Loving.

The Irish actress Ruth Neggar has rightly attracted a lot of praise – and an Oscar nomination- for her role in Jeff Nichols’ film ‘Loving’.    I think this is a fine film, telling the true story of Richard Loving – a white man – and a Mildred –  a black woman-  who married in the late 1950’s in the State of Virginia – breaking that State’s ‘miscegenation’ law forbidding inter-racial marriage.

Richard and Mildred were ordered to leave the State under pain of imprisonment.   Their case was taken up by the American Civil Rights Union and after nine years, in 1967, the USA’s Supreme Court affirmed their right to marry.   This was a landmark decision that has since then positively affected many Americans.   It was also an important victory in the whole Civil Rights history.

But I want to draw attention to Joel Edgerton, the Australian actor who played Richard.     Edgerton was a convincing US SEAL in Zero Dark Thirty, and produced a nuanced portrait of Tom Buchanan in Baz Lurmann’s Great Gatsby.

I think that film was vastly superior in just about every way to Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, which had Robert Redford as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy and Bruce Dern, as Buchanan – who was a simply rich oaf.   We had no idea why Daisy would have married him – apart from his ‘old’ money.   With Edgerton we could see that Daisy could indeed love him, and that he loved Daisy – even as he was unfaithful.   He gave us the swagger and arrogance, but we also saw his insecurity, loneliness and fear.    Gatsby’s fortune might have been nefarious but he had made it himself, whereas Buchanan’s had been inherited.   And he was physically afraid of Gatsby.    So much of this happened behind his eyes where all the best film acting is done.

Tom Buchanan and Richard Loving could hardly be more different.   Here we see a working man, a builder and car mechanic, a modest man of few words.  He knows fear, but quietly does what needs to be done out of love for his wife.  Edgerton inhabits this man, with his slow physicality, his gentle voice, his watchful wary eyes.   Richard is not a campaigner. He simply wants to do what his wife wants – to live alongside her family back in Virginia.  It is an ambitious lawyer who takes up their case, and put’s the couple at risk by doing so.

Edgerton’s performance mirrors the qualities of the movie. Understated, honest, careful, loving.  I applaud them. 

Jane Got a Gun.

It seems that Jane God a Gun had a troubled production.      The Scottish Director Lynn Ramsay left while shooting it, and  Michael Fassbender, Jude Law and Bradley Cooper had already pulled out.   This left Gavin O’Connor to take up the directing, plus Natalie Portman (who co-produced) and Joel Edgerton (who contributed to the script) to work with Ewan McGregor and Noah Emmerich and bring it home.   The film was given a limited release in the US January (a dead month for movie goers) and seems to have lost a lot on money.   Many reviewers thought it was too slow, too somber, and that Portman’s Jane was not dynamic enough.

But I liked it.     It is a slow burning Western with a female lead, and concerned with human relationships as much as with gun-play.   In fact the ‘gun’ that Jane has to get to help her protect her family is a man, her former lover, played by Edgerton, an actor I much admire.   When I watched The Great Gatsby again I had to reconsider the character of Tom Buchanan, as Edgeton’s performance revealed subtle depths to it on second viewing.   Here also,  in what may seem to be a straightforward part,  he reveals layers of complexity as flash-backs reveal more and more of the history between him and Jane.    

Nor did I miss the kind of ‘anything you can do I can do better’ female gunslinger beloved by some.   Jane is a rotten shot with a handgun – and why would she have ever needed to be otherwise? – but she is a crack shot with her rifle, used to shooting rabbits and coyotes rather than men.   Of course Jane is very good looking and well turned out for a prairie wife, but there is little Portman could do about the former without resorting to silliness, and she does wear pretty much the same (period and practical) outfit throughout the movie.    It is good to see subtly in a Western.   The music is understated – for the most part -  and the direction unfussy, unspectacular and unobtrusive.     It looks as if O’Connor simply got on with shooting the script rather than imposing himself on it. 

The DVD I watched ‘Jane’  on also had  trailer for The Keeping Room, another Western with female leads – and a female point of view - that did not do well at the Box Office.    That starred Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld and Muna Otarus.   I will look out for it.    

I have remarked elsewhere that the pov of vampire movies has changed in the last ten years or so,  to consider what it would be like to actually be a vampire (Thirst, Let the Right One In, Byzantium, Only Lovers Left Alive).   In some recent films, such as the two mentioned here plus The Homesman, Meek’s Cutoff, True Grit and Cold Mountain, we are invited to wonder what it would have really been like to be a woman in the 19^th century American West.   The answer ?  Often much tougher than for the men, coping, as Lindy West  has pointed out in The Guardian,  with the combination of societal lawlessness and personal vulnerability.    Is this Revisionist?  If that means seeing in a new way I welcome it.