DVD/150: MY BOY JACK (Brian Kirk, 2007, tv)

In 1997, I saw David Haig play Rudyard Kipling at the Hampstead Theatre in his play MY BOY JACK, ten years on he starred in a tv adaptation, with Daniel Radcliffe as his son John, Kim Cattrall and Carey Mulligan.

In 1914, Kipling was an exponent for Britain entering World War 1 - and accepted a Government offer to write propaganda - while also encouraging his 16 year-old son John to join up.

But John was rejected by the navy and the army due to chronic short-sightedness.

Kipling pulled strings and John became a lieutenant in the Irish Guards, much to the shock of his mother and sister. 

A fortnight after arriving in France, John went missing during the Battle of Loos. He was 18.

After doggedly inspecting photographs of injured soldiers, the Kiplings finally heard that John was last seen disorientated during the battle. They never found his body.

Shelf or charity shop?  One for the plastic storage box.  It is a sombre story, soberly told.  A little too soberly perhaps as the film seems to want to build to an explosion of anguish which never comes.  Carey Mulligan is fine as the 'modern' sister who shares John's wish to leave their stuffy family home but her character fades after John's death, while Kim Cattrall is admirably restrained as Kipling's American wife Carrie but her release of anguish is not the fireworks you expect.  Daniel Radcliffe's usual gauche manner suits John Kipling well and he plays well against David Haig's all-enveloping Kipling, his stiff-upper-lip facade trembles marvellously as he attempts to hide his pain.  The most niggling thing about it all is that the poem MY BOY JACK was not written for his son but for Jack Cornwell, the youngest sailor to die earlier in 1916 during the Battle of Jutland.  John Kipling was always called John, not Jack.

"Have you news of my boy Jack?”
    Not this tide.
"When d'you think that he'll come back?"
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

"Has any one else had word of him?"
    Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?"
    None this tide,
    Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
    Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
    This tide,
    And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
    And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

DVD/150: NEVER LET ME GO (Mark Romanek, 2010)

Kazuo Ishiguro's heartbreaking 2005 novel became a haunting film directed by Mark Romanek and adapted by Alex Garland.

In 1978, three children live at Hailsham boarding school with it's adherance to clean living.  Kathy and Ruth are friends but when Kathy and Tommy show a growing affection, Ruth steals him away.

They are stunned when a new teacher tells them the truth: they have been cloned to become organ doners who will probably 'complete' after their third donation.

After moving into a halfway house, Ruth and Tommy drift apart while Kathy leaves to become a carer: a doner whose operations are deferred so they can 'buddy' other clones until they 'complete'.

Nine years later, Kathy discovers her friends have started donating.  A repentant Ruth dies, and as Kathy and Tommy begin a relationship, they pursue a rumour that a loving couple will get deferred.

This film lingers in your thoughts...

Shelf or charity shop? Although destined for the limbo of my DVD plastic storage box, I will definitely revisit this devastating adaptation of Ishiguro's profound novel for Romanek's autumnal tone, and the remarkable performances of Carey Mulligan as Kathy and Andrew Garfield who is genuinely heartbreaking as Tommy.  Keira Knightley has never been better than as the brittle Ruth, Sally Hawkins is touching as the teacher who cannot keep Hailsham's secret and Charlotte Rampling is chilling as the school headmistress who delivers Kathy and Tommy's killer blow.

Dvd/150: SUFFRAGETTE (Sarah Gavron, 2015)

The struggle to win the vote for British women in the early 1900s oddly fits into a genre of British film: working-class group make a stand against their lot eg. MADE IN DAGENHAM, PRIDE...

SUFFRAGETTE is expertly directed by Sarah Gavron but Abi Morgan's script at times feels obvious.

Morgan's fictional heroine is Maud, an East-End laundress, wife and mother. While witnessing suffragettes smashing shop windows, Maud recognizes co-worker Violet among them. When the government refuse to change the law, a brutal attack by policemen leads to Maud's arrest and jail sentence which confirms her as an activist; her loss of job and family cannot make her betray the cause.

Carey Mulligan is wonderful as Maud with fine support from Anne-Marie Duff as Violet.  Helena Bonham Carter never quite convinces as a politicized pharmacist but there is a marvellous cameo from Meryl Streep as Emmaline Pankhurst.

Shelf or charity shop? A keeper in the dvd limbo of a plastic storage box.  No room sadly to mention the fine support of Ben Wishaw and Brendan Gleeson or that Helena Bonham Carter is the great-grand-daughter of Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister who refused the suffragettes the vote!

Love and Politics in the 1990s

I was thinking the other day that we seem to be in a very good season for excellent performances onstage at the moment - Michael Xavier, Joanna Riding (Pajama Game), Julian Ovenden, Geoffrey Streatfeild, Lewis Reeves, Matt Bardock, Richard Cant (My Night With Reg), Clive Wood, Eve Best, Phil Daniels (Antony & Cleopatra),  Helen McCrory (Medea), Billie Piper, Aaron Neil, Robert Glenister (Great Britain)... and now you can add two others to that list, Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in the revival of David Hare's SKYLIGHT at the Wyndhams Theatre.

