On being ornery
I have just returned from the much-vaunted The Queen, which I decided to see after spending a remarkably rainy day in doors working. N just left for the East Coast last night, leaving me and the cat with each other for entertainment. So off to the movies. The choice was a bit tricky, given that it seemed a bit unfair to see something both of us wanted to see (such as The Queen), but in the end the current crop of movies left only Apocalypto, which I only wished to see for the language and really think will be best watched on video, in installments.
So I saw The Queen, and have returned rather puzzled by the all hubbub. It’s a tame film, scrupulously acted, if not especially brilliantly. And therein lies the puzzlement. Why the canonization of Dame Mirren for this? Is it because Prime Suspect is finishing this year? Let me be clear: her acting is quite wonderful, but it (or at least in the context of the movie) is simply not the kind of transporting experience that I was expecting from the reviews. Part of me thinks i am simply reacting to several scenes of poor taste, especially one where Mirren qua Elizabeth communes with an enormous stag in the Sottish Highlands while Prince Phillip and the grandkids are stalking it. I’m not kidding. The sheer improbability of this scene in a movie that is tenaciously realist in its pretensions is one thing; worse is the metaphor the audience is not only asked to consider (i.e., we are both hounded noble beasts), but actively beaten over the head with (the stag reappears with Wagnerian frequency). But the screenplay aside, the performance of the queen left me horribly unsatisfied. Here I thought I was to be shown how the monarchy functions on the interior, to get some sense of why their distance from the mourning for Diana was the product of their upbringing, and I did, but only as the result of rather direct speechifying by others in the Royal Family (esp. the Queen Mother’s upbraiding of Elizabeth with something equivalent to “Henry VIII would have strung up the PM for suggesting you cow to him”), or her aides to a puzzled but earnest Tony Blair (a stand-in for the audience, to be sure). Mirren’s performance itself is like a wall, incredibly impermeable (but for the dreadful stag-bond mentioned above). I got frosty. I got tradition. I got distance. What I didn’t get was inside her, and that is what I hoped one would see in a behind-the-scenes biopic. So what were the critics thinking?
When the stars collide like this, my world dissolves. Not really, but still, I worry. How can people whose taste I otherwise share declare this little filip of a movie a gigantic performance? I simply cannot understand and it troubles me, for the obvious question: Is it ME? Am I the wrong one? Or has the world gone insane?
I had been primed to think this way. This month Joanna Newsom’s much-anticipated second album Ys was released, to rave reviews everywhere I looked. Many of you know Newsom only in reference to pain, given her caterwauling voice. But you also know I adored the first album. The inventive, richly-symboled verse and the melodic invention still, 2.5 years after first listening to it, remain fresh and wholly original: “I sailed away on winter’s day/With fates as malleable as clay,/But ships are fallible I say,/And the nautical like all things fades.”
Ys, which I got this week, is a major disappointment on every front. The lyricism is gone, replaced by an odd confessional repetition (as in: words repeated five times) and an abundance of high school similes. And that Newsom voice has a new semi-training that is simply dreadful. Not because I want her to sound like an out of tune musical saw, but because she’s CONSTANTLY turning notes in the exact same fashion, and has discovered melisma like a demon. It doesn’t work. At the end of one song she even does something so horrible it made me think of the vamping in contemporary R&B. With a harp? And a backup orchestra? Not working.
The album is so underwhelming I would have expected something less that total breathlessness on the part of the rest of the universe, but so far, nothing. N suspects that Newsom has sold out, becoming more pedestrian for the sake of enlarging her audience. Perhaps. But it saddens me so, because she’s dropped everything good in her work simultaneously. And it makes me wonder what’s happening with the critics. Didn’t they hear her channel Cindy Lauper (who I love, but still)?
Ultimately, though, I recognize that I am really grieving for myself, the victim of foolish expectations. Pity me. Pity me and pray that you won’t find yourself in this state.
