Lincoln

Stephen Spielberg’s bounce back from the now more-or-less universally decried Indiana Jones revival, helped along by JJ Abrams’ tribute to his style in Super 8, needed a heavy-hitter in the vein of his Schindler’s List or Amistad to really herald his return to full force. And with Lincoln, he has it – a mature, unpatronising, almost cheese-free historical biopic with some incredible performances that are sure to win a variety of awards and doesn’t have the somewhat hollow sentimentality of War Horse. Here, the mawkish scenes are kept more or less entirely to the bookends of the film – a rather silly opening scene in which Lincoln sits in a chair like his famous memorial and has two black soldiers and two white soldiers come and offer different points of view to him, as well as reciting his speeches back at him, and an ending that while not nearly so hard to believe has a rather awful crossfade from a flame in a lamp to an historic speech.

But the two and a half hours between those points are quite special. Slow at times, heavy undoubtedly – but still engaging, consummately-performed and easily able to keep the viewer immersed in a time of great suffering but great retrospective glamour. The sets are perfect, the casting superb, the wigs and makeup so well-done you notice them only when you are supposed to and the dialogue just the right mixture of formality and believable irreverence.

Central to it all, of course, is Daniel Day-Lewis, who is everything a top Hollywood actor ought to be – acting only in a select few films, avoiding celebrity gutter press and each and every time he appears in front of a camera stunning his audience with a superlative dedication to his craft and outstanding natural abilities. Deservedly, he may well become the first person ever to win the Best Leading Actor Oscar three times in a matter of weeks. That he is the son of one of the people I am writing about in my thesis always gives me a small surreal thrill, but in all honesty that is forgotten within moments of seeing him appear, because he so completely disappears into his character. He may seem an unlikely choice for Lincoln, not even American, but the facial resemblance is certainly there, and it’s quite brilliant how he pitches the performance so that it’s not too dissimilar from that iconic deep, commanding drawl from a thousand documentaries, cartoons and halls of presidents, but softened, taken up an octave or two, and given several notches of kindly old man.

The rest of the cast are also incredible. From characters who have nothing to say but ‘Aye’ or ‘Nay’ but put in a lifetime’s convictions into the word to Lincoln’s misunderstood and long-suffering wife, and especially Tommy Lee Jones as the best kind of loveable curmudgeon with such acerbic vitriol in his speeches that he can make an admission that he is going back on a lifetime’s convictions before his parliament sound like a victory just by turning it into an insult, he is a firey and irascible foil to Lincoln’s fatherly calm.

Not everyone will have a great love for this film. Those with extreme political opinions will find much to fault – on one side, there will no doubt be cries that the film does nothing to represent the South’s point of view and paints them as cardboard villains, and makes Lincoln out as too much of a saint, all the while massaging white liberal guilt. On the opposite side, no doubt there will be cries that this is nowhere near enough, that making a film patting whites on the back for having finally made progress and stopped enslaving other races is just patronising, especially making money from it, and that if the message were sincere, filmmakers and audiences alike would be doing more in the name of restitution. But both are based on political agendas, and it’s better to enjoy this as a slice of a time and a political manoeuvre than anything else. 

Crusade in Jeans

This moderately costly and well-produced 2006 film is an obscurity. It’s vaguely possible that people in Holland know of it, but in the majority of the world it went completely unnoticed and doesn’t have a single critic’s review on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that presumably it didn’t get any press screenings, or most likely any screenings outside Holland at all, despite being entirely in English and the only celebrity on the cast – Emily Watson – being British.

So why did I watch it, and with quite a deep sense of emotion? Why has it been sat on my hard drive for – quite literally – years with me always a little scared of it? Well, that’s because I have quite the personal connection with it. Indeed, I feel like it was a crossroads in my life, and that is why I’m writing this. Not really for any critical purpose. Not because it had any impact at all on the world of cinema, or will ever get the sequel its cliffhanger promises and for which the remaining half the novel could supply a screenplay. But because I thought I was going to be in it, and when that never happened, I rather gave up on the acting career path altogether – to the extent I almost never talk about it. Had I got the part, my life would have been very different and I probably would have spent the rest of my life pursuing acting as a career, with the very strong element of a feature film role beefing up my CV. And while none of the young actors who had major parts have gone on to have stellar careers, both the actors who got the parts I was considered for have appeared in other films, and the boy who got the main part also has a career in music, essentially living a life I would like. This is about personal catharsis.

