THE IRON LADY (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

Ineptly written by Abi Morgan and haphazardly directed by Phyllida Lloyd, The Iron Lady, purportedly having something to do with Margaret Thatcher, the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister (1979-90), is one big—and drearily long—head-scratcher. While it alludes to actual social, political and geopolitical events in which Thatcher participated, it has no sense of period and fails to convey the depth of the legacy of Thatcher’s “principled” but inhuman policies. It would indeed appear that this failure was deliberate on Lloyd’s part. How do we not infer this from her frighteningly obtuse remark, “Margaret Thatcher is the most significant female political leader Great Britain has had since Elizabeth I”? To Lloyd, then, Thatcher’s policies were irrelevant no matter their heinous impact on people’s lives and the soul of the nation. She has instead mounted the stupid, misguided, depraved Thatcher on a narrow “feminist” base. All that matters to Lloyd is that Thatcher is a woman; against this, what she did as a leader on the national and world stages doesn’t matter.
     Nor is this the furthest reach of Lloyd’s foolishness. Perhaps to highlight Thatcher’s being a woman, Lloyd has preposterously made her ultra-feminine and—brace yourself—a glamour puss. Anyone with the faintest recollection of Thatcher during the years of her Conservative Party rule will be aghast at this. Thatcher was someone who had no feminine or womanly accent at all in her attitude or demeanor. (By way of marital balance, Denis Thatcher was effeminate.) Lloyd so obsessively has the camera follow the lead actress’s shapely legs and (in elegant heels) feet that one is moved to discount the spun steel Thatcher-hair that the movie more or less duplicates. All in all, star Meryl Streep never in her life has looked so soft and appealing as she does, unsuitably, here.
     Streep’s performance, for which she won her third—her second best actress—Oscar, is exquisitely wrought,* but it has nothing whatsoever to do with Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, at a number of points it is indistinguishable from her more accurate, and ebullient, impersonation of Julia Child in Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009). For the record, Alexandra Roach is also excellent as the young Thatcher, and the two actresses convincingly “match up.”
     Finally, it is to be pitied that Morgan and Lloyd did nothing to probe the origins and mechanism of the dementia that both Thatcher and her U.S. counterpart, Ronald Reagan, drifted into. (I believe that Thatcher is still with us—but apart, secluded, because of her illness.) Had they possessed the curiosity, intelligence and imagination to do this, we might better appreciate why the two leaders pursued their pernicious policies regarding, among other things, business deregulation, the privatization of public institutions, and assaults on the working class and unions. Perhaps these two peas from the same diseased political pod were somehow always destined to be so much alike. Still, if we are to take Lloyd’s film at all seriously, we must also note that Thatcher, at least when she is old and infirm, most resembles Richard Nixon. She, too, is a morbidly sentimental, hallucinating drunk.

* Streep’s Thatcher also won her best actress prizes from the British Academy, the London critics, and the New York critics.

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JULIE & JULIA (Nora Ephron, 2009)

I had never liked any of writer-director Nora Ephron’s films, so I’m quite surprised how enjoyable I found Julie & Julia, which she based on Julie Powell’s memoir, which in turn was based on Powell’s online account of spending a year, after work, cooking her way through idol Julia Child’s great book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Perhaps it is more than coincidence that this is also the first time that I have enjoyed any performance that Amy Adams has given. She is convincing as Powell, one of the breed of faux-celebrities that latch onto someone’s authentic celebrity like a leech in order to make a name for themselves. Adams sweetens Powell’s narcissism by softening its edges, but we can still see from what Adams does just what a train wreck Powell was, and probably still is, as a human being. Child herself was not fooled and adjudged Powell to be “disrespectful.”
     Ephron has done a good job of flipping back and forth between Powell’s half of the movie and Child’s, which centers on her time in Paris beginning in 1949 when she discovered French food, decided to become a chef, and wrote (along with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) her first, famous book. Across time, the parallels between the two women’s lives, including (here, idealized) marriages, do not seem forced. Ephron has made an agile entertainment.
     And in Meryl Streep she has found a Julia Child as hilariously funny as Julia Child herself was on her television cooking shows. Although the character is conceived by Ephron superficially, as indeed are all the film’s characters (that’s real life for you), Streep here gives her most brilliantly accomplished performance since Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002). Moreover, when Julia learns that her sister is pregnant, what Julia herself can never be, and bursts into tears, insisting to her comforting spouse how happy she is, Streep is briefly piercing—all the more so because the moment interrupts the dominant note of joie de vivre that characterizes the role.

