Review of 2015: Part 3 - Books (and a tiny bit of TV)

I've been trying to read a book a week. Here's how I got on. (My other reviews of the year, concerning movies and live shows are up already.)

Fiction:



For me, this was a year dominated by four writers, but really it was the year of Vonnegut. The year that I found a writer who moved me, made me think, and made me howl with laughter. Who seemed to be writing just for me. And who taught me that the only person you should write like is yourself (I finished my first book this year) and who was responsible for, erm, nine of the 47 books I've read. (I could still make it to 52.)

Of Vonnegut's works, Slaughterhouse Five is the obvious stand-out - the book that drew most memorably on his own experiences, and made his name - but the polemically dazzling God Bless You, Mr Rosewater is a withering critique of capitalism (with a distinctly sentimental side), and in Mother Night he mines race hate for all the black comedy he can find, with dangerously funny results.



My favourite book of the year, though, was Philip Roth's American Pastoral, a masterwork, spun with bravura style, that deals with immigrant identity, the unknowability of everyone, the disappointments of adulthood and the utter chaos of existence, as a legendary high school sports star turned upstanding citizen has his life exploded by an unexpected act of violence. It is his daughter “who transports him out of the longed for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counter-pastoral — into the indigenous American berserk", as Roth unforgettably characterises it. The Human Stain, by the same author, isn't far behind.



The third author who took up quite a bit of my time this year was John Steinbeck, whose trilogy of books about the Californian labour struggle in the 1930s are absolutely astounding. Everyone knows about the trim, simple Of Mice and Men, and the sprawling, experimental Grapes of Wrath, but prior to those he wrote a book every bit as good: In Dubious Battle: a muddy, hungry, violent chronicle of a strike, a neglected classic apparently too abrasive, gloomy and superficially cynical to have ever found much of an audience.

And then there was Jane Austen, whose escapist but often weighty works allowed me to pass many a contented hour. I've read Pride and Prejudice and have Northanger Abbey left to read - of the others, it was Persuasion that left the greatest impact on me. Written as Austen was ailing (and so facing a severe race against time), it seems like the articulation of her entire worldview, albeit within the boundaries of a conventional romance.


The yawn also rises.

Other highlights of the year were Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, Truman Capote's legendary In Cold Blood (which falls somewhere between fiction and non-fiction) and Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Donna Tartt's The Secret History. The worst novel I read was Hemingway's tedious, self-indulgent early work, The Sun Also Rises: a great title and a singular style in search of anything like a story.

Non-Fiction:



I tend to read quite a lot of books about movies (my 48th book, in which I'm currently engrossed, is about Peter Lorre), and this year was no different. Of the biographies, David Stenn's excellent, meticulously-researched Jean Harlow book, Bombshell, was by far the best, though Charles Affron's work on Lillian Gish, and the actress's own memoir - The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me - are well worth seeking out if you're a fan, as I am (bit of a long shot). The same can't be said of the Warren William and William Haines books I read, since William enjoyed an almost uniquely dull existence, while Haines's move away from Hollywood and into interior decorating really doesn't make for the most thrilling reading.

Far better were Victor S. Navasky's cool, forensic audit of the Hollywood witchhunt, Naming Names, and the non-fiction novel, Tinseltown, which paints an unforgettable portrait of the movie community in the 1920s and may just have solved the murder of top director, William Desmond Taylor.



Besides Gish, the deceased lady I'm most interested in (not romantically) is the tragic British songstress Sandy Denny, and I read two books about her as well. Neither of them were all that great, unlike this blog I wrote about her, which is the most-read thing on here this year. Peter Hitchens bought the Mick Houghton book from me on Amazon, which was odd.

Away from the arts, I enjoyed four books by Jon Ronson, of which his latest - So You've Been Publicly Shamed - was in many ways the most serious and frightening, as well as the most coherent and complete. There were two Ben Macintyre books (Operation Mincemeat was great fun), two about the Mitford sisters, a horrible, compulsively-readable true crime tale (True Story by Michael Finkel), and Bridget Christie's utterly charming concoction, A Book for Her, which discusses feminism, comedy and campaigning. She is wonderful.

