A Monster Calls - but dare you answer?

The screenplay for A Monster Calls was adapted by Patrick Ness from his own novel of the same name, but is based on a plot thought up,  but not written,  by the late Siobhan Dowd,  another prize winning ‘Young Adult’ author.    After Dowd died Patrick Ness was invited to develop her idea into a novel and then script.

The film A Monster Calls  was directed by the Spanish Director J.A. Bayone (The Impossible and The Others) and stars Liam Neeson,  Felicity Jones, Sigourney Weaver and the young Lewis MacDougal as Connor.    I urge you to see it.   But I also offer a warning.

In the rather beautiful opening credits water-colours float across the screen.   We will see such images later telling important stories and providing vital clues to guide us through the psychological and emotional thickets of this powerful movie.     But this is about death and facing the dying of a beloved.     

Twelve year old Connor’s mother has cancer.   He knows this and struggles with his fear, rage and shame.     His father is remarried and living in America.    His Grandmother seems to be emotionally distant.     So he is visited by a Yew Tree Monster who seems to wreak destruction but also tells ambiguous stories that confuse Conner.   And the Monster also demands that Connor will eventually tell his own story, the story that terrifies him.   

I read the Patrick Ness book in one sitting and remained determinately dry-eyed, but I knew that the more potent medium of the movie would not let me get away with that again.   It is nearly eleven years since my beloved wife died but it seems I still have tears to let flow.    Anything that helps us take another faltering step along the grieving road has to be good for us.   How often have I assured the bereaved that the tears we shed can help to heal us, but warned that unshed tears turn to acid and burn us from the inside.    Grief can feel like a monster, but it will not harm us if we respond to its call and face it, like brave young Connor, and listen to it.

I love the way today’s movie makers are able to put literally anything they can imagine onto the screen, from the kaleidoscopic  cityscapes of Doctor Strange and the beguilingly human BFG to the Yew Tree ‘ Monster’ voiced by Neeson in this film.   They can do so to thrill and amaze us, and can also do so to touch our hearts and heal us.  Movies can properly and beneficially move us.   Sometimes they address our own personal struggles, sometimes they are - as Saint Roger Ebert once said - ‘machines to produce empathy.’  

Twice in this film adults are faced with the outrageous behaviour of an emotionally  tortured child.    Twice he expects to be properly punished.  And twice he is asked ‘What possible good would that do?’    And so are we.    The late Josephine Hart’s novel Damage (filmed in 1992 by Louis Malle with Juliette Binoche, Jeremy Irons and Miranda Richardson)  made the crucial and succinct point that ‘damaged people damage people.’   That was long before we had to come to terms with the fact that abused people’s behavior so often alienates us from them,  making them –at the least – unsympathetic witnesses, self-harmers or, too often, abusive themselves.  

Empathy is a crucial characteristic of big brained mammals,  and one that needs to be fostered and fed.    Books such as  A Monster Calls may be hard to read, and movies such as this may be hard to watch,  but if they can help in healing our own wounds or feed our understanding of the wounds of others they are good for us.    And often rather beautiful.   I give thanks for those artists who write such books and those make such films.    

Sigourney Weaver must be pretty busy making the fifth Alien and three Avatar sequels.   She certainly does not need to master an impeccable English accent again for this role as she did long ago for The Year of Living Dangerously,  so she obviously wanted to be in this film.   Felicity Jones is at the top of her Theory of Everything and Star Wars acclaim and fame, so this comparatively ‘little film’ must have called to her too.   Liam Neesom can earn squillions making more meretricious Taken style revenge movies, but he also sometimes commits himself to more redemptive roles such as the recovering-alcoholic cop Matt Scudder in A Walk Among the Tombstones,  a brief appearance as God in the BBC’s wonderful Rev and now this.

As I said earlier, I urge you to see this film, but do heed my warning.

A rewarding Walk Among the Tombstones.

The Hebrew Bible allows the offended to take ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ but that is intended to be the limit of just recompense.  We may only take an eye for an eye, only a tooth for a tooth.   

One definition of the word ‘taken’  in the Oxford Reference Dictionary is  ‘to have sexual intercourse with’.   When I saw Liam Neeson’s 2009 film  Taken I felt that I had been taken, in the most unwelcome way.  I could use a shorter, blunter,  word.   I also felt taken advantage of, taken in, taken down, and if it came to taking or leaving it I was sure what my choice would be.   Taken sickened me not because of its depiction of violence, but for its approval of it.    I have written at length  about my severe discomfort at the way modern cinema promotes vengeance as a morally justified activity, and gives it’s protagonists unlimited license to maim and kill anyone who gets in the way of exacting such vengeance.  (See Taken for a ride, below).   Taken, produced and co-written by Luc Besson, directed by Pierre Morel, starring Neeson as Brian Mills, the ex-CIA agent trying to rescue his teenage daughter from Middle Eastern kidnappers, epitomised this genre, and was so well made – thanks to Morel – that it became very popular.  I was not pleased with Neeson for lending his presence and credibility to it, or saying such lines as this internet favourite quote

 I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it.  I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.

