My Week With Marilyn

In 1956, Marilyn Monroe tottered along to Pinewood Studios to make a mostly dreadful light comedy, The Prince & The Showgirl, starring with and directed by Sir Laurence Olivier. It was a notoriously tense shoot, although in a terribly clipped, RP, Keep Calm And Carry On, uptight British way rather than some hellfire Apocalypse Now conflagration. Marilyn and Larry did not gel, she – waylaid by pills and booze and crippling insecurities – was always late and spectacularly flaky, he was controlling, unsympathetic and frustrated by his advancing years and the realisation that here, finally, was a co-star he would never be able to seduce.

In the wings, the young Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), fresh out of Cambridge and overshadowed by his ‘family of overachievers’ (father Kenneth, Civilisation; brother Alan, Diaries and serial-rogering) arrives in London to find a career in the movies. He ends up as the dogsbody on the production and, to the astonishment of everyone, not least himself, drifts into a confidante-and-possibly-more relationship with Monroe (Michelle Williams) herself.

It needs to be said as early as possible that that’s basically it, plotwise. A few stolen hours, one magical day, and some very tremulous, hesitant canoodling aside, almost nothing happens beyond what we must surely already know; that despite her crushing weaknesses and debilitating outside influences, Marilyn turns in a winning performance on a lesser movie (almost her least, really) and then goes home. And that incrementally slight, almost boring procession of one thing happening after another presents us with a first half hour that may have you wondering just what it is you’ve handed over your money to watch.

Admittedly, it is all done with precision. Kenneth Branagh’s Olivier (how irritated do you think he would be to not play it?) is an exceptional clone, a pitch perfect reconstruction of mannerisms, presence and sinister sibilant S’s. Dame Judi does Dame Sybil (Thorndike) to a knowing T, and Philip Jackson, the finest of all our small-part TV actors, turns in a terrifically touching performance as Marilyn’s dependable and warmhearted minder. There is much period detail, of course, including splendidly accurate establishment accents and cultural nods that nod toward the most telling of research. And it’s all a little stagey and clinical and empty of purpose. For that first act, where the scenario of the possibly chaste tryst is sketched out, it seems that despite the patina of authenticity beyond it, there may be nothing.

It does not help that the first voice we hear, Colin’s, as a bland and characterless narrator, is hopelessly lacking in colour.

But, as with Marilyn in her performance on the movie, these first unappealing missteps are forgotten after one sparkling moment which leads, carefully and inexorably on, to another. And another. Sent to collect Marilyn from her dressing room, Colin finds her addled and dreamily incapable, a vulnerable girl lost and alone. From here, the film shifts not into another gear, but into another movie altogether. The paper-thin story developments continue as mere noises off, and it slides into a mood piece, a character-led drama that shines a light into Marilyn’s darker corners.

I have been avoiding mentioning Williams’s performance until now, but only because I struggle to quantify it on the page. Marilyn has been portrayed dozens of times of course, but I don’t think anyone has ever managed to capture all of her, as Williams somehow, magically, manages. Skittish, funny, mischievous, infuriating, weak and also quite brilliant: at first – and this is surely intentional, to put you in Olivier’s position of being annoyed and disappointed – she is almost inconsequential. A figure of fun bordering on derision, once Colin speaks to her, and she recognises within him someone with whom she can communicate, it is at that point that we get an inkling of the many faces of Marilyn.

Oh, that’s such a lazy phrase. I apologise.

You see, Williams pulls off a remarkable trick. Marilyn, ‘they said’, glowed. She was a star at the end of the time of stars. We’ve lost that, we don’t really know about it any more. We’ve battered down and reduced people to the mere status of celebrities and Marilyn wasn’t part of that; and Williams knows it. She glows too, she’s luminous and alight and she shines all over the second half of the film. Even at her most needy, awry with pills and drink (the camera shifts around her bedroom, pinpointing the chemical trip hazards that kept her reliant on certain people), she shimmers with an attraction that goes beyond the sexual. Does Colin what to make love to her, or does he just want to be in love for her? She reaches out, and he responds because he can’t do anything else. Helpless, in her tractor beam, he is pulled hither and thither and, as much an ingenue in her world of cracked relationships as she, they stagger toward a minor but deeply affecting heartache.

