SPLASH AND CUT

SPLASH AND CUT

Review of A Bigger Splash

            It’s one of those occasionally tense European decadent dramas, complete with wonderful Mediterranean scenery, appropriately accompanying weather, and a considerable amount of nudity, just the sort of thing, in fact, to wow the reviewers.  A Bigger Splash also employs a couple of highly regarded performers, Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, in some rather unlikely roles.  Such a full and attractive package should appeal to the appeal to art house crowd, and its generous display of nudity might even bring in a wider audience.

The story revolves around four characters enduring an uneasy relationship in on a picturesque Italian island, where a famous rock star, Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton), suffering from strained vocal cords and reduced to silence and occasional whispering, is apparently vacationing with her lover, documentary filmmaker, Paul De Smedl (Mathias Schoenaertz).  Interrupting their idyll, her producer and former lover, Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes) calls and announces he will be visiting with his 22-year-old daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson), whom he has not seen in many years.  Not surprisingly, his intrusion triggers a series of difficulties, erotic encounters, and ultimately, disaster.

Contrasting with the voiceless singer and the passive filmmaker, Ralph Fiennes maintains a manic volatility throughout the movie.  Dancing, singing, shouting, jumping naked into the swimming pool, and thoroughly obnoxious, he indeed makes a bigger splash than anyone else.  His history with the singer establishes a level of discomfort in the group and of course disturbs the relationship between Marianne and Paul.  He behaves as a kind of engineer of mischief, stirring up the past, delighting in the tensions he creates.  As he grows increasingly annoying, the plot grows increasingly repetitive until some predictable and some completely unpredictable events move the film to a surprising close and a couple of unexpected twists of plot and character.

A Bigger Splash, which owes something to the French movie La Piscine and the more recent Swimming Pool, creates a most attractive atmosphere of Mediterranean languor—the landscape, the houses, the town, the food, the wine all virtually invite the audience to participate in the vacation along with the characters.  The movie runs too long until its strange and unexpected ending, and I am not sure if Ralph Fiennes or Harry Hawkes deserves the blame, but the character seems exactly the sort of person I would never want to be around; his manic energy and domineering personality should alienate even the most forgiving viewer.

Review of Genius

            Many years ago in his reminiscence of The New Yorker, James Thurber remarked that writers in America were either putter-inners or taker-outers, an accurate division of much of our literary history.  Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson come to mind, one an inclusive, verbose celebrant of the nation, its language, its people, the other a neurotic recluse writing spare, stripped little gems in a terse conversational style.  In 20^th century poetry the equivalent artists might be Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg; Hemingway and Faulkner surely provide the most appropriate examples of two coeval geniuses who wrote the best fiction of their time in completely different styles.

            The trophy for greatest putter-inner of that now distant past, however, undoubtedly belongs to Thomas Wolfe, whose novels simply overflowed with words, demonstrating a kind of inebriation with sheer vocabulary.  Based on a book by A. Scott Berg, Genius deals with the relationship between Wolfe and the most famous editor of the 20^th century, Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, who edited, among others, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  When Wolfe enters his world, the writer-editor connection ascends to a new level, in some ways changing the lives of both men.

            After repeated rejections, the young writer (Jude Law) brings his long, unwieldy manuscript to Perkins (Colin Firth), who finds it compelling and astonishes the author by accepting it; they work endlessly, with Perkins attempting to prune the excesses and Wolfe fighting to retain his original, voluminous, and undisciplined prose.  The novel, for which Perkins supplies the title, turns out to be Wolfe’s first and most famous, Look Homeward, Angel, and also turns out to be a best seller, creating a reputation that made him famous in the 1930s, but which, aside from a few courses in Southern literature, mostly in Southern universities, is mostly forgotten today.

            The real story of the film concerns the growth of the personal relationship between the two very different men, one a young, boisterous, immature artist from the South, the other a middle-aged, uptight Northeastern WASP.  Sloppy, awkward, sometimes rude and obnoxious, insulting to other writers, Wolfe becomes a friend and something like a son to the cool, restrained editor.  The friendship also creates tension between Perkins and Wolfe’s lover, the theatrical designer Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), who nurtured the writer’s career and regards the editor as a threat.

            Genius provides glimpses into Wolfe’s brief life—he died at 38 of tuberculosis of the spine—and the success of his later novels.  Comically and truthfully, it shows his bringing a couple of crates of manuscript to Perkins’s office, all of which he considered one work of fiction; Perkins heroically quarried two or three novels out of the inchoate mess.  The move provides only a few perfunctory scenes of actual editing, with Perkins naturally insisting on cuts and omissions while Wolfe begs for inclusion of all of his hundreds of thousands of words.  Whether editing makes for interesting cinema remains doubtful, of course, though with that rare element,  imagination, it might prove a productive subject for some entertaining sequences.  Although he certainly accomplishes his apparent goal of showing the two characters, the director, Michael Grandage, never takes a chance with the fascinating problem of writing and editing.

            Jude Law, who’s been busy lately, makes a perfectly acceptable Thomas Wolfe, with a performance as excessive as the original; the overacting and repetition sometimes grow tiresome, but he projects a believable portrait of the artist.  The real subject of Genius, however, is not the writer but the editor—when was the last time a film employed such a protagonist?—embodied brilliantly by Colin Firth.  Always tightly buttoned up, he wears his fedora in everywhere, indoors and out, even when fishing, in a three-piece suit, with Hemingway (Dominic West), so that the hat becomes an expression of his rigidly controlled personality, perhaps even of his editorial philosophy.  Firth acts with remarkable restraint, establishing the distinction between him and his young writer and demonstrating the gap both must close, perhaps in a way suggesting that two very different men are both in their own way worthy of the film’s title.