Hi Ho Silver Lining

The Lone Ranger

How is that the Pirates of the Caribbean  franchise can sprawl over ten hours of self-indulgent weak plotting and hapless jokes, and take hods of cash, but The Lone Ranger, which is just one self-contained film (admittedly over-long but much less indulgent) and is funnier and in many ways more diverting,  has failed at the box office and in most critics eyes?    I was late coming to it, waiting for the DVD, and I have to report that I was not in any way underwhelmed.    I enjoyed it.  

This film gives us the back stories of Tonto and John Reid, the man who becomes the Lone Ranger,  as individuals and as a partnership.   Johnny Depp makes Tonto as quirky as Jack Sparrow, but his Tonto  delivers deadpan asides with resigned Keatonesque glances,  instead of mugging to the camera.   Armie Hammer (who did good  work as both the Winklevoss Twins in The Social Network)  gives us a clean cut, good looking hero,  pure of heart if not too quick on the uptake.

We have a large supporting cast, including the three Brits,  Helena Bonham-Carter (this being a Johnny Depp film),   Ruth Wilson, who has leapt from Luther to Hollywood via a small part in Anna Karenina,  and Tom Wilkinson - yes I do know there is a Hollywood bye-law that every film now made there has to include Mr. Wilkinson -  and they all do sterling work for their dollars.  (Get it?  Brits doing Sterling?  Oh never mind.)

Just as a sidebar issue;  these British actors are required to speak ‘American’,  as Hollywood still insists that 19^th century Americans all spoke with 20^th century American accents.  This is despite the fact that between 1836 and 1914 immigration from Europe peaked, with over 30 million people moving across the Atlantic.     The recent Joel Brothers True Grit rigorously kept to the 19th century speech patterns from its source novel, but the last Western I remember acknowledging that some of its characters would have retained their European accents was Silverado, in which John Cleese played a sheriff with definitely Home Counties’ enunciation.   Mind you, it was only after seeing Django that I discovered that 25% of cowboys were black.   What else would all those freed slaves do?   Go play the blues in Detroit? 

The Lone Ranger  has the same producer, director and writers as most of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (Jerry Bruckenhiem, Gore Verbinski, Justin Haythe and Ted Elliot),  and in many ways it is a kind of Pirates of the Monument Valley, but is a new take on the old Hi Ho Silver saga.  It has plenty of dry humour, large scale exciting set pieces, and a billion references to other Westerns just to keep us on our toes.    We also have a funny horse.  When did we last see a funny horse?   It is lusciously shot by Bojan Bazelli (Kalifornia, Dangerous Beauty, The Ring, Hairspray, Mr & Mrs Smith) in John Ford country, Monument Valley, and is scored by Han Zimmer.    It is well designed and there are spectacular set pieces,  some of which include just about every variation on the train-top chases and fights we have ever seen, and a few we have not.    The plot is entirely subservient to the spectacle, at one point having two new railway tracks, one of which must be superfluous, weaving alongside each other through the mountains simply in order to provide us with more fairground fun,  as heroes and villains take pot shots  at each other,  battling it out like Disney cartoon characters to the beats of the William Tell Overture (of course we had to have the William Tell Overture, in overdrive).     It is all as deep and meaningful as a typical Disney cartoon, but it is a high budget/high production value  live action Disney Cartoon, just like the Pirates.  

Maybe it helped that I had low expectations, but as a professionally made piece of lightweight family fun with no ambition to be anything other than that I enjoyed it,  Don’t expect too much and you will be well satisfied.

With Great Gravity

Last night I drove 150 miles to take to the nearest large screen movie house to see Gravity in 3D.  That’s one of the realities of living on the west coast of Ireland, but when the film ended we sat in silence for a moment, wowed, amazed, thrilled and moved.   It was well worth the journey.

