Film Glow 2 - Levelling Up: The French Dispatch, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Harder They Fall...
Film Glow: October 22, 2021
Get dressed, the new Wes Anderson is out.
While you’re donning your finest corduroy suit and mustard tie, there’s briefly time to discuss the elusive greatness of screenplays, or scripts if you’re into the whole brevity thing.
Truth be told, I have never felt any great desire to be a screenwriter. Many of my peers hold firm to that course, stiffening their backs to the headwind, and I wish them well. Remember me when the millions roll in. But I’ve always seen the line, and I fall on this side of it. Writer as observer, commentator, philosopher, even prisoner of his subject, but the eternal outsider nonetheless. The gate is closed, so I shimmy up the walls to get a glimpse, bloodying my hands, breaking my fingernails, grabbing for the bespoke muffins. I’m a journalist at a sprint, an author over a marathon.
One thing I treasure about The Bourne Ultimatum (among its many pleasures - and those first three movies are as fine a collection of action movies as we’ve had in recent years) is the accuracy with which Paul Greengrass dresses Paddy Considine’s Guardian reporter: shoulder bag, scuffed blazer, harried expression of a man dogged by deadlines (and soon enough snipers). That wan expression spoke volumes about the creed to which I belong.
Screenwriting always looks so exhausting, and soul-destroying. The sheer maddening fiddliness of the format is enough to make my teeth itch. The endless rewriting. The endless indenting. The three-dimensional chess of getting characters in the right place at the right time. Don’t get me wrong, if say the men-in-suits at Marvel (the other men-in-suits) knocked on my door tomorrow with a briefcase filled with cash and a sequel in need of cloak and dagger, I would swiftly knuckle down to a crash course in inter-dimensional twists, snappy one-liners and post-match stings. Please don’t mistake me for anyone virtuous.
There was indeed a brief moment when I could have been classified as a screenwriter, if you squinted. Young, impressionable, eager to taste it all, I was asked by a colleague to help write the screenplay for Proteus 2. We had a producer, Paul Brooks, who would go on to make My Big Fat Greek Wedding with the help of talented people.
I hadn’t seen Proteus and didn’t really feel the need to rectify that. I simply got the gist from the back of the video case: a shape-shifting monster loose on an oil-rig with Craig Fairbrass. Besides which, there was little in the way of firm ground offered by our producer. This I quickly learned was how it worked - you had to pull a story out of thin air, but make sure it involved a set of apparently unrelated components that your masters happened to consider commercially viable that week. In my case, they included New York, the internet (which was bafflingly new), and shape-shifting. Craig Fairbrass was optional at this stage.
I happened on a dumb idea - what if cop and (vigilante) serial killer were the same person? He was hunting himself! Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde spilling across the neon-soaked streets of Manhattan, which despite it being 1995, as far as I was concerned, were still the sleaze-drenched avenues of Taxi Driver. You have no idea how hard it is to make this idea work. Why does the cop not remember being at the scene of the crime he is now investigating? Distorted brain chemicals! What is the source of his drug-induced mania? Military experiments! He’s ex-army – well, he is now. And he looks up the evil corporation behind it all on the internet. Why was he in New York? Because I was told he had to be, and my collaborator had written an opening scene where the camera races down Fifth Avenue, but not much else.
Lesson: screenplays can spiral into awfulness really fast.
It won’t shock you to hear that Brooks soon went in a different direction. The “project” dissolved from a Proteus sequel into a techno-thriller shoved into a folder entitled Dark Blood (which may have been mine) before the phone stopped ringing. Rather than abandoned it faded away, with my only contribution to make it to paper a terrible sequence in which a gang of local hoods held up a coffee shop, speaking mostly like Joey in Friends.
So you can rest easy, it is unlikely Marvel, or anyone else, will be in touch on that front. I remain here in this dimension, safely on the other side of the line, watching.
