Tag Archives: Julianne Moore

A Moment of Poetry in Far From Heaven

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Seeing Todd Haynes´Far From Heaven (2002) recently, I was struck once again by the beauty and power of the work. Like with the greatest of films, new and different aspects of it catch one´s eye, in this latest instance the shot you can see above. Cathy (Julianne Moore) thinks her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) is working late so she goes to his office to bring him his dinner only to discover him embracing another man. The shock of the revelation, visualised for us through a brilliant white light, makes her flee back into the darkness of the corridor, a canted angle showing her state of mind as her husband´s lover races past her.

The clip above begins in a medium close-up when she enters the elevator, shocked, out of breath, her face as if about to cry but not quite doing so. The shot then dissolves into  the exterior of the Whittaker house, her house, lights on at night, with the camera low on the ground moving up past the doorway of the house, further into the darkness, then cranes up through some bushes like in a horror film and zooms in towards the light of a window, where Cathy is framed as if in prison, looking away from the camera to await the horror to come.

It´s a beautiful shot. Why the dissolve rather than a cut? Because this revelation is the cause of her house becoming a prison instead of a home. The knowledge of one thing actualises, shapes the conditions of Cathy´s subsequent existence. The shot of her shaken with the revelation in the lift becomes her entombed and imprisoned in her home, only partly visible through a window that looks like it has bars in it. We don´t get too close to her either and remain outside. A car´s headlights, ominous, and threatening, announces the arrival of Frank.

It´s a shot in which each beat is thought through, expressive, telling us not only the story as is but through metaphor, allusion, rhymings, through a particular usage of film form, also both distilling and expanding the meaning of a moment that seems true and beautiful, finding what seems the perfect form for its expression. Seeing it again, I thought this is what poetry in film looks and feels like.

It´s a shot, that like much of the film, also brought to mind Douglas Sirk´s All That Heaven Allows (1955), particularly the moment, just before Cary´s (Jane Wyman) children arrive but after she´s given up Ron (Rock Hudson) where the camera moves from children singing Christmas Carols to Cary´s icy tears, her house also now a prison.

Screenshot 2019-11-21 at 12.51.40.png

José Arroyo

Gloria Bell (Sebastián Lelio, USA, 2019)

Uncategorized, , , ,

gloria bell.jpeg

A film to see in the cinema. Gloria Bell has an odd distancing effect. The  shots are beautifully composed but sparsely peopled. And the depiction of Gloria´s routine and her loneliness initially seem repetitive and rather boring. I was tempted to walk out. But I´m glad I didn´t.

Gloria goes about her life, driving to work each day, finding release singing along to songs she identifies with, dealing with difficult neighbours. She´s lonely, goes out dancing, has sex with men when she can and when it suits her. We see this routine with slight variations several times. And cumulatively, their effect is to make us understand Gloria. We get that Gloria is a nice woman, divorced for twelve years. She hasn´t hasn’t given up on love but she´s not finding it either.

She does find comfort in the yoga classes,  laughter therapy, the going out, the work, the friends, her children. But none of that alleviates her loneliness. Then she meets Arnold  (John Turturro) , nice but weak, and, nice as he is, instead of making her life better, he makes it worse; and much as she want a relationship, she stands up for herself and chooses to remain alone. Her dancing is a greater joy to her than her man.

As many critics have already remarked, Gloria Bell is an almost too-close remake of Sebastián Lelio´s  earlier Gloria (2013). ´Why bother to remake it at all,’ some ask? Well, duh: to allow Julianne Moore to play the part, obviously. And Gloria Bell might well be be her greatest performance. Moore is mistress of the constellation of emotions that revolve around ´niceness´. Anthony Lane´s review of the film in The New Yorker has two lines that have stayed with me: his opening one: ´The smile of Julianne Moore is one of the delights of modern cinema. It is the smile of someone who knows, all to well, that you can´t rely on life to be delightful;´  and,  ´the genius of Moore…is how plausibly, and how patiently she fills the spaces of ordinary living.´

The film is not without faults. Some elements don´t work as well as they did in the original. The boyfriend having been in the military has a different resonance in Chile, as do his obligations to his family and former wife. But this version looks better. Every shot is interesting and expressive. And by the end Gloria Bell becomes something quite extraordinary, and rarely seen in American cinema: a middle-aged woman looking for love, being sexual, being disappointed, taking pleasure in what there is. The last shot is extraordinary. There is indeed something heroic about Gloria accepting her present, taking joy in it, and letting that joy in her body and in the music carry her onto a future which is certain for none of us.

I´m glad I didn´t walk out;  and I think audiences who are not just there to be superficially pleasured will find the film  rewarding. Gloria Bell lingers in the mind. Like Gloria, you go about your routine, maybe wash some dishes, and then find your thoughts drifting on to her and to the film: how does one live one´s best life? How does one deal with disappointment? How does one acknowledge need and desire but maintain dignity? Will we be as heroic as Gloria when confronted with similar choices? The experience of watching the film is somewhat dull and demanding. The experience of having seen it, is rewarding indeed. Gloria Bell ends up being a fascinating film with one of the very greatest central performances in recent cinema.

Also worth noting that Lelio being the director of A Fantastic Woman and Disobedience are reasons enough to see Gloria Bell. 

