The Talkies: Britwits
Bowman, James
"The Talkies: Britwits" by James Bowman Britwits Recently, a black Briton, writing in the Washington Post, said that the only advantage he could see in being British was that his black American cousins...
...1 important than politics and war...
...Similarly, Feste's final song—with its refrain, "the rain it raineth every day"—is intercut with scenes in which those who are excluded from the film's happy resolution make their sad departures from Illyria/Elysium: Malvolio, Antonio, and finally Feste himself, whose concluding, repeated assurance of striving to please "every day" is heartbreaking...
...I hate them for making hate necessary...
...I wanted to stand up and cheer...
...At times you think this approach might almost have worked...
...The Brits kill children in the street and torture their guiltless victims, while the Irish have pangs of conscience even about shooting paid informers...
...And generally they do...
...But if you are going to watch propaganda for the victory of private feeling over public duty (and, by the way, a few more satisfying swipes at the British empire) you could spend your time a lot more painfully than in watching The English Patient...
...So too in the movies, when it comes to "history" or "literature," we tend to assume that the Brits will do it better than we do...
...Iwish I had space to discuss my doubts about Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies, a perfect example of absolutely terrific British acting in the service of what amounts to a therapeutic banality...
...Of course, when it comes to Irish independence, no amount of political oversimplification ever seems too much...
...The play's setting in a vaguely Edwardian and Ruritanian Illyria (one of the funniest bits is when Sebastian is shown coming to town with a Baedecker's guide to Illyria) is also beautifully handled and makes its contribution to the sumptuousness of the photography...
...For one thing, it does not treat its moral choices as simple or unproblematic...
...Its climactic moment, in which Sebastian is to remove Viola's false mustache, is deferred until the final unmasking scene...
...Not that the "Masterpiece Theatre" treatment is necessarily superior...
...It's like tales from the Bible were a century ago...
...Here the acting is not just good but stunningly good...
...70 December 1996 • The American Spectator to anti-British purposes, as it is in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins...
...One of the great things about the usually high-toned British entertainment industry is that its art can be applied even We only embarrass ourselves when we try to be Britty...
...As usual in these productions, the acting is the best thing about it, and it is hard to find fault with Christopher Eccleston's lugubrious Jude, or Kate Winslet's surprisingly flirty Sue Bride-head...
...Instead of just confining himself to eviscerating middle-class morality, Hardy lets "God" (or, as he sarcastically calls Him in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, "the President of the Immortals") have it as well—for allowing Himself to be associated with middle-class morality...
...The story is extremely complicated but can be summed up in a few words: friends and lovers are more44 When one is young and full of self-importance, this kind of thing looks awfully profound...
...Paradoxically indeed...
...This, to my mind, is the best Shakespeare there has been on film since Zeffirelli's great Romeo and Juliet nearly thirty years ago...
...But most amazing of all is the note at the end which tells us that Collins "died, paradoxically, in an attempt to bring to an end the rule of the gun in Ireland...
...The American Spectator • December 1996 71...
...So Collins agonizes about the conscience-stricken Irish lad who has just killed a British agent: "I hate the man who put a gun in his hand, and I know that it was me...
...Well, I, for one, was ready to cry "uncle...
...I hate myself...
...But they are not happy about it, and that is, of course, the main thing...
...Who will give up first, Joe...
...into a music video with old-fashioned language, and people who suppose he can are in for a big shock in the unlikely event that they ever put themselves in a way to encounter the real thing...
...Finely wrought cinema reliably produced in the service of highly suspect ideas...
...It is almost inconceivable that a writer dealing with any other subject would not see a line like this as an occasion for irony, if he dared to use it at all...
...You begin to see the pattern...
...E-mail him at 72056.32.26@compuserve.com...
...Forster's celebrated dictum that, forced to choose between betraying his friends and betraying his country, he would hope to have the guts to betray his country...
...It reminds us that, though the British may have lost an empire, they still can't half do Shakespeare...
...I had always pictured Sue as one of the worst kind of female intellectuals, the sort of person who wears Birkenstocks and uses expressions like "sex object," but Miss Winslet makes a believer of me...
...Rougher than you can imagine...
...Never in the course of this film's two hours and a quarter does it so much as hint that every murder in it takes place after the British had already agreed to Home Rule...
...Imogen Stubbs as Viola and Steven Macintosh as Sebastian really do look like twins, and there is a brilliant scene at the beginning in which they costume themselves in Turkish harem dress to perform a little gender-bending cabaret number on board their ship just before it hits the rocks...
...But in maturity it is a ludicrous idea, and an even more ludicrous one when put on film...
...04 James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...
...The same may be said of The English Patient by Anthony Minghella, from the novel by Michael Ondaatje...
...How much longer can we hold out...
