The Little Professor

ACTION!

Two very good films about the sadness of faded glory and the coming of a new era. 

Of course, other than that, they have absolutely nothing in common.

• Michel Hazanavicius' exceptionally sweet The Artist aims not for a serious history of the frequently tragic consequences of the sound era for many actors' careers, but for a warm fable in the mode of a bubbly early comedy.   As Peter Travers has already pointed out, the film's plot is "A Star is Born blended with Singin' in the Rain"--viewers will have a fun time spotting the allusions--and one might take it as either a comic version of the former (the old star gets a revamp and lives happily ever after!) or a dark one of the latter (what would really happen to Lina Lamont?).  (The finale, though, I think is more of a shout-out to Fred Astaire's and Eleanor Powell's "Beguin the Beguine.")    Our hero, George Valentin, must learn about the sin of "pride" and the power of unconditional love--that last embodied in the odd triumvirate of the appropriately-named Peppy Miller, who supplants him as box-office star; his devoted chauffeur, Clifton; and his wonder dog, a Jack Russell known as, well, the Dog.    George, who spends his career churning out one action picture after another, is not actually done in by the new sound technology, but by his own refusal to speak--something referenced both comically and not-so-comically in otherwise unrelated dialogue.  ("Why won't you talk?" wails his desperate wife.)   The fault lies not in the new regime, but in an old star's unwillingness to change his marketing strategy.  Peppy, by contrast, immediately embraces both the novelty and the new performance techniques it enables (the ones we're watching on the screen, as it happens).  In fact, the film is joyously in favor of commercial art: George does action films, Peppy makes her mark as a sprightly comedienne, and the whole thing comes to a crescendo with the rise of the musical comedy film.  Even when George sets out to make his "great" silent film, he's still doing his usual shtick.   Despite the deliberately pretentious title, then, the film doesn't retread the usual high art/pop culture war narrative beloved of many filmmakers.  (Of course, many viewers will be seeing this film in an arthouse cinema...)  The Artist may suggest that the studio system can be incredibly cruel, but in the end, the system still supplies some awfully good escapism.      
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is absorbing, but definitely not peppy.  As an adaptation, it does not aim for the near-transcription-level fidelity of the Alec Guinness miniseries: events are moved around with a free hand, somebody dies who shouldn't (although, since the filmmakers are apparently adopting the miniseries route and jumping straight to Smiley's People for a sequel, it doesn't much matter), one character's sexual orientation has been altered, and so forth.  I mentioned a couple of months ago that Le Carre's Smiley reminded me of Chesterton's Father Brown, but that's certainly not the vibe one gets from Gary Oldman, who is both edgier (in more ways than one--he's about half of Smiley's expected weight) and icier than either the original or Guinness' version.  Unlike the novel, which consists almost entirely of Smiley retracing Control's steps through the documents, the film primarily emphasizes people looking.  In particular, it frames scene after scene through windows.  We see the action or look into the Circus through a window; characters spy on each other through windows; Smiley looks out a window and sees his wife having sex (possibly a tip of the hat to the second novel, in which something similar happens); little Bill Roach watches Prideaux through his caravan window.  Etc.  The windows simultaneously reveal (because we see the action) and conceal (because the characters frequently can't hear anything); the glass may be transparent, but it remains a barrier.  This suggests the open-yet-distanced relationships amongst everyone in the Circus, as they're all "visible" to one another, yet permanently shut off.  Of the film's changes to the novel, the only one I found troubling was Smiley's stunt with Toby Esterhase, which would make sense in the third novel (when Smiley effectively turns into his opposite number) but is out of place character-wise here.  However, the film captures the novel's glum diagnosis of Cold War British malaise very well indeed, twisting the knife even further when Smiley makes it clear that British intelligence is not important--the entire stunt is to get access to the Americans.  What's a superpower to do when it stops being super?

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Well, that was certainly...loud.

The second installment in the franchise introduces the Napoleon of Crime himself, Professor Moriarty, who turns out to be at the heart of a mega-conspiracy to profit from World War One.  As the year is 1891, he is somewhat ahead of schedule.  (He is also somewhat out of line with the previous film, which was set around the time of the US Civil War. But who needs chronological continuity when you want to get WWI going?) In the meantime, he builds his shadow empire by offing significant businessmen, opium traders, doctors, and goodness knows else.  Moriarty is aided in his endeavors by wicked sharpshooter Col. Sebastian Moran and an armory of before-its-time weaponry, along with some equally anachronistic innovations in the field of plastic surgery.  Holmes, meanwhile, finds himself torn between tracking Moriarty to his lair and dealing with Watson's marriage (hint: do not ask Holmes to arrange your stag party).  For some reason, he also has the assistance of his brother Mycroft "Mikey" Holmes (Stephen Fry, rather too skinny), who genially addresses Holmes as "Shirley," wanders about his home in a state of undress, and keeps a superannuated butler named Stanley.   Also for some reason, Holmes and Watson wind up with a female sidekick concocted out of an embarrassing run of gypsy stereotypes (fortune telling! theft! dirt!).  Although Holmes wants to prevent Moriarty from blowing Europe to smithereens, he is actually more interested in preventing Moriarty from "creatively" murdering Watson (oh yes, and Watson's wife).  Everything climaxes in a castle built right over Reichenbach Falls, where the expected happens.

