JimBell Blog

Under discussion:

The Long Day Closes  (1992)

I watched The Long Day Closes (1992) because I loved director Terence Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2000). But The Long Day Closes was much different and much worse. The film is a sort-of-autobiographical account of a young boy growing up in a poor section of Liverpool in the early and mid-1950s. There is no plot. This takes some getting used to. His mother hangs up the clothes; she is obvious good at it; the clothes line is indoors. The young boy retrieves a bottle of beer from a window sill. I’ll bet that one of his older sisters had been drinking it, closed the window, and then went to the front steps. The bottle has a cup on top. The boy goes to the front steps and gives the bottle and cup to her.

From what Terence Davies has said in interviews about his new documentary film about Liverpool, I’d guess The Long Day Closes has something to do with his life-long fascination with time and memory. The movie is essentially from the boy’s perspective. What I found most interesting is how the young lad’s two older brothers and two older sisters just seemed to get boyfriends or girlfriends, go off to a dance, and get married, as if they were simultaneously an important part of the kid’s life and something he couldn’t relate to. But the disadvantage is that we, the viewers, don’t get to know the siblings, just the boy and to some extent his mother.

The Long Day Closes was nominated for the Golden Palm in 1992, so some serious film people thought it seriously good. But I was more dazed and confused as to who would make such a film. Ironically, in interviews, the 64-year old Davies is passionate, animated, and opinionated, ranting against 25-year olds with a film degree telling him how to write a script, snarling about the Americanization of England and its film industry (the fifty-first state, like Hawaii with bad weather), throwing in for good measure that being gay has ruined his life, and complaining is some detail about sloppy and inept film making. His articulate passion and The House of Mirth convince me that his new documentary will be worth seeing, but I won’t be searching out his five earlier movies.

Under discussion:

Enigma  (2001)

Enigma (2002) is just the kind of movie I’d like, but I found it flat and, ultimately, forgettable, I suppose. Here we’ve got a first-rate director, Michael Apted, and a veteran screenwriter, Tom Stoppard. And we’ve got British actors with lots of chops. Great. All stewed up in World War II suspense based on a true story of code breaking and espionage.  

            Even though I love complex movies, I had to stop this one half a dozen times and make sure I was following the plot. The mystery underlying the particular breach in security at the heart of Enigma is so remote that viewers have no chance of figuring it out. Apted and Stoppard may argue that they gave us a hint early in the movie when a dog runs through the woods and stops and digs up a human arm. This brief and inexplicable scene would have helped if we had known that forest was in Poland and the time was shortly after WW II.

            But then the complexity gets another dimension when the femme fatale plot develops. Is the gorgeous, seductive Claire (Saffron Burrows) a German spy? Is she being blackmailed? Is she actually an assistant to the slimy detective Wigram (Jeremy Northam)? Or did the woman who slept with half of the decoding department finally fall in love with someone? You’ll have to sort all that out without any help from the other characters in the movie because they don’t know most of the time either. At the same time you’ll be learning how coding and code breaking works. Hopefully, you have enough history background that you don’t have to learn the WW II context as well.

            Maybe because the film is so cerebral, Apted et al. have put in a few scenes apparently intended to get a visceral reaction. But they are poorly done and don’t work. The car chase is almost amateurish. The escape from a train could have been exciting—think of how Hitchcock might have done it—but the bad guy gets up, walks down the corridor, and disappears. Even the budding romance between the hero, Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott) and his assistant sleuth, Hester Wallace (Kate Winslet) has no passion. Sure they are both brains, but geniuses can be passionate, and that would have added some juice.

            Still you get great acting—Dougray Scott is particularly good as the brain recovering from a nervous break down; Kate Winslet is solid; Saffron Burrows is perfect for the femme fatale role, never over-playing her hand. And you’ve got the authentic setting and wonderful recreations of the 1940s. So if it sounds intriguing, go for it, but have your thumb poised above the pause and rewind buttons.