Understanding Screenwriting #111: 42, The Company You Keep, To the Wonder, & More

Many reviews have pointed out that 42 is a very conventional screen biography of Jackie Robinson. It is.

42
Photo: Warner Bros.

Coming Up In This Column: 42, The Company You Keep, Renoir, In the House, To the Wonder, Billy & Ray, Looper, The Barbarian, but first…

Fan Mail: I was delighted to see David Ehrenstein back in the comments section and not just because he more or less agreed with me about On the Road. In the past several years I’ve come to feel that my column isn’t complete until David weighs in on it. The other three comments were on Evil Dead. “Syvology” is obviously a genre fan and gave up thinking I could teach him anything when I used the terms “horror movie” and “scary movie” interchangeably. “Buck Theorem” thought the script was worse than I did, especially the exposition, which I thought at least established the characters. The most perceptive comments were from “Dersu DeLarge,” who felt that since I liked some of the humor in this Evil Dead, I might appreciate the humor in the others. I may have to look into that.

42 (2013; written by Brian Helgeland; 128 minutes.)

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Almost worthy. Many reviews have pointed out that this is a very conventional screen biography of Jackie Robinson. It is. In the film, he and his wife pretty much say and do what we expect they said and did. But Brian Helgeland is a pretty good screenwriter, and he’s done some nice work here. To keep his focus tight, he’s smart to limit himself to just two years in Robinson’s life, 1945 to ’47, starting with Dodger owner Branch Rickey deciding he’ll make Robinson the first black major-league baseball player. We watch Robinson in the minor leagues learning how to deal with all the small shit that comes down on him there, and then we see him putting that experience to work on the big shit when he’s called up to The Show.

Helgeland gives us some nice scenes to fill out the structure. The best is an extended sequence showing Robinson playing for the Dodgers. While at bat, he’s harassed by Ben Chapman, the manager of the Phillies. Chapman is using all the racial epithets he knows, which are many. Helgeland lets this scene run long enough so we can feel what it was like to be Robinson. The scene also runs long because Helgeland is giving us a lot of reactions, particularly among Robinson’s Dodger teammates. Many of those teammates did not want him on the team, but the overt racism obviously bothers them, and we can see them change their minds as the scene progresses. At the end of his at-bat, Robinson goes into the tunnel from the dugout and explodes in rage, smashing his bat against the wall. Rickey comes to the tunnel, reminding Robinson that he chose him because he wanted someone “who has the guts not to fight back.” This scene gets two great payoffs later, one with Chapman having to do a make-nice photo shoot with Robinson, the other with a title at the end that tells us what happened to him.

While that scene is a justifiably obvious one, there are some nice subtle ones as well. In the press box, one reporter says that Robinson is as fast as he is because blacks have an extra long bone in their feet. Whereupon Robinson hits a home run, and another reporter asks the first one if Robinson can hit like that because of the bone. We see the reactions of the other reporters as they realize how stupid the first man’s comment was.

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Late in the film, Rickey (some people love Harrison Ford’s performance; I think it’s too over the top) finally tells Robinson why he wanted to be the first owner to bring up a black player. It’s not exactly what you might expect. In another scene, after Robinson has begun to turn fans around, Rickey tells him that he saw a little white boy on a sandlot park trying to play like Robinson. Many of the script’s high points are those subtle moments, which keep us from feeling that 42 is hitting us over the head like an old Stanley Kramer message picture.

The Company You Keep (2013; screenplay by Lem Dobbs; based on the novel by Neil Gordon; 121 minutes.)

The Company You Keep

Actors at half throttle. This has one of the best casts recently assembled for a film: Robert Redford (who also directed), Shia LaBeouf, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte—and that’s just half of the stars. But without good writing, the actors aren’t going to be as effective as they can be. This is another one of those cases.

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Sharon Solarz (Sarandon), a ’60s-era radical who’s been on the lamb for 30 years (the chronology is a bit off, probably because the novel was written 10 years ago), turns herself in. Ben (LaBeouf), a young local newspaper reporter, gets a jailhouse interview with her. Sharon explains her situation and defends her actions. Okay, but where’s the drama? There’s no real tension in the scene. Jim Grant (Redford) learns about the case, drops his daughter at his brother’s, and lights out for the territories. Ben figures out Jim is really a former revolutionary and goes to see various former revolutionaries. We first we get scenes of Jim and Donal (Nolte) talking about the past. Again, not much dramatic tension. The same with Jim’s other scenes with other former friends. Dobbs simply hasn’t given the actors enough to play.

