By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Darkest
Hour and The Shape of Water
Darkest Hour
When the young, scrawny Gary
Oldman played Sid Vicious (Sid and Nancy),
Joe Orton (Prick Up Your Ears), Lee Harvey
Oswald (JFK) and Dracula (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) nobody, but nobody, said “You know, someday this guy
will make a great Churchill.” Even
after he was a terrific echo of Alec Guinness as George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Winston
still seemed way past his horizon.
In Darkest Hour, Oldman is the finest Churchill in films outside
documentaries (with all true respect to the Winstons of Albert Finney, Richard
Burton, Brendan Gleeson, Timothy Spall, Brian Cox, Michael Gambon and young
Simon Ward). He has prosthetic jowls and body pads, a balding dome and a brandy
growl that makes you wonder if the actor suckled cognac on the set. Oldman’s
Winston has a loving, testing relation with wife Clemmie (Kristin Scott Thomas)
– she’s so good we’d welcome more of them together – and a radar feel for his
own foibles and vanities. He uses a twinkle without turning cherubic, can be
childish to good effect, and declaims the best Churchillean rhetoric since
Burton’s. It is true that, in a few brief angles, he looks like little American
actor Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre).
But only Oldman, not Shawn, could pull off My
Dinner with Winston.
Probably 1940 was Britain’s
(and Winston’s) finest hour – he said so – but May, 1940, was bleak. As
scripted by Anthony McCarten, Joe Wright’s movie (the same Wright so right for
directing Pride and Prejudice, so
brilliant at staging Dunkirk in Atonement)
captures the least merry May in British history. Hitler’s swastika legions
seized the Low Countries and France, the British Army was cornered on the
Dunkirk beaches, the Royal Navy faced great risk in the Channel, the RAF was
short on fighters. And the new PM, favored by few in his own party after years
of fierce anti-government speeches, was disliked (at first) even by King George
VI. As was only revealed years later, Churchill also faced a coup plot by ex-PM
Neville Chamberlain and his fellow appeaser Lord Halifax. Wright is good with
parliamentary intrigues. His limiting burden is that Ronald Pickup
(Chamberlain) and Stephen Dillane (Halifax) have all the manly, dramatic blood
of cadavers fresh from the taxidermist (though bound by silk threads).
There is a key scene on a
tube (subway) train that is contrived, perhaps entirely, but is a valid,
Capra-class rouser. I doubt that in 1940 Churchill needed instruction on how to
give a radio speech. The poor French are like mice looking for a hole, with no
De Gaulle in sight. But here, so briskly urgent, is the living storm of one of
the supreme crises of modern history. A doughty champion not only rose to the dire
occasion but, with his singular voice and spine, gave it the afterglow of Henry V. There are some good digital models,
and neat devices (like the typeface close-up invented for Citizen Kane), and touching work by Ben Mendelsohn as King George
and Lily James as Churchill’s new secretary. But Darkest Hour follows its star. At 59, Oldman plays a grand old (65)
man so movingly human, so cherishably complex, so stirringly heroic.
The Shape of Water
Sally Hawkins is no movie
beauty, but the courage of her talent is beautiful to see in Guillermo Del
Toro’s The Shape of Water. How many
actors in one movie have used sign language eloquently, wittily saluted Ginger
Rogers and Shirley Temple, pulled off a gorgeous nude scene, and wrung our
emotions? Hawkins does, with her best work since Happy-Go-Lucky. Del Toro, the Mexican sensualist of densely gothic
atmosphere, recovers the magic of his early Cronos,
Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s
Backbone. My modest reservations matter little, because The Shape of Water is so frequently
engrossing.
Elisa (Hawkins), an orphaned
mute, lives with her protector, the gay commercial artist Giles (Richard
Jenkins, ace as usual). Their New York apartment is above a movie theater, the
Orpheum, currently showing two forgettables: The Story of Ruth (1960) and Mardi
Gras (1958). But the time seems more the earlier Cold War era – that is,
the fright time of Creature From the
Black Lagoon (1954). Elisa works on the clean-up crew at a secret, massive
lab where the control freak is security boss Strickland (Michael Shannon, whose
face always suggests Frankenstein fun). Sadist Strickland loves tormenting a
scaly amphibian from South America. It looks like 1954’s famous lagoon critter,
apart from a lower, human face reminiscent of Keir Dullea. Inevitably, needy
Elisa bonds with the he-beast. So does the key scientist (Nigel Bennett), a
Soviet mole tipping off Moscow. Elisa’s janitor chum Zelda (Octavia Spencer)
gives her sassy support.
The film is often
lubriciously wet, its aquatic ambience recalling M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water. It is lit by
Hawkins’s big eyes, as the trapped creature unleashes Elisa’s hunger for dreamy
release from muteness and cramped living. Del Toro’s frisky facets include an
Astaire-Rogers salute, little Shirley and Bojangles, Carmen Miranda, Alice Faye
and shiver bits like Strickland’s “I bet I could make you squawk a little.” The
movie is a feast of odds (very) and ends (exotic), superbly designed, cast and
directed. The creature’s human mouth zone might be an error, as it makes us
think of an actor wearing a sea-lizard suit (the actor is Doug Jones – not the
one just elected U.S. senator in Alabama).
Like
many imaginative directors using a fat budget and a go-for-broke story, Del
Toro can spill over a bit (so did Todd Haynes in his impressively bravura Wonderstruck). This kind of fairy-goth
tale would benefit from running shorter, and Del Toro tends to scramble our
response wires when he rapidly moves from a breezy Fred & Ginger salute to
a grim torture scene. But to miss this elegant entertainment, and Hawkins,
would be a loss and a mistake.
SALAD (A List)
Ten Absorbing Films About Winston
Churchill:
The Finest Hours (1964), starring Churchill; Young Winston (1972), starring Simon Ward; The Gathering Storm (1974), starring Richard Burton; The Gathering Storm (2002), starring
Albert Finney; Churchill’s Bodyguard (2005),
series starting Churchill and Walter Thompson; Into the Storm (2008), starring Brendan Gleeson; Winston Churchill: Walking With Destiny (2010),
starring Churchill; Churchill’s Secret (2016),
starring Michael Gambon; Churchill (2017),
starring Brian Cox, and Darkest Hour
(2017), starring Gary Oldman.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
The
unfinished but eventually fabled Latin American travel film It’s All True, for which a Brazilian fisherman
hero accidentally drowned in 1942, haunted Welles. While acting Rochester in Jane Eyre (1943) he almost got Fox to
buy the RKO footage, “so that I would be allowed to cut and finish it, then
that fell through … It would have been quite commercial in its time, not now.
But it never worked. I tried everything. I was near it, near it … and began a
pattern of trying to finish pictures which has plagued me ever since.” (Welles
to Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson
Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
In
the years after Paris, Texas (1984), Harry
Dean Stanton “became the hipster hermit on the hill. Free of tinsel in
Tinseltown, he came down from Mulholland Drive to sing in small clubs or do
modest roles. He finished his gig in HBO’s Big
Love by crooning ‘Canción Mixteca.’ He inspired Debbie Harry’s ‘I Want That
Man,’ the lyrics including ‘I want to dance with Harry Dean Stanton …’ And he appeared
briefly in David Lynch’s great film The
Straight Story.” After wrapping up his starring role in Lucky with another Mexican song, Harry
Dean at 91 in L.A.. on Sept. 15. (Quote from the Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
out on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Harry
Dean Stanton as Lyle Straight in The
Straight Story (Buena Vista Pictures, 1999; director David Lynch,
cinematographer Freddie Francis).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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