Anne Billson on Film 2009
collected columns from the Guardian, 2009
Copyright 2012 Anne Billson
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Foreword
The following pieces were originally published in The Guardian's Film & Music section in 2009. The sharpwitted among you may have already worked out that you could probably read them for free on the Guardian's own website, so what can I offer here to make you feel your outlay of 99 cents has been worthwhile?
Firstly, of course, there's the convenience of having all these columns collected under one cover, whence they can easily be downloaded to your e-reading device, thus absolving you of the need to scour the web, and ensuring you don't accidentally skip a single pearl of my accumulated wisdom. Then there's the knowledge that - for better or for worse - the pieces are you are about to read are the raw unadulterated texts, unmodified by subeditors and untrimmed by the necessity to accommodate last-minute advertising on the printed page.
And then - I'd like to think - there's the satisfaction of knowing you are helping, in some small way, to sustain the career of a struggling writer. It could well be that the job of arts journalist, film critic, will shortly cease to exist as a paid profession, and will instead become the province of people with lots of time or private income on their hands. I'm not suggesting this is necessarily a Bad Thing, just that I wish I'd got the memo back in the early 1980s, when I was starting out, so I could have learnt a more useful trade, such as plumbing or dentistry.
But as an extra sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection The Psycho Murders, a novella inspired by the 1973 Vincent Price movie Theatre of Blood and first published on Twitter in increments of 140 characters. It used to be on my blog, but now it's a piece of writing you can find nowhere on the web.
I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Beatrice, Francois and Seraphine.
In any case, whatever you think of the finished results, I'd like to thank you for buying and reading. Please feel free to tell me what you think (preferably in a civilised manner) via Twitter or on one of my blogs, links to which you can find at the end of this collection.
Anne Billson, 2012
Chapter 1: Films for People Who Don't Like Films
I don't normally like to read too much about a film before watching it, but I made an exception for The Reader, since I was having trouble working out what kind of movie it was. The Graduate with a lurking concentration camp motif? A Stanley & Iris-style study of illiteracy with a dash of The Night Porter?
But the more I read about it, the less it appealed, because I can't imagine how this film could surprise or enlighten or delight me in any way whatsoever. And now I've got it confused with Revolutionary Road, which I haven't seen either, and not just because both titles begin with R. Revolutionary Road, like The Reader, features Kate Winslet getting naked, is adapted from an acclaimed novel, and is directed by someone who made his name in British Theatre. One such film is happenstance; two practically constitutes a genre, and I think I've finally worked out what that genre is. It's Films For People Who Don't Really Like Films.
People who don't view cinema as a viable artform are only drawn to films which have been slapped with a cultural seal of approval: critically approved source material, or directors who have made their names in more venerable artforms, such as literature or theatre. They wouldn't dream of going to see thrillers starring Jason Statham, or comedies starring Will Ferrell, or horror movies starring no-one they've ever heard of, though I would argue there's likely to be more true cinematic feeling in such movies' little fingers than in the entire bloated corpus of Atonement or Proof or Possession (and I'm not talking about the one where Isabelle Adjani has sex with a tentacled monster). Let's face it, film-makers who try to reproduce the virtues of literature or theatre or fine art without understanding that film is an entirely different medium, with its own peculiar virtues, only ever succeed in coming up with ponderous, meretricious, upmarket kitsch.
I'm not saying such films are wholly without their pleasures, if not necessarily the ones their makers intended. For instance, I couldn't tear my eyes away from Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours. And perhaps Kate getting naked will in itself enough to make The Reader and Revolutionary Road worth the haul. (And yes, I will get round to watching them at some point, and wouldn't it be great if they did surprise me and force me to eat my words?)
I'm with the Surrealists on this one, which I discovered by chance (and not, I assure you, because I was seeking intellectual justification for my sins) while flicking through Ado Kyrou's Le surrealisme au cinema. Kyrou writes (pardon my clunky translation) "Let us look at commercial cinema through new eyes, because it's there that one finds the most unexpected riches." I'm all for that. The films I'm most looking forward to seeing are not worthy Oscar bait like Milk or Doubt, though Sean Penn's fake nose and Meryl Streep looking stern in a black bonnet may well afford the odd unexpected thrill, and I've already ascertained that Frost/Nixon is worth watching purely on the strength of one or two of Frank Langella's more complicated facial expressions.