Which brings me to what is commonly know in the trade as a point. How much I have come to to admire the power of movie engineering. By which I mean the great screenwriting. Where besides florid dialogue, characterisation, scene construction, and dramatic flow, they set down indelible blueprints, intricate floorpans for the film to come, with almost mathematical precision. The firmer the screenplay, the surer the the foundations, the sturdier the outcome. And it is a week where two master writer-directors, two movie mathematicians, are back in the public eye: the aforementioned Wes Anderson and Joel Coen. Both are idiosyncratic artists who not only demonstrate a stunning facility and originality with the form with obscene consistency, but also hold to a firm belief in the script as sacrosanct, and improvisation the wasp at the sun-dappled pub table of production. Which is what makes their voice so strong, their style so rich, their films so wonderfully peculiar. And why I am devoted to both.
NB: I’m well aware Dune is also out this week, but I am planning to discuss that sandy undertaking elsewhere (if I can find the time). And despite appearances this isn’t necessarily a review show.
So to some thoughts on two blessed scoops of Frances McDormand…
THE FRENCH DISPATCH
Say you were required to enter the cinema blindfold. You were then led, trustingly, past the pick’n’mix counter, its carefully designated, Willy Wonka-like array of colours and compartments unseen, and into an auditorium to take your seat with the film already underway. Given leave to unmask, how long would it take you to recognise you were watching the latest Wes Anderson? Ten seconds? Five? Less? There is no mistaking the handwriting. The rigorous staging, neat as a pin; the camera dead centre, or sliding smoothly sideways, occasionally up or down; those sets like department store windows, the multiplicitous Wes-en-scene; the lightly amused singsong timbre of the voice-over provided by Anjelica Huston. This isn’t auteur theory, this is auteur proof.
The French Dispatch has arrived, long overdue. Fans have been chewing their pipe stems in frustration. Damn that Covid for so many reasons. But to deny us the gleaming totality of Anderson’s storytelling, emotions prickling beneath the smooth veneer, is inhuman.
And make no mistake, this is a Wes Anderson movie. In fact, it is at least three of them at once. You may need a strong coffee. He’s expanded his chocolate box imagery into a pick’n’mix counter: bountiful, measured, both sweet and tart, varicoloured (to wit: Tilda Swinton’s burnt orange bouffant and floaty mandarin gown) and a little overwhelming. Word out of Cannes was unusually circumspect. There were the raves, the statutory standing ovation, but some critics had wearied of the levels of cleverness teetering like boxes stacked one upon the next. Is there such a thing as too much Wes? That is the question.
The French Dispatch is a feast of ironic asides, cinematic japes, in-in-jokes, and references to rarefied worlds, starring just everybody the director knows. It is Anderson served neat. Anderson undiluted. Anderson close to overflowing. At times, you’re not entirely sure a plot is actually underway in any conventional sense. But the foundations are too deep, the architect too good for it not to take shape. With the stories conceived alongside regular cohorts and surrogate brothers Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Hugo Guinness, everything is where it is meant it to be. The boxes do not topple. This is a dizzying monument to the cinematic expression of a singular idea.
Tonally speaking, we are somewhere north of the Russian doll historio-tragicomedy of The Grand Budapest Hotel and east of the lilting dysfunction of The Royal Tenenbaums: a period piece, but only as far back as the sixties, when print was still the voice of the world. The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, to give the fullest nomenclature of periodical and film, was an American magazine until recently published out of the magnificently named fictional French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé. Its mix of politics and culture, cartoons and travelogues, and natty, unwavering layout might seem familiar. For this is Anderson’s thinly disguised tribute to a lifelong obsession with esteemed American weekly The New Yorker. But whereas The Royal Tenenbaums was written in the idiom of a New Yorker short, this is an entire magazine in film form. In other words, Anderson has made a fictional movie about reportage. Which is a preoccupational hazard.
Of course, The New Yorker is still going strong, a rock against the tide of online entropy, but The French Dispatch, we soon learn, has perished by decree along with its uncompromisingly mild-mannered editor Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray, as charmingly depressed as ever). Like The Grand Budapest Hotel, it is a romanticised look back on a faded world of intellect and passion: the long read, the personal style, journalists stewing over typewriters, amid zephyrs of silver smoke from idling cigarettes, and stories delivered on crumpled foolscap. What you are watching is a film-wide obituary.