***

TV:


Sexy brilliant actor man.

I accidentally moved into a flat without a TV aerial, so everything I saw was on iPlayer or DVD. A Moon for the Misbegotten, a 1975 TV movie based on Eugene O'Neill's play and starring Jason Robards, was head and shoulders above the rest. The BBC's adaptation of Wolf Hall had its flaws, but also the greatest performance of this and perhaps any other year, in Mark Rylance's Thomas Cromwell. By contrast, even the acting powers of Ben Whishaw couldn't save London Spy, which relinquished its curious hold on the audience after three interesting episodes, and fell down the toilet. The Apprentice was great, especially the interview round, but Jack Dee's baffling descent into unfunniness proceeded to sink You're Fired without trace. Meanwhile, Adam Curtis's iPlayer exclusive, Bitter Lake, did something utterly new. And the best sitcom of the modern era, Parks and Recreation, came to a close, with something between a bang and a whimper.

***

Thanks for reading, and for all the comments and support this year. :-)

Jason Robards, Naked, and why Hollywood ignored the Nazis - Reviews #207

Over the bank holiday weekend, I saw Paul McCartney, David Ford (above) and Al Pacino. Here is all the other stuff I've done lately.

FILMS



A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965) - 85% of this film resulted in outright, prolonged laughter. 60% visibly moved me. 100% of Robards' performance is beyond brilliant. (4)

***



Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993) - Mike Leigh's vicious, virtuosic masterpiece still looks sensational more than 20 years on: an episodic, incendiary portrait of the breakdown of British society.

David Thewlis uses up all the genius he ever had as motormouthed Mancunian misogynist Johnny, a man with a rapier wit and a rapey personality, who staggers through a series of vitriolic, vituperative encounters with lonely, damaged people in a dying London, using his intellect and his sexuality as the deadliest, direst of weapons.

His interactions with a sweary Scottish homeless guy (Ewan Bremner) and a sexually frustrated security guard are simply the stuff of legend.

I'll never get over how much I love Katrin Cartlidge's voice, either, and for Potterheads there's the sight of the young, highly unwashed Lupin pretending to be a werewolf.

Are you wiv meh? (4)

***



Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) - The wife and the mistress of the world’s most unpleasant man plot his death in this stunning genre-hopper from Wages of Fear director Clouzot. It’s cynical and gripping, with flashes of humour and humanity, and Simone Signoret exuding malignant cool as a peroxide, jump-suited murderess with killer shades. There's twist after twist after twist - and the final two are just dynamite. (4)

***



The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006) - This is probably the most widely-praised film I'd never seen (except Fury Road, but that only came out about eight minutes ago), so I thought I better finally get around to it.

It’s a brilliant story, brilliantly told, in which a security service operative (Ulrich Mühe) in mid-'80s East Germany is asked to spy on a renowned playwright (Sebastian Koch) - apparently loyal to the communist state - and finds his blind loyalty to his paymasters severely tested. While it could look a little more dynamic, possessing a glossy TV-movie appearance at odds with the chilly subject matter, and has a little flabbiness around the middle, there's little else to quibble with in this Tinker-Tailor-with-a-Stasi-spin, which is emotionally complex, increasingly gripping and builds to a wonderful, satisfying finale.

A film so preoccupied with the plight of artists could conceivably have alienated a broader audience, but this one invests so much in its taciturn, conflicted anti-hero that its resonance is enormous, and probably universal. Mühe, who tragically died just months after release, is simply excellent as the man scrubbing himself quietly clean after taking a long bath in the moral morass. (3.5)

***



Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (Abraham Polonsky, 1969) - Abraham Polonsky’s allegorical Western isn’t quite as great as you’d like it to be, but it is important and fascinating, with some exceptionally good dialogue.

