The Golden Compass

Inappropriate as the description might seem, the much-trumpeted The Golden Compass may very easily be this year’s cinematic Curate’s egg.

Philip Pullman’s marvellous His Dark Materials arrives on the screen looking and feeling and sounding absolutely wonderful. The smart AU setting seeps into your subconscious in the same piecemeal way as it did in the books; a sudden new image here, a shiny bizarre backdrop there, each otherworldly concept crafted with infinite care.

Only it would, if it were allowed the space and time to develop.

At a smidge over two hours, Compass rattles along at a never-flagging pace, but within a minute of the start you wish you were watching the extended DVD cut (please, Authority, let there eventually be one), for it is saddled with the lamest, most rushed opening imaginable, an introduction that could quite happily be labelled “previously…on His Dark Materials“. Over title credits that carry the same ambience and sensation as The Fellowship of the Ring, we are told, Cate Blanchett-style, that it all begins with the forging of the Great Rings, three given to the Elves- , no, sorry, not really, but with New Line (the same production company as LotR) pulling the strings it damn well recalls that earlier film to mind almost immediately. Second, the voice-over that we do hear explains too speedily the many-universes concept, daemons, the ensuing quest, so that the whole enjoyably baffling discovery process of the novel is scuppered. Finally – and seriously, this really is all within the first minute – our first encounter is not with ‘Lyra and her daemon’ moving through the darkening hall, but Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), wandering up to centre screen, with his snow leopard, Stelmaria, who looks up and speaks to him and asks if they will be meeting ‘the girl’. Asriel smiles at us and says almost conversationally, ‘oh, I should think so.’

This seems a strange point at which to start flagging problems, and I assure you I’m not being precious about the text (I think that screenwriters and adaptors should be allowed to whittle away at anything they think may free the story for visual effect and style) but it is such an immediate betrayal of the novel and its intentions and atmosphere that it needs to be addressed. Within the pages of the book, until we discover the higher purposes of Asriel’s project, and after really, he seems to us to be a brittle, supremely intelligent, aloof man; dark, mysterious, powerful and challenging. Lyra, who we should meet first, is our, ahem, compass, if you like, it’s through her that we attach ourselves, daemon-like, before we meet anyone else, and its through her that we discover the world. This is crucial, and here it’s fluffed.

Five or six minutes later, there she is, moving through the darkening hall, then, eavesdropping, discovering Asriel’s project proposal before his College’s committee. The grand scheme to go North to discover the imagined parallel worlds is unveiled, the setting up of Asriel against the all-ruling all-controlling Magisterium slips into place, the creepy Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman looking threateningly glamorous, if that’s possible) begins to exert a malign influence over Lyra, and all is just as it should be.

Just as it should be. Maddeningly, that voice-over intro provides information that we find out for ourselves anyway, as the movie progresses, so why hold our hands so patronisingly?

Unfortunately, this sets the tone for certain junctures and after long periods where you’re in clover with what’s in front of you, you’ll suddenly get speedy set-ups (Lyra escaping into the London underworld after just a few hundred yards), followed by irritatingly bland shortcuts in the dialogue where people speak unnaturally, or tell each other stuff they already know. When she’s rescued by her allies the Gyptians, her good friend Billy’s Mom, Ma Costa, tells her “we’re off to meet John Faa, King of the Gyptians”. Oof! Clunky dollops of exposition pop up throughout, derailing much of the good work on show. Now, Pullman isn’t averse to grand strokes of the pen himself, and checking through the text last night I could find similarly bold statements, but he has context to play with, you’ve already seen Lyra playing with the Gyptian kids for several pages and worked out just how happy she feels in their company. When Ma and her gang recue her from Mrs Coulter’s henchman – who, incidentally, don’t really seem to deserve the heavy-handed fate dealt them – you sit there thinking, ’sorry, and you people are who, exactly?’ The connection with the brief scene of kids’ games at the start of the film isn’t strong enough to see you nodding happily, smugly putting the pieces together. It’s jarring.

Possibly the worst offences relate to the witches who, rather than casting a sinister spell with their peculiar splendour, are rushed to the point where, apropos of nothing it seems, dropping down on to the deck of the Gyptian ship heading North, Lyra says to Serafina (Eva Green, doing her best, and looking amazing), “who are you?” “I’m a witch,” comes the reply.

The magic, like the boards of the ship, creaks noisily…

The Gyptian boat heads North to Trollesund. There’s the town, on the horizon, looking spectacularly realised. For about seven seconds, and then all of a sudden we’re walking down the gangplank onto the quay. What about the lingering establishing shot? The pulling in? The sensation of dry land after a tortuous journey? No, bish bash bosh, here we are. More haste and less speed isn’t a lesson learned here.

