Of Time and the City (*1/2)

Outside of England, the only thing people probably know about the city of Liverpool is that it was the hometown of the Beatles. After seeing this film, you will know two things, the other being that it was also the hometown of writer-director Terence Davies, best known for his 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. Not so much a history of the city as Davies’s nostalgic audiovisual memoir, mostly of the late 1940s through about the mid-1960s, it is clearly a deeply personal, carefully crafted film. Nonetheless, this doesn’t prevent it from being a dreadful bore.

The Beatles do show up, but for less time than a 1970 song (“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”) by Manchester’s Hollies is used, oddly, to illustrate footage of returning Korean War veterans. According to the narration Davies pompously provides, he had by 1970 lost interest in popular music, as well as his faith in God and queen. Religion and monarchy bring out snide sarcasm (the queen and her husband are “Betty and Phil”), but that’s at least a relief from the poetic pretention that Davies otherwise employs, e.g., blankets that “warm but give no comfort”—why’s that?

Primarily, the visuals are street scenes of ordinary citizens, quaintly dressed, that do convey the sense of long ago, longer even than the 50 or 60 years ago from which they actually date. In a few cases, important persons or events or prominent buildings are seen, but little information is imparted. Apparently it is enough for us to know that these are the scenes Davies recalls, bittersweetly but mostly fondly, in his mind. I longed at least for some on-screen descriptions. Although the footage skips about in time, the newest—dreary public housing in the 1960s and 1970s, casually dressed diners and shiny buildings in newly filmed scenes—is shown, by way of contrast, toward the end. The newer the footage, the more likely it is to be in color and of greater technical quality; this has the unintended effect of suggesting steady improvement, though if anything Davies intends the opposite.

It seems wrong to slam a work that was obviously a labor of love, and made with obvious attention. But there are ways to make a work personal while engaging the audience. For most viewers, watching this may be a chore.

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viewed 4/5/09 at Bridge (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/6/09

The Queen (***3/4)

?  Director Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters), whose filmography has delved into seemingly all sides of the class divisions in Britain, depicts the top of the upper crust and how they reacted to the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Helen Mirren, whose previous role was as Elizabeth I in a TV movie, plays the titular Elizabeth II, and Michael Sheen the newly installed prime minister, Tony Blair. The script is by Peter Morgan, whose work is concurrently on view in The Last King of Scotland.

+  For the crown, the death of Diana represented an unprecedented quandary. Having divorced Prince Charles, she was no longer, technically, a royal. Nor were Elizabeth and, especially, her imperious husband Phillip, inclined to celebrate the life of someone they’d come to regard most uncharitably. Instead, they holed up in their country estate. The contrast between the young prime minister and the aging queen mirrors the gulf between the royals’ and the public’s view of the crown’s role in the age of celebrity. In other words, the people expected a gesture of grief to mirror theirs. I’ve never understood myself why an accident of birth should make someone worthy of all that attention, which put me in the odd position of relating, in this case, to the queen’s stance. Yet if I can’t say Frears made me

understand the depth of feeling engendered by the martyred princess, he does make it palpable. Mixing real footage with the fictional helps convey the genuine sadness felt by millions.

   Of course, a great deal attention will deservedly focus on Mirren, whose Elizabeth is a believable mix of the earthy (she drives her own Range Rover) and the reserved. Sheen is a pretty effective Blair, although in his earliest scene, meeting the queen, he seems such a Pee Wee Herman-esque pipsqueak that it seemed hard to believe this was a man who’d just won a landslide victory. Nonetheless, the movie winds up as a mash note to an emerging statesman, with only the queen’s comment in the epilogue alluding to Blair’s now-sullied reputation.

 - Just once or twice I thought the movie was slow as it inexorably leads toward the self-abnegation by the monarch.

= ***1/2 Not quite a political film, not quite a biographical one, this is a blend of character drama and cultural history lesson that made me interested in an episode I’d utterly ignored when it happened.

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