Polonsky was one of the best screenwriters of the late-1940s and had just graduated to directing, with the superlative crime parable Force of Evil, when the hammer fell. As Hollywood was gripped by anti-communist fervour, the lifelong Marxist was denounced as “a very dangerous citizen” in the HUAC hearings and found himself blacklisted.

It wasn’t until 1968 that Polonsky’s name appeared on screen again, when he wrote the script for a police procedural, Madigan. A year later, he directed his first film for 21 years, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. To put that in some sort of relatable context: when Force of Evil came out, George Harrison was five; 1969 was the year of Abbey Road.

The film deals with a real-life event from 1901 that must have been hugely attractive to someone who had been through what he had, being the story of a proud Native American (Robert Blake) who kills in self-defence and then flees on foot, pursued by dozens of lawmen, vigilantes and federal officers. Here, the manhunt is led by a conflicted sheriff (Robert Redford) living in the shadow of his dead father.

It’s a movie lit by Polonsky’s characteristically brusque, brilliant dialogue – “You’re not mayor yet,” Redford tells a politician while they’re on the hunt, “you’re just runnin’ – like Willie Boy” – and some glorious imagery: dust-drenched vistas boiling in the sun. The action, when it occasionally intrudes, is also superbly handled, and the film is awash with ideas: about community, justice, persecution and personal identity.

Where it falls down, though, is in the muddled story – littered with muddy, poorly-defined characters engaged in confused relationships - and the performances, which are uniformly mediocre (though Blake is the best thing on show). Whenever the film starts to work up some momentum, Katharine Ross turns up in brownface, or Redford starts yelling at his doctor girlfriend, and it all falls away again.

I’m a big admirer of Polonsky, as both a writer and a man, and I wish this was another classic in the Force of Evil vein. Though it's not, we can at least revel in his language – both audible and visual – and the cherished, confrontational ideals he looked to wallop across in his work. (3)

***



The Mortal Storm (Frank Borzage, 1940) - From 1933 onwards, the head of Hollywood’s censorship office, fascist sympathiser and notorious anti-Semite Joseph Breen, prevented the studios from making films which were critical of Nazi Germany. He did this using point 2.2 of the Motion Picture Production Code:

“That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated, to the end that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated and that good taste may be emphasized:

International relations (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country's religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry).”

On those rare occasions when Hollywood made films set in Germany, it tended to sidestep the issue completely. In Charlie Chan at the Olympics, which features footage of the 1936 Games in Berlin, the teutonic police force were not virulent racists, merely officious types who looked like the Kaiser in a WWI helmet. Anti-Nazi films were frequently planned but never delivered, and The Life of Emile Zola included not a mention of Joseph Dreyfus’s Jewishness, or the anti-Semitism so crucial to the case that Zola so celebratedly took on. Studios, afraid of losing the lucrative German market even though they were all run by Jewish businessmen, were fairly happy to oblige, and MGM put pressure on the great and unspoken Myrna Loy to apologise, after she criticised Hitler and her movies were banned. She refused, because she was a badass.

In 1939, 12 months after Breen had followed the Pope's lead in denouncing Nazism, Warner were able to make Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which dealt with German espionage within the States. The following year, MGM finally summoned the courage to make an anti-Nazi film of its own, The Mortal Storm, though it doesn’t say the word “Nazi” at any point, and nor does it say the word “Jew” (the Roth family, central to the story, are referred to only as “non-Aryans”, which seems almost more inflammatory). It was the first American movie to deal with domestic life in the Third Reich. Upon seeing it, Hitler, with his customary good grace, immediately banned all MGM films, past, present and future.

Frank Morgan plays a respected biologist and professor whose family is split by the rise of the Nazis (though we’re quite late to the story, as it begins the night they come to power), his adopted sons joining the party, but his daughter (Margaret Sullavan) falling in love with a dissident (James Stewart) who stands by his rebellious former mentor, a Jew.