But what I really want to see is Stephen Rea embedded in Mena Suvari's windscreen for half the running-time of Stuck. I want to see Tony Leung, the most beautiful actor in the world, as a Chinese warlord in John Woo's Red Cliff, and Lee Byung-hun, second most beautiful actor in the world, poncing around in cool scar make-up and tight black trousers in Kim Ji-woon's wacky Leone homage, The Good, The Bad, The Weird. I want to see My Bloody Valentine in 3-D, and Outlander, starring Jim Caviezel as an alien who teams up with the Vikings. And right at the top of my dance-card, I'm afraid, is Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which I just have to see on the basis of that stupid title alone. I'm sure some of these films will be rubbish, but equally sure that even the worst will yield moments of cinematic joy entirely absent from the likes of Revolutionary Road. If you want intellectual justification for Beverly Hills Chihuahua, I could probably rustle it up, but do we really need it? This is Cinema.
Chapter 2: When Actors Play Real People
Actors playing real people is like actors speaking in funny foreign accents, or playing autistic savants or paraplegics - an in-your-face signifier that they're Acting with a capital A, instead of just swanning around being themselves. There's a whole bunch of Real People Performances jostling for position right now, because we're well into awards season. Nine of the past 12 Oscars for Best Actor and Actress have gone to portrayals of Real People. In the eyes of the easily impressed, playing a made-up character just doesn't have the same cachet.
Michael Sheen squaring off against Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon? It's the Battle of the Impersonations! Apart from one terrific if slightly on-the-nose late-night phone call from one antagonist to the other, entirely dreamt up by playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan, I kept thinking I might as well have been watching the original TV face-off instead of Ron Howard's recreation of the edited hightlights. Gus Van Sant doesn't dig any deeper into the character of Milk than the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and Sean Penn's two-dimensional caricature is easily outplayed by Josh Brolin, who invests Dan White with so much unspoken back story you can't help wishing the film had been about him, rather than the (as presented here) saintly paragon he murdered. (And by the way, I have yet to hear anyone questioning the wisdom of Penn's prosthetic nasal addition to his Smiley Face impression, though there would no doubt have been a lot of squawking about anti-semitism if he'd strapped on a fake nose to play Fagin or Shylock.)
Stephen Soderbergh's Che gives us an hour and a half of Benicio del Toro being charismatic in the jungle before he finally gets hold of a beret and starts looking like the iconic Korda photo familiar from a million posters and T-shirts, though I swear that if I hadn't already seen The Motorcycle Diaries, I'd have been left wondering just who the hell this guy was. But isn't it all a bit Barnum & Bailey? All a bit wow, he may look nothing like the bloke he's playing but isn't it an uncannily accurate impression nonetheless? Apart from a couple (or, in Che's case, a lot) of hours' running-time, there's not much separating these panto turns from equally uncannily accurate impressions by Mike Yarwood, say, or Rory Bremner. I admire Forest Whitaker but, honestly, how hard can it have been to play a larger-than-life monster like Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland? All credit to Helen Mirren, then, who in The Queen actually did succeed in tricking us into thinking that not only was there more to the profile from the stamps and coins than meets the eye, but that we'd somehow never noticed Her Majesty had been a looker all along.
There's something inescapably shallow about the way traditional biopics traipse from childhood trauma to early career to alcohol or drug-related setback to triumphant comeback, all the while showcasing a shameless example of is-it-real-or-is-it-Memorex grandstanding from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, or Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles. I reckon the less a Real Person Movie pays lip service to known facts, the more hope it has of capturing something of the essence of its subject, which is why that one late-night phone call offers more insight than the rest of Frost/Nixon laid end to end.
Many critics, somehow overlooking the word "imaginary" in the title, whinged that Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus bore scant resemblance to the photographer or her life, but Nicole Kidman's Alice-in-Freaksville performance and her erotic shaving scene with hairy Robert Downey Jr touched on strange emotional and artistic truths that would have been beyond the scope of a more orthodox biopic. Todd Haynes' decision to cast six different actors in I'm Not There really did hint at the complexity of Bob Dylan, even if the results were uneven. And in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, maybe the best writer biopic ever made, Ken Ogata looked nothing like the Japanese writer, but Paul Schrader got under the man's skin by taking off into flights of artistic delirium that Gus Van Sant and Stephen Soderbergh can only dream of.
