Jodhi May – Movie Musings

Masterful adaption of Wharton, beautifully judged, brilliantly acted and superbly filmed

Director: Terence Davies

Cast: Gillian Anderson (Lily Bart), Eric Stoltz (Lawrence Seldon), Dan Aykroyd (Gus Trenor), Anthony LaPaglia (Simon Rosedale), Laura Linney (Bertha Dorset), Terry Kinney (George Dorset), Eleanor Bron (Julia Peniston), Jodhi May (Grace Stepney), Elizabeth McGovern (Carry Fisher), Penny Downie (Judy Trenor), Pearce Quigley (Percy Glyde), Lorelei King (Mrs Hatch)

When Scorsese bought Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence to the screen, it was seen as a wild swing out in his career. You could have said the same thing when Terence Davies made The House of Mirth, an unlikely follow-up from a host of artistically constructed, meditative memory pieces. But in doing so, Davies executed perhaps one of the most perfectly executed translations of a novel to the screen, a gorgeous, beautifully moving film. Put simply, in its grace and magic glow, it’s pretty hard to imagine The House of Mirth being done better.

Our hero is Lily Bart (Gillian Anderson), a woman who feels she is at the heart of 1905 New York society but will discover her grip on life is far less secure than she believes. Dependent on her aunt (Eleanor Bron) for financial support, needing to marry for money, perhaps in love with not-quite-rich-enough bachelor Lawrence Seldon (Eric Stoltz), unwilling to compromise on her principles and desires, Lily will make a series of catastrophic decisions. Thee will leave her facing the brunt of the ruthlessness of her so-called friends such as banker Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd) or Bertha Dorset (Laura Linney) and her world falling apart with extraordinary speed.

Shot with a visual beauty inspired by a host of painters – most notably John Singer Sergeant, whose compositions are referenced throughout to breathtaking effect – Davies film is measured, wise and slowly unleashes a powerful emotional impact. Carefully adapted, Davies film is awash with the intricate, ornate dialogue of early twentieth century New York: speech that, it quickly becomes clear, is about disguising and obscuring the true meaning of what is being said. New York society is awash with lies, deceptions, selfishness and greed, all of it disguised with fine words and high-living – as Lily says “Why is it when we meet we always play this elaborate game?”

What’s tragic about Lily Bart is that it’s a game she believes herself to be skilled at, time revealing she is a novice stumbling in the big leagues. On top of which, as someone penniless, unmarried and reliant on others, she has a terrible lack of security. A lack of security meaning people like Trenor can demand a very personal reward in exchange for his financial services, without worrying about disgrace. Someone savvier would have seen through Ackroyd’s wonderful portrait of barely concealed greed under Trevnor’s avuncular pleasantness. Just as a more worldly figure would have seen that (the simply brilliant) Laura Linney’s gossipy Bertha sees Lily as nothing more than a simple soul ripe for manipulation, a pathetic fall-guy to hide her own infidelities.

It becomes clear there is a doomed, tragic quality to Lily. She’s introduced emerging from a blackened screen in a puff of train steam, an Anna Karenina-ish echo hinting at her eventual fate. In an extraordinarily complex, perfectly judged performance from Gillian Anderson, Lily emerges as a woman of far greater depth and principle than we (or she) suspects. But prone to terrible errors of judgment, often for the right reasons. She is too principled to marry for money, but not savvy enough to play the courting game, publicly humiliating the wealthy Percy Glyde (Pearce Quigley) who she dutifully woos, only to stand him up for a walk that is a clear proposal hint.

But she is too aware of her wordly needs to embrace the mutual love between her and Eric Stoltz’s charmingly enigmatic Lawrence Stern. These two conduct a dance of suggestive flirtation, without ever truly committing their feelings openly. Lily seems to be almost a tease, but Anderson beautifully demonstrates a hesitancy born from an attempt to be honest, to find love and money in one man. The heart-rending realisation later in the film that she has made a terrible mistake, out of a mix of principle, pride, foolishness and decency is captured in Anderson’s superbly pained expression – not to mention a late emotional out-pouring that is heart-breaking in its pain and honesty.