The film seems Hollywoodised, artificial and – seen after the revelations of the death camps – absurdly rose-tinted, with the Roths persecuted, but more so because of what they believe than because of their race. They’re also shot at whilst fleeing the country or made to work in forced labour, not shipped into camps and gassed to death. And The Mortal Storm is the only serious anti-fascist polemic that includes a ski chase.

But the film is very well-cast and acted, with Robert Young’s inherent dislikeability for once put to fairly good use, an interesting part for the very Aryan-looking Robert Stack, and absolutely exceptional performances from Morgan and Sullavan. Morgan, who played the Wizard of Oz and was the only MGM performer on a lifetime contract, was usually utilised as a comedian but was also one of the most underrated dramatic actors of the period, and his turn here is every bit as good as in The Nuisance, The Human Comedy and The Vanishing Virginian (also with director Frank Borzage). Sullavan quit the screen for seven years from 1943, but in her early years made four films with Jimmy Stewart that are still celebrated today, including Lubitsch’s immortal Shop Around the Corner. Few people ever cried as magnificently, or combined the earthy and the ethereal so well, even if she does run funnily.

There are also plenty of Borzage’s flourishes here, though until the last scene nothing to rival his magnificent late silents (like Lucky Star, which also employs snow for a memorable finale). Then the camera starts to tell the story, moving around the rooms like Hitchcock’s did in Rebecca the same year, and putting across the film’s rather botched message as well as is really possible. MGM chooses to ally morality with religion and paint its story as one of free speech and intrusive police, love thwarted and God denied. Not a bad start from them, and more credible perhaps than the embarrassingly one-dimensional propaganda pieces that followed, but not as thoughtful, complex or extensive as a film like this really should be.

It was hilariously marketed as basically "another MGM adaptation of a book", adapted as it was from a novel by English author Phyllis Bottome.

Forget it Rick, it’s Hollywood – at least they managed it in the end. (3)

***



CINEMA: The Falling (Carol Morley, 2014) – This much-lauded indie isn’t even faintly successful (‘faintly’, like the people in it keep fainting), a hodgepodge of other, better movies, with almost nothing of value aside from a few pretty images, a nice Tracey Thorn soundtrack and a charismatic performance from Maisie Williams – well, aside from her curious inability to laugh convincingly – playing an influential, troubled teen whose fondness for fainting sets off an epidemic in her cloistered all girls’ school. Call it We Need to Talk About Faintin’, Sub-par-marine or Picnic at Hanging Cock, but it’s more like The Emperor’s New Clothes. (1.5)

***

BOOKS



Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (1961) – Dangerous and dangerously funny, with Vonnegut mining race hate for all the black comedy he can find; and he's poignant with it. A slim, blistering masterpiece from one of the great novelists. (4)

***



Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star by William J. Mann (1999) – An OK Billy Haines biog, best when it’s dealing with the actor’s battle with MGM – which wanted him to acquiesce to a sham marriage – and documenting the evolution of the gay community in Hollywood. Unfortunately there’s also an abundance of speculation, a tendency to claim that every famous actor of the 20th century was a homosexual (an unfortunate predilection of many gay historians) and a wealth of material about interior decoration, Haines’s chosen profession once he’d been booted out of the film industry. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to be fully satisfied by such disparate parts, or by a book that frames itself as a love story but is unable to provide almost any information about its central relationship. Also there’s only so many times you can describe some bits of furniture without it getting boring – I’d say two, Mann pegs it closer to 1,700. (2.5)

***

THEATRE



Man and Superman (National Theatre) - A bit long, a bit talky, a bit dated in its gender politics, but dizzyingly Shavian: funny, well-acted and full of fascinating ideas about love, politics and personal philosophies. Fiennes rages camply. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Humphrey Jennings, Vera Drake and my new favourite voice - Reviews #205

My continuing adventures in popular culture, both high (movies) and low (EVERYTHING ELSE):

FILMS:

Humphrey Jennings revisited:



Spare Time (1939) - "Spare Time is a time when we do what we like." Yes it is.