This film works on so many levels.   We have all heard about its technical innovation and achievement.   It is a thrilling ride through space, and space seen in ways we have never seen it before, even on NASA footage. The co-producer, co-writer and Director Alfonso Cauron and the cinematographer  Emmanuel Lubezski have  worked together on six films, including The Children of Men.   Making that film they devised new rigs and employed leading edge technology to great effect, and for Gravity they have found entirely convincing ways to persuade us that we are floating in space.  

Lubezski has also worked with  Michael Mann (Ali) Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow) Terrence Malik (The Tree of Life and To the Wonder) plus the Coen Brothers and Martin Scorsese, all of them demanding films, but Gravity must the most demanding project he has ever worked on.   When Sandra Bullock’s character Dr Ryan Stone is  spinning out of control as disaster strikes the Space Shuttle she is working outside, we first of all see her spinning against the backdrop of earth and space, then we enter her helmet as space spins around her.  

As my friend Paul emailed me afterwards  one of the technical aspects that left me in total awe was how utterly seamlessly the 3-D was maintained across shot-transitions.  It’s easy to see how mismatched perceptual planes could have been really jarring, and utterly destroyed the “You are there” sense of total immediacy…but somehow, miraculously, the perceptual-continuity illusion was maintained quite seamlessly throughout.

This  is one of the few science fiction films that takes the Alien tag line In space no one can hear you scream seriously.  The only sounds we hear are from within the suit.   The disaster that drives the plot is soundless, as hundreds of pieces of debris from recently destroyed space satellites rip the shuttle apart.   My only regret is that the overblown music tries to tell us what we should be feeling.  Inferior films sometimes need this, but here the script, acting and moving images do all the work necessary.   I understand that the trailer used Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel,   and I wish they had stayed with that minimalist style - if any music is really needed.  I would like to watch the whole thing in silence, and doubt if much would be lost. 

Space must be the most hazardous environment we can enter and surely no one goes there without first coming to terms that they may not return.  So this film is about life and death, loss and hope and there are  gentle and often subtle spiritual undercurrents running through it.

I am not going to talk about the plot, which is simple and direct.   This film relies on amazing and innovative cinematic techniques and rock solid performances.    It seems that Sandra Bullock was sixth in line for the lead.  I will not identify the first five, Google will tell you if you really want to know, but we are sixth time lucky here.     I was disgruntled when Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for The Blind Side.   I thought her performance was utterly competent, but in no way spectacular.   I think The Blind Side was the kind of self congratulatory US movie that encourages its audience to ignore the systemic problems of its society by concentrating on individual stories of good luck or compassion.    For me the real ‘blind side performance’  that year was Gabourey Sidibe’s in Precious.   But I devoutly hope that Ms Bullock will be suitably rewarded for the sheer physical hard work and extra-ordinary discomfort she endured to bring her character’s dilemma to life.  Any human being who is paid to go into space has to be remarkable.   They need to be physically tough, very clever and emotionally stable and utterly courageous.  Sandra Bullock persuades us she is all of these, and her character is also vulnerable.   Dr Stone is not Super Woman, but she is a super woman.   

George Clooney is her supporting actor, and well chosen.   His gentle humour and our awareness of his charm are worked to great advantage here.   Ed Harris is the voice of Mission Control from Houston, on the ground instead of in Apollo 13, there is also a sly reference to Alien and a delightful one to WALL-E, but this film does not rely on SF movie references.

As you see, I am not going into details about this film.  To do so would spoil your experience of watching this film, and I do encourage you to do so.  My 150 mile round trip  was well worth if to see Gravity  as if should be seen, in 3D on a big wide screen - and IMAX if you are lucky enough to have one in reach.    Go for it.  

Gerard Depardieu is Cyrano de Bergerac

The original play was written in 1897 by the Frenchman Edmund Rostand.   There was a real 17^th century man of  name, but the play is a broad fictionalization of his life.

Rostard wrote his play in verse,  and it has been translated and performed many times,  introducing the word ‘panache’ into the English language.  The English writer (and polymath) Anthony Burgess wrote a new verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac in 1970,  performed in Minneapolis in 1973  and ten years later in a Royal Shakespeare production.   Burgess also wrote a musical adaptation starring Christopher Plummer on  Broadway.

