Adultery, with and without adults

Streep, Martin, Santa Barbara

Okay, this is going to be a long review. More than any movie I’ve seen lately, It’s Complicated struck me as a disturbing commentary on modern American society— all the more disturbing because the filmmaker seems utterly unaware of her most obvious message, a message that she shamelessly splashes across the screen: this movie celebrates a life of material wealth and moral poverty.

Streep’s Jane

I saw It’s Complicated for Meryl Streep. I had just rewatched Summertime, David Lean’s 1955 movie with a similar theme. So this was a chance to compare two venerable actresses in similar roles at similar points in their careers:  Katharine Hepburn as a middle-aged spinster, Streep as a middle-aged divorcé— coincidentally or not, both named Jane. There’s a world of difference between a spinster and a divorcé, but both Janes are spirited career women who enter brief affairs. There’s also a world of difference between directors David Lean and Nancy Meyers. Lean’s films range from epic masterpieces like Lawrence of Arabia to small-scale masterpieces like Brief Encounter (which sets the standard for films about adultery). Meyers’s, in contrast, have no range whatsoever: she’s such a huckster for middle-aged American women that she’s become one of the reigning queens of that durable Hollywood genre, the chick flick.

Hepburn’s Jane

Hepburn, it turns out, outshines Streep, but only because Summertime is a vastly superior movie. (I confess, here, that I even don’t think Hepburn was the best choice for this aging-virgin role.) Summertime has an intelligent, literate script, the protagonist Jane is vulnerable but honorable, and the movie was entirely filmed in Venice (in fact, it was instrumental in the ultimate transition of Venice from city to tourist-infested museum piece). It’s Complicated, on the other hand, is a formulaic story set in Santa Barbara, which in this movie looks like it was built last year as a tribute to what money can buy.

With tub and tubby hubby

Money is almost a character in this film. It saturates every frame. “You’ve Feng-shui’d your life,” a friend says admiringly to Jane, whose house is unmitigated Martha Stewart or House and Garden or something: not one item suggests idiosyncratic or personal taste. The focus is on kitchens and bathrooms, the latter having been enthroned as an American fetish. The French have bedroom farces; It’s Complicated is an American bathroom farce. Bathrooms are used for dressing scenes, a private phone call scene, a marijuana scene, and at least one bath scene. Jane even uses a bathroom to describe her feelings: she has his and hers sinks, and the his sink makes her sad.

Now that I live alone, I need another wing.

But Jane is a professional baker, so her extravagance also shows up in lavish kitchens. She already has two, in her bakery and in her home (see top pic), yet she hires architect Adam (Steve Martin) to build her “dream kitchen” as part of  a whole new wing for her empty nest. Seriously– the kids move out, she adds square footage. I kept waiting to hear what she planned to do with her existing elaborate kitchen, or at least hear her ask Adam to design something that could use her present state-of-the-art fixtures, but such practicality would have been a spoonful of reality in this wanton homage to consumerism…

Seasoned Kate… although…

Good-bye, camera; hello, life.

The most famous moment in Summertime is, of course, when spinster Jane Hudson falls into the canal at Campo San Barnaba. It’s a surprising bit of slapstick in a romantic drama, but it serves its purpose beautifully: a wet and wild shock to Jane’s system that foreshadows her plunge into a life that includes physical excitement. The fact that Jane gamely climbs out of the canal with self- deprecating humor (“You should have seen me in the Olympics”) is also a signal: this is no easily embarrassed prude, it’s a mature woman fully ready to take that plunge. Before the immersion, Jane is captivated by Venice, but she’s an observer, experiencing it through guidebooks, her 8mm camera, excursions with a local urchin, and talks with her pensione proprietor, a voluptuary played by Isa Miranda.  Although well into middle-age, Jane presents as a virgin.  Not that she’s priggish; just inexperienced and stiffly conventional.

Keeping life at bay

The role gained Hepburn one of her 12 Oscar nominations. Her leading man, Rossano Brazzi, is so soulful and seductive as the philanderer that we’re never quite sure if he’s a cad or if he really does fall in love with Jane to some extent. (A question Europeans may not care about as much.) But I contend that the real costar, for better or worse, is  Venice. David Lean won the New York Film Critics Circle award for directing this, and no wonder. One of his wise choices was to film more than 90 percent of the movie there. He immerses us in the city right along with Jane. Views of Venice are everywhere, which is a particular feast for those of us who didn’t see it before the armies of tourists displaced native Venetians (a situation which this film helped cause, according to Robert Osborne).