In many ways, this film owes far more to the Rathbone/Bruce WWII propaganda films (e.g., Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon [1944]) than to the canon: Holmes and Watson are out to save "Western Civilization" (the film's term) from Doom.  Doom's methods bear some resemblance to modern terrorism, and there's also a pointed nod to (ahem) interrogation techniques; however, Doom has no particular ideological purpose, other than to make a lot of money out of "industrial warfare."  War is good for private pocketbooks, it seems.  Like the previous film, which counterpointed the villain's nefarious scheming for control of the Empire with the decrepit state of the urban landscape,  Game of Shadows suggests a world in which there really isn't much in the way of moral content; Moriarty is evil, but as he coolly tells Holmes just before being schlepped over the Falls, it's not clear that his evil is all that unwelcome to the Higher Powers.   After all, he correctly points out, WWI is coming anyway.  This lends the film a certain noirish sensibility, even as it also suggests that European politics has declined into meaningless balls and state dinners.    That, however, is the end of the film's pretensions to serious thought. 

Technically, the film looks very much like its predecessor, featuring lots of fight sequences shot with rapid cuts (distractingly so) and a fatal overdose of bullet time.   The opening, with Watson typing up the manuscript of "The Final Problem," hearkens back to 1930s and 1940s adaptations of classic novels; the Switzerland scenes also look suspiciously like a nod to the Lord of the Rings films, and at one point a made-up Holmes resembles the late Heath Ledger's Joker.  But there is surprisingly less exterior London, although for once somebody remembers that the city would not have been inhabited solely by white people.   Frustratingly, there is even less of Sherlock Holmes being, well, Sherlock Holmes; while there's nothing wrong with Holmes engaging in fisticuffs (he was a good boxer, after all), the ratio of things blowing up/being shot up/being punched to Holmes using his mental powers is awfully disproportionate.  If anything, the real inspiration for director Guy Ritchie and his writers appears to be TV Tropes: they hit everything from Ascended Fanon ("John Hamish Watson") to Room Full of Crazy, with, of course, extensive time spent in Ho Yay.   In fact, unlike the previous film, where Mary Morstan's appeal was at least reasonably obvious, this time around actress Kelly Reilly has been directed to simper endlessly, leaving Holmes and Watson to wrestle suggestively and, for some reason, dance unremarked around a ballroom floor.  If we must have a third installment, the filmmakers will no doubt find a reason to stick to canon and send Mary to her grave, leaving Holmes to cheer poor Watson up.   As Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law actually spark nicely off each other, that might improve matters somewhat; the film's (few) best moments consistently involve them just talking to (and/or flirting with) each other.  Perhaps more of that and less of mass set destruction? 

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I happily watched the Planet of the Apes TV series when I was a kid, and later saw all of the (notoriously varied in quality) movies; Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is must-see watching, of course, for any UC Irvine student.  Although I've yet to watch the Tim Burton remake, I was feeling nostalgic enough yesterday that I trotted over to the local movie theatre to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franco and an awful lot of CGI.  Several minutes in, I began thinking, with some puzzlement, "Wait.  Isn't this Frankenstein?"  Returning home, I punched in the appropriate search terms, and indeed, it's Frankenstein.

However, where Frankenstein spent his nights in noisome "charnel houses," identifying the secrets of death and how to overcome them with electricity (the wonder fad of the day), our scientist, Rodman, yearns instead to conquer Alzheimer's disease, which he plans to rewrite via a canny virus.  Rodman's scientific quest intensifies Frankenstein's focus on the nature of identity: for many people, the characters in this film included, the great terror of Alzheimer's lies in its power to erase human subjectivity, progressively stripping individuals of everything that constituted them as a self.  Frankenstein's Creature is in trouble because he is absolutely unprecedented, and therefore cannot be recognized as an individuated subject in the first place.  When I teach the novel, I point out that during the novel's main plot, Frankenstein finds  there's just no intelligible story about the Creature that can be told to other humans (and indeed, when Frankenstein finally does tell someone about the Creature, he is only believed as a talented Gothic novelist might be believed...).  In fact, one of Frankenstein's moral failures lies in his inability to register how the Creature might, or might not, be able to function in the world as we now know it.  This is not, however, the problem that Caesar the genetically-altered chimpanzee faces, although his first trip to Gen*Sys replicates the Creature's attempts to find himself through reading different literary texts (including Paradise Lost).  Unlike Frankenstein and his Creature, Rodman doesn't abandon Caesar until the System forces him to, and there's never any sign that Caesar lacks love or nurturing.  But he isn't a human, and as the director notes in the first link above, he hasn't been adequately socialized as a chimpanzee, either.  Caesar soon demonstrates that he isn't entirely Other to his fellow apes, though, and the film dramatizes his appropriation of human technology to transform the apes into a cohesive social unit.   The Creature masters language, but his speech never "normalizes" him, never turns him into a recognizable man; thanks to Rodman's intervention, Caesar masters the language of both apes and men, and constructs something novel out of the two. 

Caesar's ability to innovate, mobilize, and ultimately triumph is an important deviation from the Frankenstein narrative.  Frankenstein's Creature may be superhuman, but--as the fallen image of fallen man--he can only create death and absence.  He erases, instead of reproduces. (There's a reason he needs Frankenstein to create his would-be bride, instead of replicating the technique himself.)  Even though the film does nod its head to visions of modern-day Edens invaded by human snakes--the rainforest, the redwoods--neither the Biblical nor Miltonic falls are actually in play here.  If anything, Rodman successfully raises Caesar to be more moral than anyone else in the film (himself included).  Pace Christianity Today, the apes don't "start taking innocent lives": Caesar accidentally electrocutes the sadistic keeper and saves the vaguely stoned but harmless one from the other apes; there are no random attacks on any human beings, who are usually allowed to just run away; and even most of the cops attacking the apes are left alive at Caesar's direction.   (CultureLab notes that this isn't exactly normal chimpanzee behavior.) The scant handful of deaths are all distributed according to poetic justice.  Just war? Proportional retribution? Mercy? In any event, Caesar turns out to have an ethical regard for life that nobody else in the film does.  

