SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK: I.T.'S OSCAR WATCH CONTINUES

I actually reviewed Silver Linings Playbook back in November for the 'three points' section of our Americarnage podcast (that's Americarnage.co.uk, or via Itunes), but because I was also talking about Elliott Carter's death, the discussion was edited out. Since then, the film won the BAFTA for best adapted screenplay, which surprised me because in Britain the 'Playbook' part of the title of the film was virtually disappeared, and the football elements usually put British audiences, and critics, off. But when I sat down to write about the film, I found myself thinking first about the appeal David O Russell, and the odd fact that in the past 18 years, he done only six feature films.

Spanking The Monkey could almost be the quintessential independent first picture; I remember it blowing me away at the London Film Festival, primarily because of the way it managed to approach a taboo subject, and some sensitive relations, with both sensitivity and humour. And I was so impressed with Alberta Watson's performance, and have since watched her nail many parts, but not the big-ticket one that she deserved.

Spanking The Monkey foreshadowed the Russell who specialises in off-beat relationships, which is what Silver Linings is all about, though its characters aren't as willfully offbeat as those in other comedies he wrote and directed, like Flirting With Disaster (of which more shortly) or I Heart Huckabees. On the serious side, Russell also made Three Kings, still the best movie anyone's done about the American 'conquest' of the Middle East, even though it was made before the last two invasions, and Kathryn Bigelow's essays into them. Three Kings was, like Silver Linings, adapted from other sources, while The Fighter, which got Russell his first Oscar nomination for best director, was his only film where he doesn't have a writing credit. It also got Melissa Leo, an underappreciated New York actress right out of the Alberta Watson template, another much-deserved Oscar (though more deserved for Frozen River!)

A cynic might think Silver Linings is a combination of the two: the offbeat comedy which Russell creates himself, and a sporting subplot and metaphor to make it more interesting on the mainstream level. But I found that, despite enjoying the film for the most part, my cynicism hit a mother lode of Silver Linings.

It's the kind of film where everyone is a bit off, which is supposed to make them funny to comfortable audiences. But where it doesn't work is that Bradley Cooper, who has anger issues (inherited, obviously, from his father Robert DeNiro, who's been banned from Eagles' games for fighting) never really seems angry enough. He's acting hard, but he keeps this reserve of rational intelligence, or likeability, behind his eyes. We can believe the violence in DeNiro beneath the hamming because he's DeNiro, but with Cooper, we think there's something more going on. If you might see a lot of DeNiro's performance in Meet The Fockers here, it isn't surprised, since Russell supposedly did script-doctoring on that film, and as we'll see, there is a lot of revisiting going on in this film.

What's new and different is Jennifer Lawrence, although again, as a widow and a 'recovering sex addict' her character Tiffany is given faults too good to be true, from the film-maker's point of view. But Lawrence does an amazing job of projecting her ultimate vulnerability—I rather doubt she gets the Oscar this year, but I wouldn't complain if she did, since she so richly deserved one for Winter's Bone. She gets the best lines, of course, and her letter to Pat is corny but may be the best moment of the film (apart from any moments with Jacki Weaver, as Cooper's mother and DeNiro's wife, enduring them). In fact the contrasting marriages; Pat's best friend is married to Tiffany's sister; she dominates him, and they live an upwardly-mobile life that's killing him to maintain. It's a contrast to Pat's parents (Tiffany's parents barely register) and everyone else in the lower-middle class neighbourhood they live in, but it's a sharper contrast to our kooky couple...at least until the end.

But what really doesn't work is the integration of the football, which is sloppy—I complained on Americarnage about DeNiro making the show's big bet on a game whose point spread would not have been fixed at the time, and you could notice the anachronistic Eagles' jerseys in the crowd-- but what was in there for a gratuitious laugh was the whole Indian Eagles fans and the fight—since one of them is Pat's therapist, you'd think his fighting at the stadium would make more of a point toward the story, but it basically just in there for a cheap ethnic laugh. Too bad they weren't playing the Redskins.

And what is especially cynical of me is thinking that the whole 'Dancing With The Stars' subplot is redolent of Slumdog Millionaire. Yes, you say, but this is what America does, pattern their lives and live their hopes to the incessant beat of so-called 'reality' television, but to me this is simply something up to date and popular on which Russell could hitch the basic scenario of Flirting With Disaster: the love triangle between the kooky guy (Ben Stiller, on whom Cooper is an improvement), the wife who doesn't care (Patricia Arquette) and the kooky woman to whom the kooky guy is attracted (Tea Leoni). There it was a quest for his parents, here it is a quest to get his job and wife back, even though the latter doesn't want him.

