Girls, Girls, Girls

I know one should judge a movie on its own quality, rather than that of its publicity material, but even so: something about the blurb promoting Greta Gerwig’s Little Women on the local multiplex website smells awfully whiffy to me. ‘Greta Gerwig has crafted a Little Women that draws on both the classic novel and the writings of Louisa May Alcott, and… is both timeless and timely.’ Well, that ‘timeless and timely’ line must be a good one, because I used something similar myself a couple of years ago, but – ‘crafted’? Honestly? I know this is a prestige movie gunning for gongs – it’s that time of year – but the implication seems to be that while most of those non-award-contender films were just slapped together out of spit and bubblegum, Gerwig emerged, exhausted, from a shed, having painstakingly ‘crafted’ her movie single-handed, possibly using a chisel.

Well, you’re not responsible for what people write about you, so I should probably move on from reviewing a website advertising the movie and consider the film itself. This is, of course, an adaptation of Louisa M Alcott’s classic and much-loved (not to mention much adapted) novel of the same name, a coming of age story set in the USA in the 19th century. It mostly concerns the siblings of one not-especially-well-off family living in Massachusetts: Meg, Amy, Little Jo and Hoss.

The novel was originally published in two parts (under different titles in the UK), but Gerwig (scripting as well as directing) has opted to tell the story out of chronological order. Thus it does take a little while for the shape of the story to become apparent, to say nothing of the difficulties one is presented with when trying to recap the plot.

So: the earlier part of the story is set during the American Civil War, with the father of the family absent and everyone else struggling to make ends meet. As noted, the March family are not exactly rolling in dough, and so it is important that at least one daughter makes a good marriage. But who is it to be? Eldest sibling Meg (Emma Watson), who seems to want to be an actress? Second daughter Jo (Saoirse Ronan), whose mind is always fixed upon her writing? What about Amy (Florence Pugh) an artistically gifted but temperamental and sometimes difficult girl? Who will catch the eye of the somewhat feckless but wealthy boy next door (Timothee Chalamet)? Anyway, none of the girls seems to impress the family’s stern old matriarch (Meryl Streep)… (I presume Streep is in the role that Lorne Greene used to play in the TV series, though I could be wrong.)

Well, this may be a beloved piece of literature, but it’s also one aimed at young American girls, so I must confess to being almost wholly unfamiliar with it. If I wasn’t the kind of person who goes to the cinema as a matter of habit, then there’s a good chance I probably wouldn’t have seen this at all – hang on, though, perhaps that’s not entirely true. This is a Greta Gerwig film, after all, and while I am just as happy to see a movie with her as by her, I have been following her career with interest for years now. The same is true of Florence Pugh.

I am happy to report that neither of them have proved my faith to be unfounded. I will admit to feeling a bit restless during the opening stages of the film, especially before the structure of the thing became properly apparent, but in the end it becomes a richly absorbing and impressive film: the staging is excellent, the ensemble playing is also very strong, and I did find the story genuinely touching in places. I get the sense that the film has been structured to retain the bits that people who have read the novel remember – there is some significant breakfast-donating, book-burning and hair-cutting, amongst other things – but Gerwig has structured the script with great intelligence and subtlety, creating resonances between scenes set years apart (presumably in different volumes of the book). The contrast between the warm, welcoming atmosphere of the girls’ childhood home and the somewhat bleaker tone of later years is also very well achieved.

With the father of the family absent for much of the film and Chalamet playing a slightly ambiguous character – charming, but also quite callow – this is, obviously, a female-dominated film. I sense that we are in for a lot of these over the next few weeks, for the great beast of capitalism has scented there is money to be made from the MeToo movement, gobbled it up, and is now in the process of selling it back to people in carefully packaged chunks. I really feared that Little Women would likewise end up as a piece of thudding agitprop – its own trailer is big on stressing that it is about how the March sisters are individuals with their own talents and dreams, rather than just wives and mothers in waiting – but once again Gerwig proves she is smarter than this.