For the 1990 film, starring Gerald Depardieu,  Burgess’s translation, written in rhyming couplets,  was used as the English sub-titles.   Depardieu won an Oscar for his performance (plus many other awards.)

There had been a  highly acclaimed English language film starring Jose Ferrer in 1950, and in 1959 a Japanese samurai version, The Life of an Expert Swordsman, was made starring Toshiro Mifune.   In 1987 film Steve Martin made a successful contemporary comedy version, starring Daryl Hannah  as Roxanne.  

Some modern literary critics have wondered if, as Rostand was gay,  he used his own experience of being socially unacceptable in this play, Cyrano’s nose being a metaphor.

In 1991 the great film critic Roger Ebert wrote; It is entirely appropriate that Cyrano - whose very name evokes the notion of grand romantic gestures - should have lived his life bereft of romance. What is romanticism, after all, but a bold cry about how life should be, not about how it is? And so here is Cyrano de Bergerac, hulking, pudding-faced, with a nose so large he is convinced everyone is laughing at him - yet he dares to love the fair Roxane.  

The "real" Cyrano, if there was such a creature beneath the many layers of myth that have grown up around the name, lived in France from 1619 to 1655, and wrote stories about his magnificent voyages to the moon and the sun. He inspired the Cyrano we love, a more modern creation and now here is a magnificently lusty, brawling, passionate and tempestuous classical version, directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau.

You would not think he would be right for the role. Shouldn't Cyrano be smaller, more tentative, more pathetic - instead of this outsized, physically confident man of action?  

Depardieu is often said to be "wrong" for his roles. His physical presence makes a definite statement on the screen, and then his acting genius goes to work, and transforms him into whatever is required for the role - into a spiritual priest, a hunchbacked peasant, a medieval warrior, a car salesman, a businessman, a sculptor, a gangster.

Here he plays Cyrano, gadfly and rabble-rouser, man about town, friend of some, envied by many, despised by a powerful few, and hopelessly, oh, most painfully and endearingly, in love with Roxane.   

But his nose is too large.   When he looks in the mirror he knows it would be an affront to present the nose anywhere in the vicinity of the fair Roxane with an amorous purpose attached to it.

Now here is the inoffensive clod Christian.   For him, love is a fancy. For Cyrano, a passion. Yet if Cyrano cannot have Roxane, then he will help his friend, and so he ghostwrites letters and ghost-recites speeches in the moonlight, and because Roxane senses that the words come from a heart brave and true, she pledges herself to Christian. The irony - which only the audience can fully appreciate - is that anyone with a heart so pure that she could love a cheesy lump like Christian because of his language could certainly love a magnificent man like Cyrano for the same reason, and regardless of his nose.

If you don't know the brilliance of the late Roger Ebert, his website is still being run and the archive is lodged there, full of gems.    Ebert was a dedicated, informed, deeply literate critic, and usually generous.   His ire, however, was best avoided.

Michael Bay's movie 'Pearl Harbor' was described by Mr Ebert as 'a two hour film squeezed into three hours, about how, on December 7th 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.'   If you want to read even crueler, though not necessarily sharper, 'hatchet jobs' go to Mark Kermode's book of that name. 

Darkness Implacable

Marlow Meets Conrad in Scott & McCarthy’s The Counselor

A counselor/lawyer wants to make a lot of money very quickly, and maybe some of his criminal clients can help.    He invests in a drug smuggling venture across the Tex/Mex border, but it goes badly wrong.   That is all the plot you need to know, because the plot is entirely secondary in this film.  The motor that drives this story is moral logic, not narrative, and once it starts ticking it will not stop until it reaches its deadly climax.    We are told this early on in the film, but do we recognize the anecdote’s significance?   We are given no back-story or narrative exposition, so we have to pay close attention and gather any possible clues or signposts not knowing if they are part of the machinery.  Anton Chekhov once advised a young playwright  "If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act".    There is an armoury full of narrative pistols here,  and we do not know which are loaded with blanks and which with nickel-plated bullets.   But we find out.

