Paddy's Arts reviews

Preposterous plots and character stereotypes in a derivative posh soap

2011-12-28T10:21:00.001-08:00

Back in the 1980s Granada, one of the original ITV companies, made two long drama serials at almost the same time. One was “Brideshead Revisited” based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel and the other was “Jewel in the Crown” – the dramatisation of Paul Scott’s extraordinary “Raj Quartet”. They differed somewhat – “Brideshead” was very faithful indeed to the original with much of Charles Ryder’s narration and Waugh’s plot and dialogue intact. “Jewel” was of necessity more selective – the original books ran to nearly 2000 pages – but it was totally true to the main story and characters. Both these series were masterpieces and if you watch them today you will find they have stood well the test of time.

The drama tradition of Granada, of some of the other commercial companies and, of course, of the BBC is strong and is something of a jewel in the crown of British television. It is also an important source of revenue, not least in the United States, where posh British TV has a small but well-heeled following. This brings me to “Downton Abbey”, superficially in the great tradition and with obvious links also to the very successful and ground-breaking “Forsyte Saga” and “Upstairs Downstairs” of the 1960s and 1970s. Downton is set in the second and third decades of the twentieth century and we have moved from Edwardian complacency and excesses through the horrors of the Great War to the early 1920s. As with “Upstairs Downstairs” we see life, and to an extent history, through the eyes of the aristocracy and simultaneously from the perspective of those in the Servants’ Hall. The distinction between these two classes is largely unmuddled by any interventions from the Middle Class and the representatives of this class are few in number. Early in the first Series we are introduced to Matthew Crawley and his mother Isabel who although distant cousins of the gentry family are frowned upon, at least by the haughty Dowager Duchess, for being not of her class. Later in the second series we meet a newspaper magnate Sir Richard Carlisle who being a self-made man, and clearly highly successful in business, is held in contempt for everything but his wealth. But nevertheless these are solidly upper-middle establishment characters, men of education, wealth and privilege, who have far more in common with the aristocrats than they have with the burgeoning middle classes of the time who overwhelmingly worked in “trade”.

Over the 16 episodes that have so far been transmitted, spanning the years 1912-1920, the stories are reminiscent of a Soap like “Eastenders” or “Coronation Street” in that there are episode ending cliff-hangers and improbably extreme story developments. Every historic event from the sinking of the Titanic through women’s suffrage, the Irish independence movement, the Battle of the Somme, the post-war Flu epidemic and many others is a trigger for something to happen in the plot. In addition we have adultery, murder, homosexuality, alcoholism, illness and recovery or death, the black market, inter-class affairs and marriage, and most of the seven deadly sins in sharp relief. The stories are often signalled rather obviously and it is an amusing parlour game to predict what will happen next - as with any soap. Taken as a whole the story is totally preposterous and rather in the same way the Midsomer must have the highest homicide rate in Europe so the Downton extended family was surely Britain’s most dysfunctional. The “issues” are not handled with any subtlety at all – there is none of the restraint of a Galsworthy, a Waugh or a Scott.

The starting point for Downton Abbey was in the creative mind of the writer Julian Fellowes and its main inspiration was clearly that author’s film script for “Gosford Park” - which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2002. But whereas this film lasts a couple of hours and was tightly directed by Robert Altman Downton goes on for 20 – and running! The characters are largely pastiches of real people. Maggie Smith, for example, is wonderful as the Dowager a figure straight out of Pantomime - Dame Maggie overtly seeks hisses from the stalls. Fine actors like Hugh Bonneville, Penelope Wilton and Dan Stevens struggle with a script that is always close to parody and sometimes spills over into farce. Indeed at times there is a slight sense that they know what they are being asked to say, or the absurd plot twist in which they are expected to participate, has moved into lampoon territory and that Mel Brooks or the Directors of “Airplane” or “Something about Mary” are in charge.

The great strength of Brideshead Revisited, Jewel in the Crown and the Forsyte Saga is that the stories had passed the tough test of being seen as credible in the original novel format. They were great books before they became great television. The original screenplay of “Downton Abbey” has had none of the checks and balances that apply to the written word. And because the medium is only to be visual, and in a number of time-limited episodes, it is presumed that there is a need to provide colourful action rather than attempt any true characterisation. We are supposed to like the Earl of Grantham because he is a benevolent toff – fragile but caring with a true sense of noblesse oblige. But compare his character, which is utterly superficially sketched, with the way that Evelyn Waugh gradually introduces Lord Marchmain in Brideshead - we feel we know the Marquess long before we meet him. The same superficiality applies to Downton’s “below stairs” characters most of whom are stereotypes we have met frequently before.

The visual impact of “Downton Abbey” is strong and in this area the production values are high. The sets, both in the studio and on location, are beautifully designed and the costumes and other artefacts are good and look authentic. There is a strange paradox here which I suspect has led some to assume that because it looks good then it is good - perhaps ignoring the often wooden acting and sloppy direction - because what is seen is at times quite striking. A series of this sort needs a big budget to look so good, and familiar actors of the calibre of the leads in the series don’t come cheap either. Downton at a cost of in excess of £1m per episode clearly has that budget. This brings us to the economics - and to a challenge familiar to all involved in the Arts. Downton’s viewing figures are good and this is no doubt reflected directly in the income received from advertisers and the revenue from the sale of overseas rights and DVDs etc. - it is evidently a profitable venture. So a legitimate response to those critics who deplore the triviality of the series would be to never mind the quality and weigh the receipts.

There is nothing really wrong with “Downton Abbey” if you see it for what it is – a Soap of fleeting interest with can pass the time on an autumnal evening. It is easy to be superior about it – especially if you put it in the context of truly great fiction or memorable adaptations of this fiction as I have in this review. Perhaps it doesn’t pretend to be of this quality and so we shouldn’t judge it by these standards. But actually I think that Downton does take itself quite seriously at times and some of the acting is so pompously self-important that it can only be seen as light comedy, which it isn’t meant to be, or over-written moralising trash - which at times it comes dangerously close to being.

Superb portrayal of the flawed genius that was Judy Garland

2011-11-23T03:15:00.001-08:00

At the very top of the short list of the truly great live popular music performers of the Twentieth century there are perhaps no more than four or five names. Elvis of course and Sinatra. Streisand. Piaf. And Judy – all greats identified by just one name. Maybe Michael Jackson - but for me he would be with Elton, Sammy Davis, Tony Bennett and the others just below the apogee. What these mega stars all had was something beyond celebrity – the fame is taken for granted. The iconic status of an Elvis Presley or a Frank Sinatra was hard earned and was not just a consequence of talent and shrewd promotion. It was because they had a love affair with their public and in when love, when truly in love, we forgive any minor defects. Not, it has to be said, that the defects of these performers were really minor – but we love them unconditionally warts and all. And none more so that Judy Garland.

Judy and Edith Piaf both died at 47. Elvis at 42. Jackson at 51. Unlike Francis Albert or Barbra they didn't mature into a more gentle old age. But they all left behind a heritage on film and recording that will surely captivate for all time – but their true greatness was in live performance. Elvis, fat, incoherent and drugged to the eyeballs gave some fine performances even to the end (and some lousy ones too to be fair!). And so, of course, did Judy Garland. I never saw Judy live and kick myself for not making the effort back in the late 1960s when she was in London. But astonishingly we now have the opportunity to see Judy in the extraordinary “End of the Rainbow” on tour. We are all used to tribute bands and star impersonators. I’ve seen Sinatra and Presley impersonated often – sometime well, sometimes risibly. But I never for one moment thought that I was watching the original. Tracie Bennett in “End of the Rainbow” does not impersonate Judy Garland – she is Judy Garland.

It is early 1969 and Garland, her health frail and her finances in big trouble, is engaged to perform at London’s Talk of the Town. She has in tow the 34 year old Mickey Deans who was briefly to be her fifth and final husband a few months later. Also with her is Anthony her British pianist a fictional character but no doubt based on many in Garland’s retinue who remained faithful despite all her excesses. Judy is briefly “clean” but the tensions of the situation and her fright of performance force her back on the booze and the pills. The dramatic tension is sustained by portrayal of the uneasy ménage à trois between the three main characters and by the big question as to whether Judy will actually be able to perform at all. She needs the money desperately, she cannot even pay her hotel bills. But will she be able to drag herself on stage and if she does will she be able to stand up and sing? Well the answer is yes, and how! Notwithstanding her problems the old trooper mentality cuts in as we get excerpts from a number of authentic Judy Garland performances. After a claustrophobic opening with Judy and her small entourage cooped up in a small hotel suite we are transported to the Talk of the Town and a large (and very good) band is suddenly seen on stage. Judy belts out some of her familiar repertoire – all memorably performed by Ms Bennett. The Trolley Song is blasted out with all the panache that made it pure Garland, as are nine other numbers.

This show is an accurate, poignant and sad portrayal of a moment in the final few months of Judy Garland's life (she died a few months later of a massive drug overdose). But it is also a tribute to what made her great and as with the small group of other greats her strengths are her weaknesses. Her determination once on the stage to give of her best echoes Elvis and Piaf and Sinatra. But the flipside of this determination was her absolutely uncontrollable and fiery personality that made her hard to work with and impossible to live with. Flawed genius – but which true genius was not similarly flawed?

Tracie Bennett has had a long, distinguished and award-winning stage career – but this is surely her finest performance in a role made for her and to which she brings extraordinary energy, style and pathos. If she retains the part when the show goes to Broadway next year (rather than some American Diva getting the role) she will surely wow the audiences Stateside just is she is doing on this tour. A Five star evening.

“Sincerely, Noël” - but not Noël enough for me

2011-11-16T08:14:00.001-08:00

The question that anyone planning to go to see “Sincerely, Noël” needs to ask themselves is this “Would I go to the theatre to hear Alistair McGowan sing ?” McGowan is, of course, a brilliant impressionist and a decent actor. He is not really known for his singing skills but, on the evidence of “Sincerely, Noël” he has a pleasant tuneful voice and he can carry a song. Sufficient, you would think when combined with his ability to do accurate impressions, to carry off an evening of and as Noël Coward. After all the Master’s own distinctive vocal style whilst musically adept, was hardly such that he would manage to hold an audience for very long except with his own material. But only once, and then fitfully, do we get McGowan as Noël – when he performs “Alice is at it again” which he does, in part, with Cowardian intonations. The other songs in the show are not presented as Coward at all, but as McGowan - and frankly you wouldn't really pay good money to hear him sing. Its a huge missed opportunity because on the flimsy evidence of that one song Alistair McGowan could certainly “do” Noël Coward very well indeed.

So if we do not get any Noël Coward impressions during the evening what do we get? It is all Coward’s material and it has been well chosen to include a few rarities as well as some of the more familiar songs, poems and sketches. The balcony scene from Private Lives is nicely performed and for me a real highlight was the extraordinary poem “Not yet the Dodo” a classic of socially liberal writing and a quite remarkable observation of the generation gap and of class.

McGowan’s partner is Charlotte Page who, unlike him, is a professional singer of distinction. I found her voice a tad over operatic for some of the material but it is unquestionably a very fine voice – she is also a good actress able to change her accent well as required by the material.

Except during the “Dodo” piece I did not sense a frisson of engagement from the audience – there was no real buzz and even the laughter and applause felt a little forced. There were no doubt many Coward aficionados at the Cadogan Hall and I’m fairly sure that they would have felt that they had been a little short-changed by the evening. There was only one total turkey and that was “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” – one of Noël’s iconic pieces of course. This was presented not as a solo Cowardesque musical recitation but as a duet with the performers doing the song in silly cod Germanic voices as if they were a couple of Germans commenting on the foolishness of the English for going out in the Midday sun. It was really as dire as it sounds and should long ago have been replaced in the programme.

McGowan gives us “There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner” in the style of a speech by William Hague (and earlier he did a wickedly accurate Will Self impression). These were slightly gratuitous in the context of the evening but they showed what might have been. We could have done with a tad more light-heatedness of this sort and much much more of McGowan as Coward which, not unreasonably, I suspect that most of the audience had expected they would see.

Keeler

2011-09-20T01:04:00.001-07:00

When theatre, or film for that matter, tackles a real life story the writer’s challenge is to do more than just tell the story. At its best, as for example recently in Lucy Prebble’s “Enron” or Lee Hall’s “Pitmen Painters” the drama will illuminate the actuality. At its worst it will trivialise it or simply tell it “as it was” in a quasi documentary style. It is the latter fault that makes Gill Adams’s “Keeler” such a dire night in the theatre. As a very frequent theatregoer I can only recall a couple of previous instances when I haven't lasted the course but I had had enough of Keeler (at the Richmond Theatre this week) by the interval. I left.