Chapter 3: Old-Age Acting
It seems unfair that Brad Pitt should be nominated for an Oscar when six other actors helped him play the title role in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That some of these other actors had to play it with bags over their heads, so that Brad's face could be digitally imposed on to theirs, only increases my admiration for them. Anyway, it's not Brad who impresses me the most, but Tom Everett, who plays the character between the ages of 69 and 67. I needed a calculator to work this out, by the way, and would have greatly appreciated a small counter in one corner of the screen conveying the precise ratio of Benjamin's physical to mental age at any given moment, which might have had the added advantage of reminding me I wasn't watching a film about a person whose life was of no interest whatsoever.
But old-age acting isn't just about physiognomy. The most conspicuous physical symptoms of age aren't so much wrinkles as gait and posture, which is why Everett's grasp of the way an old guy moves impresses me more than Brad looking adorable with varying amounts of hair. You can even spot the exact moment when Benjamin starts being Brad all over; his body language abruptly becomes laconic.
The official world record for Greatest Age Span Portrayed by a Movie Actor is still held by Dustin Hoffman, who ran the gamut from 17 to 121 years old as Jack Crabb, sole white survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in Arthur Penn's revisionist western Little Big Man. I've never met a 121-year-old, but I'll wager he'd waggle his head much like Dustin, who also screamed for two hours prior to shooting to achieve the papery voice effect. Given the Academy's predeliction for this sort of grandstanding, it seems odd he didn't get nominated for an Oscar in the same year that Ryan O'Neal, say, got the nod for Love Story; one can only conclude the film itself wasn't much liked. The Best Make-up category didn't exist in 1970, otherwise Dick Smith would surely have been a shoo-in for his pioneering foam latex wizardry and blinkable eyelids. (Hoffman has since played a 243-year-old in Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium - for which he reportedly didn't need any special slap at all. Go figure.)
Even further back, in 1941, Maurice Seiderman's old-geezer make-up for Citizen Kane does as well as can be expected for the era, but what's even more persuasive than the wrinkles is that Orson Welles seems to grow not just balder, but broader and rounder as Kane ages from the film-maker's own 25 years to a prematurely decrepit 70. This was coincidentally the same age at which Welles himself would die of a heart attack, looking in his last years (according to photos) not so very different from old Charles Foster Kane, albeit somewhat jollier and hairier.
The best case of pre-digital ageing, for my money, is that of Robert De Niro, effortlessly spanning four decades in Once Upon a Time in America as washed-up gangster Noodles. No thanks to the make-up people, who go overboard on grey lines as though mistakenly thinking themselves hired for a provincial opera company production of Falstaff. James Woods does what he can with implausible silver hair-topping; Elizabeth McGovern cops out altogether by pushing cleansing cream around her face for ten minutes, like an anorexic fiddling with mashed potato. But De Niro is a marvel; he doesn't just pull off the posture and the gait - he also nails the slightly vague expression of someone whose eyesight isn't quite as sharp as it used to be.
And the booby prize for acting old? I'm afraid it's James Dean in Giant. The doomed 24-year-old strikes iconic poses a-plenty as young ranch hand Jett Rink, but makes a hash of playing the same character as an oil tycoon a couple of decades later, though admittedly he's not helped by a naff moustache. This older Rink is only 46, for heaven's sake, but young Jimmy plays him like a hammy impersonation of Ted from The Fast Show. You feel like pointing at him and sneering, "Ha! Where's your precious Method now?"
Chapter 4: Shopping and Weddings
Men, I share your pain. Chick-flicks really suck. Especially in this post-Sex and the City period, when their focus seems to have shrunk down to shopping and weddings, as if those are the only subjects women could possibly be interested in. I gaze, bemused and, yes, fascinated, at curious anthropological artefacts like Bride Wars or He's Just Not That Into You and Confessions of a Shopaholic, in which Kate Hudson or Ginnifer Goodwin or Isla Fisher play characters who might almost belong to a third gender, a bubble-headed one that emits ear-splitting shrieks, teeters constantly on the verge of hysteria and acts as indiscriminate product placement mouthpiece for overpriced tat.
Perhaps the recession will finally put the kibosh on all this vulgar Jimmy Choo-ing and Vera Wang-ing. Perhaps designer name-dropping is fated to go the way of the dinosaur, to be replaced (please God) by comic situations that don't involve tulle-clad brides tussling in the aisle or catfights over Gucci boots, or maybe even (dare one dream) by a smidgeon of emotional truth and some witty, clever dialogue. In fact, I'd probably settle for slapstick and cheap sarcasm, just so long as it's not wedding related.