You can see where the novel might have appealed to Russell, and beneath the triangle he recognised were the extra plotlines, the rehab requirements, the dancing competition, and most of all the football. But really they don't go much of anywhere, especially the football, which is laden with potential metaphors for this story which went untapped. Similarly, the dancing, in the end, becomes its own payoff and telegraphs its own ending.

As I said, Silver Linings Playbook is entertaining enough; it simply does carry the weight of its own storyline to any sort of 'best picture' degree. Which is why I find it surprising he's been nominated for best director because his direction is completely in service to the screenplay, and the set-pieces are very mundane. I think that's deliberate, because as I say, I think Russell's most interested in his triangle, and everything else is just a series of devices to get him to the payoff. Besides, Flirting With Disaster II isn't a very catchy title.

DON WINSLOW REACHES SATORI

Extending the careers of other novelists' memorable characters is a task which has defeated many big-name writers, some (like Sebastian Faulks with James Bond) almost before they've even started. On the other hand, there have been many characters written by ghost writers where no one has, at the time, noticed the difference (Ellery Queen springs to mind).

In the detective field, such franchises tend to be offered to likely suspects; Robert B Parker with Chandler, Joe Gores with Hammett, Max Allan Collins with Mickey Spillane; often writing sequels or finishing material left behind (see my take on Max's Mickey here). Recently Parker's work has been passed on, with Michael Brandman, who produced the Jesse Stone TV movies, writing new Stone novels (see my review here), and Ace Atkins a surprising choice to continue Spenser.

The difficulty is deciding how far to go on the road to pastiche. Can you remain true to the spirit of the writer while taking his character in new directions? Can you write in his style, or is it useless to avoid your own? The more distinctive the writer, and the character, the more difficult the task becomes.

On the surface, Don Winslow may have seemed an unusual choice to produce this prequel to Trevanian's Shibumi. Winslow is an immensely talented writer who has produced some fine, neo-noirish, California stories, a recent series of laid-back surfer detective novels, and two remarkable books centered on the drug wars, the majestic epic Power Of The Dog and the brilliantly bleak Savages. He may have been chosen because Hollywood has caught on; The Death and Life of Bobby Z has been, so to speak, filmed (see my take here); Robert De Niro and Michael Mann were at times attached to a film of The Winter Of Frankie Machine, Oliver Stone is adapting Savages. And you might argue his bittersweet novel Isle Of Joy (see my review here) showed a facility with spy tales that might have appealled to the Travanian estate.

What must be remembered is Shibumi, although Trevanian's most successful book by far, was an outgrowth of his earlier work, straight-forward Bondish stuff like The Eiger Sanction. He moved from them to The Main, a dark police procedural set in Montreal, which may be his best, but wasn't a best-seller, before simplifying his formula and hitting on a character, Nicholas Hel, who is, in effect a Super Hero, pitched beyond Bond and nothing like a Marlowe, Spade or Hammer. Hel beat Jason Bourne into print by a year, but whether there's any influence would be for the reader to decide.

The background was intricate, but the problem was that, as a super hero, Hel would always triumph in the ultimate shoot-out, and this is a dilemma that might constrain your story telling. As this is a prequel, Winslow has to conform to the Hel Trevanian created, but he is afforded some freedom in showing how he got to be who he is, and he uses this freedom well. After all, as the blurbs suggest, Hel is not only the 'world's most dangerous assassin', but a 'mystic, master of language and culture, and the world's most artful lover'--so Winslow gets to provide him with a French courtesan to instruct him in whatever he doesn't know, courtesy of the CIA. The multiple conflicts and contradictions implied are something Winslow has fun with, but his assignment, to kill a Soviet commissioner in China, becomes something more complicated.

This is where he is at his best, outlining multiple betrayals, warring loyalties, and as you might expect from the author of Power Of The Dog, following the drug trade through Asia alongside the budding conflicts in South East Asia. He is constrained, to an extent, by Hel's talents, the fact that he is a Superman, and at times the trying to draw all the strands together can have twists colliding with each other. But he manages to draw it all together in a climax that not only resolves his story but does leave Hel set up properly for Trevanian's own book from three decades earlier.

