Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

 

 

Cast: Edith Meeks, Millie White, Buck Smith, Anne Giotta, Larry Maxwell, Susan Norman, Scott Renderer, James Lyons, John R. Lombardi. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, based on novels by Jean Genet. Cinematography: Maryse Alberti. Production design: Sarah Stollman. Film editing: Todd Haynes, James Lyons. Music: James Bennett. 

Parody is often the sincerest form of appreciation, especially in the sections of Poison  labeled (in the end credits) “Hero” and “Horror.” The former takes on the true-crime documentary to tell the story of a boy who kills his father and then disappears; the latter smartly adopts the look and feel of old black-and-white horror movies in its account of a scientist’s experiment gone awry. The third segment, “Homo,” is less parodic in nature, although it draws elements from prison movies to tell its story of an inmate’s obsession with another man whom he had known in a previous incarceration. If you’re used to the finesse Todd Haynes brings to his later films with big budgets and major stars, such as Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015), the roughness of Poison may be a shock. But it’s still a compelling and often disturbing movie. 

Radio On (Christopher Petit, 1979)

 

Cast: David Beames, Lisa Kreuzer, Sandy Ratcliff, Andrew Byatt, Sue Jones-Davies, Sting, Sabina Michael, Katja Kersten, Paul Hollywood. Screenplay: Christopher Petit. Cinematography: Martin Schäfer. Art direction: Susannah Buxton. Film editing: Anthony Sloman.

The road movie is a modern version of the quest romance, tales whose protagonists set out in search of something and wind up discovering much about themselves and their world. The protagonist of Radio On is Robert, a radio disc jockey who sets out from London in his somewhat unreliable car on a journey to Bristol to find out the truth about his brother’s recent death. Along the way he encounters various people in various states of alienation, including a deserter from the British army, an aspiring musician, and a German woman whose husband has left her, taking their 5-year-old daughter with him to England. Robert’s trip is underscored by music on the radio, including such ‘70s artists as David Bowie, Kraftwerk, and Devo, but also by the news, which tells of a Britain plagued with labor problems and the unrest in Northern Ireland. The film owes much to the road movies of Wim Wenders, like Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976), which isn’t surprising, since Wenders is credited as an associate producer and Martin Schäfer, who was an assistant cameraman on those films, is the cinematographer for Radio On. The film is a melancholy treat for those willing to absorb the essence of a period when the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. In the end, Robert abandons his quest and his car, taking the train back to London. As Pogo might put it, He has met the anomie and it is his.

I’m Your Man (Maria Schrader, 2021)

 

Cast: Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens, Sandra Hüller, Jürgen Tarrach, Karolin Oesterling, Marlene-Sophie Haagen, Victor Pape-Thies, Falilou Seck, Hans Löw, Inga Busch, Wolfgang Hübsch. Screenplay: Jan Schomburg, Maria Schrader, based on a story by Emma Braslavsky. Cinematography: Benedict Neuenfels. Production design: Cora Pratz. Film editing: Hansjörg Weißbrich. Music: Tobias Wagner. 

Leaving a hit TV show is not always a good career move – just ask David Caruso. But since he asked out of Downton Abbey, Dan Stevens has gone on to demonstrate that he’s one of the most versatile actors around. Still, I was surprised to find him speaking German – albeit with an English accent, as one character notes – throughout I’m Your Man. He plays an android with a kind of charm that turns from artificial to genuine as the story progresses. (The accent is explained as his programmer’s attempt to introduce a note of the foreign that German women find appealing.) The problem is that he’s an experimental model whose producers are testing on a volunteer: a middle-aged divorced anthropologist (Maren Eggert) who’s skeptical of their attempt to market a model life companion for lonely people. It’s a romcom setup, an odd coupling filled with awkward moments leading to an inevitable breakup and a just as inevitable reconciliation. But it works, largely because Stevens and Eggert are so skillful at the task. Stevens’s Tom has the wide-eyed naïveté and the somewhat birdlike movements of Star Trek’s Data, but he’s also able to project warmth and vulnerability. Eggert perfectly brings out Alma’s conflicted approach to the relationship, balancing skepticism with neediness. 

