Screen
O'Brien, Tom
Hastings, arrayed in a gorgeous Oriental dress, looked radiant. As she introduced me to her friends, she beamed. They all asked, "Are you one of the performers?" and I nodded modestly, enjoying...
...Other bad lines are scattered about, mostly by Natassia Kinski, an overrated actress perhaps, but here working with the distinct liability of having no role to act...
...Carter as Lady Jane have together accomplished...
...Carter approaches Jane's beheading with tragic dignity...
...Without a family tree, one is bound to get lost in Tudor politics...
...Hastings distributed presents: neatly wrapped packages of three #2 Herald Square pencils...
...Soon, most is cliche: all the British officers are lamely caricatured...
...In some comical, but compelling scenes, we see him learn respect for her propriety and Jane learn to direct (and delight in) his mischief...
...It was refreshing to see the topic taken seriously, especially when Ms...
...Lady Jane almost achieves the grandeur of that film...
...Nunn avoids the slightest trace of con~[escension in portraying their fervor;, he also performs the neat trick of presenting Mary sympathetically...
...recruits are simply driven to battle by uncaring officers on horseback...
...Carter (only eighteen herself) makes Jane authentic by passionately arguing against transubstantiation...
...Revolution only touches what Lady Jane, in its treatment of faith, accomplishes more clearly...
...But its high Romanticism also stems from Nunn's nineteenth-century sentimental streak, more Shelley than Dickens...
...This view provides a good corrective to those history films that leave out real people for those best dressed...
...Although the relationship is interesting, it is portrayed too melodramatically when conjoined with history, especially when Jane's husband's roguishness is explained as an alienated rebel's protective cynicism against the times...
...Relying on music, he underestimates the fineness of what he and Ms...
...and some stirring landscapes of how America then looked, The brooding score by John Corigliano sometimes even complements the screenplay...
...According to the film, her nine-day reign featured brave attempts to end exploitation, stop inflation, and provide for a "real shilling...
...Nunn stages her first appearance to underscore these traits...
...When British officers (taking their turn at brutality) hunt fox, Pacino provides a terrible image of a man doing anything to survive...
...The battle itself (fought on the rolling hills of Queens and Brooklyn) pits the inexperienced colonists against a line of British infantry that mechanically advances despite terrible losses...
...As with most directors these days, Nunn overdoes orchestration at key spots and fails to let action and emotion speak for themselves...
...Jane Grey was only sixteen when she became a pawn in a dynastic struggle...
...Revolution reminded me often of King David, another 1985 bomb -- a foreign director with a proven success record (Bruce Beresford) got so absorbed by the production values that he forgot character and feeling...
...What Nunn Commonweal: 84creates, in effect, is A Man for All Seasons Meets Romeo and Juliet, No doubt this approach involves a concession to Hollywood marketing and the contemporary need to appeal to a teenage audience...
...she must develop self-discipline and confidence...
...Too often, historical re-creation is equated with mere physical recreation...
...More seriously, Nunn exaggerates two elements in Jane's private life: her relationship with her parents and her marriage...
...Indeed, such historical films are more often found on TV lately -- witness the atrocity on the civil war, North and South...
...For both director and audience, this involves an intellectual struggle to transcend the clichts of universality about human nature and the liberal approach to history that reduces the past to an anticipation of what we have become...
...Showing up at Valley Forge, in uniform no less, she gets to mouth the worst line in a 1985 film...
...But director Trevor Nunn, the head of the Royal Shakespeare Company with the populist instinct to create Cats and Nicholas Nickleby, sagely provides a guide early in the film, when a conniving English nobleman neatly maps out the alternatives on a parchment scroll...
...Nevertheless, Nunn goes wrong when he fashions Jane into a Tudor social reformer...
...The plot to use her to prevent the succession of Mary Tudor failed, of course, and the innocent were punished along with the guilty...
...Platonic dialogue in hand (the Phaedo), Jane parries firmly but politely with Dr...
...I I II I Screen I I SPIRIT OF HISTORY LADY JANE & REVOLUTION I LOVE HISTORY but often hate historical films...
...still, she impressed her age by a mixture of intellect, spirituality, and courage...
...Director Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, Greystoke) vividly captures the world of the eighteenth-century army (see, for example, the opening chapters of Candide), providing not a single image of ideological commitment...
...Nunn's economics have more to do with satirizing Margaret Thatcher than celebrating Jane Grey...
...fine re-creation of the eighteenthcentury scene...
...the actual thrashing, although remarkable filmmaking, is uncertain history...
...Nevertheless, Lady Jane suffers from this "too many notes" syndrome, especially at the end, when understatement would have better served its high spiritual tone...
...The Return of Martin Guerre, for example, was magnificent because it re-created the value system of sixteenth-century French peasants in all their obstinate simplicity...
...Most of the film was shot in castles little changed from the sixteenth century, such as at Dover, here a stand-in for the old look of the Tower of London...
...The poor are well represented, hurt particularly by the new economic conditions of Tudor times: the enclosures of old common land and the end of the charity of the monasteries...
...Appropriately for a director of Dickens (and currently in London, a stage version of Les Mis$rables), Nunn has attempted to portray a wider image of sixteenth-century England than we normally get...