One character knowingly misquotes from Kit Marlow’s Jew of Malta: That was in another country;  and besides the wench is dead.     If we connect with the original quote these words they will reverberate chillingly later.   Marlow also wrote ‘There is a point, to which when men aspire, they tumble headlong down.  (Edward II) and ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ (Dr Faustus).   And that is also a good plot summary .   

McCarthy once wrote “I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.” It seems some critics think he has written a stupid script here, and that Scott has filmed it with equal inanity. Well most of them didn't like Blade Runner either.   McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, is about drugs and greed and consequences.  So is  The Counselor,  but McCarthy wasn't going to write about them in the same way twice.  

McCarthy may be the Josef Conrad of our time.    Like Conrad he looks into the heart of darkness.  He knows the deadly seduction of greed.  He recognizes the banality of evil, and he knows that banality should not reduce the terror.  The Counselor, like Verloc in Conrad’s Secret Agent, thinks he can work with evil, profit from it – and survive.   And consider these words;

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”   

Is it Conrad or McCarthy?   In fact they come from McCarthy’s The Road, but they could be in The Heart of Darkness.   McCarthy has also written

“These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing.   (Blood Meridian).  

“Every dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.” And

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”    (Both from All the Pretty Horses). 

These themes run like obsidian threads through most of McCarthy’s work.  The themes may be constant, but he is always looking for new ways to plait them and he will not give us what we expect.  

One critic actually called this film  a crime caper.  You will not understand how wide of the mark that is until you see the film.   Some reviewers excuse McCarthy  by saying that ‘he has never written a film script before and so it is understandable that doesn’t really know how to do it’.    But this is a McCarthy script so it will not be like other scripts.   The Road was not like any other post-apocalyptic novel or film, and No Country for Old Men was also distinctive.   What we remember about that film is the implacable evil embodied in Chugar, as played by Javier Bardem.   Bardem is cast here again,  but his character is absolutely not Chugar, and the evil gravity sucking the plot and the Counselor inexorably downwards does not lie within him.  The faceless cartel is the black hole.   No light escapes its pull.   At the end of No County a lawman is defeated, not physically, but morally.  He can no longer face the darkness.  In this film another lawman, the lawyer rather than a sheriff,  is also defeated by the dark powers, but he is a more willing victim.

So here we have Ridley Scott directing a Cormac McCarthy original script, with Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem  and Brad Pitt.   The expectations are high and the critics are widely divided.   Many of them are deeply disappointed.    Yet others are exhilarated by this film’s refusal to play the standard narrative beats, to wink at us, keep letting us in on the plot, to give us a hero. We are given no release from the inexorable, implacable, pitiless consequences and when the violence comes it is extreme and utterly thrill free.  

None of the actors try to win us over.   Fassbender’s Counselor is smart and greedy and stupid. He will not listen to the people who know what they are talking about.    He is vain enough to think they are his friends.  His only redeeming quality is his new found love, Laura, but the quality of that love is only discovered too late.   Bardem’s character is  blinded by his success (and maybe his shirt) and fascinated by the feline beauty and power of his girlfriend, in which role Cameron Diaz does something new – and I do not mean the notorious ‘sex with a Ferrari wind-screen’  scene.   No; in this film Diaz is frightening, and I have not seen that before.     Brad Pitt dons his Thelma & Louise Stetson but puts aside his charm.  He is smart, but not the smartest.     Penelope Cruz, as Laura has the least to do, because she is the film’s only innocent, but her beauty alone is enough to justify the crucial role her existence plays in the film.    

Major and minor characters spout cod philosophy about life and death and crime and punishment, and it is cod philosophy because they are not philosophers.  McCarthy is, but his message is not spoken here, it is shown.   He has always loved using words and images, writing for the stage and screen as well as novels.    Some think his vision is nihilistic, bleak and hopeless, nd of course The Road and No Country  reinforce that opinion.  But maybe his humanity is that of the surgeon who has to cut deep into our bowels to reveal the cancer.   If we deny its existence it will kill us.   And sometimes it does.  We must never ignore that possibility.  But we have to find ways to live with this knowledge.

