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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 04/21/2008 : 16:52:36
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Oh, Danny boy -- what have you done?
You know when you're in a bit of a hurry and you've got a bit of paper that you have to tape onto another bit of paper, and the scotch-tape isn't coming away from roll properly and you get the two bits of paper lined up, but just at the moment you apply the tape, one of the bits moves and you don't have time to start again, and you have to rush out of the house with these not-quite-joined bits of paper? Yeah? Well, Ex-music vid director Baillie Walsh wrote and directed Flashbacks of a Fool, but it never recovers from being two separate films that just won't join up together.
The film stars Daniel Craig as Joe Scott who also joined the long list of Executive Producers. Judging from the amount of different companies involved in getting this limping vehicle to the screen it must have been a hard sell, even for James Bond. Of course, topping and tailing the Flashback of the title - one huge loooooooong flashback [a structural error], means he's not the central character. Well, OK, he is, but it's his younger self [as played by Harry Eden] who gets more screen-time.
In a nutshell, the film's a mess. Craig's a good actor, he really is, and with even more of his body on display than as 007, he's got the kind of looks which are already beginning to age not just gracefully, but in the way that will make him even more watchable.
But, but, but, but, but ... Danny-boy - you need someone clearly wiser than you to sort the script wheat from the chaff. This is chaff, buster, despite some creditable performances and some intriguing English scenery that hasn't been done to death.
What have we got? A once hot film star way past his peak, taking refuge in his to die for home overlooking the sea and a lifestyle of self-obsession and indulgence that make the Marquis de Sade seem like a playful puppy. He's coasting. He's floating on the past.
News from home about the death of his best boyhood pal drops him in a dilemma. His reluctance to return for the funeral hints at his troubled past, and he chooses to wade into the sea instead of queueing at airport check-in. During a long floating episode, we're transported back to his past.
We get to meet his single mom, her neighbours, his pals in an unremarkable seaside town, where all there is to do is hang out at the arcade [where kids played the games that preceeded their computer versions], or go skinny-dipping in the wooded lake, or thrill to the outrage of Bowie, Lou Reed, and Roxy Music - impersonating their muso heroes amid the vapid decor of distant parents.
Young Joe knows he wants out, but can't quite figure out where out is and what he might do should he ever find it. Helping him is the more sophisticated, more educated Ruth, whom he almost pairs up with if it weren't for a bad mis-timing involving a sexually predatory neighbour. As she's educating him her young daughter is sent to play on the beach, a very dishevelled beach after a particularly violent storm.
Oh, yes, folks it's all there - all those weather and water metaphors. All to no avail. It's such a clumsy tale. I suspect Walsh had a much smaller story about a teenager who unwittingly gets involved in a local tragedy which haunts him forever. Then he tried to tape it onto a story of a glam film star gone wrong.
But it really never fits so everything seems a contrivance. And, when Joe finally washes up on the LA beach and decides to take that plane back home, the one potentially explosive scene - between Joe and the adultrous neighbour - that scene's denied to us, it's not there, and for no good reason. It's replaced by an awkward moment between Joe and grown-up Ruth ... a scene for anyone who remembers the powerful meeting of Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass is like a weed by comparison.
Of course Kazan was a wonderful director and had an emotional sizzler of a script by William Inge who knew a thing or two about love and guilt and redemption. Walsh has got a long way to go.
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Demisemicenturian 
"Four ever European"
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Posted - 04/21/2008 : 17:10:09
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Flashbacks of a Fool
Yep, he really is not good-looking at all, but the opening scene was a pleasant surprise. 
I agree about the structure. It might be totally cliched to intersperse two timelines, but that would have worked better here. The S in the title is completely superfluous! And talking of things not joining up properly, some of the years and ages just do not make sense.
Still, there is something enjoyable about the feel of it, and not even in just a nostalgia-trip kind of way. |
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Flashbacks of a Fool