...The greatest problem with Lady Jati~ has to do with its music...
...Nunn presents Jane as an abused child, beaten into an arranged political wedding with a noble rogue...
...J - - - - , TOM O'BRIEN 14 February 1986:85...
...But many old-time film "epics" do the same, supplanting concern with believable character and engaging plot for concern with gorgeous externals and juicy naughtiness...
...What's sadabout Revolution is how much is wasted: a dour, challenging beginning...
...I botched "We Three Kings" only slightly, but since everybody was singing loudly, off pitch, and at random tempo, nobody minded...
...her scenes become stiffer and more artificial after that...
...I looked vainly for Cissey Cafhey...
...Clutching my pencils and my carols, I departed, joyful and triumphant, having bridged the awful chasm between myself and the music of the spheres...
...But as the film progresses, Hudson inexplicably burdens his leading man with lines and ideas Pacino can't sustain, and unconvincingly turns him into a patriot...
...She is surrounded by veterans of the RSC, but manages to shine above them by catching the personality of a remarkable Renaissance woman...
...Hence the pleasure of a film like 1967's A Man for All Seasons which actually forged historical re-creation and moving drama into an aesthetic whole...
...Like so many historical films, Lady Jane employs pageantry, costume, and location to re-create the Tudor past...
...Nunn should have known that her acting, and Plato's Phaedo, could have carried the day without any accompaniment...
...The spirit of history is more evasive, but is magnificently brought to life in Lady Jane by the acting of an English' ingtnue named Helena Bonham Carter...
...It concerns the story of Jane Grey, niece of Henry VIII, who was placed on the throne after the death of his son Edward VI as a Protestant alternative to Mary Tudor...
...Some of the best scenes involve confrontations between Jane and Mary, played by Jane Lapotaire, star of the RSC and Broadway's Piaf...
...the turn is a bolt that seems designed merely to get him to Valley Forge and proceed with the epic...
...Indeed, if you can ignore his Bronx accent, initially even AI Pacino's parallel minimalism (first perfected in The Godfather) works adequately...
...Revolution repeats the error, mistaking vacuity for primitivism, clich~ for old truth...
...My Mozart went swimmingly but Timmy and I didn't finish our duet in unison...
...Jane's reading of the Phaedo (the passage describing the soul taking flight from the prison house of the body) is also expertly carried through the film as a register of how genuinely Jane felt her faith...
...Nunn's use and grasp of history both pleases and periodically annoys...
...what you get is twentieth-century people tarted up in antique costumes, with a plot that hybrids swashbuckling and the sexual hijinks of a nighttime soap opera -- Dynasty Down Through the Ages...
...Through this device Nunn, here making his screen debut, is able to translate the basic facts without a hitch...
...one (of course) is gay and after drummer boys...
...R EVOLUTION first stirs, then bombs...
...There is simply no historical evidence that Jane tried anything of the sort...
...It was provocative because strange, relevant because it so deflated the demands of modern narcissism...
...Ladies and gentlemen," I announced, "as Paganini and Rubenstein said at their famous joint concert in Prague, 'Permit us to lay that one on you again.' " We did better the second time...
...English professionalism is incarnated in a sergeant major (Donald Sutherland), whose ramrod rectitude and ruthlessness carries the true whiff of powder...
...After we finished the music and devoured the cakes, Mrs...
...Her presence is required for romance, but her character is forced into the action with zero plausibility...
...A genuinely great history film involves more than physical re-creation or merely telling a story...
...There is no transition or preparation...
...A better film would have stuck to its guns...
...Feckenham, Mary Tudor's Jesuit confessor, on points of biblical interpretation...
...Sutherland's provocative robotic state provides literal backbone to the early part of the film...
...In Nunn's case, this is understandable: he comes from theater, where his most innovative work has involved musicals...
...Interestingly, the Americans were shown in unflattering colors: a Bowery mob forcibly requisitions the boat of one Tom Dobbs (AI Pacino), who immediately thereafter is dragooned into the rebel army by a vicious recruiting sergeant...
...But its real distinction is in catching the emotional flavor of the past to reproduce the seriousness with which subtle religious issues were taken in previous eras...
...Moreover, once married, Nunn claims that Jane and her spouse fell deeply in love...
...When my nemesis, Cecil Harper, went blank midway through his piece, I felt benevolent enough to refrain from sticking out my tongue...
...Director Hudson seems to have wanted Pacino to embody a plague on both your houses...
...Worse, her efforts are presented in a ridiculously quixotic manner...
...evil Indians hunt our hero, and good ones (who happen by in the middle of the Adirondacks, as only in a Cooper novel) save him...
...Instead of the Declaration, the film focuses on the battle of New York, a stunning patriot defeat...
...It must not read the past as present, escaping a "rearview mirror" rendering of history which ignores the way in which people in the past were not "just like us...
...Initially, it provides an intriguing image of America during the summer of 1776...
...and I nodded modestly, enjoying my celebrity...
...Poor woman, I mused...
...To Lady Jane's credit, it echoes that miracle...
...One even gets to say, "Anyone who kills my enemy is my friend...
...It might have worked if he had prevented Pacino from speaking and kept the screenplay consistent...
Vol. 113 • February 1986 • No. 3