Slowly, Lily’s world falls apart, Davies capturing the tragedy with coolly observant camerawork gliding through society, echoing the photographic approach that defined his earlier work. In every sequence, and between every scene cut, Lily’s position slowly, at first imperceptibly, becomes worse and worse. Less and less secure, until eventually she’s lost to society, in a world of run-down bedsits and laudanum addictions. Where she brutally realises her life of society balls has made her a “useless person”, with no skills and utterly out-of-depth in a world where she must earn her living.

Anderson’s punctures Lily beautifully throughout with a naïve vulnerability. In a way, the undeserved social disgrace Lily suffers (wrongly seen as a slut and a home wrecker) makes her cling even more closely to her principles – even as they become more and more damaging to her. These principles can seem as inexplicable to us as they do to her few allies: she pays out a stock of her limited personal finances to cover up Bertha’s affair with Lawrence, continuing to cover for her even as Bertha burns her in front of all of New York (and barely considers using her evidence for blackmail). It’s part of what makes Lily an astonishingly admirable figure, even as her life spirals downward.

The powerful emotion of this, the deep investment Davies helps us feel for a woman who becomes more and more understandable to us as she is more and more stripped of privilege, is complemented by exquisite film-making. One breath-takingly superb transition sees Davies camera drift through a grand house with all its furniture and fittings carefully hidden under dustsheets, out into a rain-speckled stream, the camera swooping lower and faster until the water transitions into the sun-kissed waves of the Mediterranean: a gorgeously, masterfully simple transition that moves us across weeks and miles in a moment. Haunting images abound, a spilt ink pot in the film’s closing sequence like a gut punch of emotional rawness.

Really, what Davies understands, is that Wharton’s bitter comedy is set in a ‘vile’ world. In society, nothing matters other than the quality of homes and classiness of backgrounds. The finest people can lie, cheat and steal with no blowback. Nouveau riche like Simon Rosedale (a very good Anthony LaPaglia) are judged as vulgar when their actions reveal they are decent. It’s a world where you start to expect no one is happy: Lily’s cousin Grace (an excellent Jodhi May) is unloved, her aunt miserable, half of society are privately humiliated cuckolds, deeply bitter and unhappy.

The House of Mirth is a truly outstanding literary adaptation, beautifully assembled, wonderfully acted – Anderson, in particular, was and is an absolute revelation – and directed with a deeply powerful simplicity by Davies. It’s possibly his masterpiece.

Martin Freeman is the great artist Rembrandt van Rijn in this bizarre part drama part art lecture

Director: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Martin Freeman (Rembrandt), Eva Birthistle (Saskia van uylenburg), Jodhi May (Geertje Dircx), Emily Holmes (Hendrickje Stoffels), Toby Jones (Gerard Dou), Jonathan Holmes (Ferdinand Bol), Natalie Press (Marieka), Fiona O’Shaughnessy (Marita), Adrian Lukis (Frans Banning Cocq), Adam Kotz (Willem van Ruytenburch), Michael Culkin (Herman Wormskerck)

There are few artists who have such a distinctive visual style as Rembrandt van Rijn, perhaps the greatest of the Dutch masters. And there are few filmmakers with such distinctive style as Peter Greenaway. So this film is a sort of perfect marriage: Greenaway, the man who claims most of the world is visually illiterate and incapable of understanding the grace and depth of visual images (be they film or painting), taking the secret language of Rembrandt’s paintings.

Rembrandt (Martin Freeman) is hired to paint the Militia Company of District II. There is, however, a conspiracy in the company. Captain Hasselberg (Andrzek Seweryn), the original commissioner of the painting, is killed, seemingly in an accident, and replaced by Frans Banning Cocq (Adrian Lukis) and his lickspittle deputy Willem van Ruytenburch (Adam Kotz). Rembrandt believes the accident was in fact murder, removing Hasselberg so that the other members of the militia can profit in a financial deal with the British government (I won’t go into the details). Alongside this, the film also looks at the personal life of Rembrandt and his relationship with his wife Saskia (Eva Birthistle) and, after her death, his maids and mistresses, Geertje (Jodhi May) and Hendrickhe Stoffels (Emily Holmes).