There are certainly scenes which feel – how should one put this? – proto-feminist, or even feminist full-stop – the economic importance of marriage to women of this period is made quite clear, for instance. But these are not laboured and do seem to fit quite naturally within the narrative. There is also a moment where Emma Watson’s character is permitted to say that she does actually want to get married and have children, and that this is a perfectly valid life goal. Nevertheless, much of the film is about Jo’s desire to stay in control of her own life, which basically means remaining single. How, then, to contrive a happy climax to the movie, especially when the book does end with Jo getting spliced? The script manages to negotiate its way around this with some deftness and perhaps even a little impudence.

This is a solid and impressive movie, and very enjoyable. Ronan is customarily good, but she is at least matched by Pugh, who has a rather trickier role to contend with. None of the performances are what you would call weak, though. In the end it is Greta Gerwig’s script and direction which really make the movie what it is: charming and pleasant, but not without serious and moving moments, and perhaps even the odd life lesson. Little Women may do very well when the awards season properly gets going: I would not object if it did.

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Oah, Mistah Croah!

There are, I suppose, weirder choices of film projects than blockbuster fantasy versions of tales from the depths of the Old Testament, but not many. I suspect that the fact Paramount have embarked upon such an adventure, in the form of Noah, is not based upon the studio’s confident belief in the bankability of this kind of film, but the past acclaim and success of director Darren Aronofsky and the box office clout of leading man Russell Crowe.

I suspect you know the story to this one already, more or less at least. The script is by Aronofsky and Ari Handel (based on an idea by some 6th century Judaean priests) and is rather coy about the exact setting of the film – you can treat it as proper history if you really want to, but the fantasy quotient is also comfortably high. Ten generations after the creation of the world, humanity has split into two factions along ideological lines – with those who see the Earth as something to be relentlessly exploited very much in the ascendant, and those desiring to live in harmony with nature living in fear of their lives.

Noah (Crowe) and his family are pretty much all that is left of the latter group, eking out a fairly miserable existence in the wasteland the mechanistic civilisation has reduced the world to. But then Noah has a vision: and, not to put too fine a point on it, it looks like rain…

Not quite sure what to make of this, Noah and his nearest and dearest trek off to the remote hermitage of his grandad Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), who fills him in on the finer points of what’s in the offing. With the help of a gang of fallen angels who look rather like cobbled Ents, Noah sets about measuring his cubits and gathering the gopher wood.

Inevitably, as the time of the inundation draws closer, others take an interest in Noah’s little project, particularly Tubal-Cain (Ray Winstone), king of one of the destructive human nations. Tubal-Cain is quite keen to get a berth on the Ark for himself, and isn’t above attempting to suborn Noah’s kids to do so. Noah himself has other problems, not least the issue of finding wives for all his sons. Sometimes it never rains, but it pours…

There has been some media coverage of Russell Crowe’s industrious efforts to secure a celebrity endorsement for Noah by showing it to the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, mainly (one suspects) because of the sheer size of the potential Christian audience this could help the film tap into. The slightly quirky decision not to use the word ‘God’ once in the entire movie aside, it seems to me that there’s very little here to frighten the Biblical-literalist horses, in the sense that the movie takes the Book of Genesis at face value – for all that it embellishes the story in some fairly eye-opening ways (battles with giant stone angels and so on), there’s nothing here that directly contradicts the scriptural account.

There is something compellingly bizarre about the way in which the film works very hard to treat such an extravagant story so seriously. Tranquility on the Ark, for instance, is secured by doping all the animals aboard it into suspended animation for the duration of the voyage (this also explains why it doesn’t fill up with dung before the end of the film). Noah himself is treated with an unexpected level of psychological realism, but then in these particular circumstances this makes a certain degree of sense. All in all, watching Noah I had a strange sense that this was a blockbuster fantasy film of which the Christian right might well approve.

I’m not sure I was very comfortable with that, and it did make me wary of the environmental message which is central to the story: the subtext of the film is ‘live green or die’, which ordinarily I’d agree with, but not when it’s presented as some kind of religious fundamentalist dogma. (On the other hand, another major theme is whether the planet wouldn’t be better off without the human race, a suggestion which I can’t imagine many religions getting behind.) The earnestness of the film in this and other departments is a bit of a problem, too: Anthony Hopkins does his usual formerly-Welsh twinkliness, but apart from this Noah is an extremely po-faced film, presumably in order to avoid charges from its target audience of irreverence towards scripture.