José Arroyo

 

What Maisie Knew (Scott McGehee/ David Siegel, USA, 2013)

Literary Adaptation, Long Read, , , , , , , ,

what-maisie-knew-film

I have not read Henry James’ novel from which the film is adapted so I’m in no position to evaluate how faithful or true it is to the original novel or how well it is updated. On its own terms, the film is well-intentioned, serious, worthy. If effort were all, it would be wonderful.

The structure is classically symmetrical: Four adults, two younger, two older; four couplings; one dissolves at the beginning, the other begins at the end. One child to be tossed around amongst them.

The structure is filled out by a straightforward story. Susanna (Julianne Moore) is a rock star. Her husband, Beale (Steve Coogan) is an art dealer. The milieu is well-to-do but bohemian Manhattan. The film begins with the end of their relationship and the beginning of their brutal, acrimonious and selfish custody battle over their daughter, Maisie (Onata Aprile). Margo (Joanna Vanderham), the nanny, is at all times concerned with Maisie’s feelings and need. She initially offers stability but then gets married to Maisie’s father and becomes caught in the crossfire of Susanna and Beale’s selfish hatred. Susanna also marries someone, Lincoln (Alexander Skarsgärd), a tender-hearted hunk of a bartender and, like Margo, considerably younger. By the end of the film, it is Lincoln and Margo, now a couple, who are de facto doing the parenting the biological parents are too self-involved to provide.

How divorce affects a child is not a new theme in American Cinema: Mildred Pearce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), The Parent Trap (David Swift, 1961 and Mancy Meyer, 1998), Kramer vs Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), Stepmom (Chris Columbus, 1998) and many others have in different ways touched on the theme. But cinema has rarely explored the theme as intricately as What Maisie Knew does. Susanna and Beale profess love for Maisie, and the film is complex enough to show us that they do indeed love their child. However, it also shows us how they see that child mainly in relation to themselves, as an extension, rather than as a separate consciousness and then only in the odd moments they do in fact happen to think of her. Neither acknowledges the child as having needs and indeed feelings outside their own presence or perception.

Susanna and Beale constantly declare their love for Maisie, indeed violently fight with each other for her possession, but the violence of their struggle with each other is itself a demonstration of their lack of duty and responsibility towards the child and of their own egocentrism.  Is love pure feeling or is it feeling made manifest in actions; do you still love your child if you neglect it? How much do you love your child if the fulfillment of your needs is at the expense of theirs? I’m sure Maisie’s father thinks he doesn’t love her less when he decides that his business will go better if he moves back to England and thus really can’t be part of her life, at least not on a regular basis any more. I’m sure Susanna’s career requires that she go on tour. Both parents ‘love’ their child but see themselves in difficult situations in which they think they’re doing the best they can. However, the film shows us they can indeed do much better. And little Maisie knows it.

The film depicts the situation from Maisie’s vantage point literally and figuratively: her point of view is privileged and the camera is often placed at her eye-level to show us the action. Maisie is a warm, open, trusting and intelligent child. She watches and she sees, and slowly we see that she understands much more than a child should, and finally, we realise that she might even know and understand more than her parents. Onata Abrile, big eyes on that baby face, brings to mind Ana Torrent in Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, Spain, 1963), and seeing her is one of the film’s pleasures; her little arms reaching out for whoever’s handy for a hug, the eyes watching and weighed-down by the burden of knowing, and her little hand encased in Skarsgärd massive paw are moments that stay and resonate.

The rest of the performances are variable. Julianne Moore is never for one moment believable as a rock star, and the bit where we see her singing at the studio with what sounds like her voice, is pretty terrible (though of course that hasn’t stopped rock stars from being rock stars in the past); however, that aside, she’s not afraid of playing unlikeable and she screeches at her husband, cheats on her lover, and goes on tour with an abandon that always seems true to the character whilst also enjoyable to watch. She’s also very gentle and affectionate when she’s alone with her girl, and has a truly great moment where she goes to pick up her child from her former nanny and Lincoln and realizes with horror that she now makes Maisie afraid.

Skarsgärd is a pleasure to watch as well. I’ve never seen him this boyish on screen. Graphically, his enormous height contrasts well with tiny Abrile, and both are at their most appealing and vulnerable when shown together. Tender, sweet, responsible; he’s the man Susanna really doesn’t deserve. Joanna Vanderham is technically proficient, very nurturing with Maisie and a good match for Lincoln (what is incomprehensible is why someone so responsible and sensible would take up with Beale). Steve Coogan has been getting good reviews for his playing of Beale but I find him opaque in the part; Coogan traffics, and succeeds in irony, detachment, distanciation. He does technically convey the emotions his character’s supposed to feel but always at a distance; he never lets you in and, perhaps because of that,  you never feel that that character is a person rather than Coogan acting out a set of character traits.

The film has many virtues. It does makes one think about love, relationships, parenting, responsibility and it treats those themes complexly. It has some good performances. Though not visually dazzling, it has some memorable images. The main problem I think is that it is too restrained. It’s dealing with material that borders on the melodramatic and doesn’t want to go there. But restraint in a film such as this should mean not to manipulate the audience falsely into emotion rather than simply abstaining from the attempt altogether. It is often through feeling that films get us to think. The main characters in What Maisie Knew deserve a tear. The film’s unwillingness to grant it feels overly detached and rather cold. A pity.

José Arroyo