| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 09/03/2011 : 18:58:02
I'm going to kick off this mini-essay with a fwfr quote of mine for a 2007 film called Across the Universe.
"In an ensemble cast Jim Sturgess stands out, not because he's better than anyone, but because he's clearly going to be a huge star."
I'll resist the temptation to say I told you so. Sturgess simply walks away with One Day. And he happens to be surrounded by some mighty fine actors indeed.
What he's got that assures his stardom is like a wonderful cake. World-renowned baker Paul Hollywood is currently co-presenting a British Bake-off show and his fav praise-phrase is "that's a good bake."
Everything Sturgess presents builds from a base of "a good bake." His technique folds seamlessly into an uncanny understanding of the complexity of human behaviour, a fearless willingness to display an emotional cabinet of depravity alongside near spiritual redemption.
His icing on that cake is of course a face that the camera just loves. You want to see more or him, whatever his character's mood, mayhem or magic.
Now this isn't a case of doing what the director says, or just following the script. Let's take the latter first.
I've not read the novel, which I gather trails out the tail of two people we all know ought to wind up together but who spend decades resisting their attraction that transcends friendship.
It's not a particularly original story and I'm not sure it finds any new wrinkles to keep us enthralled - I suppose it's a good girlie beach or plane book. Forgive me if it's some literary masterpiece.
Now films are not books and only a very small handful manage to reform themselves into screen stories worth telling. The best screen writers don't have hundreds of pages to tie in a character's breakfast order with their emotional arc. They need to focus on more than mere moments of significance.
One Day skims along like a stone across water, attempting to fill in the inner life of people with a recitation of incidents.
OK - yes, there's enough to make us care about this couple. And here's a bit about Anne Hathaway - an actress I think has a very effective range and oozes charm and intelligence. Like myself, she was born in Brooklyn and has managed to sound convincingly un-Brooklyn in many films.
But here, for some insane reason that added nothing to the story (I don't care whether it was true to the book or not), the choice was to have Emma come from Yorkshire. Some British accents are fairly easy to achieve. Yorkshire ain't one of them. And Hathaway fails spectacularly. Most of the time she's just speaking with a standard English accent as adopted by so many UK actors. That would have been fine. We'd never have noticed -- until every once in while and out of the blue she'll produce some vowels that are --- I dunno, part Liverpudlian, part Manchester, part up North somewhere.
As for the acting - she's excellent. Not as excellent as Sturgess - but then no one else is. Except for a couple of small scenes featuring Rafe Spall (the very talented son of Timothy). Spall's cornering the market in the interesting loser - sometimes the mad interesting loser, sometimes the sad interesting loser. Anyway - he has two tiny moments that are the kind of sublime crumbs of genius that would have forced Lee Strasberg out of his poker-faced Actors Studio stasis.
One is a tiny moment of sheer joy at seeing someone he loves sweep the crowd off their feet. He tries to whistle through his fingers, then realises he doesn't know how to do it. And the other moment is when he has to say goodbye to a briefly shared life. The couple has said it all. He knows it's the moment to leave. He opens the door and for a micro-second he glances back, taking a final mental polaroid. Those are the kind of moments that prove there are no small parts, only small actors.
I'd better mention virtual cameos from Patricia Clarkson, Ken Stott, and Romola Garai - who do the best they can with the scraps they've been thrown.
The delinquent in the room is the screenplay. If you speak the language of cinema you will know everything, every single thing, before it happens. And sometimes, you'll even be able to predict the next line.
If movies are to be made which tell our familiar stories - and of course they must be - why is it too much to hope the telling might find something extraordinary. Something about people that isn't a gimmick, or predictable, or mundane in a charming disguise.
Director Lone Scherfig, who also did the film adaptation of An Education, sure knows how to move from shot to shot. What she still needs to learn is when to trim about 15 minutes from a story that's way too cluttered with insignificance.
But she was more than lucky in choosing Sturgess for her leading man.
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| ChocolateLady |
Posted - 09/05/2011 : 21:19:30
Well, Bafta, when you hit the nail on the head, you hit it squarely and perfectly. While my ear for British accents probably isn't as attuned as those who live there full time, my London-born husband was able to confirm my suspicions with Hathaway's accent - I was appalled by it and can only think that Dick Van Dyke's portrayal of Bert in Mary Poppins may finally have a worthy contender to grab his "worst British accent" title from him. I just kept thinking that they took her so that this very British story would get an American audience - much like putting Julia Roberts into Notting Hill and Andie MacDowell into Four Weddings. The problem here is that the character here is supposed to be British while those characters were American. Hathaway is a talented actress, but this wasn't a good part for her. She did a much better job with the accent when she did Becoming Jane, although she slipped a few times there as well.
And by the way, did you not notice that after 20 years she looked maybe 5 years older than at the beginning of the film, while Sturgess looked the full 20 years older?
I too haven't read the book, but after feeling a bit let down by the movie, I'm sure its a cut above your typical 'chick-lit' - probably since it was written by a man. Which makes me think that while I agree that Jim Sturgess did a lovely job with the part of Dexter, he probably was the best drawn character of the book, and therefore the script writers were able to give him more meat than they did with the others. (Okay, call me sexist, but on the whole, male novelists write more believable male character than they do female ones, and visa versa - although there are some excellent exceptions.)
I also agree about the extraneous clutter, which shockingly made me forget the big "surprise" climax only days after I saw this movie. I swear, there's something just not right when you can almost totally forget an event in the film that supposed to be THE most truly momentous of the whole story.
But you are right - watch it for Sturgess and watch it for Spall and watch it for the little roles. I described it as "When Harry Met Sally" meets "Same Time Next Year". It isn't a bad movie, it is a nice movie - it just falls short of what it could have been.
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