Peter Greenaway is a visual stylist that’s for sure. The film takes place (apart from a few outdoor sequences in a forest) in a sort of representative set that looks a bit like a combination of a theatre stage and the bare framework of a Dutch interior painting. The camera frequently uses the width of the frame to squeeze in full-body shots of its characters, and the width and depth of the room, to try and replicate as much as possible the look and feel of these artworks. An early discussion of colour (and how to describe it) is illustrated by Geertje opening curtains in a representation of Rembrandt’s bedroom, with each colour (red-yellow-blue) in turn flooding the room from the open windows. The film looks distinctive and impressive, the costume design is meticulously researched, and the artful framing to ape the conventions and styles of Rembrandt’s painting is extremely well done.

What is less well done is the actual story itself, which is largely inert and frequently dull, and takes ages to outline what is, to be honest, a not particularly interesting conspiracy. It then intercuts this with scenes and moments from Rembrandt’s domestic life, but never ties the two of these together into something coherent. Too immersed in the details of the case to be the sort of dream-cum-fantasy of previous Greenaway films like The Draughtman’s Contract, and too preoccupied with the director’s narrative laxity to become a proper character study or piece of investigative fiction, the film rather uncomfortably falls between two stools becoming neither one thing or the other.

In fact, you almost sense Greenaway’s heart wasn’t really in it, that he really wanted to make Rembrandt J’Accuse, the companion art lecture illustrated with moments from this film, which really goes to town on his conspiracy theory. The details of the conspiracy (extremely hard to follow here) are at least easier to follow in Rembrandt J’Accuse, where they make a batty but enjoyable Dan Brownish argument – even if it is based on hands being drawn “without commitment” and elastic interpretations of visual language. To be honest, for all that Rembrandt J’Accuse is a bit odd – and that Peter Greenaway has an air of an ultra-pretentious Johnny Ball in his addresses to the camera – it actually makes a far more compelling piece of cinema than the narrative film it sits alongside.

Which is a shame because, as well as the design, there is a lot of good stuff here, not least in the performance of Martin Freeman. Cinema and TV’s eternal nice-guy gets to stretch himself fantastically as an electric, compelling genius overflowing with passion, ideas, intelligence and a chippy (frequently foul mouthed) confidence, mixed with an insatiable sex drive and nose-thumbing defiance. Freeman really gets the sense of a complex, earthy, fiery man who knows he is the smartest man in the room, and is extremely cocky with it – but also has a keen sense of justice and decency. It’s about a million miles away from Tim or Bilbo, and a big reminder that he is a hell of a performer.

Put Freeman in with the thrilling design and painterly flourishes of the film, and you’ve got sections that are really worth watching. Eva Birthistle is very good as his intelligent and articulate wife, as is Johdi May as his earthy, ill-tempered, sensual lover. Nathalie Press is heart-breaking as an illegitimate girl with a tragic life. Adrian Lukis is particularly smarmy and vile as the head of the militia. In fact, most of the performances are great.

It’s just the story is not. Moments of investigation are just building into something logical and coherent when they get interrupted by straight-to-camera addresses (very odd) from the members of the Rembrandt household explaining their personal situations. Just as we start to get invested in the loves of Rembrandt, we get thrown back into the dull conspiracy. When the two overlap, neither is really served. The story frankly isn’t interesting enough. That’s even before you have to wade through the inevitable Greenaway penchant for including as much full-frontal nudity as possible (Freeman and May in particular) and graphic sex in multiple positions and orifices. I mean, I get it, Rembrandt was a lusty guy but do we need to keep seeing it?

Nightwatching is a bizarre oddity – a vehicle for a commanding lead performance, with an actor cast way against type, that never decides whether it is some sort of biography of an artist or a secret-history-expose of a conspiracy forgotten by time. As always with conspiracy theories you suspect the obvious-but-dull is probably the truth – Rembrandt delivered a painting that was so radically different from the dull line-up paintings of this genre that it shook up the art world (not in a good way) and then he fell out of fashion, didn’t have a good understanding of money, and went bankrupt, rather than being destroyed by a shadowy Amsterdam cabal. Greenaway is so in love with his theories – and his usual lusty and psychological obsessions – that he ends up with something that is neither a drama or an art lecture but somewhere in the middle with the worst aspects of both.