Tamara Drewe: Vaguely feminist farmland farce hardly Hardy but not half-bad either

Based on Posey Simmonds’ graphic novel, itself a clever, loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Maddening Crowd, Tamara Drewe is set largely in and around a rural Dorset writer’s colony, where a celebrated mystery novelist’s under-loved helpmeet (Tamsin Grieg) serves nummy snacks in dowdy turtlenecks, functions as an unacknowledged editor of sorts to her numerous and apparently mostly talentless residents, attempts to tolerate her husband’s philandering, and gradually kens on to the fact that the shlubby American Hardy scholar (Bill Camp) who keeps coming back to massage his writer’s block is probably falling hopelessly in love with her.

This is a rather sprawling ensemble comedy, so that’s not even the half of what’s going on in Moira Buffini’s adaptation—I haven’t yet introduced the titular character, who isn’t exactly the heroine of the piece but, most pleasingly embodied by Gemma Arterton, is quite obviously its star, a successful young journalist returning to her country home after years away with a new nose and a body to keep the cocks crowing night and day, making her grand appearance in ass-exposing cut-offs and a five-alarm red tank-top. Before we’re through she’ll have wittingly or unwittingly seduced a pretentious London rocker (Dominic Cooper), an even more pretentious middle-aged scribe (Roger Allam), and the local ex-con farm hunk (Luke Evans, sort of a less crazed-looking Michael Shannon) who opens the film shirtless and sweating against the setting sun in a tableau that could grace the cover of any six-dozen Harlequin Romances.

All this business—there’s still the mischievous teenage chorus to work in!—makes for a precarious balancing act. The multiple narratives are well-structured enough to keep us oriented, but from the get-go the overall tone slips into a decidedly broad brand of British comedy, replete with pissing cows and one guy eavesdropping while dropping a log, and Buffini’s dialogue is at times so on the nose—“She doesn’t need a writer; she needs a man!”—it’s nearly comical during those rare scenes that seem designed to be otherwise. The landscapes meanwhile are lovely, the story’s divided into seasons, and the occasional glimpse of London makes the big city seem dreary even for the rich. Director Stephen Frears seems at his best here when nurturing connections between his largely superb cast, as well as when emphasizing the script’s loving homage to bucolic life and sexually empowered women and its barely contained disdain for artsy retreats and emotionally immature men. Having said that, if a couple of the guys were more interesting, it may have elevated the film as a whole.

"By walking and walking and walking, everything stands still": Werner Herzog on My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

There once was a man named Brad, who even in his mid-30s still lived with his mother, but Brad went a little mad somewhere along the rapids in deepest Peru, and when he came back he was talking about inner voices, about how god lives in his house, about basketball. He was to play Orestes in a Los Angeles-based production, but was dismissed for erratic behaviour. Unable to kill his mother on stage he wound up doing it in real life, with a sword, at the neighbour’s house one sunny suburban San Diego morning. All this has already transpired by the time we tune in to My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, which plays out mainly through flashbacks prompted by Brad’s girlfriend and former director, who arrive on the scene to discover Brad’s holed up inside his bungalow with a pair of flamingos for hostages, while baffled police surround the house, order pizza, and ponder Brad’s cryptic declarations and offerings of oatmeal and old gospel tunes.

Ostensibly based on a true story, the movie was scripted by Werner Herzog and longtime collaborator Herbert Golder, directed by Herzog, and granted an executive producer’s blessing by David Lynch, who otherwise had nothing to do with the picture, though its particular brand of quirks seem at times almost an homage to the director of Blue Velvet, and Brad’s irritation with his hippy friend’s meditation practice reads as a friendly jab at Lynch’s outspoken advocacy for TM. Songs from Chavela Vargas, Washington Phillips and Caetano Veloso, as well as a haunting score for strings, piano and accordion from Herzog regular Ernst Reijseger provide haunting accompaniment to this strange study of untreated schizophrenia and unbridled eccentricity. Michael Shannon imbues Brad with tremendous conviction, this Aguirre returned from his Amazonian raft to transform into Woyzeck. Grace Zabriskie plays the over-attentive mom, Chloë Sevigny the worried girlfriend, Udo Kier the thespian and father figure. Willem Dafoe and Michael Peña play the homicide cops too fascinated by the enigma of Brad to attend to their duties with due rigour, the latter especially seeming eager to do whatever it takes to get close to the raving murderer. Brad Dourif turns up as a bigoted rancher uncle. There are ostriches, tiny horses, and a well-dressed dwarf. There are inexplicable sojourns to Tijuana and Central Asia. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Herzog is simply cramming the movie with truckloads of weird items he likes having around. It’s equally hard to resist the movie’s magisterial control of atmosphere, its charismatic performances, and brilliant bits of humour.