The story of “Keeler” is that of Christine Keeler’s version of the Profumo affair as told in her book “The Truth at Last”. Unsurprisingly the book, and this stage version of it, is sympathetic to the young women caught up in the case presenting them as naive and largely innocent victims. I've no problem with this - although to imply that Keeler and Rice-Davies were heroines of feminism, which is suggested in “Keeler”, is perhaps a step too far! There is nothing particularly remarkable about men who should know better having liaisons with silly and gold-digging young woman. Had the affair been today rather than in the early 1960s it would probably have been rather less of a cause célèbre than it was then. But simply to hold a mirror up to the foolishness of the double standards of the times, and retell an over-familiar tale, adds little to our understanding . Nor is any light thrown on the hypocrisies of the present day which though subtly different are no less venal. And the use of a single piece of source material, Keeler’s book, inevitably means that this must be a one-sided telling.

The playwright is Gill Adams about whom I know nothing. Unusually the programme has no biographical details about Ms Adams but an Internet search shows her to have been born in 1961 (the year Profumo met Keeler) and it seems that this is her first work to have been given a major commercial run. The writing and staging is patterned and predictable with few if any dramatic devices to relieve the tedium of the quasi-documentary style. Stephen Ward, overacted to breaking point by Paul Nicholas in a preposterous wig, is a caricature without depth or creditability. Christine Keeler is well portrayed by the Soap starlet Alice Coutlhard but she struggles with banal material. The Russian diplomat Ivanov (Andrew Grose) struts around for a while looking faintly absurd in red swimming trunks and the other characters, including Andrew Piper as Profumo, are really cardboard cut-outs. It is the lack of depth that is this play’s principal failing. It is almost pantomimic in construct with the First Act establishing the villains and the heroes and telling us who we should cheer on or hiss at in Act Two.

If you want to study the Profumo affair there is plenty of material around both contemporary and more recent. Michael Caton-Jones’s well-received 1989 movie “Scandal” starring John Hurt and Joanne Whalley, made a pretty good fist of telling the story as it was with fine writing and good performances by the principals. “Keeler” is a pale imitation of “Scandal” and adds nothing to our understanding of this grimy period in British political history. Or to the vicissitudes of the human experience either.

Frank–the Making of a legend

2011-03-10T03:53:00.001-08:00

There’s been a lot written about Frank Sinatra over the years – and there’ll be a whole lot more in the years to come no doubt. How many true superstars were there in the 20^th Century? Today we live in an age when we give the adjective “Great” to all too many Tom, Jude, and Julia’s – transient “stars” who twinkle a little but who will surely be forgotten when “Hello” magazine finally loses interest and moves on. But nobody loses interest in Frank Sinatra and nobody ever did. When he plumbed the depths in the early 1950s (he hardly had a record release between 1950 and 1954) he was still a source of fascination for the gossip writers of Hollywood and New York City. He was a tall poppy who had not been trimmed but completely uprooted. But the roots weren’t dead – quite - and if his fall from grace was exceptional his comeback was more so. And so he became, with Presley and Streisand and Garland and Brando and a very few others a Superstar recognised only by his Surname - and one of the most famous people in the world. James Kaplan in “Frank - The Making of a Legend” tells Sinatra’s story from his birth through his meteoric rise, decline, fall and rebirth - the latter marked by the beginning of the link with Nelson Riddle and the winning of an Oscar for “From here to Eternity” in 1954. The definition of a Star has to be that they are bigger even than their exceptional talent – that they have a quality that is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Frank fits the bill.

James Kaplan’s book is long, detailed, helpfully chronological - and unputdownable. His research is impeccable and he does not make one claim or statement without giving the source. He applies as rigorous academic standards as if he was in the History Department of Oxford or Yale and writing a biography of Washington or Bismarck! Sinatra was driven nearly mad, and to a suicide attempt, by the hold that the terrifying Ava Gardner had on him. This passion is almost Shakespearean – Frank loved her not wisely but far, far too much. She lusted after him and loved him in her way but she was so skittish and unruly that marriage with a romantic and emotional Italian was never going to work. The Gardner/Sinatra story is one of the central themes of the book and rightly so. Sinatra was a driven man - he wanted it all and he wanted it now. He’d buy a house even if he didn’t have the money to do so – it happened more than once in the darker years. If he wanted a woman (and he wanted them all the time) he’d just go for it and he nearly always succeeded. From a constant flow of Teeny Boppers in his early years to Lana Turner and the rest when he moved on – and, of course, to Ava; the most beautiful girl in the world. Then with the women came the wine – or the Jack Daniels and the Martinis and the rest. That Frank lived to be 82 must be in part attributable to his physicians but mainly to his liver. I don’t think he’d have given up the wine or the women just to live a few years more anyway! And then there was the song. Not his own song, he never wrote a note of a melody or a word of a lyric - but the great American Songbook - Frank was its master interpreter. Kaplan tells one or two song stories in considerable detail and describes how Frank worked with the arrangers and the conductors and the musicians to make a song work in his unique style. He was soon more than a crooner, more than a pretty voice. He was the man that surely any song-writing team wanted - and if that team had delivered a potential classic then Frank would see it, and know how to make it so. Kaplan’s description of the work with Nelson Riddle on the Johnny Mercer/Rube Bloom “Day in Day Out” takes three pages and we see how this was a seminal event right at the beginning of the Sinatra/Riddle partnership. Fascinating!

Frank Sinatra, later in his career, had a show “The Man and his Music”. Whether in that show or elsewhere he ever truly revealed “The man” I doubt. There were too many myths and too many events over which the older Sinatra would wish to draw a very thick veil! Kaplan doesn’t duck presenting these events but this is not in any way a demolition job on its subject. The paradox of Sinatra was the mixture of genius and dysfunctionality and Kaplan details both sides on the man. Frank was a womaniser on a prodigious scale not just with the girls that threw themselves at him, - of which there were hundreds - but also with his fellow artists, like Turner, and with the tarts that gathered in the places he visited for his early rat pack type male frolics – especially Las Vegas. He drank heavily, he was occasionally violent and he had a pretty poor taste in some of his friends – including the hoods and hoodlums who got him into trouble from time to time. Through all this there was Sinatra the consummate artist who at his best was unquestionably the greatest male popular singer of the Twentieth – and even at his worst, with poor material and less than imaginative direction, he was pretty good. And there were some recording turkeys and some poor shows – notably in the dark years when he struggled to get any bookings at all.

The biggest surprise, at the time and even in retrospect, was Frank Sinatra’s extraordinary talent as a movie actor. Remember this man had no training in the theatre, he never went to drama school, he never learned his craft from the bottom up. He starred in the first movies he appeared in because they were musical vehicles to exploit his fame as a singer. But when he appeared as Private Angelo Maggio in “From Here to Eternity” he proved what had been apparent to a few for a while – he could act. Kaplan describes Frank’s hustling for the role at a time when his stock was at rock bottom and how he buckled down on the set where on previous movies he had been petulant and unreliable. He also tells how Sinatra learned on the job from Montgomery Clift – and how Clift helped him to get the best out of a role that was made for him. The Oscar that Frank won for this film was the turning point and his career bounced back almost immediately. Kaplan finishes the book at this point in time a period which also saw the beginning of the partnership with Nelson Riddle at Capitol Records. The rest of the story will be told in the second and final volume of this comprehensive, detailed and engagingly written biography. Something to look forward to.

Hansie - a sinner who repenteth?

2011-01-19T05:56:00.001-08:00

“

Hansie” is a curious film. It was produced and inspired by a team, including the subject’s brother Frans, who seemed to have two motives. First posthumously to rehabilitate Hansie Cronje the fallen idol of South African cricket. Second to suggest that through Christian belief in action, “choosing life”, it is possible for even the most fallen of sinners to get absolution. This makes it sound extremely slanted and precious and likely only to be of interest to those who, like Cronje, have been “born again”. In fact it is a much better film that this outline indicates and I would argue that it is worth viewing by anyone who has an interest in Cronje and cricket but also in the complexities of South Africa society and human character.

The subtitle of the film is “A True Story” and it certainly takes and explains Hansie Cronje’s side of the story - the personal explanation for his actions that he gave to the King Commission which investigated the match fixing allegations on behalf of the South Africa government. So the film is not investigative journalism and no new material facts about the scandal emerge. What the film does is paint in the personal issues surrounding the story – in particular Cronje’s relationship with his teammates, his family and his friends. And there is a very strong message that the child is father of the man – we visit Cronje’s school, Grey College, Bloemfontein, quite a lot both in flashback and in the aftermath of Cronje’s death. The strict Afrikaner moral code taught by this school is contrasted with Cronje, the sinner, who falls from grace. For those at Grey, Cronje is the “Prodigal Son” and this bible story is a leitmotif of the film.

“Hansie” is clearly a sincere act of attempted redemption of Cronje’s reputation by Hansie Cronje’s widow, brother and others close to him. This is not to say that it ducks the tough issues – how could it as they are very much in the public domain following Cronje’s confession and evidence to the investigators? It does not try to exculpate Cronje’s behaviour – his greed, hubris and arrogance come across albeit tempered by strong suggestions that he was a troubled soul. The truth, of course, is that Cronje had absolutely no reason to take money from the shady world of the illegal bookmaker and to then inevitably get sucked into that world. By South African standards he was extremely well off with a lovely home, substantial income and hero status. Even after his fall from grace and death he was chosen at number 11 in the list of 100 Greatest South Africans!

Is “Hansie” an inspiring story? Not to me it isn’t. That some religions allow and even encourage those who have fallen to be redeemed is fine I suppose. But the barely disguised contention of the film that this rebirth (including a baptism scene) somehow eradicates the original crime is surely wrong. The choice of “Life”, which must be linked to an affirmation of faith, seems a bit of a cop out. It is almost as if a “sinner who repenteth” is in some way morally superior to someone who hasn’t sinned at all – or hasn’t been found out!

The production values of this fairly low budget film are good – even the cricket scenes, whilst far from authentic, are to an acceptable standard – as is the location shooting in India and South Africa. The performances are good as well – Frank Rautenbach makes a convincing Cronje, the American Sarah Thompson is believable as Cronje’s wife Bertha and Nick Lorentz is excellent as South Africa's coach Bob Woolmer. So “Hansie – A True Story” is a pretty good film – so far as it goes! But was I convinced that this was the whole truth about illegal betting, match fixing and the involvement of Hansie Cronje and other South Africans in this sordid business? I’m afraid not!

Giving the King a voice

2011-01-12T09:53:00.001-08:00

The King’s Speech

Some movies, perhaps most movies set in the past try, directly or indirectly, to suggest lessons from that past relevant for us today. Films set in times of war are particularly frequently meant to say to us “Never Again” – although we rarely take any notice. Did Schindler’s List stop genocide? No. Did “Oh What a Lovely War” make Generals more sensitive to the privations of soldiers on the front? No. Did “The Last King of Scotland” make us all ensure that no more mad tyrants rule African countries? No again. These are all fine films but if they had objectives beyond that of telling a rattling good story I would suggest that these objectives were not met. So when one commentator suggested that “The Kings Speech” is a “…hymn to the royal ideal. An insidious anthem to the notion that nobility of birth and spirit are usually, if not always, linked” I was on my guard. I am, you see, a Republican – I believe that after our present Queen meets her maker we should get rid of the whole bloody nonsense. I don’t want, if I am still around, to be ruled by King Charles or King William or King or Queen anybody else for that matter. The hereditary principle in governance is almost dead in Britain – one more shove in a few years’ time and it will be gone for good.

But the charge that “The Kings Speech” is some sort of monarchist tract is frankly nonsense. Indeed it is at least arguable that the opposite is the case. It shows how close we were in a time of unimaginable national stress of having as a monarch a man of no moral principles, a dysfunctional personality and objectionable political views and social attitudes. Wallis Simpson saved us from that disaster and she and the equally hideous Duke of Windsor troubled us no more once brother Bertie reluctantly took the throne as King George VI. That’s the problem with the hereditary principle – for every good egg like George VI or Elizabeth II there are madmen like George III or twits like Edward VIII.

“The King’s Speech” is about Bertie (Colin Firth) and in particular about the Achilles heel that nearly made him unfit to rule. The Duke of York, as he was as the film opens, was the “spare” that King George V and Queen Mary produced in case there was a problem with the “heir” (the Duke of Windsor). He faffed around for a while getting married and having a couple of children and rather ineffectively standing in for the monarch from time to time. At the close of the Wembley exhibition in 1925 his serious stammering speech impediment was revealed to all and the realisation dawned that any sort of public speaking, especially on the new medium of the “Wireless”, would be torture for him. Long before his accession in 1936 Bertie and in particular his sparky, confident and determined wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) tried to find a way of curing the Duke’s stammer. A series of quacks and incompetents did not help him at all before the Duchess discovered the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Logue was unconventional in his approach demanding informality in address (“Lionel” and “Bertie”) and also that the treatment took place in his Harley Street rooms rather that the Duke’s palace.

