Mad in Craft

Why? Why did I watch Kenneth Branagh’s HAMLET?

Apparently I was curious about it. But not so curious that I watched it in 1996. That would have made sense — I could have seen in in 70mm. I watched it this week.

I was curious about it being the full four hour unexpurgated play, but I came to believe that by not cutting, Branagh had given up a big part of the adaptor’s toolkit — directors typically choose what parts of the play to emphasise, they focus in, by cutting. And, while I can see doing it uncut on the stage makes sense, any uncut Shakespeare text on the screen is likely to suffer from redundancy as the characters take their time describing things we can SEE. Oh boy did that happen here.

I should give Branagh credit where possible: he makes the thing go at a fair lick. And when ones’ eyes and ears have not actually gone blurry, you can still tell what the people are saying. Sometimes, it is true, you wonder why everyone is in such a frenzy when there’s not so much happening, and often, it is true, you feel that a momentary dramatic pause would bring out a lot more meaning than the relentless jabber.

The film is cast in a racially-blind manner, before it was fashionable or popular, and this is good. Hamlet is totally a play you can do this with, and any call for realism can be dismissed outright since the characters are (a) speaking blank verse and (b) not speaking Danish. There are no important Black characters, but there are quite a few minor ones, and one of those is the excellent Don Warrington.

Branagh has a certain boldness. My friend Paul Duane calls him “the worst director who has ever lived,” and he is, essentially, correct, but Branagh does things which are wrong in surprising ways, not just in boring ways, so I can still find him preferable to, say, Richard Attenborough. Who turns up here, because, of course he does.

OK, I think I’m done being nice. It wasn’t a very impressive display of positives, I admit.

No Merchandising. Editorial Use Only. No Book Cover Usage. Mandatory Credit: Photo by Moviestore Collection/REX (1596346a) Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh Film and Television

Branagh’s boldness is manifest in the uncut text, in the 70mm format, in a certain gusto with which he throws the camera around, and in the chaotic mix-and-match approach to casting. The guiding aesthetic principle here is the Dunning-Kruger effect. Branagh swirls the Steadicam around his cast, goes into slomo, cuts furiously, because he does, at least, know he CAN, but doesn’t know whether, from moment to moment, he should or should not. We’re on random.

Similarly, Branagh throws together the classically trained theatrical knight, the movie star, the sitcom actor, with gay abandon — it’s admirable in theory — you can see it being exciting — but everybody is playing the wrong part. Brian Blessed — fruity ham — is the ghost. Charlton Heston — grim-visaged axiom of cinema — is the player king. Swap them around and you’d have something.

Jack Lemmon — a potentially fine Polonius — is Marcellus, essentially a random spear-carrier. You wonder why he’s the only American spear-carrier. And whether he’s a bit old for active duty. Richard Briers, a good sitcom actor, is Polonius. And it’s true that Polonius is the most sitcomlike character, and also true that Briers suppresses his natural affability to play the man as a more creepy and august figure, it doesn’t always work.

All the play’s double-acts are mismatched: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two interchangeable doofuses, are Timothy Spall and Reece Dinsdale, a grotesque and a normie. The two gravediggers are Billy Crystal and Simon Russell Beale, Borscht belt and Stratford. Crystal is possibly my favourite performance in the thing: he isn’t funny, his stuff with Beale is a snooze, but there’s a provocative sense of challenge when he’s matched with Branagh. One is a movie star and the other only thinks he is because he has no sense upon which to base his judgement. The result is tension, and the only place where the cutting back and forth between characters adds any excitement.

How badly cast is this film? We are asked to believe that Derek Jacobi has stolen Julie Christie away from Brian Blessed.

Jacobi — always cast as men called Claudius, is miscast as Claudius here. He’s not an impressive opponent. He does OK.

Branagh has realised one thing, I think, but he’s realised it in the edit: the shot/countershot cuts only work when we see who’s talking. It must have been discovered that reaction shots make you lose the thread of the speeches. Or else it was assumed. The result is a Dragnet approach to cutting, where every cut is on the end of a speech, cueing up the reply. I love Dragnet but it has a deliberately inexpressive cutting pattern, suitable for procedurals.

What Shakespeare needs, I suspect, and could very well get in a 70mm film, is dynamic blocking and long-held wide shots where everyone can act together in real time. There’s very, very little of that here, though there are plenty of scenes where the camera just circles the actors for no good reason. This is Branagh’s third Shakespearean adaptation so you would think he’d have a working theory of montage and mise-en-scene.