But the film also deviates from the novel in its lack of ambiguity about responsibility and blame.  Frankenstein spends much of the novel, including the end, trying to weasel out of admitting fault--and, notoriously, concludes that he's not responsible for much of anything; the Creature blames himself for his actions, but also notes that the very structure of the narrative stacks the deck against him. ("'Am I to be thought the only criminal,'" he asks Walton, "'when all human kind sinned against me?'")  Here, the deck gets stacked in a different direction.  This film operates with Good Guys and Bad Guys, and pays little attention to the potential problems with Good Guy behavior.  Moreover, given that Franco channels Keir Dullea's emotionless performance in 2001, it's hard to identify with him qua human being, just as it's difficult to feel much for any of the other human characters (except, perhaps, Rodman's dying father).  As the reviewer for Variety points out, Rise seems not to blame Rodman at all for engineering the total destruction of the human race, thanks to the new virus.  Raging capitalism is to blame!  Far from being the "new Prometheus," bringing fire to inaugurate civilization as we know it, Rodman turns out to be one of the harbingers of the apocalypse.  Perhaps we should regard the film as posing a what-if about Frankenstein: what if Frankenstein had been successful? Had done everything right? Rodman does create a new Adam, at the expense of the old...

I Walked with a Zombie and the "wise servant"

Val Lewton's and Jacques Tourneur's film misleadingly-titled I Walked with a Zombie (1943) has interested many recent critics because of its status as what Kamilla Elliott would call a "de(re)composing adaptation" (in which "novel and film decompose, merge, and form a new composition at 'underground' levels of reading") of Jane Eyre [1].  Most of them have focused on the film's striking anticipation of postcolonial interpretations of the novel, which come across as Edward Said-ish quite avant la lettre: the film moves the action to the Holland family's Saint Sebastian sugar cane plantation and pointedly remarks on the role of slavery in establishing the family's wealth.  By the same token, this is also where controversy over the film's racial politics enters in.  While the various Black characters have far more prominence than in many films of this period, they're either exoticized (the houngan and other vodou practitioners at the houmfort), alien (Carrefour the zombie), or conventionally deferential (Alma); only the anonymous calypso singer, played by Tourneur favorite Sir Lancelot, seems to escape easy classification.  The back-and-forth between racial stereotyping and anti-racist commentary strikes me as in line with one of Tourneur's later films, Stars in My Crown (1950), in which the white protagonist saves a passive Black man from the KKK.  In the case of I Walked with a Zombie, though, I'd suggest that something else is at work: the film engages with and racializes one of the standard topoi in Victorian and post-Victorian horror, the wise servant. 

About three years ago, I quipped that some of the "practical applications of Gothic fiction" included such useful life lessons as "[d]o not attend college," or, at least, "always listen to the housekeeper or butler."  Victorian ghost stories regularly feature well-educated, genteel types who have been raised, in either good rationalist or good Protestant fashion, not to believe in such things as haunts, vampires, or other ghoulish things.  Frequently, the only people around who prove savvy about such things are...the servants.  (If the servant is Roman Catholic, all the better.)  The servants are unlearned, emotional, and superstitious, and yet their repository of knowledge--usually passed down through oral tradition, which may also be gendered female--turns out to trump that of the middle- and upper-class men and women who stumble into supernatural affairs.  (Le Fanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" exemplifies this topos in action; it's no accident that the victims are doctors.)   Nevertheless, this knowledge carries no social value, beyond that of potentially saving master, mistress, and the kiddies from the what-have-you.  Even though it calls reason's adequacy into question, such familiarity with the supernatural does nothing to challenge the usual run of class or gender hierarchies; in fact, it consolidates them, by identifying supernatural awareness as the sort of thing one would expect to be possessed by people otherwise in need of rule. 

I Walked with a Zombie's representation of vodou as a potentially functional power borrows heavily from the wise servant topos.  Alma introduces the nurse, Betsy Connell, to vodou, suggesting that it's more powerful than Western medicine, and the men and women at the houmfort diagnose the catatonic Jessica as a zombie (she doesn't bleed when stabbed).  Moreover, Jessica apparently responds to the sabreur's long-distance manipulation.  Similarly, the calypso singer serves as the local repository of popular tradition about the Holland family; despite his apparent deference to Wesley Rand, younger brother of Jessica's husband Paul Holland (and would-be lover of Jessica himself), the calypso singer makes no bones about coming back later to finish his song for Betsy.  So far, so in line with the tradition. However, the film goes on to inject a note of skepticism into the topos, for it's never clear if the rituals work or not.  As Chris Fujiwara points out, the film "never obliges the viewer to commit to a natural or a supernatural explanation of Jessica Holland's state."   Mrs. Rand, the Christian widow who insinuates herself into the houmfort, believes that Jessica's state is her fault, the result of her own possession, in which she asked that the houngan turn Jessica into a zombie.  Jessica fell ill that very night--but is that just coincidence? And Jessica's death at Wesley's hand appears to be the sabreur's doing--or is the causality an illusion, a mere artifact of the film's cuts between the sabreur and the doomed adulterers? One might ask how this momentary focus on the film itself, the way in which editing produces the effect of causality, reflects on both voudou and modern technology.  Does the cutting enact the possession, or does it "merely" generate a fiction of possession?  Or, to borrow Mrs. Rand's terminology, if the houngan (probably herself, given that she takes over the role) cures one woman by a dose of good "psychology," is this the cinematic equivalent--mundane technology masquerading as magic? (Still, this thoroughly rationalized reading of his practices doesn't account for Carrefour.)  The ambiguity here--who knows best?--further unsettles the already unsettled question of who knows what in horror.  However, the film's opening and final shots suggest that the potential danger posed by vodou--specifically, its apparent ability to strip white men and women of their self-possession, in a bleak echo of slavery--has been defused by Jessica's and Wesley's deaths.  The opening shot, which we at first might think pictures Betsy with her lover, is actually Betsy walking companionably along the beach with Carrefour; in the closing shots, Carrefour carries Jessica's body back to the plantation, and we see that the symbolic St. Sebastian figurehead (renamed Ti-Misery) has been stripped of its arrows.  On the one hand, these shots suggest that voudou can, for all intents and purposes, lose its status as a potentially subversive threat; on the other, the adulterers' deaths apparently purify the family, easing the burden of its guilt (which does not follow logically, to say the least).  Or...does it?  It's a remarkably open ending. 