It took a while for Logue’s approach to work and for him to break down the barriers of class, position and nationality that divided him from the Duke. The Duke resisted hard at times and was clearly shocked at the Australian’s informality and lack of deference. But gradually he became to see that the approach was working, that Logue was sincere and talented and that the possibility for him to live a normal public life in service if his country was emerging. The cataclysm of the abdication enhanced the urgency for him to be able to speak clearly, and live, to his people as King. The approach of War made this all the more imperative. Logue became King George’s right hand, helped him hands on with his addresses to the nation – especially at the declaration of War in September 1939.

“The Kings Speech” is a true story. It is not a paean to monarchy but simply a portrait of a man at a moment in time who was bereft because he could not do a simple thing that almost everyone else could do - put a series of sentences together without stammering. And it mattered. It is also a portrait of a brilliant, engaging and strong-minded man, Lionel Logue, who had the talent and the means to make a difference. The key role of Queen Elizabeth in Bonham Carter’s slightly mischievous portrayal is also clear – although whether the (later) Queen Mother was then quite as sexy as she is portrayed I’m not sure! The reminder of the cast is also outstanding – including lovely cameos from Timothy Spall as Churchill and Derek Jacobi as the censorious Archbishop Lang. But this is, above all, Colin Firth’s film. We knew from “A Single Man” that Firth was a great deal more than a pretty face and with this performance he builds on the solid foundations of that film to create a moving, sensitive and utterly believable King in need. This is a portrait of a man at a moment in time dealt a hand which he has to play in the national interest. He is not, as some have suggested, defending the institution of the monarchy which despite the venality of his ghastly brother was not really in threat. Britain had been distracted over the abdication affair. There had also been the threat of Oswald Mosley’s fascists – the battle of Cable Street was only a couple of months before Bertie’s accession as King. Times were unimaginably difficult and in a constitutional monarchy it was not the King’s job to govern – but he could, and did, make a difference. This wonderful film shows how and why.

Cometh the Hour cometh the Woman

2010-11-04T04:40:00.001-07:00

Henry Ford once said that "History is more or less bunk”. But to be fair to the old curmudgeon he also said that “…the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." Made in Dagenham is certainly about the making of history - although whether Ford’s successors at the automobile giant that bears his name would wish to be reminded about the events of 1968 is another matter. In short the story is about how a group of less than 200 women workers at Ford’s huge Dagenham plant organised industrial action in pursuit of their goal for equality of treatment with the 40,000 men employed there. In particular they wanted an acknowledgment that the work that they did sewing seat covers was at least “semi-skilled” – a category which brought with it higher wages than the “unskilled” category into which Ford’s management had reassigned it. This demand soon escalated into a more general call to stop the discrimination against women which saw them paid significantly less than men doing equivalently categorised work.

Nigel Cole’s movie accurately depicts the key events of the Dagenham girls’ (as they were called) protest but focuses and fictionalises the story to give it pace. The main character, Rita O’Grady superbly played by Sally Hawkins, is an amalgam of a number of the women who were prime movers in the action. Social change which comes from the bottom up, as it so often does, needs charismatic and determined characters to drive it - and Rita is certainly that. But the climate also has to be right and in that respect the protest happened at the right time. In 1968 there was a Labour Government with a decent majority in power and the newly appointed Secretary of State for Employment was the feminist firebrand Barbara Castle. 1968 was also a year in which protests and activism reached their post war apogee – the “Prague Spring”, Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War protests in the United States, student protest and sit-ins in London, Paris, Berlin, and around the world. The extent to which the climate of protest affected the Dagenham strikers is not covered in the film – but its true to say that these were watershed times and conventional wisdoms and orders were being challenged everywhere.

The 1960s was the decade when women began to assert their rights in the western world for the first time since the suffrage movement and although on the face of it the revolt of less than a couple of hundred women in Dagenham may seem insignificant in the context of other events of the times in fact it was the spur that was quite rapidly to lead to legislation for equal rights in the United Kingdom (1970) and then around the world. The momentum for change caught the business world unaware and unprepared. One of the most revealing scenes in Made in Dagenham is when Ford sends one of their senior managers over from Detroit to quell the rebellion. His language and demeanor pours fuel on the flames and strengthens the resolve not only of the protestors but also of Barbara Castle whom he threatens that Ford might withdraw from production in the UK entirely. Despite Prime Minster Harold Wilson’s (an amusing cameo by John Sessions) wishes not to upset Ford - “I’ve enough problems with America at the moment” – Castle supports the Dagenham women and helps negotiate a settlement which is entirely in their favour.

Made in Dagenham gets right not just the employment iniquities of the 1960s – including a brilliant demolition of the disingenuous and complacent union convener at the factory – but also the social mores of the times. Women are expected by their menfolk to know their place – not just the working class working women of Ford but also the wife of the Plant Director Lisa Hopkins (nicely played by Rosamund Pike) who despite her Cambridge degree and intellect is expected to be just a pretty appendage to her husband. She teams up with Rita to lend her both support and a smart red Biba dress for her meeting with Barbara Castle. The only man who comes out of the story with any integrity intact is Albert, a Supervisor at the plant beautifully played by Bob Hoskins in his best role for years. The rest of the male characters are utterly bewildered by the idea of change – including Castle’s two senior civil servants who are classic “Yes Minister” officials and who Castle brushes contemptuously out of her way.

Made in Dagenham is history – and the historical context is 100% authentic from the cars to the shops to the costumes – and above all the attitudes. But it would be dangerous and wrong to assume that the victory that the Dagenham women won was the end of the struggle – either for women or for others who are discriminated against. The power of orthodoxy is arguably as strong today as it was in 1968 – conservative attitudes prevail and in some respects have been strengthened by recent events. There is an unwillingness, at times, to challenge the employment practices of business - from bankers’ bonuses to underfunded pension schemes and to the apparent preparedness of those in power to accept that it doesn’t matter if British businesses (even football clubs!) are taken over by absentee foreign owners. In 1968 it was “cometh the hour cometh the woman” – in 2010 perhaps we need more of the same.

Local heroes take on a corporate giant in Ireland

2010-10-27T02:19:00.000-07:00

Risteard Ó Domhnaill’s documentary film about the Corrib Natural Gas project in County Mayo Ireland, The Pipe, has been quite a long time in the making - but the wait has been worthwhile. This is a moving, unsentimental and compelling story well told and, particularly, well edited (by Nigel O'Regan) of how ordinary people in a remote community fought with a multinational company, Shell, to protect their community and their livelihoods. The public release of The Pipe is timely in the light of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico because, as with BP, the evidence is clear that Shell’s initial handling of Corrib showed a comprehensive failure to match the rhetoric of their public statements with the reality of their actions. BP’s “green” positioning was shown to be a chimera as the world greatest environmental disaster unfolded in all of its horror – and Shell’s stated commitment to Sustainable Development has been shown in The Pipe to be no less of a veneer.

Shell’s self-proclaimed adoption of the principles of Sustainable Development goes back quite a long way – I recall, as a then Shell employee in the Middle East, a visit from Managing Director Jeroen van der Veer sometime in the late 1990s during which he pitched this commitment to us. Sustainable Development was, he said, about “integrating the economic, environmental and societal aspects of Shell’s business to achieve sustained financial success, safeguard the environment and develop our reputation as partner and provider of first choice for all our stakeholders.” The metaphor he used was that of a three-legged stool with a leg each for economic, environmental and societal concerns. Take one away and the stool falls over.

Shell acquired Corrib when the company completed the takeover of Enterprise Oil in 2002 – at which point of time the development of the project was still in its early planning stage. It is quite clear that from the start it was economic considerations that drove the project and that whilst environmental protection was, nominally at least, important the societal aspects were at best handled in a patronising way and at worst ignored. There was certainly no equivalence between the three legs of Corrib’s stool. In The Pipe Willie Corduff describes the first people that Shell sent to Rossport as being “Rude people who didn’t care” and who stumbled arrogantly about his land (he is a farmer) in suits and “told us what they were going to do”. This was Shell’s fatal error. The community in and around the tiny fishing village of Rossport have chosen a way of life which intentionally keeps them remote from not just the rest of Ireland but even the rest of County Mayo. The idea that their lifestyle would be under threat from a large scale project which included the construction of a huge Processing plant (refinery) near the tiny townland of Bellanaboy was anathema to them. Even more threatening was the proposed burial of a pipeline around nine kilometres in length from the shoreline to the processing plant. This pipeline would transfer raw unprocessed gas at high pressure to Bellanaboy where it would be turned into gas suitable to be injected into the Irish domestic gas system.

The Pipe, as the name suggests, is substantially about the planned raw gas onshore pipeline - but not exclusively so. One of the stars of the film is Pat O’Donnell, a local fisherman, who decided to challenge the right of Shell to commence offshore pipe laying which, he alleged, was damaging his property – an area in the bay where he lays crab pots. O’Donnell, in his tiny fishing vessel, sails close to the enormous pipelaying ship the Solitaire - this sequence, brilliantly captured in the film, is in many ways an allegory for the whole story. One man in a tiny ship which is his livelihood confronts a giant ship which is, in his mind anyway, is potentially threatening that livelihood. An unequal struggle - Goliath versus David. O’Donnell, Willie and Mary Corduff, Monika Muller, John Monaghan, Maura Harrington and the others who appear in the film ooze sincerity and frustration and at times raw anger – the gas is far from the only raw commodity around! The anger boils over from time to time as the protesters seem to divide into two camps – those who oppose the idea of an onshore facility completely and those who think that such a plant and connecting pipeline might be acceptable – but well away from Rossport. It is to the credit of the campaigners that they have been sanguine about revealing for all to see their occasional internal differences.

Not sanguine to reveal anything at all was Shell Ireland who declined to cooperate with Risteard O’Domhnaill’s project. This means that the film is not balanced in that neither Shell’s views nor those of successive Machiavellian Irish governments are aired. This has led to criticism in some quarters but that is not a charge that I think stands up. From what I know of Corrib, having visited the area and written about it, The Pipe is an accurate representation of the views and the fears of most of those in the local community. How the mess happened in the first place and what the prospects are for the future are not covered – nor is the perhaps self-evident fact that exploitation of the Corrib gas field is desirable – subject, of course, to stakeholder consent. The strong arm tactics of the Gardaí and of private sector security personnel are shown in sharp and shocking relief. And the gap between the developers and their acquiescent friends in high places in Dublin and the local community seems to be widening not narrowing. There are some pretty entrenched positions on both sides and few signs that there are processes underway that could narrow the gap – although the sequence where a visit was made to the European Parliament suggests one possible route for resolution.

The Pipe is at times a very visually attractive film and the aerial sequences at the beginning set the scene well – this really is a very beautiful part of the world and you cannot be surprised about how those living there want to keep it just as it is. Human nature is very resilient and it is no exaggeration to say that those who have protested, have been to prison, have gone on hunger strike and who have explored every legal and other angle to achieve their objectives have undoubtedly raised the stakes for any corporation planning a similar major project in the future. For that they all deserve our thanks.

A quiet, restrained and very deep film indeed

2010-10-04T22:14:00.001-07:00

When you discover an Author and are captivated by the first of his works you read it is quite likely that you will immediately want to explore the rest. That was certainly my experience with Christopher Isherwood. I read Goodbye to Berlin in my teens back in the early 1960s and soon I had worked my way through just about everything significant that Isherwood had written. It isn’t actually a particularly large oeuvre – perhaps a dozen or so major works – but every one is entertaining, thought-provoking and tumbling with sincerity. For many the best of them all will be A Single Man - I remember its first publication in 1964 by which time a greater tolerance was being shown in Britain, post Lady Chatterley. But still openly gay literature was something of a novelty in our then still rather backward society – even James Baldwin’s magnificent Giovanni's Room was a bit of an under-the-counter purchase! And the idea that a book like A Single Man could be filmed and shown on general release would not have been considered possible – certainly without what would have been utterly destructive censorship. In our more enlightened age these restrictions no longer apply and it is with great pleasure that we can enjoy such a skillful and honest realisation of Isherwood’s work as in Tom Ford’s fine movie.