M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg, 1993)

 

Cast: Jeremy Irons, John Lone, Barbara Sukowa, Ian Richardson, Annabel Leventon, Shizuko Hoshi, Margaret Ma. Screenplay: David Henry Hwang, based on his play. Cinematography: Peter Suschitzky. Production design: Carol Spier. Film editing: Ronald Sanders. Music: Howard Shore. 

If M. Butterfly were made today, 30 years later, I have a feeling that it would be a very different film, more acute in its treatment of sexual identity and in its exploration of cultural disjunction. Though both elements are touched on in David Cronenberg’s film, they are subsumed in the more traditional movie preoccupations, love story and spy thriller. Cronenberg’s rather languid pacing doesn’t help bring out its subtexts, and I think Jeremy Irons is severely miscast as the deluded, obsessed diplomat. Irons is strongest at creating dryly ironic characters with a hint of menace, but he doesn’t quite get at Gallimard’s vulnerability and naïveté. John Lone, on the other hand, is remarkable in his transformation into Song Liling, so much so that when he appears with short hair and in suit and tie late in the film, it’s momentarily hard to realize he’s the same person. This is, I think, one of those films that were much better and more provocative as plays. 

Persuasion (Carrie Cracknell, 2022)

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Cosmo Jarvis, Richard E. Grant, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Henry Golding, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Nia Towle, Yolanda Kettle, Lydia Rose Bewley, Edward Bluemel, Afolabi Alli. Screenplay: Ron Bass, Alice Victoria Winslow, based on a novel by Jane Austen. Cinematography: Joe Anderson. Production design: John Paul Kelly. Film editing: Pani Scott. Music: Stuart Earl.

Persuasion is not as bad as I’d heard. I knew it had been described as a kind of mashup of Bridgerton (non-traditional casting) and Fleabag (breaking the fourth wall), and that Austenites were appalled. There are two ways to adapt a classic novel to film: follow it as faithfully as you can, reproducing the substance of the story and the milieu in which it takes place, or use the story as a springboard for a modern adaptation – e.g. the translation of Emma into Clueless or of Pride and Prejudice into Fire Island. Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion falls somewhere in between, taking the bones of the Austen novel and its Regency setting, and viewing them through a contemporary sensibility. It doesn’t work here, but it might have. Armando Iannucci came closer with his Dickens adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019), which also used non-traditional casting (including Persuasion’s Nikki Amuka-Bird) and has a 21st-century sensibility clearly operating throughout. Iannucci may have succeeded in part because he didn’t go as far as Persuasion’s screenwriters in mixing today’s casual speech with the author’s period dialogue. Jane Austen’s contemporaries would never have referred to former lovers as “exes,” for example. Persuasion is a misfire, but it’s often fun to watch. 

The Champ (King Vidor, 1931)

 

Cast: Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Roscoe Ates, Edward Brophy, Hale Hamilton, Jesse Scott, Marcia Mae Jones. Screenplay: Frances Marion. Cinematography: Gordon Avil. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. 

David Thomson has made the suggestion that The Champ is only a prequel to a much more interesting movie about how Dink (Jackie Cooper) fares after being turned over to his mother, moving from hardscrabble poverty with his alcoholic pug of a father to affluent gentility and respectability. That movie was never made, and I’m not sure I would have trusted MGM in the ‘30s to have made it anyway. What we have is enjoyable enough, sentimentality made palatable by the performances of Cooper and Wallace Beery, who have real chemistry, and by King Vidor’s superbly confident direction of them. For a creaky antique, it’s superbly watchable. 

Reruns

Movie: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) (TCM).

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.

TV: Doctor Who: Eve of the Daleks (BBC America); Only Murders in the Building: To Protect and Serve; The Boy From 6B (Hulu). 