I think if you're a Winslow fan already you'll be impressed rather than enthralled. If you're a Hel fan you shouldn't be disappointed; the world may have caught up and passed Trevanian's super-assassin in 30 years, but Winslow, while taking him back in time, also brings him forward. The news that Leonardo di Caprio wants to play Hel in a movie makes a lot more sense than his playing J Edgar Hoover, and should help cement Winslow's name. Next he brings back Hel to the Manhattan setting of Isle Of Joy, say in the early 1960s, all hel breaks loose, and the adapters of Mad Men option the film rights.

SATORI by Don Winslow
Headline, £14.99 ISBN 9780755370207 (paperback published at £6.99)

MACHETE: CUTTING EDGE EXPLOITATION

Quentin Tarantino has a lot to answer for. Machete, of course, began as a trailer as part of Grindhouse, the parody exploitation film(s), he co-directed with his low-budget emanuensis Robert Rodriquez. It follows almost slavishly the same formula, and with both its knowing pseudo-cheapness and its often referential humour, it's basically very enjoyable. But it's a shallow kind of enjoyment, one tempered by the cloak of irony, of self-awareness, that hangs over the film, like a semiotic critic about to go semi-idiotic on it.

Otherwise, though, what you see is what you see, lots of action, lots of soft-core sex, and some real humour, leavened by some performances by big name actors playing off or with their image, or sometimes hamming it up—and of course Lindsay Lohan as more or less herself.

Machete (the iconic Danny Trejo) is a Mexican cop, lured to a trap by drug kingpin Steven Seagal, who sees his wife murdered and is left for dead in a burning house. When we see him next, he is in Texas, looking for day labour like all the other illegals. He's hired to assassinate a right-wing state senator (Robert DeNiro) but is actually shot himself, while DeNiro is wounded by the same shooter. Aided by his brother (Cheech Marin), a priest, and by local activist Luz (Michelle Rodriquez), and avoiding immigration agent Jessica Alba, Trejo basically uncovers a plot by business man Jeff Fahey, the brains behind DeNiro, to enflame the immigration issue to allow for total border control, which somehow will allow Seagal to dominate the drug trade. And did I mention Don Johnson leads the border vigilantes, and shoots Michelle Rodriquez through the head, a wound whose only consequence is that she gets to wear a cool eye patch?

Along the way Machete gets his vengeance, which includes a mother-daughter threesome on camera with Fahey's wife and drug-addled internet celeb daughter (Lohan, as I said, playing herself). The ultimate shootout is the over-the-top confrontation you'd expect, although Lohan in a nun's suit shooting on the side of the good guys may be too much for the suspension of disbelief to take hold! Rodriquez and co-director, his longtime editor Ethan Maniquis keep the action moving, though characters do morph at will from capable to not. Cheech gets to have fun with his priest wielding two shotguns, and though Alba at times seems to be expecting a more serious role, Michelle Rodriquez really steals the chick side of the film. It's true in spirit to the era of Grindhouse, and it's fun on its own terms. And it's certainly worthwhile to see Danny Trejo get not just the girl, but all the girls. And the best line: 'Machete don't text.' If only we weren't supposed to take it so seriously!

MARK HARRIS: THE LOST GUARDIAN OBIT

NOTE: Here's another obituary, written for the Guardian in 2007, but not published, probably because the centrality of baseball to Harris' appeal seemed a little outre, if not inconsequential, to them. Oddly, cricket has never spawned a sub-genre of literature the way baseball has. But as you will see, although the Wiggen novels are impressive, and Bang The Drum Slowly remains one of the best baseball, indeed sports, movies, Harris' credentials went far beyond that. I found the copy when I was filing an obit of another somewhat negelected novelist, Donald Harington, to the paper today, look for it soon.

Although he wrote 18 books, including novels, memoirs, and literary criticism, Mark Harris, who has died aged 84, will be remembered best for four novels narrated by Henry Wiggen, a left-handed baseball pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. No sport has been transformed into more lasting literature, and, with the arguable exception of boxing, into better films, than baseball; Harris is unique in that his most famous novel, Bang The Drum Slowly is considered one of the very best set in the world of baseball, and its film adaptation, for which he wrote the screenplay, routinely features near the top of lists of successful sports movies.

