Neighbourhood Watch

Hard to overstate how terrific CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? is but the same director’s A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD might be even better, even though comparisons are odious (even more odious than other things).

Marielle Heller is a new favourite. And it says something that ABDITN, in which Tom Hanks plays Fred Mister Rogers and Matthew Rhys plays a fictional-but-inspired-by-real-life journalist assigned to interview him, is arguably much more flawed than CYEFM?, but still manages to be even more moving and effective, at least for this audience of two.

We didn’t grow up with Mr. Rogers in the UK, although I’ve seen snippets. This might actually be an advantage, because the question of whether Tom Hanks sufficiently resembles Fred Rogers in look and manner wasn’t really an issue for us. I could see how it might be distracting. And I can see how Hanks’ physiognomy dictates certain effects when he smiles protractedly (he can seem slightly eerie) which distinguish him from his model (a little otherworldly but never spooky). Never mind that.

I think MAYBE the use of models and puppets could be integrated more ambitiously into the full-scale action. It’s always fun and charming, though. Apparently the director and cinematographer had rules about everything, but these are not obvious to the audience, and the editor sort of ignored them. But I did sometimes puzzle over why one exterior longshot was a live action full-sized location, and another was a miniature with obvious toy figures and vehicles. Again, it doesn’t really matter, I just think you could have even more fun with this stuff, delightful as it is.

And there’s one noisy sequence — a Cat Stevens song comes in and I think “Oh good, I like Yusuf Islam” and then a bunch of Mr. Rogers clips crash into it and the lyrics and the dialogue are on top of one another, and while a build-up of Babel could be quite effective, instead it’s just two sets of words all the time, shouting over each other, and this was weirdly unsure-footed in a film that’s otherwise so effective.

Those are the quibbles. I’m not even that bothered about whether Matthew Rhys’ particular family troubles, which Mr. Rogers helps sort out, are compelling or convincing. I can treat them as a placeholder and still find the film enormously satisfying because the scenes between Hanks and Rhys are what it’s all about and they work like gangbusters. Although Lloyd Vogel (Rhys) is supposed to be interviewing Rogers (Hanks), Mr. Rogers insists on reciprocity. He’s like Hannibal Lector in that way. Only in that way — but here the faint suspicion of some interior darkness is not a disadvantage. Although it might be important to keep in mind that this suspicion might be ALL OUR IMAGINING — based on the ways we read faces, and the way faces are sometimes shaped in ways that mislead us. Rhys’ character is, initially, trying to figure out if Fred Rogers is for real. And Hanks doesn’t tip his hand one way or the other.

They put one of the most incredible scenes on YouTube:

In this scene we also get to see the real Mrs. Rogers. But isn’t Rhys excellent? We enjoyed him a lot in the Perry Mason reboot, but here he’s wonderful, really a master of micro-acting.

A scene Heller and DP Jody Lee Lipes talk about in they’re commentary (yes, it’s worth buying the disc, but you could rent the film on YouTube right now if you desire it) is the first in-person meeting, where Vogel/Rhys tells Rogers/Hanks that he’s having trouble knowing if he’s talking to a person or a character. “There’s you, and there’s Mr. Rogers.”

Heller does something magnificent. She crosses the line. The scene has been elegantly filmed from BEHIND the two characters, with over-the-shoulder shots favouring each face, and for Fred’s reaction (or is it Mr. Rogers’?) she jumps to a shot taken from the FRONT.

It’s not confusing at all, since this is a static two-hander at present, and all the shots show at least part of both characters, so we’re perfectly orientated. But the line-cross kind of turns Rogers (whose name, like Hanks’, is appropriately plural) into two people. YOU and MR. ROGERS. Heller says the scene gets a huge laugh from audiences, without them mostly knowing that it’s the line-crossing that makes them respond that way. Which is fascinating. And super-nerdy. It’s going straight into my first-year teaching where I talk about the eyeline.

Page Seventeen II: Risk Addiction

It was very late when we were finishing the meal, and the sun was already low on the horizon. I was barefoot, and one of the girls in our group, who had been an admirer of mine for some time, kept remarking shrilly how beautiful my feet were. This was so true that I found her insistence on this matter stupid. She was sitting on the ground, with her head lightly resting against my knees. Suddenly she put her hand on one of my feet and ventured an almost imperceptible caress with her trembling fingers. I jumped up, my mind clouded by an odd feeling of jealousy toward myself, as though all at once I had become Gala. I pushed away my admirer, knocked her down and trampled on her with all my might, until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.