The loss of a partner is a common theme in the cinema but I doubt that it has ever been more sympathetically portrayed than in A Single Man – the book and, now, the film. I would like to make reference to an equally moving account in a much less “Arty” but no less interesting film – Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral. The Funeral in that film was that of the colourful Gareth – a gay man who died suddenly at the third of the film’s weddings. At that funeral Charles (Hugh Grant) remarks “It’s odd isn’t it – all these years we’ve been single and proud of it, we never noticed that two of us were to all intents and purposes married all the time”. And these words resonate with those of Matthew, Gareth’s partner, who had touchingly quoted from WH Auden’s “Stop the clocks” – a poem which mourns the loss of a partner. Gareth and Matthew and, in The Single Man George and Jim, had partnerships that were so close and so loving that the loss of the partner, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, was too much to bear. Or it was in George’s case anyway.

A Single Man is a film about the response to grief. About how even the most educated and urbane of men, like Professor George Falconer, can quite literally find the loss of their life partner unbearable. The closeness of the relationship is illustrated in a few flashback scenes – most memorably one where the two men are sitting peacefully on a sofa and joshing a bit – as married couples do. They were one another’s “North and South and East and West” and for George it is clear that, as Auden put it, “Nothing now can ever come to any good” – and so he decides to kill himself. In part this decision comes from his loneliness – a state from which neither his long standing friend Charley (Julianne Moore) nor a handsome and possible gay or bisexual student admirer Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) can rescue him. These are two strong characterisations and the main theme of the film, the search for love and the extreme distress when it is taken from you is played out in their characters as well. Charley’s husband left him and while she has many “friends” she reveals that only George is a true one and someone she really cares about. Similarly young Kenny had a relationship with a very pretty fellow student Doris (Nicole Steinwedell) whose undeniable charms Tom Ford cleverly negates by showing her sullen in class and chain-smoking. Kenny has split with Doris and is perhaps seeking something more cerebral and satisfying with the stylish and classy George?

A Single Man is a quiet, restrained and very deep film indeed. It is about one key part of the human condition – our need for love and the way we manage it when it happens - and when it departs. It is a gay film as it was a gay book – but in a way that is incidental. George could be mourning the loss of a wife rather than a same sex lover – his response would have been the same – as Charley points out. To make it work sincerely Tom Ford had to get huge performances from his actors - most of all from Colin Firth who as George is on screen virtually the whole time. Firth is quite exceptional and his Oscar nomination and other awards were well deserved. He is utterly convincing – something he achieves by understating rather than exaggerating his performance. I also enjoyed immensely Nicolas Hoult’s Kenny – a difficult role to pull off because in less skilled hands in could turn into a sentimental child rather than the sensitive young adult that Isherwood wrote about and Ford clearly wants in the role.

Tamara shocks them - far from the madding crowd.

2010-10-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

Tamara Drewe is full of comic book characters – literally, of course, as it is based on a Posy Simmonds comic strip. So we should not complain that nearly every character is a slightly exaggerated depiction – which they are. In real life surely nobody could be such a serial philanderer as Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) and think that he could get away with it. Or no wife could be as innocent and ignorant of her husband’s infidelity as Beth Hardiment (Tamsin Greig). Or no young woman could be quite as lusty and self-assured, wilful and flirtatious as Tamara herself (Gemma Arterton). But no matter the in-your-face nature of the characters makes for a very funny and rather impious movie which just about keeps going over its nearly two hours duration.

I, like most townies, have sometimes thought that I would enjoy life in the country. The country pub with the fine local ales and fresh food; the country lanes with the birds in the hedgerows; the fresh air and the simple life. What this mental idyll ignores, of course, is just how insular and rejecting of newcomers country communities are. The Hardiments have been in Ewedown, their fictitious Dorset village for twenty years – but they are still seen as parvenu newcomers by the locals. The returning local, Tamara, like her Thomas Hardyesque model Bathsheba in “Far from the Madding Crowd”, causes a sensation because of her re-imaging. The ugly duckling has had a nose job and become cosmopolitan – and she even dares to wear the shortest shorts that rural Dorset has surely ever seen! Tamara, like Bathsheba, is torn between three men all of whom desire her. Hardiment of course; Ben Sargeant, a rock band drummer brilliantly played by Dominic Cooper and handsome Andy Cobb who is the archetypical local man with strong arms - the “Gabriel Oak” figure, with a bouquet of “earth, dog, tobacco and engine oil”, and who strongly resembles Alan Bates in John Schlesinger’s the 1967 “Madding Crowd” film.

The film pokes gentle fun at the literary world. The Hardiments run a writers’ retreat which allows Nicholas to wallow in his fame as a successful writer and requires Beth both to look after him as well to cater for the guests with home baking and other country fare. Key to the unwinding of the plot are two feral local teenage girls, Jody and Casey, who make mischief in an undercover and puckish sort of way. Because of their interference all of the main characters become aware first of Ben’s steamy fling with Tamara and then of Nicholas’s affair with her. Tamara seems to sail through all of this without too many cares - but she leaves a couple of broken hearts along the way before, predictably, settling for Andy who turns out to have been her childhood love all along. The final scene is dramatic and violent and a rather rough justice is done – not all of the characters lives happily ever after. Indeed arguably none of them emerges unscathed from the story. The film is part romp, part morality tale and part mild social commentary. It is entertaining, well directed by Stephen Frears and is definitely a good promotion for the beauty of the Dorset countryside. The story is an amoral one – certainly by the conventional mores that well-bred country folk might like to assert they follow. But such pomposity and hypocrisy is rather nicely pricked – just like Thomas Hardy once did with his slightly shocking tale of nineteenth century double standards.

A brilliant and repulsive "Salome"

2010-05-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

The Headlong Theatre’s production of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” is scary stuff. Should an unwitting fan of the mainstream Wildean oeuvre venture accidently to the theatre expecting the usual wit and epigram, froth and bubbles they will be extremely disappointed. This is a repulsive play – and a very good one. Repulsive because it is unrelentingly pessimistic about the human condition - in the one Act all of the Seven Deadly Sins are on display and most of the Ten Commandments are broken by a bunch of characters as vile and abhorrent as it is possible to imagine. In Headlong’s new presentation the degradation is complete by a literal smearing of faces and bodies with filth - and by behaviour which is certainly not for the squeamish theatre-goer. It is a good play, and this is a fine production, because it has the courage to reveal mankind’s darkest side utterly uncluttered by any saving grace at all. There is every abuse you could imagine – of power, of position, of physical strength, of sexuality, of trust…you name it it is there.

Central to the success of this production is Zawe Ashton’s astonishing performance in the title role. She is convincing because her beauty shines through her self-indulgence and her malignancy. Only a woman as alluring could possibly secure what she wants from the all-powerful Herod. In Ashton’s hands Salome is a woman used always to getting her own way – before she appears the cast in thrall to her and as she appears she is from that moment central to the story and she commands the stage. The dance was truly erotic and her hubristic insistence on her reward - the head of Iokanaan – as believable as it was malignant.

Quite what Oscar Wilde was trying to tell us in Salome I’m not sure. It is so depressing a story and in some ways a strange one for him to have written just as his career as a playwright was taking off with Lady Windermere’s Fan. Could it be that in his own personality he saw the light and the dark is sharp relief – the urbane, witty and talented socialite on the one hand and the seeker of satisfactions in the darker corners on the other. Does Salome remind us that these dark corners, both real and in our souls, are ever present? Who knows?

So go and see Salome if you can – it is compulsively watchable if not a joyous evening. And you will perhaps rush to the shower when you get home to rinse the grime away – as no doubt that cast has to do every night!

Vicky Christina Barcelona - the compromise of choice

2010-05-15T02:02:00.000-07:00

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a hugely entertaining and pleasingly unpretentious film. Woody Allen has always directed female actors particularly well and he gets stunning performances from Rebecca Hall (Vicky), Scarlett Johansson (Cristina) and Penelope Cruz (Maria Elena). The fourth member of the ménage à quatre, Javier Bardem as the Catalan artist Juan Antonio, is also very good indeed, as is the supporting cast.

The film could have been pretentious and offensive twaddle in less assured hands than Allen's. Two beautiful young American women on holiday in Spain falling for the same mature Latin lover doesn't sound very original or engaging. But the contrast between the two young women is nicely drawn and rings true and the location shooting and the naturalistic dialogue adds to the authenticity of the story. The shock to the plot when Penelope's Cruz's Maria Elena storms in is at once both hilarious and frightening - but also convincing.

Allen has an amusing gentle dig at self-satisfied middle-class America with his depiction of the dull as ditchwater Doug - Vicky's fiancé (Chris Messina). I knew that I was going to hate him when I heard him call Vicky "Babe" - and I wasn't disappointed. As the movie unfolds the key question is whether Vicky will choose dull old Doug or exciting firebrand Juan Antonio as her partner. The former choice would almost certainly be for life - the latter probably not!

When Woody Allen is at his best - and this film is very close to being in that category - it is satisfying and cerebral entertainment. The characters are not from a comic book but from real life and whilst a degree of poetic licence in the plot is necessary to move the story along it is never incredible. And as audience members we will empathise with the characters in a way that is much less possible in a more traditional Hollywood movie. We care about what happens to Vicky and Cristina because we like them and understand their dilemmas. They are serious and bright and attractive and real.

Is there a deeper meaning to Vicky Cristina Barcelona than, just, the romance and the charm? Is it in any way a "message" movie? I think that to some degree it is - and that the message is to consider living every day with the thought somewhere in your mind that it might be your last - Juan Antonio says as much at one point. And, of course, it is also about the luxury of choice. To choose between alternative lifestyles, alternative partners, alternative compromises. Each choice is a compromise to some degree because perfection is not just elusive it is impossible - the question is how far short of the ideal will you have to settle for?

The Boat That Flopped

2010-02-28T03:57:00.000-08:00

I doubt that Richard Curtis has a bigger fan than me. His first big movie success, the original screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral, was original and outstanding – it is my favourite film of all time. I also hugely enjoyed Notting Hill and then Love Actually – a film that he also directed. Bridget Jones Diary, for which he wrote the screenplay of Helen Fielding’s novel, was also pure Curtis and very enjoyable - as were his television scripts for Blackadder and the Vicar of Dibley. To me the strength of Curtis has been not only his talent for humorous writing and plotting but his willingness to tackle controversial subjects with a light but sure hand. Across his oeuvre there is homosexuality, class, race, disability, dementia, adultery, obesity, and plenty of licentiousness and lust. In that respect his work holds a mirror up to society and reflects back life’s highs and lows, joys and disappointments and frustrations and satisfactions in a realistic way - with only the occasional exaggeration or use of poetic licence.

The Boat that Rocked deals with a subject, Pirate Radio, and an era, the “swinging sixties”, that is surely ripe for social comedy and humorous treatment. Quite why Curtis has created such a turkey is difficult to fathom – given his outstanding track record. But turkey it is - not just Curtis’s biggest creative and commercial failure by far but arguably one of the worst films ever made. The $50m+ budget and the galaxy of starts that Curtis managed to persuade to be involved including Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh, could not rescue a film that is ill-plotted, tritely written, self-indulgent, and worst of all very unfunny. The characters are mostly unbelievable and parodic – especially the cabinet minister Sir Allistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh) whose portrayal goes way beyond satire. The treatment of women is offensive – they are just amoral sex objects for the pirate ship’s disc jockeys. Whilst it is true that the real DJ’s on the real pirate ships were borderline-certifiable eccentrics the fictional characters that Curtis has created are improbable as well as dysfunctional. Seymour Hoffman shows his class in the one performance that is in any way memorable – but the rest are just going through the motions.

In Richard Curtis’s previous body of work there was never any need to explain the jokes – the humour was never forced and the situations rarely went completely over-the-top (except, perhaps, Colin Frissell’s silly but funny fantasy trip to Milwaukee in Love Actually!). In The Boat That Rocked the humour cannot be explained because it is either absent or so puerile that, for me anyway, it barely raised a smile - it is also, at times, iredeemingly vulgar. I generally subscribe to the view that nothing should be off-limits to poke fun at – but the parody of the Dunkirk “Little Ships” at the end of the film went a step too far for me. As Philip French in “The Observer” put it “Curtis has alighted on Dunkirk, a tragedy narrowly averted, which he reprises as mirthless, feelgood farce.”

I don’t understand how The Boat That Rocked could have happened. How Richard Curtis could have written such trash. How distinguished actors could have lowered their standards to appear in it. How the money men thought that it could be a success – and how I or anyone else could have allocated nearly two hours of our lives to watch such dross.

Carey Mulligan brings vividly to life a "loss of innocence" true story from pre "Swinging 60s" London.