Humphrey Jennings' first great film shows a documentarian in transition. The opening two passages, set in Sheffield and Manchester, are altogether mesmerising, but show a somewhat aloof fascination with the working classes - a species previously alien to the Cambridge graduate - which had grown during his time working on the Mass Observation project. He seems sympathetic, but not empathetic, observing their rules and rituals without truly engaging with his subjects. That's especially true, I think, of the still contentious 'kazoo band' sequence, which hints at Jennings' past as a surrealist and manages to be utterly unforgettable, aggressively bizarre and also a little cold.

It's the final chapter, 'Coal', where Spare Time comes into its own, as Jennings alights in a Welsh mining village and something in his soul is stoked: the result a warm, tender portrait of soot-choked generations finding release through music in church halls and romance in sweetshop doorways, the whole piece scored by a beautiful amateur rendition of Handel's Largo. I've seen it on the big screen, the small screen, and in my mind's eye a thousand times, and it still takes the breath away.

The film also contains a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance for my all-time favourite newspaper headline: "Her scent was bats' delight". (4)



A Diary for Timothy (1945) - A masterpiece from Britain's most poetic propagandist, Humphrey Jennings, with an E. M. Forster script read by Michael Redgrave and directed at a newborn baby, who hears a chronicle of his first six months on Earth: of the sacrifices of WWII and the challenges ahead. It's more literal and staged than most of Jennings' others, but full of his sublime visual juxtapositions and the understated, heart-melting vignettes that became an increasing part of his wartime work. It also contains the only existing footage of John Gielgud's Hamlet (ooh sir), perhaps the most celebrated of the century. (4)



The Dim Little Island (1949) - Humphrey Jennings' reputation as "the only true poet that the British screen has yet produced" (Lindsay Anderson, 1954, that quote being the one that's always wheeled out) is based largely on his wartime work.

After an outrageously colourful career as a poet, surrealist and Mass Observationist, Jennings joined the General Post Office as a documentarian, which upon the outbreak of war was renamed the Crown Film Unit and started making propaganda films, including Jennings' calling cards: Listen to Britain and A Diary for Timothy, the latter a mainstay in my all-time top 10 since I first saw it in 2005.

The Dim Little Island, his penultimate film, was made four years after the end of the war and is preoccupied with what happens next, as the country is at once patronised and accused of going to the dogs. In turn, a comic artist (Osbert Lancaster), an industrialist (John Ormston), a naturalist (James Fisher) and the legendary composer Ralph Vaughan Williams give their thoughts on their chosen subject - and therefore on Britain itself - before Jennings starts cross-cutting, drawing some unexpected parallels between their ruminations.

The film lacks the seamlessness and effortless poetry of Jennings' best, not least because of the mannered, awkward voiceovers from Ormston and Fisher, clunky in both content and delivery. But the vivid footage and discussion of Britain at a turning point in its history, busily shedding its influence and relevance, makes it a fascinating historical piece, while the marriage of Vaughan Williams' beautiful music and erudite thoughts to Jennings' incisive, instinctive feel for imagery leads to some truly wonderful moments towards the end of this short, sometimes very special film.

It also shows my lovely office, which made me very proud. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004) - Vera Drake has the feel of one of those campaigning films of the 1950s and ‘60s – such as Victim, which lobbied for the legalisation of homosexuality – but made some 40 years after the law was changed. In that sense, perhaps it has no real reason to exist, but as a character piece and a historical document, it’s sort of fascinating. It’s also exceptionally well-acted.

The title character (Imelda Staunton) is a housewife and domestic cleaner who also works as a freelance, free-of-charge abortionist, helping out girls who get into trouble by pumping them full of soapy water, thus helping them to miscarry. But one day things go wrong, and her poor but idyllic working class existence implodes.

