Film Club Featurette: Animal Kingdom (2010) 1h 53m

On Saturday, 30 April at 6:31pm, The Phnom Penh Film Club straps in for one of the most stark and relentless films we’ve tried, *Animal Kingdom* (2010), written and directed by first-timer David Michod, and starring Jacki Weaver, Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn, and, in a positively thrilling debut performance, James Frecheville. 

In fairness a tough and gritty narrative isn’t really all *that* unusual an ingredient for successful, or entertaining, or critically acclaimed films. Indeed already in our short time together we have shared some outstanding examples of each. But what’s probably much less common are the films that manage all four things at once. Especially when also offering brilliant first-time directing, elite cinematography, a pitch-perfect score and, above all, an entire cast’s worth of performances so bang-on perfect that at some point, very early along the way, it becomes essentially impossible to remember that we’re all just taking in a movie. 

Adapted loosely from the true-life story of the notorious Pettingill crime family of Melbourne, Animal Kingdom sees Frecheville playing the lead role of “J,” an unnervingly impressionable young man who finds himself bunking up with a gang of vicious bank robbers. Oh, I forgot one small detail: The bank robbers in question just happen to be his own extended family. 

After some uneasy opening notes to set an appropriately uneasy tableau for J’s new place in his new domesticity, the various gang members take their turns showing him in no uncertain terms how they feel about his sudden presence, neither decorum nor basic self-consistency withstanding. Gradually it emerges that neither J nor the others are comfortable with his front-row seat to the family business, nor is anyone prepared to finally take the taboo step of severing that sole remaining hereditary provenance in J’s young life. Nobody ever actually says, “Where else would [he/I] go” but the question is always hanging there among us, the acrid stench of an unforeseen, inescapable, and literally existential Hobson’s Choice. 

Naturally, matters turn in chilling directions for which J is obviously neither prepared nor the least bit pre-adapted. And then they turn again in ways that make J’s situation even more intractable. And then it happens again, and again, and again, and *again*. All while a kaleidoscope of brilliantly drawn supporting characters struggle to recruit, coopt, cajole, turn, ignore, or in some cases even neutralize, this our most reluctant hero. Eventually, when the final twist must surely, surely have come and gone, we allow ourselves to trust the surety of a lifetime’s experience of cinematic denouements—and we exhale. Big mistake, that.   

The film was a smash-hit runaway success in both Australia and the U.S., with Jacki Weaver nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the coolly psychotic family matriarch, “Grandma Smurf.” Pay special attention to exactly how she casually shows her own sons how happy she is to have them around her home, and then feel about it exactly as you’re tempted to allow yourself to feel. Especially as J takes a mantle that has much less to do with accidental custody and much more to do with steering the entire family’s grim and sordid near-term prospects. 

I hope everyone will plan on joining us, Saturday 30 April at 6:31pm, for this very special event. If I can promise anything, it’s that our usual policy of respectful silence for the end titles will require absolutely no policing whatsoever for this one—as we all sit thunderstruck and unsure how to even process its very final moments. Never mind the stunning performances, the improbably confident directing, and the story that grabs us from page one and never once lets go. For all these reasons, Animal Kingdom is a film that I can promise that none of us will soon forget.

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Film Club Featurette: Bandit Queen (1994) 1h 59m

On Sunday, 24 April at 6:30pm, Film Club Phnom Penh plunges headlong into an arresting world of contemptible authority and sympathetic law-breakers, *Bandit Queen*, starring Seema Biswas and written and directed by Sakhbar Kapur.

Among aspiring fiction writers it is very often said that ‘heroes have motivations, while villains have backstories’. And it’s a sneaky-impactful aphorism, insofar as the implied distinction so clearly comes down to whether the character in question can bring him- or herself to let the past be the past and just move on. Those who can, go on to the channel their ugly pasts into a constructive impetus for the betterment of all—their “character-building” experience as literal as anything in literature. 

Cue the entrance of one of the most driven and iconoclastic characters in modern history, Phoolan Devi: the real-life woman who really did just about single-handedly kick over one of the most brutally misogynistic patriarchies on the planet, that of rural India in the 1970s and 80s. A figure of pluck, vengeance, audacity, all but unbearable pathos, and ultimately of one of the least probable redemptions of all time. Cue the rule-defying movie about her harrowing path to that redemption, Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen. 