2009-11-21T03:56:00.000-08:00

Lone Scherfig's skilfully directed film of Lynn Barber's poignant memoir of growing up in England in the 1960s contains some outstanding performances in the main roles. In particular Carey Mulligan is utterly convincing as the sixteen-year-old Jenny despite the fact that the actress was herself 23 when the movie was made. For a mature young adult to play a girl in her mid teens takes a great deal more than just putting on a school uniform. Mulligan, with clever make-up (or lack of it) and thoughtful direction by Scherfig is every inch the clever, knowing but still innocent girl that Lynn Barber remembered. And her seduction by a man more than twice her age, David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), whilst perhaps morally repugnant is not something that Jenny fights at all against – as long as she can retain some control of events. It's her decision to lose her virginity on her seventeenth birthday and there is no coercion on Goldman's part - and it is her decision to chuck up the chance of going to Oxford University by leaving school early and becoming engaged to her lover.

Although Jenny is self-assured she is naïve not to realise that Goldman is a fraud. But she must at least have been reassured that her parents didn't ban her liaison with this much older man – indeed they are as much seduced by Goldman's charm as she is. This is the key plot element – the extraordinary fact that Lynn Barber's parents did not step in and warn her of the dangers of mixing with this credible but highly dysfunctional character. Not only is Goldman a liar and a cheat, although the full extent of this is not revealed until the end of the film, but he is also involved in borderline criminal activities in property. He was part of the shady world of the racketeer Peter Rachman a notorious exploiter of vulnerable tenants in London at that time. The vulgar high life of operators in this unpleasant world is well-illustrated in a series of scenes in which Jenny mixes with Goldman's business partner and friend Danny played by Dominic Cooper and his dumb blonde girlfriend Helen excellently portrayed by Rosamund Pike.

Nick Hornby's screenplay is tight and realistic and true to the period – as is Ben Smith's brilliant art direction. I was around in London at the time that the events take place and can testify to the extraordinary authenticity of everything visual in the film. It was a strange era for Britain was at the cusp of moving into the swinging sixties - as Philip Larkin wrote "Sexual intercourse began, in nineteen sixty-three…between the end of the "Chatterley" ban and the Beatles' first LP." For Lynn Barber/Jenny it began a tad earlier than that but the rite of passage that she went through was not unlike the experiences that many of her fellow baby-boomers will perhaps recall with the same mixed feelings. As it turned out because Lynn/Jenny eventually discovered Goldman's deceptions before it was too late she was able to escape his clutches, return to her studies and go to Oxford after all.

Peter Sarsgaard is very good as the rotten Goldman and you would not know that he is an American actor from Illinois – well done him, and well done his two voice coaches. There is also a fine cameo from Emma Thompson as Jenny's disbelieving and condemnatory headmistress. But the enduring memory for me will be of Carey Mulligan who gets so believably into the role of Jenny that it must be a candidate for an award when the Oscars role around again – she is that good.

Fool's Gold - Silly nonsense

2009-06-01T05:29:00.000-07:00

One of those films that you should only watch if you really have nothing better to do. Maybe if you are trapped on a flight where there is nothing else on the flight entertainment system. Or you're with friends where after a very long and drunken lunch you collapse and the friend has the remote control. The plot is not so much formulaic as without formula at all. Take all the kids' buried treasure films you have seen. Add a modicum of racy chat hinting unsubtly at the long and hot sex that the two main protagonists have had in the past. Squeeze past the censor some gratuitous shagging in a church (well hidden behind the pews). Mix in some stereotypical baddies who seemed to have failed the audition for the latest Bond movie (one strokes a Rabbit - and is called…"Bigg Bunny). Get colourful locations with neat opportunities for some good underwater footage. Cast it with Kate Hudson who peaked early with her Oscar nomination eight years ago (for "Almost Famous") and has made dross ever since. Opposite her put Matthew McConaughey who is certainly just as pretty as she is and who has a following amongst those not too fussy about body odour. Add Donald Sutherland doing just a bit more than he needed to to pick up the cheque for his portrayal of the British rich toff with the wayward bimbo daughter (Alexis Dziena). That's about it really.

Hudson acts OK but looks rather strange. She has the opportunity to show off her very boyish figure (flat chest and neat butt) but is about as far removed from the Hollywood queens of yore as it is possible to get. Is she a Gay icon? Well she could certainly do Viola in Twelfth Night without too much need for strapping on the chest. She wins the "who has the neatest behind" contest with Dziena - but only just. Nice bikini shots of the two of them and lots of bare chest stuff from McConaughey. Something for everybody really - except students of the Cinema.
　

Mamma Mia - the DVD

2009-01-01T02:27:00.000-08:00

As the last strains of Waterloo eventually faded away I was to stay in my comfy chair for quite a while numb and trying to bring back to life my facility for objective criticism. What can possibly be said about Mamma Mia other than to recall Lord Reith who once said "He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy". That this DVD is what the public wants is not in dispute. But will this truly abysmal film now create a run on of "fictitious demand" as Hollywood rushes to copy it - well don't hold your breath.Of course objective criticism is a bit of a waste of time as those of us who think that good Cinema should at least be about films having a decent plot, well cast actors and decent production and direction may soon be in a minority. Those of us who suggest that on the evidence of the success of Mamma Mia that it is final proof of the maxim that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public are likely to be seen as elitist killjoys. Well so be it - I'm not going to dilute my crucial faculties just because the public votes with its feet and its money to crown Mamma Mia as worthwhile entertainment. Never mind the quality feel the width of the box office takings!

But, for what its worth - and that's probably not much, here is a brief list of the reasons why Mamma Mia is such excreta. The plot is trivial, unbelievable, ill-constructed, offensive and just plain dull. The casting is dire. True Meryl Streep is wonderful - but when has she ever not been? But Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth are wooden throughout and they can't sing - and no this is not irony or even remotely funny. It's a MUSICAL. The leads must be able to sing. Doh! Amanda Seyfried can sing and she's very pretty too. But what about those bloody teeth? Sorry this may be a bit from left field but why would a nice little 20 year-old have to have shining white and 100% artificial looking brilliant white teeth. It made her look like an American Ryder Cup wife for goodness sake! Stellan Skarsgard (who?) was dull and he couldn't sing either. Julie Waters gave us one of her batty old ladies - we've seen it before Jules and it made no sense in Mamma bloody Mia. Christine Baranski was good - almost in the Streep class but surely a film with this budget could have cast all of the principals rather more thoughtfully?

The editing was woeful as well. There seemed to be a good few gaffes that should have been edited out and reshot - did nobody care or not think that we'd notice when an actor forgets their lines? And was that set meant to look realistic - or the extras look like real people? Maybe not. And maybe on stage it wouldn't matter. But it wasn't on stage - it's a movie! Musical Theatre only really transfers well to film when it is opened out. Think "Sound of Music" or "Carousel" or "My Fair Lady". Mamma Mia was claustrophobic despite the stock shots of the Aegean. It looked more like Pinewood. It was Pinewood!

OK so ABBA write catchy songs and we all like occasionally to hum along with them. But why put them into a stage show with a supposed plot in the first place. Why not just perform them as song and dance in concert? And if you must try and make a facile piece of drama around a random collection of songs and put it on stage then please don't later think that it will make a film. But you have - and a few rich people have become even richer as a result. And the Cinema is the poorer for it.

Oliver Stone's "W." Truth that's stranger than fiction...

2008-11-15T03:48:00.000-08:00

It is said that every President of the United States has an idiot brother (think Roger Clinton) but with George W Bush he is the idiot brother. Oliver Stone, in his fine new biopic “W.”, has decided not to exaggerate the absurdities of America’s worst ever President – he doesn’t need to. The facts are far stranger than any fiction so what Stone does is hold a mirror up to the life of Dubya – it doesn’t need to be a distorting mirror either. We see, in flashback, the hard-drinking, womanising, and idle man that Bush was for most of the first forty years of his life. We see that his father “Poppy” (Ugh!) had constantly to bail him out when he got in trouble and to use his influence to try and get the wayward son advantages, including a place at Harvard. We see the positive influence that the saintly Laura (engagingly played by Elizabeth Banks) had on him and, crucially, the born again moment when he finds God and forsakes alcohol guided by an evangelical preacher. And we see in sharp relief what is perhaps the principal theme of the film – the uneasy father/son relationship between America’s 41st and 43rd Presidents. George H.W. Bush clearly, and understandably, had scant regard for his eldest son for the first three or four decades of the latter’s life. Indeed it is on record that the Bush political dynasty was not supposed to be furthered at all by the wayward Dubya but by the more stable and reliable younger brother Jeb. George W Bush knew this, of course, and the film credibly suggests that one of his prime motivations was to prove his father wrong – first by getting elected as Governor of Texas and then more improbably as President.

In sticking with the known facts about the life of Bush Oliver Stone has not just avoided any possible libel suits but has made an even more chilling film about this accidental President. He avoids showing the accident actually happen, no Florida count stalemate, hanging chads and Supreme Court deliberations are in the film. The fact that Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, and almost certainly won Florida as well and should have been President, is ignored – and rightly so. This is a film about the personal inadequacies of Bush, but also about his extraordinary luck. His luck in having a rich and influential father. His luck in finding a calm and tolerant wife. And especially his luck in surrounding himself with clever people who not only got him to the White House but kept him there. The fact that these clever people were mostly evil and dysfunctional was in the end Bush’s downfall but more importantly it brought the world into turmoil and the Presidency into disrepute. That Bush will leave office without a word being said in favour of anything that he did in his malignant eight years is in part a fact of Bush’s weakness and lack of fitness for high office – but it is also directly a consequence of the disastrous choices he made for his cabinet.

The malign influence of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice and the rest of this disreputable team is excellently shown in “W.”. Richard Dreyfuss’s Dick Cheney is a masterpiece – an impersonation so accurate and so scary that it made me feel that we can only hold our breath and hope that nothing happens before President Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009. Don’t count on it with this malevolent man still around! Cheney’s call for a new American imperialism with the Stars and Stripes littered across the map of the Middle East and the Caspian region was shown vividly in the movie - as was his call for American control of the massive energy resources of this part of the world. If there were still any doubters around that the grab for oil and gas was a prime driver of the Iraq invasion in 2003 and of the so-called “war on terror” then Cheney’s chilling Power Point presentation on the subject in W. will have silenced any such doubts.

The portrayal in W. of two people at the two ends of the moral spectrum was crucial to the story – and to the unfolding of the disaster that was George Bush’s presidency. Early in his emerging career as a politician Dubya was spotted and adopted by the Machiavellian and ruthless and connivingly clever Karl Rove. Rove was as smart as Dubya was dumb and we see this both from the way that Rove gave Bush the words and the bullets and how Bush blustered and stuttered when Rove wasn’t around directly to pull the strings – most memorably in a press conference in April 2004. Bush is asked what lessons he had taken away from events since the Sept. 11 attacks. He shakes his head, looks quizzical and then says: “I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hasn’t yet.” Oliver Stone didn’t invent this – he didn’t need to. He just told it as it was – and the portrayal of Rove by the brilliant English actor Toby Jones is masterly.

The second of the two crucial characters, and in many ways the antithesis of the vile Rove, was Colin Powell who comes out of the movie with his reputation intact, except for his failure to stick to his obviously deep-felt (and right) view that the invasion or Iraq was both morally and militarily wrong. Powell knew that the justification for the war, the mythical “Weapons of Mass Destruction”, was specious. He also knew that whilst toppling Saddam would be a military cakewalk managing the post invasion world would be both dangerous and difficult. Unfortunately Powell acted not as the calming and intellectually robust Secretary of State that he could have been but as the über-loyal ex General that he was as well. Whilst he must have felt scant respect for the idiotic and ignorant gung-ho imperatives of his Commander-in Chief in the end his ingrained military loyalty made him hold his tongue. And the rest is history.

The damage that George W Bush has done to America’s reputation and the cataclysmic after-effects of his being in thrall to the neo-conservatives pulling his strings will probably not be banished for the first couple of years of Barack Obama’s presidency, but once again there is hope that a firm moral purpose will return to the governance of the United States of America. The Bush years will be seen as a malignant blot on the good name of America – and Oliver Stones’ excellent movie “W.” will help future generations understand why it all happened. Essential viewing for all.

The joy of the dance...

2008-11-11T03:29:00.001-08:00

One of the extraordinary appeals of dance is that it is, by definition, non verbal – it transcends language in a way that is unique. Some music does this as well, of course, but whilst a Symphony concert can be ravishing to the ears dance appeals to all of the senses in a deeply emotional way. I remember, at a time of some stress, how the work of the wonderful Nederlands Dans Theatre in The Hague under their brilliant choreographer Jiří Kylián was an inspiration to me. I was struggling with learning the Dutch language at the time (don’t ask!) and to be in an environment where everything was communicated through movement rather than verbally was a blessed release!
In the last couple of weeks I have since dance at two ends of the dance continuum from classical to modern. The new production of Jerome Robbins groundbreaking dance musical West Side Story has been on in London – and very fine it is as well. The music and the book of this great American musical are so powerful that it is sometimes easy to overlook that the main originator was actually Robbins, a choreographer of exceptional originality and quality, and that dance is central to the piece. West Side Story is of course a narrative and the dance carries the narrative along just as much as the songs and the other action. Robbins choreography is hard to categorise. Unlike the ballet sequences in, say, Carousel or Oklahoma which, fine though they can be, are really incidental to the plot in West Side Story the dance is central. It is largely ensemble dance with quite strong balletic influences, although unequivocally modern. Wonderful!

