Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/14/22

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

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Handsome Devil (John Butler, 2016)

Cast: Fionn O’Shea, Nicholas Galitzine, Andrew Scott, Moe Dunford, Ruairi O’Connor, Michael McElhatton. Screenplay: John Butler. Cinematography: Cathal Watters. Production design: Ferdia Murphy. Film editing: John O’Connor. Music: John McPhillips.

I’ve got nothing against happy endings, except when they turn a promising movie into an ordinary one. Something like that happens in John Butler’s Handsome Devil, which starts off well, with a deft lightness of tone and some extremely likable performances, especially from Andrew Scott as Mr. Sherry, the Irish high school’s new English teacher, and Fionn O’Shea as Ned, the misfit student who hates rugby in a school devoted to it. Naturally, Ned is immediately suspected of being gay, especially by the blustering bear of a rugby coach, Mr. O'Keefe (Moe Dunford). But then Ned is assigned a new roommate, Conor Masters (Nicholas Galitzine), a rugby star who was expelled from his old school for fighting. After a bad start, Ned and Conor find that they’re more compatible than they expected. There’s a lot of bright, sharp dialogue as the film progresses, but soon you see the turn into familiar territory, as the only way Butler seems to see for his film to end is by turning to conventions out of sports movies, romcoms, and the troubled adolescent subgenre. At the end, everyone involved learns a lesson about prejudice and tolerance, and what was a thoroughly enjoyable movie becomes a vehicle for a message. I didn’t feel bad at the end of Handsome Devil, but I did feel cheated.