Neil Young's Film Lounge

for this week’s TRIBUNE : ‘The Ghost’; ‘Crying With Laughter’; ‘The Manchurian Candidate’; ‘Beeswax’

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RATHER a good week at the movies for lovers of conspiracy-theories. With suspiciously perfect timing, Roman Polanski’s politically-charged thriller The Ghost materialises only days after the General Election countdown officially kicked off. Early May was always the bookies’ favourite, of course, but the film’s distributors can’t have known that The Rt Hon A. C. L. Blair would reappear so dramatically on the British political scene – just as the first Ghost posters started popping up on our bus-shelters, prominently featuring the visage of Pierce Brosnan as Blair-surrogate ‘Adam Lang.’
   In an audacious – indeed, libel-risking – example of roman à clef (Polanski pun unintentional), Lang is a recently-retired former PM, one who took his country into unpopular Middle-Eastern wars out of loyalty to a gung-ho right-wing American president. There are differences between Blair and Lang, of course: Blair secured a reported £5m for his upcoming memoirs; the fictional Lang must have had a rather better agent, as he nabbed $10m for his autobiography. Trouble is, what with worrying about being prosecuted for war-crimes at The Hague, Lang can’t quite find the time to put pen to paper.
   A ghost-writer is duly hired and completes a hefty first draft – but, in the film’s opening, promptly washes up dead on the misty shores of Martha’s Vineyard (one of numerous sequences making much of that area’s damply brackish Chappaquiddick* air.) With rewrites needed quickly, a replacement must be found – enter an opportunistic London freelancer (Ewan McGregor), who soon finds he’s entered some very hazardous waters (think “demon eyes” and then some.)
   To say any more would be to spoil the fun. And The Ghost, for all that it deals with fundamentally dead-serious subject-matter (the protagonist’s changing relationship with Lang mirrors that of the British people with Blair), is an unusually witty page-turner that, despite a slight dearth of actual ‘action’, keeps us engaged throughout its two-hour-plus running-time. Based on the 2007 novel written by ‘Robert Harris’, the script – by Harris and Polanski – contains its share of absurdities, inaccuracies and implausibilities, but so briskly does the tale unfold that these only become apparent in retrospect.
   Delivering a pacy, slick entertainment that mercifully avoids Jason-Bourne-style high-jinks. Polanski is on his best form for well over a decade (ironic that one of the film’s main subplots should involve a man seeking to avoid jail for long-ago misdeeds.) The result is a pleasingly paranoid, topical thriller that combines Hitchcockian tropes with the doomy ambiguities of mid-1970s forebears such as Alan J Pakula’s The Parallax View. The director also incorporates nods to his own back-catalogue (Chinatown, Cul-de-sac, Rosemary’s Baby, Frantic): the ghost-writer is “haunted” by his ill-fated predecessor in a manner strongly reminiscent of The Tenant (1976). Polanski and Harris even get away with withholding the name of their main character – a screenwriting gimmick that, in lesser hands, almost invariably comes across as distractingly smart-alec.
   Casting and performances help – McGregor’s slight insubstantiality as a leading man is for once a plus rather than a minus; Tom Wilkinson is on his best suavely sinister form as a shady academic; Olivia Williams is an Oscar-worthy revelation as the notably un-Cherie-like Mrs Lang. Brosnan, meanwhile, wisely avoids impersonating Blair à la Michael Sheen in Stephen Frears’ The Queen (a film with which The Ghost would make an ideal double-bill) – but is, if anything, a closer physical match. And as I noted to a cynical left-leaning pal after exiting the screening, Brosnan is probably what Blair sees when he looks in the mirror. “Not sure he looks in the mirror much these days,” came the reply.