THE DEER HUNTER (Michael Cimino, 1978)

The 1970s constituted U.S. cinema’s most dismal decade, and its Oscar-winning best pictures composed a series of trash (Patton, Rocky, etc.)—with two exceptions: the mediocre Godfather-sequel (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) and Michael Cimino’s rock-solid The Deer Hunter, a study of war’s impact on three buddies from a Pennsylvania steel town who enlist to fight in Vietnam. It is a film of rituals: one’s wedding the weekend before all three young men leave; war; the funeral of one of the three.
     The central metaphor, powerful, is provided by the Russian roulette that (fictionally) the Vietcong forces on prisoners, coldly gambling on the outcome; all this perfectly encapsulates war’s fearsomeness and random killing, but also, ironically, war’s addictive nature. Nick (Christopher Walken, best supporting actor Oscar) remains behind in Vietnam, rather than go home, to keep playing the “game,” sending home anonymously his earnings.
     There are two other affecting passages. In one, home from combat, Michael can no longer shoot deer; a sign of Cimino’s coarseness is that Michael’s whispered aloud “Okay” is followed by Michael’s shouting out to Nature, “Okay!” After Nick is buried, the mourners group-sing “God Bless America!” finding a poignant place where sentimental patriotism and dry, unsentimental plea intersect.
     Robert De Niro is superb as Michael, whose sexual ambiguity adds immeasurably to the film’s capacity to observe reality quietly and intriguingly—and at a distance. Does Michael refrain from pursuing girls because he is in love with Linda, who is off-limits as friend Nick’s girl?—or is he so caring toward Linda because he secretly loves Nick? Meryl Streep, by the way, is lovely as Linda; as in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), Streep had not yet cultivated those distracting, self-serving mannerisms that would mark her transformation from dedicated actress to star.

MANHATTAN (Woody Allen, 1979)

While Zelig (1983) remains writer-director Woody Allen’s most highly analytical and brilliantly funny film, Manhattan, which was co-written by Marshall Brickman, is his most romantic and appealing one, and is equally hilarious—the closest cinema has come to Astaire & Rogers post-1930s. Visually, it is a dream of the city, gorgeously photographed in black and white by Gordon Willis—but a dream into which Allen’s anxious psyche intrudes, as though Allen, in the persona of Isaac Davis, cannot help playing chicken with his dream. Isaac’s adolescent cynicism borders on defeatism, and Manhattan’s comedy and romance teeter on the brink of evaporation, which indeed they do, because of the Depression, in Fred & Ginger’s Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936). No sooner than a dreamy montage of wide-angle shots of the city opens the film than Woody/Isaac’s voiceover deflates what we see, suggesting his ambivalence; sure, this is the most beautiful city on Earth, but it is also a metaphor, Isaac tells us, for everything he finds degenerate. The images are bold and decisive, but we hear Isaac beginning his book (an expansion, he claims, of his story about his mother, “The Castrating Zionist”), scrapping what he has written, starting again, scrapping, restarting, etc., until we are not sure what Isaac feels about the city—or about himself. Manhattan ought to be locating Isaac, stabilizing his wobbly ego, but instead it has become a part of this as he projects upon it his self-doubts. Matters in his life reflect the self-uncertainty that his cynicism covers: Jill, his more recent ex-wife (Meryl Streep, terrific), left him for a woman and is now writing a book smearing their unfulfilling marriage; Tracy, his current girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway, sensitive and sublime—along with Allen, giving the best performance), is 17 (“She does homework!”)—Isaac is 42—and therefore cannot possibly, he says to her exquisite face, be really in love with him. But she is; Isaac, we can see for ourselves that she absolutely is. Isaac, open your eyes! Before you trample something fragile and wonderful!
     Isaac sets himself up for another fall, breaking off with Tracy and settling in with Mary (Diane Keaton, coming damn close to sublimity) after this “high-strung” journalist guiltily breaks off with Yale (Michael Murphy), Isaac’s married best friend. But Mary, still in love with Yale, dumps Isaac for Yale, confirming Isaac’s cynical view of things. The Manhattan that Isaac loves is disappearing (some of it is literally being demolished); relationships are evanescent. Tracy must lose the quality of innocence—narcissistically, her teachableness for Isaac—and everything else also must change. How does one hold onto things when the world keeps turning? Well, one thing one can do is insist on one’s own moral authority. When Isaac jiminy-crickets him, Yale explodes, “You’re so self-righteous. You think you’re God!”—to which Isaac explains, “I’ve got to model myself on someone.”
     Beneath all the wit and humor, there is that undertow of melancholy—just as there is in Swing Time, Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936) and Shall We Dance (Sandrich, 1937). As with the last of these Astaire-Rogers musical romances, all the music we hear in Manhattan is by Gershwin, beginning and closing with rousing chords from Rhapsody in Blue. Folks, when you start to hear “But Not for Me” on the soundtrack, head for the hankies.
     Best Film prizes: BAFTA, César, Bodil, Italian film journalists, National Board of Review. Best Direction: National Society of Film Critics; New York film critics.

