Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut
Bob Ellis on Nowhere Boy, Bright Star, Broken Embraces, The Informant! and Did You Hear About the Morgans?
A far-off time of inconsummate petting is well recalled in Sam Taylor Wood’s Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon’s lace-curtain suburban Liverpool youth, a disturbing, full-hearted biopic that resembles, correctly, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and A Taste of Honey from the same era. It shows him at 14 finding his birth mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), who’s been living round the corner all the while, at the funeral of Bill, the only dad he can remember, and getting to know her.She’s promiscuous, talented, difficult, game, stupid sometimes, verbally witty like him. She teaches him the banjo; she goofs around with him. She is his mate, as Mimi (Kristin Scott-Thomas), her sister and his stepmother, childless, widowed and coldly grieving now, never was. He moves in with her but Bobby (David Morrissey), her bulky, thin-moustached fancy-man, hates him, undermines him and soon evicts him. He goes back to Mimi, stuffs up at school, gets suspended, conceals it from Mimi, forms a rock band. Meets Paul McCartney. Julia hangs round the band applauding and dancing, like a groupie. She’s game for anything, even incest. She becomes an embarrassment. She must be bought off.
And suddenly she is killed, run over on a suburban street. Paul McCartney has lost his mum too, and the two boys bond. The band changes its membership, and its name, and soon sets out for Hamburg. Remembrances of his father’s desertion when he was four fill up some painful flashbacks.
At no point do we hear a Beatles song, only the music they heard and the idols, like Elvis, they imitated. It’s a boyhood that could have been that of a serial killer, or a smacked-out loser in a Liverpool doss-house, or a merchant seaman or art teacher maybe, had not Julia’s banjo lessons, and McCartney’s adjacent oedipal tragedy and melodic skills soothed, for a time, John’s life into great art, before Yoko, smack, New York and Mark Chapman ended it. Early and late, he never had the luck. In between, he was blest.
The script by Matt Greenhalgh has authoritative quietude and its flawless Wylerish director Sam, a woman, is marrying Aaron Johnson, its impressive nineteen-year-old star.
THE EMPRESS’S NEW CORSET
Pray God she makes a better fist of him than Fannie Brawne did of her penfriend John Keats, another difficult young whipper-snapper of tremendous pretension and large gifts. In Bright Star Fannie dithers a lot, and crochets and writes anguished letters and bursts in on his writing room in the boarding house, refuses his proposal because her mother thinks him a pleb, refuses to share his last days with him in Rome because people will talk, hears of his consumptive death from a garrulous friend, and ends the picture alone and palely loitering and shouting his verse to the uncaring skies above Hampstead Heath. For all this she is thought a feisty feminist heroine by the intellectually challenged auteur Jane Campion, who made a film about her.
And wrote it, alas, dad blast her. She could have had Christopher Hampton, Julian Fellowes, Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Antonia Fraser, Joanna Murray Smith or even Miranda Devine do it better, but she chose to do it herself. And the script, though not the other components of the film, is really, really bad.
Is Bright Star, then, the Empress’s New Corset? Perhaps; perhaps, old friend. The difficulty with upbraiding Campion, though, is she directs so well. Postures, glances, tossings in bed, the way that women behave alone in a room, look longingly, sob inwardly and clench their knitting she does as well as Renoir, Bergman or Antonioni. Her colour-control and costume design and lighting are always very fine. But she can’t write for toffee (I cite Holy Smoke and The Piano and thereafter hush my mouth), and she seems utterly unversed in how people talked in the nineteenth century. ‘Hello,’ she has them saying very frequently, a word not then in use.
And she gets things wrong. Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’s mentor, funder and collaborator, was not a Scotsman, though he brutishly rages in that brogue throughout the movie, kicking over the furniture and yelling please leave the room like Billy Connolly on Guinness. She devotes thirty minutes of the film to this conflict with him – kindly leave the room, Miss Brawne; I shall yield to your wishes, Mr Brown – though we see almost nothing of Keats’s Cockney family, his wary bourgeois publishers, his lionisation at literary soirees. All that does not touch on Fanny, a negligible figure in world history, Campion leaves out.