The structure is a commemorative issue: a travel piece covering the local hotspots, an introduction to the staff (I craved more of Elizabeth Moss as fearsomely punctilious grammarian Alumna), as well as the life and moods and office protocol of Arthur Howitzer Jr., before we enter three choice examples of its legendary journalism. It being fundamentally impossible to unpack everything that goes on across its triptych of typewriting – this is after all only an article - allow me to scratch the surface. The first is art history, as “written” by Swinton’s free-associating, art-world madam J.K.L. Berensen, and delivered as a lecture with accompanying slides, about incarcerated art sensation Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), his muse in prison guard Simone (Lea Seydoux as formidably beautiful as she was wanly adrift in Bond), and enraptured art dealer Julian Cadazio (Adrien Brody, applying maximum zing to proceedings). The second is a political report from the scene of the Ennui-sur-Blasé’s 1968 student riots, as “written” and lived by Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand channelling Lillian Ross - that pout!), in which she interviews and beds big-haired radical Zeffirelli (Timothée Chalamet, thin of limb and moustache) amid tear gas and Godardian dancing in coffee shops. The third is a food piece from the Tastes and Smells section with added kidnap, as “written” by puree-smooth food critic Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), and retold on a really talky talk show, in which he attempted to unearth the secrets of famed police chef Nescaffier (Stephen Park). If all that sounds a bit much, you don’t know the half of it.
A good comparison to make is with the Coens last outing (their last together), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Both are portmanteaus, a collection of short stories, or in Anderson’s case long articles. Both purport to being the direct cinematic iteration of the written word (via screenplays). Only with Anderson the concept goes one stage further. He pictures the creation of the articles, placing his valiant journalist at the heart of the action (or in the first story, largely to one side), in the process of reporting. Tintins at the scene of the crime.
One of its multi-storey (multi-story!) and indeed multimedia of themes is a quest for the soul of the creative process. Which amounts to an orderly and heartfelt examination of how writers tame life onto the page, and extends into the question of what art is supposed to extract from reality and what it chooses to leave behind. And how much the writer therefore influences what we take to be truth, and how an editor influences the truth of a writer, and filmmaker refracts onto the screen. Got it? The observer always changes the experiment. Particle or wave or a swig of the finest cognac.
The French Dispatch will do nothing to convert the unconvinced. There is almost a doubling (tripling?) down on the things that tend to stick on the craw of those phobic to Anderson’s compartmentalised, everything-is-metaphor universe, and increasing dedication to a personal style. If you take an overview of his career trajectory, a smooth incline can be seen from oddball zen to postmodern neatnik on overdrive.
The references whirl from Max Ophüls’s antique portmanteau Le Plasir to the French New Wave to The Beverly Hillbillies, with that strange sensation of being simultaneously feverish and unerringly spot on. Mash-up is the central impulse. Each of the main characters is based upon not one but a multitude of real figures. In a recent interview with The New Yorker (throwing us down a well of life imitating art imitating life), Anderson eloquently listed the basis for Jeffrey Wright’s manner of speech as Roebuck Wright alone, in which the voices of James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal provide seasoning to his leisurely yet testy eloquence. Each and every character is seeded by such a list, just as each fictional article harkens to a factual equivalent from the magazine’s long history (Anderson has all the back issues). This is one giant soufflé of storytelling.
While inevitably never as centred or moving as his best work (The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, or The Darjeeling Limited), it is still a marvel that Anderson never loses his grip on the accumulation of incidents and their concomitant Mechano set of shots. He conducts a world of bustle, meaning and outrageous flair with his lexicon of angular magic. There are new additions to the toolbox. Lengthy sections of black of white, symbolic, no doubt, of black ink on the white page; colour spilling back in when the story dallies in a quick aside or an animated chase sequence in the mode of Hergé or the gaudy furnishings of seventies television or the autumnal slump of the editorial office. There is even sight of this straightest of arrows cutting corners. Quite literally cutting corners, with the camera spinning round a dinner table in a circular motion. Whatever next?