If I recall correctly, it was in early 2004 that I had the auditions for the film. I remember because at the audition I chatted with Harry Eden, who was a lost boy in the then-current Peter Pan had also starred in the difficult Real Men. Whether he was offered a part in this film I will never know, but I suspect it would have clashed with Polanski’s Oliver Twist, in which he played the Artful Dodger.

My agent at the time was very enthusiastic about my chances for this role. She knew me as literary, and the only one on her books likely to have heard of the Dutch children’s book Kruistocht in spijkerbroek, or Crusade in Jeans. I hadn’t, but I was easily capable of reading it in a few days and doing a good impression of someone who had. It was a pretty poor book, really, about a teenager who uses his mother’s experimental time machine for his own trivial ends, mixes up days and years and ends up part of the semi-historical Children’s Crusade in 1212, with all anti-Islamic rhetoric carefully sidestepped. The young hero, whose name surprisingly remained Dolf for the film (it’s short for ‘Rudolph’ rather than ‘Adolf’), ends up passing as a noble, mystifying others with his odd clothes and futuristic artefacts and soon becomes a hero to the good kids and a threat to the nefarious manipulators intending to sell the children into slavery.

The early scripts were pretty awful – I think still have some of the early drafts, involving horribly awkward dialogue where Dolf played music on his iPod and convinced followers that Marylin Manson was the voice of the devil, thankfully changed by the filmed version to a more palatable ‘troubadour in a box’ bargaining tool – and the final draft has awkward mistakes, like Carolus apparently coming back to life with nobody commenting. Interesting characters are melded into a dull love interest. But I got very invested, practised like hell and memorized audition dialogue. I passed an audition, but meeting the casting agent, was quite saddened to hear he didn’t see me as Dolf – he thought me too old, something in my eyes betraying a bit too much knowledge to be the likeable boy hero. That’s fair enough, really – I was never the blonde hero type, a quality the lucky guy who was cast exuded, and in all fairness I think he looked better with his shirt off than I would have. Instead, I was considered for Vick, the thuggish bodyguard, who is a secondary character but given an inflated role in the film (not even killed off), and I came around to this quickly, with much to relish in the role, which I thought I could make cold and slightly sinister. There was another audition stage, a group session where we took part in various exercises, and I’m confident I distinguished myself. At the end of it, I happened to look at the casting assistant, and she gave me a huge grin and a big thumbs-up. I left thinking I would at last get to be in a film, and just needed to wait for the call.

Well, the call never came. I never heard from them again – as is usual for that world. The chance came and went, and in the end I wasn’t cast – instead, some rather forgettable fellow played the role in a very straightforward schoolyard bully way, which may well have been the perfect way to do it, and I suspect did well because he looked like a rather less handsome version of the hero – which I don’t say in any attempt to be rude, as it’s an interesting casting decision. For my part, well, I wouldn’t as I suspected have looked too old, not at all (most of the cast are a bit old for their book counterparts), but if anything I would have looked too similar to the horribly miscast Nicholas, the spacey boy prophet.

I had watched bits and pieces before, to see what the guy who got the role I had wanted looked like and how he played it, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish until finally I decided I wanted to watch something live-action and had nothing else. A vindictive part of me smirked at how clearly the film was going to fail, how poorly it was done, but oh, I would have been proud to have been a part of it, and I would have loved to have played any of those parts and had the life that could have gone with it. Instead, after this never came to pass, I drifted through a few more stage roles in Cambridge, put my heart and soul into Alan Strang, realized that I was at the age where I’d be expected to do romantic roles and that I utterly loathed the part of acting that demands you perform physical acts of love with someone you do not love, and drifted away from it and into music. I didn’t pay for a new set of pictures for Spotlight, and that was the end of my having an agent. I was approaching the end of university and I imagined that within a year I’d have a career playing the drums, and a book published. Well, these things have failed to come to pass after all, at least so far, and I’ve largely drifted. It traces back to this, at least in my head. It was my last chance to be an adolescent actor of note, and it passed me by.

I don’t expect this to be read by anybody. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write out for a long time. I won’t let on that it’s personal, and just link it as usual from my Facebook. If anyone stumbles upon it, well, perhaps it will be of interest. But I doubt they will. I don’t promote my film blog so the only people who read it are friends – who don’t care for obscurities.