He sees her only a few times, but in the middle of their encounters is one day where they walk in the country, as if they were lovers, and have, what sweethearts would call, an adventure. At the end, driving back as the sun goes down, the light slanting through the car window, first tenderly holding hands and then – as they look out, at the real world – letting go, Nat King Cole sings Autumn Leaves and the swelling strings are almost unbearable.

Williams takes Marilyn away beyond Colin, then. Beyond us, somewhere untouchable and extraordinary. As she realises she cannot be anything more to him she is as harsh and cruel as she needs to be, as she can bare to be, and with what seems, but isn’t, a wave of her hand, snaps his heart in two. His realisation later, that she could have done it no other way, is bittersweet and touching.

At the end, Olivier and Colin watch The Prince & the Showgirl and the great man suddenly sees the brilliant actress behind the troubles and he gasps. Later, he would say that she was, “the best of all”. What Michelle Williams does here is make us believe that too.

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We Are What We Are (Somos Lo Que Hay)

You really do have to be careful what you read. The posters, the trailer, the advance word, and now the Blu-Ray box will tell you that We Are What We Are (Somos Lo Que Hay), the debut feature of writer-director Jorge Michel Grau, is a full on “cannibal gore-fest” (to quote just one crit). There are numerous stills being bandied about showing either aggressive or terrified people slapped liberally in blood, but in only one instance – and a very very brief one at that – has the claret been administered for the dreadful reason you might assume.

The film starts with a static camera at the top of a shopping mall’s escalator, in, we later discover, Mexico City. An old and clearly unwell man rides to the top of the staircase. He is distressed and extremely frightened. He falls to his knees, retches, and collapses, dead. Shifting to an overhead shot, janitors from the mall rush over and remove him, another sweeps in and cleans the mess up quickly. Moments later, a couple walk across the very spot where he expired, oblivious.

Across the sprawling city, in a more chaotic world entirely, the man’s wife and children await his return. When they realise he is the man they have heard about dying at the shopping centre, they are thrown not just into grief but a real, fierce terror. The man was the patriarch, but he was also their provider. The full import of this fact hits home as the man’s body is opened up in the morgue and a human finger is discovered in his stomach. The mortuary assistant is unimpressed, even amused. “More people eat other people in this city than we realise,” he comments. Normally it is blamed on the rats (“the two legged ones,” he scoffs).

For the family left behind, though, this is no laughing matter. Suddenly faced with a life-threatening crisis they must learn to act, and fast. Their compulsion is one of the strengths of the film for it indicates a massive unexplained world at play behind the set-up. There is a madness here, sure, a proper, seeping madness that has created around it, by necessity, an accepted mythos. The kids, the mother, must eat and follow ‘the ritual’, an unseen, briefly mentioned obsession. Behind their front door, in an apartment oddly stuffed with unexceptional relics and tat from previous encounters, the family circles around itself in a shared state of mutual OCD. They pile boxes high, they rip cloth and knot it for no rational purpose, but this thing, any mention of this “rite” drives them on.

In a shadowy, dark, meaningless world, their determination to fashion some purpose to their existence is hypnotic. The children, a sweaty trio of unspoken urges and bewildered torment, who cannot trust outsiders and can barely trust themselves, pass their new-found responsibility around like an unwanted ugly gift. They need to continue but no-one wishes to take over the mantle of leader. Eventually, the young girl, the forceful Sabina (Pauline Gaitan) convinces her bother Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro, in an extraordinary performance) to go out into the packed streets and subways and underpasses to find the ‘something’ (their term for food) that will help them survive.

Stepping out into the clamour of Mexico City begins the process that guides the story to its climax. On the metro, Alfredo watches people, seeing only their hanging arms, or hands or legs. He is frightened but inescapably driven. A woman starts to sing and at first it seems that she is a beggar, but she stops and explains that she used to sing to put her child through school, and now he has just graduated from University, and so this performance is to thank people. She puts a small piece of paper into everyone’s hands. Alfredo reads it, it says, “Estás Vivo”. You are alive. It is a moment of beauty (the song is exquisite, the intention sublime) bumping up against the gruesome and the macabre.

