Clooney’s cheap Money Monster and Davies’s rich Sunset Song.
George Clooney’s relentless effort to remake what he fantasizes as the politically forthright American films of the 1970s makes him both a bore and an easy target. It turns out that the movies Clooney prizes — Network, All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor — were politically fatuous; though none of them were so fatuous as his own Syriana, Michael Clayton, The Monuments Men, The American, The Descendants, The Good German, The Ides of March, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and Good Night, and Good Luck, or his new film, Money Monster. It should be open season on such unintelligent grandstanding.
In Money Monster, Clooney plays Lee Gates, the host of a financial TV program, who is held hostage (live, on-air, with a gun at his head and wearing a bomb-rigged vest) by a disgruntled viewer whose life savings were lost to one of Gates’s careless recommendations. Money Monster (also the name of Gates’s program) pretends to expose Wall Street chicanery at the same time as critiquing opportunistic television. Who do Clooney, director Jodie Foster, and lead screenwriter Jamie Linden think they are? The three-headed reincarnation of Paddy Chayefsky?
Lacking the currency of those Seventies Vietnam/Watergate reflexive dramas, Money Monster partakes of the fashionable thralldom to television as the ultimate communicative medium, but it sentimentalizes the intellectual and spiritual damage TV does to those — including social elites — who bow down to it. Foster directs in that HBO style people mistake for cinema, but her emphasis on close-ups and shrill emotional manipulation (as when show hijacker Jack O’Connell is publicly humiliated and then pitied by big shot Gates and his tough female studio director, played by Julia Roberts) is all for lovers of the boob tube. Foster’s low point comes when, once the crisis is resolved, she does a Family-of-Fed-Up-Man montage of average faces. Thank God for Terence Davies’s Sunset Song, or else this week’s moviegoers might have had no idea what a real movie looks like.
Sunset Song is a fulfillment of Davies’s individual filmmaking style. This long-dreamed-of project is accomplished without concession to marketplace gimmicks. Davies luxuriates in grand storytelling traditions even while boldly collapsing time into quirks of memory and shifting expansive panoramic exteriors into interiors of symbolic psychological intensity. Such scenes as the townspeople of Blawearie trudging through radiant wheat fields on the way to a spare, sun-filled chapel (singing the traditional “All in the April Evening”), or Chris undressing next to a framed sampler of the Beatitudes, mix the physical and the spiritual life. The film is an amazing feat of tension and harmony.
Sunset Song is true to Davies’s sensibility. He shows how the soul feels things, and we can see it.
These moments (and there are many more) recall masterpieces like How Green Was My Valley, Ryan’s Daughter, and Sons and Lovers, yet Davies’s sentiments are complicated by postmodern self-consciousness. His aesthetic cunning is daring and slightly more abstract than John Ford’s and David Lean’s, which we take for granted as “realistic romanticism.” (But understand: Ford and Lean were no less modern or technologically adventurous.) Davies, as in previous masterpieces The Long Day Closes, Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The Neon Bible, always inquires into the political underpinnings of narrative as well as personal and social relationships. That makes Sunset Song a challenge in today’s spiritually shrunken, TV-addled pop culture. This film’s Hardyesque passage of time moves in rhythmic measures, conforming to Davies’s own cinema-plus-music affinity and his particular cynical existentialism. He is moved by the effects of culture and religion on people’s habits and interested in what time and circumstance bring out in folks: Chris’s fears, Ewan’s weakness, men’s bitterness, women’s compliance. All seemingly timeless, therefore classic. Plus, the film is visually astounding. Cinematographer Michael McDonough used 65mm lenses to “ensure depth, clarity, and emotional impact on the screen.” It recalls the magnificent period scenes for Bertolucci’s Little Buddha.
Sunset Song helps 21st-century audiences understand the foundations of contemporary humanity; rural life and peonage in the early 20th century are perceived as exquisitely as in Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse. A sympathetic flashback to Ewan’s war experience (in Chris’s imagination or Davies’s?) gives proof of love and citizenship rooted in sorrow and history. Davies recreates the past so that it distills what the present — our certainties and delusions about our own time — obscures.
#related#Without being a conventionally “conservative” filmmaker, Davies, in this avant-garde film, forces “radical,” “feminist” ideas to blend with our common concerns through a unifying appreciation of the difficulty and splendor of human experience. Note Chris’s intransigence about both her place of birth (“Nothing endures but the land”) and Scottish song and language (“She knew that they [English words] could never say anything worth saying at all”). It recalls the great Hollywood heroine Scarlett O’Hara, but here as depicted by a real artist.
A great director must see himself in all his characters, and the events in Chris’s life convincingly continue the autobiographical aspects of Davies’s previous films about family and social heritage. That is to say, Sunset Song is true to Davies’s sensibility. He shows how the soul feels things, and we can see it.