My Son, My Son had its world premiere at Venice 2009, alongside Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans. Though unsavoury and ill-behaved in its own right, the latter got a decent theatrical release while My Son, My Son, perhaps considered the more difficult of these spastic cinematic siblings on account of its countless knee-jerk non-sequiturs, has been ushered directly from the festival circuit to home video. I posted part of my TIFF 2009 roundtable interview with Herzog earlier this year when Bad Lieutenant turned up on video store shelves, and now offer up the remaining exchanges that deal specifically with My Son, My Son.

As we settle down and surround our captive subject with a battalion of recording devices, a bespectacled young fellow launches right in and asks Herzog about collaborating with Lynch on My Son, My Son, pointing out numerous elements that strike him as being especially Lynchian.

“There was no collaboration,” Herzog replies.

“Really? None whatsoever?”
“He read the screenplay,” says Herzog, signaling for the next question.

Another writer asks Herzog if he could describe the movie’s reportedly long genesis.
“There was an early phase of the project at least a dozen years back,” Herzog explains, “when I wrote the screenplay together with a friend of mine, Herb Golder, who has been my assistant director. He collected materials from a murder case which took place around a staging of The Oresteia. Herb Golder had translated The Oresteia into English. He kept a huge pile of homicide detective reports, psychiatric evaluations and these sorts of things. He always wanted to write a screenplay yet could never come up with one. I told him to give it to me and I will write the screenplay. It will take me a week, not three years! So we sat together and in five days we wrote the screenplay. Then it fell dormant. It couldn’t be produced. Now to answer the earlier question in a way, I like David Lynch’s work. We have great respect for each other. I was with him and I kept saying in this financial crisis the budgets of big movies are still skyrocketing. 100 million, 180 million dollars: this is not sustainable. Almost like a manifesto I suggested that we should make films that cost no more than two million dollars, but with the best of the best of actors, and with a great story. David Lynch and the producer Eric Bassett founded a company which is some sort of offspring of David Lynch’s production company. So David Lynch said, ‘Yeah, we should do it! Do you have a project?’ I said sure, we have a project. He said, ‘When can you start?’ I said tomorrow. He said, ‘Then borrow my name and you can probably sell it better to France. Canal Plus has always bought my stuff.’ So I said fine, yes, put your name as executive producer. Otherwise, if we see any points of comparison in the film to Lynch’s work than he must certainly have learned from me!”
Everyone laughs. Herzog smiles, reconsiders.
“However, yeah, there’s a small homage to him. You will see in one scene there’s a man on a treadmill running and he has an oxygen mask. I put that in to say hello to David Lynch. Otherwise he has nothing to do with it. We are very, very different in character, and in our personal lives we couldn’t be more different.”

A bossy woman asks Herzog what it is about The Oresteia that endures.

“I can’t really discuss it,” Herzog replies. “It’s going to be too deep plowing. The fact is that it has been alive for more than two and a half thousand years now, and rightly so. It’s a very beautiful text. However, what you hear in the staging of the film was actually taken from a variety of ancient Greek tragedies. We concocted some sort of a text which is not just The Oresteia. But that doesn’t really matter. We improved it!”
Everyone laughs.