I would protest that We Are What We Are is not really a horror film at all, certainly not in any conventional sense. Admittedly it addresses some horrific subjects and it will draw people to it simply on the promise of such revelations, but in reality this is something else entirely. It reminded me of Benito Zambrano’s Solas, a very careful study on loneliness and alienation which begins, as here, in composed, dreamy, and unhurried arthouse style; we are more in thrall to mood and texture than anything else. There are also distinct nods toward Romero’s Martin and of course Let The Right One In, but it should be remembered that there are no supernatural elements here at all. The transgressions here are real and all the more frightening for that.

The Woman

Lucky McKee’s The Woman is really “Lucky McKee’s and Jack Ketchum’s The Woman“, since the film maker and novelist created the story, co-authoring the novel upon which the movie is based. Both have a pretty forceful reputation in the horror field, of course, including work that has overlapped before (the troubled Red, from 2008 ). They clearly understand one another and that sympatico vibe creates, if nothing else, a hit the ground running start for a movie that propels the viewer very quickly into a nightmare.

In an arresting opening sequence we’re given a dream, a bold move indeed, where the eponymous character is seen running through the darkness, encountering herself as an abandoned baby and being discovered by a wolf; yes, you see, The Woman is about a wild child, now in adulthood. But this is no Nell, for the woman is discovered not by a noble Liam Neeson type character, but by a complete asshole. Chris (a simply alarming Sean Bridgers) is a prize prick, who discovers the woman (Polyanna McIntosh) while out hunting and in what seems to be an astonishing move, decides to capture her and keep her in his barn.

Chris rules his family through a combination of fear and, well, fear. Outwardly, a charming and intelligent man (he runs a successful legal firm in the local town), behind closed doors he’s a manipulative bully. He introduces his wife and kids to the woman and tells them that they are going to civilize her. That this is so readily accepted seems to indicate that they live in complete thrall to such a monstrous man (it is an extraordinary development, their complicity, and will puzzle and trouble you right up until the climax).

This is handled very well towards the end of the movie’s first act. The dynamics playing out in this dysfunctional, scared family are remarkably well observed and addressed, particularly through the adolescent boy, Brian (Zach Rand), whose cautious and then, whoah, way not cautious, aping of his father, says in a few broad strokes everything you need to know about the dreadful misuse of power within families. Zach’s two sisters, one a moody insular teen, the other a wide-eyed innocent pre-teen, also sketch out the nastiness and predetermined paths they have been forced down. The horror should be coming from them, it is certainly bad enough, affecting enough, troubling enough.

But The Woman, despite this, seems to be far too keen to exploit the extreme plot point it has brooding away in the darkness. It is impossible to avoid the nastiness locked away, of course, and inexorably we move toward a conclusion where that extremity will be exposed. Much like deadgirl, another intense idea that could have worked right up until the moment where they insisted on making everything so real, The Woman cannot, unfortunately, waste the notion that there is a crazed amazon chained up, open to abuse and clearly very fucking dangerous should things get out of hand. Up to a point you might even get away with saying that she’s a cypher, a representation of everything the family fear in varying degrees: for the father, strong women; for the boy, sex; for the girls, enslavement. But in the third act, we have to, we simple have to, start ramping it all up and asking for a bit of blood.

I cannot tell you what happens as that would constitute a series of massive spoilers, but it is, for me, a third act that enjoys its crowd-pleasing self way too much, looks up Grand Guignol in the auteur’s dictionary and thinks, “I can do better than that”.

The Woman will be overshadowed for many by the viral video of a man walking out of a Sundance screening and decrying it for all manner of sexist crimes. Fair enough, in fact there is a bit of lingering on Mcintosh when she is stripped, there is a moment of cruelty that could have been played with more restraint, but that protester missed the point, I believe. The Woman is not the piece of shit he claims, for it has hidden away some excellent observations on gender and the blurring of family sexual boundaries (and yes, these may be easily missed, or at least the ending may erase them as it thunders along). It just doesn’t need the woman. Or the last 30 minutes, for that matter. In their eagerness to make a great horror movie, Ketchum and McKee didn’t realise that they could have cut out all the horror and still succeeded.