The novel was the second to feature Wiggen, introduced as the author of The Southpaw (1953). Left-handed pitchers are baseball’s eccentrics; it is telling that their signature pitch, a reverse-breaking curve, is called a ‘screwball’. Harris’ (and Wiggen’s) style was influenced by the baseball fiction of Ring Lardner, particularly You Know Me, Al, but on publication he was often compared to Bernard Malamud, whose The Natural had appeared the previous year. But where Malamud was recasting myth, Harris used the quotidian nature of the baseball season to reflect everyday life, and the baseball team to mirror society.He once explained that ‘the society of boy games is a miniature of the larger society of men and business,’ and that some writers understood that and some did not.

Bang The Drum Slowly appeared in 1956 (that's a 1956 shot of Harris from Sports Illustrated above) and was immediately adapted for television with Paul Newman playing Wiggen and Albert Salmi as his dim-witted and much-ridiculed catcher Bruce Pearson, who thinks Wiigen's nickname 'Author' is actually 'Arthur'. In the film, Michael Moriarty, looking every inch a pitcher, played Wiggen, while Robert De Niro, less convincing with his baseball mechanics, was endearing as Pearson, whom Wiggen discovers is suffering from terminal Hodgkins disease. With Wiggen orchestrating Pearson’s acceptance, the catcher blossoms and the team wins. Harris downplays the baseball melodrama in favour of wryly comic insights expressed best when Wiggen initiates Pearson into the card game ‘TEGWAR’, The Exciting Game Without Any Rules’, and eventually allow him to win. After Pearson’s death, Wiggen meditates on what he has learned: ‘from here on in, I rag nobody’.

Concerns with prejudice, peace, and justice permeate Harris books. His characters are often trapped between worlds, an echo of his own life story. Born Mark Harris Finkelstein in the New York suburb of Mount Vernon, he changed his name legally after serving in the army in 1943-44, advised that he would have a better chance at a writing career without such an obviously Jewish surname. He worked in New York on the short-lived left-wing daily PM, and for International News Service,then in Chicago for Black Digest and Ebony. His first novel, Trumpet To The World (1946) is about a struggling black writer who marries a rich white woman.

While working as a magazine writer, he earned bachelors and masters degrees in English at the University of Denver, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1956. While studying at Denver he wrote City Of Discontent, (1952) an off-beat study of both the poet Vachel Lindsay and his home city of Springfield, Illinois. After Wiggen’s third book, A Ticket For A Seamstitch (1957), Harris turned to more mainstream novels, with perhaps his best book, Something About A Soldier (1957). Its protagonist, Jacob Epp, (ne Epstein), is disillusioned by both the war and by racial injustice. He goes AWOL, and winds up in prison writing out his process of self-discovery. Sixteen years later, confronted with the Vietnam war, Harris wrote Killing Everybody (1973), a more diffuse and much darker work, focussed on parents who’d lost their son in the war.

Harris often used narrators to highlight his seemingly-natural style of humour. Wake Up Stupid (1959) and its sequel, Lying In Bed (1984) take the formof letters written by Lee Youngdall, a novelist/teacher/boxer whose character bears obvious parallels with Harris’ own. The eponymous protagonist of The Goy (1970) keeps a life-long journal detailing the conflicts which follow his marrying a Jewish woman. Harris’ own journal-memoirs, Mark, The Glove Boy or The Last Days of Richard Nixon (1964) and Twenty-One Twice (1966) anticipated the blurring of the line between novel and non-fiction by writers like Norman Mailer and Robert Coover (himself the author of the novel The Universal Baseball Association). He maintained his playfulness in a more formal autobiography, The Best Father Ever Invented (1976).

Harris’ baseball non-fiction was collected in Diamond (1994) and his short-stories in The Self-Made Brain Surgeon (1999). He maintained a parallel career as an English professor, including twenty-two years at Arizona State, where he retired in 2002. He published another eclectic work of criticism, Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck in 1980. The previous year, the final Wiggen novel, It Looked Like Forever chronicled the now-39 year old pitcher trying to cope with the loss of his fastball. As a metaphor for the aging process, many writers have done worse. He died a month after breaking his hip and contacting pneumonia, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He is survived by his wife of more than sixty years, Josephine, two sons and a daughter.

Mark Harris (Finkelstein)
Born 19 November 1922, Mount Vernon, NY
Died 30 May 2007 Santa Barbara, California