Cannes 1995: Day 5: May 21

Carrington, UK, dir. Christopher Hampton

What's going on?  It would be a significant overstatement to say Cannes 1995 wasn't giving us anything to enjoy or admire in its first 100 hours. Sharaku and Angels and Insects have real lingering power, The City of Lost Children at least offers grand spectacle, and the programming in Directors' Fortnight and Un Certain Regard picked up some of the Main Competition's slack. Carrington might be the high-water mark of the Competition thus far. One week later, the jury certainly held that view; give or take Sharaku, I'm inclined to agree with them. But as much as I've always liked Hampton's movie, it's a surprising apex, one-third of the way into the world's most auspicious film festival. Plenty of worthy rental choices below, but also a couple of indifferent doodles and must-avoids.

Updated: For even richer thoughts on many of the films listed below, head over to the first Jury Roundtable, where we all go into more detail about our reactions. 

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Angels in America

I struggle with the HBO adaptation of Angels in America because the play means a lot to me, and especially given all the money that was clearly made available to this project, I wish it were a richer, more thoughtful production. Perestroika in particular brims with missed opportunities, though the heavy re-writing only further proves that Kushner has never quite settled on a design for that half of the play (though chaos is clearly an indispensable element). I can see that Nichols and his designers have played up the "staginess" of several interiors so as to keep the project rooted in a sense of theatricality, but a lot of the cinematic embellishments and CGI effects feel too slick and two-dimensional, when the play clearly benefits from as much tangibility as you can bring to it. I'd love to see what John Greyson or Robert Lepage or somebody might have done with the material. Still, it's hard to imagine a really bad production, and this one certainly isn't, because the core text is just so provocative, ambitious, imaginatively drawn, and beautifully written.



I'm picking this image less as the "best" than as a kind of emblem for my feelings. I'm not sure Angels needed this new scene that Kushner wrote for Perestroika, and it feels like a somewhat desperate opening-out of the physical space. I'm not a huge fan of natural location photography with a project like this anyway, since the whole text is constructed as a series of artificial problems and conceits laid over the very real nightmares of our history and our current reality. The beach here feels so ...domesticated, in a play that thrives on fantasy and fire. At the same time, I do appreciate the dynamic of this scene, not just because you see Joe Pitt getting recklessly invested in a relationship he barely understands—and at the same time you're feeling Louis Ironson starting to pull out of it—but because Angels in America is always telling us that denuding ourselves does not pare us down to essentials but in fact exposes our complexities. That in opening yourself to the world of sexuality you inevitably create a storm of debris, big or small, and that somebody else will have to pick it all up, now or later.

From a visual standpoint, in a miniseries that takes playful but earnest care to consider all the characters' potential relations to the angelic, I like how the foamy line of surf hits Patrick Wilson's body just where a tufted set of wings might go. The story, the dialogue, and the bulk of the shots make this Joe's scene, which is fine with me, since I think Wilson gives the best performance in the cast, in the play's most potentially opaque role. But visually, as Joe begins to strip down, we also recognize that it's really Louis's turn to wrestle, Jacob-like, with the naked angel—whatever an "angel" might mean to Louis, or to us, at this point in the piece. The shot and the scene are like a cold parallel to Emma Thompson's magnificent arrivals to Louis's HIV-infected boyfriend, Prior. Joe looms above with a kind of majesty that Wilson's body, the best one that a court of appeals lawyer ever had, only reinforces. Louis, like Prior, crouches below in a panic. This Louis-as-Prior doubling, despite the annoying fact of how the miniseries rejects a lot of the other doublings that the playscript demands, only intensifies insofar as this gray, cruddy beach with the jagged stumps at the shoreline and the capsized hulk on the horizon is like a downscale, mundane precursor of the chilly, magnificent wreck called Heaven that Prior is soon to visit.

If anything, though, it is Joe who is the hapless, Prior-like innocent in this relationship, and Louis who is the flighty, schizophrenic, Angelic agent/invader who likes to think he is a victim. In fairness, Louis does suffer. But nonetheless, the brief, visual confusion of roles in this shot strongly implies that this relationship won't work out.

So, a lot of resonant stuff going on in this otherwise simple shot, though it still feels like the viewer and the play have to do a lot of their own thinking to keep the image and the movie interesting. HBO's vision of Angels is nothing if not concepty but it barely if ever registers as intellectual, a category that the play fully embraces but which Nichols' movie avoids like a kind of ...virus? That's my reaction in a nutshell to this made-for-TV Angels, which I always feel like I'm either overestimating or underestimating. If Patrick's just taking off his clothes in a last-ditch attempt to convert me to the cause, what can I do about that? Let him try.

P.S. I would like to add a few more runner-up shots. Like Nathaniel, I am totally in love with Jeffrey Wright's physical vocabulary as Belize, whom he plays very differently than he did in his Tony-winning take on the same character for Broadway. I like this shot not only because Belize just cracks me up with all his heavy-lidded, low-volume, but prissily catlike gestures, but because I always wonder how much Wright might have felt like Belize, trapped in a play that pretends to have a lot to say about race (and, like Louis, it occasionally does have something to say) but delivers a lot less than it promises. Does Wright ever wish he could just signal the waitress, grab his check, and get outta there? It'd be Belize's best option for finding a private life or an orgasm, since even Hannah Pitt beats him to both. (Also, love those Ann Roth costumes.)