It’s really an ensemble piece, and though some performances do tend towards caricature (the shallow sister-in-law, the rapacious middle-woman, the stupid Irishman), they’re mostly extremely good, as the film effortlessly evokes the atmosphere of a working class community very similar to the one in which my dad grew up. Phil Davis is absolutely superb as Vera’s husband, Adrian Scarborough creates a multi-faceted, multi-layered character as his aspirational brother, and Eddie Marsan is the last word in anxious suitors as the adorable bundle of nerves courting the Drakes’ daughter. If Daniel Mays is caught acting a few times, he still makes a good fist of his conflicted character, wrestling with what he sees as his mother’s betrayal of her family, and of basic decency. As the middle class counterpoint to Drake's working class charges ("you had to have that, it was in no way extraneous," says Leigh a little defensively in the Q&A accompanying this screening), a compelling, breathless Sally Hawkins does at least enjoy a more pampered termination, having suffered through hell to get there.

Best of all, though, is Staunton, who has spent rather too much of her screen career playing wittering gossips. As the saintly Vera, who spends the first half of the film basically acting like your nanna and the second half choking back tears as her world crumbles to dust, she is little short of revelatory, Leigh’s intensive preparations – including an 11-hour in-character improvisation of the film’s turning point – provoking a wealth of complex emotion, impeccably captured by a series of immaculate, uncompromising close-ups.

In some ways, the film is almost nostalgic for the Britain that was, before pop culture hammered a rivet between the generations and Thatcher sounded the death knell for society, but there are untold horrors lurking beneath that cosy, perkily poverty-stricken surface, and Leigh isn’t afraid to show them all, ably assisted by an oft-overlooked actress at the peak of her powers. I don’t think it’s necessarily a great movie – I’m not sure quite what its point is, except that the law should have been changed in 1967, which it was – but it’s gripping and gruelling, while casting light on an under-reported chapter of British history.

(PS: I saw this as part of the Tricycle Theatre's British Screen Classics series, and at the end I got to meet Leigh, Staunton and Davis, which was just awesome. Thanks to my excellent wife for bringing a pen with her for autograph purposes.) (3.5)

***

BOOKS:

As well as the two Sandy books, this one:



Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2011) - Wow. Just exquisite. Hilary Mantel's follow up to Wolf Hall is a fast, sleek, linear sequel without a wasted page. Bloody and brilliant. (4)

***

TV:



Wolf Hall (Peter Kosminsky, 2015 - It's a little hard to tell how good this edited highlights package is; without the bits between the bits that we know from Mantel's Booker Prize-winning books, perhaps it wouldn't work so well. It's also fair to say there's a little too much of people just walking around, while Bernard Hill and Jonathan Pryce are both largely going through the motions. Those shortcomings are largely blown away, though, by Mark Rylance's astonishing performance as brooding courtier Thomas Cromwell, his acting the most mesmeric I've seen since Rebecca Benson tore up the Apollo Theatre in last year's Let the Right One In, and reminiscent of Jason Robards at his early '60s peak. His voice is also utterly seductive, it may well be love. Kosminsky's unusual visual sense also grew on me, as did the sparing, simple traditional score, and the female characters were perfectly cast across the board. (3.5). I think.

***

THEATRE:


Sometimes starring Beverley Knight.

Memphis (Shaftesbury Theatre) - An explosive first half, full of stunning stagecraft, gives way to a somewhat muted second that's set too much around a sterile, uninteresting TV show. The story - about an interracial couple in '50s Memphis - is also rather slight, but the numbers are strong without being sensational, and the cast is first-rate, especially alternate female lead, Rachel John. (3)



Antigone (Barbican) - A frequently dazzling introduction to Greek tragedy, with Juliette Binoche a beautifully compromised heroine, and seamlessly modern staging. A few lulls, though also - surprisingly - a few lols. (3.5)



"There is no present or future - only the past, happening over and over again, now." A Moon for the Misbegotten (film, 1975) - In 1956, Jason Robards exploded onto Broadway in a then-neglected play by Eugene O’Neill by the name of The Iceman Cometh. As Hickey, the play’s bruised, brooding, evangelical salesman, flogging temperance to a bar-load of barflies, he gave a performance of bristling intensity that’s among the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen, thankfully captured in a 1960 live TV broadcast that’s essential for anyone who cares about theatre or drama or really life in general. That revival, directed by José Quintero, led to the comprehensive rehabilitation of a play that up until then had been regarded as one of O’Neill’s weaker efforts.

