Extremely Loud & Incredibly Twee
Film
EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE
Cert: 12A
** by Steve Dinneen
Tragedy can have a powerful effect on popular culture, be it on a local scale (the Smiths singing about the Moors murders; Terrence Malick’s Badlands on the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree) or as a reaction to global events (Japanese Manga’s fixation on nuclear holocaust; the Vietnam protest songs of the 1960s). There has been a reticence, though, to directly address the events of 11 September 2001. While countless films, songs, and works of art and literature bear its influence, few have tackled the atrocity head-on.
Notable exceptions are Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Paul Greengrass’ brutally direct United 93 or John Ney Rieber’s introspective writing for the Captain America comic (which saw the consummate American hero sifting through the rubble alongside fire fighters). Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close wants to be a definitive 9/11 movie, capturing the aftermath of loss and despair and incomprehension. It fails.
It follows Asperger-suffering eleven-year-old Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), who is unable to move on from his father’s death. When Oskar finds a key in an envelope labeled “Black”, he convinces himself it is a message from his father and begins a quest that largely involves sifting through the New York phonebook.
The real skill in Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, from which this is adapted, is his layered prose, giving a real sense of the world closing in on the young, frightened protagonist. Director Stephen Daldry makes a stab at replicating this, with trains screeching by, cars honking and planes droning overhead. But mostly he’s content to follow Oskar from one nauseatingly saccharine encounter to the next. It is all so hopelessly, cloyingly nice it makes Be Kind Rewind look like Straw Dogs. Around 20 per cent of the screen-time – and five per cent of the screen space – is taken up by shots of Oskar’s big, glassy eyes, welling up like little, sorrowful fountains – and if that isn’t enough to let you know how tragic it all is, a handy voice-over is never too far away. Carrying the weight of the whole affair, Horn often looks hopelessly out of his depth. There are parts that are very sad – but then 9/11 was very sad. Daldry hardly has to break a sweat pulling the heartstrings.
The supporting cast offers little redemption, with Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock too glossily perfect as Oskar’s parents. Max von Sydow is the stand-out exception; his mysterious, mute lodger conveys more of a sense of the unfathomability of loss than the rest of the cast combined, despite never opening his mouth. Daldry’s adaptation, though, too often relies on schmaltz over substance. It may be extremely loud but it is also incredibly twee.
Art
PICASSO AND MODERN BRITISH ART
Tate Britain
**** by Steve Dinneen
What is there left to say about Pablo Picasso, the man who is to modern art what Shakespeare is to sonnets or Lou Reed is to feedback?
The Tate Britain’s Picasso and British Modern Art, explores, predictably, the Spaniard’s relationship with, and influence on, the UK. Far from being revered as a young artist, he was critically lambasted during his first exhibition here in 1910. Renowned critic GK Chesterton described one painting as “a piece of paper on which Mr Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots” – a line as inspired as it was misguided.
The exhibition charts Picasso’s career from his earlier, less abstract work (Girl on a Chemise and The Frugal Meal being highlights) through to the unmistakable cubism of Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, contextualising it all through its reception on these shores.
His work is displayed alongside the British artists he influenced, from Ben Nicholson’s violently scarred canvases to David Hockney’s touching tributes (one sketch of Hockney sitting naked at a desk while Picasso inspects one of his paintings is particularly moving). The inclusion of several of Francis Bacon’s wailing, twisted mouths and Graham Sutherland’s Crucifixion series are other highlights.
Some of the “comparisons”, though, are little more than mimicry – most of the work by Duncan Grant and some by Sutherland amount to little more than Picasso-light; scrawl the Spaniard’s distinctive signature across the bottom and squint a bit (OK, squint a lot) and you’d struggle to tell them apart.
The Guernica was, of course, conspicuous by its absence and a printed replica glued to the wall felt like a bit of an insult. When you consider the last time it was in the UK it ended up nailed to the wall of a used car showroom, you can’t really blame the Spanish for hanging onto it.