We also have no idea why Jim is trying to track down Mimi (Julie Christie). We know it’s important to him, but it’s a very long time before we have any idea why, and there’s not a lot of drama during the wait. And the payoff scene when they finally meet is more of the general discussion. All the actors are as good as the script lets them be, which isn’t that good.

Renoir (2012; screenplay by Gilles Bourdos and Jérôme Tonnerre, with the collaboration of Michel Spinoza; based on the book Le Tableau Amoureux by Jacques Renoir; 111 minutes.)

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Renoir

Flesh. In the spring of 2010, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) had a stunning exhibition of French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s late work. Most of the paintings were of young female nudes, and what struck me about them was there lack of lecherousness. Their tone seemed nostalgic toward women in Renoir’s past, both real and imagined. Renoir is the film equivalent of a coffee-table volume accompanying the exhibition.

The film begins with Andrée Heuschling, riding her bicycle through the countryside at Côte d’Azur, photographed like a series of Impressionist paintings. Andrée, soon nicknamed Dedee, walks through the house in a very straightforward, unseductive way. She gets to Renoir’s studio and tells him his late wife had suggested she pose for him. We can see why: Christa Theret, who plays her, has the coloring of a Renoir painting. Soon they’re at work, and it’s very clearly work for both of them. He’s driven, arthritic hands and all, to paint. Okay, but that’s just a situation. What makes it a movie? Shortly Renoir’s middle son, Jean (yes, that Jean Renoir), comes home from World War I (it’s 1915) on convalescent leave. Jean and Dedee hit it off: She says his father always paints her fatter than she is (and he does), and Jean says Dad always painted him to look like a girl (and he did). Not only is Theret good as Dedee, but Vincent Rottiers looks and acts very much like the young Jean, and Michel Bouquet is great as the painter. The casting of those three is perfect, given the way the script draws the characters.

Jean and Dedee begin a romance and she interests him in the new-fangled toy: the movies. (The one historical howler in the film is that it has them watching D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance a year before it was released.) Both are enchanted with the movies; years after this film takes place, she acted in several of Jean’s early films. There’s tension between Dedee, Jean, and other members of the household, some of whom are women who’ve modeled for Renoir before, and Dedee throws a hissy fit and leaves. The film is more of an incident than a full story, but then Renoir’s paintings were as well, so it’s a scriptwriting approach that fits the material.

The Jacques Renoir in the writing credits is the great grandson of Pierre-Auguste and the grand nephew of Jean. His book was a novelized version of family life chez Renoir, so presumably the script is as authentic as it feels.

In the House (2012; screenplay by François Ozon; based on the play El Chico de la Última Fila by Juan Mayorga; 105 minutes.)

In the House

“Cinematographic.” Juan Mayorga is Spanish playwright who wrote the 2006 play this is based on. It was subsequently produced in France, and François Ozon, who also directed, adapted it for the screen. You might not necessarily realize it’s based on a play because it feels so film-like. A review of the published version of the play that you can read here will show you how much the film is like the play. The reviewer says near the end of the piece: “There is a continuum of reading, with cinematographic effects that I hadn’t understood when I watched the play.” The film and play follow three storylines. One is about Germain, a high school English teacher, and his wife Jeanne. The second is about a family that Claude, one of Germain’s students, is writing about in his papers for class. The third is about Jeanne trying to save her art gallery. Germain, who’s very disdainful of his students, gets caught up in Claude’s accounts of him insinuating himself into the Rapha household. Germain and, later, Jeanne eagerly await the next episode like soap-opera fans. Germain instructs Claude on how to write and rewrite, even changing details of what happened.

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You can see how this could go wrong as a film, but it doesn’t. Watching Germain and Jeanne devour each paper is interesting because they’re beautifully developed characters and we love watching their reactions, and on film Orzon can cut away to what Claude is telling us. As the film progresses, we can see the different versions of Claude’s papers. Generally in film, if we see something we assume it actually happens, but here we never quite know. The film is very self-reflexive, providing its own commentary on the story and how it’s created. Eventually the situation collapses on Germain, who’s left with nothing, leading to a great closing scene where he and Claude sit on a park bench across the street from an apartment building with all kinds of potential stories being acted out. Yes, it’s yet another homage to Rear Window, but a very smart and even moving one.

To the Wonder (2012; written by Terrence Malick; 112 minutes.)

