Making the Transformational Moment in Film
Page 18
The preceding scene in the sequence, however, is where the emotionality starts to grow. As well as being the cool sophisticate, Cary Grant could be an unemotional foil to James Stewart's emotional firecracker in The Philadelphia Story or a manically over-excited center of attention in Arsenic and Old Lace, but here he demonstrates his ability to stand still and slowly spill a quantity of what feels like emotional truth into the scene. Stevens captures much of this in the master shot (1), as if it wasn't sufficiently repeatable to capture from other angles in coverage. Grant fluffs his lines a couple of times, which only adds to the feeling of spontaneously expressed emotion, as he pleads at length to keep the child, in front of a judge who seems more interested in the paperwork. But Grant's “wet take” contains something else as well – a very “dry” performance from Beulah Bondi right in the center of the screen.
We know that Miss Oliver cares deeply about the couple and the child. However, Beulah Bondi acts this by doing essentially nothing. We know that Beulah Bondi could turn on the emotional tap if she wanted to, but she becomes a compelling presence in the scene by not doing so. Counterpointing Grant's plaintiveness, Bondi is the solid anchor that stops the scene short of sheer sentimentality. Moreover, her presence lingers over the sequence long enough for the button-pushing sentimentality of the homecoming to feel less manipulatively mawkish than it might otherwise have done. So the relationship between the plaintive figure of Cary Grant and the undemonstrative stillness of Beulah Bondi is what charges that scene with an unforgettable tension, whereas the tensiongenerating tricks of framing and a slow pan in the next scene are shamelessly exploitative of the medium's capacity to manipulate an audience's response in a more superficial way, as the “weepie” tended to do (with its persistent risk of falling into Capra's Error as we called it earlier, p. 39).
This brings us to the absolutely key question about acting, emotion and what it is like. Does the actor need to feel the actual emotion? It is very much part of the received wisdom in a dominant strand of actor training in the U.S. that the answer to this is yes, though the precise details of the answer take various forms in different “schools.” The idea of an emotional truth first felt and only then expressed by the actor is a shared emphasis across a whole range of training and coaching methods for actors. A major problem with this fact, however, is that much of the best research into acting, such as Elly Konijn's work in the Netherlands, suggests that “emotional truth” in the sense of self-exposed interiority is largely a misreading of what happens in practice.
Penny Serenade (1941)
Pierre Arditi, one of the two leads in Love Unto Death, jokes that director Alain Resnais told him he would be able to shed tears on demand because it was in his contract. A joke maybe, but also a reminder that it is behavior a spectator sees. David Chambers of Yale School of Drama has praised El ly Konijn's research for counterbalancing the “fog banks of sanctimonious mystification, psycho-jargon, and charlatanism [that] obscure the craft of acting,” by which he means in large measure the persistent characterization of acting as a quest for emotional truth found through an inward rather than a task-orientated focus.
Konijn's work (from which the simplified diagram below is extracted) finds instead that acting in practice is largely task-focused, where the actor faces a series of well-defined task situations that produce what she terms an “action tendency.” This leaning towards a specific action or set of linked actions is what gets transformed in performance into a portrayal of a character's behavior. This transformation is what produces the observable impression that an actor's behavior-based expression “belongs” to a character's emotion.
So this kind of transformation will be an indispensable last component to our moments, if we can separate it from the “psycho-jargon and charlatanism.”
We can see how this works in Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (1964), one of Henry Fonda's best performances (though the film's release was overshadowed by Kubrick's satirical Dr. Strangelove coming out at the same time on the same topic). Fonda plays the American President, dealing with a failure in the nation's Cold War strategic bomber control systems that sends a group of aircraft past their “fail safe” point and towards the Soviet Union with erroneous instructions to drop their nuclear bombs. Negotiations are started with the Kremlin in order to avert catastrophe, the contact taking place over the “hotline” telephone, with Larry Hagman playing the interpreter on the American side (we never see the other side). Re-staging the scene opposite makes a great exercise for acting class.
Using Konijn's model (simplified here), we can see how Fonda and Hagman are dealing first with a specific task situation: they have to make these protracted telephone conversations believable. The core components of this situation include sounding like who they are meant to be (President and professional interpreter) and then looking and sounding like they are actually having these conversations. The context components include looking and sounding like they are in the larger situation (the historical moment, with certain requirements in terms of likely behavior) and expressing both familiarity with the general situation and the unexpectedness of the particular turn of events. The “urgency” components, as the narrative develops, are those factors that determine the required level of tenseness. According to the model, getting these layered components of the task situation right then triggers a transformation into behavior in which the audience “sees” the characters’ emotions within the represented dramatic situation.
In other words, the observed emotion does not have to be felt by the actors. It is read into the observable behavior. Fonda and Hagman generate edge-of-seat tension through their performances, not by conspicuously “emoting” (e.g. on the basis of what they are really feeling as actors) but by crafting their behavior within Konijn's “situational meaning structure” in ways that are utterly believable and riveting, including small details such as briefly fumbling with a strip of security tape stuck across the “hotline” telephone (it genuinely looks as if the President has never used this phone before).
