Pay No Attention

Musings on Atonement

WARNING -- SOME SPOILERS,  BUT PROBABLY NONE YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY HEARD.

"Atonement" is a fine film.  It's not as good as Ian McEwan's book, but then, the book was really extraordinary.  Actually, I didn't think they'd be able to make a decent film out of the book at all because so much of the book takes place inside the character's heads, and so much of the underlying theme is about the nature of storytelling and writing.  The movie touches on that theme, but it pretty much gets lost in the love story and the war and hospital scenes.  However, I think that was probably inevitable.  Director Joe Wright (who also directed the movie version of Pride and Prejudice that starred Keira Knightley, by the way) and the cast did a fine job bringing the love story and the war scenes to life, and that's enough to make a great movie, even if it doesn't touch the depth of the book.  The cast was great, particularly Saoirse Ronan as Briony, the little girl whose lie changes three lives irrevocably.  Anyway, if you haven't already done so,  read the book and then see the movie, and after you do, please call me immediately.   I'm dying to talk about them and compare them.

It's the love story between Cecilia (the Keira Knightley character) and Robbie (James McAvoy) that's touted on all the advertisements for the movie.  You can't help but get a bit swept away by it , in both the movie and the book.  You've got the wealthy beauty and the handsome, brilliant charwoman's son, you've got coitus interruptus in the library, you've got star-crossed lovers torn asunder by horrific circumstances -- you've got it all.  But then, when you really stop and think about it, you've got two people whose entire romantic relationship consists of a few minutes of passionate sex, and one kiss on a street corner.  All said and done, they've had about two hours total of romance together, tops.  Granted, they grew up together, and granted, they write one another for five years while he's in prison and in the army, but still -- they haven't, you know, dated.   

When you think about it, a lot of the great fictional romances are like this -- it's Romeo and Juliet syndrome.  Two people are passionately drawn to each other, meant to be together, but torn tragically asunder, and one or both of them dies.  Tess and Angel, Maria and Tony, Heathcliff and Cathy, Tristan and Isolde, Rose and Jack, Lancelot and Guinevere, Robert and Maria, Gatsby and Daisy, etc., etc., etc.  Yeah, it's romantic all right, but I can't help wondering how many of these couples would have stood the actual daily wear and tear of dating and marriage.  I can definitely name a person or two in my own romantic life, whom, if he'd been hit by a bus early in the proceedings, I might have regarded as my own tragic Romeo.  However, time and circumstances have generally tended to show that he was just a guy for whom I had the hots for a while.  I can't help but wonder if the same would be true for Celicia and Robbie, Romeo and Juliet, and the rest of them.

But don't pay any attention to me.  Cynic that I am, I nonetheless was rooting for Cecilia and Robbie.  I rooted for the rest of those drippy couples too, blast their passionate little hearts.  I guess there's some part of me that still believes my soul mate is out there, a brave and brilliant and carelessly handsome man who would risk everything for me and die murmuring my name, for whom I would cast away convention and wealth and family and friends, and go running across Central Park in a driving rain, crying "Heathcliff!  Heathcliff!"   If I ever find that man, I'm not taking any chances.  I'm pushing him under a bus immediately so that our love endures forever.

Gaaah! Jane Austen is rolling over in her grave!

WARNING!  JANE AUSTEN NERD ALERT!

I just watched the BBC's latest version of "Mansfield Park" on Masterpiece Theater.  I'm a rabid Jane Austen fan (I have read everything she's ever written at least twice over).  I'm also an enthusiastic Masterpiece Theater and BBC fan, and I have pretty much a boundless appetite for Jane Austen adaptations, from the amazing BBC version of "Pride and Prejudice" (I have it on video) to "Clueless," a fabulously witty modern take on Austen's "Emma."   When I say that this version of Mansfield Park is the most appalling adaptation of one of Austen's works I've ever seen, I am not speaking lightly.  They've cut vital scenes (how on earth could they cut all of the scenes in Portsmouth!), added pointless ones (how could they substitute a picnic for the ball, and why do we need the scene with the leeches?), and altered half the characters almost beyond recognition. 

