A Marriage Almost Made in Heaven.

Love & Friendship

(2016. Screenplay by Whit Stillman, based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen. 92 minutes.)

As I wrote in the third edition in 2001 of FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, Austen was one of the hot screenwriters of the nineties. She’d worked primarily in television from the fifties on, but hit the big time with theatrical films in the nineties. She’s since gone back primarily to television. Look at her credits on IMDb here. As I said in the book, “not bad for a woman who died in 1817.”

As far as I can tell from the IMDb, Lady Susan has never been adapted for film or television. It’s an early Austen work, from the 1790s and is not quite as well shaped as the later ones. It is also not typical Austen, i.e., it is not about a family of three or four daughters all trying to marry well-to-do gentlemen.

The heroine, if you want to call her that, is Lady Susan Vernon. She is a widow with a daughter approaching marriageable age. So Lady Susan is determined to find a husband for both herself and her daughter. Austen’s heroines tend to be smart, but Lady Susan is at the top of the heap in that category. She is mentally ahead of all the men and all the women as well. So the fun in the film is watching her outwit everybody else in the film.

Whit Stillman’s films are the late twentieth century equivalent of Austen. Look at his view of the hermetically sealed society of upper class New York young people in Metropolitan (1990). Stillman and Austen are such a perfect match you wonder why it took him so long to get around to filming one of her works. His previous works are very contemporary, so he may have been hesitant to jump into costume drama.

That turns out not to be a problem, since he has a natural feel for Austen’s characters and dialogue. Ah, not quite. I have not read the novella, but one thing that struck me about the Austen novels I have read is that she includes very little dialogue. So a screenwriter taking her on has to come up with dialogue we will believe Austen’s characters would say. Emma Thompson in her script for the 1995 Sense and Sensibility is the gold standard for writing Austen dialogue. Stillman is almost as good.

What Stillman is particular good at is giving great gobs of dialogue to Lady Susan as a way to show us how bright she is. Fortunately he has Kate Beckinsale to play Lady Susan, and she is spectacular. As she flies through one of the arias Stillman has created for her, you won’t be able to breathe until she finishes.

There is one flaw in the script, and I suspect it may come from Austen. Both Lady Susan and her daughter wind up married, but not to the men you expect. What’s missing are a couple of crucial scenes that let us know why each one has ended up with the men they have. I’d tell you to leave before the final couple of scenes, but like me you will be so entranced with Beckinsale’s Lady Susan that you won’t want to move.

But after you leave, think about how you would write the missing scene or scenes. I think it could have been done in one scene, but what do I know?

Maybe You Shouldn’t Write What You Know.

The Meddler

(2016. Written by Lorene Scafaria. 100 minutes.)

I was a huge fan of Scafaria’s 2008 script for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. You can read my comments on it here. As you can see, I was particularly impressed with Scafaria’s plotting: when things happen, when we learn what about the characters. She was also great at writing the characters themselves.

Unfortunately, none of those skills are on view in The Meddler. Nick and Norah was based on a novel, which appears to have given Scafaria a lot to work with. This one is an original screenplay, and judging by the number of Scafarias who appear in the credits, the screenplay may be at least partially autobiographical.

I know, I know, young writers are also told to “write what you know,” but I have generally found that to be bad advice, particularly in screenwriting. You can get away with it better in novels and short stories, but the demands of screenplays work against it.

I mean, seriously, ask yourself before you try a piece based on your life: why would anybody other than your friends or family want to watch this for 100 minutes? If you are honest with yourself, nobody would. Or they would if you found a way to dramatize it to make it compelling on the screen.

So what we have here is Lori, a thirtyish screen and television writer who is sort of getting over a romance with a movie star. At least she has a pilot that is being shot.

Who shows up at her Los Angeles doorstep but her widowed mother, Marnie. With bagels. No, Marnie is not officially a Jewish mother, but an Italian-American one. Marnie has moved to Los Angeles from New York, without telling Lori. You see the title of the film?

