Nosh 155: 'Rocketman,' 'Photograph' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Reviews: Rocketman and Photograph)

Rocketman

Not far into Rocketman you may feel like a python that slithered into Liberace’s wardrobe room, then choked on sequins and rhinestones. The movie is amped so high on show-biz that it makes Elton John seem like the mythic son of Liberace and the spiritual father of Lady Gaga. It opens with a frantic, jaded Elton storming into his first A.A. meeting, not only confiding “I am an alcoholic” but also a drug addict and bulimic shopaholic. He’s wearing a giant bird costume, plus the goat horns of Satan, and can even slip into a New York cab in this rig without damaging his epic wings.

Other alcoholics forget their troubles and fall into awed silence, listening to John tell his life story, using most of the Elton John songbook for ricochet cues and clues. This seems like a Vegas Olympics confessional musical, as vast, blasting concerts spill into stagey intimacies. Sir Elton produced the film, a dizzy appetizer for his coming memoirs. Director Dexter Fletcher is the most wanton pile-driver of Brit kitsch since Ken Russell assaulted many famous books and talents. Lee Hall wrote, both beyond and below his more graceful crowd-pleasing with Billy Elliot. Music often rides to the rescue of weary dramatic devices, songs essentially outing young prodigy Reggie Dwight well before he has gay sex as stellar party bazooka Elton John. Actor Taron Egerton captures John’s rather plain, insecure looks, and has the pipes to rival the singer’s sock-it-home voice. He’s like a nice, balding church usher who can morph into the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Along with some sappy stuff and the surging tunes, there is a heavy tax of giddy montages, split-screens and egotistic exhibitionism. And, of course, rote types: the grimly homophobic father, the cynically distant mother (Bryce Dallas Howard barely ages over 25 years), the “genius” manager (smugly handsome Richard Madden) who becomes a money vampire, the old black rocker who passes quick soul wisdom to the naïve young comer. The one truly sympathetic soul is lyricist Bernie Taupin, a friend in all moods and under huge stress, finely played by Jamie Bell. That Elton’s life turned out quite well is a lame footnote – a Hallmark twinkle after all the jubilation and misery.   

Photograph

Back in 2007 Chris Smith’s The Pool set some critical hearts aflutter. The simple, sensual tale of a young hotel servant in Goa, India, who falls in love with a garden-girdled house and its swimming pool, is mysteriously both factual and elusive, almost a lyrical documentary. But American movie audiences, like most, are sugar-hooked on reliable jolts of melodrama (Rocketman, anyone?). The Pool flopped fast – possibly now the fate also of Ritesh Batra’s Photograph.  

Like fabled compatriot Satyajit Ray, writer and director Batra, whose The Lunchbox won wide praise, will not rush or theme-park his vision. Also like Ray, he does not fear odd bits, such as here including a ghost (brief, and witty). That works because the people and milieu are so real. Rafi, whose commercial street camera photographs people near Mumbai’s Gate of India monument, snaps Milani, a passerby and legal student whose demure grace catches his eye, lens and heart. The swarthy, soulful Rafi, around 30, lives in a packed flat with other struggling chums. He feels pressured by his village grandmother to find a bride. Shy, pretty Milani’s in-laws are pushing an arranged marriage with a rising but boring biz-boy. Rafi and Milani quietly find their deep symmetry. Both are solemnly polite, emotionally reticent orphans – that fateful photo will have to be worth more than a thousand words (other figures, mostly, provide the rich masala of dialog in Marathi and English).  

The matchmaker is Dadi, which means not “daddy” but “granny,” played by blunt scene-stealer Farrukh Jaffar. She’s the practical epitome  of Mother India, frank but loving, even willing to bend old strictures of class and religion to help Rafi find a good woman. Nawazaddin Siddiqi and Sanya Malbotra are the impending lovers who don’t need a sex scene to deliver intimacy with absolute humanity. Rafi gently snarks Bollywood clichés, and there is romantic whimsy involving a defunct cola drink that Milani recalls with Proustean appetite, leading to a tough old guru of cola production. In the colorful maze of Mumbai (Bombay), he is a virtual raga of fizz. It’s a lovely movie.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The unprecedented RKO Pictures contract that Orson Welles, 24, signed on July 22, 1939, which led to Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, was not only unique but a creative prism for expanding Welles’s talents. It was “large enough in scope to match his swelling ideas. Studio head George Schaefer was brilliant. By giving Welles as much liberty as RKO could afford, he was hoping to enlarge his cinematic faculties without allowing the possibility of plunging the studio into ruin owing to possible youthful excesses. Despite the restrictions of the contract, it enabled Orson to be the kind of film professional he wanted to be: bold, broad-stroked, totally in charge on the set, involved with infinitesimal details, the father of his acting family, using all of the experience he had gained from radio and theater.” Kane would lose $150,000 on first release, a small price to pay for such bold and experimental creativity. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Sometimes an intro scroll really helps a movie, like the one in 2006 for Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus: “This is a film about Diane Arbus, but it is not a historical biography. Arbus, who lived from 1923 to 1971, is considered by many to be one of the great artists of the 20^th century. Certainly her pictures changed the face of American photography forever. What you are about to see is a tribute to Diane, a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her extraordinary path.” Had more viewers truly absorbed this, they might have been more open to one of the most beautiful films of Nicole Kidman’s risk-taking career. (From the Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Chhabi Biswas (center) plays the old aristocrat whose fading fortune and palace must have one last concert of Indian classical music and dance in The Music Room (1958; director Satyajit Ray, photography by Subrata Mitra).

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