Olivier went into HENRY V with a plan: he knew that Shakespeare’s more rousing speeches seem to necessitate a certain building to a climax by the actor. The traditional approach to long scenes in the movies is to move closer. Olivier sussed that this would result in us looking right up his nose just as he was really getting into it with the yelling and gesticulating, so he reversed the pattern, very consciously: as Henry builds to a climax, the camera pulls back.

Actual saliva bubble

Branagh never realised that when he made his own HENRY V, so the film is a spittle-flecked shoutfest in which the King spends a lot of time screaming right in our ear. It’s distracting when you see saliva blasting forth in great gobs: it’s only appropriate to do spit if that’s the only thing you want the audience to notice.

Here we are, after MUCH ADO, and Branagh is still drenching the scenery with his face. He gets started early, when he meets the ghost. This is very bad: we have about three and a half hours to go at this point. How’s he going to top this? Shit, what happens when he goes/plays mad?

Plenty. The Dane froths, simpers, screams, and his voice goes comically high to suggest strong emotion. One of my favourite out-of-control performances is Alan Arkin’s last scene in LITTLE MURDERS. It’s huge and manic and (bouncing) off-the-wall. But it’s one scene. He builds to it, and then he stops. Branagh does have quiet moments — the only scene I’d seen excerpted from this was, predictably, “To be or not to be,” which is perfectly OK, and calm. But he spends about an hour running about doing full loony.

Kate Winslet, at least, is only wildly over-the-top for one scene.

As the film trundled on, I found myself no longer able to notice how badly directed it was. I had lost the aesthetic sense. I was in Branaghworld. But the opening scenes really pop and zing with ineptitude, and cry out for close analysis. I think it’d be fun to look at scenes from the Branagh, Olivier and Richardson HAMLETs, as I previously did with three varied MACBETHs.

But not this scene. This scene I just include because it made me giggle. I’m not even sure why. Do you find it funny? I’ve written before about how certain actors should be put at the tip of an A composition because they can’t help but distract from the big foreground heads. Turns out Jack Lemmon is one. Everything he does is more interesting than what Hamlet and Horatio do, even when he’s just titling screen left so Horatio won’t block him from view (00.13).

But the funnier stuff is inside. Partly it’s weird because we see a normal door, and then Branagh cuts back and forth between two groups in the narrow doorway, and they both have the same background. Despite the fact that the camera angles must, presumably, be at least 90 degrees apart. This is called “cheating” and I generally approve of it — to hell with continuity, make the shots effective. Here it becomes subtly discombobulating and hilarious.

(Louis Malle said he was fond of shooting the closeups in a shot/countershot sequence against the exact same background, but I haven’t looked out examples to see how he gets away with it. He mentioned it in connection with ZAZIE so he may have been after the exact dizzy effect Branagh stumbles upon here.)

But there’s just something about the Dragnet cutting-on-dialogue that becomes hysterical to me when the actors build up a froth and the cutting gets faster. Thespian tennis. What do you think?

HAMLET stars Hercule Poirot; Martin Beck; Petulia Danner; Young Iris Murdoch; King Vultan; Sir Robert Peel; Smee; Airey Neave; Miracle Max; Lavrenti Beria; J.M.W. Turner; Sherlock Holmes; C.C. Baxter; Lenin; Cyrano de Bergerac; Dr. Satnam Tsurutani; Judah Ben-Hur; Aunt May; Johnny Rotten; Philip Smith; Popeye; Iris Murdoch; Lord Raglan; Sid Luft; Pinkie Brown; Captain R.F. Scott R.N.

An Alternative to Facts

DENIAL is something we opted to watch on BAFTA screener when something else didn’t grip us (not fair to talk about the non-gripper since we didn’t finish it). We knew DENIAL would offer a good STORY, which is what we craved, and so it did.

What has Mick Jackson been doing? I know his name from L.A. STORY, which was a while ago. He’s been on TV, I see. Well, I kind of know what he’s doing here — he’s been brought in to give it a touch of cinema. It’s a BBC film, see, and written by David Hare — very intelligently written as far as the issues are concerned, occasionally clumsy as it draws in bit players to comment on the issues. But compared to much recent exposition, very decently done.

(We attempted a screener of MY WEEK WITH MARILYN once and were appalled at the leaden way characters kept explaining things to each other that they both clearly already knew. I spoofed this with the line, “As you know, I’m your father,” and after ten minutes we’d almost convinced ourselves this was a genuine bit of dialogue.)