Regardless of medium or adaptive license, Phoolan Devi is not a figure whose story would suit the little kids at bedtime, to be sure. From forced betrothal at age eleven (and from exactly the sort of treatment one may imagine with only that much news to go on), Devi’s journey proceeds through a withering chronicle of false flight, violent reversals, shocking police misconduct, caste-based humiliation, banishment, bloody double-crosses, and extra-legal justice. 

In time her unique combination of self-galvanizing purpose and ever-higher-profile escape will come to earn her the legendary status of heroic outlaws, particularly among a cohort of impoverished rural women whose own heartbreaking backstories had robbed them of similar empowerment. Indeed in watching the film for the first time not long ago, I was reminded of what David Sedaris once wrote about a comically over-distressed cashmere sweater in his closet: “Because it is destroyed, it is indestructible.” So too the stunning life of Phoolan Devi. 

The challenge that this simple reality presented for domestic movie-adaptation was so basic as to be almost deal-breaking, with Indian cinematic tradition so deeply antithetical to the unflinching and relentless grit that Phoolan Devi’s tale demands. There are no sappy song-and-dance numbers to chase the gunplay from the screen. There is only a life, here and now, set before us on the rails of an unsinkable ideologue’s ferocity in fighting City Hall. 

We take our seats expecting the typical Indian film experience—a saffron Andrew Lloyd Webber—and what we get is a saffron Lars Von Trier. Complete with that same peculiar gift for folding our judgements about visceral gratuity back in our own laps for the sociopolitical accusation that they are. Make no mistake, Bandit Queen is not a happy-go-lucky romp through fields of brightly-clad backup singers and star-crossed romantic entanglements. But it just might be, indeed probably is, the most important movie we’ve yet seen. 

I hope everyone will make a special point of joining us at 6:30pm on Sunday 24 April for this stunningly impactful motion picture. We really and truly have taken in nothing remotely like it in our filmography thus far. 

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Film Club Featurette: Arrival (2016) 1h 56m

On Saturday, 23 April at 6:30pm, Film Club Phnom Penh will screen Denis Villeneuve’s touchstone of contemporary storytelling excellence, *Arrival*, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker and Michael Stuhlbarg. 

We’ve gotten a lot of mileage in these pages from the linkage between the ugly real-world circumstances befalling the planet in the early to mid-1970s, and the unprecedented wave of superlative films that graced the planet’s theaters at that time. Perfectly sensible, this bit: If one couldn’t bear to face the era of Watergate transcripts and Kent State shootings and Sinai offensives, the natural vector of escape was a plush-velvet theater seat and all the suspension of reality that it promised to confer. 

Except I wouldn’t have to tell anyone reading these words that 2016 was no picnic, either. From Brexit to Aleppo, from the rise of Donald Trump to the death of Princess Leia, hiding from the real world in that fateful year took on a mantle of gallows-chic that hadn’t been so prominent in popular culture since ... well, since the early to mid-1970s. And the world’s filmmakers delivered again, too—with Risen and Perfect Strangers and Nocturnal Animals and How to Be Single. 

And then there’s Denis Villeneuve and his jewel of throwback cinematic escapism, Arrival. A film that defies not just genres and conventions, but the far more sacred taxonomy of commercially- vs. critically important work. 

Amy Adams is Dr Louise Banks, the cracker-jack linguist who finds herself visited in her academic office by a shadowy military detachment (led by Forest Whitaker), seemingly out of the blue. After some appropriately uneasy back-and-forth, it develops that the military folk want Dr Banks to come with them to interrogate a group of uninvited guests. If I told you why they need a math expert (played by Jeremy Renner) along for the ride, I’d spoil the movie. But they do. And a CIA observer (Michael Stuhlbarg), too.  