The Tate’s own relationship with the artist is also a running theme – the gallery bought its first of his works (a rather un-Picassian floral number) in 1933, three decades before he rose to global popularity.
A Modern Lover’s song about the artist goes: “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole – not in New York”. This clearly wasn’t the case in Britain. You won’t find many people saying it now though.
Theatre
THE RECRUITING OFFICER
The Donmar Warehouse
**** by Zoe Stripmel
It’s funny how fads sweep theatreland. Sometimes you can’t move for Shakespeare and just now there seems to be a proliferation of 18th century comedy (She Stoops to Conquer at the National springs to mind). Now, for his debut as Donmar’s new artistic director, Josie Rourke has gone with The Recruiting Officer by Irish playwright George Farquar, a ribaldric look at a group of army officers, the women they seduce and the men they’ll do anything to enlist.
The Officer in question, Captain Plume (played by very sexy rising star Tobias Menzies), is based on the Duke of Marlborough. A divisive figure, Marlborough was also a highly successful, charismatic commander in chief. His claim to fame was transforming the British army from what he thought to be a bunch of overfed oafs who drank too much into a lean, mean fighting machine, ultimatley capable of defeating the French.
This warm and jolly play’s action opens in a village in Shropshire, where Plume and his cohort Sergeant Kite (played by Mackenzie Crook of Jerusalem fame) are in town to, err, recruit officers. It’s all very convivial, with news arriving that Plume has fathered yet another child to a woman who has given birth down the road. True love enters the fray, though, when a flustered Mr Worthy (Nicholas Burns) rushes in and confesses to a tiresome lack of success with one Melinda (Rachael Stirling), a woman of recent means, strong opinions and huge petticoats.
Meanwhile, Plume – by all appearances a rake – gets all dewy eyed over Silvia (the truly excellent Nancy Carroll), Melinda’s cousin. Silvia alone seems to transcend the folly of womanhood, and Plume is man enough to appreciate it. Indeed, Silvia is a unique creature: one of the most enjoyable parts of the play is her turn as a gentleman, part of a plan to test Plume’s faithfulness.
The misanthropic Kite provides lots of laughs in his guise as a German fortune teller, tricking the townspeople to suit his (and Plume’s) ends, while Silvia’s father, Justice Balance (Gawn Grainger), is a lovelier version of Polonius and made me smile. Mark Gatiss is brilliantly funny as the camp Captain Brazen, a rival to Mr Worthy for Melinda’s affections, and is resplendent in wig, ribbons, blush and wit.
It’s a finely staged production, with its woman-baiting and sexual power-broking brought out with real comic panache. The cast is terrific. There are shades of depth, to be sure, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Shakespeare would have done it all a bit more interestingly.
Film
CORMAN’S WORLD
Cert: 12A
***** by Lisa Melvin
You might think a documentary about the director of B-movies like Attack of the Crab Monsters and Swamp Women was a bit superfluous. Corman’s World: Confessions of a Hollywood Rebel could easily have focused on nothing but the schlocky, low-budget films he is known for. Instead, we get a clearer portrait of a man who, despite his geniality, paints an almost tragic figure.
It seems grossly unfair that Hollywood picked up his ideas and ran with them to make huge budget action films like Jaws and Star Wars while he languishes in straight-to-video obscurity. Interviews with his former proteges, including Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro, reveal a director and producer who has consistently pushed the envelope, creating the first biker movie (The Wild Angels) and a film about racial integration (The Intruder) so controversial that Corman was branded a communist and persuaded to keep his political ideas in the sidelines. Still producing films in his 80s, he recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars: a late recognition from the establishment for a man who, for all his seemingly silly movies, deserves to be taken seriously. Corman’s World is a fine testament to a director whose approach to film-making is reflected in his violence-filled movies: “when it stops moving, blow it up”.