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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 12/25/2010 : 14:20:08
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After months of speculation that Carey Mulligan would be starring opposite Sam Riley in Rowan Joffe's remake of John Boulting's classic Brighton Rock, Wall Street won out and Andrea Riseborough took the part of Rose.
This remake's bona fides seem to auger well. Joffe is, after all, the progeny of powerful director Roland and meticulous actress Jane Lapotaire. Riley won kudos as Ian Curtis in Control. Graham Greene's source novel is packed full of ideas, fit for the 1947 version as well as this updating. The support cast most tellingly headed by Helen Mirren, John Hurt, Phil Daniels, and Andy Serkis are really no more than fine, but then there's little to challenge them.
Riseborough's quirky looks sustain our interest because although Rose is incapable of deception, Andrea lets us witness whatever passes for logic in justifying her character's actions and attractions.
Part of Richard Attenborough's seething irrationality in the role of Pinkie is sparked by an irritation with Rose's OTT expressions of what she believes is true love. But here she's not given the chance to try to learn what drives Pinkie bananas, so we have no idea why she chooses to stay with him.
After seeing him as Curtis, I just don't believe that Riley's incapable of the emotional demands of Pinkie Brown's psycopathy. But Joffe's screenplay reduces both Pinkie and Rose to the kind of melodrama B movie relationships so favored by Hollywood as cine-fodder for double bills that changed twice a week. It's a cliche, and an almost risible one, to see Pinkie pull the legs off a spider as someone might the petals of a daisy for the old love test.
Boulting knew that Greene's story was worth more than that. That it used Pinkie's condition to examine the relationship between the sense of failure sometimes felt by devout believers when they cannot conquer what they're told are their basest impulses. That's why it was important that Pinkie was actually or felt himself to be impotent, possibly homosexual, and certainly not complicit with Rose's naive expectations of love.
Greene's Pinkie is far closer to the insane counterpart created by James Cagney in White Heat. This Pinkie's too tepid to inspire either true fear or loyalty.
Greene's setting in the 1930s was also a deliberate reminder of the growing sense of violent social facism - not necessarily allied to the Nazis - which was increasingly the result of a global financial crisis.
Joffe's choice to update Greene's story is in itself neither wise nor ill-advised. Many stories gain by being told with a different perspective. But to update it to an era on the brink of the kind of cultural explosion only possible after a period of financial security, that just seems to misunderstand why Greene created his microcosm of small-minded criminals.
The film is also overloaded with inappropriate visual references to an era of film noir. This is just film grey, rooted nowhere. There's very little sense of place or of the means by which mid-1960s teens and young people were grabbing at the technicolor excitement bleeding into their bleak lives, from the Big Smoke and The Big Apple.
Greene's underlying religious questions are reduced to a few lines and scenes so arbitrary and unrealistic they're laughable. Why bother?
Apparently at one point Martin Scorsese mooted a remake. Oh, how I wish he had taken it on.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 12/27/2010 19:00:42 |
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Brighton Rock- please see my Bafta thread