The four of them must work together, and to say this spoils nothing. And none of them know what they're doing, or what the consequences of what they're doing might be, good or otherwise. The whole of the story is a deep-dive into the samurai arts of professionally faking it and hoping for the best. There are turns of a sort we might expect under high-pressure, high-stakes, without-a-net circumstances such as these, and then, just when we think we're clear on where we're being taken, the entire flow of the movie and the story that we thought we were being told, is dumped all but literally on its head. Everything about this picture is a feint, and everything about it is a reminder that feints don't have to end with travel bans and slatted border walls in Arizona. They can be beautiful, and thrilling, even as they are dangerous and difficult to comprehend. Yes, Arrival is a science fiction movie. But in the end it hardly matters.   

Many great films have enjoyed box-office prosperity, and many successful movies have attracted the eye of the world’s critics and awards, to be sure. Most of the films we’ve shared in our screenings straddle this boundary to at least some degree. But far, far fewer films have ever dared to actually be both of these things, with conscious intent, from the moment they were green-lit at the studio’s top-floor offices. That Arrival succeeds so completely in both aspirations—as a commercially entertaining movie, and as a work of cultural durability—is little short of miraculous, especially for its time. A bonbon of mall-cineplex escapism, just when we needed it most, which manages to be genuine art at the same time.

But to succeed as well as it did, Arrival had to match its moment into the bargain. Had Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi been released in 1971 it would still have evoked spirited intellectual discussion and deep reservoirs of fan loyalty, but it wouldn’t have broken the freaking world. (Indeed it would have been Werner Herzog’s *Fata Morgana*, which ... didn’t.) Coppola’s The Conversation is a fantastic picture, sure, but part of the reason it works so well is because it was screened over a summer when tape-recorded conversations were all anyone could think about. The lesson is clear. To make that kind of impact, a film must lay its hands in just the right folds of our collective consciousness at that particular time. 

In 2016, those folds wouldn't have been much fun to think about. They would have prominently included fear of outsiders, an even greater fear of those who were afraid of outsiders, and existential geopolitical uncertainty. But they also would have included breakneck technological progress and an almost foolish-feeling reach for optimism and self-betterment. Villeneuve would have needed to resonate with all of these disparate cultural overtones, and, in that last extra little challenge, he would have needed to at least nod in the direction of society's desire for cinematic escapism itself. Somehow. Perhaps by featuring some venue or shooting aspect that happened to be of a sixteen-by-nine dimension. I dunno, maybe have it look white when there’s nothing to see on it, just to be nutty.   

For those who know his work, it will come as no surprise that Villeneuve hit every single note with this gorgeous picture. Writing for The London Telegraph, Robbie Collin called it “introspective, philosophical and existentially inclined—yet [it] unfolds in an unwavering tenor of chest-tightening excitement. And there is a mid-film revelation—less a sudden twist than sleek unwinding of everything you think you know—that feels, when it hits you, like your seat is tipping back.” Across town, The Guardian was busy deciding it had been the third-best movie of the year, and the nineteenth-best scifi movie. Ever. 

I hope everyone will plan to join us Saturday, 23 April at 6:30pm for this stately and breathtaking puzzle of overlapping narratives, nuclear statecraft, and the sometimes, but not always, reckless-seeming currency of hope. 

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Film Club Featurette: Rope (1948) 1h 20m

On Wednesday, 20 April at 6:30pm, Film Club Phnom Penh kicks off its outdoor shoes and cozies up with one of the most audacious and criminally underrated pictures we’ve yet seen, *Rope* (1948), directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring John Dall, Farley Granger, and the incomparable Jimmy Stewart. It was Hitchcock's first film shot in colour, and few of his efforts more richly deserved the added dimensionality and depth of field that colour offers, afterward. 

We don’t think of him this way now, but in his heyday as an A-list Hollywood actor and script-adapter, Hume Cronyn bore a well-earned reputation for being a ripe miserable bastard—particularly toward anyone who dared to tell him no. Thus it was that, on an improbably rainy spring afternoon in Los Angeles in 1947, Cronyn barged in on a studio meeting to present Alfred Hitchcock with one of the less circumscribed and deferential movie pitches ever to that time: He wanted Hitchcock to make a murder mystery, adapted from a one-act, one-room play, and filmed so as to suggest that everything we witness is unfolding in real time. 