Granted, I think Austen's Mansfield Park presents more than the usual problems for a modern audience.  Loyal Austen fan that I am, it is my least favorite of her major novels.  The heroine, Fanny Price, is too niminy-piminy for modern tastes, whereas Fanny's nemesis, the light-hearted and witty Mary Crawford, seems charming to modern sensibilities.  It's hard for a 21st century audience to see why it should be so appalling for a family and friends to put on a private play.  And we tend to be a little squeamish when the happy ending involves two first cousins (who moreover have been brought up as brother and sister) getting married.  That said, however, if you're an Austenite (and oh boy am I), you swallow Ms. Austen's standards whole, and the story works. Not so the BBC adaptation.

Billy Piper's Fanny is an unrecognizable tomboy--she is hopelessly miscast from first to last.  On top of it, her yellow hair and black eyebrows clash, which I found quite distracting -- is that a bad dye job or is that actually natural?  Piper's Fanny is still niminy piminy in her attitudes, but in this version Fanny is also pouty, petulant and unlady-like -- the antithesis of Fanny.  Sir Thomas is an often ill-tempered (possibly bipolar) ogre rather than the dignified, if rather cold and stiff, patriarch he is in the book.  Mary Crawford has been transformed into such an obviously snotty and shallow bitch it is impossible to believe Edmund ever could have fallen for her.

And oh God!  The scenes at the end where Edmund is trying to declare his love for Fanny!  Could anything be so completely foreign to the book and the characters?  Fanny was in love with Edmund all through the book, but too timid and deferential to let it show--that's the whole essence of her character and the book.  Here she's toying with him and prancing about with puppies and giggling at him and running away while he tries to tell her how he feels. And the scene where the BBC has Lady Bertram explaining to Sir Thomas that Fanny has always been in love with Edmund since she was a little girl -- Gaaaahh!  No one was more surprised at the marriage than Lady Bertram.  I could go on, but why?  The only reason I watched the adaptation all the way to the bitter end was so that I could trash it properly in this review.  It wasn't worth it.

Robert Redford as Bill Bryson?

Robert Redford plans to make a movie out of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods," and he plans to play the Bill Bryson role.  Redford to take on 'A Walk in the Woods'   HUH??

Please understand that I love Bill Bryson.  He's one of my favorite writers.  I've read every damn thing he's written except for the most recent book on Shakespeare, and that's only because I haven't had a chance to buy it yet.  I can easily see "A Walk in the Woods" being made into a very entertaining movie, although I think you'd lose a lot because you'd lose Bryson's wonderful narrative voice and his descriptions.   OK, that said -- ROBERT REDFORD AS BILL BRYSON?? Who is going to play Steven Katz, Paul Newman?  Oh shit -- yeah, Redford DOES have Newman in mind to play Katz!  Bill and Katz were forty-four years old in the book, both out of shape (especially Katz), and both admittedly not very attractive.   I went to see Bill Bryson speak when his autobiography "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" came out.  He's a very funny writer, but he's -- well, he's a middle-aged, average-looking dude with a paunch and a funny accent that wavers between mid-western American and British.  A  lady killer he's not.   And here is Bryson's description of Katz: 

For the past three years he had devoted himself to rectitude and--I instantly saw now as he stooped out the door of the plane--growing a stomach.  Katz was arrestingly larger than when I had last seen him.  He had always been kind of fleshy, but now he brought to mind Orson Welles after a very bad night.