So Marnie meddles, not only in Lori’s life, but in the lives of her friends. Fortunately, Lori’s pilot is being shot in New York, and she leaves her Mom in Los Angeles. So Marnie pays for Lori’s lesbian friend’s wedding (Marnie was left well off by her late husband), among her other adventures. These scenes do not really go anywhere interesting. Marnie meddles, on to the next bagel delivery.

Marnie does get sort of romantically involved with Zipper, a retired cop. Ah, the Sam Elliott part. That is Elliott’s moustache all right, but here it’s being worn by J.K. Simmons, who sounds like Elliott, but he’s just not. Zipper’s at best a mildly interesting character, but there is not the kind of emotional heat there was between Elliott’s characters and the women in last year’s Grandma and I’ll See You in My Dreams.

At one point Marnie goes back to New York and goes to the set of Lori’s pilot. We get very quickly that the pilot is about Lori’s family (the movie is getting rather incestuous), and Marnie is taken with the actor playing her late husband. She mentions that to the actor. But then nothing happens. Like nearly every other scene in the film, Scafaria does not develop the material she has. Like a lot of people writing autobiographical stuff, she assumes the fact it happened is enough.

It’s not.

Bad Start.

Suffragette

(2015. Written by Abi Morgan. 106 minutes.)

I’ve often mentioned the necessity of getting your movie off to a good start. This is a perfect example of doing it wrong.

We are in the early twentieth century in England. We see a bunch of women working in a laundry in sweatshop conditions. O.K. so far. But then Morgan lays in voiceovers of the male politicians of the time explaining why women should not get the vote. The politicians sound even stupider now than they did then, and I am sure they sounded stupid then.

So what’s the problem? It gets the film off to a clunky start, beating us over the head with what the movie is going to be about and letting us know which side the movie is on and which side we had better be on if we know that’s good for us.

The opening would have been better if we had just seen the women at work and then followed the characters into the story. The main woman we follow is Maud Watts, a worker in the factor who is married and has a son. She originally has no interest in the suffragette movement, but through the various people she meets, she becomes very much involved. Unfortunately Morgan limits Maud’s reactions to a general sadness about everything going on around her.

Her husband, Sonny, is no better, moping around about his wife’s involvement. Given that Maud and Sonny are played by Carey Mulligan and Ben Wishaw, two of the best young actors around, this is a large waste of their talents.

The filmmakers also have landed Meryl Streep for a cameo as the great British leader of the suffragette movement, Emmeline Pankhurst. The other women go hear her give a speech. She does, they applaud. And that’s it for Emmeline and Meryl.

For the rest of the film, we simply watch the obvious happening, never a good thing.

Good Start. But then…

Man Up

(2015. Written by Tess Morris. 88 minutes)

There is both an upside and the downside of the digital revolution. Studios do not have to spend thousands of dollars on making 35mm prints of films and more thousands on shipping them to theatres because it is cheaper and easier to make and show digital prints. As a result, a lot more films can get theatrical releases.

In the greater Los Angeles area these days, around 25 new films open in theatres every week. That means you’d have to see three to four films a day, every day, to catch up. Fortunate for our tender bottoms, most of the new films each week are awful.

I respect the string of critics at the Los Angeles Times who have to see these things so the rest of us don’t have to. Even reading the reviews of all of them each week is wearying. To encourage yourself as a screenwriter, you should see a couple of the truly terribly reviewed films, since you will know in your heart of hearts you can write a much better script. And you may be right.

When Man Up opened in the Los Angeles area last year, it was about twenty miles away from where I live. As much as I love Lake Bell, the star of the film, I couldn’t get to it.

Even if I had tried to, I would have only had a week to get it in. Because there are so many new movies each week, a lot of movies that do not catch on immediately get cleared out after a week or two to make way for the new ones. So I am only just getting around to it on Blu-Ray.

Unlike Suffragette, this one gets off to a good start. Bell’s character Nancy is sitting by herself in front of a mirror trying out various mantras about how she should make more of an effort to get out and meet people. Morris gives Bell a lot to do and she’s terrific at it. Then Nancy goes to the engagement party of two friends of hers and it is peopled by drunken idiots, not the kind of people Nancy is looking for.