The story of the narrative is easily told and almost impossible to spoil. Dall and Granger play two well-polished collegiate aesthetes, bored and lonely after having just completed a mesmerizing course from a philosophy professor obsessed with Nietzsche’s Superman. After a brief conversation in which the philosophical underpinnings of their thinking are revealed to have been suitably and explicitly misunderstood by them, the two young men decide to exhibit their self-appointed superiority. And to do this, it follows (-?), they will commit an act of unspeakable private barbarism—and then confidently host a cocktail party immediately thereafter in the same space. Apparently without so much as washing up first. 

The guest of honour is naturally their would-be mentor, the prim and tweedy Professor Cadell (Stewart), invited by the pair with a clear intent of showing off, without actually revealing to him what they’ve done. No stranger to overzealous college-boy idolatry, Cadell’s simmering discomfiture is at first mistaken for a professor’s natural remorse at seeing enthusiastic converts get it wrong. But gradually, as innuendos find lubrication through the force of drink, Cadell comes to realize that the discomfiture in this case very possibly, indeed probably, counts for so much more than mis-quotation ever could. 

More than anything, this is what makes Rope such a brilliant work of cinema: It’s not how the boys change over the course of this claustrophobic little evening of boat-house protocol and WASPy badinage; it’s how Stewart changes. He knows something is up from the moment he hits that door, of course—but like a man struggling to process the news of a fatal accident, he must drag himself through the stations on a passion-play of self aggrievement and denial. If it’s as bad as it starts to sound, he is indirectly responsible for an act from which he will never quite release himself. If it’s worse, he might not get the chance.  

You may have seen Aleksandr Sokurov’s *Russian Ark* with us a few months ago, and you may have seen Alejandro Inarritu’s *Birdman* without us, a few years before that. If either is the case, then you know how difficult it is just to make a movie look like it was filmed continuously, even in contemporary times. For its era, then, Rope is nothing short of norm-shattering. No one but the 1948 version of Hume Cronyn could have marshaled the Superman’s private conviction of his craft, to devise such a comfortably subversive concept for a film. And no one but A. J. Hitchcock could have carried it off with such riveting aplomb. 

I hope everyone will join us, Wednesday 20 April at 6:30pm, for this spellbinding little keepsake-box of macabre suspense and relentlessly onrushing dread. It’s not true that movies don’t get made like this anymore, but it may as well be.

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Film Club Featurette: Apollo 13 (1995) 2h 22m

On Sunday, 17 April, at 6:30pm, Film Club Phnom Penh checks that its carry-bags are secure around its shoulders and its hands are wrapped securely around the safety bar, as it embarks down the gentle start-slope for the ride of its young life, Ron Howard's soaring masterpiece of technical achievement and immutable emotional resonance, *Apollo 13*, starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Kathleen Quinlan, Chris Ellis, Jean Speegle Howard, Clint Howard, and Capt. James Arthur Lovell, Jr, USN O6-SpecDty (ret.).  

Our gracious and long-suffering host gets a lot of mileage out of reminding me from time to time that "nerds are cool" -- though goodness knows I can't imagine who she might be thinking of when she does. And yes, nerds are indeed cool: It's an axiom on which our entire platform has depended and will, I hope, continue to succeed. But taken by itself the conviction that nerds are cool doesn't gift us with Apollo 13. To get us there, we needed maestro director Ron Howard's innate understanding of another, equally important axiom. Schmaltz is underrated. Especially when you're at the movies.

We know the story by now: A third moon-mission bearing the number 13 lifts off from Cape Canaveral with three astronauts aboard—Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), and backup Command Module Pilot Jack Swaggart (Kevin Bacon), while original Pilot Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinese) sits grounded in Houston on suspicion that he will soon contract the measles. It’s a routine mission to whatever extent any mission outside of earth’s gravity could possibly be thought of as routine. 

When, on the third day out (April 13), an explosion cripples the spacecraft, what was supposed to be a voyage so banal and un-inspired that the networks refused even to cover it becomes a global vigil in which all stops are pulled to do whatever can be done on the ground to bring the astronauts home. “The President wants odds,” Deke Slayton (Chris Ellis) tells Flight Director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) as they quietly confer over his console at Mission Control. “What do I tell him, one chance in three?” To which Christopher Kraft (Joe Spano) replies unbidden, “I don't think they're that good.”