[1] Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 157. 

The zombification continues

It appears that a film version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in the works. 

Jane Eyre

Novels told in the first person pose difficulties for any film adaptation; novels told in the first person with heavy doses of romance, Gothic, and fairy tale make matters even worse.  Which is another way of saying that Jane Eyre's cinematic history, stretching back at least to 1914, has been sadly checkered.  The newest Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, and Jamie Bell, only adds to the checkering.

Like many adaptations, this Jane Eyre negotiates the problem of "faithfulness" by sticking staunchly to the original's plot, albeit by structuring the film as one long flashback after arriving at the Rivers household.  Thus, in mind-bogglingly rapid-fire order, we hit the old reliables: conflict with John Reed, Red Room, encounter with Mr. Brocklehurst, dispatch to Lowood, Helen Burns, Helen Burns dying, off to Thornfield, and so on.  In fact, Jane's early life moves so quickly that it's not at all clear to me that somebody unfamiliar with the novel would understand what's going on.  The speed-demon approach becomes most problematic, however, when we get to Rochester's relationship with Jane.  Not only do Fassbender and Wasikowska have little chemistry, but the source of their characters' purportedly passionate attraction remains unexplained; the characters have spent so little time together that it's difficult to feel sympathy for Jane (or irritation with Rochester) when Blanche Ingram flits by in her few minutes of screen time.  Wasikowska's rather whiny delivery of Jane's famous "'I tell you I must go!'" speech doesn't help matters--despite frequent reminders of Jane's "passion," this one lacks much in the way of burning emotion.  (One of the most striking and effective moments between the two, in fact, is silent: Rochester roughly drags her along to the church on their wedding day.) 

However, there are more serious problems than zipping through the plot.  To begin with, the film destabilizes Jane's moral center, beginning with the five seconds of Helen Burns (whose universalist theology in the novel profoundly shapes the adult Jane's).  Calvinist caricatures like Mr. Brocklehurst or St. John Rivers are countered not by Jane's Bible-based Godliness, but by all-consuming romantic love; this Rochester may be "deceitful," as Jane mournfully informs him, but there is no sign of the novel's insistence that Jane's passion for him was itself a sin.   Similarly, the reduction of Jane's debate with Rochester over "custom" and "convention" to what is "right" obscures the force of her willingness to accompany St. John overseas without marrying him: as Jane tries and fails to make clear to Rochester in the novel, her conscience, grounded in divine law, cannot regard marriage in the light of a mere convention, as opposed to something that is simply propriety.  The occasional "God help me" aside, the film's Jane appears to understand righteousness in secular terms, something emphasized by the near-total disappearance of the novel's interest in providence (the tree shatters offscreen; St. John Rivers is not Jane's cousin; etc.).  And, as is so frequently the case in the adaptations, Jane gets to tell off Aunt Reed without experiencing any psychic retribution--satisyfing for the audience, but rather missing Bronte's point.  Now, it's understandable that the filmmakers elected to de-Christianize the plot in this way, but it's both a) a conventional choice and b) a reductive one.   Without either Jane's striking voice or her retrospective belief that her desire for Rochester (and vice-versa) participates in a greater conflict betweem Good and Evil, the whole affair looks simultaneously tawdry and implausible.  As Mrs. Fairfax reminds Jane, men like Rochester do not, as a general rule, marry their governesses...although they may well do other things with them.

But besides secularizing the plot, the film de-symbolizes and, indeed, de-Gothics it (with the notable exception of Jane's initial encounter with Rochester in an appropriately misty wood).  The Red Room sequence is remarkably well-lit (and, really, surprisingly lacking in red); there's no sense of why it's terrifying, and it doesn't foreshadow Thornfield's destruction.  Similarly, despite the vampiric legend about Bertha Mason, she's a quite attractive woman in need of a good haircut.    Thornfield, which owes its appearance to the Robert Stevenson version* instead of the novel, burns down--but Rochester and Mrs. Fairfax are apparently still living in it (also a feature of the Stevension version), thereby leaving the past not entirely erased (and wouldn't living in a burnt-down home be conducive to catching one's death of cold?).    St. John Rivers, besides being completely unrelated to Jane, is very not a Greek god, one  of the things in the novel that marks his otherness to both Jane and Rochester.  (On the other hand, Aunt Reed and Blanche Ingram actually resemble each other, which is an interesting echo.)   And Rochester, amazingly, is totally unscarred by his experience in Thornfield, besides his blindness--face unmarked, both hands attached.  So much for the Biblical overtones of his punishment in the novel.  Even the miraculous moment of telepathy has been rendered more "realistic"--is Jane just hallucinating Rochester's voice as St. John berates her, as she earlier hallucinated Rochester in St. John's place?