I ask about the moments of stillness in My Son, My Son, when the actors suddenly fall silent and create tableaus. These scenes made me think about the Russian tradition alluded to in Incident at Loch Ness of sitting silently for a minute before embarking on a significant journey.
“It’s good that you refer to those because they are somehow pivotal moments in the film,” Herzog replies. “There’s a standstill. Quite often the leading character is puzzled by the tunnel of time. By walking and walking and walking, everything stands still. During the rehearsals of the ancient Greek drama he speaks about basketball and how he was a three-point man and he gets the ball and jumps and in mid-air and realizes he’s 70 feet away from the basket, just shy of mid-court, and then he freezes, and everything else freezes, and he contemplates, and he’s suspended in mid-air, and then he shoots, and the director says, ‘And then in swished in?’ And he says, ‘No, it kind of rattled. It hit the rim hard and rattled in.’ And he speaks of the pivot of time. It’s a motif which is very important in the film, this stand-still of time, of persons who all of a sudden turn toward the camera and look and look and look until the song is over. I love these central moments. For example, the tree stump with the midget on it and the tiniest horse in the world. It’s at the exact centre of the movie, like the pivoting point of the movie.”
I ask what made him choose the Vargas and Veloso songs.
“They’re very beautiful,” he says with a shrug. “That’s it. Yes. I immediately knew I had to do that. There was not one second of deliberation.”
And suddenly there was not one second left for more questions. I asked Herzog to sing my copy of Conquest of the Useless, which he did with pleasure, repeating his belief that his books will outlast his movies, and the lot of us collected our things and shuffled out.

Absence makes the art go yonder: The Missing Person on DVD

John Rosow (Michael Shannon) used to be NYPD, now he’s a Chicago PI and a strong candidate for a DUI. He’s woken from some state close to comatose by the proverbial ringing phone, requesting his services to tail someone all the way down to LA. Initially the gig seems conspicuously easy, with the subject hiding in plain sight, taking the train, not bothering to disguise the fact that he’s a middle-aged white guy traveling with a handsome Mexican boy. Things gradually become more arduous. The technologically impaired Rosow has to buy a phone that takes pictures from a gentleman named Boo Boo (Mark Ventimiglia), pay a Serpico-obsessed cabbie named Hero (John Ventimiglia) $500 to let him hitch a ride in his trunk, and ward off the amorous attentions of an altogether fetching cougar named Lana (Margaret Colin) who sleep-talks to her mother about blueberry pancakes. But nobody told Rosow switching professions in your mid-30s would be easy.

Writer/director Noah Buschel’s The Missing Person is loaded with pronounced eccentricities, but its also loaded with amiable, detailed performances, thanks to an impressive cast of film, television and theatre veterans who unanimously seem to jive with Buschel’s kooky, decidedly unhurried neo-noir. Genre tropes are dusted off and tickled back to life, with Rosow regularly knocked unconscious, dreaming of some lost lover, or trading banter with good-cop/bad-cop feds who mysteriously turn up in the motel parking lot. At times it’s a little cute, a little cartoonish, all the coffee and jazz and smokes and booze and abundant anachronisms. Personally, I like coffee and jazz and booze, but besides it’s all leading somewhere, all in the service of a thoughtful narrative arc that exchanges noir’s foundations in postwar despair for a post-9/11 dispersion. This is a story about going missing, staying missing, and liking it, about being missing as a state of grace, and helping others to disappear for their own good.

None of which screams box office gold, I suppose, and thus, in this country anyway, The Missing Person makes its debut at your local video store rather than your local cinema. It plays well on TV, even if Ryan Samul’s HD imagery is a little annoyingly heavy on ostentatious filters. It also plays to the strengths of Shannon, an actor whose very particular peculiarities won him an Oscar nod for Revolutionary Road, not to mention plum nut-job and/or jerk-off parts in films by William Friedkin, Sidney Lumet, and Werner Herzog. He’s really quite ideal for the strange, haunted, lumbering hero of The Missing Person, so withdrawn he could initially be mistaken for the title character. Shannon shuffles and groans through most of the film. I had to laugh at certain shots that play out with the sole item on the soundtrack being Shannon’s amplified wheeze. But it’s a wheeze with a soul, from a face like yesterday’s unrefrigerated lunch. Despite intermittent voice-over, we learn only fragments of Rosow’s past, but we finally know everything we need to know just by spending time with Shannon’s sardonic grin, bleary confusion, and seemingly outsized figure. They speak of a primal wound, one we can trace back to Philip Marlowe, to Jeff Bailey, or to Al Roberts. It’s a feeling that transcends time and genre, even when the setting is as winky as this.