On a train Nancy meets Jessica, who tells her she should be reading this self-help book Jessica swears by. Nancy is reluctant, but when she dozes off, Jessica leaves the book with her.

Nancy wakes up when the train pulls into Waterloo Station and tries to find Jessica in the station. She is approached by Jack, who assumes that since she is in Waterloo Station, under the clock, carrying this book, Nancy is his blind date. In real life, Nancy would pass on Jack, and the movie would be over. But remember that Nancy is determined to meet people, so she plays along.

Here is where things begin to go wrong. Jack is played by Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz [2007], Scottie in the Star Trek reboots, and Benji in the Mission: Impossible reboots). He is wonderful comic actor, but Morris makes him a nervous chatterbox. Morris does not give him that much interesting to say, and either Morris did not give Bell or Pegg interesting reactions to what is going or Ben Palmer, the director, did not get them on film. We get some of Bell’s Nancy trying to figure out how this is going to go, but not of Jack’s watching Nancy to see how she is reacting to him and what he is saying.

They go out drinking, and boy do they all drink a lot in this movie. Eventually Nancy has to admit she is not Jessica, the woman he was expecting, and we get a couple of more restrained scenes that work better than the comedy. That’s sort of a surprise because Palmer’s directing credits are mostly in sketch comedy for television.

Morris’s writing credits are limited. I think what she is trying to do here is a Richard Curtis screenplay, but she does not have the skill for it. She does not balance the tonal shifts the way Curtis can. Her characters have less variety than his does. The supporting roles here are rather bland. Compare that to the supporting cast in Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Well, it’s something for her to aim for.

Last Time: The Hermitage; This Time: The Louvre.

Francofonia

(2015. Written by Aleksandr Sokurov 88 minutes.)

In 2002 Sukorov co-wrote and directed his best known film, Russian Ark. It is a tour through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, led by a 19th Century French aristocrat. We meet a lot strange people in the course of the film, as well as a lot of the great art in the museum.

And it is all done in a single 99 minute take.

It is a striking artistic as well as technical tour de force. The fact that it is one take provides the structure and the tension in the film. The characters we meet also connect to the art and to Russian history.

Francofonia is not as stunning as Ark. Not is it not done in a single take, but it has multiple story elements, some of which work and some of which don’t. The subject here is the Louvre museum in Paris, and the film is much more obviously an essay on the value of art and culture than Ark.

Sokurov appears on camera talking about the film and its issues, but spends a lot of his time Skyping with a colleague on a cargo ship a storm. The ship is carrying artwork, so I guess the idea is that it is a container of culture that is threatened. I think we are supposed to see the connection with the Louvre protecting the European culture. It’s a philosophical idea rather than a cinematic one, for all the shots of the storm the ship is in.

Another chunk of the film deals with the relationship between the director of the Louvre during the German occupation and the German officer supervising French culture. This is done in recreations that merely look artificial. If you have seen the 2014 film The Monuments Men, you have already learned as much about the wartime events at the Louvre as you will learn from this movie.

Although there are interesting elements in the film, particularly in the photography of the art, the film simply never holds together.

Grimmer than Grimm. Well, Later Grimm.

Tale of Tales

(2015. Screenplay by Edoardo Albinati & Ugo Chiti & Matteo Garrone & Massimo Gaudiso, based on stories in a book by Giambattista Basile. 133 minutes.)

When the Brothers Grimm started collecting fairy tales in the early 19th Century, they were influenced by the earlier 17 Century book by Basile, a collection of Italian fairy tales. The first version of the Grimms’ book was a lot bloodier than the later versions, and that may have been the influence of Basile.

This film, using three of Basile’s stories, is certainly darker than a Disney version of the stories would be. Closer to Tim Burton, but grimmer and more visually restrained than Burton usually is.

The writers (Garrone is also the director) have selected three tales to tell. The first story is about The Queen of Longtrellis who desperately wants a child. A sorcerer tells her that if she eats the heart of a sea monster, she will give birth to a child that very day. The king gets the heart and a servant girl cooks the heart.