Obviously, for those who have read a lot of the reviews, I'm going against the tide of generally positive reactions.  As an adaptation, it doesn't depart in any particularly striking or interesting ways from previous incarnations (although at least the Rivers family shows up, even if they aren't related...).  It's certainly an attractive film, as others have said, with plenty of moors to admire, and Fassbender does make an appropriately surly-to-intense Rochester.  But, with apologies to Richard Bentley: a very pretty film, but one must not call it Bronte. 

*--Which, despite its problems, is in some ways the novel's best adaptation: it isn't afraid of either Gothic or excess. 

The King's Speech

One of the most endlessly popular narratives about British royalty could be called the coming-of-monarch story: the new (or, sometimes, old) monarch must battle some personal problem, whether medical or romantic, in order to embrace their public duties and transform themselves into a national symbol.  Often, this painful process requires them to work with a commoner (insufficiently respectful) whose contributions are essential, but who may nevertheless be expelled from the inner circle at the end.  In recent years, we've seen variations on this theme in the various films and miniseries about Queen Elizabeth I, along with The Madness of King George, Mrs. Brown, The Queen, and The Young Victoria.  The King's Speech, which tracks the personal fallout from George VI's unexpected accession to the throne, offers some new riffs on this storyline.

The title has a double meaning: it refers both to the speech that announces the country's entry into WWII, and to Bertie/George VI's problem--his stutter.   Like Mrs. Brown and The Queen, both of which addressed the effects of contemporary mass media on the royal image, The King's Speech focuses on the technological advances that will reshape how the king interacts with his subjects.  In this case, it's the wireless, which seems to collapse the physical and metaphorical distance between king and country.  No longer will just a few people hear the king speak; now, everyone with access to a radio can do so.  Moreover, the act of listening to the king's broadcasts turns out to symbolically unify the nation, as the montage of different audiences (from royalty to factory workers) near the end suggests.  For just a moment, class differences apparently evaporate.  But for this to happen, as George V tells an unhappy Bertie, the king needs to be able to speak.

Enter one of the film's two resident commoners, Lionel Logue, who lives in a shabby flat and receives patients in a dank, cavernous office in desperate need of a good coat of paint.   As we see early on, the Australian Lionel is regarded with some contempt because of his nationality; nor does he necessarily make friends and influence people with his habit of addressing the Duke of York, later king, as "Bertie," along with other liberties.  Nevertheless, Lionel's relative want of respect for Bertie/George VI--aside, that is, from the respect due to a friend and equal--turns out to be one of the most significant factors in the king's improvement.  Like Dr. Willis in The Madness of King George and John Brown in Mrs. Brown, Lionel "saves" the monarch by, in effect, refusing to treat him as anything other than a troubled human being.  To fully perform his function as a symbol, the king must first find someone outside the royal family who will treat him as a man.  Unlike those two films, however, this one doesn't require the king to reject Lionel once his "cure" is complete--in fact, it's made clear that the cure will never be complete, and Lionel will always need to be on hand.  This king, in other words, can never be complete as a symbol: instead of submerging the private self in the public, George VI learns how to make the two work together through friendship.  Moreover, this friendship also miniaturizes the king's new relationship to his public in the age of wireless, in which he appears to "cross the threshhold," as he says, of his subject's homes.

Lionel's opposite number turns out to be Wallis Simpson.  Where Lionel works to make the king a "great man," Wallis seeks to empower herself through her connection to Edward VIII.  And while everything Lionel does has duty as the ultimate goal, everything Wallis does has pleasure and personal power as its ends. And then there are Wallis' Nazi sympathies.  Cherchez la femme, one gathers.   Lionel, then, turns out to be a patriot (despite English contempt for his Australian origins), while Wallis simply looks for the main chance.  Beyond the historical realities involved, there seems to be some nostalgia for the last days of the British empire here--George VI's reign, after all, saw the empire collapse.  (Actual politics are pretty much absent from the film; we have politicians, but no real idea of what they stand for.) In any event, the post-George III model of the eminently "middle-class," domestic king is at work: the rightful heir may have sown his wild oats, but he's a dedicated family man whose (idealized) personal values match those of the commoners he doesn't really know. 

In fact, of the films I listed above, The Madness of George III seems to be--loosely--the closest model for this film's plot.  (Bertie even compares himself to George III.)  Putting to one side the Shakespeare references (featuring Caliban instead of Lear), The King's Speech is, like The Madness of King George, very much about learning how to perform the part of "king."  "I have remembered how to seem," George III remarks; Bertie must learn how to "seem" in the first place.  Similarly, The King's Speech invokes, then inverts, the conclusion of The Madness of King George by replacing George III's rejection of Dr. Willis at the thanksgiving ceremony with George VI's embrace of Lionel.  In a way, George VI displaces the lingering specter of his ancestor. 

As with any historical drama, this one plays some games with the facts.  The king's other siblings vanish (making hash of George V's final words), and Wikipedia informs me at least one childhood anecdote belonging to Edward VIII has been handed over to George VI.  The ironies of Churchill's "too Germanic" comment will probably escape most American viewers.  And, for obvious dramatic reasons, the amount of time it took for Lionel to get results has been vastly exaggerated.  (Refreshingly, though, the king's success isn't overdone.)  I'm sure specialists in this time frame will note other issues.  Overall, though, this is a fine example of this particular subgenre of the biopic, and features rightly-lauded performances from Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush.   