Most people don't know just how not-that-good the odds really were, but the astronauts did. “We were looking for a trajectory that intersected with the earth's path in some way,” the real Jim Lovell once told a documentary interviewer. “What we didn't want was to become an orbiting memorial to the space program for all time.” 

This is how not-that-good it was, friends: The three men, trapped in an all but impossibly confined and quickly freezing space, weighing the alternatives of a slow death in orbit or a quick one in the atmosphere, and then calling-down their preference for the quick one. That anything different happened, in the end, is a literal monument to the guile and dedication of some of the smartest and most zealously committed nobodies in the history of humankind.

So how do you tell a story like this one? It’s compelling for what it was, of course, but the trap of that starting-point is that its ending-point is available to any kid who’s heard of Wikipedia. How do you make it not just compelling, but involving? 

Perhaps you start with Faulkner, who wrote that for every southerner it is always possible to imagine himself standing in ranks in a Pennsylvania field on an early July afternoon in 1863, the flags not yet out of their casings, before the war was going to be lost. It happens that a great and consequential war was about to be lost in the United States in the 1970s as well—not just a physical one, but one over the very cohesion of what it meant to be American. From Vietnam to Kent State to unprecedented racial strife and the crisis in the Middle East, no one who came home to the evening news during this time could have anticipated living through one of the most collective and universalizing crises of their lives. 

With that simple awareness, Howard’s prescription for telling this story was as bounded by circumstance as an actual marching order: What you have to do, if you’re going to tell this story in a way that transports us back, is you have to tell it cheesy. You have to gently overplay the family emotions, and the crane shots, and the dry-witted Houston badinage, and the soundtrack—everything about the story needs just that extra little bit of schmaltz. Just as we did as we lived through it.   

Of course you also have to tell it in a way that works cinematically, and that is never going to be easy when it comes to pre-CGI-era pictures about traveling to space. Fortunately for us, Howard is a bona fide creative genius, and nowhere does his own star shine anywhere near this bright. 

 

This may not be true of all great films—even all the great films on this list—but what makes this one worthy of an earlier claim to my top overall spot is the total, absolute, unwavering suspension of disbelief: There comes a time in each viewer's experience of this movie, when the very idea that we are sitting in comfy seats on the ground simply and unceremoniously leaves us. For me that moment comes just after liftoff, as the spacecraft is climbing out. We see an interior shot of the command module, the rumble everywhere around us, with a clear view of the instrument cluster. And there is just enough shake, just enough terror, just enough mechanized life to the thing, to let me know that I'm on the ride of my life. I wept like a baby when I first saw that moment in a theater—and I was on a freaking date.

Inspired genius abounds in this one, suffusing even the seemingly minor details with as much timely creativity as Howard's unfailing loyalty to the historical record would abide. His decision to crane-shoot the scenes at Mission Control, providing us the very sort of un-grounded, call-to-greatness vibe experienced by the controllers themselves, is but one example. The pitch-perfect performance of Jean Speegle Howard as Lovell's aging mother Blanche, is another. Upon being introduced to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (tasked with keeping her preoccupied during the tension of reentry), Blanche raises her eyebrows and asks, “Are you boys in the space program too?”

Then there is the zero-G footage—which actually comprises far less of the film than our credulous brains would lead us to suspect (much of what looks like zero-G is instead good actors, planted firmly on the ground, swaying rhythmically). The true weightless shots were accomplished by building a second command module and a second LEM inside a zero-G training plane, meaning that each shot could only last a few seconds and could not be immediately re-taken if it didn't go right, a fact that only added to the realism and tension of the actors' performances.

The set for Mission Control, meanwhile, had been replicated from the real one to such exacting standards that the real Gene Kranz would leave the set at the end of each day in his capacity as creative consultant, only to find himself startled anew by the absence of an elevator to take him “down” to a Houston parking lot. 