...I especially liked the intercutting of two simultaneous performances of "0 Mistress Mine" with its melancholy conclusion ("Then come and kiss me sweet and twenty:/Youth's a stuff will not endure")—one by Feste on the squeezebox and one (melody only) by Viola on the piano—while Viola and the Duke (Toby Stephens) have their portentous chat about the supposed woman that Viola's fancy "bath stayed upon...
...Even where the latter is ostensibly to be understood in its Shakespearean sense, the characters speak the lines as if they were rap lyrics and less to be understood than to strike an attitude...
...Very rough...
...To be fair, this is as much the fault of Thomas Hardy as it is of the filmmakers...
...Jude, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure directed by Michael Winterbottom, is a good example of how the British film industry churns out nicely atmospheric period pieces, like Laura Ashley fabric, for the culture-starved masses...
...But let us instead end on the high note of our Movie of the Month, Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night...
...Ben Kingsley's Feste and Nigel Hawthorne's Malvolio are particularly impressive, and even Helena Bonham Carter seems just right for the mournful Olivia...
...This is partly because the small, highly specialized British film industry has been doing "Masterpiece Theatre"–style costume dramas for so long that it has got really good at them, and partly because they have not yet dumbed down their educational system to American levels...
...Are you up to that...
...He cannot be made JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...They probably won't like him anyway, and they won't realize that the real Shakespeare takes work—though not so much work as they might imagine...
...True, it is not so vulgar as most of the production of the Merchant-Ivory work-shop—an example of which is also currently on show in Surviving Picasso, which reduces the life and art of the great painter to women's magazine fare (though that may be just the fate that the old coot deserves) —but it is still resolutely middlebrow...
...Us or them...
...The problem lies with the overall dramatic conception, which is unequal to the quality of the materials...
...Such lines are delivered without a hint of irony and point up the dreadful writing of which the film is full...
...It makes perfect sense to think that the universe is controlled by a malign power who has set the stars in their courses just so as to prevent one from having any fun...
...Even when it becomes clear that the fighting is just jockeying for power between thugs—De Valera (Alan Rickman) versus Collins (Liam Neeson)—the myth of British perfidy is carefully cultivated, for instance as a tank drives onto a football field and slaughters players and spectators at random...
...But I doubt the efficacy of slicing and dicing Shakespeare and serving him up in quick cuts to pander to a bunch of no-mind slackers...
...The stylization of the violence, the clothes, the cars, the guns (Romeo carries a "Rapier 9mm"), like the setting in a vaguely futuristic "Verona Beach," USA, weirdly complement the artificiality, in such a context, of the language...
...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Britwits Recently, a black Briton, writing in the Washington Post, said that the only advantage he could see in being British was that his black American cousins spotted him ten IQ points just for his accent...
...Yet the subject of Irish independence is remarkably free of any such nuances...
...So, until the happy day when our two nations are equals in imbecility, we will tend to come off looking rather badly when we try to beat the Brits at their own game...
...In general, this sense of counterpoise — of joy and sorrow, sanity and madness, male and female —so central to the play has never been better conveyed, especially in the songs...
...Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, for instance, really ought to be called "Richard III goes to Sesame Street...
...Its main characters, played by Ralph Fiennes and the delectable Kristen Scott-Thomas, betray both their country and their friends...
...It is a film based on the by-now old-fashioned notion that Shakespeare can be made "relevant" to the happening youth of the nineties—kids who might not, were it not for Al and his pals in Mr...
...The Australian Baz Luhrmann's Americanized Romeo and Juliet is not as condescending as Looking for Richard, but it is even more the victim of its own desperation to be hip...
...Both Minghella and Ondaatje would doubtless agree with E.M...
...Rogers's neighborhood, ever bother to tear themselves away from MTV...
...In this respect, Jude is actually an improvement on Hardy, since it tones down a bit the idea of malevolent fate...
...This movie, like several of its main characters (including Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo), is wired and, with its nervous camera-work and intense, shouted dialogue, deliberately resembles a two-hour gangster rap video...
...Cliché piles on top of leaden cliche as again and again we are told that "We can't take much more" and "It's going to get rough,"/ "How rough...
...Once a country has assimilated that particular lesson, it is only a matter of time before defending it at all becomes impossible...
...When one is young and full of self-importance and self-pity, this kind of thing looks frightfully profound...
...This society just at its peak of ripeness before a sad decline is the perfect match of period with theme...
...But though it is often funny and always clever, the film has no respect at all for Shakespeare, who ought to get a "based on a story by" credit, or his text...
...A great poet, Hardy as a novelist is little more than Galsworthy on speed...
...Never have I seen the play's themes of love and music and transience and frustration and gender mix-ups so effectively brought together in a single emotional movement...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