This doesn’t stop the film being very, very strange for most of its running time. It looks good, as you’d expect from Aronofsky, with the antediluvian world looking pretty post-apocalyptic anyway, and some decent special effects. Jennifer Connelly honestly doesn’t get much to do as Mrs Noah – Emma Watson as the daughter-in-law gets more decent material – but Crowe, Winstone, and Hopkins all bring their customary commitment and presence, as well as a slight tendency to chew on the scenery (in light of which it’s a bit unfortunate that various scenes depict characters wandering about shouting ‘Ham! Ham!’).

On its own peculiar terms the film remains interesting and pacy for its first two acts, but I did find the final third to be rather tough going, to the point of actually being slightly twisted. The stuff with everyone on the Ark, post-flood, does go on a bit, and wanders off into some distinctly unexpected areas (there’s some hand-to-hand combat, for instance, plus Noah threatening to turn into a swivel-eyed murderous headcase). I was looking forward to the bit where Noah says ‘At my command, unleash doves,’ but this doesn’t happen. Genesis 9:23 does make it into the movie though, just another example of the permeating weirdness of the project.

Going in to see Noah I was fairly certain that this was the proverbial win-win scenario: either Aronofsky was going to make an interestingly original and visually sumptuous film, or just a hilariously bad one, either of which I would happily watch. In the end, though, I think Noah is somewhere in between: the conception of the film is deeply, deeply odd, unless you genuinely believe the Flood to have been an actual historical event, in which case you may well take exception to some of the film’s more idiosyncratic embellishments on the traditional story (wondering what happened to the unicorns? Looks like Ray Winstone ate them both). But set against all this, it is a beautifully designed and photographed film with moments of real vision and power. I don’t foresee a full-scale revival of the Biblical Epic as a major genre (though, hey, I’m the guy who predicted that Strictly Come Dancing would be a famous disaster, so what do I know?), nor even a massive box office return for this particular film. But I’ve never seen another film quite like it, and I’ve always found it hard to dismiss originality. Even so, Noah is engrossingly strange more than anything else.

 

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When Harry Met Sauron

From the Hootoo archive. Originally published December 27th 2001:

Another point on this, the question that dominates my email: the adaptation of masterpieces from one medium to another is as old as literature. Most of Shakespeare’s plays are re-workings of stories, poems or written history. When I moved Richard III from stage to screen, I was determined to make a good film in honour of a great play. Had I left every scene and line of the text intact in the movie, it would not have been a good one. Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, my favourite version of the Macbeth saga, distorts Shakespeare to spectacular effect. The play which inspired it remains intact. – Sir Ian McKellen

For a critic, even a pretend one like me, there is only ever one ambition: to write about the subject accurately, entertainingly and persuasively enough to have some impact on the way the reader views it – maybe even enough to influence whether or not they decide to see it all. Sometimes success is, perhaps, achieveable. And sometimes… well, this week I’m looking at Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and faced with such a couple of cinematic colossii, whose metaphorical ankles I stand no higher than, it quickly becomes obvious that I’m staring defeat in the face.

Both these films are based on the opening volumes of well-loved fantasy series¹. Both have been eagerly awaited. Both feature powerful casts and striking effects-work. Both look very certain to muscle their way up the all-time box office takings chart. Obviously, they are – superficially, at least – very similar.

And consider the storylines: the story of an ordinary, unassuming young orphan, living with relatives. After he discovers the remarkable significance of his inheritance he is forced into a journey of discovery. His ultimate opponent is a dark lord whose power is resurgent – his greatest ally a venerable wizard of formidable power, though there are friends both large and small to be found along the way. At the end the Death Star blows up. So, yes, both stories derive from the same tradition of heroic fantasy. But the way in which the stories are told for the screen couldn’t be more different.

