Last Chance Harvey: Thompson's Do-Over?

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it should be a truth generally acknowledged that Emma Thompson can Do No Wrong. Whether hidden under layers of disfiguring make-up in Nanny McPhee, or beneath a ridiculous mop of hair in one of the Harry Potter movies, or even as a thinly-veiled Hilary Clinton in Primary Colors, Thompson always produces a subtle and nuanced performance. The quiet intelligence of her acting elevates the mundane to the meaningful, and turns any meaningful scene into a truly remarkable work of art.

Thompson’s performance in Last Chance Harvey is no exception. But what does it mean that, in an early scene—in which Kate cries in a pub bathroom—is a near-duplicate of a scene in another Thompson movie: Love Actually? Does Our Em have feet of clay? Has she taken a shortcut and copied earlier work in a kind of self-plagiarism? Or has she tapped into something fundamentally true about a woman crying, and is her do-over just a repetition of that truth?

The bathroom scene occurs fairly early on in the film, before she meets Dustin Hoffman’s Harvey Shine whose last chance—and surely best—she is. Thompson’s Kate Walker is suffering through a double date gone wrong: the other couple has left her with a man younger enough than Kate to seem from another generation. He runs into friends at the pub and, over the next few moments, during which Kate answers another one of her mother’s frequent telephone calls, he gradually pairs up with one of the women, leaving Kate politely and quietly alone. She escapes to the bathroom and begins to cry—or, rather, not to cry. She holds it together just in time, and then reaches over to tinker with the toilet-paper roll, setting it straight. Then she gathers herself further. All the while, you can see the struggle in this woman between her awareness that she has unintentionally been made a fool of, and the pride that won’t allow her to acknowledge that fact. It is the kind of moment that only the best can pull off with such transparency.

The killer is that gesture with the toilet paper. It’s that momentary concern with order—as if one’s life is not going down the toilet—that gives Thompson away as a copier of her own earlier work (and suggests that what she brings to the screen has little to do with whoever is directing her—in this case, Joel Hopkins). In Love Actually, the relevant scene appears towards the end of the film, when Thompson unwraps a Christmas gift from her husband (Alan Rickman) only to realize that it is not the gold bracelet she knows he has bought. Rickman has bought the bracelet for another woman, but he has given Thompson something genuinely thoughtful and kind: a cd of Joni Mitchell, “the woman” Thompson says earlier “who taught your cold English wife how to feel.”



She escapes to her bedroom, puts the cd on, and tries to hold herself together. It’s a beautiful scene. Mitchell’s smoke-and-wisdom deepened voice (another do-over, with an orchestra replacing the young Mitchell’s steel-string guitar) is the perfect score for Thompson’s suppressed emotional collapse. And it turns this moment in Richard Curtis’ music-laden movie into a kind of opera.

But, as in Last Chance Harvey, once again Thompson’s character has been unintentionally made a fool of, and she struggles with pain and pride and simple grief. Once again, as she pulls herself together, her attention goes to setting things in order: she bends down and straightens the blanket on the bed before suppressing the new wave of sadness that the domestic gesture evokes in her.

Does this doing over make the scene in Last Chance Harvey a kind of actor’s cheating? Is it unfair for Thompson to mimic her previous performance if both iterations make perfect emotional sense? What do you think?

Revolutionary Road: Going Nowhere

It’s usually the action-filled movies that leave us humming a few measures of their theme music as we walk through the multiplex parking lot. Movies like Superman, with John Williams’ soaring brass, or Pirates of the Caribbean, with a melody so distinctive that it just might start a new genre: Pirate Music. Then there is Revolutionary Road. Sure, there is action in Sam Mendes’ film: a husband clears a dresser-top in fury, he slams his fist into the roof of a car; a wife runs into the woods across the street, she whirls like a bacchante on a dance floor. But the fundamental condition of April and Frank Wheeler—and of all the other suburban women and their men who come and go on Westchester trains—is restlessness. And perhaps the best evocation of their trapped lives is Thomas Newman’s score. (listen here)

Two days after I walked out of the movie theater, I am still hearing in my head the simple, open piano chords that sound at numerous moments during the film. I will leave it to others who know more about music to analyze and explain exactly what is going on. Suffice it to say that, with its restless movement and the elusive resolution of its chords, Newman’s score captures what Kate Winslet’s April says to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank: “I can’t stay and I can’t go.”

April says this in a discussion of whether to abort the child that might keep the Wheelers from escaping to Paris. But she might as well be talking about every aspect of a woman’s life in Mendes’ and Richard Yates’ 1950s suburbs. After an argument in one of the film’s early scenes—an argument in which Frank almost hits her—April gets back into the car’s passenger seat. She likely can’t drive, and she certainly doesn’t even consider taking responsibility for her own motion. Mendes’ camera work emphasizes this idea. Nearly every time we see April outside either her home or the home of a neighbor, she is filmed alone, in tight close-up. Even in the American Express office as she prepares for their trip, the camera frames her tightly enough that we can barely make out the map behind her.

Frank is no better off, though the men in this movie have the advantage of getting out of their houses and into shots with a wider frame than those that depict the women. Still, though Mendes gives them two elegantly filmed set pieces, the men’s movement is lemming-like—on train platforms, on the steps in Grand Central. Like the music, they move while not seeming to move at all. The grandness of these scenes underscores the self-delusion of both characters who are, as April says in a moment of clarity, no different from anybody else.

What is a shame about Revolutionary Road is that Newman’s music outshines Kate Winslet’s intense but ultimately disappointing performance. While she utters the line that expresses the Wheelers’ emotional situation, her acting doesn’t quite access the depth of April’s despair. The performance is a very stylized one, as clearly articulated and unnatural as Winslet’s thorough American diction. (This makes sense from the stage director whose first foray into film was the highly stylized American Beauty.) While I am willing to grant Winslet and Mendes the possibility that this was what they were after—the mid-century American woman so desperate that she either rages grandly or bites her emotions back into a surreal calm—this approach doesn’t mesh with the much more naturalistic performance of DiCaprio. If there is an Oscar performance in this film, it is his. (Coming soon: The Two Kates, a comparative review of the two Winslets on current screens.)

One of the watchwords for Revolutionary Road among movie-goers is: don’t go see it if you’re in any way familiar with a bad marriage. In an odd way, I wish this had been true. This movie should be devastating, not just upsetting (and make no mistake, it is certainly upsetting). Still:  go see Revolutionary Road. You’ll admire its technique and its craft; you’ll feel deeply sorry for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank. And I’m guessing you’ll come out of the theater trying to remember how exactly that music goes.