Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/13/22

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022)

Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thompson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee. Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. Cinematography: Mandy Walker. Production design: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy. Film editing: Jonathan Redmond, Matt Villa. Music: Elliott Wheeler.

In 2001, the two movie critics at the San Jose Mercury News both put Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! on their end-of-the-year lists: One put it on his list of the year’s best movies, the other on his list of the worst. Something like that may happen to Luhrmann’s Elvis, which similarly divided critics into love it or hate it cohorts. But how can anyone object to the movie as “loud” or “garish,” as some do? This is Elvis Presley, for god’s sake, not the most subtle or cerebral of celebrities. And no one expected subtlety from Luhrmann, one of our most operatic directors. Elvis has its stylistic roots in Luhrmann’s love of opera, and it has to be described as Wagnerian, with Elvis as a kind of Siegfried, a naïf and demigod, and ultimately a tragic figure, undone by his trust in others. The villain of the piece, though he’s determined in his voiceover narration not to bear that label, is Col. Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in a performance almost smothered in prosthetics. It’s this old carny who turns Elvis’s life into a perpetual carnival. The real triumph in the film is Austin Butler’s: He manages to keep Elvis real despite all the gaudy trappings with which the self-commissioned colonel (not to mention Luhrmann) is determined to adorn him. This is not my idea of a great film, being one in which substance is fitfully allowed to co-exist with the style that threatens to overwhelm it, but it’s pretty damn good entertainment.

Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)

Cast: David Bradley, Freddie Fletcher, Lynne Perrie, Colin Welland, Brian Glover, Bob Bowes, Bernard Atha. Screenplay: Barry Hines, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, based on a novel by Hines. Cinematography: Chris Menges. Art direction: William McCrow. Film editing: Roy Watts. Music: John Cameron.

I have to admit that I put off watching Kes because it sounded like the kind of movie to which I am averse, stories about children and animals that inevitably end in tears and uplift: tales of a boy and his dog like Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957) or a boy and his deer like The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946). Kes, a story about a boy and his bird, does end in tears, but the uplift is there only if you’re capable of reflecting on what a remarkable film Ken Loach has made by avoiding sentimentality. I’m certainly not the only one who sees the film as rooted in Dickens (setting aside his own sentimentality). It has the same hatred of bullying and bad education that beset his young protagonists, and there are characters who are drawn with the same broad strokes Dickens used. The headmaster of the school, Mr. Gryce (Bob Bowes), is given to long-winded preambles to his infliction of pain, rambling on about how he knows that the thwacks he’s about to give to the palms of the miscreants won’t do anything to change their ways, but nevertheless taking an obvious delight in the act. And Dickens might well have created Mr. Sugden (Brian Glover), the school’s physical education master who delights in tormenting the boys during their football lesson while pretending to be a great soccer star. I can only reflect how disappointed Dickens, who died in 1870, would have been to see how little things had changed in the life and education of the working poor in the century after his death.