Thirteen years later, Robards and Quintero returned to O’Neill in A Moon for the Misbegotten (Robards had also appeared in a film of Long Day's Journey Into Night, playing a younger version of his character here), and once again it was filmed for broadcast, with one set, a minimum of credible make-up and a pair of Irish accents so improbable that you could sue the actors for lying. Regardless of how you feel about those things – and I’m pleased with the first, apathetic about the second and got over the distraction of the third after 20-odd minutes – it’s a stunning achievement, a remarkably grown-up, literate and moving film with the writer’s usual damaged souls marinated in alcohol, spewing out their skeletons as the liquor tips them into despair.

Colleen Dewhurst is Josie Hogan, a rough, big-breasted farmhouse girl with a reputation as a slut, who attracts the attention of a charming Broadway actor (Jason Robards), plagued by dark moods and a bleak past. Her father – played by Ed Flanders, 10 years her junior – is a drunk who may be a tyrant or a bastard or a great dad – it’s a play of shifting perceptions – and whose unconvincing ageing make-up has gone a bit crusty. Dewhurst and Flanders both struggle to come up with anything approaching a credible Irish accent – her attempt is particularly baffling – and yet both performances are nothing short of astounding, blessed with a vast depth of emotion that comes out in subtle inflections and fleeting gestures. Rather that way round than the other (hello, Meryl Streep, I am looking at you – when did you last make me feel anything).

And Robards, that eternally underrated actor, who played few lead roles in films because he was considered a bit ugly (how could anyone that talented be ugly? I suppose he did have an enormous head), is simply amazing, inhabiting O’Neill’s avuncular, semi-autobiographical boozehound, ravaged by self-loathing, while surely drawing heavily on his own fertile experiences as a substance-abusing manic-depressive. Swinging from uncertainty to euphoria to tenderness to bitterness, self-recrimination and finally self-awareness, he’s desperately moving and unwaveringly, compulsively watchable.

I’m not sure it’s for all tastes: the camera generally goes to the right places, but there’s little in the way of staging or action, just lots and lots of talking, some of it cyclical, some of it funny, most of it profound in O’Neill’s familiarly sad, elegiac and battered humanist style, lent an unbearable, unforgettable weight by two actors in exceptional form, and another who has probably never been surpassed. (4)



Maxine Peake in Hamlet (film, 2014) - Maxine Peake is a Hamlet of relentless game-playing, caustic sardonism and frequent spit-flecked fury in this engrossing, arresting Royal Exchange adaptation of Shakespeare’s finest. The story, as you may know, is that “a ghost and a prince meat, and everyone ends in mincemeat”. While the script is recycled from a West End production in 2009, and the supporting cast is a little bland, causing attention to wander when its hero(ine) is off-screen, that scenario is lit by staging of minimalist invention – including an ingenious ‘apparition’ scene featuring oversized yellow lightbulbs lowered to the stage floor – some perturbing grace notes (the Prince of Denmark mock-wanking), and the hottest Hamlet since John Barrymore. (3)

and sort of theatre, in a way:



Stephen Merchant: Hello Ladies... Live! (2011) - I'm generally a fan of Stephen Merchant, but I found this document of his first - and so far only - stand-alone stand-up show strangely slight, hackneyed and lacking in ambition. It includes newspaper clippings from 10 years earlier, which are funny but suggest a certain paucity of invention, and laboured gags about his height, his stinginess and Ricky Gervais. At times you can see the working, as he moves laboriously or unconvincingly from one topic to another. There are a few good jokes, though, and he has excellent comic timing to make up for a comic persona that's rather less appealing than the real-life Merchant appears to be. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.