I never saw the original production of the play which starred Michael Gambon and Lia Williams which did the usual hop, skip and jump of National Theatre - West End - Broadway.  After it's Broadway run it reopened in London with Bill Nighy in the Gambon role and he is revisiting the role again, 18 years later.

This production also has Carey Mulligan in her West End debut and she was the reason I wanted to see it as her performances in AN EDUCATION, NEVER LET ME GO, DRIVE and SHAME have been exceptional.  Luckily she did not disappoint, with both her and Nighy giving sparky, memorable performances.

Set in that ancient, long-gone time - the early 1990s - the action takes place in a small council flat in West London which Kyra is subletting from a friend.  Kyra is a teacher in a struggling school in East Ham and has a quiet, untroubled private life.

One wintry night, Kyra is surprised to receive a visit from Edward, the 18 year-old son of her ex-lover Tom, a wealthy restaurateur.  She learns that Edward's mother died from cancer a year ago and that father and son are struggling with each other's unspoken grief, sharing a house that is no longer a home.  Edward is also still angry that Kyra walked out of all their lives three years before with no word of explanation.  Edward, bristling with the sulkiness of youth, skulks off but who should appear later also unannounced?  Tom turns up, saying he just happens to have been in the area.  Just by chance he also has an unopened bottle of Whisky.

 

Prowling the small flat like a lion in a cage, straightening and unstraightening her school books, dragging a chair out with his foot only to push it back again, Tom obviously has come on a mission which slowly is revealed along with what really happened three years before.  Although their story starts six years before that...

That's when Kyra had landed a waitress job in Tom and his wife's Chelsea restaurant soon after arriving in London.  She proved indispensable to the couple and their children, eventually moving in to the family home. Needless to say, Kyra and Tom were soon lovers although she said she would leave if his wife ever found out.  When she did, Kyra left with no goodbyes.  Soon after Tom's wife was diagnosed with cancer and he did all he could to make her life comfortable in their home.  Finally he admits to Kyra that he is there to try and get her back but Kyra is a different person now and refuses to give up her new life, although she cannot help her old feelings surfacing.

What soon emerges in their barbed conversations - and out-and-out arguing - is that Tom, while railing at the political correctness and woolly liberalism that he sees all around him, can no more understand Kyra's wish to travel across London every day to deliberately work in a depressing job than she can for his ever-growing need for money and his selfish world view.

In their night of long knives, we see both sides of their argument - yes, Tom cared for his dying wife turning their home into her holistic paradise but was he doing it out of genuine love or guilt over the affair and yes, Kyra cares passionately for the sink-estate children she teaches but is her hair-shirt approach to life just a reaction against her upper-middle-class upbringing - is she a working class tourist?

Bill Nighy was on excellent form as Tom the misanthrope ex-lover, railing at a changing world while attempting to repeat the past with Kyra.  His comic timing was wonderful, gaining huge laughs at his withering responses to both life and Kyra's attempts at carving out a new career, as well as the physicality of his performance too, you could feel his revulsion having to handle the lump of cheese Kyra was intending to put in her ragu!  But underneath it all was a loneliness, an emptiness and his short-lived happiness at their resumption of intimacy was touching.

Carey Mulligan had a wonderful sense of gravitas as Kyra, firmly believing that she was making a difference to people's lives and ideologically stronger than either of her male visitors.  Her sly sense of humour was delightfully played and she also suggested the quiet gnawing loneliness of a young woman deliberately cutting herself off from love.  I do hope she makes the return to stage often, she is too good an actress to be lost to film.  She also proves she can multi-task by acting and cooking onstage at the same time!  And it was real cooking too... the smell of frying onions was delicious!!!

Matthew Beard was effective as the stroppy Edward - an archetypal teenage boy that his father likens to a character from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS - who surprises both Kyra and the audience in the final scene.

Stephen Daldrey directs with his customary insight and stages the ebb-and-flow conversations with variety and pace.  Bob Crowley's set design conjured up the drab flat perfectly, it's invisible inner walls seen against a life-like block of council flats with lights going on and off in the windows showing that, while Tom and Kyra are battling each other, life goes on elsewhere.

An excellent revival of a fascinating play, as relevant now as it was in 1995.

Flickers...

It's not been my finest year for cinemagoing... *flicks through diary* ...four times to be precise.  Two new films, two old.  I am nothing if not disciplined!

My first film of the year was Pedro Almodóvar's LOS AMANTES PASAJEROS (I'M SO EXCITED) and I was!  It has not been well-received with carping about it being too camp and too much like his early 'movida' films.  Which was probably why I enjoyed it as much as I did.  Pedro can't win, when his films went through a transition during the mid-nineties the general consensus was "Why isn't he doing more funny films like he used to make?"  The fact that he can move across styles and genres marks out his excellence.

Yes it was lightweight and ephemeral but it also had a wicked sense of humour - his characters here aren't given depth and deep emotions, they are brash, glossy and non-stop talking for longer than a full Madrid minute.