ONCE revealed, the grand conspiracy underpinning The Ghost is suitably extravagant, elaborate and chilling – and remains just about within the realms of feasibility (as well as arguably letting Lang/Blair off the hook a little.) Half a step further into the realms of political-historical paranoid-conspiracy sci-fi would take us into the territory of John Frankenheimer’s 1962 minor classic The Manchurian Candidate: reissued this week; emphatically not to be confused with Jonathan Demme’s misbegotten 2004 remake; and subject of a 2002 BFI monograph by Greil Marcus that’s still probably the greatest book ever written about a single film.
   Based on the novel by Richard Condon – who also provided the literary basis for 1979′s unfairly neglected Winter Kills - it pivots on a figure evidently inspired by real-life Commie-hunting Senator, Joe McCarthy. Except this time the McCarthy figure – Sen. Iselin (James Gregory) – is little more than a hapless Dubya-ish front-man for extreme right-wing machinations and plots, many of them involving his own wife (Angela Lansbury.) The “candidate” of the title isn’t Iselin, by the way, but his step-son Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) although, confusingly, the latter isn’t running for any kind of public office.
   The ‘Manchurian’ element, meanwhile, refers to events during the Korean War – from which Shaw came home a hero, along with his comrade-in-arms Bennett Marco (top-billed Frank Sinatra). Years later, Marco is plagued by a recurring nightmare – and his subsequent attempts to find out exactly what happened Way Out East lead him directly to Shaw and his powerfully-connected family, and a plot (by pantomime-baddie Russkies and Orientals) to create the perfect, conscience-free assassin…
   Though informed by specific Cold War concerns, and dealing entirely with internecine squabbles within the Republican Party (hence the preponderance of Lincoln references), The Manchurian Candidate retains such boldness, irreverence and vigour – think Preston Sturges meets Stanley Kubrick – to indicate it must have been years, even decades, ahead of its time. Indeed, the initial release came just before the start of a wave of assassinations which was to irrevocably alter the US political landscape, and whose reverberations continue to be felt to this day – Frankenheimer was, eerily enough, in the kitchen of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.
   Technically, The Manchurian Candidate is something of a marvel: inventively off-kilter monochrome cinematography by Lionel Lindon combines engagingly with the deadpan off-the-wall dialogue of George Axelrod’s complex screenplay, handled with consistent, controlled aplomb by the terrific cast. Incidental pleasures abound: Lithuanian-British Harvey, making absolutely zero attempt at an American accent, is quite hilariously icy as the colossally unpleasant, perpetually sneering Shaw (“One day of Christmas is loathsome enough!”). But this is very much Lansbury’s show – she was, quite rightly, Oscar-nominated for her turn as one of the greatest, sexiest villains in screen history. Let’s just say that anyone who only knows the venerable British actress from her twinkly Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote is in for one hell of a (pleasant) surprise.

THE welcome re-issue of The Manchurian Candidate casts something of a shadow over this week’s new releases, but adventurous audiences should nevertheless seek out a low-budget British thriller that will surely rank as one of the year’s finest domestic offerings. Crying With Laughter is a most entertaining, engaging, likeably confident affair from debutant writer-director Justin Molotnikov. And whereas so many UK films founder on grounds of unneccessary melodrama, contrivance, implausibility and coincidence, this one actually manages to turn those exactly elements to its advantage.
   That’s because the whole film is, in effect, the illustration of a stand-up “routine” by its protagonist Joey Frisk (Stephen McCole), an Edinburgh comedian on the brink of the big time. But while he’s successful and confident on stage, away from the spotlight it’s another matter –  and when he makes an ill-judged crack about a former schoolfriend, he ends up knee-deep in blood-spattered trouble.
   A synopsis of Crying With Laughter‘s plot developments would make it sound like a typically convoluted, over-dramatic Brit-pic. But by putting all of this in the context of Joey’s act, barrelling the story along with frenetic gusto, and building the whole thing around McCole’s terrific performance, Molotnikov more than gets away with it. McCole’s achievement is partly to be so utterly convincing as a stand-up (no surprise to learn he trod the boards for real as part of his research), and partly because of how he socks over Joey’s charisma, vulnerability and cockiness – so that his progress from obnoxious, solipsistic schmuck to something resembling decent-bloke normality keeps us watching at every juncture. At 37, this rough-hewn Glaswegian is perhaps a little young to be hailed the new Brian Cox (and the old Brian Cox is still as ubiquitously busy as ever). But only a little.

AN unusually busy week film-wise leaves only limited room for Beeswax. It’s the third feature from Andrew Bujalski, a 32-year-old Bostonian writer-director hailed in certain quarters as the saviour of American independent cinema after Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), both of which obtained UK release in 2007. Like that pair, this is another rough-edged, noodling affair in which genial but frustratingly self-absorbed twenty- and thirty-somethings chatter on (and on) about their lives, loves and finances.
   Set mainly in a kooky Austin vintage-clothing boutique, Beeswax (as in “mind your beeswax”; beeswax = “business”) focusses on twin sisters: blonde, brittle Jeannie, and brunette, easier-going Lauren (real-life siblings Tilly and Maggie Hatcher.) Jeannie is manager/co-owner of the store, while Lauren drifts between teaching jobs. Jeannie is also involved in a long-simmering dispute with Amanda (Anne Dodge), the shop’s co-owner, and receives informal legal advice from her law-student boyfriend Merrill (Alex Karpovsky). Minor mishaps ensue.
   The Hatchers are certainly fresh and appealing screen-presences, and Beeswax at its best captures the semi-articulate flow of conversation among a certain social stratum. Given Bujalski’s reported discomfort at being so closely associated with the no-budget, relationships-focused mini-genre known as “mumblecore,” however, one might have expected him to distance himself from such labels here. But while they’re educated and intelligent, nearly everyone has somewhat contrived communication problems. The result is OK as it goes, but Beeswax is perfectly content to burble along through 100 minutes without ever threatening to come up with much that’s surprising, troubling or unpredictable.

Neil Young
3rd April, 2010

(written for the 13th April edition of Tribune magazine)