I'm including these three shots of Emma Thompson—the we-get-it, she's-a-religious-icon halo shot, the worthy showstopper that ends Part One, and the Goth-queen hurricane she whips up in Part Two—because even though I felt while watching Angels that Emma could have been more confident with her character work (outside of her marvelously dykey, warm but gruff take on Nurse Emily), I think the piece ultimately benefits from her balls-to-the-wall spirit of exaggeration and risk. You'd not have imagined Margaret Schlegel doing this, and if you fast-forward through Angels instead of actually watching it, she seems like the biggest incentive for a re-watch. I'll certainly take her any day over Mary-Louise Parker, who can always find new opportunities for empty, adenoidal "irony" in virtually any part. The entire HBO version misses Harper so badly, from script to performance, that it's too sad to dwell on.



And lastly, since it's one of the few shots that suggests what Angels might look like with a Tarkovskian sense of cold, stately, unreassuring divinity blowing through it, I'll admit that this shot triggers fantasies of what a totally different film might have looked like. I'm more reconciled to this version than I'm sounding in this post, but I like it best when it prompts celestial visions of other, more persuasively millennial approaches.

Birthday Girls: Emma Thompson

I hate to crowd Julie Christie, whose tribute just went up yesterday, but for this you will have to blame Eric Thompson and Phyllida Law, who brought Emma Thompson into the world the day after the Darling's eighteenth birthday. I have no control over these sorts of scheduling issues. And anyway, it's impossible to feel anything except cosmic, perpetual, imperturbable gratitude toward Eric Thompson and Phyllida Law. They furnished to the world one of its great human beings, and even if she's been absent from the screen a bit more of late than I selfishly prefer, there's even more to savor in her filmography than some viewers might realize. All hail our fair lady.

I'm Buying What Merchant's Selling

Wow, no love for Solaris, huh? Awful quiet around that entry. Maybe this one'll fare better.

Angel of Britannia

Happy 47th birthday to Emma Thompson, who seems to belong to that high-altitude class of women like Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, and Annie Lennox whom absolutely everyone likes. Like most Americans, I "discovered" Emma via her pristine, Oscar-winning performance as Margaret Schlegel in Howards End—a performance so dextrous, subtle, literate, and intellectually alive that one can hardly believe that it won. That statuette was only the beginning of her annus mirabilis in 1993, when she snagged two more nominations for The Remains of the Day and In the Name of the Father. I recently revisited the latter film and liked the performance a little more than I had remembered, but still, neither one is any competition for her real triumph of 1993, the saucy, funny, occasionally short-sighted Beatrice she contributed to Much Ado About Nothing: a living, breathing human in a Shakespeare film, and a shimmering romantic vision at the same time.

If you've seen all of these movies, and if you're reading this site you probably have, may I recommend some of Emma's less heralded performances—as the spiky and grief-bitten photographer in The Winter Guest, directed by Alan Rickman, or the politico's wife she played so well in Primary Colors that Hillary Clinton, though hardly the same woman as Susan Staunton, seemed newly illumined, and that without the irritatingly direct mimicry that so preoccupied John Travolta in the same movie.

We see less of Emma these days than I'd like, especially since she's often inhabiting movies aimed squarely at the demographic of her own six-year-old daughter. But I'm sure we'll see more of her eventually, since she can do anything. Truly, anything. I still say she'd be a kicker of an Oscar host. Or she could pull a Glenda J. and dump acting for politics, which to a certain extent she has already done. Or she could share some draughts of that 7% Solution of Human Perfection that she's been hoarding all these years.

R.I.P. Ismail Merchant

This tribute to Ismail Merchant just appeared at IMDb on the occasion of his death, at the age of 68. I'm a huge fan of Howards End (see also here, of Anthony Hopkins' and Peter Vaughan's performances in The Remains of the Day, of Richard Robbins' scores for lots of their movies (especially Remains), and of so many of the performances and stories they brought to the screen. And when she's on, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a superlative scripter.

One quibble, and I hope this doesn't seem like too nasty a time to mention it: why hasn't the couplehood of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant ever been more openly acknowledged? I totally understand people, gay or straight, who don't want to discuss their sexuality or their relationships, but to not even have the fact on the table, when they are already fixed as a duo in the minds of their public? It's not as though Merchant-Ivory had some enormous, heterocentric fan-base that was going to erode if they came out, and at some point, I think it would have been nice to have this on record. I wonder if Merchant's obituaries will speak to this at all. Even the IMDb capsule alludes to their "career together (both personally and professionally)" in a remarkably oblique way. Ah well. Not to snack on the sour grapes, especially on a sad day. But my heart does goes out to James Ivory—now a widower, even if some PR people wish that I didn't think of him that way.

P.S. The AP report on Merchant's death, just up at the New York Times, concludes: "Merchant was unmarried and had no children." Jackasses.