not sexy -- he's my wife's favorite, and given that she's married to me, the sexiness bar standard is very high. (Kidding, folks.)

The Fighter makes a fascinating contrast technically for all its narrative and spiritual common ground. Where The King's Speech looks and feels carefully designed, its camera moves smooth and graceful as its production design, The Fighter seems to have been caught on the fly just as the HBO documentary about Dickie's crack addiction which dominates the first third of the film has been. (I thought at first that the documentary frame was going to be a guiding narrative device for the entire film, but it is dropped before it wears out its usefulness.) This is clearly a choice, as director David O. Russell's films (I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster) have previously favored more deliberately created imagery.

There is a critical pitfall in such filmmaking, as it invites the viewer to devalue the acting, as it seems to have been part of the reality being captured by the camera. So it was heartening to see Christian Bale and especially Melissa Leo recognized for their work in the form of nominations and awards. Bale's work is the kind of total transformation we expect of his kind of master character actor, to the point that it is hard to remember what his "real" persona is like. But Melissa Leo rose to prominence in roles that were extravagantly deglamorized, most notably her hard-bitten veteran detective on Homicide. Her Alice wishes to be glamorous, to be put together, almost as if to spread a patina over a seamy existence and an exploitative relationship with her own, beloved son. Hopefully this will open new doors for an underrated artist.

Finally, The Fighter constitutes a new entry in the small, but growing sub-genre of films based in Eastern Massachusetts. Many of these are associated with Matt Damon or the Affleck brothers, but this one is not (although Matt Damon was once pencilled in for the Bale role). Two of them, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone are based on the work of the superb novelist Dennis Lehane. It might make sense to examine these films as a coherent sub-genre about a corner of America from which the parade has gone by, perhaps forever, leaving broken dreams and despair, from which the occasional triumph, as in The Fighter, gleams all the brighter.

Never send an Australian to do an Englishman's job

Best known for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Stephan Elliott is an Australian filmmaker whose films turn up at odd intervals with very little common thread among them. Given that he had not had a theatrical release in 9 years, I am curious why he should have applied one of his sporadic efforts to a 1925 Noel Coward play which has not had a major revival recently, and most of which Elliott chose to jettison in making his adaptation. I'm referring to Easy Virtue (2008), which gives us the old, old story of the unacceptably modern daughter-in-law who offends the traditional family. Coward's play was a melodrama, written before he became famous as a wit; Elliott has chosen to adapt the film as if it had been written later, as a comedy.

Many of the structural changes are improvements. But the problem is one of consistent tone. If you are going to comedy of manners, especially English manners, precision is required. You've got to hit it spot on. Are your villains going to openly display their contempt, or cloak it in mock-courtesy? In Kristin Scott-Thomas's performance, the mother constantly vacillates between fake sweetness and an outright rudeness highly unlikely among the English upper class.

It suggests a tone-deafness that may be attributable to Elliott's non-Englishness. Australian society has its classes, but it does not have the fine and subtle distinctions, nor the practice of dissembling hostility. Ozzies tend to say what they mean right out, manners be damned, which makes this film confused and confusing.

Nonetheless, Jessica Biel looks absolutely splendid in long white evening gowns, and my wife believes that ALL films should end with the heroine running off with Colin Firth.