There is self-parody here too, which is what is finally so beguiling, if you have the stamina. Anderson is unwilling to take seriousness too seriously. He maintains that charming knack of puncturing pretension with more pretension. Or as Arthur Howitzer Jr. would say, “Just try and make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” It will take multiple viewings to unpack the jokes and jargon, and the sheer volume of quotations (though you may not feel the need). But isn’t that a joy? Who else gives you so much? He is fully (and I mean fully) his own man.
The French Dispatch is out at cinemas now.
And the inevitable plug…
Wes Anderson: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work is out now.
THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH
The news that Ethan had decoupled (temporarily or otherwise) from the creative embrace of his brother and was to play no part in the new Coen film was such a shocking turn of events I suspected Yoko Ono or the Devil or Johnny Caspar to be behind it. The dudes no longer abide! For weeks, I refused to come out of my room. Miller’s Crossing playing on loop as I sipped forlornly at a White Russian, spiralling into reverie.
I have fond memories of negotiating the Coen double act. What under normal circumstances might be classified as interviews. As a rule, Joel would remain stationed on the hotel sofa, mostly frowning, but occasionally slumping. Ethan tended to roam the suite, prodding at the furnishings, examining the door lock, on one occasion entering the bathroom and repeatedly turning the light on and off. He may have been planning an escape route. It was impossible to know where to address the next question. Eventually, he would complete his circuit and return to his chair to confer with his brother, and together they would gurgle mysteriously. There was also a time when Joel was eating yogurt.
Looking back the most successful query I ever presented the entwined brain of the Coen brotherhood was asking what they considered to be the worst smell in the world. Answer: Gary, Indiana.
As this general theme was repeated with the regularity of Hudsucker clockwork, I soon realised it was nothing personal. Tom Hanks probably met much the same fate. More to the point, I loved every minute. They were irreducibly always the Coen brothers. This was their genius, beyond the ken of mere mortals. Minnesota’s maestros of the ironic refusing to explain themselves. Unable to explain themselves. Especially to someone who seemed to care for their films.
When shall those two meet again? (Probably Christmas, but I’m insinuating on mutual creative ground.)
For them to part ways, to gurgle their liquid thoughts in separate worlds, was a personal issue for me. Ethan really tied the room together. The universe was unlikely to recover from such a blow. And as I sat down among the finely tailored on the closing night of the London Film Festival to watch a Coen flying solo, an aura of Paddy Considine about my crumpled suit, I steeled myself for dismay. But Joel’s new film, in partnership with William Shakespeare, and more impressively still Frances McDormand, who stars and produces, is quite frankly immense.
The Tragedy of Macbeth unfurled like a dark and thorny flower, seething with wickedness, as bracing and fast-paced as a film noir. And it was wonky and strange, and unhinged from the dignity of a thousand Arden editions by a definitively Coen sense of humour. Of all Shakespeare’s spiritual shakedowns, the Scottish play has that Coen patina of best-laid plans unstitched by fate. Hotheads abound. Bodies pile up. People sure do love the sound of their own voice.
The staging is European fusion: German expressionism in full swing, theatre as cinematic ruse, a gothic dreamscape that would have given Orson Welles a real kick. Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel was clearly tasked with maximal portent. And he answers the call. They go big on mist, Fargo style, with metaphysical crows circling battlefields and tree limbs scratching at window frames – Miller’s Crossing on the move. Everything is angular and disconcertingly vast, the shadows stretch like the hands of the Hudsucker clock. The black and white photography – or perhaps this is simply a world devoid of colour – recalls the whispering noir of The Man Whose Wasn’t There, with its UFO auguries and fallen wives. The snow looks like ash – nuclear fallout. The sound editing is volcanic.