Do not be misled by the marketing.  This is not a crime caper or a thriller.    I think this is a fine film, wonderfully written, filmed and performed.  It compliments us by asking us to do some work, and it does so with serious intent.  Ridley Scott is a serious artist, and so is Cormac McCarthy.    I cannot wait to see it again, to pick up what I missed the first time round.   

Have you hijacked us, Captain Phillips?

Oh, Captain Phillips, we have a problem.   And so it seems does Paul Greengrass, Director of the movie adapted from your memoir. “A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea”  co-authored by Stephan Talty, concerning the Somalian Pirate attack on the ship you captained in 2009.    It seems that some of the crucial aspects of this story have been challenged by your own crew, including important aspects of you character, professional integrity and ‘heroics’.  

Let us try to separate the film and the story it is ‘based on’.  

Paul Greengrass is the British director who has brought the immediacy and fluidity of documentary film making into mainstream movies.   He electrified the Bourne series, and what he did there raised the bar for the Bond movies.   Captain Phillips  has some of the same kinetic excitement. 

Greengrass’s  United 93  used documented evidence to recreate the fate of those involved in the fourth plane on 9/11, which the passengers prevented from  reaching its target – and died doing so as it crashed into a Pennsylvanian field.     United 93 achieved the remarkable feat of portraying the hijackers and victims in morally equal terms.    The hijackers were not black-hat villains, but brave and frightened men who were willing to give their lives for their religious and political ideals.   We were left to make our judgments.

The pirates in Captain Phillips are not painted as villains either.  When first see Somalian crew they are being recruited for ‘work’ by the local overlords.   The work is storming merchant container ships and holding them to ransom.   But the huge ransoms demanded do not enrich the actual pirates,  who receive  a tiny fraction of the millions given up by the Insurance companies.

I was reminded of the dockland scenes in ‘On The Waterfront’, where the men with power, in this case the Union bosses who were virtually gangsters, hand out work to the desperate men looking for work.    One of the conditions of this work was that blind–eyes were turned on the rampant criminality. 

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So Greengrass does what he so often does; he brings powerful political and economic realities home to us by showing their effect on ordinary people.   In this case Muse and his team, the ones chosen to go hunting in their small out-board motored skiffs.     The gang are played by non-professional actors.  Muse is played by Barkhad Abdi, who was spotted working as a chauffeur after immigrating to the USA from the  Yemen when he was 14.  

The  casting of Abdi is clever.  He looks like a man who has known starvation.   His seemingly frail body houses a powerful spirit – and it shines through his eyes, sometimes challenging, sometimes, arrogant, sometimes thoughtful.   Abdi’s performance is crucial, because we have to see this man as a human being,  equal to us in every way, save that of the economic and political situation that shape his ends.     Muse is  intelligent, and often wise.   He is clear about the moral justification for his action.  He does not want to hurt anyone, and sees no reason why anyone should get hurt.  This ransom exchange is, as he sees it, simply a tax collected by the poor from the unbelievably rich shipping lines that use his people’s waters to make themselves even richer.    Muse is also politically very naïve.   

Captain Phillips is played by Tom Hanks,  and so he is bound to be heroic.  Not in the action-man heroic mould, or course, but in that of an ordinary man reacting to extra-ordinary event with integrity and quiet courage.  Courage does not mean being unafraid.  It often means being very afraid, but not letting fear stop you from doing what must be done.   In this film Hank’s character does what has to be done with an understated heroism, and deep humanity.    Well, we are set up to believe in him.  We have seen Hanks in Philadelphia,  Apollo 13, and  Saving Private Ryan, in Castaway and of course as Woody In the Toy Story trilogy.  Hanks' Democratic politics and support for environmental and gay rights issues are well known so, even if we have seen Charlie Wilson’s War,  we know what to expect when we see Hanks in a film role.   He is the Gary Cooper of our times.      So simply casting Tom Hanks makes Richard Phillips heroic.  

