Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut
Bob Ellis on Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps, The Reluctant Infidel, Arthur Penn, Tony Curtis and Elizabeth Taylor.
Oliver Stone has twice altered American history, with Platoon and Wall Street, films that made possible the anti-Afghan war campaigns and the anti-CEO mood in small-town America today. A third film, W, lost Bush the Second those few fans he had left. And Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps bids fair to change, or nudge, history too.
A Shakespearian plot, an oedipal theme and a dark-hearted mood like the early Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayevsky or Larry Kushner pervade it. Lots of computer-Meltdown graphics and a ghost or two kick it along. Hamlet, Pericles, Coriolanus, Antigone and All My Sons infect its premises and reckonings. An adult, numerate, onrushing American classic is the result.
It is 2008. Churchill-Schwartz, a company like Lehmann’s, is probed, humiliated, disgraced and bankrupted. Lewis Zabel, its big, proud, bearded boss, jumps in front of a train. Jake Moore, his keen young disciple, a weekend rev-head, investigates. His lefty girlfriend Winnie, a blogger, daughter of Gordon Gecko (now a budding author and proud and sneery veteran of nine years in the slammer), doesn’t want to see her dad, though Jake, attracted by his book, meets him secretly, writing down his advice.
It turns out she has a hundred million dollars in a Swiss bank, a secret gift from Gordon, and Gordon wants to make a new fortune with it and he cajoles and begs (and the old crooked smoothie’s cool charm still works) Jake to arrange a meeting. Jake meanwhile has found out Bretton James, Gordon’s past betrayer, may have nudged Zabel’s suicide too. Confronted with this, he offers Jake a job and Jake edgily, lured by the whiff of billions, takes it. Winnie won’t see Gordon because her brother Rudi died of smack while Gordon was neglectfully in gaol. Wall Street, despite Gordon’s jeremiads, totters towards global meltdown.
All this is set up in the first forty minutes, and the movie begins. I shouldn’t spoil it for you, but some things can be said.
We are shown by a master of brief abundant exposition both new and old things. One is New York’s bullying financial primacy on Earth before things went bad. An epic city making sleepless mischief worldwide, it sometimes in its moon-dark hours floats past the fabulous, wide-eyed, fashion-mad metropolis of Carrie Bradshaw. Another is Michael Douglas’s gift for ugly-seductive moral complexity, Oscar-winning this time probably, like that of his mischievous friend Jack Nicholson. We trust, mistrust, admire and abhor him, just as his daughter does.
Carey Mulligan seems to be the premier female talent of the present era, her knowing elfin innocence channelling Winona, Audrey and Judy. Her Antigone scenes with Gecko (how can my brother’s ghost be laid while you live, you beast, unpunished on this good green Earth?) ache and move like those in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Her love scenes with Shia La Boeuf (a superstar, who looks like nobody much) prefigure the new, soul-scarred monogamy. Frank Langella’s leonine woundedness, as good as what he did, at greater length, with Richard M. Nixon, and James Brolin’s quiet-eyed brew of good and evil (he races motorbikes, comperes charity fundraisers, burns and pillages his way to trillions) and Douglas’s impelling chess-moves show how good still, even now, American drama can be – like August: Ossage County on stage last month in the Sydney Theatre outclassing Long Day’s Journey. A film not easy to go with early on as it wrestles with its exposition, it is terrific nonetheless and merits a third and fourth viewing, with friends, on DVD, with whisky. Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, not Stone, wrote the script, but you wouldn’t know.
WORLD-CHANGING HIERESY
A correct but rusty title, redolent of the 1950s (The Reluctant Bride, The Reluctant Debutante, Beloved Infidel) put me off seeing, for a while, The Reluctant Infidel, a splendid, heretical neo-Jewish comedy that could change the world. Mahmud Nasir (Omid Djalili) a lax, beer-drinking London Muslim finds to his annoyance (1) that his son’s betrothed’s father is a strict and famous charismatic Islamicist mullah, and (2) that he himself is adopted and, genetically, oy vey, a Jew, and (3) that his Jewish birth-father is dying in a pious hospice whose fanatical administrators won’t let him in until he looks and sounds more Hassidic.
A kind of two-way Pygmalion then unfolds, of strict instruction in opposite faiths, the Judaic by an American cabbie who lives nearby and initially hates him for his selfish parking, the Muslim by his nervous family including (as in Send Me No Flowers) a beautiful wife who fears his frequent absences learning, and suffering, Judaism are trysts with a rival woman, some strumpet slimmer than herself, and a mullah who thinks he is homosexual and forgives him. Anguished, torn and overtired, he is discovered at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in a yahmulke, which he then in panic burns and stamps on, and for which, after brief sensational stardom on BBC, he is promptly arrested for anti-Semitism while Hassidic firebrands riot around his doorstep and the firebrand mullah emerges to denounce them.