 

 

The Young Victoria

The Young Victoria wants to offer two overlapping narratives about Queen Victoria's coming-of-age.   On the one hand, it represents Victoria as a potentially powerful woman, but one easily manipulated by a handsome slick talker like Lord Melbourne; on the other hand, it transforms Victoria's relationship with Albert into a conflict between political necessity and idealized true love.  Melbourne and Albert become rival suitors for Victoria, one for self-interested political reasons, the other for love--even though Albert, in turn, must fight off Leopold of Belgium's own political investment in the marriage.  In that sense, The Young Victoria imagines a royal family that is simultaneously absolutely private (because based in pure love) and absolutely public (because that love helps stabilize the nation). 

This conflict between politics, as embodied in a politician on the make, and love, as embodied by the disinterested devotion of some man or woman, has animated a number of royal biopics in the past couple of decades.  Usually, politics tends to win, but only incidentally: the monarch draws strength from love, then must sacrifice it on the altar of public duty (which benefits the politician, but isn't for him).  We see this struggle at work in both of the Elizabeth films, for example, as well as in Mrs. Brown; there's also a slightly more complex and ironic version at work in The Madness of King George (where the King implicitly sacrifices Greville in order to save his image). In The Young Victoria, the Queen must abandon her improper passion for Melbourne because it contaminates what ought to be an apolitical space.  Thus, the Bedchamber Crisis shows Victoria dangerously confusing emotional attachments with the demands of political patronage: although she complains to Peel that she ought to be in charge of her own household, all of her ladies were actually appointed by Melbourne, meaning that the "private" and the "political" have become dangerously entangled.  For her ladies to be all Whigs during a Whig government was not the problem; for them to be all Whigs under a Tory government, however, was a very different matter.  By so openly taking Melbourne's side, the Queen undermines her status as a national symbol, even as she also refuses to acknowledge that she is such a symbol--and so must relinquish at least some of her private desires accordingly.  Melbourne becomes even more dangerous because he represents party politics, not the national interest; we see the first signs of the Queen's ability to distinguish between the two when she demands him to produce a detailed account of the state of the poor.  In fact, Melbourne's politics seem entirely vapid (or, at least, they seem to be about Melbourne). 

Unlike those biopics in which private romance must be sacrificed to public duty, though, The Young Victoria turns the romance into the nation's salvation.  To do that, though, it necessarily ramps up the political conflicts involved: Victoria, although indeed disinclined to marry when she and Albert met, certainly had no illusions about either the need to get married or the backstage negotiations involved, and King Leopold (who promoted the marriage) was not exactly some sinister mastermind.  (One wouldn't know from this film that Victoria's relationship with her uncle was of the sort that later involved requests for some favorite goodies.)  Victoria and Albert only marry when both realize that they love each other, thereby rejecting the politicking that pushed them together in the first place.  Albert, of course, is also far more suitable than Melbourne because he is interested in the public welfare--signaled early on by his assumption that the British ought to be concerned about British interests.  Once married, Albert promptly sets out on a modernizing spree, insisting on clean windows (shocking!), orderly finances, and a streamlined household.  English "tradition" thus gets a healthy injection of German organization.  After some quarreling and an invented wound (the shooting incident is real, Albert's injury is not), the married couple finally come to an egalitarian agreement about how they will share their power, with apparently beneficial results to all concerned--or so the end titles cheerfully inform us.

For these conjoined stories to work, the film obviously needs to paper over some of the historical details.  There's no mention, for example, of how much practical power the real Albert managed to wield--or, for that matter, of how much the Queen wanted him to wield.  (Which is why, no doubt, we hear nothing of her push to get him appointed King Consort.)   Similarly, a moderately contrite Melbourne tells Victoria that she must get rid of her former governess, the Baroness Lehzen, in order to consolidate her relationship with Albert--a moment that simultaneously marks the end of Melbourne's dominant power over Victoria, the true end of Victoria's childhood, and the renewal of Victoria's marriage on fully adult terms.  But, in fact, it was Albert who got rid of the Baroness, whom he passionately disliked.   More to the point, the film has to carefully avoid Victoria's own feelings about women's roles and the budding feminist movement, as the former were resoundingly traditional and the latter resoundingly negative. While Victoria certainly expressed sympathy (sometimes practical) for women who were badly treated, she was impatient (at best) with the women's movement. As she notoriously declared in one letter, it was necessary to stop "this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights'" at all costs.¹

Interestingly enough, even as the film conjures up a proto-feminist monarch, it also wholeheartedly endorses the image of a simultaneously spectacular and domesticated royal family that originated with George III, temporarily detoured with George IV and William IV, and then resurged full force with Victoria and Albert.²  On the one hand, we have a passionate love affair; on the other, the Queen's coronation and the business of her regular public appearances.  Certainly, the end titles seem to suggest that--the sad and early end to the marriage besides--Victoria and Albert had a happy, productive marriage (in both senses of the term...), entirely beneficial to the national good.  I don't know if the filmmakers intend to comment on the current state of monarchical affairs, but the "and they lived happily ever after as good rulers, or at least until Albert died" conclusion seems to suggest that Victoria and Albert maintained that image in a way that the Windsors have not. 