Taking his cue from the "Airport" film series, a plane on a routine flight is discovered to have damaged landing gear and only a limited amount of fuel and we watch as the passengers and crew react to the situation.  Only here the crew have access to copious amounts of drink and drugs - which they eventually share with the passengers!

As with any disaster film we have a motley bunch in first-class, a high-class bondage madame, a Mexican hit-man, a recently married couple, a psychic, a businessman etc. and of course we also get to find out what has brought them to be on that plane.  Mostly though we concentrate on the three gay cabin crew: the wonderful Javier Camara as Joserra who is having an affair with the pilot, Raul Arevalo as thin-as-a-whip Ulloa and chubby Fajas (Carlos Areces) who never flies without his portable shrine!

For us Pedro fans another treat was seeing Cecilia Roth (star of his first film PEPI, LUCI BOM as well as the magnificent TODO SOBRE MI MADRE) as the high-class dominatrix and Lola Dueñas (VOLVER, LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS) as the lovelorn psychic Bruna.  There are also two delightful cameos from long-time Pedro stars Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz as the airport workers who accidentally damage the plane.

 

It was fun, filthy and flew by, the only time the film seemed to pall was when we left the interior of the plane and returned to earth.  The highlight of the film being the trolly-dollys choreographed dance routine around the plane to The Pointer Sisters' I'M SO EXCITED (which is where the English language title comes from) - and on the subject of music, Alberto Iglesias' score is a major component in it's success.  If you want to view the film as a satire on Spain's current malaise you can, if you want to view it as a hymn to camp gay men - hey that's there as well!

 

As usual, I came out wondering where this remarkable film maker will take us next.

My second new film was Baz Luhrmann's much-vaunted version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY.  This one was always going to be tricky for me, firstly because GATSBY is my favourite novel (I re-read it again last August) and secondly, because I have a problem with Luhrmann.  I loved WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO + JULIET but his other films have always annoyed the hell out of me.

Luhrmann has stated that he made the film because he loves the book but I can't believe it's the same one that I do.

I have sat staring at this screen trying to find a way in to blogging about the film but I simply can't.  Let me try it this way:

What did I like?  Leonardo DiCaprio gave a performance of pure star quality, suggesting the loneliness and quiet desperation behind Gatsby's studied pose.  He also conveyed the unquenchable hope that lay behind all his efforts to win Daisy back.  DiCaprio also had real chemistry with co-star Carey Mulligan.  The trouble with Mulligan though is she is such an intelligent actress that I felt she was simply too grounded to play Daisy.  Mia Farrow was the perfect Daisy in the 1974 version, highly-strung, maddening, gossamer.

 

 

Occasionally a screen image would appear which made me gasp with amazement and his vision of the desolate valley of ashes, that stretch of misery between the rich worlds of West Egg and New York was exactly how I had pictured it in my mind when reading the book.

 

While I disliked Luhrmann having Nick Carraway narrating the story to a doctor in an alcoholic sanatorium, I did like his occasional use of the actual text disappearing on and off the screen.  It felt to me like Luhrmann was showing up all his outlandish visuals - in the end, there are Fitzgerald's words.

 

 

What didn't I like?  Have you got a while?  The sheer dizzying absurdity of his vision was so relentless that when the visuals stopped, it was difficult to concentrate on the quieter scenes.  The worst excess was splurged on the impromptu party that Tom and Myrtle have at their apartment in New York.  Fitzgerald gives us a scene with Nick trapped in a small flat with bores and boozers, Luhrmann instead gives us a wild orgy with a hallucinating Nick.  It's all so crass.

 

My real problem lies in the fact that Luhrmann strips his characters of any saving graces apart from Gatsby, Daisy, Nick, possibly Jordan.  Tom Buchanan is a teeth-grinding, moustache-twirling villain straight out of a bad silent movie, Wilson is a snivelling loser and Myrtle is a low-rent slut.  Compare this with the way the characters are represented in Jack Clayton's superior 1974 film.  They all have key moments which at least give them a humanity: Tom and Wilson both have scenes mourning Myrtle and crucially, Myrtle is given the speech at the party where she explains how she first met Tom on a train.  Of course it also helps having actors of the calibre of Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson and the late Karen Black.  In this film Joel Edgerton gives a truly lousy performance as Tom while Isla Blair and Jason Clarke bring nothing to the table.  Luhrmann even changes the plot to have Nick tell Wilson that Gatsby is the man responsible for Myrtle's death.

 

 

Damning as well - especially from someone who says he loves the book - is that he changes the conclusion of the story.  In the book, an old man shows up at Gatsby's mansion in time for the funeral who turns out to be his father who explains to Tom his son's determination to 'better' himself and to marvel at what his son achieved.  Here Gatsby himself tells Nick in a few lines of his background which robs the story of any real context.

 

But right at the end, Luhrmann surprised me by including Fitzgerald's haunting last lines which Clayton left out of his film:

 

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

 

I know I will be borne back to the book again, I'm not sure about this film version.  Even if we did get a free Stella Artois pint glass after the screening!