And there we have the problem.  Eleven members of Phillip’s  crew are currently suing his shipping line for $50 million for the  "willful, wanton and conscious disregard for their safety" shown  by Phillips. The crew say Phillips received many warning  e-mails about the increasing threat of piracy near Somalia, but ignored them and kept them from his crew.   "The crew had begged Captain Phillips not to go so close to the Somali coast," said Deborah Waters, the crew members attorney.   They dispute the characterization of Captain Phillips as portrayed in his book and in this film.   They also dispute some events that are crucial to the film’s plot, but no spoilers here. 

So; here we have a well made, humane,  and politically challenging   film, with an exciting dénouement, outstanding acting by the two leads,  terrific direction,  camera work and score; but.   It purports to be a true account of true events, and while many of these are undoubtedly true,   serious  questions have been raised about the central character and his conduct.  This film is called Captain Phillips,  and he is the  hero.   His ordinariness and decency are skillfully and economically painted.    His sympathy for his hijackers is powerfully shown.    What a hero!

Do we try to keep this portrait separate in our minds from the questions raised about it from his actual crew?     Do we criticize Paul Greengrass for not doing enough research – or even for doing the research and ignoring what it told him? 

I encourage you to see this film, to think about it, and to question it.

The English Patient revisited

Who made The English Patient - and made it so well?

Great movies do not come out of nowhere and showing The English Patient again has prompted me to look at the team that made it.

First of all, who put this team together?   Saul Zaentz, previously a professional gambler and record producer had bought the rights to, and then produced, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadaus,  and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.    Zaentz was one of the last great independent film producers.  He used his own money, recruited his own team, and kept control of the final product in his own hands, rather than those of nervous investors or Studio heads.   He took risks, which so often paid off handsomely, not only financially, but artistically.    He said ‘It takes five years of my life to produce a film, so I don’t do it to make money, I do it because these are the films I want to see made.’     Many people follow Directors, and so do I, but most of them take what they are offered, while Producers choose the films they make, and are worth following too.  

So Zaentz chose Anthony Minghela, the script-writer and director, who had written British TV scripts for shows as diverse as Grange Hill and Morse, but had only written and directed one critical cinema hit,  Truly, Madly /Deeply.

John Seale however, the Australian director of photography, had worked on Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Witness, Children of a Lesser God, Gorillas in the Mist, Rainman and Lorenzo’s Oil.    Seale had worked with Peter Weir of course, a director who always has something to say in his movies.   Later on he filmed Ghost’s of Mississippi,  The Perfect Storm and Cold Mountain, as well as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.  

Stuart Craig had been the Production Designer for  The Elephant Man, Gandhi, The Mission, Cry Freedom, and Dangerous Liaisons. He later worked on all the Harry Potter movies.   

Both of these key men had worked on ‘committed’ films, films with something to say rather than blockbusters or popcorn entertainment.   Zaentz has not worked with either before The English Patient, but he knew what he was looking for.

And then, as editor,  there was the multi-talented Walter Murch who has worked in various capacities on THX 1138, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, and The Godfather III.   Safe hands indeed, but Zaentz was a gambler, and here he surely took a risk by using Minghela, who had little film experience,  and Kristin Scott Thomas.   She had done well as Anne in Richard III, courted by Ian McKellen’s fascist usurper, but only made a popular impact in Four Weddings and a Funeral.    We had seen how well she could do ‘cool’ but could she also do passion? 

And to put her alongside the luminous Juliette Binoche was surely a risk.   Although four years younger than Scott Thomas she had already starred in the Three Colours Trilogy, Damage, The Horseman on the Roof, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being – the latter produced by Saul Saentz.  

Ralph Fiennes had come from the theatre, but had impressed in Schindler’s List and starred in Quiz Show and Colin Firth had come fresh, dripping from the pond in the  TV Pride and Prejudice.   So an interesting and talented team had been brought together,  and the film would be shot in Tuscany and the desert,  bringing their own distinctive qualities.

