HEAD IN THE CLOUDS
*/****
starring Charlize Theron, Penélope Cruz, Stuart Townsend, Thomas Kretschmann
written and directed by John Duigan
BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS
**½/****
starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, James McAvoy, Michael Sheen
screenplay by Stephen Fry, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh
directed by Stephen Fry
VERA DRAKE
***½/****
starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney
written and directed by Mike Leigh
by Walter Chaw There's a certain fascination embedded in our images of wartime England. When a film comes birthing across the pond this time of year, dripping with prestige and a whiff of stuffiness, what can it be but awards fodder laden with lovely sets, sepia-stained cinematography, handsome wool and silk costumes, and largely European casts that remind of how venal American mainstream casts tend to be by comparison? Something about the Blitz still intoxicates–perhaps England's steadfast refusal to surrender their island sanctuary to the barbarians at the gate tickles at our national self-delusion, trading on the belief, once ironclad, that our borders were as sacrosanct, or that our intentions in establishing a New World Order were ever that noble. Now, without the comfort of our own inviolate island sanctuary (what was Manhattan pre-9/11 than that–and what was it after but the biggest metaphor for the irony of capitalist arrogance since The Titanic?), there's just that much more reason for moth-balled middlebrow arthouse audiences to snuffle up great pinches of mid-twentieth century British pluck and remember from the cloistered perspective of a cloth chair a when that never existed–at least never for them.
The worst of the current crop is John Duigan's dreadfully self-important unofficial updating of Notorious, Head in the Clouds, a film that has garnered whatever attention it has thanks to its status as Charlize Theron's follow-up project to Monster and her Oscar-winning performance as Beetlejuice therein. (Not to mention its promise of a few steamy sex scenes between Theron and her real-life beau, Stuart Townsend.) Predictably preposterous from beginning to end, Head in the Clouds isn't even charmingly kitschy in its failure, coming off as nothing more than a vanity piece for the briefly illustrious Theron. There's a scene where Theron's character, Gildo Bessé, says her name and it sounds like "Gilda Passé"–if only the film were that self-aware. Head in the Clouds is Charlize Theron's Beyond Borders: both films cats' tongues preening their owners.
Gilda is that devil-may-care flapper archetype, irrepressible and ebullient, as free with her body as she is with her tongue. "You say things that just come to your mind!" scolds boyfriend Guy (Townsend), and with that he outlines the extent to which either character is developed: Guy's a stick in the mud with big eyes, Gilda's a wild stallion; you can build a fence but she'll just jump right over it. So Guy loves Gilda but Gilda can't be tamed. Gilda loves Guy but Gilda also loves Mia (Penélope Cruz, looking less like an animated chicken now for whatever reason), a crippled stripper-cum-battlefield Florence Nightingale. They're lovers of course, but discretely, offscreen; Mia informs Guy that she wanted to tell him but that Gilda thought Guy was too British to handle it. Of course, the film itself is too British to actually get down to the details of the love that dare not speak its name, casting Head in the Clouds as a great big airless bit of highly polished bull roar. Guy becomes a battle-weary soldier, then a soulful British intelligence agent working undercover in Vichy France. Gilda starts sleeping with a Nazi (Thomas Kretschmann, making a career for himself playing Nazis), but could it be that she's sleeping with the enemy? Could be.
Head in the Clouds has its head up some places, too. It's a long melodrama where the heroine gets enough entrances and costume changes to fatigue the fawning muscles of her captive audience. Typical of a melodrama, the picture doesn't believe in nuance: the characters aren't complicated, they're subjected to complications. And even the complications aren't complex because they're generally just to prevent the nothing that's happening for over two hours from forming a skin like gravy. It's a watched pot that never boils because there's no fire lit beneath it. Because no cliché goes unravaged and no loose end goes untied, there can't be any surprise that by the time Head in the Clouds is over, no time is wasted escaping into the parking lot.
An adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1930 Vile Bodies (which has been called, among other things, the funniest English novel of the last century), Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things is a fair sight more successful and infinitely more entertaining than Head in the Clouds. Unlike Waugh's book, however, the movie is merely amusing; Fry has magnetized Waugh towards the author's acerbic melancholy–the picture is an un-mute witness to the caustic, dangerously laissez-faire attitudes of the bourgeois. Bright Young Things establishes itself quickly as one of the more trenchant satires of the state of our beloved union on the verge of a terrifying election ruled by an aristocracy possibly just as blithe as Waugh's ridiculous leisure lizards, who tiptoe along the abyss of war, yellow journalism, and economic collapse. But Fry can't hold on to the delirious pace forever, and by its third act, the film starts to take on the same Time of Destiny melodramatic dead weight as Head in the Clouds, likewise ending in the wake of WWII on a sappy romantic fade-out whose honesty Waugh would rightly have questioned.
Adam (Stephen Campbell Moore) loves Nina (Emily Mortimer), but he's penniless, while she's in love with the social acceptance that cash buys. Although Adam comes into a good job as a columnist gossiping about the inner circle that Nina has penetrated, a drunken Major (Jim Broadbent) promptly blows Adam's newfound fortune on a bad horse, and so Adam runs the risk of losing Nina because he can't provide for her the supercilious superficialities to which she's become accustomed. That is, if he doesn't lose her by instead getting them jettisoned from the upper crust for the scurrilous tabloid exaggerations that are not only his stock and trade, but also his entrée to the celestial plane of the rich and insane. After Nina's father, Colonel Blount (Peter O'Toole), briefly funds his daughter's mate choice (stealing the film in the process), all the bright young things of the title gradually come to a moment of sobriety, in sanatoriums real and imagined.
Fry himself could have been the basis for some of Bright Young Things, a young turk riding the cresting wave of Brit-hip and only now coming out-of-phase. What he brings to these lifestyles of the rich and reptilian is a touch of nostalgia that unerringly pings on the very human fears that drive these shells of human beings. The treatment of socialite Agatha Runcible (Fenella Woolgar), in particular, rings a bell first with her impenetrable fantasia, then with her rude awakening–she's lost behind the wheel of a racecar and committed to a madhouse when her bubble finally bursts. Reality is rude in Bright Young Things, eternally at war with the ghosts of prosperity that seem in retrospect like just a place holder between war and suffering, paper-thin and squeezed between the pages of the inevitability of what's past and what's to come.
The best of the bunch of Bellum-era Brit throwbacks might be Mike Leigh's ode to a back-alley abortionist, Vera Drake. Collaboratively conceived and improvised in the Leigh style by a stellar English cast centred around the incomparable Imelda Staunton, the film must contain the most moral female character in any movie this year–next to Uma Thurman's Beatrix Kiddo, of course. The catch is that staunch Vera, who makes her living in blue-collar London cleaning the homes of the kind of people played by Emily Mortimer and Charlize Theron in the other films, sidelights as a kindly abortionist, paying house calls like a dowdy angel of mercy. She's the prototype of the proper English mum, presiding over her claustrophobic three-room flat with a kind of expansive warmth that is the very manifestation of an old quilt and a rocking chair next to the stove. (Her cure-all a nice cup of tea.) How fascinating that Leigh turns this positive creation into a lightning rod for the hottest of hot-button debates.
Matched step-for-step by Leigh's relentless dedication to putting Vera through her paces, Staunton is almost unbearably true in her performance. The interruption of her domestic ritual reflects an auteurist concern about family and loathing among the working class, standing in for the autumnal blindness of social justice, too, in the affairs of the heart and the metaphorical purse. A quiet scene wherein Vera's husband (Phil Davies) and a prospective son-in-law discuss in simple terms the scars of war on the common man locates itself as the heart of the piece: a parlour drama that happens to have the interests of a highly-charged political debate crushing down on it. At their best, Leigh's pictures are confrontational without being invasive. They address issues without pounding them, recognizing that the best way to portray the heavy cost of our mad world is by looking frankly at the problems of its most helpless, most decent, and most hopeful victims. Originally published: October 22, 2004.