Shortly after this movie came out on video I had occasion to stroll the aisles of one of those icky big-box electronic stores, noticing in passing that one of the end-cap displays was playing Apollo 13 as its demonstrator. When those first desperate moments of emergency broke over the astronauts, every single customer in the store—and most of the staff—ceased whatever they were doing and crowded around the screen, as if this were really happening and we were really standing there, in a store someplace, terrified for the safety of our three brave astronauts. They say millions of people missed their trains when John Glenn lifted off for the first time; well, tens of people were made late for their next errand by watching a movie depiction of a crisis for which every last one of us knew the outcome. That, friends, that is the brilliance that we prepare ourselves to relish at the conclusion of this weekend. 

I hope everyone will make a special effort to join us Sunday, April 17, at 6:30, for this thrilling and enthralling triptick of technical prowess and heart-plucked inspiration. I can absolutely, positively guarantee you won’t regret it. Schmaltz and all.

    

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Film Club Featurette: Three Days of the Condor (1975) 1h 57m

On Saturday, 16 April at 6:30pm, Film Club Phnom Penh takes on one of the great and iconic espionage capers in cinematic history, *Three Days of the Condor*, starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, Max Von Sydow and John Houseman.

Thought experiment: Take one of the sexiest movie stars in history and hire him at the very zenith of his acting career. Hand him a razor-sharp script, pair him with a genuine titan of 70's-era directing prowess, and shoot a movie about complex international espionage in which the star must evade numerous allegiance-shifting bad guys at every turn. You’d have a pretty good movie, if you did that. Actually, you’d have Alan Pakula’s *The Parallax View*, starring Warren Beatty and featuring a shadowy non-governmental entity trying to force the United States to change directions on an issue of mortal peril and universal significance. 

And let's be clear: Parallax View is a pretty doggone terrific movie. But it’s not a classic, and it never will be -- for the sneaky-simple reason that the inciting incident which impels Beatty onto his theme-park ride of harrowing intrigue isn’t the tiniest bit relatable. (Someone in an I’m-really-shady business suit approaches him and asks if he’ll submit to a personality evaluation that centers around being forced to watch a movie. You know, the sort of thing that could happen to any of us – right?) What you wouldn't have, if you did that much and stopped, is *Three Days of the Condor*. Not yet. 

No, what makes our present feature such a totem of Hollywood excellence isn’t the sexy star (Robert Redford), performing at the very top of his game (1975), with a relentless espionage-thriller script (adapted from the smash-hit novel by James Grady), and directed by a giant of the business (Sydney Pollack). What makes Three Days of the Condor is the deeply, deeply unsettling realization that comes over us about twenty minutes in: that for all the trappings of sordid CIA cat-and-mouse, the basic crisis that has befallen the main character really could happen. To any of us. 

Redford plays Joseph Turner, the improbably bookish and un-macho CIA analyst who returns to his nondescript Manhattan station office to find that something has occurred which will tear from under him everything he has known, or counted on, or done, or trusted. 

It’s a moment so brilliant in its every aspect of execution that we can easily miss the meta-brilliance that it represents: for its instant connection with our darkest insecurities about our anonymity and our routines. We watch as Turner struggles to process what he sees. We take in the shock, the non-comprehension and, ultimately, the mortal terror of the thing, for all it represents. And we feel every, last, *bit* of it ourselves -- sitting there with our popcorn hovering halfway to our mouths. None of us will ever have to dispatch a dead girl crawling out of our TV. None of us will ever have to fend off a creepy grandma who compelled us to murder our sister so she could hijack our soul in a candle-lit treehouse. But the simple horror of what happens to Joe Turner’s life in the first reel of Condor is like nothing I have ever seen in a film purported to be scary. None of us expect to have to handle the things that Turner will thenceforth have to handle, and all of us know—way down deep—that we really, really, really could.   

Naturally there follows a cat-and-mouse between Turner and any number of different would-be freelance and Intelligence-inside neutralizers, some of whom begin as friends and others of whom don't seem to work for the same set of people who are supposed to be trying to kill him. As with so many great 1970s conspiracy flicks, nothing is quite what it seems and nothing is clear or predictable until the very end. Along his breakneck path to sorting out the players while he tries to learn the game, Turner will cross swords with an overtly relativistic crisis-contact inside the agency (Robinson), a grim uber-boss (Houseman), a cheerfully sociopathic liquidator (Von Sydow), and crucially an unsuspecting middle-class photographer who just wanted to go skiing for the weekend with her boyfriend in Vermont (Dunaway).    