I Spit On Your Grave

It’s a well-established truth that those over-familiar cultural landmarks you’ve never actually experienced, but just think you know, are never, when you finally get around to them, what you expected. Take my current discovery – David Copperfield – which confirms this theory and, of course, has thoroughly confounded my presumptions. It is, obviously, why the classics are the Classics and why we should make room for them.

It is not true, however, of possibly the most famous of that tranche of movies we in the UK have come to call the Video Nasties. I Spit On Your Grave, AKA Day of the Woman, the infamous rape revenge flick from 1978 still, quite justifiably, stirs up intense feeling. In his impassioned criticism of it, Roger Ebert called the thing “a vile bag of garbage”, and he’s absolutely on the money. Not only is it fucking awful, it is guileless, unsurprising and utterly artless. It is exactly what you imagine it to be, should you wish to waste your imagination in such a way. In fact, imagination is way too bright and creative a word to use. It’s a film about a gang of men who rape and torture a woman repeatedly, believe her to be dead, and then, when she returns in the final reel, suffer for their actions. Don’t think beyond that. That nauseating idea you now have in your head is all that it is, and less.

Slamming a movie so lacking in craft (it looks like crude video rushes thrown together, it has virtually no dialogue, it is badly recorded, there is no direction, and that’s without mentioning that it is an exploitative piece of crap) isn’t sport. In the end you devolve into a head-shaking doubt-wracked mess, wondering if you’ve become that reactionary fool you always swore you’d never turn into; but here it’s justified. Looking at I Spit On Your Grave now, looking at it then, is as unpleasant as it gets.

Which brings me to the re-make and a lot of areas that I feel very uncomfortable inhabiting, but, hey, I want to unscramble this.

You see, despite many many misgivings, one of the things I am definitely unable to say about the new movie is that it lacks craft. Indeed, it is extremely well crafted. Moreover, it is an effective and lean machine put together solely – it seems at first glance – to show support for the female character (Jennifer, played by the excellent Sarah Butler). The basic story is the same but it has been embellished and thankfully shifted around to eradicate the grim feeling that I never managed to erase from before, that by being attractive, by sunbathing in public, and then by using her wily charms to later lure the men individually to an unexpected rendezvous – she takes a bath with one of them – the girl at the centre of everything was somehow complicit in her predicament.

Now, yes, Jennifer is still a pretty girl, but she’s conspicuously successful, intelligent, charismatic and much more importantly has placed a boundary around herself. The fact that she is still assaulted in her holiday home dispenses with any she-asked-for-it defence. You might think this is an unnecessary comment, but beneath the bleak cold shadow cast by that first film, believe me, it needs saying that these men step over a line. This concept is further emphasised by having a character she is expected to trust shattering that confidence in the worst way possible.

When the assault takes place, the threat and tension had been ratcheted up to such a degree that I was expecting something as unwatchable and soul-staining as similar scenes in Irreversible or Baise-Moi, say, but that’s not the case and although what we get is deeply unpleasant and most definitely not entertainment (again, you’d think it unnecessary to say that, huh?) for the most part it is implied, or is suggested as happening during Jennifer’s understandable blackout.

Although none of this first half of the movie could ever be defended as some sort of feminist manifesto, what isn’t beyond doubt is that the film is on Jennifer’s side. We’re on Jennifer’s side. Unquestionably we don’t want this to happen to her, and when it does we want it to stop.

In the second half, well, that’s something entirely different. The revenge section of the first film is a comparatively brief matter. What that says, I’m not sure. Here, it’s what it’s all about. Undeniably, this hits all the right buttons for an audience baying for blood. The way Jennifer dispatches her tormentors mirrors the different ways in which they humiliated her (the guy who video’d her has ‘something’ done to his eyes, the cruelly handsome thug who cannot bear the idea of not possessing her loses his manhood, etc.). There’s a primitive satisfaction to it all.