Fortunately, it is at this point that the film grabs itself some gravitas by introducing us to Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott) and the great polar bear, Iorek Byrnison (voiced by Sir Ian McKellan). Elliott is a great actor, a man so far out of his time you can see why, when he unravels that immense laconic drawl, he stars in Westerns. He should have been a gunslinger or a town sheriff or something. His Scoresby is older than I’d ever imagined the character, but now I shall just see him as the definition of what’s on the page. His mannerisms are perfect and wonderfully casually heroic. McKellan’s ice bear is well-matched to Lyra’s sense of let’s-get-this-sorted and Scoresby’s easy courage. He also looks astonishing, just astonishing. It’s here that the film suddenly wakes up from the troubles it’s been encountering and decides to amaze and seduce you. Iorek, Lee and Lyra make a terrific trio and for a long time you sink back into your chair, relieved to be carried along by something that is genuinely great.

In the frozen North, our party of Gyptians, Lyra, Lee and the bear, come up against the forces of the Magisterium (remember them?) who – the witches tell them – have created a citadel where a team of scientists are gathered. On their way there, Lyra encounters her friend Billy Costa, hiding in a barn, almost a ghost because his daemon has been cut away from him. This is a conflation of the scene in the book where the child is Tony Makarios. The change of character, I think, is made because up until this point you haven’t really been allowed to appreciate just how inseparable human and daemon are. By changing Tony to Billy (whose Mom, you will recall is in the Gyptian group), there is now also a strong maternal pull to make you realise just what a crime it is that has been committed. However, it is at this point that we leave Billy and he’s never mentioned again. Is removing the daemon really that bad? Can we have some guidance here?

Whatever the repercussions of the cutting-away, it seems that this is what the scientists of the Magisterium are doing in their citadel, and so inevitably we move across the ice to a grand showdown under the stars.

Before that, two things which those of you who have been keeping awake, will be aware of, need to be resolved. Firstly, didn’t Nicole Kidman used to be in this? And second, going further back, whatever happened to Daniel Craig? Kidman and Craig are seen briefly after the first act, the first in a scene back in London where, having lost Lyra, she returns to the Magisterium to mutter darkly with Derek Jacobi, Christopher Lee and Edward de Souza about how deep and mellifluous their voices are. Well, not de Souza’s, who doesn’t have a line; nor Lee, who only has five or six. Jacobi, too, is criminally underused. This on it’s own, regardless of the fact that there must – there just has to be – a longer and more fleshed out cut yet to be seen, betrays the sense that less is not more. A grander vision is lying in a film can somewhere. Surely? But yes, Kidman, back to Mrs Coulter, who arrives slinkily at the scientist’s lair just as Lyra has infiltrated it herself, in time to catch a neat explanation of how the daemon cutting will cure all children of the need ever to have free will again. Finally, something serious upon which to hang your interest. All too briefly, unfortunately, this devolves to a confrontation, where the Gyptians plus the bear and Scoresby (now in a balloon) bump up against the Magisterium’s armed guard.

No grand discussion here, then. No thought-provoking examination of the human condition. Just a fight. And it is just a fight, too, it’s certainly not the Rohirrim charge on the Pelennor Fields, in fact it’s all over very quickly and is gloomily confusing, even if the witches do turn up to add a little Goth glam to the proceedings. Eva Green really does look smashing…have I said that already? As it ends, Lyra, her friend Roger, Lee, Iorek and Serafina head off even further North to rescue Asriel.

Ah, yes, Asriel, who has travelled North to do, well, something, that was, hang on, mentioned almost, what, two hours previously? He is seen very briefly, like Kidman, in a tiny scene on a mountain where he looks across a valley and says to his leopard, “Ah, the kingdom of Svalbard!” Presumably he’d not told her where they were going. Then he gets captured by some bandits and that’s that.

And, alarmingly, that’s where the movie ends. Yes, there, not with Ariel being sprung from his mountain fortress or even stepping into the pierced sky and entering another universe. Is that all? Are all these too-brief wonders really going to be left here? Is this enough to drag us back? “There are worlds beyond our own”, the poster shouts. Are there? Who says? Asriel wants to provide proof at the very beginning of the story, but unfortunately as it draws to an end we see nothing, and we’re asked to take that promise on Faith. And that’s a big request, especially of an audience treated in such a cavalier fashion.

There is much to admire here, but so many false notes struck, and jerks and jabs tossed in to knock us off our stride. When Peter Jackson released his Rings trilogy he made the DVD versions bigger and brasher, adding almost an hour to each part, and in doing so created a much more cohesive set of works. If New Line want another world-conquering trilogy on their hands, they’d better start putting back some of the good cut stuff, because this might be tempting, but it may not be tempting enough. That free will the story champions could end up seeing this franchise stumble at the first hurdle.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Knowing that the audience knows that they’re starting out on a near three-hour ‘arthouse’ western, Andrew Dominik, the director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, makes a really smart move and decides from scratch to tell his story plainly, simply, and with as many beautiful images as possible. We start with James (Brad Pitt) standing in a fabulous horizon-reaching cornfield, clouds scudding across to the sunset; over images of his thousand-yard stare, the narration begins:

 

Quote:

“He was growing into middle age and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue…he went everywhere unrecognised and lunched with Kansas City shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattleman or commodities investor, someone rich and leisured who had the common touch…he also had a condition that was referred to as granulated eyelids and it caused him to blink more than usual, as if he found Creation slightly more than he could accept.”