Abbie Cornish, however, is wonderfully deep-etched and premenstrual in performance, Oscar-worthy some would say, of this muddied mess of a role. And Ben Wishaw, tiny, whippetish and sickly, is very, very good as Keats. Paul Schneider as Brown I can’t see the point of (he roars and stamps and pines, and licks John’s ear not once), and Kerry Fox as Fanny’s mother is very fine.
Yet it’s packing them in, and I can’t see why. It’s narratively incompetent, written by an amateur, but saved from the fire it seems (unlike Lord Byron’s memoirs), by great acting and the skills behind the camera of the remarkable Jane Campion, auteur, Oscar-laureate and fuckwit. And so it goes.
JUST SEE IT
Almodovar is the Shakespeare of modern Spain and Broken Embraces needs little more said of it than see it, see it five times, it’s wonderful, absorbing, stirring. Harry Caine (Lluis Homar), a blind screenwriter who used to be a film director is reminded by the death of a rival in love, the millionaire Ernesto Martel (Hose Luis Gomez), of the girl they both loved and exploited, Lena (Penelope Cruz) and made, for a moment, a starlet of, until… The story goes back and forward in time and we realise Lena is not alive now. Other films, however, are planned, with vampires, ghosts, remembrances, in script conferences I can vouch for, and ruined in the re-editing. A scent of Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa pervades the story, plus Michael Powell’s Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, and Kubrick’s Lolita and Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love. Almodovar, unlike Campion, can write as well as direct, and like Shakespeare make multiple identities, improbable seductions, murders, betrayals, misplaced descendants and obsessive love in old men plausible and sympathetic. A great film, as always.
SOON FORGOTTEN
This is a bit less so of Soderbergh’s The Informant! Somewhere between a Jack Lemmon comedy, Get Smart and Kafka’s The Trial, it is unreliably narrated by Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon, dressed up, bewhiskered and physically embellished to look like Philip Seymour Hoffman), a rising biochemist in a corrupt corporation who may be lying to us half the time. He reports to the FBI a price-fixing plan by his and other mega-corporations and, eventually wired, bugs his own dodgy dialogues with his bosses.
His growing mendacity, intellectual panic, moral switherings, headline-mongering and budding paranoia fill up the story. Straightforward, amusing and scary by turns, it delights and purges and pleasures the mind but is curiously soon forgotten.
GRANT, IRREPLACEABLE
To my praise of Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a wacky romantic fish-out-of-water Hollywood comedy Howard Hawks would have loved to have made in 1938, I must preface my besotted admiration for not only Sarah Jessica Parker, which is not hard to understand, but also the screen’s most bewitching male, Hugh Grant, which I fear you won’t forgive me for.
Hugh Grant is really, really good. A cross between Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, he telegraphs his distance from what he is doing and how he judges himself for doing it better than anyone since, well, Cary Grant. What he does is pitch-perfect, inimitable, irreplaceable, exact, observing himself with distaste and contempt, as Hamlet does, and Lucky Jim and Henry Higgins, a role he must play soon. If you think light comedy is easy to do pray go see Russell Crowe in his one Hugh Grant role, A Good Year, crashing and burning like the Hindenburg and imagine what Hugh would have done with it.
The plot concerns two divorced Manhattan murder witnesses sent for their protection by the FBI to a Wyoming farmhouse to share a bed and some genial cultural contrasts among slow-speaking trustful rodeo-following down-home country folk including Sam Elliot and Mary Steenburgen, and is not too intellectually taxing or culturally confronting, but like its forefathers Crocodile Dundee, SeaChange and Tammy is a freshly innocent, palate-cleansing experience to enjoy with someone of another gender, soon.
Obediently yours.