It's not as though there's a shortage of female talent capable of delivering a well-timed quip. Even the most Friends-phobic curmudgeon has to admit that ten years' toil on a popular sitcom will have honed Jennifer Aniston's comic chops. So where are they now? Nowhere to be seen or heard in He's Just Not That Into You, that's for sure, where all she wants is... to get married. Isla Fisher carries Confessions of a Shopaholic on her adorable shoulders, but it's clear she's punching below her weight. For God's sake, someone give these girls something they can sink their teeth into.
And it doesn't have to be like this! Think back, for example, to His Girl Friday, in which Rosalind Russell not only juggles fiancé, ex-husband, speed-of-light dialogue and the ethics of journalism, but performs an impressive rugby-tackle. Maybe the secret is that the role was originally written for a man, which lends it a breadth missing from the usual chick-flick stereotypes, though Russell has her cake and eats it by getting to wear extravagant hats as well.
So I'd like to see a little more role reversal, please. I'm fed up with charmless slackers like Seth Rogen getting off with hotties, so how about a rom-com in which a girl geek gets knocked up by an overachieving Mr McDreamy? How about Sarah Silverman playing a 40-year-old spinster who sets out to lose her virginity? Or some edgy comic business relating to abortion, or menstruation? (Too much to ask, I know.) More to the point, where is the female Judd Apatow, playing godmother to a new wave of funny ladies in femme-oriented comedies that allow their characters to live lives beyond Prada? Five years ago, with Mean Girls, Tina Fey looked as though she might be shaping up to fill that role, and of course in 2008 she was elected Most Admired Comedienne in America for her perfect Sarah Palin and 30 Rock. And yet her last big screen outing was the brain-dead Baby Mama. Though I guess women being interested in nothing but babies makes a change from them being interested in nothing but shopping and weddings.
But why can't someone write a female equivalent of, say, the mock-biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, so Anna Faris could expand on her scene-stealing Britney Spears impersonation from Just Good Friends with a potted send-up of half a century of girl music, instead of being stuck in cutesy fluff like The House Bunny? Or how about a female stoner comedy? Actually, there already is one of these - Gregg Araki's Smiley Face, in which Faris eats all of her flatmate's hash-cupcakes, leading to a masterclass in 101 dope-addled expressions as her day devolves into a paranoid nightmare of botched auditions, sausage factories and a first edition of The Communist Manifesto. Now that's funny, but for some reason, the film was never given a proper release in this country (though you ought to be able to find it on DVD). British distributors evidently concluded there wasn't enough shopping and wedding in it.
Chapter 5: In Praise of Supporting Actors
It's not because I'm a costume pic junkie that I'm salivating at the prospect of The Young Victoria. It's because I can't wait to see Mark Strong as Miranda Richardson's drunken, controlling, abusive, dog-kicking secretary with ambitions to rule Britain. As far as I'm concerned, Strong can rule Britain any time, because he is, for me, one of those supporting actors who make films worth watching.
Who cares about Gerard Butler and his dreary scam in RocknRolla? I wanted to see what Strong's dapper henchman was up to. Let Michelle Pfeiffer cut out Claire Danes' heart in Stardust, for Chrissake, so we can get back to the adventures of Strong as the Seventh Prince. And forget about Leonard DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in Body of Lies - I would rather spend time with Strong as that lovely chap from the Jordanian secret service, the one who calls Leonardo "my dear" and whom everyone keeps calling "honey". (I swear the movie unspooling in my head was more fun than the one I was watching, even when the credits rolled and I found out the bloke's name was actually "Hani".)
So now I find myself getting unfeasibly excited about Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and Ridley Scott's Robin Hood, simply because Strong will be playing Satanic cult leader Lord Blackwood in the former, and Guy of Gisborne, a potentially scene-stealing role if ever there was one (cf Basil Rathbone) in the latter. Hey, wouldn't it be brilliant if someone cast this guy in a leading role?