But is that progress? What sort of balance have we redressed with that? We’re given an itch and it’s scratched for us. And you know what? It’s done very smartly, very creatively; and, yes, once you’ve been beaten into submission it is appealing to see these monsters taken apart like this. I don’t deny that when Jennifer is betrayed and you know there’s no hope left for her, you want the man who has deceived her to suffer (and trust me, he does). But I Spit On Your Grave leaves a foul taste.

The film is being marketed on it’s unrated status. Indeed, on IMdB it’s now known as I Spit on Your Grave: Unrated. It’s a repulsive enough phrase without having to add anything so salacious as the intimation that it’s too strong for a certificate. The poster shows Sarah Butler’s almost bare bottom (peeking out of an outfit she doesn’t actually wear in the film, it’s a copy of the old poster from the seventies). The tagline is “It’s Date Night”, a phrase lifted from a sneered line in the movie, but given, in isolation, it’s own particular brand of wince-inducing inappropriateness. As a lesson in what is wrong, this remake works almost too well. As an entry in the new canon of re-imaginings of old horror standards, it is, I’d say, unique because it trumps its source material at every turn. But when it starts to turn into Saw (would a rape victim bent on revenge really decide to ‘get inventive’?) and when the only way left to sell it is on smirks and nudge-nudge insinuations then what’s really been learnt?

Stars? I think I’ll leave it unrated…

Monsters

A friend of mine, to whom I’d not spoken for some time, asked me yesterday if I’d seen any good movies recently. This was 48 hours after Film 4′s FrightFest, where I’d seen some utter dreck, but where I’d also managed to catch the sublime Monsters. As I told her the premise, I could see her eyes glazing over. “It doesn’t sound like anything I’d fancy,” she said. And I could see her point.

“Six years ago,” runs the press blurb, “a NASA probe returning to Earth with samples of alien organisms, crashed over Central America. Soon after, new life forms began to appear there and half of Mexico was quarantined. Today the American and Mexican military struggle to contain the giant creatures.”

You’re thinking District 9, right? Or something along those lines, but that ball park. And if you have no science fiction or horror leanings at all, then I bet, just like my friend, you’re reaching for the Off switch around about the start of the second sentence? I can’t say I blame you; the movie described there is not the movie I saw on Saturday night. But, shit, you have to get the punters through the door somehow, and Monsters is such an unusual little film (little in budget only, in scale and ambition it’s genuinely epic) that it may struggle – in fact, no, it will – to find any kind of audience at all.

Aptly, it stars two people who impressed in separate movies that are as far apart as one might get, other than that their budgets were both pretty modest. Scoot McNairy, who mooched around with a decent dollop of Indie cool in the Woody Allen-esque In Search of a Midnight Kiss, and Whitney Able, the High School bitch so memorably chased across a field by a car in All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, coming together here with a perfect chemistry that might otherwise defy such cross-genre melding.

This is, you see, a love story. And a road movie. And there’s some social commentary thrown in. And a little – a very little – bit of politics. So you can see how difficult it may find hunting out an audience. What with the aliens as well.

I’m being glib. Monsters is predominately a love story. It follows Andrew Kaulder (McNairy), a feckless and frustrated photojournalist working out of Guadalajara, who is charged with escorting his newspaper’s owner’s daughter, Sam (Able), through the infected zone and back into the US. When the official and security-monitored transport links break down, the couple are soon relying on dodgy connections, corrupt officials, and ultimately their own instincts to survive. For the most part, for the vast vast majority of the time, this is an attritional challenge fed to us purely through third party references, through anecdotal evidence, through the TV, through threats perceived rather than encountered. Noises off are heard, but the creatures are hardly ever seen. For many, I fear this will mean the movie falls betwixt and between all the bases it is trying to cover, but for me it was almost perfect. The hints and threats as the two protagonists limped towards their final goal added to what we felt about the characters, not how good we thought the CGI might be.

It is a languid and beautiful film, set out with a scope and sense of awe that so much popular cinema simply no longer bothers with. That it takes the time to do this, and do it all so well, means that when the climax comes it is all the more affecting for having involved you so personally. A satisfying and quietly impressive movie, director Gareth Edwards has debuted with some style, I just hope that somebody takes notice.