From the Heart: the Films of Mani Ratnam

ROOM 101 Revisited

by Mark Ashley

The Devil's Own pile of crap (Alan J. Pakula, 1997).
This is blatantly an American film, from its opening gun battle on the streets of Belfast that has more in common with the Gunfight at the OK Corral than anything seen in the real Northern Ireland. Brad Pitt's IRA terrorist is harboured, like many IRA terrorists, in the good old US of A where he hopes to buy weapons. Harrison Ford plays Pitt's unwary landlord and New York cop with a conscience.

Pitt's accent may well be authentic from what I can tell, but is so thick it tends to mar the film, as half the time you can't understand a bloody word he says. That said, deciphering the Pitt drawl is one of the picture's more entertaining elements - at least it keeps you awake. I notice the usual collection of Irish jigs and reels along with the obligatory Cranberries opening music, and all the expected earthy Irish stereotypes - although it never gets as bad as the awful Blown Away, with Tommy Lee Jones' Good Ol' Boy version of an IRA terrorist.

The one highlight for me was a brief appearance by Simon Jones (Arthur Dent of Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) as the British Intelligence agent who is apparently going to murder Pitt's character rather than bring him in alive (the British are the bad guys yet again), giving Harrison Ford an authority figure to defy in the name of justice.

The Fountainhead (King Vidor, 1949).

I don't expect anyone will care about a second rate 1949 black & white film....Well, I say second rate, yet it has an IMDB rating of 7.0 which tends to put it in the higher bracket, but then I've never cared much for popular opinion. Ironically that's what the film is about: popular opinion - a man, an architect, forced out of his job and ruined because he won't compromise his designs to placate popular opinion, and fights to design buildings his way.

Sadly, King Vidor did not follow the story's example, instead producing something which reeks of overblown melodrama - I can't get over how every morsel of dialogue is delivered with an utterance of profound portent, every scrap is forced with agony through the actors' mouths. The actors, well now...Gary Cooper, in mean brooding mode, clashes with the tragic Patricia Neal in a classic love-hate romance, even down to the mock fight then passionate kiss scene (obligatory). Then there is the unknowing cuckold, Raymond Massey, that Neal marries to get away from Cooper. On top of that, there's a megalomaniac newspaper columnist played by Robert Douglas, determined to shape society to his own ends - his speeches are delivered with almost as much gusto as Hitler's at Nuremberg.

I recognised the name of the writer, Ayn Rand, whose books have been selling for ages, god knows why. The film is taken from her novel of the same name, and I really can't work out if it is a romance thrust up with an architectural backdrop, or a treatise on modern architecture disguised as romance. There is so much about the film that is unreal, it becomes quite humorous - the grand offices, surreal apartments, a quarry that Cooper is working in (a perfect opportunity to see him as a sweaty labourer who can stir the heroine's blood) that consists entirely of right angles, and the total lack of any ordinary people.

There is much talk in the film about dragging oneself from the gutter (Hell's Kitchen, to be precise) and yet there is no frame of reference given; it is nothing but empty words. For me this marks the fascism that tints every frame, the pretence at some level of concern for poverty, and yet all we see are the hideously rich. Even Cooper's "fall" is romanticised. At his lowest he is the rugged labourer with an air of superiority that the rich bitch cannot resist. In many ways a hideous film, professing horrific ideals: everyone should be powerful, rich, and white.

By now you should know that I dislike Kenneth Branagh and particularly dislike Much Ado About Nothing (1993), but I thought I'd try to give it another go, as it was on TV. Well, in the opening pre-credit sequence there is enough to make me wonder how bad it can get, several lines misread as though the actor or director has no fundamental understanding of the text. Then we get into an embarrassing sequence with the men riding fists aloft towards the women who are running around taking their clothes off. This completely gratuitous nudity is immediately followed by a strange water-fight slapstick routine.

Into the play proper we are confronted by a dizzying variety of acting styles often clashing against each other in cascades of discordant sparks. From Branagh's pompous oratory style through the more natural style of Emma Thompson to the wooden husk that is Keanu Reeves and finally to Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice revisited, surely a director worth his salt could have guided the actors towards something more consistent. One of the more amusing observances is the swathes of laugh-acting, fained jollity with heads flung back and bellies cradled in true Shakespearean style. Along with the "large" facial expressions that punctuate every word this all comes across as a guide on how NOT to translate theatre into film. Sadly, I saw nothing to redeem the film and rather more to confirm my first impression and lower my opinion further still, if that were at all possible.

Terrible terrible film.