How to Get Ahead in Advertising (Bruce Robinson, 1989)

Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Cast: Richard E. Grant, Rachel Ward, Richard Wilson, Jacqueline Tong, John Shrapnel, Susan Wooldridge. Screenplay: Bruce Robinson. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Michael Pickwoad. Film editing: Alan Strachan. Music: David Dundas, Rick Wentworth. 

The satire in How to Get Ahead in Advertising is as obvious as the pun in its title. Denis Bagley (Richard E. Grant), a Type A advertising executive, has a breakdown under the stress of coming up with a campaign for an acne medicine. He suddenly realizes the venality of his profession: trying to sell things to people that they don't need and which probably don't work. He quits his job and in a fit of manic behavior almost destroys his house. What's more, he develops a boil on his neck, and in a few days the boil comes to a head -- quite literally -- and begins to talk to him, muttering the advertising slogans and clichés he is determined to put behind him. His distressed wife, Julia (Rachel Ward), tries to help him and sends him to a psychiatrist (John Shrapnel), but things only get worse when a medical accident turns the second head into the primary one. Borrowing from "body horror" movies, Bruce Robinson's screenplay sets up a promising situation, but doesn't have a way of resolving it successfully. Only Grant's terrifically frantic performance, as both Denis and his pustular alter ego, keeps the film going, but the hilarity feels a bit strained toward the end.  

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller, 2018)

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller, 2018)

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, Ben Falcone, Gregory Korostishevsky, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Christian Navarro, Anna Deavere Smith. Screenplay: Nicole Holofcener, Jeff Whitty. Cinematography: Brandon Trost. Production design: Stephen H. Carter. Film editing: Anne McCabe. Music: Nate Heller.

Malcontents make for good movie material -- just look at the success of Todd Phillips's Joker, a current box office hit despite decidedly mixed reviews. Not that Lee Israel, the subject of Can You Ever Forgive Me? has much in common with the psychotic character played (some would say overplayed) by Joaquin Phoenix. Lee is just a little larcenous, not murderous. But she has a similarly sour view of humankind, which she feels has rejected her talents as a writer. She looks to get even with the literary world -- and to shore up her dwindling income -- by forging letters from the likes of Fanny Brice, Noël Coward, and Dorothy Parker. And she has just enough talent to bring it off. Melissa McCarthy is superb in the role, which earned her an Oscar nomination; she knows when to soften Lee's hard edges, so that we don't lose complete sympathy for her. And it helps that she has the fine character actor Richard E. Grant, who also got an Oscar nomination, to play off of: Grant's seedy gay layabout, Jack Hock, is just a few moral levels below Lee, making him the perfect foil for her character. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is only Marielle Heller's second film as a director, and it's nicely paced, except for a few moments when it feels as if something has been left on the cutting-room floor. The introduction of Anna Deavere Smith as Elaine, Lee's friend and apparently her former lover, seems to come out of nowhere and linger there awkwardly. But Heller also handles the sexual tension that develops between Lee and Anna (Dolly Wells), the bookseller who buys Lee's first forgery, with subtlety: We sense Anna's quiet disappointment when Lee walks away from her shy attempt to make a move. Can You Forgive Me? feels a little ragged in its resolution, as if the film has run out of story to tell once Lee has been caught, and it ends with the usual title summaries of what happened to the real-life Lee and Jack, a crutch that biographical films too often rely on. But it's full of witty moments and performers who make the most of them.

Jackie (Pablo Larraín, 2016)

Natalie Portman and Billy Crudup in Jackie

Jackie Kennedy: Natalie Portman
Bobby Kennedy: Peter Sarsgaard
Nancy Tuckerman: Greta Gerwig
The Journalist: Billy Crudup
The Priest: John Hurt
Bill Walton: Richard E. Grant
John F. Kennedy: Caspar Phillipson
Lyndon B. Johnson: John Carroll Lynch
Lady Bird Johnson: Beth Grant
Jack Valenti: Max Casella

Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Jean Rabasse
Costume design: Madeline Fontaine
Music: Mica Levi

I will give the benefit of the doubt to director Pablo Larraín (born in Chile in 1976) and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (born in 1978) and assume that they didn't know what a thudding sentimental cliché ending Jackie with a reprise of the title song from Lerner and Loewe's musical Camelot would seem to those of us who actually lived through the Kennedy years and experienced the assassination and extended period of mourning that followed. Back then, you couldn't avoid Camelot allusions, even when we were fully aware of the shortcomings of JFK and the Cold War mentality, especially that of his "best and brightest" who were about to lead us into the Vietnam quagmire. Even as early as June 1964, reporter Tom Wicker was trying to evoke a less sentimental vision in his Esquire piece titled "Kennedy Without Tears." This absence of real historical context is a blemish on a well-meaning and sometimes very good film. The very good part is the heroic effort of Natalie Portman to bring together a coherent portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman undone by grief but struggling to keep a family and a legacy together. The best scenes in the film are those in which Jackie, briefly obsessed with the history of American political assassination, waffles between giving JFK a funeral that would rival Abraham Lincoln's and her fears that her husband's assassination might be part of a larger plot. She chooses a grand procession in which she, members of the administration, and foreign dignitaries would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the church. Then, when Lee Harvey Oswald is gunned down, she calls the procession off and rages at her brother-in-law Bobby for having kept the news of Oswald's murder from her while she and her two small children were making a vulnerable public appearance.  But then she changes her mind again, after LBJ's assistant, Jack Valenti, has already informed the foreign dignitaries, including the very difficult Charles De Gaulle, that there will be a motorcade instead of a walk. "I will march with Jack, alone if necessary," she tells Valenti. If the rest of Jackie were as good as these scenes, it would be a major achievement. Unfortunately, it's blurred by an unnecessary frame story in which she is interviewed by a journalist and exercises an iron-willed control over what he will print, even as she spills the most intimate details of her experiences to him -- a way of launching flashbacks. There are too many lugubrious moments, scenes of Jackie wandering alone through the White House. There's also a rather sententious conversation with a priest in which he and Jackie flirt with existentialist concepts of the meaning of life and death -- even John Hurt, in one of his last film appearances, can't quite bring this one off. There's some miscasting, especially Peter Sarsgaard as Bobby Kennedy, whom he neither looks nor acts like. But throughout it all, Portman skillfully evokes Jackie Kennedy in voice and manner without mimicry. I have to credit the producers for making a film with a powerful lead role for a woman, but Jackie Kennedy was a more interesting person than this segment of her life suggests. I'd like to see a fuller biopic, perhaps a TV miniseries, that takes in her reaction to her husband's well-known infidelities and carries her through the controversial marriage to Aristotle Onassis and the rest of the Kennedy tragedies. I'll bet Portman could play the hell out of the rest of Jackie Kennedy's life.