Juliet without Romeo

The film works, and memorably, but I do have regrets, minor though they are. I couldn’t quite understand Brazzi’s attraction to an uptight spinster, and her attraction to him seems merely generic— an American woman of a certain age and any elegant European gentleman. Hepburn’s character was more fully developed than Brazzi’s, but both could have used greater depth. That said, however, I appreciate that Summertime acknowledges the fact that brief encounters with travelers are usually sketchy— often gloriously so. It’s part of the seduction of travel. You only need present what you want to about your life back home. (Although of course, there’s no changing your character. That takes more than a passport.)

Hepburn and Miranda

Finally, and crucially, one of the great satisfactions of this film is that it is about love among adults, rather than among the insipid but photogenic twenty-something chick flicks that Hollywood dispenses like Snickers. In 1955, when this film was made, Hepburn was 48, Brazzi was 39, and Isa Miranda was 50. The youngsters were Darren McGavin, aged 33, and Mari Aldon, 29. Not a Megan in the bunch. Thank you yet again, David Lean.

Too vital? and vintage?

My last regret, also minor, is one I will indulge at length because this is my blog and nobody can stop me. Admire Hepburn though I do, she may not have been the right actress to play a role that, in my view, should have been a less vital woman, and a slightly younger one. Hepburn is such a thoroughbred, and so indelibly herself on-screen, that it was a stretch for me to believe that she’d been wasting away in the spinster paddock all these years.  I can’t help but wonder if the role shouldn’t have gone to someone else, and wonder at length, because it’s such fun. Question is, who?…

In Hollywood’s henhouse

Cairo upstages Juliet

It would, no doubt, come as a surprise to the makers of Cairo Time  that their film is no more than an odd duck in a lowly film genre, the chick flick. Short on content and long on mood, the movie obviously means to transcend its niche, but Cairo Time merely adapts the chick flick formula for the mature set. Call it a hen flick.

Because it’s about adult love, and for other reasons, including the echo in the titles that may well have been intentional given the similarities in the films, Cairo Time reminded me of Summertime, the superb David Lean film with Katharine Hepburn (reviewed on another page). Both films use their locations (Cairo and Venice) to a seductive extent, and both tell stories about star-crossed love. The heroine in Cairo Time is even named Juliette.

al-Qāhirah, or Cairo

Although the views of Venice in 1955 in Summertime helped transform that city into the tourist circus it is today (about 20 million visitors annually), the love story between Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi did not require Venice. It had its own drama, its own story arc, with Hepburn’s character, Jane, evolving in a way that was involving. In stark contrast, Cairo is crucial to Cairo Time. Scenes of the city—day and night, indoors and out, in chaos or solitude—are what kept me watching because, sadly, the love story comes close to being a vacuum: two middle-aged people meet, are attracted to each other, and ultimately part—a parting that is never in doubt.

Cut-rate Casablanca

Thousands of love stories follow the Romeo & Juliet formula, of course, which is universal and timeless—Paris & Helen, Ruth & Boaz, the Butterfly Lovers, Ohi’a and Lehua, Prince Charming and Princess Sleeping Cinderella Snow. And a hefty percentage use war as their background. In Cairo Time, the Middle East conflict is treated much the way World War II is Casablanca, to name the most famous war romance movie, and one of the best if only because the war is central to everyone’s motivation. War is a great dramatic setting, of course, though it is more than a bit callous to use war to sell a love story.

And story is the operative word. Cairo Time settles for delivering a mood. The forbidden Arab Romeo for our American Juliet is an Egyptian called Tariq Khalifa, a situation that screams star-crossed tragedy. In this 2009 movie, however, the cultural divide is not what crosses them up; her marriage does, which is one of the reasons the story stays solidly in chick-flick territory. The MidEast conflict, not to mention Bush and Cheney’s “war on terror,” is nothing more than background context.

Lean directs Hepburn in “Summertime”

But back to David Lean, briefly, because few directors were better at delivering love stories that don’t descend to formula.  Summertime is only one of his triumphs in the realm of adult love stories. His best, Brief Encounter, is a masterpiece; indeed, it is the romantic film by which all others can be measured, and I’m not the only one who thinks so: link, link, link. Each of Lean’s love stories are strongly flavored and exquisitely felt. The Passionate Friends is perhaps the least known. Yet another, Madeleine, differs from the other three because it’s based on a true story, and the female lead is meant to be young and marriageable (though she is played by Ann Todd at age forty-four).