It occurred to me, as Denzel Washington strode his impossible battlements, that this is the very first Coen film not to be set in America (apart from a brief excursion across the border in No Country For Old Men, and a drafty Eastern European shtetl to open A Serious Man). But this isn’t Scotland so much as a Macbeth of the mind.
As credited, Joel has adapted Will for the screen, cunningly disguising an edgy crime thriller as a straight-up rendition of the play. You know the drill: Scottish noble gets a tip off from a trio of hags, embarks on a killing spree, spurred on by his wacky wife, proves a let down as king, before falling victim to mobile woodland.
Yet there is that canny sense of the Coen running beneath the familiar locutions and tragic flaws in full flow. The precision is there, where Shakespeare has been enslaved to the guile of a rigorous filmmaker. The pace is quickened. The monologues jazzed. Joel artfully groups the fleet of messengers loaded with bad tidings into subsidiary noble Ross (Alex Hassell - veteran of the RSC, eyes like bowling balls), who wafts in and out of scenes as an agent of fate – that ever present Devil at the Coen party. Having previously assayed record producer and bank teller in Coenville, Stephen Root fits right in as the Gatekeeper. You’ll have heard, no doubt, that the witches (sounding the statuary Coen warning - no one ever gets aways clean, my Lord Macbeth) are played by one astonishing actress, Kathryn Hunter, who writhes like Gollum and intones those famous rhymes like a rockfall.
The great skill in performing Shakespeare is to make you forget it’s Shakespeare. Tousled in grey, Washington looks weathered and hungry, a middle-aged man waking up to opportunity, at once laid-back and given, in that Washington way, to sudden, uncanny bursts of movement as if zapped by an electrical current. His Macbeth is a intriguingly modern soul striding through medieval Scotland, indeed barely stopping for breath, and the old lines gain new intoxicating rhythms in his softly amused delivery. By contrast, as Lady Macbeth, McDormand looks as if she is fresh in from the 1940s, the contours of her remarkable face made as eerie and beautiful as Bette Davis beneath the chiaroscuro shimmer. She too gives an urgency to her part: that viper-quick delivery and that immortal pout, a sour crease of the lips accompanied by an incandescent look that has surely been lasered on Joel on more than one occasion. This is an older, childless couple clutching at last chances; morality worn thin by age. Note the ripple of grief that crosses McDormand’s face as her screen husband bemoans their lack of issue. Deep fissures are opened in the chaos.
And those creaky themes (and endless essay questions) are roused by Joel’s fierce attention. The peril of ambition has long been a Coen concern; from Barton Fink to Ed Crane to Larry Gopnik woe betide those who have ideas above their station. The Dude abides precisely because he is utterly devoid of ambition. He is the anti-Macbeth. That said, he really wants to get out that damned spot on his carpet.
Did I have any doubts? Well, John Goodman isn’t in it. And there are moments, fleeting moments, where Washington sashays into his own, separate film. Not all of the supporting cast manage the impact of Hunter, Hassell, or Bertie Carvel’s untamed eyebrows as Banquo. And the descents into madness comes with alarming suddenness. But pace is the thing - Joel isn’t hanging around to admire the scenery, he is applying the jolts of horror, crossing the streams of genre, finding the Hammett in Hamlet, the wild in Will. And Shakespeare has found something grand and phantasmagoric in him.
I wonder what Ethan thinks?
The Tragedy of Macbeth hits cinemas at Christmas and Apple TV soon after in January.
Other thoughts…
The Harder They Fall is a riot whose political charge only hits you later. It’s too much fun to be caught lecturing, but the point is as clear as the New Mexico landscape. History if not cinema tells us that the Wild West was as much the province of people of colour, and director Jeymes Samuel pastiches Leone, Tarantino, Peckinpah and the whole kit and caboodle of a colourblind genre with a sumptuous cast of outlaws and sharpshooters – each characterised with cartoon panache - played by Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, Zazie Beatz, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo and more. Call it postmodern revisionism, hip and ultraviolet, and entertaining as all hell. Out on Netflix from Friday, October 29.
Here endeth the lesson, for now. But please spread the word. I need the company.
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