ADAPTATION (Spike Jonze, 2002)

Now it’s clear—clearer than even Being John Malkovich (1999) left the matter: Charlie Kaufman is a brilliant comedy writer. Adaptation, another collaboration with director Spike Jonze (pronounced Jones), is curious, audacious and on the mark. It’s all about, on several different levels, adaptation.

The premise of the plot is dizzyingly complicated. Being John Malkovich having given him currency in Hollywood, Kaufman is adapting for the screen Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, as actual a book as Kaufman and Orlean are actual persons, as indeed is John Laroche, the fancier of orchids to whom Orlean’s title refers. (Orlean is a writer for the New Yorker.) A work of nonfiction without, therefore, a plot of its own, The Orchid Thief proves massively difficult for Kaufman to adapt into a fictional screenplay. Contributing further to the problem are Kaufman’s all-round unhappiness and defeatism, his ongoing (interior) battle with Hollywood commercialism and compromise, and the presence in his home of his identical twin brother, Donald, who enthusiastically takes up screenwriting as something to do and ends up having a much easier time writing his (moronic) script than Charlie is having writing his. Adaptation credits both Charlie and Donald Kaufman with writing the film’s script, but Donald, however “real” he may be in the film, doesn’t actually exist. In any case, Donald is as cheerfully shallow as Charlie is endlessly worried about measuring up and doing the right thing.

Donald has a mentor, Robert McKee, at whose screenwriting seminars he develops a quasi-religious faith in the sort of formulaic Hollywood writing that’s anathema to his brother. Under McKee’s tutelage, Donald, a first-time writer, will come up with a million-dollar (though hackneyed) script, prompting an act of desperation on the part of mind-blocked Charlie, who demeans himself by attending one of the seminars, where the commercial guru publicly humiliates him. By no means is this the only cause of the script that Charlie ends up with—an “adaptation” that submits to every sort of commercial vileness that, at the outset, Kaufman had been determined to avoid. No other American film that I’ve seen better dissects the matrix of pressures, from without and within, that leads intelligent writers to come up with the kind of crap that acts as the springboards for Hollywood’s current and recent crop of compromised and corrupt “entertainments.”

The tack of the film is this: As Charlie suffers throughout the ordeal of piecing together an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, we “see” the script that’s taking shape, a projection, as it were, of the actual eventual film, the one we’re watching—only, the confusion between fiction and non- that this engenders wildly results, too, in a “real” adventure involving the Kaufman brothers, Orlean and Laroche that corresponds to nothing in actuality, and instead teases the latter two out of their reality as human beings into murderous figures in a farfetched melodrama: precisely the sort of thing that Hollywood loves to make out of “real-life” persons and events. The adventure costs Charlie a brother (a fool who, incidentally, as he expires from gunshot discloses belatedly wisdom and intelligence), but it ensures him a second Oscar nomination. This is withering satire at the expense of Hollywood—but also, implicitly, at the expense of the audience to which, in the creation of its lousy movies, Hollywood at least believes that it’s meticulously responding.