But wait. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bright idea after all. Scene-stealers often lose their edgy allure once they're bumped up to leading-man status. Kevin Spacey was a riot in The Usual Suspects, Seven and LA Confidential, but pretty much an unconvincing ham in American Beauty, Pay It Forward and The Shipping News. Philip Seymour Hoffman was a scream in Boogie Nights, Happiness and The Talented Mr Ripley, but a crashing bore in Doubt, and nearly two hours of him as Truman Capote is, frankly, pushing it, though I grant you he can still bring home the bacon in smaller-scale productions such as The Savages.
Isn't it a crime against nature to cast Matthew McConaughey in rom-com leading roles when he - and we - are clearly having more fun with his wacky turns in Dazed and Confused or Reign of Fire or Tropic Thunder? And when will casting directors realise that a little of Jude Law goes a long, long way in The Talented Mr Ripley, or with bad tooth make-up in The Road to Perdition, but that his pretty-boy presence overstays its welcome, and then some, in Breaking and Entering or My Blueberry Nights?
No doubt it's easier to pull off a relatively brief but flamboyant character turn than to carry an entire movie on one's shoulders, but imagine how much poorer cinema history would be without the likes of Walter Brennan, Eugene Pallette or Claude Rains, who for my money steals Casablanca out from under the noses of Bogart and Bergman. There's a sad tendency these days to shove the star in our faces at the expense of juicy secondary roles. Part of my frustration with the Mission: Impossible movies (spun off from a TV show that was, may I remind you, all about teamwork) was Tom Cruise snaffling all the best stuff for himself and reducing a promising supporting cast to also-rans, with barely a decent line of dialogue between them.
Two of my favourite latterday scene-stealers are no longer with us, alas, but their great movie moments are seared more indelibly into my brain than all the heavy-duty thesping from today's starring actors laid end to end. Who can forget J.T. Walsh effortlessly making his mark on The Last Seduction as a sleazy lawyer whose scant two seconds of screen time ("Still a self-serving bitch?") don't even take place in the same room as his leading lady? Or how about The Godfather: Part II - packed with memorable explosions of violence, but few of them quite as treasurable as the low-key scene in which young Clemenza initiates Vito Corleone into a life of crime by rolling up a rug? Bruno Kirby, you are much missed.
Chapter 6: When Horror Comedy Goes Wrong
Still cheesed off by the soppy emo vampires of Twilight? Fret ye not. The lunkhead demographic gets its own back with Lesbian Vampire Killers, in which two unappetising TV comedians get to phwoar at babelicious lesbian vampires before knocking them around and cutting their heads off. Far be it from me to suggest that this is a chucklesome expression of every Cro-Magnon's secret misogynist fantasy, because obviously these chicks are vampires! And lesbians! And thus fair game.
Lesbian Vampire Killers is only the latest manifestation of a long and not always honourable hybrid genre: the British horror-comedy. Its distributors would have us believe it cleaves to the tradition of Shaun of the Dead, so let us keep our fingers crossed that James Corden and Matthew Horne are not following in the footsteps of Kenny Everett in Bloodbath at the House of Death instead. If there are any would-be horror-comedy film-makers out there, please note that you can't just stick TV comedians in an undernourished plot, shovel in a few horror clichés and a shower of disconnected gags, and then slap the result with an over-the-top title and expect it to work. For horror-comedy to succeed, you must treat both the humour and the horror with respect. It's a tricky balancing act; The Cottage toppled off the tightrope by allowing the splatter to swamp the characters, so that by the end one might as well have been watching any old American mutant-hillbilly slasher flick stocked with a cast of anonymous cannon-fodder.
Horror and comedy are bedmates by default: neither genre, in its rawest form, is appreciated by mainstream critics. Both revel in the gross-out effect; splatter and slapstick are intimately related, the fruit of their congress being moments like that icky business with the intestines from Dog Soldiers. Comedy, like horror, plays on a dread of what might happen, loss of control, imminent chaos. When a horror movie goes wrong, the audience responds with laughter. When a horror-comedy goes wrong, there's not even that laughter to fall back on - the results are just painful.
If a director is sufficiently well-versed in genre clichés, however, the slaughtering of foolish comic characters in unexpectedly grisly ways within a strong narrative framework can reap dividends by often being even more shocking than non-comic horror, with the stakes accordingly raised, as it were, for the survivors. Neil Marshall with Dog Soldiers, Christopher Smith in Severance and Edgar Wright in Shaun of the Dead all clearly knew what they were doing here. There are few moments in modern British cinema more distressing than Dylan Moran getting torn to pieces by zombies; by that stage of Shaun of the Dead he seemed less a TV comedian than a credibly obnoxious character we'd got to know and hate, but no-one deserves to die like that. Except maybe Joseph Pilato in Day of the Dead.