Myers directs the chatty set

Cairo Time reminded me of another recent hen flick, It’s Complicated, the 2009 Meryl Streep film that is as bad as its title. I took It’s to task here (again, comparing it to Summer-time) because the director, Nancy Myers, is as callow and formulaic as any working director I can think of, man or woman. Cairo Time also has a woman at the helm: Ruba Nadda, a Canadian who is not as shallow or predictable as Myers, but is still orders of magnitude behind Lean. It isn’t fair, I realize, to judge film directors (or any profession, except perhaps the oldest) by their gonads—though John Huston and his manly ilk bear examination, and I hold that Ida Lupino was so far ahead of the rest of her gender that she merits special acknowledgment. But when two movies are as similar as It’s Complicated and Cairo Time—both directed by women, both love stories involving married women tempted to adultery—it would be cowardly to withdraw into politically correct self-censorship.

Nadda with Cairo actors

From what I have seen of their works so far, neither Myers nor Nadda know how to turn “Lights, camera, action!”  into cinema. In It’s Complicated, Myers delivers 100% conventional movie-making, stagey and chatty, with the women clucking about what’s missing from their over-privileged lives. Myers’ very particular failure is her inability to make anything but the most superficial attempt at observing and revealing the genuine moral quandary women face when they suddenly yearn for a forbidden man (the same quandary, let us remember, that men face when they want a taste).

King Lear on a pub crawl

Hobson, hammered

The King Lear reference is a stolen one, but it is too apt to ignore in describing Hobson’s Choice, the 1954 British comedy that has more than a bit of truth about domineering fathers and less-than-grateful daughters in it, and the kind of bawdy dialog that Shakespeare would have admired. David Lean’s direction is pitch-perfect, as is Jack Hildyard’s photography of the dark, grim, wet north of England, and Peter Taylor’s fluid editing. Four years later, all three won Oscars collaborating on a dramatically different movie– one of the spectacles Lean is known for– The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The walk home

Our hero, Henry Horatio Hobson, is played with all the gusto and inventiveness we expect from Charles Laughton. He is the happily widowed father of three grown daughters, whom he freely insults (“You have the kind of waist that’s natural in wasps but unnatural in women”). As a patriarch, he’s all pomp and no circumstance. The daughters see to his every need, managing his boot shop, which is also their home, and indulging his dogged alcoholism. He’s a hilarious drunk, make no mistake, and Laughton delivers at least two of the greatest drunk scenes ever put on film in this performance. We first meet him staggering home from the Moonraker’s pub and into his shop, where his eldest daughter, Maggie (Brenda de Banzie), leads him to bedroom, which is upstairs. That’s when Laughton kicks into high gear, swinging his arms at the bottom of the staircase to get up momentum, then hurling himself up the steps, arms whirling like propellers, finally landing at the top with his last ounce of energy, and beaming with pride. When Maggie lights the way into the bedroom, he raises her arm, transforming her into the Statue of Liberty, then falls into bed, a heap of self-congratulatory giggles.

The triumph of insult

Prof. Higgins and the "incarnate insult to the English language."

When I was still a kid, My Fair Lady won eight Oscars (only seven films have won more), so as far as my generation was concerned, Audrey Hepburn was Eliza Doolittle and Rex Harrison was Henry Higgins. But 25 years earlier, George Bernard Shaw had won an Oscar for the 1938 film version of his stage play, Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts. It was up to me to catch up with the real thing, and I finally have.

Now that I have seen Pygmalion, My Fair Lady feels like burlesque– a marvelous, vigorous burlesque, but a thin reduction of the original literary work. Pygmalion is more substantial in every way: the cruel class prejudices are more heartfelt and searing, not only because the script is superior, but because the dialogue is not sentimentalized into song. Consider the song Without You, taken from a line in Shaw’s script where Liza says to Higgins, “You are a motor bus: all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone. But I can do without you: don’t think I can’t.” Replacing resoluteness with rhyme and– don’t get me wrong–brilliant inventiveness, Alan Jay Lerner has Liza sing, “There’ll be spring every year without you. England still will be here without you. There’ll be fruit on the tree. And a shore by the sea. There’ll be crumpets and tea without you.”  And I contend that it’s a steep drop from the pith of “Don’t think I can’t” to the pathos of “There’ll be crumpets and tea without you.”