For protection against lawsuits, films and television programs used to bear a disclaimer insisting on the fictional nature of both the characters and events that they portray. Lately, however, these shows instead boast that they are based on real people, real events. Almost always, though, what appears on the movie or TV screen, despite this claim, is so unreal and farfetched, so contrived and melodramatic, that an intelligent viewer instinctively knows that the fiction has only the slightest toehold in truth. Kaufman has a high time in Adaptation ridiculing the factual claims of these erstwhile entertainments; and because he and Jonze, rather than resting on the ridicule, frame their satire in a consideration of more momentous forms of “adaptation” than Hollywood’s adaptation of reality to their business motives and interests, the film develops a tragic undertow. One of these other forms of adaptation involves the evolutionary history of species of orchids; another, the evolutionary history of man. To be sure, this seems to take away as much as it gives, as though Kaufman finds himself as much seduced by the compromises that his industry dictates as opposed to them; but this also accounts for the film’s surprising heartache in the midst of its hilarity. Life in America (and, surely, not only in America), it seems, requires each of us constantly to adapt our ideals and morals to a series of compelling realities.

Geography underscores the film’s concern with evolution. There are three principal locations: Orlean’s New York City, an apotheosis of civilization; Kaufman’s L.A./Hollywood, an apotheosis of corruption and compromise; and Laroche’s rural Florida, with its proverbial primordial swamp, where civilized people become barbaric hunters and the hunted, and monsters—I confess: I don’t know an alligator from a crocodile—menacingly lurk about, evoking a prehistoric world. Indeed, part of the film’s weird, dark fun is to see Kaufman—well, both Kaufmans—and Orlean functioning in ways so unlike their own in the midst of this swamp.

Adaptation is a wonderful film, playful, sharp and inventive; Kaufman’s shyness with women perhaps encapsulates the film’s warmth and tenderness, helping to move it in an optimistic direction. But it’s by no means a perfect piece of work. Jonze’s filmmaking doesn’t match the caliber of Kaufman’s script. Moreover, the actor who plays the Kaufman brothers doesn’t strike me as being up to the task. Nicolas Cage is an actor of very limited resources, and I’m afraid that, in addition to distinguishing one brother from another in a blatant and uninteresting fashion, he drowns much of his Charlie in a swamp of mawkishness. (He should have found a way of dryly cutting against the self-uncertain stream-of-consciousness with which the character is aptly provided.) This is particularly unfortunate, for Cage’s dedication to the tricky double part is unmistakable, and Cage largely succeeds in implying the possibility that one Kaufman is the fiction of the other Kaufman. On balance, some other actor—perhaps a colder actor, like Vincent D’Onofrio—might have taken less away from the film.

Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep, on the other hand, are to die for as Laroche and Orlean. These parts are gloriously played. Irascible, sneaky, anarchic, borderline demented and—I must say it—swampy, this unflattering but utterly fascinating portrait of Laroche brought Cooper an Oscar at last. Indeed, this marvelous actor also took home best supporting actor prizes from many other quarters, including the National Board of Review and the critics’ groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Kansas City, Vancouver, Dallas-Fort Worth and Toronto. (The last also named Cage best actor.) The Southeastern Film Critics Association, which named Cooper best supporting actor, likewise named Streep best supporting actress, and the pair also won Golden Globes from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Streep is delicious throughout, although the phone scene where Orlean mimics a dial tone is one high point, and a voiced decision on Orlean’s part involving Kaufman’s fate (it’s Donald, but Orlean thinks it’s Charlie) is another. (When Orlean met Streep for the first time, at a screening of the film, in fact, she said to Streep, quite in the spirit of Adaptation, I would say, “I wish I were Susan Orlean.”) This is Streep’s best work since Fred Schepisi’s A Cry in the Dark (1988). The critics’ group in Chicago named her best supporting actress, as did the Florida Film Critics Circle, which, appropriately enough (given the film’s Florida connection), also named the film the year’s best, Kaufman best scenarist, and Cooper best supporting actor.

Adaptation won Jonze a Silver Bear at Berlin and the best film prize of the Toronto critics, and Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin won prizes for their [sic] screenplay from the British Academy, the National Board of Review, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, and the critics’ groups in New York, Boston, Toronto and Chicago.

Despite all these accolades, not everyone may like the film right off the bat. After all, the film is very odd. For some, warming up to it may take some adaptation.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19