Fail-Safe (1964)
This is not to say that actors do not bring a palpable intensity to performing roles such as these ones in Fail-Safe. Fonda and Hagman both look completely absorbed by the situation they are in and physically tense when things get especially tricky in the life-or-death negotiations, and they seem particularly aware of each other's subtlest shifts of mood and attitude, something that the selfabsorption of an actor's quest for their own inner emotion does not always facilitate. El ly Konijn's research allows that personal emotion will be drawn on by an actor from time to time in a kind of re-tuning process as the performance dial shifts between components of the task situation and appropriate things that an actor may find themselves feeling. But she uncovers little evidence that strong performances may mostly be driven emotionally from deliberately plumbed personal depths. Instead task-emotions, or emotions stimulated in the actor by doing the tasks required by the situation, become a principal emotional resource for generating around the transformation (as diagrammed) what Konijn, quoting Josef Kelera, calls a “radiance,” the feeling of convincing on-stage or on-screen presence that spectators sense. Kelera, however, was referring to actors trained by Jerzy Grotowski whose approach melded technical precision with material drawn from deep inside the actor's private life, and Kelera spoke of the result in terms of “light” and “illumination.” Konijn's research with actors recognizes a less mysterious “radiance” effect but produces no convincing evidence that it comes from anything other than the actor's task-emotions in the given situation.
So here we have in fact yet another evocation, on the one hand, of intensity as light, as illumination, of the transformational moment as impelled towards transcendence. In this case, not the light in a Bierstadt painting but the “illumination” generated by the actor looking deep inside his or her own emotional life and triggering a kind of fission there. David Chambers’ “fog banks of sanctimonious mystification” have sprung up around this impul
se towards transcendence. The analysis of acting reported on here, on the other hand, identifies a much more situation-specific kind of intensity of concentration in performance.
With this insight in mind, we have reached a point where we can return to the question of Samantha Morton's problematic role as Sarah in River Queen, which we touched on throughout the book. We are looking at this, not as some local instance of trouble on a film set, but because it raises some important questions about how emotion is handled in film, especially now that we have prepared the way by considering some key aspects more generally of the relationship between emotion and what-it-is-likeness. Samantha Morton is the volatile and talented two-time nominee for an Academy Award as actor whose own (made-for-TV) directing debut in 2009 won that year's British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for “Best Single Drama.” The Unloved (opposite) is a semi-autobiographical account of a young girl in the north of England who, beaten by her father, is taken into a children's home in the British social services’ care system.
We see Lucy (Molly Windsor) being threatened by her father (Robert Carlyle) and hear her being beaten from outside the open door to their living room. After this and other moments in the film we see Lucy's reaction in “dry takes,” often looking at something past or behind the camera, usually with unsettling stillness and always without emotionality. A glowing sunset over the drabness of the town is less spiritually uplifting than a mutely ironic commentary on Lucy's colorless reality. When the social worker takes her into a medical examination room for assessment, the door is closed in our face. We see Lucy being driven to the children's home – she gazes impassively out the car window. The film's one memorably “wet take” is at the end, when Lucy tries to connect with her troubled mother (the parents are separated) who keeps her at arm's length, tells her that their living together is out of the question, and puts her on a bus back to the children's home. At the last moment the mother (Susan Lynch) breaks down, but only long enough for one protracted embrace before the bus takes Lucy away. We watch Lucy sitting at the back of the bus for a very long time before the end credits roll.
The Unloved (2009)
While writing and training for film actors in the West is still full of the language of emotional self-expression on the part of the actor and still often concerned with finding techniques for matching that interiority to a character, it remains relatively rare on screen these days to find somebody who looks and feels like they are really testing that paradigm. Samantha Morton is one of these, which is why her work (e.g. in Oren Moverman's The Messenger, 2009, or Cecilia Miniucchi's Expired, 2008) occasions considerable interest. Reviewer David Edelstein in New York magazine said of Morton's performance in Expired that her “skin barely covers her soul.”
Evocations of “Method” acting are often ritual inclusions in this sort of discussion but there is not one school of self-expressive, emotion-excavating acting any longer that can be so neatly labeled. And Samantha Morton's personal method is clearly rather different, tapping something that, as noted, might have come from theater director and innovator Jerzy Grotowski's ideas – the notion that emotion gets wired through to the muscles. Whatever its sources (and some of this may just be intuitive) Samantha Morton brings a very particular way of working to her film parts. The scene opposite from River Queen is an especially clear example.