The trouble is, a writer like Hare, schooled in the theatre, leaves no room for cinema or “cinema” — he gives you strong dramatic scenes of people talking to each other. A master of such stuff — and it would be lovely to see Otto Preminger getting to grips with this material — can make cinema out of just such scenes. There’s nothing wrong with Jackson’s handling of them, and he renders London in photogenic, grey, wet panoramas. Lots of frosty, foggy, atmospheric shots of Auschwitz too. It’s the bursts of attention-getting technique applied to the Holocaust that seemed a bit egregious. I’ll allow the barely audible sound of screams heard as our characters stand on the roof of a former gas chamber, since I allowed the barely audible sound of cheering in the deserted Nazi Olympic stadium in THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM — the coincidence is so striking, I have to embrace it. But the sudden horror movie plunge into a photograph of a gas chamber window, which becomes live-action and filled with distressed, clawing figures who look like ZOMBIES — that was bad, both because it belonged in a different film, and because any time a filmmaker uses such historical events to show off, I get repulsed.

But that is, to be fair, one tiny moment in an otherwise strong, sensitively handled drama. Rachel Weisz, who made an unconvincing librarian in THE MUMMY and AGORA, makes a convincing historian here and her accent is enjoyable to listen to. EVERYONE is doing an accent, except Tom Wilkinson, who refuses to make any compromises in the direction of being Scottish. Good for him, I say, he has the right idea. Wilkinson brings the entertainment, as does Andrew Scott as his fellow lawyer (I won’t get into the whole barrister/solicitor thing) — Scott annoyed us no end in Sherlock (he’s Moriarty — we enjoyed the show but not him) but it turns out to have been to a large extent the fault of the writing. He uses many of the same tics here, but they don’t come off as tics: he has a sort of flip, aggressive way of jumping in with a line and cutting it off short, which is helpful as he’s essentially playing antagonist to a woman who wants to talk about things. One of those Sherlock writers is here too, Mark Gatiss playing Polish — and he’s really excellent, very restrained, he makes you forget the oddness of that casting (are there no Poles in Britain? To read the tabloids, not that we do, one would think there was nothing but.)

Holocaust denier David Irving is played by Timothy Spall, and just as Weiss is technically too cute to play Deborah Lipstadt, who should look like an ordinary person, Spall is not handsome enough to play Irving, who looks like the portrait of Dorian Gray if Gray were a big rugby-playing type — traces of handsomeness in a face grown gross and harsh and corrupt. Spall has actually lost a shit-ton of fat (by the looks of things, siphoning it off into John Sessions) and now looks kind of like Tim Roth wearing Timothy Spall’s abandoned skin, something I have no doubt Roth would do, given the chance.

But these observations ultimately don’t matter — you get used to the strange accents emanating from Weiss and Spall (and everyone else) and to the fact that they’re imperfect embodiments of the personages they represent, because the actual ACTING is what counts (along with the writing, of course) and it’s very good. And it all manages to express a point that shouldn’t need to be expressed, with enough subtleties around the edges (for instance, why one shouldn’t put survivors in the witness stand in a case like this) which are far from obvious and fascinating to hear argued so well. When Scott tells Weiss that he’s not going to let her testify, I was surprised and impressed and waited for the movie to change its mind and give her a BAFTA-winning speech from the box, but it never came. Almost uniquely in a film centred on a female protagonist, her job is to remain silent, to bear witness, to not debate a man who doesn’t deserve to be debated. The film’s courage in sticking to this principle is praiseworthy.

 

Enfield of Dreams

Suddenly, it’s Enfield time. The notorious 1970s poltergeist case recently got the TV treatment with The Enfield Haunting, starring Timothy Spall, and hits the big screen with THE CONJURING 2. We watched both within days, reminded ourselves of the 2007 TV doc Interview with a Poltergeist and the 2008 one, The Enfield Poltergeist, and Fiona did a bunch of background reading on a story which had, ahem, haunted her since her teens.

Both fictional adaptations have their good points, but neither is wholly satisfactory. But one is a lot of fun.

The TV drama version of Enfield has an atmospheric title sequence and a reasonably effective period feel, though there are always stray bits of dialogue in these things that don’t feel right. It’s worst moment is early on, when a shrill, REPULSION-style telephone ring breaks in on a conversation to supposedly shocking effect. The phone is then answered, and proves to be a trimphone, a model which, as anyone alive at the time knows, made a gentle, trilling sound, not the old fashioned rotary phone jangle-shriek. Unforgivable!