Horror-comedy found its poster-boy in Vincent Price, whose sardonic blend of camp and sinister seems more unsettling now, in retrospect, than it did back in the 1970s, when he starred in a strain of American-funded yet essentially British Grand Guignol in which a full complement of well-known character actors were slaughtered in flamboyantly ghastly ways. The Abominable Dr Phibes and its sequel are full of queasy moments like Alex Scott's head being crushed in a booby-trapped frog mask - a death more horridly baroque than any in the Saw movies. As for Theatre of Blood, I was so upset at seeing Price sawing off Arthur Lowe's head (nooo! Captain Mainwaring!) and force-feeding Robert Morley with his own poodles that I obsessed about it for days. It just wasn't right to treat loveable character actors like that. Which was precisely what made it work so well. If anyone's interested, by the way, I have a long list of much-loved TV comedians I would like to see disembowelled.
Two of the best British-style horror-comedies were directed by non-Brits, who managed to respect our homegrown Gothic traditions without succumbing to their cosier tendencies. Some people still complain that Roman Polanski's Dance of the Vampires isn't funny (I would disagree - Jack MacGowran is a scream) but don't tell me it isn't the stuff of nightmares when our fearless vampire killers find themselves the only dancers reflected in the ballroom mirror. And why is An American Werewolf in London still the yardstick by which all horror-comedies must be judged? Because John Landis never forgets he's directing a werewolf movie, and that the humour should never be gratuitous but should spring naturally from the characters. Even if, like Griffin Dunne, they're rotting corpses.
ETA: I had a bit of a senior moment when I was writing this column and mistakenly thought my word count was 750 instead of its usual 700. Not surprising, then, that it got cut down for publication. The sub-editors did a pretty good job of it in the end, but this is the uncut version.
Chapter 7: Can British Films Get Any Worse?
Can British films get any worse? The Boat That Rocks has already triggered a debate as to whether it's even crummier than Lesbian Vampire Killers. Francois Truffaut said, "There's something about England that's anti-cinematic", and English film-makers, and quite possibly Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ones as well, always seem to be falling over themselves to prove him right.
I seldom go and see British films for pleasure. I go out of duty, and invariably regret it. Love Actually and The History Boys were so ineptly crafted and emotionally dishonest they left me depressed for days. The only thing that stopped me slitting my wrists after Atonement was that No Country for Old Men and Sweeney Todd were coming out a week later, and I was looking forward to seeing those. I got so bored during The Wind That Shakes the Barley that I actually started trying to read a magazine. In the cinema! In the dark!
Of course, there are exceptions. Happy-Go-Lucky was interesting (mainly because it forced me to examine the reasons why I wanted to kill the Sally Hawkins character) and The Bank Job mildly diverting, but most British output seems divided between prestige period pics by inheritors of the Merchant-Ivory mantle, and ladmag fodder, exemplified by all those ghastly British gangster films that spoiled my stint as a bona fide film critic in the 1990s. There isn't space here for me to bang on about all my wacky theories about what Truffaut called the "incompatibility between the terms 'cinema' and 'Britain'," so I'll limit myself to just a couple.
I once heard a British film director say in a televised interview that he wasn't interested in telling a story visually (why were you directing a bloody film then, you wanker?) and it's clear he's not the only one. Historically, Britain has produced more world-class writers than painters, and words tend to be valued far above visual imagery, if only because reading and listening apparently require more effort than looking, and so are deemed to be worthier pursuits. A lot of British film-makers think that screenplay equals dialogue, and because the Brits still haven't glommed on to William Goldman's maxim that "Screenplay is structure", we get endless redundant exposition and a plodding procession of scenes unfurling like stage plays. Scene begins, there's some dialogue, scene ends, next scene begins, more dialogue and so on. Lawks-a-mercy, we might as well be watching a Restoration Drama at the Old Vic! Worst recent offender in this area was Revolutionary Road, which may not have been strictly British, but its director was, and he sure as hell managed to imbue it with his achingly dull theatrical sensibility. I'm not saying theatre is dull, you understand, just that there's a time and a place for it, and it's not up there on the cinema screen.