The film itself is often quite charming, if rather meandering, and benefits from strong performances by Emily Blunt as the determined young Queen and Rupert Friend as an almost fairy-tale Prince Albert.  (Friend has also been successfully made up to look like Albert.)  By a weird twist of casting fate, Mark Strong, who plays Lord Blackwood in the new Sherlock Holmes film, also crops up here as the resident villain, Sir John Conroy.  (No bird familiars this time, though.)  Paul Bettany dapperly oozes insincerity as Lord Melbourne, while Harriet Walter offers up substitute-maternal advice as the Dowager; Jim Broadbent, meanwhile, is virtually unrecognizable in William IV's wig.  As this is a costume film, there are of course many pretty dresses to look at, a number of them recognizable from Victoria's portraits, and alert viewers will catch the brief allusions to George Hayter's coronation portraits and H. T. Wells' famous painting. 

¹ The redacted name in Strachey's quotation is Lady Amberley.  Molly Youngkin is correct, I think, in identifying Victoria's beliefs with the "conservative feminism"--emphasizing woman's moral power in the domestic sphere--of authors like Mrs. Ellis; see Feminist Realism at the Fin-de-Siecle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman's Press on the Development of the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007), 9.

² As Linda Colley comments of George III: "At one and the same time, Britons were being invited to see their monarch as unique and as typical, as ritually splendid and remorselessly prosaic, as glorious and gemutlich both."  Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 232.  On the literary and cultural conflicts over Victoria's image, see, e.g.,  Margaret Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and Victorian Culture, 1837-1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Gail Turley Houston, Royalties: The Queen and Victorian Writers (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1999).  On the further permutations of the Queen's image in Victorian advertisements, see Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 85-95.

Sherlock Holmes

After glimpsing the trailer for Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, many Victorianists trembled in their shoes and reached for the smelling salts.  Having now seen the film, I can certainly confirm that none of us will be assigning it for its historical details, let alone for its fidelity to the canon: it takes place at some undisclosed and unrecognizable moment in the late nineteenth century (shortly after the Civil War, apparently), involves mass hysteria brought on by supposed acts of black magic (Doyle always made sure to keep his conspiracies behind the scenes), and defies any attempts to relate it to the stories' chronology (Holmes has never met Mary Morstan, even though she was his client in The Sign of Four; Watson hasn't begun writing yet; Holmes and Irene Adler have had a long...er...relationship; etc.).  So what can we make of it, either as an action film or, dare we say, as a Sherlock Holmes adaptation?

Although stories like The Hound of the Baskervilles at first seem to involve other-worldly situations, Holmes always brings them back down to empirical reality.  In that sense, the stories descend directly from Radcliffean Gothic, with its manmade horrors.  Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes blows up this rationalized Gothic mode into broad parody.  The super-evil Lord Blackwood, whom we meet at a Black Mass, is hanged for five murders.   And then, after he offers Holmes a pre-execution apocalyptic prophecy, Blackwood...rises again.  Good heavens, it's Christ! Or the Antichrist! Or, er, somebody.  It turns out that Blackwood is the illegitimate son of the leader of a mystical secret society, which, when its members aren't having hot sex under the guise of Ritual, apparently Controls the Government.  (Somebody has been reading a little too much Dan Brown.)  Meanwhile, accompanied by his trusty familiar, a crow, Blackwood offs daddy, then an impudent Yank named Standish, and finally plots to murder all of Parliament.  Needless to say, this is bad.  Complicating matters further, Holmes' old nemesis/flame Irene Adler returns, in the pay of someone who turns out to be a sequel hook.   Last but not least, Holmes' investigation is mildly hampered by his bromantic sulks over Watson's imminent marriage.

To the extent that the film shows any sign of a functional brain, it lies in its heavy-handedly ironic take on imperialism.  Lord Blackwood plots not only to subjugate a degenerate British government, apparently populated by legions of old men, but also a "corrupt," "weakened" United States; ultimately, he plans a new, "immortal" world order, united in its fear of his deadly magical abilities. (J. Hoberman calls this the film's "near-subliminal references to terrorism.") For backup, Blackwood has his steampunkish WMD.  However, his fantasies of empire take place in a rotting capital, dominated by rust and filth, and decorated in a color palette that runs from grey to black.  (And occupied by people with terrible teeth.)  Several of the film's set pieces involve various examples of Victorian manufacturing prowess falling over, falling in, or blowing up.  In other words, it's not as though the empire is in good shape at home.  Blackwood's reign by superstitious terror meets its match, though, in Holmes' powers of empirical observation, in a moment that luxuriantly parodies the standard Summation.  The forms of power involved all boil down to the Great Man, whether he's swaying thousands by sleight-of-hand (which, after all, is what this mysterious "order" basically is) or untangling deception to get at the truth.  Just add reason, and the bad guy is left *cough* hanging.

Of course, when Holmes isn't reasoning, he's beating people up.  This is not all that far out of line from Doyle's originals, although Ritchie's Watson is, somewhat oddly, a bad shot.  (Decades ago, an article in The Baker Street Journal pointed out that if you wanted something dead, you'd best have Watson aim the gun.)  Unfortunately, the action scenes all outlive their welcome (like the film, come to think of it); to make matters worse, they're edited in Ritchie's signature style, which renders the fight choreography almost totally incoherent.  The violence itself quickly becomes cartoonish--often ludicrously so--not least because Holmes and Watson appear to be impervious to injury.  When Watson gets blown up, for crying out loud, he winds up with a few minor cuts and an arm sling, instead of massive scarring (and, well, death).  As Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt pointed out, there's definitely a B-movie feel to all the slapping, punching, exploding, shooting, and kicking, and some of the set pieces appear to have come straight out of the serials.