None of the people in this show look like their real-life counterparts, which matters more than it normally would. Paranormal investigator Maurice Gross had huge comedy sideburns, and altering his appearance was probably a good idea. Spall’s hangdog look suits the character. But the afflicted family have been normalized — what we see in the photographs is a prematurely aged, careworn mother who looks like she should be the kids’ grandmother, and Janet, the child at the centre of the occurrences, is emaciated and sharp-featured, with prominent corpse-like teeth. The kids in the show are all really good, especially Eleanor Worthington-Cox as Janet, but they’re too cute and too posh. Not many hyphens in Enfield.

The show is totally uninterested in who the family were. The absent father is never discussed, the family’s income goes unexplained (they were constantly financially stressed) and they essentially seem to have come into existence without past histories the second the cameras started rolling.

The script, by Joshua St Johnson, invents lots of bogus haunting details, apparently unsatisfied with the rather peculiar and alarming true-life incidents. A kid looks through a Viewmaster-type slide viewer, and is startled by an apparition. Never happened — and mimics too obviously the BOO! YouTube videos of a few years back, further shredding the sense of period. To make room for these inventions, many authentic details are omitted.

This might be forgivable if the result was a balls-out thrill-ride, but the thing just isn’t scary. Slickly made, it nevertheless lacks any sense of how to generate terror, its most damaging weakness being the timing. It’s always in a hurry, so no suspense is generated. When something scary seems about to happen, it immediately happens. We aren’t forced to wait. There are no false build-ups without pay-off, and you can tell which scenes are going to have apparitions and which aren’t, so you can completely relax in between “shocks”. I’ve just made a scary movie which isn’t really scary (but it’s hopefully funny) so I know how difficult this is, especially when you’re trying to keep the pace up, but I was disappointed by all the supposedly creepy bits. I was never anxious that I was about to be unpleasantly surprised by something uncanny, and I never was. Some of it had to do with TV closeness, as there were moments when viewing little vulnerable figures from a distance would have helped. But mostly it was a problem of time, not space.

James Wan’s latest spookshow, THE CONJURING 2, hoes very close to the rut carved by his earlier works, but surprises in two ways. Firstly, it’s frequently quite a bit closer to the facts and “facts” of the Enfield case than the TV version (and, sub-surprise, it’s not notably less accurate in terms of period flavour nor Englishness). Of course, it departs wildly from history in order to have the expected POLTERGEIST style all-Hell-breaks-loose-but-in-a-localized-domestic-area ending, but it does surprising things like acknowledging the fact that little Janet was caught on camera faking manifestations. Some of the conversations with “Bill Wilkins,” the apparently malevolent departed spirit, are reproduced almost verbatim, and are scarier than anything the TV show created.

The real-life ghostbusters established in the first film, Lorraine & Ed Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) visited the afflicted house, very briefly, out of the blue and uninvited, and this slender basis allows Wan and his throng of co-scenarists to shoehorn in most of the more evocative reported “facts” of the case.

Secondly, Wan shows slightly more interest in the family set-up and the characters, which ought to be where British telly excels. We hear about the absent dad and get more sense of the family’s financial impoverishment. The kind of pressures that could either lead to a psychic eruption, if you believe that sort of thing, or cause a little girl who is deprived in all sorts of ways to exercise her natural cleverness in an original and naughty way.

The only point where Wan’s film falls down in comparison to the TV show is in its depiction of the family home, realistically drab and cramped in the TV version (and its very mundane reality ought to make the unheimlich occurrences more chilling), implausibly cavernous in the movie, and equipped with a ridiculous flooded cellar from which one expects Karloff to emerge. In a vain attempt to make this haunted mansion seem working-class, Wan’s art department have distressed every surface to suggest centuries of neglect. They’ve made it look like a haunted house, in fact. This should be disastrous, and it’s certainly less intelligent than the low-key authenticity of the TV show’s look. But, rather annoyingly, Wan’s film is deeply frightening and tense where the TV version just isn’t.

