Off Script: Mary Reilly

Films: Mary Reilly
Format: DVD from Wilmington Public Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

I sometimes will watch a movie and write up a review that I can post if I ever need one. It’s been more and more difficult to find time to watch movies this year because of work, so there are plenty of times in the past year I have “banked” a review for use later. I thought that was the case for Mary Reilly, a retelling of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story from the point of view of Jekyll’s housekeeper. I did watch the movie and I remember it well enough, but I evidently used that review as a template for another review, so my original thoughts on Mary Reilly have gone the way of the dodo.

The idea is a fantastic one, honestly. Take a classic, well-known story and tell it from the point of view of a minor character who would simultaneously have a clear window into the proceedings of the entire story. The problem is that while the idea for the film is tremendous, almost nothing is done with it. It’s literally just the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde told from the point of view of the housekeeper. That’s it.

Transplants

Film: Dirty Pretty Things
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I go into a lot of movies pretty cold. As I get closer and closer to finishing my Oscar lists, I set moderate goals for myself each month. One of those goals right now is to close out a few films from years where I still have too many films remaining. I don’t want to end this with a bunch of films from the same year, so at least some of my decisions are based on filling in gaps on years that I have neglected. That’s literally the only reason that Dirty Pretty Things showed up in the mail. Thus it was a bit depressing but hardly shocking when, about halfway through, there’s a clear instance of sexual misconduct. I promise, we’ll get there eventually.

Once I got the film, though, I was pleased and looked forward to watching it. It has two actors I love (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou) in the leads and two more (Sophie Okonedo and Benedict Wong) in supporting roles. It’s directed by Stephen Frears, whose work I have generally liked very much and loved at times. So, off the bat, I was prepared for this to be a film that had a great deal going for it.

Sing, Sing a Song

Films: Florence Foster Jenkins
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

I’m going to say something unpopular here: The Academy needs to end its love affair with Meryl Streep. Don’t get me wrong here. Meryl Streep is easily one of the greatest actors to every stand in front of a camera and likely the greatest living actor (especially now that Daniel Day-Lewis is retiring, and honestly, maybe even if he stayed in acting). But seriously, it seems like we can’t have an Oscar ceremony without Meryl getting nominated for whatever movie she did last. This seems absolutely the case with Florence Foster Jenkins.

Some time ago, I came across the acronym “BOSUD” to describe one of the title characters of Melvin and Howard. The acronym stands for “biography of someone undeserving.” Our title character here seems to be similar in that respect. Essentially, Florence (Streep) is an eccentric (‘cause she’s super wealthy) woman in New York during World War II who is deeply involved in the music scene, especially with opera and the symphony.

Skin Trade

Film: Mrs. Henderson Presents
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

My local library is closed, which means that I’m forced one town over. It was a nice surprise to discover that the library I’d been hitting through interlibrary loan has a substantial movie collection. I’m evidently in a whimsical mood these last few days, with Designing Woman yesterday and Mrs. Henderson Presents today. Since comedies tend to be in short supply on my Oscar lists, staying in this mood for too long might mean a lack of comedies for the next couple of years.

Mrs. Henderson Presents purports itself to be based at least partially on the truth, or inspired by real events. I don’t know enough about the history of the stage in London to know if this is true or not, but I suspect it is. As we open, Laura Henderson (Judi Dench) has just been widowed. Her friend Lady Conway (Thelma Barlow) tells her that widowhood isn’t all bad. It means that she can have affairs and buy things for herself that her husband would have balked at. Laura takes this to heart and purchases an old theater.

A Stolen Life

Film: Philomena
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

The movie(s) I watch on a given day are watched from a combination of availability, mood, and the need to remove movies from my various lists. I have a stack of movies checked out from the library sitting in front of me including the last two I need to complete the latest 1001 Movies list. But tonight I was in the mood for something lighter, something that didn’t require me to think that hard. I wanted something I could just sit back and enjoy. At the 1:37 mark, the trailer for Philomena calls it “…a comedy about two unlikely companions.” The trailer is also filled with scenes of Judi Dench being whimsically outspoken and brash. Sounded like the perfect thing for what I was in the mood for.

Philomena is not a comedy. There are a couple of funny moments in it, but all of the funny moments are in the trailer. All of them. In fact, aside from genocide and terminal illnesses, there aren’t a great many topics that are less funny than what Philomena explores. I’ll cut to the chase here early—this is a very good, perhaps even great movie—but it might be the most misleading trailer I’ve encountered this decade.

Rinse Cycle

Film: My Beautiful Laundrette
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

One of the things I love about having this as a hobby is that every now and then I come across a movie that is substantially ahead of its time in one respect or another. Such is the case with My Beautiful Laundrette. A 1986 movie that features a homosexual romance would normally be about that romance. That’s not the case here. It’s certainly a part of the story, but this is a film that is much more about racism in Thatcher’s Britain. It was refreshing to see a film that didn’t specifically focus on what would even today often be the central idea.