After the queen eats the heart, she gives birth, but so does the servant girl. Sorcerers have been known to leave out little details. The boys grow up to be friends, much to the irritation of the queen, the epitome of a jealous mother. She tries to break them up, but bad stuff happens. The tone of the episode is melodrama, with Salma Hayek giving great Joan Crawford as the queen.

The second story is about the King of Strongcliff, a kingdom close enough to Longtrellis that this king shows up for the funeral of the first king. Other than that, the stories do not intertwine. The King of Strongcliff is a lecher of the first order. He hears a woman singing who he assumes to be young and pretty. She’s not…at least not at first. She eventually becomes queen, much to the irritation of her sister. More bad stuff happens.

Less melodramatic than the Longtrellis episode this episode has its longeurs, as do all the episodes. They are more of a problem in this episode.

The third episode starts out about the King of Highhills, who seems more interested in a flea that he is feeding than his daughter Violet. Violet is getting to a marriageable age and finally convinces her dad to have a tournament so some young man can win her hand. You were expecting jousting maybe? No, the flea that the king has fed until he became enormous has died. So the king has his skin stretched on a rack. Claimants must identify what the skin is.

All the handsome guys fail miserably. The one who understandably identifies the skin is the Ogre. Not a cute, Shreky kind of ogre, but a real one. He claims Violet, and drags her off to her lair in the woods. This episode has a more solid dramatic line than the others and even an arc for the character Violet.

I have told these tales separately, but the writers intercut between them, like, to take one example, Love Actually (2003), but these guys are not Richard Curtis either. It feels as though each tale was written separately and then they were all mushed together. Only the Violet episode has enough dramatic shape so that we want to keep coming back to it. We keep hoping we don’t go back to the Strongcliff episode, since it drags considerably.

If you are going to write a multiple storyline film, you had better make sure the stories can hold their own against the others. The writers here do not mange it.

HBO Doing What HBO Does Well.

Confirmation

(2016. Written by Susannah Grant. 110 minutes.)

Over the years in this column I have pinged on HBO for pretending it is so much better than any other channel, as in “It’s Not Television, It’s HBO.” HBO has inspired a lot of other channels to try to be just as good, and some of them succeed some of the time. And sometimes HBO actually lives up to its own hype.

Yes, the Susannah Grant who wrote this film about the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas is the same writer who wrote Erin Brockovich (2000). So you would expect that this film would be heavily slanted towards Thomas’s accuser Anita Hill and against Thomas.

You would be wrong. Grant makes a very scrupulous effort to be fair to both Hill and Thomas. At the time I happened to think that Hill was telling the truth in her accusations about Thomas’s sexual harassment of her when they worked together, but Grant gives Thomas his dignity and his passion. I don’t believe him any more now, but I have a better sense of where he is coming from.

This film is a good one to look at to see how Grant portrays all the characters in the film. She lets you see the gross sexism of a lot of Hill’s attackers (I especially like her take on Sen. Alan Simpson), but she also shows you how conflicted the now-Vice President Joe Biden was about chairing the Senate hearings.

The writing of both Hill and Thomas is very good. Grant gets Hill’s dignity and reluctance to get involved, and Kerry Washington nails it in her performance. You almost believe Thomas, which is a credit not only to Grant’s writing, but to Wendell Pierce’s superb performance as Thomas. Pierce makes Thomas a lot more human than he seemed at the hearings, and since for that matter. Thomas has always struck me as looking as though he was suffering from constipation, but Pierce shows us how normal he is.

And stick around for the documentary footage at the end of the real people, including a shot of Clarence Thomas…smiling.

Goodbye Tony, Goodbye Kate.

It’s the end of the 2015-2016 television season, although shows come and go at so many different times, that it’s hard to call them seasons any more. But old habits die hard.

One thing that happens at the end of seasons is that we say goodbye to favorite characters. How do you write those farewells? Sometimes they are planned by the showrunners, sometimes they’re not.