Leslie Howard, full-tilt

There’s little sentimentality of any sort, in fact. One particularly tough-minded incident occurred when Alfred Doolittle (Wilfred Lawson) arrives to shake down Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) for some cash. In the middle of a lively disagreement, Doolittle flips the British bird (the  V-sign), thrusting his grimy fingers into the air at the fussy professor. It knocked me for such a happy loop I had to rewind to be sure I’d seen right.

The script belongs to Shaw, but the movie belongs to Leslie Howard, who co-directed it with Anthony Asquith (David Lean was the editor). Howard displays all his genius here. I’ve been a fan since I saw The Petrified Forest and Gone with the Wind when I was in high school, but he still surprised me in this role. He charms the audience in spite of his essentially loathsome character (the charm is provided by Shaw’s writing; Rex Harrison benefitted, too). Higgins ruthlessly hurls insults at Eliza– “I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe“–  and some insults aren’t even at her, they’re toward or about her:  “Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down or shall we throw her out of the window?” The script is a compendium of vilification, but so laced with Shavian wit that we can’t help but be entranced and amused, especially with Howard’s enthusiastic, light-as-a-feather delivery.

Top this.

Wendy Hiller creates an intelligent, strong-willed, sympathetic Eliza, but– and I regret admitting this– I could not for the life of me erase Audrey Hepburn’s later Eliza. I don’t even consider Hepburn a formidable actress, but she is so winning in the role of Eliza Doolittle, so dazzlingly beautiful (and costumed), and so sturdily supported by Harrison, Wilfred Hyde-White, and Gladys Cooper, that other Elizas can’t help but pale in comparison. I rush to acknowledge that Hiller is the superior actress– more accomplished, more subtle, more down-to-earth– but Hepburn flat-out owns this role. It makes one wonder what would have happened if a less glamorous actress (read: Julie Andrews) had been cast in the film. Perhaps Lizas past and future wouldn’t suffer the sad fate of inevitably being compared to, and receding before, the pure pulchritude of Audrey Hepburn.

http://www.filmsite.org/oscars2.html#1

Verdict: not proven

Prisoners of love in "Madeleine"

Let me start with a confession. Although I was a tuition-paying student of film in college, and I remain a zealous connoisseur of filmmakers from Griffith to Greengrass, I have never seen Lawrence of Arabia. That lapse has always been rather shameful to me– until recently. I have now seen most of David Lean’s other movies. He directed only 18 films from In Which We Serve (1942) to A Passage to India (1984), but I’ve also seen quite a few of the 27 he edited. More than most directors, Lean’s skills fully reveal themselves only after multiple viewings, and I’ve now seen Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Doctor Zhivago and This Happy Breed several times each. Yesterday, I added Madeleine to that list, and as a result I am now officially in awe of Mr. Lean, and thrilled that Lawrence of Arabia, his acknowledged masterpiece,  lies in my future.

Dad gets the bad news

In  Madeleine, which is based on a true story, Lean takes full advantage of a peculiar tenet of Scots jurisprudence, the so-called third verdict: not proven, which Sir Walter Scott called “the bastard verdict.” The film puts the viewer in the place of a juror, but so artfully that we’re not conscious of sitting in judgment. Very little of the movie takes place in a courtroom. Set in the 1850s, it begins in a posh square in Glasgow, where the Smith family is house-shopping. All the Smiths but one go first to examine the drawing room; 20-year-old Madeleine, however, spots a staircase that leads down to a private apartment, complete with a bedroom and a door to the street. She encourages her parents to take the house, they do so, and the next thing we know, Madeleine is trysting with her lover, a Frenchman (Ivan Desny) whom her domineering father (Leslie Banks) would never approve of.

Madeleine is played by Ann Todd, who was Jane Seymour to director David Lean’s Henry VIII, by which I mean she was the third of his six wives. Todd was also a skilled film actress, a woman who could convey a great deal with almost no change of affect. Indeed, her work here reminded me of Helen Mirren’s masterfully understated, Oscar-winning performance in The Queen, another role that is a study in secretiveness.

In addition to David Lean’s obvious skill at lighting and framing scenes for emotional impact, skills which are evident in the few stills I’ve posted, several elements in Madeleine can be held responsible for my belated infatuation with Mr. Lean…