Writers in movies: Bright Star

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like The Invisible Woman and Hemingway and Gellhorn, Bright Star is about a real writer — this time, John Keats. The movie covers the last three years of Keats’s life, focusing on his relationship with Fanny Brawne.

Unlike Dickens and Hemingway, Keats was not a jerk. He is, in fact, just about the most lovable great writer I know of. This is, of course, problematic in a movie. Here is what the director, Jane Campion, had to deal with:

All Keats’s friends loved him.
His relationship with Fanny Brawne was chaste and “appropriate”. Fanny’s family loved him as much as his friends did.
At the end of the movie he’s gonna die, and we all know it. (He dies because he catches TB taking care of his beloved brother.)

So you have a sort of tragedy — the romance is doomed, and Keats is doomed to think that he will die a failure. But that’s just sad; it’s not dramatic. Where do you find your conflict? Campion finds a little between Fanny and Keats’s roommate, but that’s about it. For the most part, watching this movie is like watching very elegant paint dry. It’s well acted; the costumes are great; but there’s just not that much going on.

There’s a little bit in the movie about writing: we see Keats and Charles Brown, his roommate, sitting around during the day trying to find stuff to write about. And then there’s the famous scene of Keats sitting in Brown’s yard one morning writing “Ode to a Nightingale”:

According to Keats’ friend Brown, Keats finished the Ode in just one morning: “In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of the nightingale.”

But really, there’s not much you can do to dramatize that. This is the essential problem with writers in movies: a young guy sits in a chair, listens to some birds, and scribbles out an immortal masterpiece. It just isn’t very cinematic.

Anyway, let’s all enjoy Bright Star:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

         Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

         Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

         Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

         Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

         Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Writers in movies: Third Star

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Haven’t done one of these in a while.

Third Star is an indie movie from 2010 starring Benedict Cumberbatch and three other young British actors. The main character is a 29-year-old aspiring writer who is dying of cancer. His friends take him on one last journey to a remote bay in Wales. Along the way they laugh, they cry, and they learn something about life, about friendship, and about loss.

I know what you’re thinking: This is just the kind of movie I want to avoid at all costs. And you would be right. The movie is nicely photographed, nicely acted, it contains no superheroes, no one meets cute . . . but it still feels very trite, very paint-by-numbers. Everyone has his own flaw, his own secret . . . and yet, at the end, we don’t really feel that we know them; instead, we feel manipulated by a screenwriter without anything deep to say.

There are actually two writers in the movie: the dying-of-cancer-so-he-will-never-achieve-his-life’s-ambition writer and the talented-writer-who-could-never-be-as-good-as-his-famous-father-so-he-gave-it-up writer. But there’s never a moment when we really see them as writers. Cumberbatch’s character feels a generalized sense of loss, of leaving this world too soon, but he never feels this loss as a writer, with stories left untold, with characters left undescribed.

Which is not to say that I can’t empathize with that loss. I sold my first novel when I was about 30; by that time Cumberbatch’s character would have been dead. And I recall that one of my strongest reactions was one of relief. I would never have to think of myself again as an aspiring writer. Instead, I could now think of myself as a published author. However unsuccessful my writing career might be, no one would be able to take that away from me. It surely would have been a cruel fate to be denied that satisfaction. I was hoping I’d get some sense of this from Third Star, but alas, I enjoyed The Two Mrs. Carrolls more.

Writers in Movies: The New York Times gets into the act

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Last Sunday’s Book Review had a pair of essays on the topic “Why is it so hard to capture the writer’s life on film?” This a question that seems easy enough to answer. Thomas Mallon captures it like this:

Because no one wants to watch somebody typing, Hollywood often makes movies about writers who stop writing. It’s easier, and more entertaining, to show them being Technicolorfully destroyed by fame or drink or premature success.

And he brings up one of my favorite writer’s movies, Wonder Boys:

The hard part is always trying to show writers doing what they actually do. The Michael Douglas character occasionally sits at his Selectric wearing a woman’s bathrobe, like a pitcher’s lucky underwear, trying to summon more phrases for his already overlong, inert manuscript.

It seems a bit odd that there are so many movies about people whose lives are so fundamentally boring. My guess — and it’s only a guess, mind you — is that this is because many movies are written by writers. Anyway, these essays are pretty good, and they provide me with several additions to my list of writerly movies to watch (or re-watch):

Barton Fink
Deconstructing Harry
Julia
The Hours
Beloved Infidel
Capote

And, in particular, Bright Star, which I’ll blog about next.