If ever there were roles that cried out for a couple of middle-aged schlumpy character actors with fantastic comic timing, these are the roles.  Instead we're going to get a couple of sex symbols, both of whom are 20 to 30 years too old for the roles.   Robert Redford and Paul Newman may not be spring chickens, but they're still good-looking guys with serious mojo.  Eighty years old or not, I wouldn't kick either of them out of bed.  (I wouldn't kick Bryson out either, but I envision us eating a german chocolate cake and watching "Young Frankenstein" or something.)  Besides being too hot, Redford and Newman are way, way too old for these roles.  This is midlife crisis material, not "The Bucket List."  Don't get me wrong -- they're not too old to act -- I'd happily go see a movie starring them.  But they are too old to play characters who are supposed to be in their mid-forties.  There's even a food-related conflict with the casting--one of Katz's most memorable characteristics is his obsession with beer, snickers and Little Debbie snack cakes (think Homer Simpson and you've pretty much got Katz nailed).  A "source close to Redford" noted that "Paul, who takes his food seriously — as his Newman organic range has proven — might not be too happy to have to down dozens of doughnuts for the camera,” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1592961_2,00.html

Anyway, I'll probably go see the movie, but I'll bet I'm bitching about it constantly afterward.  I haven't seen anything yet about what Bryson thinks about this casting -- I'm curious.  If I were him, I'd object.  But then again, would I object to Angelina Jolie playing me in a movie?  Probably not. 

Juno

WARNING:  SPOILERS AHEAD

Ellen Page is just wonderful, and she's far and away the best thing about "Juno."  I really enjoyed the movie, but put Hilary Duff in the title role, or anyone less amazing than Page, and the movie would fall flat.  I also like Michael Cera as Juno's geeky wanna-be boyfriend, and J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, who play her father and step-mother.  But this is Juno's show and it rises and falls on her.  Lucky for us and for the movie, she's up to the task.

I know the screenplay has been nominated for a Golden Globe, but with some very notable exceptions (the scene where Juno tells her father and stepmother she's pregnant, for example, which I think is just great),  I thought the script was trying too hard to be hip and too-cool-for-school.  Take the painful opening scene where Juno keeps taking pregnancy tests and discussing them with the store clerk.  Nothing about it rings true.  I suppose it doesn't help that I cannot bear Rainn Wilson of "The Office," the one-dimensional actor who has a cameo as the store clerk.  (And may I just interrupt myself for one moment here to say how much better and funnier the original BBC version of "The Office" is than the American version?)   

Even Ellen Page can't carry off all of the relentlessly clever patter in the script.  Come on, since when does a 16-year-old girl -- or anyone else -- refer to Soupy Sales?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soupy_Sales   Is there a 16-year-old in existence who's even heard of Soupy Sales?  (I'm not even sure why I've heard of Soupy Sales.)  Someone told me that this screenplay wasn't edited at all -- it was produced exactly as Diablo Cody wrote it.  I know I'm in a tiny, curmudgeonly minority here, but I think it would have benefited from some editing.  At least take out the Soupy Sales line, for pete's sake.  There's a lot of good things in that script, but I'd like to weed out some of the excess pop-culture references and let them breathe.

Was anybody else out there disappointed that Juno gave her baby to the Jennifer Garner character?  If I were giving a baby up for adoption, I'd pick Juno and Paulie -- raw, unready and inexperienced as they are -- as parents before I'd take that overbearing, pushy, phony, smarmy control freak of a woman any day.   She set my teeth on edge.  Yes, I got that "Juno" was trying to tell us that her husband needed to grow up a bit, but I admit he had my sympathy (except for the creepy scene where he was slow-dancing with Juno in the basement, maybe).  Who wouldn't rebel if his wife forced him to keep everything that really interested and defined him in a spare room and a few boxes in the basement?  I see Vanessa doing exactly the same thing to Juno's baby as she did to her husband -- grimly hammer away at all the rough and interesting edges until she either has something as shiny and bland as her McMansion or she drives the kid into life-long therapy.   Why would someone as defiantly individual as Juno want her child to grow up in an environment like that? 

OK, all that said, I really did enjoy the movie.  Ellen Page alone is reason enough to see it.  I can't wait to see what she'll do next.