This picture would have deserved a place on our calendar for no other reason than its status as claimant to one of the truly great scenes in cinema--the oft-copied confrontation between Turner and his arch-nemesis, Station Director Atwood (Addison Powell), in which Turner surreptitiously enters Powell’s house in the middle of the night and summons him from his upstairs bedroom by playing the stereo as loud as it will go. It’s not quite as iconic as Slim Pickens riding that nuke all the way to its date with ground-burst destiny, but it’s all the more significant for how incredibly it works. 

I hope everyone will make a special point of planning to join us, Saturday 16 April at 6:30pm, for this thrilling tour de force from the one great golden age of American moviemaking. In the end the relatability of the thing serves as a sort of marching order in its own right: We owe it, not just to Joe Turner but to ourselves, to see just whether—and if so, how (!) — he can marshal his paltry resources and his even thinner understanding, to extricate us all. 

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Film Club Featurette: Withnail and I (1987)

Join us Wednesday, 13 April at 6:30pm at YK Art House for Bruce Robinson’s dark, subversive, and forever-quotable rumination on post-modern cultural decay in Britain, Withnail and I, starring Richard E Grant and Paul McGann. 

Inspired by Robinson’s own experiences as a struggling west-end actor at the time, Withnail and I plumbs the squalid melancholy that so many others have elected to forget about the drug-fueled 1960s, and comes up cherries across the reels with a hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking riff-parade that is still being cheerfully de-contextualized by quotesmiths to this day. The vehicles for all of this piercing social comment (for in the end that is really all they are in this picture, vehicles) are the two main characters, aspiring theater-actors who spend their time drinking, bickering, drinking, taking drugs, drinking, and failing at every single thing they do. 

Unable to find official work, the charismatic Withnail is forced instead to “perform himself” – choosing to voice his character as a sort of mashup of Edward VIII and Keith Richards. “A man,” in the words of Gene Siskel, “whose greatest talent is for squandering his talents.” Then of course there is Withnail’s unnamed straight man, “I,” whose job in the main character’s life seems to vacillate between dubious antagonist and intentionally sabotaged errand-boy. And in the highest and most perfectly inexplicable traditions of the comedic straight-men of theater, “I” simply keeps on coming back for more. (The drugs don’t hurt in this regard, to be fair.)

 

That a movie this threadbare and unstructured could work this well is no small tribute to the creative vision of Robinson, for whom this was a very first attempt at either writing or directing. Most reasonable persons would have angled their debut efforts along a much safer and less astringent line, but Robinson was having none of that—opting instead for what A. O. Scott summarized as, “an exploration into the brooding aesthetic of awfulness.” 

By turns we witness drug-fueled monologues, technicolour non-sequiturs, a madcap misadventure with a pile of dirty dishes in a common sink, and a pointless road trip that manages to take up more than half the film without doing or accomplishing much of anything at all. In the end, bereft in a driving rain and nowhere in particular in the suddenly gloomy-seeming London, one of our leads is finally left to confront his mortal loneliness and utter lack of self-direction—thus inspiring himself to perform Hamlet’s soliloquy to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “What a piece of work is man.” 

And we melt. 

We melt in spite of ourselves, in spite of our simmering disliking for the individual in question, in spite of having seen something not unlike this coming from essentially the moment we first sat down. ...Which, really when one thinks about it, is probably the truest reason why this movie is so damned enduring and universally beloved. Mention “The Hamlet scene from Withnail” to an even casual cinephile and you’re apt to get a rendition, sure, but you’re also apt to notice how it trails off in the middle as your friend labours to keep himself emotionally together for it, thinking of that poor guy in the rain. It’s a performance within a performance within the performance, and—for all of that—it is one of the greatest moments of Shakespeare recitation in cinematic history. What a piece of work is man, indeed. 

I hope everyone will plan to join us Wednesday, 13 April, at 6:30pm, for this touchstone of iconic British cinema. Goodness knows the post-credits discussion will no doubt be as lively as any we’ve yet had. 

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