Immediately we know that this is not Pitt’s voice, and as the film progresses we realise it belongs to none of the other players either; it is an anonymous Chorus (the text comes from Ron Hansen’s biography of the same name), shifting easily from scene to scene, delivering guidance that we might see the characters in this story as real people, a very human mixture of good, bad, and indifferent. Following the opening cadence of Hansen’s re-imagining, like the clouds above that turn and tumble over Jesse’s head, there are thin, dark slivers that rumble threateningly amid the description:

 

Quote:

“He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to…”

The camera drifts away from Jesse and the gathering dusk and switches to woodland camp where the James gang is about to undertake what will end up being their very last train hold-up. This is a tour de force, delivered with such care and attention to detail, but producing so many startling images, that you cannot imagine anyone else bothering ever again to depict a similar event. Jesse and his brother Frank (Sam Shepard) board the train with a calm, military swagger, marshalling their troops with casual authority. Around them they’ve gathered a rag tag bunch of scallywags and petty villains from the local hillsides, but chief among this group are the slightly more regularly employed Ford brothers, Bob (Casey Affleck) and Charley (Sam Rockwell), whose network of familial connections mesh together several gang members. It is this set of connections that will ultimately bring down the gang.

After the hold-up, Jesse heads home to his wife and children, and Frank announces that he won’t be taking part in any more raids. Clearly he has issues with his brother and sees the success of their partnership as a thing of the past. It’s a wise move. As the older James brother leaves, the gang themselves set off to their individual safe houses, re-engaging with family and acquaintances. Each is followed, their individual characters fleshed out. It is not an edifying experience, for this is a very flawed and complicated group of men. No-one is more complicated than Jesse himself, who ruminates away on his own like a distant storm, but running him close in the enigmatic and troubled stakes is Bob – Robert – Ford, who is fascinated by the legendary outlaw. Comics and newspapers and dime novels are kept under his bed, he pesters the older man with tales of what the press say he’s done, but hasn’t. Pushed, he says that he could produce a list “as long as your night-shirt” of the connections they have:

 

Quote:

“It is interesting the many ways you and I overlap; you’re the youngest of three James boys, I’m the youngest of five Ford boys. You have blue eyes, I have blue eyes. You’re five feet eight inches tall, I’m five feet eight inches tall”

Frank, whom Bob approaches first, dismisses the boy by pointing his gun at him and ordering him away; Jesse accepts him.

Gradually, cracks appear in the gangs’ many relationships and at one point a close and terrifying shoot out inside a farmhouse results in one member’s grisly death; if you don’t want to see an exit wound in a human skull, consider this your warning. Another member is rumoured to be thinking of taking the substantial reward for information leading to the outlaws’ capture. Jesse, on a tour of the disparate members’ locations, begins to suspect that something is up and heads out to try and shake things down. As Jesse pulls the gang closer, particularly Bob and Charley, the feelings that Bob has developed become ever more complicated. Now, there’s terror, for they are covering up the death of their colleague, believing that Jesse will kill them if he discovers their secret. Jesse invites Charley and Robert to take part in another robbery, allowing them to move into his home to keep him better protected. This is fatally ironic; Bob has already been approached by the State Governor, offering him $10,000 and clemency from involvement in the gang member’s murder if he kills James. And there the title of the film is explained; no need for a spoiler warning on this one…

It must be said that Pitt’s well-worn less is more approach can be tiresome, sometimes it doesn’t work, you see him thinking through his Oscar acceptance speech as he grates the lines out; you wish he were more animated, more whistles and bells. But here the technique is employed to spectacular effect, and he is shockingly good. His impression of a haunted man, perplexed and recondite to the point of destruction is remarkable, as he tries to hold himself in and be the legend he’s become, you can see in the tiniest gestures just exactly what it is costing him. But, astonishingly, he’s not the star of the show, however good his performance. Casey Affleck, as the ‘coward’ Robert Ford is mesmeric. Gauche, obsessed, full of compulsive glances left and right, this is a man riven with great contrasting themes of fixation, repression and the need for affirmation – which doesn’t come – that arrogant, muderous bully before him isn’t the myth he expected (“He’s just a human being,” he tells his brother). In the final act, he takes Jesse down and then his real struggles begin.

Be careful what you wish for.

Affleck’s Bob Ford ultimately emerges as a character more fractured and broken than even the bandit he destroys. The legacy he creates in one terrible moment of history-making produces a fame that he is totally unprepared for, regardless of the wealth of newspaper cuttings he may have collected and absorbed. It is an awful, horrific, destiny that he creates and watching him stare into the same distance that Jesse looked at in those opening scenes is sobering indeed.

This is a long, beautiful and studious piece of work, but it is also remarkably modest in its reach. There is legend, there is fact, and we have always, continue to do so, and will always, mix them up. Clear minds have created a clear-minded movie, but the minds on show are anything but.