The office was furnished in sombre good taste that was relieved by a pair of bronze puppies on the chimney-piece. A low trolley of steel and white enamel alone distinguished the place from a hundred thousand modern American reception-rooms; that and the clinical smell. a bowl of roses stood beside the telephone; their scent contended with the carbolic, but did not prevail.

I continued to smell the flower, from time to time, for its oddity of perfume had fascinated me. I passed by the house on the cross-road again, but never encountered the old man in the cloak, or any other wayfarer. It seemed to keep observers at a distance, and I was careful not to gossip about it: one observer, I said to myself, may edge his way into the secret, but there is no room for two.

This view is mistaken. You underestimate even the foothills that stand in front of you, and never suspect that far above them, hidden by cloud, rise precipices and snow-fields. The mental and physical advances which, in your day, mind in the solar system has still to attempt, are overwhelmingly more complex, more precarious and dangerous, than those which have already been achieved. And though in certain humble respects you have attained full development, the loftier potencies of the spirit have not yet even begun to put forth buds.

The dead man was face down on the dark hardwood floor. He was frail and old, and the house was sturdy and old, redolent of Victorian dignity. It was the house where he had been born.

Next to Ken’s store was Milton. He dealt in furniture and bric-a-brac, and went by the soubriquet of Captain Spaulding, perhaps because of the lyric, in the song of the same name, ‘Did somebody call me schnorrer …?’

This observation and part of the surrounding narrative appear to have been borrowed from a passage in The Gothic War by the sixth-century Byzantine historian, Procopius. The passage is known to Celtic scholars as a particularly late reference to Celtic religious beliefs. Procopius describes how the Armoricans – the inhabitants of Brittany – would be woken by a low voice and a knocking at the door in order that they might ferry the souls of the dead over to the island of Britain. When they went to the harbour they would find boats, apparently empty, sunk to the gunwales. One common explanation of fairy origins was that they were souls of the dead, an explanation which accounts for Puck’s disguise as the dead Tom Shoesmith in this story. Hobden’s wife is a descendant of the widow herself and so the borrowing from the historian indicates the ancient descent and immemorial continuities imagined by Kipling for his embodiment of Sussex man as well as for his fairy spokesman.

Seven extracts from seven page seventeens from seven books bought from Edinburgh’s charity shops or sent in by readers. (Send me books!) Feel free to reply with extracts from some page seventeens of your own, especially if they make suitable rebuttals to the bold statements cited above.

The Secret Diary of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali (natch); The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh; The Ghostly Rental by Henry James, in Classic Tales of Horror, Vol. 1; Olaf Stapledon’s introduction to his Last and First Men; There Hangs Death! by John D. MacDonald, from Stories to be Read with the Door Locked II “edited” by Alfred Hitchcock; A Whore’s Profession by David Mamet; Sarah Wintle’s introduction to Puck of Pook’s Hill by Rudyard Kipling;

The Sunday Intertitle: Topping the Topper

A curious little Max Linder half-reeler. It has far more intertitles than were common in 1913, but it’s a Pathe-Baby version — the home cinema system introduced in 1922. So I think this is a chopped-down version designed to fit in a single cartridge the size of a matchbox. It moves very rapidly, with an almost nouvelle vague choppiness, which the title cards are meant to obviate. So we can imagine a one-reeler version with more detailed visits to the hat shop.

The IMDb gives the runtime as five minutes, suggesting this may be the only version surviving. And maybe it IS the authentic original edit, I can’t be 100% sure. But even with my doped schoolboy French I can tell the titles are witty. They use a different word for hat each time. And something about “an accident has transformed my hat into an accordion…”

The final indignity is a but more vulgar than Chaplin would have allowed himself to go, but of course Max’s elegance allows him to get a bit more scatological than Charlie. Not that Charlie isn’t elegant in his own way, but he doesn’t have the social standing. It’s like the special dispensation that allows Stephen Fry to swear as much as he likes on the BBC.