My second recent dance experience was at London's Royal Ballet where a three act programme in which two George Balanchine ballets to Tchaikovsky sandwich the extraordinary “L’Invitation au voyage” by Michael Corder to music by Henri Duparc. The impressive thing about Corder’s work, which was first seen in 1982 and has been revived for this programme, is that the dance is to a song cycle – wonderfully performed by the Mezzo-Soprano Harriet Williams. The staging is superb – I found the costumes and sets almost surreal and Daliesque. The two Balanchine pieces are just ravishing in every way – the music, the costumes and the richness of the movement are sublime. They are also, I though, quite passionate and arousing pieces - even though there is no real semblance of a storyline. As Havelock Ellis (who knew a thing or two about arousal) said "Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself"

The Upper Middle classes at play...

2008-11-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

This is a hugely impressive debut by writer/director Joanna Hogg. It is an uncomfortably realistic film in that you feel at times that you are being a voyeur and eavesdropper at real events. That the characters are so realistic is a tribute to Hogg’s skills and to the quality of the actors. In that respect I was reminded of Mike Leigh who also makes movies that really do seem to intrude upon and depict the real world. In a sense, of course, not all of us go to see movies to see life at its most real and (in this case) in the raw. There is nothing escapist or improbable about the unfolding of events in Unrelated nor are any of the characters unlikely depictions either. More’s the pity for a more ghastly bunch of arrogant, insular, selfish sons and daughters of privilege it would be hard to find. Not too hard actually in honesty for this type of English man and woman is all too commonly seen in the leafy suburbs and the Tory Blue counties. Here they are summering in Tuscany with a holiday lifestyle as empty as it is privileged. So empty that they resort to infantile games to pass the time between meals and indulge in banter that suggests that they have libraries in inverse proportion to their wealth – which is considerable.

There are two main themes. First the battle between the “olds” the forty-something adults and the younger set in their late teens. Key conflict is that between George, a prosperous prat with a high regard for himself and a low regard for his son Oakley with whom he has an alpha-male contest. The second theme is that of the lonely, confused and menopausal visitor Anna and how she relates as something of an outsider to the rest of the party. She is going through a crisis with her husband who was supposed to accompany her to Italy but who in the end stays at home. Does she want to leave him, he her or do they both want a new start or to “try again”? The unfolding of this happens as we listen in to one side, Anna’s, of a series of stressed mobile phone conversations. Anna is clearly something of a “poor relation” to the main characters who are wealthier and for self-assured than she is – albeit in a repulsively conceited way. This applies especially to Oakley who is attractive in a pre-Raphaelite sort of way and for whom Anna quite soon has urges – not withstanding the full generation gap in age between them. There is a trip to Sienna during which Anna certainly flirts self-consciously with Oakley and maybe he with her – we cannot be sure of his motives, until later.

Joanna Hogg films the whole story in a cleverly under-stated way. Even the lovely Tuscany countryside and the beauties of Sienna are toned down by the use of a gentle filter – at no time are we in a travelogue in “Unrelated”. The climax of the film is an event which could have been serious, but actually wasn’t. When George works out what happened in this event he blows his top in an overemotional way with Oakley who he blames for what occurred. It is a pretty nasty scene which we hear but do not see - a very clever device that further enhances the verisimilitude.

Is “Unrelated” a film with a “cause” to promote? Probably not unless it is to confirm that at its most supercilious and uncaring man’s nature is pretty malicious. We know that before we see the film of course, but what the film succeeds in doing is to show that a group of people who would probably regard themselves as being educated and enlightened are in fact hypocritical, selfish and irredeemably self-centred – especially in their treatment of their visitor who is subjected to the minimum of courtesy and the maximum of patronising contempt. Anna is the only character we care about and we do feel sorry for her – and there is some satisfaction that at the end of the film it is she, after the revelation about what has caused her current melancholy, looks to have some resolution in her life. And the rest of the party move on, no doubt unaware of Anna’s turmoil, and back to a world at home in leafy England where they can parade and pomp about how “heavenly” Tuscany was again.

A better than it might have been Brideshead

2008-10-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

The practising of the art of transferring great works of literature or drama into other media such as film or television is always likely to be controversial or divisive. Even when it is done supremely well, as when Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel “Brideshead Revisited” became an eleven-hour TV epic in 1981, not every lover of the original was happy. And now, in a world that is as different from 1981 as 1981 was from 1945, we have the movie of the book – and reverential critics have not just the literature to compare it with but also the hugely admired TV series as well. And the film, in the eyes of most reviewers, is not a patch on the series and for some it is a travesty of the book as well. I beg to differ.

I don’t think that Julian Jarrold’s Brideshead is a great film or even, perhaps, a very good one. But it isn’t as bad as many of the reviewers have opined. It is beautifully filmed – surely some prize for cinematography for Jess Hall would be in order. The script is also pretty good – Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock have wisely stuck with Waugh’s original as far as possible. The story is well told and whilst a few liberties have been taken, some quite unnecessary, nothing too much is left out – quite a masterpiece of compression.

The casting is competent rather inspired with one or two exceptions. I thought that Ben Whishaw’s Sebastian Flyte worked surprisingly well. He wasn’t very pretty in a convectional way (as Anthony Andrews undoubtedly had been in the TV series) but he was quite beguiling – and , crucially, he looked like a gay alcoholic almost from the start. He didn’t gradually descend into alcoholism but he revealed these tendencies from the beginning – which I think was right. He also looked like his sister Julia, played by Hayley Atwell and they were credible as siblings for this reason alone. Hayley Atwell was enchanting – although quite a modern Julia I thought. But the scene when she goes swimming in the Lido in Venice showed her charms off well – and Charles Ryder clearly thought so to.

The trouble with the Venice segment is that it stayed from Waugh completely. Julia never went to Venice at the same time as Charles in the book and it is quite unnecessary for her to do so (looking good in a bathing costume is insufficient reason). What this irritating scene did was to suggest a far stronger ménage a trios than is apparent in the book. Charles came much more slowly to succumb to Julia’s charms in Waugh’s original and to portray it as otherwise was a cheap shot and silly. Similarly when you compress a long and complex novel into a little over two hours why invent new scenes – the Crnival was well filmed, but it isn’t in the book and it was gratuitous?

I enjoyed Matthew Goode’s Charles Ryder very much – it was a close imitation of Jeremy Irons and none the worse for that. But he should have had a moustache in the Army scenes – every officer did at the time and he looked odd without one!

But what about the religion? After reading the book you will wonder why Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic convert. After seeing the film you will think that he must have been certifiable to do so. Charles Ryder also follows the Waugh conversion to Catholic path and there is no logic in the film to this whatsoever. Catholicism in the Marchmain family
version is an evil doctrine that screws up marriages, relationships, families, people and lives. Why the hell would Charles Ryder want anything to do with this gruesome faith? He rails against the phoney hypocrisy at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed – his atheist stance seems incontestable at the time. So why would he move to Rome later as Waugh makes clear that he does. The film cannot and does not explain.

Emma Thompson is superb as the ghastly Lady Marchmain and Michael Gambon equally as good as her estranged husband. Indeed I cannot really fault any of the performances and they do not fail to measure up to the equally fine acting in the TV series of 1981.

Did I enjoy the movie? Yes I think that I did and I didn’t really expect to. The book is my favourite novel of all – so I am likely to be a harsh critic. I didn’t like the messing around with the plot, but in the main it was true to the original. If as a result of seeing the film many people go out and read the book for the first time (I hope they do) then it will have achieved something worthwhile.

The History Boys

2008-08-10T04:13:00.000-07:00

The play blends comedy with tragedy and has many layers and themes. Whilst the story is ostensibly about education and, in particular, the teaching of talented pupils on the cusp of adulthood it is also a subtle study of the human and personal relationships between teacher and pupil, pupil and pupil and teacher and teacher. Hector, the confident but eccentric, eclectic and iconoclastic history teacher is contrasted with Irwin, a generation younger than him, who is clever, confused and insecure. The boys have warmed to Hector's maverick style and methods which includes role playing and a very broad cultural range - from Gracie Fields to Housman. They tolerate Hector's fondness for fondling their genitalia when on his motor bike with equanimity clearly seeing it as a harmless foible rather than a pederastic threat.

The boys themselves are sharply contrasted and skilfully characterised. Dakin, is handsome and self-confident attracting not only the lovestruck and guilt-ridden Posner but also the Headmaster's secretary the "fair Fiona" and eventually Irwin as well. Rudge is the sporting hearty who despite his lack of overt academic competence has sufficient other qualities and connections to get him into Oxford. The play is about the "anarchy of adolescence" and whilst the fact of Hector's homosexuality runs through the story and is ultimately Hector's downfall "The History Boys" is not primarily about sex. The sexual confidence and promiscuity of Dakin and the sexual confusions of Hector, Irwin and Posner are neatly contrasted however and this theme may well be autobiographical.

The idea that culture is not sharply divided into highbrow and lowbrow is one of Hector's beliefs and he is as comfortable in the genre of Hollywood as he is in the classics. This seems to be a plea for tolerance and understanding and for the need to trawl widely in order to grow and to learn - especially early in life. The belief that in education anything goes so long as it helps the pupil's development contrasts sharply with the headmaster's wish to stick to the curriculum and to get results above all. For Hector entry to Oxbridge will (or should) come from a rounded education as much as from curriculum adherence. For Irwin the need is to play the game so that in the Oxbridge entrance exams and interviews taking the conventional line is to be avoided in favour of articulating a contrary position in order to be noticed.

The play is set in the 1980s - a time of social and political change and in a sense The History Boys is a refection of that change. The likes of Hector would never be accepted again and results driven headmasters became the norm. Bennett suggests that this is a regrettable consequence of the Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite focus in education on curriculum, standards and political-correctness.

Atonement

2008-02-10T01:34:00.001-08:00

Ian McEwan’s novel was an astonishing achievement and both its structure and storyline presented difficulties for anyone who wanted to bring it to the screen. Joe Wright (Director) and Christopher Hampton (screenplay) have surmounted these difficulties with aplomb and produced a film which is not only 100% true to the original but which is a moving and creative work of art in its own right. The story is in three distinct parts. The first is about the tensions between two sisters and with a handsome young man - who is suitor to the elder - in an upper-middle class English family in 1935. There is an undercurrent of unease in this story - and when the climax comes it is no surprise. Passions, mendacity, jealousy, snobbery and ultimately violence bubble inexorably to the surface. The second part describes how the grievously hard-done-by young man from the first story gets caught up in the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. This is harrowingly complete and horrifically graphic in its gory detail. The third part shows how the now adult younger sister copes with her guilt in the aftermath of the tragedy of 1935 and also with her determined effort to atone, partly by training as a nurse in a military hospital. A gripping plot, brilliant writing and fine characterisations illuminate this movie – excellent perofmances both by both the principals and the supporting cast.

Atonement is really a three-hander. The elder sister is played with great subtlety and distinction by Keira Knightly – perhaps here finest screen performance to date. Her suitor, Robbie, is brought to life by James McAvoy who is quite outstanding in the war scenes. And the younger sister, Briony, is believably played as a child by Saoirse Ronan, and thoughtfully by Romola Garai as an 18-year-old. There is also a stunning cameo from Vanessa Redgrave as the 77-year-old Briony at the end of the film. The five minutes when Ms Redgrave is on screen is a small master class in acting that all drama students should study carefully!

The cinematography is excellent throughout – especially the recreation of Dunkirk which is done absolutely without an ounce of sentimentality (as it should be). No small boats and brave Brits escaping to freedom here – just blood, sweat and tears. The same applies to the hospital scenes which might not be suitable for those with a weak stomach. But it certainly tells it as it was.

Finally it is worth recoding that a minor subtext of McEwan’s nook is about the art of writing fiction – particularly about the writing of a realistic novel which is closely linked to real-life events. I wondered whether this would be tackled in the film, but it is and it works very well. For those who have seen the film but not read the book I heartily recommend McEwan’s novel to you. They compliment one another well and you are likely to be moved all over again when you turn the pages.

