Distant Relatives: The Entertainer and The Wrestler

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema. 

Angry Old Men 

As a society we have such a strange relationship with celebrities.  We admire them and we despise them.  We love when they fail, embarrassing humiliation and then we promise to celebrate their comeback.   For the person who has actually attained fame, there's a good chance that that fame will come to an end before they do.  At some point society won't have a place for them anymore.  Filmmakers seem naturally attracted to the stories of these people since their world, for good or bad, is eternally rooted in the hype of fame.

Tony Richardson's The Entertainer and Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler are two outside-of-Hollywood films with two very outside-of-Hollywood subjects.  Archie Rice of the somewhat-forgotten (or at least under-loved) The Entertainer is an old music hall performer, a song and dance man in a world where rock and roll is the only song and dance anyone seems to care about any more.  His audience is small and unenthusiastic.  Randy the Ram's audience is enthusiastic.  He's got small crowds cheering for him every week as he makes the rounds of the local underground wrestling scene.  The audience cheers for blood and bruises.  They cheer for Randy out of nostalgia for a time when Randy had full arenas packed just to see him entertain.

See the Resurrection

Two men trying desperately to hold onto a time when they mattered, growing old, living paycheck to paycheck or not even.  At the start Randy seems to have a better deal.  He's at least part of a community (though most of his fellow underground wrestlers are young guys trying to get where he once was), he has a haunt in the local strip club and a tenuous connection with fellow over-the-hill dancer Cassidy.  Living in a trailer park isn't preferred but he plays with the local kids and he has people who cheer for him.  Archie Rice does not.  And while he can often be found throwing one or many back among laughing cohorts, it's an attempt to recapture the good old days and numb the present ones.  They are not really his friends.  Both men are estranged from their families with particular attention payed to their relationships with their daughters.  Archie's is sympathetic but disappointed.  Randy's is jaded.  The father/daughter relationship is often plastered with "daddy's little girl" cliches.  Maybe we're meant to think that here, or maybe not.  Certainly we're given a glimpse into what could be.

Naturally there's a comeback opportunity that is not to be.  It seems unfair to breeze over the big chance for these men but it's a foregone conclusion that it can never be.  The entertainment industry demands change or death and these men, so desperate to matter again, aren't evolving but trying to pull their worlds back into the past with them.  Then again, the evolution that the world demands of these men is far from ideal.  Archie's best prospects are in Canada where he has an opportunity to run a hotel.  For Randy it's the deli counter of his local grocer, waiting on grumpy, particular seniors.  It's no surprise that Randy chooses to put his health at risk to fulfill his comeback, just as Archie stakes his financial future and risk of prison time on his.  The choice that these men have really isn't a choice at all.

We Had Faces Then

There is one woman whose shadow looms large over these two men.  She is the patron saint of washed up performers, or perhaps since we're talking in terms of relatives, their mother.  Norma Desmond is the original doomed performer though she's a villain; as time goes on, these characters get more and more tuned to our sympathies.  Desmond is such a villain that her film needs a hero.  Archie Rice isn't a villain but he's quite hurtful to those who love him.  He's given up trying.  Randy the Ram too screws up and often, but we get the sense that he's trying, he just can't overcome his own nature.

Randy's likability and the severity of his ultimate fate presents us with the biggest emotional blow of any of these characters.  Perhaps as time goes on, these kinds of stories must get more painful to make us take notice.  Or perhaps writer Robert Siegel has noticed how fatalistic celebrity culture has become.  All three films inhabited by these characters end with a death.  Perhaps it's the death of hype, or old Hollywood or British reign (as has been speculated in the case of The Entertainer).  Either way, the past dies.  And so does the roar of the crowd.

LFF 2010: Northern Lights, Black Swans

Dave from Victim of the Time, reporting from the 54th BFI London Film Festival.

We're winding down now. Today's gala screening, the sparky, perceptive The Kids Are All Right, is old news on American shores, so it's a good thing that I've taken so long to ponder over today's films. Today's theme might be... don't expect too much. You'll only get hurt.