Lord of the Rings has a large cast, containing many well-known faces: Ian McKellen – who’s fast becoming one of my favourite performers – as the wizard Gandalf, a magisterial Christopher Lee as his counterpart Saruman, Liv Tyler as the Elf maiden Arwen, Ian Holm as the legendary Bilbo², and Sean Bean as the mercurial warrior Boromir. But all seem to have been cast solely on merit, just as with the lesser-known actors in other key roles – Elijah Wood as Frodo, the ringbearer, Viggo Mortenson as the stoic ranger Strider, and Sean Astin as the faithful Sam Gamgee, to name but three. (There are also a couple of well-known names rendered unrecognisable by their prosthetic make-up, particularly John Rhys-Davies as Gimli the dwarf.) The performances are uniformly excellent, at the very least: Wood is moving as Frodo, and as the wizard, McKellen is a towering presence.

With Harry Potter, though, it was ever-so-slightly like watching people in free-fall fighting over an insufficient number of parachutes. Every few minutes, it seemed, someone like Julie Walters or John Hurt would roll up, do a show-stopping cameo and then clear off. Now most of these people were also very good, but the overall effect was a bit distracting – a combination of ‘I wonder who’s on next?’ and ‘is that all they’re actually doing?’ Robbie Coltrane emerged from the scrum with most success, with Alan Rickman and Richard Harris not far behind. The troika of child stars were rather variable, I thought, and under-used (dialogue seemed to consist wholly of exclamations of ‘Whoa!’ for long stretches of the film). Rupert Brint was good as Ron, but as Harry, Daniel Radcliffe was a bit too passive (and looked like a strange hybrid of Walter the Softy and Liam Gallagher).

I think Lord of the Rings scores over Harry Potter in the visual department, too: admitted it has the bonus of New Zealand standing in for Middle Earth, to awesome effect, but even so I found my jaw continually dropping open at the sheer beauty and power of the images on the screen – a brief but impressive glimpse of Sauron’s fastness, Barad-Dur, the manic activity in the pits below Isengard, or the infernal might of the Balrog (a stunning creation). It’s the most fully-realised fantasy world in many years. Harry Potter, of course, is set in a version of our own world, but even so the special effects, while respectable, are not as convincing as one might have hoped for (the Quidditch match is particularly disappointing).

It should be obvious by now that I rate Lord of the Rings a good deal higher than Harry Potter. And the main reason for this has nothing to do with the concerns outlined above. Harry Potter was made in consultation with the author of the books, JK Rowling, who apparently had the power of veto over all aspects of the production. Probably due to this, and also from a desire to appeal to the widest possible audience, director Chris Columbus has made a visually rather bland film that sticks very, very close to the book – too close, in fact. The result is a film that frequently seems unfocussed and a little self-indulgent and is certainly at least thirty minutes too long – Lord of the Rings is a longer film, but doesn’t feel overlong the way Harry Potter does. It’s not a bad film, by any means, but by staying too close to the original text it does Rowling’s remarkable prose no justice.

By contrast, Peter Jackson takes liberties with Tolkien that will make any purist blanch. There are many substantial changes – sections of the book have been removed and new material inserted in their place. But all the changes serve to make the story work for the screen, as a film in its own right. The memorable-but-superfluous visit to Tom Bombadil is gone completely. Glorfindel’s role is carried out by Arwen, to provide a suitable introduction for her. The pursuit of the hobbits by the Black Riders is suitably chilling and relentless. Frodo’s encounter with Galadriel (an ethereal Cate Blanchett) is truly startling. Most significantly, Saruman’s role has been substantially beefed up, and he and his hench-thing Lurtz provide a physical personification of evil lacking from the text. And throughout the whole enterprise, the key themes of Tolkien’s work – the corrupting influence of absolute power, the conflict between mechanisation and the natural world, and the power of true friendships such as the one between Sam and Frodo – are emphasised and explored.

It’s by no means perfect, though. Longeurs threaten in Rivendell and again in Lothlorien. The romance between Aragorn and Arwen doesn’t really justify its inclusion. There’s no real sense of the topography of Middle Earth, but short of handing out maps in the foyer I can’t think of a solution to this. The Professor himself would be appalled by the Celticisation of much of his creation. And the end is, perhaps inevitably, a little anticlimactic. But it’s still a magnificent achievement.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a superior, though overlong, children’s adventure. It’s also a film with a mountain to climb. The Lord of the Rings is that mountain, and The Fellowship of the Ring is an epic in every sense of the word – and, if there’s any justice in this world, the recipient of next years’ Academy Award for Best Picture.

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