Les Misérables (2012)

Les Misérables is amongst my very favourite books, if not my favourite. It is also likely my favourite musical. This is often a surprise to lovers of the book, as so many hate the adaptation – as well as being very sick of musical lovers who pretend they have read the book then are revealed to only know the story in the musical – but as a matter of fact I enjoy both as very different properties. I keep them separate and enjoy each for what it is, though admittedly with every fresh adaptation like this one, a part of me hopes Gavroche will be transformed to his more thoughtful, vulpine, brotherly form from the novel rather than the irritating little cliché of the film. But hey, the familiar story goes that it was the Artful Dodger who inspired the adaptation to happen at all, so…

Anyway, this version I was not particularly looking forward to. The trailer stirred no emotional response from me at all, other than thinking Fantine did not sound very powerful, and Russell Crowe could not sing. Well, on the former point I was admittedly very wrong – though I’m afraid the latter stands. Overall, though, I ended up liking this far more than I’d expected.

There was much brouhaha before the release about the way actors sang live on camera – and not in the way of the old musicals, essentially filmed like a modern-day concert with less cranes, but with the sophisticated cuts and angles of modern filmmaking. Well, I find myself sceptical that all the vocals were recorded during what we saw on screen, partly because multiple cuts would totally change their flow and be a nightmare to mix, and partly because I really don’t believe Hugh Jackman was singing as he and Javert were fighting with sword and wooden plank with no effect to his breathing. But what we did get were some truly remarkable sequences where a single shot was held – when Valjean first decides to turn his life around, when Fantine has fallen to her lowest and when Marius sings of the empty chairs at empty tables – and we have something quite unique, something that cannot be captured in a musical, and which completely justifies the technique and the hiring of film actors rather than singers: close-up performances where every nuance is clear and every breath, every sniffle, every waver is caught. It works rather brilliantly.

Most of the cuts to bring this down to an appropriate running length are good, too, snipping here and there and thankfully making the only song I dislike, ‘Little People’, not much more than an aside. It was a shame ‘Castle on a Cloud’ was snipped a bit, as the young Cossette really doesn’t get much to do, and the lack of ‘You broke a window pane’ in ‘Look Down’ changes the perception of Valjean’s initial crimes in a way I didn’t like, but otherwise things proceeded nicely.

I definitely think there were a few poor casting choices, though. Crowe is certainly the most prominent. It’s impossible to watch him and not to think of him simply as Russell Crowe struggling, never as Javert. He delivers ‘Stars’ like he’s just singing along to himself in private, and when he switches from his gravely voice to a higher line he sounds absurd. The crucial chemistry between Valjean and Javert thus never properly forms and his complete mental confusion at the end is nowhere to be seen. The girl playing adult Cossette is bland and not very likeable, which makes something of the emotional centre of the film – that more or less everything Valjean does is for her – go missing. And yes, the kid who’s Gavroche is the perfect musical Gavroche…but I still did hope for the gamin of the book, the one with the fierceness of that famous Delacroix painting. There’s also no sense of the book’s M. Bienvenu, but the musical does render him plot device priest #1.

For every miscast, though, there are numerous that are spot-on, and bring that aspect far into a positive light. Jackman, who we all know by now can sing superbly, does a fantastic transformation, carries the role with gravitas and in fact doesn’t miss the barrel chest of most Valjeans. He does seem to affect an odd quasi-Northern accent at the start, though. Hathaway, who got so much negative press before the film was finished, was a superbly damaged, sympathetic Fantine, perhaps the most miserable of the misérables, and made some excellent decisions to foreground suffering over bombast, making her very believable even in an inherently artificial art form. The girl playing Éponine’s tragic love was delicately delivered and she did a lot with very little, making me care more about her than almost any of the others in the cast, and her parents the Thénadiers were brilliantly done by Sasha Baron-Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, repeating some elements from their Sweeney Todd appearances but stealing the show every time they were on and ad-libbing superbly. Cohen’s ‘How dare you?’ was perfect.

Eddie Redmayne, who plays Marius and who I last saw in My Week with Marylin, was likeable and delivered a very moving ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’, though when he sang falsetto I must admit I was reminded of Kermit the Frog and was glad when the song moved to its main register. I can’t shake the feeling I passed him a few times in University, perhaps in Hall or the bar or even at the ADC, but this may well be false memory syndrome based on recognising him from My Week with Marylin.

Overall, it wasn’t perfect, and if asked whether it was as good as the musical I’d have to say better in some places and not in others, and of course the book is the best overall experience, but it was very good and at the very least it showed me some things I haven’t seen before – which is remarkably unexpected for an adaptation of an old musical based on a very old book.