The other noteworthy thing about My Beautiful Laundrette is that it’s one of the breakout roles for Daniel Day-Lewis. According to IMDB, this movie was released on the same day as A Room with a View in New York, and featured Day-Lewis in two completely opposite roles. In A Room with a View, he plays an upper class, emotionally stifled man while in My Beautiful Laundrette he is a working-class gay former skinhead. Shades of the man’s talents to come, no?

The Grifters

Film: The Grifters
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I really like The Grifters. I’ve always considered this to be the movie where John Cusack graduated from teen comedies (even some pretty good ones) into adult fare. The Grifters is a film that doesn’t pull any punches. It’s a brutal film. What it reminds me of more than anything is a film like The Sting, but run through a very gritty, ugly filter. This is neo-noir at its finest, featuring not one, but two femmes fatale and a host of characters, all on the take from somewhere.

Our three main characters start with no connection, but are soon united. First is Roy (John Cusack), a commission salesman who supplements his income liberally with short con games, such as showing a bartender a $20 bill and paying with a $10. He tries this once too often and gets a slug from a baseball bat in the gut. Second is Lilly (Anjelica Huston), whose job is to go to racetracks and bet heavily on longshots to reduce the odds, making the payouts far easier to handle. Third is Myra (Annette Bening) who uses sex as liberally as possible to get what she wants. It’s not too long into the film that we discover that Roy and Myra are not quite an item but are frequently in each other’s company and that Lilly is Roy’s mother.

Rule Britannia

Film: The Queen
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

When the world suffers a traumatic event, one question that gets asked frequently is “Where were you when you found out about _____?” When it comes to the death of Princess Diana, my answer is quite a bit different than most. Sue and I had just purchased a little vacation home (emphasis on little) and were spending that weekend working on it. We were completely out of touch with the world—no television, no radio, no newspaper. We didn’t find out for a good 48 hours. So I found out while eating lunch in a little townie bar on a Sunday.

The Queen is not about Diana, but at the same time, it is about her. The film covers the few days about and around the death of Diana in Paris and the week leading up to her funeral. So, while Diana herself appears in this film only as newsreel and interview footage, she is very much at the heart of the narrative. However, the film is truly about the royal family and how they dealt with Diana’s death and the aftermath. Central to this narrative is the head of the family, Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren).

What this film does is create a real sense of the royal family not as figureheads or monarchs or titular heads of the British Empire, but as actual people with lives and emotions. And, they have a number of specific concerns that virtually no one else in the world can appreciate. As the royal family, there are hundreds of years of precedent and protocol that must be followed at all times regardless of the reality of the situation. For them, the death of Diana was a singular and unique event.

Why? Well, strictly because they are royals. Diana had divorced Charles (played here by Alex Jennings) and was no longer a part of the royal family (an ex-HRH in the parlance of the film). Being a royal allowed for particular rights and privileges that now, based strictly on protocol, needed to be denied. And those rights and privileges were precisely what the rest of the world wanted Diana to have. The film depicts crowds of British citizens irate to the point of vehement anger that there was no flag flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. It didn’t matter to them, nor to the rest of the world, that the flag never flies at half-mast there. In fact the flag flies only to show the residency of a monarch. But that is what the people wanted, and its lack infuriated them. Precedent and protocol, a thousand years of tradition, no longer seemed to matter.

What this film does is, as I mentioned already, allow Elizabeth to become for the rest of the world a real person. Upon Diana’s death, her first instinct is to do what many of us would do; she looked to protect her family and attempted to keep the tragedy as a private affair within the walls of the family itself. She wanted the ability to deal with things on her own, to deal with her grandchildren not as royal scions, but as children.

The four members of the royal family who are actual characters in this film come off fairly unevenly. Both Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) and the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) come across poorly. Both appear hidebound and reduced to following tradition as a matter of course rather than for any good reason. Both seem almost devoid of sympathy or pity, wishing only for things to go back to the way they were before Diana’s fatal accident. Prince Charles comes across far more favorably, although by no means perfectly. There is a sense that he wishes to modernize the country and is willing to go along with the throngs of British citizens. There is also a sense that he is ferociously paranoid and fears assassination. The Queen herself comes off as a woman worn down by her duty and desperate to stave it off, but unable to do so. She is shown to us as a paragon of that long-gone past history when the monarch’s job was to face stoically whatever threatened her or her people.

But is it good? I’m happy to report that it is. Frears has managed to catch something on film that is almost completely unique. Elizabeth has always been a popular monarch, but this crises damaged her significantly. Frears sugar coats nothing, hides nothing, and exposes anything he can. As a result, Elizabeth becomes more approachable—more of a human being. In my opinion, she comes out of the film looking like a tough woman who doesn’t get to make many of her own choices, and who holds up as well as she can.