The character of Tony DiNozzo left NCIS because the actor playing him, Michael Weatherly, wanted off the show. During much of the show’s run, DiNozzo had a flirtation (and sometimes more) with a former Israeli Mossad agent assigned to the NCIS unit, Ziva David. In 2013 the actress playing her, Cote de Pablo, asked to be let off the show. Weatherly came to realize without her and her character to play with, he was not enjoying doing the show as much.

He asked to be taken off the show, but did it in enough time that the writers could develop his dissatisfaction with the job and his general desire to be doing something different. DiNozzo also suggested he wanted to try to get back with Ziva, who had gone back to Israel.

In the last episode of this season, “Family First,” written by Gary Glasberg & Scott Williams, we learn that Ziva has been killed in a fire bombing of her house. The kicker is that she has had DiNozzo’s child (see, I told you it was sometimes more than just a flirtation), which he did not know about. So now he is going to be a single dad. It’s a satisfying ending to the whole Ziva-Tony storyline, because it had both been prepared for and had an element of suprise.

Oh, don’t think Weatherly is going on unemployment. He will start a new series called Bull this fall on CBS.

Sometimes a character’s departure is rather abrupt, which can cause the writers to have to tap dance. As the eighth season of Castle wound down, there appears to have been a disagreement between Stana Katic, the actress who played Kate Beckett on the show, and the network, ABC.

By some accounts, Katic, like Weatherly, simply wanted off the show. By other accounts, the network did not want to renew her contract, since they wanted to cut down the budget on the show. The network may have felt they did not need her on the show, although the heart of the show has always been the relationship between Beckett, a police captain, and Richard Castle, a crime novelist who started hanging out helping the cops on cases. Or the network did not want to play the increase in salary she was asking for. In any case, the writers were left to write the last season as though she was coming back.

So in the final episode of the season, “Crossfire,” written by Terence Paul Winter & Alexi Hawley, Beckett and Castle finally track down the mysterious criminal Locksat. In the final shootout Locksat is killed, but both Beckett and Castle are wounded. That would have been the season cliffhanger.

But now there is tacked on epilogue telling us it is three years later and Beckett and Castle are happily married with three kids. So the series is over. Well, at least they did not kill her off, so there may be a chance for a couple of TV movies down the line.

Goodbye Lady Mary, Goodbye Alicia, Goodbye Dowager Countess, Goodbye Eli Gold…

Although both NCIS and Castle are entertaining shows they are relatively lightweight in the grand scheme of things.

Downton Abbey and The Good Wife are not lightweight. Both came to an end this spring, with wailing and gnashing of teeth all around. Yes, you can spend a lot of time enjoying NCIS and Castle, and I certainly did, but I was not as deeply involved with them as I was with Downton and Wife. You know where I am going with this: it was the writing. I have been writing about both from their first episodes.

One thing I noticed in my review of the first season of Downton was that Julian Fellowes (and his two other writers; Fellowes wrote all the rest of the series alone) focused on characters. A lot of characters. What’s striking when you look at the cast list is that thirteen of the characters appeared in all 52 episodes of the show, which is probably a record for a television series. Most series have trouble keeping five or six on the show all the time.

On Downton those regular characters were not just extras with a line or two. In the opening episode, we get reactions from a lot of the characters to the sinking of the Titanic. Fellowes developed all those characters and kept them in balance for the rest of the series, not a small feat.

For example, there were three daughters (I assume Fellowes has read his Austen) in the Crawley family, Lady Mary, Lady Sibyl, and Lady Edith. Throughout the series there was more of a focus on Mary, who Fellowes gave a lot of edges to, some of them very sharp.

I noted in that first review that Sibyl was interested in politics. So she married—gasp—slightly radical Tom Branson, the Irish chauffeur – double gasp—, which led to problems with the family. She later died in childbirth. Branson eventually returned to the family and became the brother Mary never had. And which she needed: somebody who was not romantically involved with her and was able to call her on her bullshit. Of which Mary was often full of.