The Holiday

2007-11-18T01:30:00.000-08:00

This is a movie of such unremitting awfulness that the only reason for writing a review is to warn others not to waste over two hours of their lives by watching it. A cast list which includes Jude Law, Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet promises much more than this travesty even begins to deliver. Their performances are wooden – nothing they can do can rescue a dire script and confused direction. It wasn’t a low budget film – stars of this fame don’t come cheap and nor does location shooting in Los Angeles as well as England. But every cent of this budget was wasted on a film that has to rate as one of the greatest turkeys of all time.

There is one (just one) positive thing to say and that is that there is a delightful cameo by Eli Wallach as Arthur. An actor as experienced as him must have known that he was in a movie of no merit - but he had the presence of mind, and the presence, to act his far younger fellow actors off the set.

The roots of this farrago lie are the genre of Richard Curtis - but in case you wondered whether writer/director Nancy Meyers has one percent of Cutis’s way with words or ability to create a plot then the answer is clearly no. There are Curtisesque moments but whereas the love affairs in his films (Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Love Actually) are improbable they mostly become believable. The love affairs in The Holiday are as synthetic as the ill chosen soundtrack and the humdrum locations. Kate Winslet is too old to do Bridget Jones and Cameron Diaz needs to learn to whimper and emote less if she is ever to be convincing. The best line in the film is when a little girl calls her a “Barbie”.

When you think how all the money used up on “The Holiday” could have been more wisely spent on half a dozen art house films that might make you think - if not make you weep. This is Hollywood at its absolute worst – a banal confection devoid of interest or merit – in the good old days it wouldn’t even be a decent B movie.

Barbra Streisand at the O2

2007-08-01T02:52:00.000-07:00

Barbra Streisand at the O2

How many performing artists would of modern times would you crawl across broken glass to get a ticket to see? For me there is only one – the magnificent Barbra Streisand. In fact you didn’t need to subject yourself to such discomfort – just to dig deep into your savings to find the £250 (or more) that a decent ticket cost. Money well spent? Undoubtedly!

I was first aware of Barbra Streisand back in 1963 when I heard “Cry me a river” from her first solo album. I bought the album and was captivated by her voice. Contrast from that album “A Sleeping Bee” with “Happy days are here again” and you will see the range and originality which was quite extraordinary for a woman of 21. Roll forward an astonishing 44 years and the voice has changed a little but the unique ability to modulate a phrase is as strong as ever – as is the supreme musical mastery. In the twentieth century, for me, only Frank Sinatra and Streisand immediate owned a song once they had sung it. Sure other good singers have sung “People”, “The Way We Were”, “You don’t bring me flowers” and the rest. But they only borrowed the songs – Barbra owns them.

At the July 18th London concert there was a mix of standards and more recent material such as “Smile” from the 2003 “The Movie Album”. I loved it all with perhaps “A Cockeyed Optimist” the high point. The show was unpretentious with little to take away from the main attraction. I could have done without the Broadway singers (four men) who added little to the evening – but that is a minor quibble. La Streisand was in superb from and her script was inoffensive and at times quite funny and moving. She’s still a Funny Girl at heart and whilst her life and her career has had its ups and downs and with Old Blue Eyes gone there really is just one Megastar in the firmament – and that’s Barbra.

2007-01-12T07:43:00.000-08:00

Miss Potter

The movie industry is getting much better at biopics; “Walk the Line” and “Ray” are just two quite recent examples of how the obvious limitations attached to the task of compressing a life into a two hour movie timeslot can be overcome with good writing, acting and directing. And so it is with the challenging subject of “Miss Potter”, about the wonderful English children’s book author, illustrator and naturalist Beatrix Potter. On the face of it Beatrix Potter is not a particularly obvious choice for a film. True she was a talented author, a wonderful illustrator and a pioneer of the need for conservation in her beloved Lake District. But over her long life not a lot really happened to her that would be the stuff of movies. “Miss Potter” overcomes this handicap quite wonderfully by concentrating on her relationship with, and engagement to, her publisher Norman Warne to illustrate her personal strength and character – especially her courage.

Beatrix Potter grew up in a prosperous London Victorian family and in a world where women of her genteel class were expected to know their place and obey their parents. Beatrix’s gradual emergence as an independent character is well treated in “Miss Potter” with a good use of flashbacks to her early childhood showing her growing love of animals and the natural world. Her talent was treated with patronising contempt by her parents – especially her monstrous mother. But Frederick Warne, the publisher, saw something in Beatrix’s work and took a risk in publishing Peter Rabbit. The youngest Warne brother, Norman, supervised the publication as his first real job and the diffident and kindly Norman gradually and subtly attracts Beatrix. The development of their mutual attraction is really well portrayed in the film – as are all of the obstacles put in their way. Not only must they always be accompanied by a chaperone but when, at last, they do manage to escape Miss Wiggin’s attention for a moment and declare their love for each other this declaration, when revealed to Beatrix’s parents, is vociferously opposed by them because Mr Warne is “in trade” and therefore not a suitable husband. One of the best moments in the film is when Beatrix reacts to this snobbery by informing her parents that they are themselves “parvenus” - that they come from a “trade” background as much as the Warne family does.

The snobbery of Beatrix Potter’s parents is shown in the context of the ruling morality (and hypocrisy) of London society in the late Victorian age. Beatrix’s escape from this claustrophobic world to the Lake District is well portrayed – as is her dogged commitment to the preservation of an area which was then being threatened by speculative builders. This is a good story – but not especially filmic, and the movie copes with this well with a brief scene at a property auction where Beatrix angers one of the speculators with her determination to put conservation ahead of profit. This is quite a modern and fashionable subject for our green conscious world but Beatrix Potter was an early adopter of the need for conservation and she had the substantial resources from her earnings to do something about it.

Beatrix Potter was a remarkable and admirable woman who overcame the prejudice and pretentiousness of the world she grew up in to exploit her talents and to follow her principles. She is well played in the movie by Renée Zellweger. I was a bit worried at the very beginning of the film that Ms Zellweger was going to give us a sort of Victorian Bridget Jones, but she soon morphed well into the character of Beatrix Potter and was convincing in the role. Ewan McGregor as Norman Warne is excellent as well – a retrained and believable performance. I also enjoyed Emily Watson’s rather butch Millie Warne, Norman’s sister and Beatrix’s confidant. The cinematography is excellent – not just in the beautiful Lake District scenes but also in capturing Victorian/Edwardian London.

Overall Miss Potter is a splendid, moving, engaging and interesting film. There may have been some artistic licence in both the story telling and in the characters. But that matters little if at the end we believe that the film has been true to the nature of its subject and is broadly accurate, as well as being entertaining.

The Queen

2006-11-15T03:17:00.000-08:00

From IMDb Movie database

The Queen

Stephen Frears’ extraordinary movie “The Queen” is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the strange, dysfunctional, detached, protected, snobbish and misguided responses of the British Royal Family at the time of the sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales in August 1997. That the Queen, after too many days of aloof distain behind the fences of her remote Balmoral estate, eventually understood the mood of the people was in no small measure due to the persistence of her new Prime Minister Tony Blair. This was the honeymoon period of Blair and he was sure-footed in his reaction to the loss of the woman he dubbed the “People’s Princess” and his wish that the Queen should come back to London to lead the nation’s mourning eventually prevailed.

Peter Morgan’s script and Stephen Frears’ direction are as realistic as possible and some parts of the film are semi-documentary in style. The dialogue between the characters, both in the Queen’s immediate family and in the rival court of Mr Blair is, of course, invented but it all carries the firm ring of truth. It will be a shock to the royalist to see just how awful some of the Royal Family could be – the snobbish and insensitive Queen Mother, the bad tempered and dismissive Duke of Edinburgh and the diffident Prince Charles are chillingly well portrayed. Helen Mirren’s performance as the Queen is truly astonishing –to such an extent that very soon into the movie you forget that this is an actor playing a role and firmly believe that you are seeing Queen Elizabeth herself. Mirren does not impersonate the Queen - she is “The Queen”!

The film is more than a believable record of a week in the lives of the Royals and of the Prime Minister – it makes some telling points about modern Britain – the country that had just given the Labour Party a stunning victory after eighteen years of rule by the Conservatives. This is a Britain whose people are not prepared to accept what they see as inappropriate behaviour by anybody – even their Monarch. When the Queen acted so ill-advisedly the people told her so. It is also a Britain confident enough to choose its own icons and quite obviously it preferred the real and fallible Dianna to the stiff and remote royal family. This remoteness was well captured in the movie by Frears’ clever use of the stalking of a stag as a metaphor. The hunting down of a beautiful wild animal is shocking not only because most of the British people would find the violent act an obscenity in itself, but also because the fact that many of the royals clearly enjoyed the “sport” showed how removed from ordinary life and values they were. Whether Stephen Frears also meant the hunting of the stag to be symbolic of the hunting down of Diana I’m not sure – but the senseless death of the animal seemed to move the Queen, and Mirren’s performance at this moment allowed us to glimpse a more sensitive individual beneath her stiff upper lip external persona. One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” in respect of both Diana and the Stag.

Diana’s death was a learning experience for the Royal Family, but also for Tony Blair. He had to tread a difficult line between those in his immediate entourage with Republican leanings - who wanted to hang the Queen out to dry - and the reality of the British constitution which has the Queen, not the Prime Minister, as head of State. He did this well and listened more to the pragmatic and scheming Alastair Campbell than he did to his more strident wife Cherie. Blair’s sure touch was eventually to desert him with his disastrous decision to support the United States over Iraq and one of the incidental aspects of “The Queen” is the reminder that it gives us of how much we lost when this skilful politician made such a ruinous error of judgment.

“The Queen” is a serious film, but it is made with a lightness and sureness of touch which means that it entertains as well as informs. And in Helen Mirren’s sympathetic but never obsequious portrayal of the monarch we can see what must surely be an Oscar winning performance.

Prime

2006-03-25T07:49:00.000-08:00

From IMDb Movie database

A shallow and rather vulgar "romantic" "comedy", 25 March 2006

So Hollywood decides that it is time for a new "romantic comedy" which covers the fashionable subject of the attractive "older" woman taking a "toy boy" lover. She (Uma Thermon) 37, he (Bryan Greenberg) 23. She divorcée on the rebound from a failed marriage. He hunky stud learning about life (and girls) and looking for fun, whilst pondering his inner soul where a "great artist" is struggling to be free. Add his Jewish family and (especially) his Jewish mum (Meryl Streep) who wants him to settle down with a nice Jewish girl and you have plenty of room for some Neil Simon style yiddisher Mama clichés. Further complicate things by having the Thurmon character's psychoanalyst the Streep character (i.e. her lover's mum - gettit?) and let the fun begin.

Whilst daring (plenty of genitalia descriptions) and modern the plot is also derivative. Perhaps the illusions are intentional (e.g. the scene stolen from "Notting Hill" where he breaks into a small urban garden with his new love to sit quietly amongst the greenery and the peace)they are none the less unoriginal. Putting red wine in the fridge - now what movie was that from? I saw the film on a long distance flight so perhaps it was an edited edition, but most of the coitus did seem to be off-screen. But the anatomical references were up front (to coin a phrase) and (I'm no prude) vulgar. Wanting to "knit a little hat for his lovely penis" - that sort of thing.The direction is as clichéd as the story. The usual city shots in the twilight...

As far as the performances are concerned let's assume (charitably) that the stars were directed that way. Funniest (not wholly intentionally) of all is Streep and about half way through the film I roared out loud (causing some of my fellow passengers to look up) when I realised who she reminded me of - it was Dustin Hoffman in drag in Tootsie - the spitting image of Steep's Mama/psychoanalyst!
If you have really nothing better to do (like me at the time) then watch the film if you must. But better to find a good book.

Sideways

2005-03-02T07:29:00.000-08:00

Published on IMDb, the Internet Movie Database

No Man is an island

This is one of those films which ever so gradually creeps up on you as you watch it until it grabs you hard and won't let go. With Hollywood often (wrongly in my view) accused of only making movies with big names, big sets and big "stories" it is refreshing to see and thoroughly enjoy a film which has none of these. The performances are as honest as they are understated. Thomas Haden Church's Jack is an utterly believable Don Juan with the morals of a rat and the sensitivity of a two ton truck. And yet you can't help liking him. Paul Giamatti as Miles has all the insecurities (and some) all men of his age facing mid life crises. The stunningly beautiful Virginia Madsen, scarred by a failed marriage and a little lost, is just wonderful as Maya and is probably the character that you are most rooting for and want to be happy. Sandra Oh's Stephanie is kooky and slightly scary but proves to be as vulnerable as all the other leading characters.