St. Mawr is a lumpy pudding of a novella, crammed with D.H. Lawrence's themes and obsessions. The title character is a handsome but temperamental stallion, threatened with being sold to a new owner, a woman who will geld him, before his current owner, also a woman, decides to take him to America, specifically to a ranch near Taos, New Mexico. It doesn't take much knowledge of Lawrence's biography to see the correspondence between the horse and the author. The latter wound up on a ranch near Taos owned by Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy American woman whose experiences developing the ranch are reflected in a narrative aside near the end of the story. But the bulk of the story deals with the acquisition of the horse by Lou Witt, an American woman, and her husband, Rico, who inhabit the bright but empty society of postwar England. St. Mawr becomes a flash point in their marriage, which has grown stale and sexless. The situation gives Lawrence ample excuse to explore conflicts familiar to his readers: nature and civilization, men and women, race, class, national identity, and the like. In addition to Lou and Rico, there's Lou's middle-aged mother, who serves as a kind of cynical chorus, commenting on their marriage. There are also two grooms for the horses owned by the others: the part-Mexican, part-Navajo known as Phoenix (Lawrence's personal symbol) and the Welshman Lewis, who comes as part of the deal when St. Mawr is acquired by Lou and Rico; both provide their own commentary on the story's themes and events. Truth be told, St. Mawr is kind of a mess, but like most Lawrence stories it's larded with some extraordinary descriptions and narrative turns. 

The last time I watched Blade Runner on TV, about six years ago, it was on HBO, which was still showing the version of the film with a voice-over narrative and a "happy ending" that Warner Bros. demanded after poor box office response to the initial release. TCM, I'm happy to report, is now showing the so-called "Final Edit," which was put together with the director's approval in 2007. It's a darker version, but a truer one -- even to the editing out of some brand names like Pan Am that were defunct in 2019, when the film's action takes place. (Atari still remains, but maybe it was too hard to cut.) I miss a little of the whimsy involving Sebastian's "toys" -- we seem to have lost what I remember as a teddy-bear figure that bumps into things -- but the ending has more power to haunt. It also sets up Denis Villeneuve's 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049, much better. 

Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Last night's Doctor Who was a fairly routine episode involving a time loop in which the Doctor and her companions keep getting exterminated by Daleks but coming back to life to figure out ways to survive, which of course they do at the final second. Time loop stories are irresistible to sci-fi writers, and there are some good ones like Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), and Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020). But too often they fall into the trap of being the same damn thing over and over. Doctor Who avoided that one, but didn't give us anything new either.

Only Murders in the Building did something interesting in the second episode, called The Boy From 6B, last night: Because it featured a deaf character who could communicate only in ASL, there was very little audible spoken dialogue throughout the episode, even when the scenes involved our usual protagonists. The plotting remains skillful on this series.  

Slacking Off

Movie: Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1990) (Criterion Collection).

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr. 

TV: Only Murders in the Building: Who Is Tim Kono?; How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?; The Sting; Twist (Hulu). 

New Year's Eve in the age of Covid: What better time to stay in and watch stuff that's not too depressing but has a little edge? Slacker fits those criteria as well as any movie. It's a comic portrait of the Austin counterculture of its day, edged with a little violence. I'm a big Richard Linklater fan, and I'm surprised I've never seen his debut film before. It's a walk-and-talker like the Jesse-and-Céline trilogy, and a group portrait like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!, with some of the experimental élan of Boyhood. The tag-you're-it structure -- one character crosses paths with another, launching that person into their own episode -- is beautifully done: Austin becomes something like the Dublin of Ulysses, an inspiration that becomes obvious in the scene in which two guys toss a tent and a typewriter off a bridge as a third reads a passage from Joyce's book. The unknown performers mostly remained unknown, except for Linklater himself, the guy in the opening scene, listed in the credits as "Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station,"  and future director Athina Rachel Tsangari, the "Cousin From Greece" listed in the cast as Rachael Reinhardt. 

Richard Linklater and Rudy Basquez in Slacker (1990)

Only Murders in the Building was also a fortuitous choice for a low-key New Year's Eve. I can't binge-watch much more than the four episodes I saw last night, but the plot is ensnaring and I like wondering which guest star is going to turn up next after Nathan Lane, Sting, and Tina Fey.