Edith I described in that first review as someone “who seems willing to take any of … Mary or Sybil’s castoff men.” She was sort of the sad sack sister that the others, especially Mary, looked down on. Nobody, either the family or us viewers thought she would amount to anything. She turned out to be the most ambitious and hard-working of the lot, and while she had her share of romantic problems, in the end Fellowes married her off to a rich gentleman who a) loved her, b) gave her a title so she outranked her sisters. Ah, revenge is sweet.

Fellowes could be ruthless about killing people off. Not only Sybil, but Mary’s one true love, Matthew Crawley. When it came time for the final wrap up in the two-hour series finale, however, Fellowes (and we) had come to love his characters so much he did not kill any of them off. In fact, with the exception of Carson, the head butler, who had to retire because of illness, everybody else had a happy ending.

Fellowes really had to huff and puff to get all that into the finale. One character who throughout the series was generally up to no good was Thomas Barrow. In the final season, Fellowes tried to redeem him by making him realize how great life at Downton was. At one point Barrow went to work for an old stuffy couple and missed the people at Downton. When it becomes obvious Carson cannot perform his duties, Robert suggests Barrow take over as head butler.

That is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. At least some people in the house know how much of a scumbag Barrow is, but nobody spoke up. Well, in the final episode of season 5, Mary used Barrow to do some behind the scenes nastiness, so at least she knows. And she probably thinks, as I wrote in US #141 about Barrow, it was “very useful to have a character like that around.”

So it might work out. But we will never know. Unless of course Fellowes does a rumored film spin-off.

The writing of The Good Wife was like that of Downton in that the showrunners Robert and Michelle King created an equally great gallery of characters, but they were not quite as restricted as Fellowes was. In Wife, there were only three characters who appeared in all 156 episodes. But this being current America rather than England of nearly a hundred years ago, the world of Wife was much bigger and contained multitudes and more multitudes and even more…well, you get the point.

One of my mantras is that you write good characters you get good actors. Yes, Fellowes had a large bunch of great British actors, but not quite on the scale the Kings managed. Here is a partial list of some of the actors who appeared in the series: Michael J. Fox, Nathan Lane, Carrie Preston, Margo Martindale, Stockard Channing, Dennis O’Hare, David Hyde Pierce, Christopher MacDonald, Maura Tierney, Amanda Peet and one of my favorites, Mamie Gummer. And those were just the ones in seven or more episodes. And they were not collecting unemployment. Wouldn’t you like to have them in your movie or TV show? Well, write parts that good for them.

In addition to great characters, the Kings ran a great bunch of stories through the series. Not only were there the obvious ones about law and politics, but cases came to the firm dealt with up-to-date computer issues, national security, and corporate shenanigans.

As occasionally happens the final episode was not as good a farewell as an earlier one. In this case the earlier one was “Party,” written by Leonard Dick & Luke Shelhaas, the third from the last episode. In it Alicia is, reluctantly, hosting a party for the signing of the Ketubah (the marriage contract in a Jewish wedding) for the marriage of her pain-in-the-ass mother-in-law Jackie and Howard Lyman, the oldest lawyer in the firm.

People come in, a lot of stuff happens (you ought to look at this episode even if you never watch the show just to see how they do it), and eventually they say goodbye and leave. Since we the viewers know we probably won’t be seeing them again, it’s a nice sendoff for them, and the writing is not as rushed as Fellowes’ final episode of Downton.

The final episode, “End,” written by Robert King & Michelle King, got rather busy tying up loose ends. In the final scene Alicia walks away from Peter after he announces he has taken a plea deal. She thinks she sees her lover Jason going down a hallway, runs after him. It’s not him. Diane comes up and slaps her and walks away.

O.K., Diane is pissed that Alicia let Lucca cross-examine her husband on the stand in Peter’s case and made him look bad. But surely Diane of all people knows how the game is played. So the slap only makes partial sense on those terms, which is one reason it caused a lot of commentary on and off line.

But the Kings saw it as a bookend to the very first episode, in which Alicia stood by Peter when he confessed to a press conference that he had been unfaithful, then slapped him. So you can defend having Diane slap Alicia in intellectual and theoretical terms, but emotionally it does not feel quite right.

That is one of the few times the show ever made that mistake.