I wonder how many misguided teenage boys have learnt those line and growled  them into their bedroom mirrors, thinking they were the quintessence of manliness?    And these words came out of  the mouth of the man who once played Schindler!    One NY Times critic asked The conundrum posed by “Taken” is as old as cinema itself. Do stars degrade themselves when they take a role in trash, or does their very presence?   This appeared to be a rhetorical question.     I understand that Taken 2 was in some ways less meretricious.  It was also, of course, less popular. 

And so I rejoice at the release of Neeson’s latest film, A Walk among the Tombstones.

It is adapted from one of  Laurence Bloch’s 'Matthew Scudder' novels.  There have been over a dozen books featuring this New York Private Eye (unlicensed),  an alcoholic ex-cop.    The tone of the books could be judged by the titles.  The first two, back in the 1970’s, were  The Sins of the Fathers and In the Midst of Death.  The titles that followed contained the words or phrases Murder, Stab, Die, Cutting Edge, Eight Million Ways To Die, Boneyard, Slaughter House, Dead Men,  Everybody Dies,  and Hope to Die.   But these dark books are also credited with depth and nuance.  They are not Micky Spillane celebrations of violence and misogyny.    Matt Scudder  has the kind of integrity once found in Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, both of whom are name-checked (somewhat clumsily) in A Walk Among the Tombstones.

In 1986 Oliver Stone co-scripted and produced Eight Million Ways To Die,  directed by Hal Ashby,  with Jeff Bridges playing Matt  Stutter.  I did not see it, but apparently it did not work well. In the New York Times Walter Goodman asked  How did ''Eight Million Ways to Die'' commit suicide?

But A Walk Among The Tombstones works much better.   It had Frank Scott at the helm, and he also adapted the novel for the screen.   Scott has an impressive record,  having written  or adapted Little Man Tate, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, The Interpreter,  The Wolverine and Minority Report.   This is first full length movie, although  he was 2^nd unit director (uncredited) for the Minority Report .   But combining script-writer and director works well here, giving us an evenness of tone  and a cohesion of plot. 

The villains, played by David Harbour and Adam David Thompson, are clearly insane, but theirs is a cold implacable madness rather than scenery-chewing eyeball-rolling and they are all the more frightening for that.  The plot revolves around  their sadistic murders of women,  but these killings are mainly off screen, showing us instead the terrified vulnerability of the victims  and are in no way exploitive.   

The gradual disclosures of plot and character are well paced, and in the inevitable and shockingly violent finale Scott bravely cuts into the action with sequences reiterating the AA’s 12 steps, the road to Scutter’s recovery and his spiritual discipline.    This has troubled some reviewers, but in the Bloch novels the AA plays an important and recurring role, and Scott has been true to his source.   The climax is for Scutter as much spiritual – challenging his values -  as physical.   Neeson is so well cast here.    His Scutter is tough but vulnerable,   humane but world-weary.  When a killer has him at gun-point and asks Why aren’t you afraid?  he answers  I don’t know.  Maybe it doesn’t matter much to me whether I live or die,  and I for one believed him.

Scott has cut the gum-shoe’s girlfriend, who in the novel is a prostitute, from the script,  but kept Scutter’s  teenage side-kick TJ, a smart homeless black kid,  played by Brian “Astro” Bradley, who wants to be a PI himself.   When TJ first appeared I wondered what this familiar and sentimental trope was doing in so tough a movie, but his inclusion is justified when he plays a crucial part in the plot.   The gritty photography by Mihai Malaimare Jn.  and music by Carlos Rafael Rivera  (both relatively newcomers to Hollywood) complement the style beautifully, showing once again that noir does not have to be shot in black and white and scored with jazz.     Dan Stevens, Eric Nelsen and Olafur Darri Olafsson provide solid acting support, helped by believable lines of dialogue.     It has been said that Emily Blunt brings out the best in good actors (see Looper, The Adjustment Bureau and Edge of Tomorrow),   and maybe Liam Neeson has the same gift.

This is not a perfect movie, it spends a little too much time on inessentials, sometimes lapses towards sentimentality, and may tell us more than we need to know about its villains,   but at its heart is Matt Scutter.    He is a thinking man with a soul, and this is a thinking movie with a soul.     I think it gave Neeson his best script for 20 years, since the days of Schindler's List, Rob Roy and Michael Collins.  I would very much like to see more films with him embodying the role.    Mr. Neelson; all is (almost) forgiven.