The film also deals with the election of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), a Labour Party candidate. Evidently, the Labour Party contains the anti-royalist element of England, but as the film progresses, Blair begins to take pity on Elizabeth just as we do. His wife, Cherie (Helen McCrory), comes out as sort of the other side of the coin from Prince Phillip. She’s opposite, but still just as insensitive and uncaring.

I’m surprised that I liked this film as much as I did. But I did. The fact that Elizabeth favors corgis doesn’t hurt, either.

Why to watch The Queen: A fair and honest portrayal of one of the major figures in the world.
Why not to watch: Extensive reliving of the death of Diana.

Keep Your (Wig) Powder Dry

Film: Dangerous Liaisons
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I imagine that for an actor, a period piece is a lot of fun, depending on the period. It might be entertaining for a day or two to run around in a loincloth, but that would get pretty old pretty fast. However, something taking place during the Victorian Era, perhaps…or in France before the Revolution? The costumes look like they might be a problem at times, but it still looks like it would be fun. There are few more lavish period pieces than Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons, and few better.

As with many a great story, what’s going on here is actually quite simple. A French noblewoman named Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Glenn Close) wishes to be revenged on a former lover who left her—the first time any lover has dared do that to her. When this lover departed, he left with the mistress of Vicomte Sebastien de Valmont (John Malkovich), the one-time lover and sort of friend of the Marquise. This former lover of hers has settled on a woman to be his wife, Cecile de Volanges (Uma Thurman), both for her beauty and for her chastity—guaranteed by her convent education. The Marquise wishes Valmont to seduce the girl and spoil her for her wedding night.

But Valmont initially refuses. He has a reputation as the greatest rake in France, and this conquest would be too easy. He has set his sights on Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), a woman noted for her purity, religious fervor, and happiness of her marriage. His goal is to make her betray everything she holds dear, enjoying her fall into the betrayal of her beloved husband. The Marquise is intrigued by this and promises a night of sexual passion to Valmont if he can offer written proof in de Tourvel’s own hand that he has seduced her successfully.

The Marquise and Valmont are our two main characters, and they spend the bulk of the film exercising their appetites for virtually all of the seven deadly sins. Only gluttony seems to sit out, and with a little thought, that one can probably be added to the mix. Certainly the two bear no slight without furious and overwhelming anger and revenge; they lust after everything and everyone they see; they spend money on whims; are part of the idle rich nobility; envy anyone else garnering attention for anything; and exhibit a pride unlike any seen on a movie screen. These are not nice people.

While Valmont schemes to win the heart of Madame de Tourvel by any means possible, the Marquise works to get anyone into the sack with Cecile, including a poor music teacher named Danceny (Keanu Reaves). Ultimately, pretty much everybody goes to bed with everyone else, betrayal abounds, and lives are wrecked on the shores of pride, arrogance, and sexual passion.

I admit it sounds pretty lame, but it really isn’t. The intrigues are convoluted and vicious. Better, despite the fact that the women wear umpteen layers of clothing and the men wear powdered wigs and lace cuffs, this movie brings the sexy. There is something undeniably erotic and tawdry about someone using one lover as a desk to write a letter to another lover.

One of the best scenes is the opening one. We see our two main characters getting dressed and prepared for their day. Both of them require an army of servants to powder them, squeeze them, primp them, dust, daub, tuck, fold, and otherwise spindle them into what was the fashion of the day in pre-Revolution Paris. It’s a great scene for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, it’s a fantastic introduction into the era. It also serves to show us precisely how much pretense these characters put on—nothing about them is what it seems and everything is hidden under layers of falsehood.

Our two main characters are in many ways the only ones who are important. The others could really be played by almost anyone. Cecile needs only to be young and pretty, and Uma Thurman does a credible job here. Her mother (Swoosie Kurtz) needs only to be outraged by everything she sees, and she’s good at it. De Tourvel needs only be innocuous and pretty—two things Michelle Pfeiffer can pull off. The only person I think is miscast is Keanu Reaves, but I think that about Keanu Reaves in everything except The Matrix and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. This is Close’s and Malkovich’s movie, as it should be. Malkovich’s performance is nuanced and tremendous, and I think it may well be the single greatest acting role and performance of Glenn Close’s very storied career.

I watched this film for the first time years ago and remembered that I thought it was good. This second viewing a couple of decades later has shown me that I underestimated it. This movie is more than good—it’s one of the best of its kind. For the men in my reading audience, don’t shy away from this one. Watch this with someone special. It’s lurid and tawdry, and might well excite a few passions, which is reward of its own. Even if it doesn’t my guess is you’ll enjoy the intrigues and the plots exhibited here, even if it does mean seeing John Malkovich’s bare ass.

This film is actually a remake--I'm curious to see the original.

Why to watch Dangerous Liaisons: The prettiest piece of evil you’ll ever see.
Why not to watch: John Malkovich’s naked ass.