Writers in movies: Hemingway & Gellhorn

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like An Invisible Woman, Hemingway & Gellhorn is about a famous novelist’s relationship with a woman — in this case, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. This was an HBO original movie and got a ton of Emmy nominations. Unlike An Invisible Woman, this movie has an A-list actress, Nicole Kidman, playing the woman. She’s pretty good! Clive Owen as Hemingway, however, never convinced me the way Ralph Fiennes as Dickens convinced me. Surely the director (Philip Kaufman) could have found an American who’d have done a better job. (At least an American could have gotten the accent right.)

The other major problem with the movie is the script. It never settles down and becomes about anything. It just dramatizes a series of real-life incidents, usually with clever camera work and editing, and that becomes the film.

We do, of course, see Hemingway writing, and I assume they got that right. He types standing up, his typewriter on a dresser, floating discarded sheets of paper in the direction of a wastebasket at his feet. He types as bombs fall in the street outside, and he types after a long night of drinking, while Gellhorn is too hung over to get out of bed. And the script is full of what I assume are accurate Hemingway quotes, such as: “Writing’s like Mass. God gets mad if you don’t show up.” All good stuff. But they didn’t make me like the movie.

Writers in Movies: The Invisible Woman

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like Young Cassidy, The Invisible Woman is a biopic about a famous writer. Unlike Young Cassidy, it is really really good.

It’s the story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. Ralph Fiennes directed the movie and plays Dickens; Felicity Jones plays Ternan. I like the way the film captures the complexities of the relationship: this wasn’t a love story. Ternan admired Dickens, but above all she needed money and security; Dickens was fond of Ternan, but above all he needed a young, pretty woman to admire him.

Beyond that, I like that they got Dickens right. Dickens was a creep in his personal life: he was awful to his wife, dismissive of his children . . . but he was also haunted by a dreadful childhood that goes a long way toward explaining the mess he made of things. And there was his art and his public, both of which were more important to him than his wife and children. The film captures that: he is constantly writing, and when he isn’t writing, he is performing.

Finally, the emotional climax of the movie is Ternan’s explication of the alternative endings of Great Expectations. How cool is that?

The movie seems to have been kind of a flop, which is too bad. There are plenty of reasons why, I suppose. It’s not especially romantic; there’s no musical soundtrack (which worked for me); Dickens is probably considered old-fashioned and sentimental. But I found it more satisfying than almost every other movie I’ve seen lately.

(By the way, someday I might start an occasional series of Shakespeare on film. The previous movie that Fiennes directed was a modern-day version of Corialanus, with Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain. That, too, was pretty good. And also kind of a flop. Maybe Fiennes needs to sign on to direct Iron Man 4.)

Are there 25 good movies about American politics?

Posted on April 5, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here is Vanity Fair’s list of the 25 best movies about American politics. But… but…

All the President’s Men, sure. The Candidate, fine. Dr. Strangelove? It’s not exactly about politics, but OK. All the King’s Men, A Face in the Crowd? Of course.

But, um, The Queen? Isn’t that sort of, you know, about British politics? (The same folks brought us Frost/Nixon, which isn’t on the list, and probably should be.) The same goes for In the Loop.

The American President is about American politics, of course, but really, it’s not that good a movie — it’s Aaron Sorkin clearing his throat before embarking on The West Wing. If we want throat-clearing, what about including The Ides of March, which seems to be Beau Willimon’s warm-up for House of Cards?

Another omission from the list: the charming Dave, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver. Also, was I the only one who liked Primary Colors, with John Travolta and Emma Thompson portraying the fictional equivalent of the Clintons?

I’ve seen most of the movies on the list. One that I’d never even heard of is Gabriel Over the White House, a 1933 fantasy produced by William Randolph Hearst. VF says:

Walter Huston plays a hack president-elect who gets into an automobile crack-up shortly after he’s sworn in. He is subsequently possessed by a spirit (see title) who guides his actions, which include staging firing squads on Ellis Island and bullying the world into submission by brandishing a super-secret military weapon. Quasi-fascism: it gets things done!

Sounds like it’s worth watching!

Writers in movies: Young Cassidy

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Richard Bowker

In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, here’s an Irish writer in this occasional series. This time it’s Young Cassidy, the 1965 biopic of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey starring Rod Taylor, Maggie Smith, and Julie Christie.

As you can see from the poster, the movie doesn’t emphasize his writing. OK, it doesn’t mention it at all. But boy, do we get an idea of what his soaring male senses are up to.The writing does show up in the actual movie, of course. But they aren’t able to do much with it. We just get a peek at him now and then staring with grim determination at a blank sheet of paper or a typewriter, in between his brawls and his romances. (The young, gorgeous Julie Christie only has a few couple of scenes, but she makes, um, quite an impression.)