Sarah, who has spent years searching for her lost son, is being taken up-river by boat to the Mori stronghold. She has realized that Wiremu, her son's uncle, has taken the boy in and raised him as his own. We have already looked at a later scene where Wiremu cuts off his own finger to save the boy, a moment that seals Sarah's decision to leave the white world for ever. But at this point she is still wanting to reclaim her son and take him back. Still blindfolded (so as not to betray the location of the Mori stronghold), she reaches out to touch an old scar on the boy's knee, the proof of who he is.
Samantha Morton, though blindfolded, succeeds in giving Sarah here a blistering but tightly wrapped intensity of feeling. There is something about her body, her hands and her mouth that – even with her face half covered – expresses the stored up emotion in that Growtowskian sense of a wiring through to the muscles. What is especially interesting in practice though is that Samantha Morton refused to touch the boy's knee when shooting the scene. The hand in the close-up is a body double's.
Four things are going on here and we need to unpick them in order to discover something crucial about overall success and failure in this kind of filmic moment. The first is the huge risk that the self-absorbed, inward-orientated, emotion-plumbing method of acting presents to a film as a whole, which is the risk of failing to connect with much else that is going on in the film unless all of that is being centripetally organized around the one performance (and in River Queen it was not). A risk of closing out the other actors goes hand in hand with that. The boy (Rawiri Pene) is being given nothing to work with here and you can see this even from the frame stills.
Second, the most intensely inward-looking forms of acting if brought to this kind of moment, especially if there is a Growtowskian wiring of emotion to the muscles, run the internal risk of that bodily involvement being easily discharged or dissipated – for example through the simple action of touching somebody else, like a stored current going to ground. Samantha Morton is protecting her own “charge” here.
Third, there is an ideal narrative means for handling this sort of pent-up tension and psycho-physical interiority, which is storing it up for a symbolic release at a key chosen point in the narrative. This is what Samantha Morton hoped to do in River Queen but this method got progressively out of step with the kind of film it was – an expansive, multi-layered narrative with a complex time structure and very little by way of a centripetal organization of narrative material around only one role. However, we will look at that idea being played out as far as it could be in two further moments over the following pages.
Fourth, Samantha Morton was resistant to handing over to the film any “classical” emotion-laden resources – like a touch between mother and son – that could be too casually re-directed into what critic Tara Brabazon calls “a womb with a view,” which is to say visible emotionally expressed motherhood, etc. which ultimately becomes all that the woman is (like Irene Dunne in Penny Serenade).
River Queen (2005)
In the run of frames on the two preceding pages (scene 105 in the screenplay, left) we initially see the sort of thing that Samantha Morton was wary of in River Queen, as Wiremu has a Dickensian “Tiny Tim” moment with one of her boy's cousins by the river bank, an image of overt sentimentality placed in deliberate contrast to the images of rapacious soldiery (including kupapa or pro-British Mori) approaching through the forest.
As filmed and edited, this scene adds several distinct features to what was scripted and deletes others. Cinematographer Alun Bollinger's camera stays well back off the characters, filming them closely and edgily through a long lens, which isolates them and also gives the camera a feeling of trying to stay in touch with the two as they move around each other tensely. This visually dramatizes the evasive nature of their exchange, and the refusal of connection as Wiremu reaches for Sarah and she backs off. This distinctive operating of the camera also creates a space for Samantha Morton to turn inwards again (frame 17), visually disconnecting her from the background with the shallow depth of field.
Sarah in fact snarls “Get off me!” (frame 11) and Samantha Morton, much more insistently than in the screenplay, refuses Wiremu's advances. The piece of business with the “bouquet” is dropped. Some extra dialogue is dubbed onto the backs of heads in postproduction to “explain” that in fact she is resisting Wiremu's attempt to have her leave (the scripted line “I have to go…” is dropped along with several others). In short, the scene as it ends up is much more clearly an example of Sarah/Morton creating another moment of refused connection, “directing” the film from inside her performance on the way towards the climax (right) where sh
e finally does let a touch pass between herself and her son.
After the battle, Sarah has her penultimate encounter with Baine, the English officer, who points out a white woman being stoned out of camp for a liaison with a Mori man. Then Doyle, her one white friend, dies and she and Wiremu make love. Her boy is captured by the kupapa but rescued by Wiremu. The three of them escape together via the river and take refuge in a cave where the boy, who has learnt tatooing and skin chiselling from his Mori grandfather, cuts a moko (facial marking) into Sarah's chin. As she washes her now marked face in the river she is shot from the riverbank above. We watch her blood swirl away in the water.
The big question we have been heading for here is in one sense very simple. Do we care that Sarah has just apparently died? Enough extracts from River Queen have been included in the book for you to feel something of the reach of this question. If you can watch the film you will be in the best position to answer this question but I am going to predict the answer anyway. That answer is “not enough.” Understanding why this is so – in the context of our discussion of what it is like – is a very important question in terms of understanding the transformational moment that the preceding scene might have been.
Why do we not have a sufficiently strong sense of what it is like to be Sarah for us to care sufficiently about her death? After all, we cared about Zia after only the opening moments of the film Wristcutters, A Love Story.