Further complications reminiscent of The Producers, Fiddler on the Roof, Withnail and I and Extras I should not, perhaps, reveal. Omid Djalili is astonishingly good, in a baffled, overweight, harried Bob Hoskins way, Amit Shah as his anguished, lovelorn, pious-but-secular son, Archie Panjabi as his beautiful, ferocious, younger wife and Yigal Naor (especially) as the charismatic mullah, magnetic as Orson Welles and likely soon to send planes crashing into Big Ben if he has his way. This portrait of smug self-anointed over-weening false modesty, like similar fat-headed messiahs in Woody Allen’s films, is a joy to behold and cringe under. Real tears punctuate the belly laughs sometimes, but that’s what masterpieces do.
The Comedy of English Embarrassment, as old as Chaucer and in every generation improved updated Amis, Waugh, Shaw, Dickens, Fielding, Congreve, Jonson and Shakespeare, has lately in the work of Richard Curtis and Ricky Gervais (Love, Actually and The Office) and this film attained blast-off. The Ian McKellen episode of Extras I would rank the funniest half-hour of the current millennium (though not too far ahead of the Kate Winslet, give-me-a-Holocaust-film-which-will-get-me-an-Oscar-you-bastards one) and Gervais the finest fumbling clown since Tony Hancock.
GREENGRASS’S ZONE
If there is there is a Platoon about Iraq, it’s Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone, a scarcely fictionalised account of how the Big Lie of the WMD (atomic bombs that Saddam Hussein chose not to use to defend his country but to bury in the sand) came to be told and who was betrayed by its telling and who was killed for asserting, or trying to assert, as Andrew Wilkie did, the truth.
American in its look but British in its conscience, it follows Matt Damon’s Warrant Officer Miller in his quest for these Big Bombs and then for the Big Lies (and the Big Liars) through a neo-Biblical Gehenna of crumbling alleys, helicopter-gunship computers, night-vision and screaming wives and children under fire, as impactful as anything by Ridley Scott or Jeremy Hartley Sims. His quarry, a bald-headed Saddam lookalike, is truly menacing and Greg Kinnear scrubs up well as Clark Poundstone the morally shifty Jerry Bremer-figure who doesn’t care about the missing weapons and wants only the glory and power, and Khalid Abdalla as ‘Freddie’, the sorrowful compromised patriot, improvising his honour from hour to hour, is really, really, intimately, cross-culturally, affecting.
I missed this film in the cinema but saw it this week on DVD with the kind of throbbing intellectual excitement which recent war films (except, of course, Hurt Locker) rarely afford. Rent it and see it, if you haven’t, soon.
FAREWELL TO PENN AND CURTIS
Arthur Penn I met once and offered a film he said yes to in what must have been a fallow period, of which there were a few in his distinguished, low-key saga. He seemed an affable, gentle, left-wing survivor of McCarthyism, first wedded to the theatre and prevailing, at first, with The Miracle Worker, an Oscar-winning taming-Helen-Keller filmed play, a Gore Vidal script about Billy the Kid that was a lot like a play, The Left-Handed Gun, a Lillian Hellman suspense melodrama that resembled a play, The Chase, co-starring Redford, Brando and Jane Fonda, which narrowly zilched because of Brando’s masochistic butchering at the end — demanded, Penn told me, by Brando himself, who liked that sort of thing — and then Bonnie and Clyde, a roving, light-hearted, Truffautesque bloodbath every bit as good as its reputation.
He should have done more, as the splendid Brechtian joke-epic Little Big Man showed. He should, perhaps, have got himself a better agent, or analyst, and been less frightened of the fame of his brother Irving. But he made more good, impactful films than his contemporary theatre titan Orson Welles, and that, I guess, is something.
Of another New York Jew Tony Curtis (Bernie Schwartz) more stirring things can be said. He may not have outclassed Brando, as he yearned to do, but Paul Newman was in his range. As Hud or Harper or Hombre or Fast Eddie Felson or Butch Cassidy he would have done as well. He suffered unjustly for the line ‘to whom I also taught the classics’ delivered Bronx-nasal to Olivier in the steam-bath in Spartacus. The final fight with Kirk in that film was potent and Shakespearian, as was every minute of The Defiant Ones. He was magnificent in The Great Race and immortal (of course) in Some Like It Hot and Sweet Smell of Success, in a role close to himself, the orphan-huckster, beyond morality, desperately seeking fame and bimbos. He would have been good company on a submarine, I thought when I learned he had spent a lot of World War II under the Atlantic. He would have told good jokes.