Darren Aronofsky’s films consume. They consume the characters, slowly more obsessed with a singular goal or self-destructive impulse, but they consume the audience too. His last film, The Wrestler, was, despite its emotional intensity, less stylistically immersive than is typical of him. We are, in more ways than one, back to ‘normal’ with Black Swan, which simply can’t resist overpowering you with the contrasting black and white thematics of Swan Lake. Any other colour scheme would seem nonsensical, but Aronofsky doesn’t merely prescribe to the ballet’s bald imagery. The whole film seems to mimic the necessarily overdramatic, telegraphed stylisation of the whole artform; the escalating nightmarishness of Nina’s (Natalie Portman) fixations are pitched to the rafters, defiantly relishing the kind of flourishes of red and flashes of madness that Powell & Pressburger would be proud of.

It’s a fine balance, though, and the trappings of imitating such a florid style are easy to fall through even as it delivers vivid, scorching imagery. As a result, it often feels as though it’s in service of an increasingly flimsy set of dynamics. Nina is, physically speaking, a huge step forward for Portman, but as a character to inhabit, she’s reduced to an alarmingly simple ‘coming-of-age’ narrative: a realisation of sexuality, a rebellion, and a descent into madness that, since it is telegraphed right from the off, she is never defined apart from. Confusing, and possibly reductive, suggestions about sexuality (and particularly lesbianism) rear their head, and, coupled with the similarly basic friction between oppressive mother and stunted daughter, Black Swan leaves a slightly bitter taste in the mind at points from the sheer abundance of cliché.

If I sound like I’m being overwhelming negative, it’s merely because my expectations were far higher than any film deserves. The viscerality of the Black Swan experience is such that it’s not difficult to commend, and indeed recommend, and it doesn’t entirely deny Portman the chance to, er, spread her wings. But, ultimately, it feels like a step back for Aronofsky, a triumph of style over substance, and even if the style is slightly magnificent, it’s still a niggling disappointment. (B)

I spent a lot of time sitting watching Aurora, and most of it was spent trying to find the greatness in it. I knew it had to be there somewhere; after all, Cristi Puiu’s previous feature, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, was a majestic, darkly ironic masterstroke, so there had to be at least a hint of it here somewhere. Finally, as the film approached its end, the rather restless audience around me seemed to find some appeal, chuckling away at the film’s sudden change of tone, and I gave up. There is good in Aurora, but not only is it never great, the goodness is drowned. The film’s intriguing treatment of violence as an event barely more notable than an exchange of money or visiting your parents’ house seems to make sense of the extraordinary running time, but the slowness of the building character study never justifies this length. Puiu’s favouring of long shots, with diegetic sound covering dialogue, seem gratuitously inscrutable rather than fascinating, and though the closer shots are alert and responsive, the lethargy of the film is overwhelming. As the film gathers pace and events are felt a bit more keenly, Aurora seems headed to a meaningful apex, but it torpedoes itself with a finale of absurdity within its realist aesthetic, with the sardonic, humourous social commentary suddenly laid on so obviously it’s as if we’re being buried beneath it. As Puiu introduced the screening, he seemed to acknowledge the wearing length, but it seems he couldn’t resist. Depth, Cristi, doesn’t necessarily require length. (C)

It’s unlikely, no, that a film would name itself after something so intriguing and then barely engage with it? For the soap-opera dynamics of the half of Patagonia that actually takes place in Patagonia don’t have any need to be there at all, although I doubt they’d be much more engaging in California or Siberia than they are here. Rather curiously sheathed in half, with two plots that are cleanly unrelated, the film swerves between Patagonia and Wales without much rhyme or reason. There isn’t much sense of Patagonia as a place distinct from any of the rest of South America, except that the characters – two of whom are visitors – speak in Welsh. Showing the disconnect that should likely be the point of the film, the characters in Wales speak in Spanish, though this plot is played much more heavily for the cultural tension. As the soap-opera dynamics of infidelity and a tired coming-of-age plot crowd the film and Wales is inevitably depicted as a rosy, pastoral landscape, any deeper angles that have been vaguely suggested are shunted aside. The brief hints of something more specific that we are given make the film’s overall disinterest even more maddening – there are stories here being ignored, snubbed for ones that have probably been written during a deep sleep. (C-) [edited from full review]

Still left on the LFF docket are Sofia Coppola's Venice champion Somewhere, and closing night film 127 Hours, which Nathaniel just left word on. If you're so inclined, take a look at the screening log on my sidebar and let me know if there's any film you're just desperate to hear my thoughts on, and I'll slip it into my final post in a few days.