But of course none of this could have happened without the original novel. Michael Ondaatje's poetic and oblique 1992  Booker Prize winner. This was  a difficult book to adapt for the screen.   Ondaatje ‘wrote of the injured man sifting through his memories. This dreamlike, nonlinear tale moves in much the same way, swooping gracefully from past to present, from one set of lovers to another, from the contours of the body to the topography of the desert sands.’ (Janet Maslin, film critic of the NY Times)  and as Edmund White, the NY Times Book Critic said  ‘The most impressive feature of the book, Ondaatje's prose, can't be caught on celluloid.  Much has been said about the richness of Ondaatje's writing, the sensuousness of his physical descriptions and his poet's gift for using well-timed silences and ellipses to speak volumes.  It may come wrapped in musky perfume, but Ondaatje's prose could go a few rounds with Hemingway and probably knock out Kipling, too.’ 

One passage in the novel reads  

''She walks towards his night tent without a false step or any hesitation. The trees make a sieve of moonlight, as if she is caught within the light of a dance hall's globe. She enters his tent and puts an ear to his sleeping chest and listens to his beating heart, the way he will listen to a clock on a mine. Two A.M. Everyone is asleep but her.''             

White commented that Ondaatje does not use  ‘the poetic prose of false sentiment and highfalutin' diction, rather the true lyricism of fact, myth and tragic vision. The running narrative tone has a majestic, almost Biblical cadence to it, but one that can assimilate all the details of modern life, from air pillows to land mines.’

So 'The English Patient' film is a stunning feat of literary adaptation as well as a purely cinematic triumph.   As Janet Maslin said  ‘Mr. Minghela  manages to be astonishingly faithful to the spirit of this exotic material while giving it more shape and explicitness, virtually reinventing it from the ground up. The film has so many facets, and combines them in such fascinating and fluid style that its cumulative effect is much stronger than the sum of its parts.’

Roger Ebert, the late lamented doyen of literate film critics,  wrote   

‘Backward into memory, forward into loss and desire, ‘The English Patient’ searches for answers that will answer nothing.    This poetic, evocative film circles down through layers of mystery until all of the puzzles in the story have been solved, and only the great wound of a doomed love remains.    It is the kind of movie you can see twice - first for the questions, the second time for the answers.”

There were objections to the way the novel ended, with the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   Caravaggio tried to explain why Kip is so upset, saying that Kip knows ‘They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.’      But Kip has also spent the whole war trying to prevent explosions.   He had risked his life, time after time, to save Allied lives – and now the Allies had killed millions at a stroke.  

I regret the omission of this passage from the film, though I understand how including it could have impacted negatively on the crucial American audience. 

In the book, Kip says “if they can explain this away there is no hope for us’.    But of course we did explain it away, and our leaders still explain away more than 8000 nuclear warheads that exist today with no military justification and pose a potentially disastrous risk.   But that is another issue, as they say. 

One reason I choose to show this film is that I hope it might persuade those who se it to read the book.    It is even richer than the film, and the author’s voice is wiser than any of the characters, except maybe that of Kip.   

“Have you taken the Voigt-Kampt test yourself, Mr Deckard?”

As I am showing Blade Runner as part of my current local film season I wrote these notes for those who attended.   You might find them interesting/useful/whatever.

When Ridley Scott released Blade Runner in 1982 most film critics did not rate it highly and science fiction fans deeply resented the changes made to Dick’s novel.  It has now become a ‘classic’ the Citizen Kane of noir science-fiction movies.  Ridley Scott had invented a whole new visual vocabulary and style, with retro/futuristic designs that have inspired movie after movie in the last 30 years.     It is considered to be the first film noir science fiction film.   

Some critics and theologians have talked about it as a post-modern exploration of the distinction between the natural and the simulacra, the non-human, human and post-human.   For me the film asked a simple question.  What is life?  And it gave a simple answer.  Life is precious.      Thirty years on my affection for it has only been deepened by time and the release of the Director's Cut.   It still rings deep bells.

The ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner have been given a limited life-span, but they passionately want to go on living.      That is why they have come to find their Creator.   What is at stake is the meaning of being truly human.     In the context of the Garden of Eden myth there is the tension between our human capacity for the knowledge of good and evil – which makes us moral, and morally responsible -  and the limits of our mortality.      In Genesis Adam and Eve could not eat of the Tree of Knowledge and also of the Tree of Life, which would give them immortality.    As John Milton pointed out we cannot be fully human without being moral and mortal.   Being human means we have to know the difference between good and evil and be free to choose,  so The Fall is not a curse but a blessing.  

To understand the nature of evil we need empathy, to be able to understand what the consequences of our actions feel like for others. The presence or lack of emotional response is what the Voigt-Kampt is testing for.  In the opening scene of the film,  the replicant Leon fails the Voigt-Kampf test when questioned about his mother.    He had no mother.    He had no one to teach him empathy, no one to make him truly ‘human’. The replicants may have no parents to learn from, but the advanced Nexus 6 are beginning to develop emotions, to care for each other.     They have a sense of selfhood.

In the scene in Tyrell's bedroom Roy weeps, caresses Tyrell's head, and confesses, "I've done questionable things.”   He is judging the morality of his actions.   When he spares Deckard’s life, and then says of himself "Time to die.” he is at his most human.    Moral and mortal.  Deckard’s life has meaning to Roy, and so does his own..

Even though she is a replicant Rachael falls in love with Deckard.   She cannot trust herself, but she has learnt to trust him.     She may be a Nexus 7 but at the end of the film we do not know how long she will live.   We do not know how long Deckard will live either.  

Some things you may not know about Blade Runner.

1.  The first person outside the production team to say the script really should be filmed was Gregory Peck.
2.  Syd Mead, the film’s Future Visualist (designer), also created the interior of the Anglo-French Concord plane, and  the giant spaceship in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.     Blade Runner was made long before CGI (Computer Generated Images).   Everything and everywhere we see on screen was designed and made just for this film.   Old sets of New York streets on back lots in Los Angeles were used, overlaid with new, but trashed, exteriors. 
3.  The film needed a ‘Star’.   Dustin Hoffman was originally set to play Deckard.   The team tried to adapt the script to accommodate him, but it did not work out.    Only when Hoffman  left was Harrison Ford considered.    He had been in Star Wars, and his first ‘star role’ as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark was in post-production.    
4. Unknown faces were wanted for the replicants, so this was the first American role for the Dutchman Rutger Hauer, it was the first major role for the 19 year old Darryl Hannah and Sean Young had only two previous minor roles. 
5. The metropolitan gutterspeak, ‘Cityspeak’, used by the policeman Gaff was invented by the actor who played him, Edward James Olmos.
6. Rutger Hauer wrote Roy’s final speech.   “I have seen things you wouldn’t believe.   Attack ships on fire on the shoulder of Orion.   I watched c-beans glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.  All these …moment will be lost… in time.  Like … tears… in rain.  Time to die.” 
7. When they shot this scene the dove Roy released simply walked away.   Doves don’t fly when it is raining.  
8. The Producers did not think they could call the film Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the title of Philip K. Dick’s novel on which the film is based)  so the working title was first Android, then Dangerous Days.  The final title, Blade Runner, came from a William Burroughs novel. 
9. For the initial version the Studio bosses insisted on a voice-over to ‘help us understand the plot.’   There was also a happy ending added, as Rachael and Deckard fly off into the sunny future, using some shots from Kubrick’s film The Shining.   This was the only ‘daylight scene’ in Blade Runner.  Both the voice-over and ending were later removed from the Director’s Cut and the ‘unicorn’ sequence was inserted by Ridley in the 1995 version.  
10.   In my 1982 review of the film I used the word ‘noctilucous’ to describe the films images .         It means phosphorescent, shining at night. I have never used it since.                                                                                             Most of these facts are to be found in the British film Producer Michael Deeley's book, Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Blood Doors Off.