To the Wonder

Terry, would showing Ben Affleck’s face kill you? I have some of the same problems with this film as I had with The Tree of Life (see US #76), only more so. There’s very little narrative drive and virtually no characterization. Neil and Marina are obviously in love and visit Mont Saint-Michel, then go to live in Oklahoma, where Neil sort of takes up with an old friend, Jane. They seem to be in love as well, but then Neil is back with Marina, then Marina leaves, comes back, gets a divorce, doesn’t, end of movie. We learn virtually nothing about the characters, particularly Neil. He seems to work in something related to the oil business, but that’s about it. Malick uses very little dialogue, assuming that, like silent movies, the faces will carry it. Olga Kurylenko as Marina gets most of the close-ups, in which she’s mainly directed to look rapturous. She does, but everything she does is repetitive. Rachel McAdams as Jane gets the same treatment. Ben Affleck as Neil doesn’t even get that much. We never get a close-up of his face; he’s usually seen from an angle. But Affleck has nothing to play. Given the great performance he gave in Argo last year, it’s very frustrating to see Terrence Malick’s script give him nothing to do. But at least he doesn’t have to dance around in the tall grass as Kuryulenko does over and over again. I think Malick should be banned from showing women dancing in the grass for at least his next two movies. Insert your own Renoir joke here.

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Billy & Ray (2013; stage play by Mike Bencivenga; approximately 129 minutes.)

Billy & Ray

Billy and Ray who? Over the last 10 years or so, Ron Hutchinson’s play Moonlight and Magnolias has been floating around professional theatres in the United States. It played in New York in 2005, and the New York Times didn’t like it much. Charles Isherwood thought it was “silly,” but that may have been because the production he saw was overripe. The one we saw at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles was much better. I had been hesitant to see the play because I knew how inaccurate it was, but it was still very entertaining. It’s based on Ben Hecht’s 1954 memoir A Child of the Century, which relates at one point Hecht’s version of how, at David O. Selznick’s request, he came in and rewrote the screenplay for Gone with the Wind in a week. Hecht was a great storyteller, and in dark ages of 1954 neither he nor anybody else cared about the facts of screenwriting. Hecht was only one of 17 writers on the film and the more recent books on Gone with the Wind make it clear very little of his work survived in the film.

Time passes, things change. Bencivenga’s play is about Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler’s attempt at collaborating on the screenplay for Double Indemnity. Almost 60 years after Hecht’s book, people, and not just me, pay more attention to the reality of screenwriting. Bencivenga has done his research, more than just reading Ed Sikov’s great 1998 biography of Wilder, On Sunset Boulevard. His play is a much more accurate view of the total mismatch of Wilder and Chandler, and we get a great look at the creation of a screenplay by two top talents constantly butting heads. Bencivenga appears to have looked at the Hays Office papers on the film at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, since one element of the plot is how Billy and Ray outfoxed the censors of the time. The play is also very funny, and not all the jokes go to Wilder. The play had its world premiere at the small Falcon Theatre in Burbank in April, and if the four-character, one-set play comes around where you live, see it. Unless the producers screw up the production like the New Yorkers did with Moonlight and Magnolias, it will have you rolling in the aisles. And it will also help you understand screenwriting.

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Looper (2012; written by Rian Johnson; 119 minutes.)

Looper

Having its moments, past, present and future. The opening is about as bad as you can get, but writer-director Rian Johnson may have been smart to do it this way. We begin with a lot, and I mean a lot, of voiceover narration setting up the rules of the film. This is the bane of nearly all science-fiction films: How do you establish the world the film is going to live in? If we see a man with a gun on a horse riding over a hill, we pretty much know we’re in a Western until you tell us differently. With sci-fi movies, it’s more complicated. Here Johnson lays out the ideas of a system of hired killers who often have to end up killing themselves as older guys when the older versions are sent via time travel to the present. I suspect he does it so quickly so we won’t have time to think how preposterous the setup is. This is a classic example of Johnny Carson’s line, “You buy the premise, you buy the bit.” Get the silly setup out of the way as soon as possible. But then Johnson spends more time with the killers moping around in settings and situations that are film nourish in extremis. And they aren’t very nice people. As with way too many science-fiction films, this one is almost totally humorless. One of the reasons Back to the Future worked so well was that it had a great deal of fun with its time-travel premise.

