The Press Gang by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: movie book; essays about film; books about movies; writing about movies; writing about film; film theory; collection; arthouse cinema; new york cinema; new york movies; cinema essays; film essays; film criticism; cinephile; movie buff; film buff; film studies; film writing; cinema studies; art criticism; art history; essays; film; movies; cinema; movie; hollywood; movie books; essay; book lovers gifts; short story collections; essay writing; book lover; character; book lovers; gifts for movie lovers; film making; anthology
ISBN: 9781609809782
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2020-08-10T18:00:00+00:00

Topsy-Turvy

(Mike Leigh)

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

Mike Leigh doesn’t make movies the standard way, by writing or procuring a script and then hammering it into a shape that pleases him. He comes up with a story outline and a list of themes first. Then he casts the movie, and for the next several months he and the actors work out the characters, dialogue and structure. When the time comes to commit the drama to film, Leigh shapes it into a fixed screenplay. Leigh calls his process “growing a movie.” It sounds slightly hippie-dippy and very Method—like therapy for actors, except the sessions are conducted in character and when they’re over, everyone gets a souvenir transcript. Yet Leigh’s films aren’t unfocused and rambling like the films of P. T. Anderson, who sometimes turns the camera on actors, feeds them suggestions, films their improvisations and calls it a scene. Leigh’s movies, which include High Hopes and Secrets & Lies, showcase simmering unhappiness and bursts of wit and fury, but they’re not sloppy. They’re exact and ritualized, full of emotional misdirection and sly feints. In other words, they’re very British—and I mean that in the most complimentary way. Topsy-Turvy, a huge, rich musical biography about W. S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) during their collaboration on The Mikado, is Leigh’s most British movie yet. Leigh “grew” like his projects, but the results are even more impressive than usual because the scenes were improvised and worked out within the bounds of period accuracy. What a challenge this must have been for the cast. What Leigh has done is the equivalent of assembling a brilliant free-jazz ensemble to record an album, then telling the musicians they can’t employ any melodies, styles or riffs that predate, say, the Dixieland era.

Topsy-Turvy’s dialogue and manners are from 1884, not 1999. Yet the movie doesn’t seem frozen in the amber of tastefulness, like a bad Merchant-Ivory film. Instead, like Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Kansas City, it’s fluid and rude, funny and natural. It’s about musicians and actors putting on a show, but Leigh and his cast don’t put on a show for moviegoers. Rather, the characters go about their business and Leigh lets us watch from the wings.

A comedy with melancholy undertones, Topsy-Turvy has too many characters, too many scenes and, at 161 minutes, it’s probably too long. Yet I didn’t stir as it unfolded and, looking back, I can’t think of anything I’d cut. Like Secrets & Lies, it’s at once intimate and monumental, and not every scene fits into Leigh’s apparent plan with geometric precision, but the bits that stick out are pleasurable anyway—sometimes thrilling. Maybe they’re pleasurable and thrilling because they don’t fit, because Leigh is showing you things most filmmakers wouldn’t think to show. The scene in Secrets & Lies where Timothy Spall’s character, a portrait photographer, has an uncomfortable meeting with his alcoholic ex-partner didn’t fit. Of all the scenes in that 142-minute movie, it’s probably the most expendable. Yet it’s

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