Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.      

                                             SO I WENT TO THE MOVIES

            I know that you like me to give my opinions on what is wrong with the world, and what I think of the arts and how people should drive more carefully and the failures of many politicians and problems overseas; and my chief entertainment is reading and writing. But the fact is that, like you, I get much of my entertainment from television or the movies [o.k., picture-theatres or the cinema if you prefer]. So recently, my wife said let’s go to our local bijou picture-theatre and she booked us to see three films in the British and Irish Film Festival. We saw one on Friday early evening, one on Saturday afternoon and one on Sunday night. A very busy weekend.

            So, purely to amuse you, I give you a review of all these the films we saw.

            Friday, Jerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man, a documentary about one of the leaders of Sinn Fein in Northern Island [sometimes mis-called Ulster when part of Ulster is in the Republic of Ireland]. The film puts together interviews he gave over a number of years. He is an old man now and in some ways mellowed. To his credit he does acknowledge that the I.R.A. sometimes committed murder and he does agree that at least some English envoys did attempt to bring peace to this torn territory. But he makes a very strong case about his own republican views. Many newsreels and television documentaries do show the brutality of the British Army as they dealt with what were essentially Catholic ghettos, the fact that the official police in Belfast and elsewhere were always Protestant only, and walls were [and still are in some places] put up to segregate people. Much of this film we watched with horror, as any sane person would. Well worth seeing if ever it comes up again.

Saturday, The Choir, an amusing film written by Alan Bennett. The year is 1916. The First World War is raging in France.  In a northern English town, some soldier boys are coming home maimed and some are about to be sent off. The Mayor and corporation are getting ready for their yearly choir performance. They usually choose something by Handel, but the only conductor they can get [played by Ralph Fiennes] points out that Handel, and any composer they can think of, is German. Mayor and corporation won’t have that. So they decide to perform Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, though some are annoyed that the libretto was written by a Catholic [the Cardinal Henry Newman]… and might I pedantically add that Elgar was also Catholic, but apparently they didn’t know that. Anyway, most of the film is jolly enough with all the problems of getting the choir together, some romantic goings on, some saucy [maybe too much].  Always bear in mind that this is a work of fiction. There is [and was] no town with a name like this one. And I can be grumpy about two major things. One – as the story goes, the choir dress up as wounded and maimed soldiers wrapped in bloody bandages when performing, showing how horrible the war is… and if you believe any such event happened in 1916, you must be off your rocker. Two – in a brief visit, Edward Elgar is presented as a pompous twit, which I regard as a cheap insult. On the whole though, an entertaining film, even if the town looks too idyllic to be true.

And after two watchable films, there came a clanger on Sunday. The theatre was packed – mainly with older women who had probably come to see Emma Thompson – you know, that English woman who can do Shakespeare, can perform genteelly in many English films and even in some comedies. So they came to see Dead of Winter. But that was not what they got. Here was Emma Thompson performing with a broad American accent [or was it meant to be Canadian?] in what turned out to be not only a very violent thriller, with much gunfire and chases in the wilderness and over the ice lake. Implausible enough, but even more so were the many episodes wherein Ms. Thompson gets caught, gets tied up, gets threaten with death… and miraculously is able to free herself and win another day. Toward the end, not only I but other members of the audience started to laugh at what was meant to be a thriller. I couldn’t help seeing it as one of those old-time serials, where the hero turns up at the last moment and saves the day. Real twaddle.

What compensated us, a week or so later, was seeing David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky’s documentary about the artist Caravaggio, which carefully looked at his life and carefully examined nearly all his work. A breath of fresh air, especially in contrast with the largely sensationalist film about Caravaggio made by Derek Jarman some years back.