The movie really isn’t very good — and it was a flop at the box office. Mostly it’s just a bunch of more or less disconnected episodes from O’Casey’s autobiography, never building to much of anything. But we do see Rod Taylor betraying his best friend by making him a character in The Plough and the Stars — that’s a nice writerly touch. And (spoiler alert) the ever-faithful Maggie Smith finally dumps him, realizing she isn’t cut out to be the wife of a famous writer. Another nice touch.

Anyway, if you want to experience more of Rod Taylor’s soaring male senses, here is the the trailer (assuming I can get the embedding to work):

Writers in movies: Their Own Desire

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in a series.

Their Own Desire is a 1929 movie starring Norma Shearer. Here’s the Wikipedia synopsis:

A young woman is upset by the knowledge that her father is divorcing her mother in order to marry another woman. Her own feelings change, however, when she falls in love with a young man who turns out to be the son of her father’s new love.

First thing’s first: this movie is terrible. Norma Shearer chews enough scenery to get an Academy Award nomination (she lost to herself, for The Divorcee, so I guess she couldn’t feel too bad about the defeat). But the plot is primitive, and everyone else in the case is pretty bad, particularly Robert Montgomery as her love interest, maybe because he has to say lines like this, at a moment of high drama:

I’ve got the little ol’ canoe down at the landing; let me run you over to the little ol’ love nest.

The writer in the movie is Norma Shearer’s father, who splits his time between writing novels and playing polo at his club. Apparently those were the days when writers belonged to clubs, and polo was a thing they played there.

The only reason why Dad is a writer and doesn’t have some other high-class occupation is so that to movie can include a scene where he describes to Norma Shearer the plot of his latest novel, which involves a 45-year-old married man falling in love with another woman. Our heroine’s response is to laugh at the very idea of an old man like that falling in love. Little does she know that the novel is based on her father’s own life, and soon frumpy old Mom will be dumped for the glamorous Mrs. Cheevers. Irony!

Their Own Desire is bad, but still I’d rather watch a bad movie from 1929 than a bad one from 2014. The past is a different country, and it’s interesting to pay a visit now and then.

What should we do when an artist is a creep?

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Richard Bowker

It doesn’t get much creepier than this:

What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know: when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me. He talked to me while he did it, whispering that I was a good girl, that this was our secret, promising that we’d go to Paris and I’d be a star in his movies. I remember staring at that toy train, focusing on it as it traveled in its circle around the attic. To this day, I find it difficult to look at toy trains.

It makes me happy when a writer (or anyone else) I admire turns out to be a nice person — Stephen King, say, or Bobby Orr. But ultimately it doesn’t matter. As far as I can tell, John Updike was a much nicer human being than Philip Roth. But I’d much rather read a Philip Roth novel. The more you learn about Charles Dickens and the way he treated his wife and children, the less you’re going to like him. Woody Allen apparently should be in prison, as should Roman Polanski. And probably any number of other folks whose works I admire. I don’t think Blue Jasmine or any other Woody Allen movie was worth Dylan Farrow’s happiness, and I won’t be rooting for Woody Allen at the Oscars. But ultimately we engage with the work of art, not the artist.

Writers in movies: Love Actually

Posted on December 28, 2013 by Richard Bowker

It seems as if I’ve been seeing a lot of writers portrayed in movies lately. Here I mentioned the difficulty of portraying the writing life on film: it’s just too boring. But that doesn’t keep screenwriters from trying. Screenwriters should at least get the details right, but those details generally seem to escape them as well.

Let’s start with Love Actually, which features Colin Firth as a hack novelist falling in love with his Portuguese house cleaner. (This comes in eighth out of the nine plot lines in the movie, according to this post; I’d rate it a little higher.) In the plot, very little is made out of his being a writer — it just seems to be there to set up the scene in which a gust of wind blows his manuscript pages into a pond, forcing him and the maid to strip to their underwear and hop into the pond to rescue them. This of course makes them fall in love.

Fair enough — the maid looks pretty good in her underwear. But the setup is stupid. I suppose we can believe that a hack writer in 2003 wouldn’t be using a computer. But apparently we’re also supposed to believe that he wouldn’t be making daily copies of his manuscript pages, in an era of cheap home photocopiers. And that’s just idiotic beyond words. This isn’t something he’s doing for creative expression; it’s his job. I haven’t seen anyone remark on this scene; Love Actually offers far easier targets for criticism. But this one never fails to irk me when I’m forced to endure our annual holiday viewing.