The somewhat homoerotic B-plot itself has been anticipated by several Sherlock Holmes pastiches (e.g., most explicitly, Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Friend of Oscar Wilde), and, to a lesser extent, the Jeremy Brett adaptations.  (By this point, all Sherlock Holmes adaptations feel a bit belated.)  But Holmes' prankish attempts at derailing Watson's marriage are a dead ringer for recent events in another Holmes knockoff: House M.D.  Think House's various machinations to split up Wilson and Amber, and you've got this film's dynamic exactly.  The conclusion, in which Holmes buys Mary Morstan the engagement ring--a suitably over-the-top diamond--seems to keep his part in this triangle alive (not least because Watson describes the ring as Holmes' gift to "us," suggesting a rather different view of who is marrying whom...).  Of course, while Watson is heading off to domestic peace (at least, until Holmes grabs him again), Holmes finds himself unable to get it on with his One True Love, Irene Adler: alas, the only woman for Holmes turns out to be too amoral for Romance, and in a nod to The Maltese Falcon, he abandons her to justice.  (Or not, depending on Irene's skills.)  True Love would make Holmes much too bourgeois.

Irene Adler poses another problem, which is that actress Rachel McAdams has little presence and even less romantic chemistry with her Holmes, Robert Downey, Jr.  Downey looks wrong for Holmes, especially for anyone who has had heavy doses of Brett and Rathbone, but his offhand, lightly rueful delivery actually works rather well; moreover, he has the requisite chemistry with Jude Law, who comes across as warmer than his general wont.  Refreshingly, both men are the right age, for once, and Law also matches the Paget illustrations.  It's nice to see another  intelligent Watson, following on the revisionist Watsons (in the sense of revising the Nigel Bruce Watson) of David Burke, Edward Hardwicke, and, most recently, Ian Hart.  Nobody else, the villain included, makes much of an impact, although character-actor spotters will notice James Fox and Eddie Marsan.  

Overall, in the interests of avoiding any wailing and gnashing of teeth, it might be best to regard this film as a Sherlock Holmes send-up.¹  There are the expected shout-outs to the stories themselves, from quotations (the pocket watch episode, game being afoot, etc.) to more subtle allusions (Gladstone the bulldog clearly refers to Watson's mysterious and much-explicated "bull pup" in A Study in Scarlet).  At this point in the history of Holmes pastiches, such allusions are a wink at audience expectations; the characters come burdened under the weight of hundreds of adaptations.  But the plot is so ludicrous, the violence so corny, the solution so hammy, that the whole affair eventually turns into fond, if ultimately wearisome, self-mockery.  

¹ Andrew L. Urban and Louise Keller also note the elements of "parody" coming into play (albeit, they suggest, not always intentionally).   

Poetic justice

At the end of the Jane Eyre course, we watched Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 film version, which most people (myself included) consider to be one of the most problematic of a long series of problematic adaptations.  (Really, I should have found a copy of I Walked with a Zombie instead.)  Still, it was worth showing as an example of how adaptations affect other adaptations--in this case, the 1944 version with Orson Welles (which we also watched) still makes its presence felt.  I hadn't watched the film in years, though--since 1996, to be precise--and this time around, I was startled by one of the creative team's odder minor decisions.

If you spend more than ten seconds thinking about the novel's Bertha Mason set-up, it's obvious that everybody in the household must know that a) there's a woman in the attic, and b) Grace Poole is responsible for her.  In fact, the only person who doesn't know, and who keeps refusing to find out, is our heroine.  However, in the novel, Mrs. Fairfax never shows any awareness that Mr. Rochester is keeping his wife in the attic--which is an important distinction.  Mr. Rochester himself tells Jane that "Mrs. Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts" (ch. XXVII).  Mrs. Fairfax's own anxiety about the marriage rests on the disparities in age and class, not on Mr. Rochester's pre-existing commitment.  But in the 1996 film, Mrs. Fairfax clearly knows what's going on, to the extent of dropping pointed hints in conversation, recognizing Mr. Mason, and  looking awfully anxious during the marriage vows.  Nevertheless, she can't quite rouse herself to, you know, say anything to Jane.  Which, if you once again spend more than ten seconds thinking about it, makes her Rochester's accomplice in his would-be bigamy attempt. 

During the film's Reader's Digest Condensed Version wrap-up, Bertha Mason tosses poor Grace Poole over the banister.  It's not clear why Grace needs to die: aside from her drinking habits and gruff manner, she hasn't done anything--well, except let Bertha escape from the room while carrying a burning piece of wood, which of course was rather bad form.  But, OK.  Presumably, we're supposed to see this as purging Rochester's past (although, like the 1944 version, the film wrecks the symbolic message by having Rochester live in Thornfield's ruins, instead of decamping to Ferndean Manor...).   Grace is dispatched.  Her patient dispatches herself.  Mr. Rochester, after attempting to rescue Bertha, endures a couple of hours in the makeup chair, and winds up with a contact lens and picturesque scar to show for it.  Everyone involved with the woman in the attic and/or Rochester's betrayal of Jane has now been suitably punished...

...except for Mrs. Fairfax, who escapes scot-free and is still working for Rochester in the end.  And this is why the change to the novel is so odd.  If, again, you spend more than ten seconds thinking about it--or maybe five seconds--Mrs. Fairfax is far more culpable than Grace Poole, and almost as culpable as Rochester himself.  If this were the novel, something symbolic would have happened to Mrs. Fairfax (besides retirement).   But Zeffirelli appears not to have thought through the logical consequences of his alteration to the original plot...