Wan’s camerawork is brilliantly scary. It’s at the service of a slightly dumb plot that barely makes sense, and hardline Christian propaganda (which absolutely makes no sense), but his understanding of when to go wide and when to come in close, his timing of shocks, and his willingness to withhold the expected shocks and leave the audience panting, is absolutely first-rate. Scene by scene, there are terrific creepy gimmicks and visual devices: a creepy painting looming from the shadows so that it might be a real face (borrowed either from THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR or THE OTHERS’ borrowing of it) is spun into a terrifying sequence which takes the concept to giddy new heights of suspense — and then into ridiculous, FRIGHTENERS-type realms of crazy.

Best of all is a protracted single take in which Wilson is compelled to interrogate child actor Madison Wolfe as Janet, with his back to her. Janet remains well out of focus in the background, and we stay on Wilson’s face as he asks his questions with increasing trepidation. Meanwhile, we become aware that the blurry shape of Janet in the background has imperceptibly changed… no longer seems like a little girl, in fact.

Wan also repeats the most shocking shock from INSIDIOUS, by having the ghost/demon suddenly seen over somebody’s shoulder during a daylit conversation scene — the violent rupturing of normality made Fiona scream (“Damnit! He did it AGAIN! Fuck you, James Wan!”*) and makes every subsequent neutral scene fraught with tension, because the bastard could do it again any time he feels like it.

Wan’s kids aren’t as terrific as those he had in the first film, or those in the TV adaptation. But he has a superior Maurice Gross, the elaborately bewhiskered Brit investigator, here embodied by the beady-eyed Simon McBurney, a man who creates dramatic tension just by looking at things.

Anybody interested in the art of suspense and horror should see THE CONJURING 2, even though the content side of it is extremely frustrating. Watching both dramatizations of the case, and viewing some of the docs (an experienced enhanced by the fact in Interview with a Poltergeist, the reconstructions feature my friend Dylan Matthew in the role of a concerned neighbour) I formed some conclusions about what the perfect adaptation would look like — so I offer the following suggestions for anyone thinking of venturing into this terrain ~

1. Embrace the uncertain. Both TV and movie versions are in a terrible hurry to confirm that, yes, there really is a haunting. Since doubt is scary, and the feeling of not-quite certainty animates and energizes the documentary treatments of the story, I would suggest maintaining some question in the audience’s mind about the reality of the various ghostly phenomena would be a good strategy for maintaining interest and augmenting fear. Since most commercial versions of this kind of thing are going to end up affirming the existence of the supernatural (from bitter experience I can say that producers today are deathly afraid of ambiguity), you also gain a turning point which can amp up the dramatic stakes midway through. All the makers of these things seem to admire THE HAUNTING and THE INNOCENTS, but few of them seem to understand those movies, or at any rate they lack the ambition to even try to achieve the same depth.
2. Embrace the slow. Wan understands this and the TV team didn’t — terror is a slow-burn emotion. Slam-bang stuff has limited value, and scenes that are pace like normal telly just can’t be scary at all. There’s a sort of normalizing effect when things get shaped into slots between commercials which eliminates the frissons achievable when a scene is stretched to breaking point while nothing actually happens. Slow can be the opposite of boring.
3. Embrace the bizarre. Little Janet would speak in a terrifying ghost-voice (she had studied ventriloquism, some say), but the ghost’s utterances had a peculiarly childlike sensibility, considering he was meant to be 77 years old at the time of his demise. Fiona recalls the extravagant claim “I’ve got a hundred dogs,” though she admits she may have imagined it. But it has an uncanny, demonic, yet stupid feeling about it. The Late Bill Wilkins was also partial to knock-knock jokes. This gets us into thrillingly Lynchian territory. Fear is frightening, but fear mixed with contradictory emotions is really disturbing. Fuses start to blow in the audience-brain.
4. Scare yourself. There’s a dull BBC show right now called The Living and the Dead. It has a beautifully evoked early twentieth century look, copying the palette of Lumiere’s autochrome photographs. But Nothing. Scary. Ever. Happens. Again, the show’s haste is part of the problem. A girl turns up bloody, having apparently self-mutilated. And the show immediately cuts to the aftermath. An efficient ellipsis, but one which leaves out all the disturbing stuff of dealing with the demented, gory teenager. The horror writer has to find themself writing stuff that actually freaks them out. As with comedy, where you perform the schizoid trick of trying to crack yourself up, you can do this by either going further than you set out to go, or by attacking the situation from a weird, unexpected direction. And, worryingly, just as there’s not much scary on Brit TV just now, there’s not much that’s funny.

*She doesn’t really mean it. She rather likes James Wan.

Dylan!