Off screen, he lacked hypocrisy (unlike Spence and and Charlton and Greg and Kirk) and this predating of his fellow muff-diving coke-sniffer Jack Nicholson did him public harm. Had he stuck with Janet as Paul did with Joanne and stayed off the hooch and the younger bimbos (of one he said, at the wedding, ‘With this one you don’t need viagra’) he might have enjoyed a latter-day resurgence in, say, The Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire, but he had Las Vegas’d out by then, and it’s a pity.
‘It’s been a bad week for short-arse Jews,’ Denny Lawrence said of Tony, Eddie Fisher and Arthur Penn, a week alas before Norman Wisdom died too at the early age of ninety-four, and grieved me with my remembrances of his light-as-a-feather mime-slapstick in the 1950s. He was one of what might be called the Pommy Hobbits (Charlie Drake, Toby Jones, Freddie Jones, Charles Laughton, Charles Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Tony Hancock, Ricky Gervais): not quite human, but of an adjacent species, like pug puppies, that bring us unutterable pleasured fellow-feeling when we are young.
And …Tony’s death brings to an end the era of the big stars, we are told.
But … Maureen O’Hara, Esther Williams, Olivia De Havilland, Lauren Bacall, Doris Day, Sophia Loren, Joan Fontaine, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joanne Woodward, Claire Bloom, Leslie Caron, Muriel Pavlow, Mitzi Gaynor, Shirley Jones, Shirley MacLaine, Shirley Temple, Shirley Bassey, Terry Moore, Julie Christie, Julie Andrews, Glynis Johns, Jeanne Moreau, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Anita Ekberg, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Angela Lansbury, Diane Cilento, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Eva-Marie Saint, Hayley Mills and Googie Withers are still with us; Robert Wagner, Jerry Lewis, Kirk Douglas, Clint Eastwood, James Arness, Tab Hunter, Don Murray, Richard Attenborough, Donald Sinden, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Sid Caesar, Rod Taylor, Mel Brooks, Pat Boone, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, Sidney Poitier, Sean Connery, Harry Belafonte, Max Von Sydow, Cliff Richard, Fabian Forte, Nicol Williamson, George Hamilton III, Roger Moore, Warren Beatty, Jean-Pierre Leaud and Mickey Rooney (top-grossing star of 1935) are still with us; and among the lesser luminaries, Albert Finney, David Warner, Michael Craig, Deanna Durbin, Diane Baker, Tom Courtney, Alan Bennett, Eli Wallach, Yvette Mimieux, Shirley-Anne Field, Rita Tushingham, Juliet Mills, Barbara Windsor, Robert Morse, Bill Kerr, George Cole, George Segal, June Whitfield, Murray Meldrum, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard, Val Doonican, Shirley Abicair, Norman Lloyd (Cinna the Poet in Me and Orson Welles), Leslie Phillips, Col Joye, Paul Anka, Tony Bennett and Dame Vera Lynn are (mostly) still working, as are the seven most esteemed young-turk directors of the late fifties, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, Sidney Lumet, Milos Forman, Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Roman Polanski, Kevin Brownlow and Jean-Luc Godard; and Stanley Donen, who made Singin’ in the Rain, is, at the very least, not dead.
A hundred and one names thus far and counting. I wonder why we are so keen to stamp ‘finis’ on things: on eras and heroes and demigods and the fashions of our youth? The last US Civil War widow was around till the 1990s, the last Anzac till 2006. ‘The past isn’t dead and buried,’ said Barack Obama in 2008, misquoting Faulkner, ‘in fact it isn’t even past.’
Why do we do this? We want to survive something, I suppose, as we sense death coming for our non-immortal selves.
SERIAL TOXICITY
One of the sillier immortals, Elizabeth Taylor, has buried her fifth husband Eddie Fisher and like her predecessor the Wife of Bath continues to revel in applause for her serial toxicity. It seems only a month ago she threw herself on Mike Todd’s grave, ran off with Eddie Fisher, left him for Richard Burton, charged a million dollars (a world first) for ruining Cleopatra, paupered sad, forgiving Burton with endless demands for jewellery, left him flat broke, remarried him, extracted more jewellery from him, found the young hunk Larry Fortensky in her front garden with his shirt off, got even more jewellery from Michael Jackson, urged his plastic surgeon to make him look like her, succeeded, survived him too, won three Oscars for bad acting, and so on.
‘How awful it must be to be Elizabeth Taylor,’ Whoopi Goldberg said once, ‘and to wake up one morning and realise you’ve married the man who came to fix the pool.’ Senator John Warner, her seventh, a former Secretary of the Navy, a good grave conservative man whose mid-life crisis she clearly ambushed and looted of jewellery, will be feeling nervous now, at only 83, at the possibility of her avaricious, glittering return.
And so it goes.