Vulnerability is the lead motif of the movie with all of the characters incomplete in some way (as we all are in real life I think).Sideways really does run the full gamut of emotions and very often you don't know whether to laugh or cry – indeed the characters themselves are always teetering along the brink between depression and elation. The golf scene is so funny that it had me hollering out loud – but again its denouement (when Jack charges up the fairway to threaten the fourball behind who had driven a "hurry up" ball at them) is wonderfully manic.Is there a moral from Sideways? I'm not sure that there is. Perhaps (without being too pretentious about it) it is Donne's "No man is an island". Alone each of the characters is vulnerable, weak, confused but put them with others and their personalities and their potential are realised (for better or worse).

Sam North in his article on Road Movies says about Sideways that "It's an escape from reality into unreality, but oddly enough, given their ages, it is also a coming of age picture. The road, as often stated, educates us, makes us face up to who we are and what we are escaping." I think that is very incisive and that Sideways is a classic of the road movie genre. It is also quite un-modern, by which I mean that although it is of the new millennium it could actually have been made at any time in the last thirty years or so. It is not a film that reflects the times we live in as a film that reflects the human condition at almost any time. Superb.

The Camomile Lawn

2004-11-09T05:40:00.000-08:00

The Second World War changes Middle Class behaviour and mores.

From: IMDb The Internet Movie database

This is an exceptional adaptation of a very good novel. Virtually nothing is changed from the original and the story is beautifully told. Whilst it is not really necessary to place this very accessible saga in the context of more acknowledged works of art about the effects of the War on society (e.g. 'Brideshead Revisited') it does stand up well even in such illustrious company.

In just a few years attitudes, morals, priorities and sensitivities change beyond recognition for this appealing family group. A rather self-satisfied and indulgent family is first rocked by the effects of the Spanish Civil War (on Oliver). Then in rapid succession, as the effects of the Second World War take their grip, we get a believable series of events which make a modern morality tale.

There is adultery; pedophilia; under age sex; bereavement; racial prejudice; a 'marriage' with two fathers and one mother; homosexuality; a manslaughter; a 'flasher'; sentimentality; casual sex; women's liberation; alcoholism; rape… Put like this, of course, its sounds improbable and sensational but in fact it is wholly believable.

The women are the stronger characters and it is they who get their act together best to survive the war. Tara Fitzgerald's Polly is the classic example – a brilliant, pragmatic, practical and fabulously desirable woman who decides for herself what is right and brokes no argument. Her secret war work is clearly significant – but she is equally adept at managing her unconventional private life - where she begins a relationship (which endures) with both of a set of twins each of whom fathers one of her children. Jennifer Eale's 'Calypso' is no less determined – although her ambition (to marry a rich man) is selfish and she remains self-centered throughout. But there is honesty in her chosen lifestyle which is no less appealing than that of Polly. The young Sophy (Rebecca Hall) is again a strongly painted character who grows up rather too quickly as a result of the war. In the book this leads to a deflowering by the old goat Max Erstweiler when she is around 14 – although the constraint of the TV adaptation do not (quite) allow this to be seen. Helena (Felicity Kendal), wife of the dull and pompous Richard, also breaks free in war conditions and Max shows her that life need not end at 40 – with satisfying results for them both.

Although the men in the story are rather weaker than the women there are some touching vignettes and good performances from Paul Eddington (as Richard) and others. I can unhesitating recommend the DVD to anyone interested in the social changes of the Second World War in England.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

2004-05-04T02:09:00.000-07:00

Published on IMDb, the Internet Movie Database

A very funny film, with hidden depths.

It is said that if you need to explain a joke then it can no longer be funny. So the compulsion to explain why I think that `Four Weddings and a Funeral' is much more than just a very funny film is rather risky. But I believe that the movie is an example of a work of art that can be enjoyed at many levels. Enjoy it, certainly, as witty, very well acted, moving and engaging. But I would argue that it has a deeper quality – especially its ability to challenge prejudice and its touching belief in the ultimate decentness of people – and in the power of love.

Love is the central theme of all three of Richard Curtis's major films (`Four Weddings…'; `Notting Hill' and `Love Actually'). Curtis's credo is `amor vincit omnia' – although in ultimately conquering love may slip along the way. In `Four Weddings and a Funeral' the risks to love's happy resolution are all revealed and (mostly) conquered. Shortly before he dies at the Scottish wedding Gareth says `A toast before we go into battle. True love – in whatever shape or form it may come – may we all in our dotage be proud to say ‘I was adored once too'; and Carrie (the bride) quotes John Lennon in her speech - `Love is the answer'.Described in this way the risk of such a critique is that we navigate close to romantic novel territory. But Four Weddings never strays across this sentimental border. The ultimately happy ending (not just for Carrie and Charles but for all the characters in the photo montage over the credits) is only possible for Charles when, having at last declared his love for Carrie `I've loved you from the first second I met you', then asks her if `after we've spent lots of time together you might agree…not to marry me?'. No more weddings – but an agreement to spend the rest of their life together. And so it was (of course) with Gareth and Matthew - the relationship described by Charles at Gareth's funeral as the `perfect match'. Such a match can only be destroyed by death as Matthew acknowledges in his quote from Auden at the funeral `I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong'

The connection (or not) between love and sex is also addressed throughout the film. The unspoken sub-text of Carrie's slightly shocking revelation to Charles that she has had thirty-three lovers is that she didn't actually love any of them (including, as it turns out, the one she is about to marry). And Scarlett says `…most of the blokes I fancy think I'm stupid and pointless, so they just bonk me and leave me.' Charles is like this in Henrietta's description of him as a `serial monogamist' who will `never really love anyone, because you never let them near you.' Implied strongly here is the modern reality that sex (as an enjoyable pastime) can be decoupled from sex (as an expression of love). There is however the (moral?) suggestion that if you combine love with sex then that will be the best of all worlds. Whilst Bernard and Lydia reach the height of sexual passion together (and Charles crouches in a nearby cupboard) he says `Oh I love my wife' to which she replies `I…love…my…husband!'

The central theme of the film is really that love takes many forms. Platonic (Charles and Scarlett; Tom and his dog Jilly…) unrequited (Fiona for Charles); Single sex (Gareth and Matthew); hard work (Shy Serena and deaf David) and (crucially) the love that binds a group of true friends together. The film is not judgemental – other than to expose the crass (George, who asks `what use are the novels of Wordsworth') and the boring (John, the `38 going on 60 stockbroker').That the pursuit of love leaves casualties along the way is an explicit part of the film. Fiona's hopeless love for Charles, Henrietta's rejection by Charles at the altar; the failure of Carrie and Hamish's marriage (despite his confident statement at the wedding that his life with her would be a `joyful one, for years and years to come') are examples. But despite the wounds there is a moral message here as well – that living a lie or deluding yourself that there is love when really it is only lust, or convenience or habit is undesirable.

You can be as indecisive as Charles; as dim as Tom; as scatty as Scarlett as randy as Lydia; as intellectually brutal and honest as Fiona – none of this matters if, in the end, your heart rules your head and you allow true love to triumph.

"Memoirs" by Douglas Hurd

2004-01-19T01:55:00.000-08:00

Published on Amazon.com

The end of "Noblesse oblige"

Former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd had the sort of career for which the phrase “noblesse oblige” could have been coined. Not that Hurd regarded himself as being of particularly noble origins and he was clearly irritated by those who thought him to be a toff. “I was far from patrician” he says, “…my suits were made in Swindon rather than Saville Row.” The implication is that if he had been more proletarian then it would have been he, rather than John Major, who would have been elected Prime Minister in 1990 after the fall of Margaret Thatcher. He seems to think that the fact that hewas an Old Etonian scuppered his chances. I rather doubt this not because Hurd was not up to the task but because I am not persuaded by his “memoirs” that he really, in his heart, wanted the top job.

As you would expect from a man who benefited from the very best of English education (Eton, and Trinity Cambridge) who was a scholar and who graduated with a “First” in History this is a beautifully written book. The language is elegant, readable and never pretentious and here Hurd’s apprenticeship as a novelist has clearly helped. It is also not a purely politicians autobiography and he rarely sounds off portentously about the great affairs of state. Where he was directly involved or responsible for policy then that is described. But where he was not involved directly in the decision making he forswears comment – even though he must have been very close to the action. The memoirs are blessedly free of economics – Hurd was never Chancellor of the Exchequer, no doubt to his great relief. This makes his post politics venture as a Bank director slightly odd, but he no doubt acted as a skilled diplomat and had the highest level contacts which is presumably what the Nat West Bank wanted.
Hurd was one of the few career diplomats actually to become Foreign Secretary and one can see that he must have been very popular amongst the Foreign Office mandarins as “one of us”. He really understood the system in a way that few of his predecessors and none of his successors have managed to do. He claims throughout the book to have politics of the centre left rather than the mainstream centre right of his party. I do not doubt that this was how he saw it – but I see few signs of a really radical streak. He was more likely to keep his more liberal thoughts to himself than to fight the boss – Mrs Thatcher was rather ruthless with those that challenged her too much from the “wet” left leaning wing of the party. But Hurd was solid in his principles and his life long opposition to Capital Punishment is both honourable and a sign that he generally put principle before short term populism.

When you have read a biography or an autobiography ideally you feel not only that you know what the subject did, but also what he or she was as a person but Douglas Hurd’s “memoirs” leave many questions unanswered. He is very uncomfortable with revealing any of the more personal details of his life. For example there were two traumatic events which get rather reserved treatment. When Hurd was twenty-one his two years younger brother Julian committed suicide. This terrible and inexplicable event must have been harrowing, but even today Hurd does not describe it in his own words. He quotes form his mother’s diaries rather than say what it meant to him. Similarly his divorce from his first wife Tatania after fifteen years of marriage is not really explained. He talks of disagreements and storms but what they disagreed about and why it was all so stormy is not explained. I think that the failure to express his feelings about his brother’s death is that it was an event too painful to put into words – even for as accomplished wordsmith as Douglas Hurd. The decision not to describe the reasons for the breakdown of his marriage to Tatania is good manners – she is still alive and Hurd no doubt feels that it is really none of anybody’s business why their marriage failed and that it would be out of order to explain. No doubt Tatania will be pleased to see that their courtship is described in the short sentence “The two of us fell in love.” This contrasts noticeably with the more convoluted description “on my part one set of feelings grew into another, warmer and stronger” in respect of his second marriage to Judy. At the end of the book he writes movingly of Judy’s battle with leukaemia and it is clear that theirs has been a loving and successful marriage.
Hurd is, in the main, discrete about his colleagues and about his family partly to protect his reputation and partly, as I have said, out of good manners. Regrettably he does not tell his side of the story about the oft repeated anecdote that at Eton he was a notoriously avid doler out of corporal punishment which lead to his nickname being “Hitler Hurd." Many Britons in public life today, for instance, have recalled being flogged by Hurd and often mentions these canings as a mark of pride!Looking at today’s bunch of British politicians one wishes that there were a few more like Douglas Hurd. His memoirs tell the story of his life and times with honesty, discretion and at times with an air of almost diffident commentary on his success. To know more about Hurd the man, however, we will have to wait for a more penetrating personal biography. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Brideshead Revisited (TV serialisation)

2003-05-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

Published on Amazon.com

The most remarkable thing about the TV dramatisation of "Brideshead Revisited" is that when you return to the written word you realise how perfect the casting and the production was. It is impossible to think of anybody but Jeremy Irons as Charles or Anthony Andrews as Sebastian - and the other key roles were equally brilliantly portrayed - Diana Quick's delicious but disturbed Julia; Claire Bloom's controlled and certain Lady Marchmain - and Olivier's funny and moving Lord Marchmain.

Waugh's novel is one of the truly great works of fiction of the 20th century. It describes a lost era by contrasting it with the changes the Second World War was creating to society and to the old order of things. Although the novel's publication pre-dated the landslide Labour win of 1945 by a couple of years there is nevertheless an undercurrent of the inevitability of change. Some of the characters are the new order (Charles's junior officer Hooper for example) - and those who are clearly unsuited to the post war world die before the end (Lord and Lady Marchmain do not live to see the inevitable desecration of their great country house). The TV adaptation captures this sense of change as elegantly as the novel. We see Charles encounter the realities of life (death; divorce; adultery; the need to earn a living; the fall from grace of his friend) which contrasts beautifully with the distant idyll of Oxford with Sebastian and his bear.

Brideshead is an achingly real book - none of the hilarious fantasies of Scoop or Decline and Fall are here. I do not think that the novel has one false moment in it's hundreds of pages - and the TV adaptation is equally sure footed. Watch it in one sitting if you can find the time - maybe with a glass or two of Chardonnay and some plovers eggs by your side!