The killer we’re following is Joe, and the first big twist is that Old Joe from 30 years later is dumped in Joe’s spot. They have a scene together in a diner, which could have been wonderful. After all, there are great diner scenes in the collected works of Quentin Tarantino, as well as between Al Pacino and Rober De Niro in Heat and Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow in Se7en. But Johnson shuts down his own scene when Old Joe refuses to talk to Joe about the mechanics of time travel. Without getting into too much techno-babble, you could write a nice scene with Joe wanting to learn the mechanics and Old Joe having another objective that he’s more concerned about.

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Then, alas, Johnson sends the two Joes off on their separate ways, and we don’t get enough of them together. Old Joe has come back voluntarily to find the “Rainmaker,” the younger version of the boss who wants him dead. It turns out the younger version is a kid, one of three kids. So we’re going to get into the business of killing children, which really creates a couple of eeewww moments. Joe ends up at a farm with Sara and a young boy, whom we guess long before the film tells is the future Rainmaker. The farm scenes are tonally different from the earlier part of the film, but they’re more interesting. Sara turns out to be a tough cookie who knows more about the looper program than you might think. We get a nicely written and directed suspense scene when one of the other loopers comes to Sara’s farmhouse and the kid and Joe manage to avoid being caught.

Johnson has written himself into a corner. How can you end this story in a satisfying way? Does either of the Joes kill the other? Does either of them kill the kid? If they get sentimental and decide not to kill the kid, he will grow up to be not a nice person. Johnson comes up with a slightly if not completely satisfying ending, which I’m not going to give away, even at this late date.

The Barbarian (1933; screenplay by Elmer Harris and Anita Loss; based on the play The Arab by Edgar Selwyn; 83 minutes.)

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The Barbarian

Anita Loos rewrites The Sheik. Well, not exactly. Edgar Selwyn’s play The Arab appeared on Broadway in 1911, with Selwyn playing the lead. That’s 10 years before The Sheik was a big hit and confirmed Rudolph Valentino’s stardom. The Broadway Database doesn’t give any plot details of the play, but it was made twice before as a film, once in 1915 by Cecil B. De Mille, and in 1924 by Rex Ingram. The plot synopsis of the 1915 film and the cast lists for both the earlier films suggests they stuck more closely to the play than The Barbarian does. In the 1915 film, Jamil robs a caravan, and his father makes his son give the robbed merchant the son’s horse. The horse is sold to a Turkish general, who gives it to Mary, a Christian missionary, whom Jamil falls in love with after trying to steal the horse back. The lovers part when Jamil’s father dies and Jamil must become the new sheik. Now that doesn’t sound like anything Anita Loos would be involved with, does it?

In the Loos-Harris version (Harris was a playwright and occasional screenwriter), the horse is dropped, as is the Turkish general, and the heroine is no missionary, Christian or otherwise. She’s Diana Standing, half-American, half-Egyptian, who’s come to Cairo to be married to an English twit. The script starts with what can only be an Anita Loos scene. Jamil, now a gigolo, is bidding a passionate farewell to an American tourist he’s obviously seduced (she’s played by Hedda Hopper, later a famous gossip columnist). He gives her a ring, which he deftly steals from her finger before leaving her compartment on the train. He then goes to another compartment and plays the same scene, this time in German, with a German tourist. Look at Elmer Harris’s credits and tell me if you can find anything in there like this. While at the train station, Jamil spies Diana and is instantly enchanted; well, she’s Myrna Loy, who’s playing a version of the exotic women she played before marrying Nick Charles. Jamil muscles his way into being her tour guide while her fiancé is off building an aqueduct. He promises to take her to the aqueduct, but instead delivers her to Achmed Pasha, who thinks he’s buying her. When he tries to have his way with her, she cries out Jamil’s name and he rescues her. Great fellow, except that he takes her to an oasis and…rapes her. In The Sheik, it’s seduction with a hint of rape, and here it’s rape with only a hint of seduction. What was anybody thinking at MGM? Maybe that they needed to go further than The Shiek did. Diana, in a virtual coma, agrees to marry Jamil. At the wedding, she throws a glass of water in Jamil’s face, runs away, and is about to marry her fiancé when Jamil shows up and he and Diana run off together. Well, why do you think the studio made her half-Egyptian? Since Harris’s big hit as a playwright was Johnny Belinda, which involves a rape, the second half of the film may have come from him. Whoever it came from, it’s creepy and kills the picture.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Tom Stempel

Tom Stempel is an American film scholar and critic. He is a professor emeritus in film at Los Angeles City College, where he taught from 1971 to 2011.

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