Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
In the autumn of 2009, my mother was in the last few months of her fight against cancer. In fact, she’d battled more than one cancer throughout her life, and even when she was doing well, the knowledge of how it had affected her life and the fear of its return, at some point, in some shape, was always with her. Earlier in 2009, an episode had revealed that one of the tumors had returned and metastasized, making it clear, if not to her then to most of her family members, that this would be her last fight, and it was just a matter of time until she lost it.
My father, who had retired early (not entirely of his own volition), looked after her while she was still at home, before her final stay at hospital. They’d not always been very happy together, but they had seemed to find a way of being kind with each other during the last couple of years they were both alive. But there was a weekend when my dad said he wouldn’t be around – I don’t remember the details, but I assume he needed a break, as anyone would. So my sister and I split the weekend between ourselves, and I looked after my mum for the first part of it. This meant that I prepared dinner for the two of us – pasta, predictably – and, just as predictably, I brought along a film we could both watch together. The film: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, in which Geoffrey Rush played the iconic English comedian and actor.
Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.
I’d be curious: did Michael Caine and Jude Law talk about Alfie on the set of Sleuth? Did they compare performances? Did they get drunk and watch the Stallone version of Get Carter? Or did they just stare at each other threateningly until Kenneth Branagh shouted “Roll camera”?
The Sleuth remake sounds like quite a compelling proposition at first: one of the grand old English actors facing off against a glittering, promising young guy. (Admittedly, Jude Law hasn’t quite followed up on the promise of his early films, has he?) Directed by Kenneth “Four fucking hours of Shakespeare” Branagh, who has a deft hand behind the camera when he isn’t trying to showcase his own thespian ego. And the original play and film adapted by Harold Pinter, master of intellectual menace and keeper of the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.
In practice, though, Sleuth is dead as a film. It has occasional moments where the individual contributors flare up and come to life, but it’s like putting an electrical current into a dead frog. Its twitches are easily mistaken for signs of life, but the poor little green guy is still as dead as, well, a dead frog.
Michael Caine probably fares best. He slips into the Pinteresque dialogue with ease and manages to make it sound relatively natural. Caine comes closest to convincing us that the film has a beating heart – but even he cannot sustain this against the wooden staginess of the proceedings. The script might work on stage, with the immediacy that a live performance brings to things, but if some scripts jump off the page, this movie lurches back onto the page.
I’ve liked Jude Law in a number of films, first and foremost Gattaca, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and The Talented Mr Ripley, and he’s got moments in Sleuth where he shines – but all too many of his line deliveries sound as if he imagined that This Is What Pinter’s Supposed To Sound Like. It gets worse in the second part of the film, after the first major twist, which I felt was badly handled; I sat there wondering whether it’s a genuine twist or whether the film suddenly decided to go all post-modern on us. I would have prefered the latter, since the twist made the characters even less credible. In any case, after half an hour Law turns up as a new character, but while his body language is convincing, his accent couldn’t be more fake. Yes, he’s supposed to be fake, but if it’s so transparent to us that this is Jude Law in disguise, it makes the Michael Caine character look stupid if he doesn’t get it… and since the film tries to convince us that the characters aren’t stupid while showing them doing utterly stupid things, it’s difficult to take anything happening on screen seriously.
The third act introduces a homoerotic component that seems to have popped in from a different film altogether. While the casting should work brilliantly here – Law has always had a peculiarly feminine quality – seeing Michael Caine trying to get his menacing paws on the younger man rarely feels anything other than awkward because the development comes out of left field, from another game, in a different country altogether.
Would the film have worked better for me if I’d seen the original? Perhaps – but I doubt it. Branagh’s main mistake in the end was to think that the staginess of the script could be counteracted by ‘clever’ (read: obvious) cinematographic choices. However, no weird camera angle will distract from the script and the performances if they’re geared towards the stage. Seeing this live might have been riveting. Seeing the film? Well. Dead frog.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 