Shooting the Past (1999)

Tim Spall. Is there an actor working today who's as dependably wonderful?

Directed by Stephen Poliakoff
Written by Stephen Poliakoff
Starring Lindsay Duncan, Timothy Spall, Liam Cunningham, Billie Whitelaw, Emilia Fox



Well, this is a little different.  I'm doing something for the first time, something that I might perhaps never do again - or which, at most, I'll only be doing very, very sparingly.  I think.  We'll see.  I mean, I can't really rely on myself to do what I want, but... so far as I can tell, writing about television will be a rare event, or less frequent than that.

But then, why not write about television?  Every picture here that I've rambled in the broad vicinity of was watched via a DVD, on a screen at home.  So was Shooting the Past.  And it's a three-hour miniseries (shorter than Apocalypse Now Redux, and far less flabby), not something that ran for weeks and months.  Neither of these, however, are the reason why I decided to sit down and write about something made entirely for TV.

Nope, it's all down to Stephen Poliakoff.  See, Poliakoff has made films for the cinema - not that they've been terribly successful, well-received or, um, good - but at some point in the mid-90s, he decided that television was the medium he wanted to work in.  Given the thoroughly unexceptional nature of his ventures into theatrical releases, that's probably not a bad idea (although, to be fair, those movies were right at the beginning of his career, so we should let him off).  But it's also not a bad idea - a very good idea, indeed - because few filmmakers today have quite the same gift for televised drama as Poliakoff.  His films - or plays, perhaps, I think it's entirely reasonable to call them plays, and that word probably suits better than films in most cases, certainly better than movies - his plays have become something to look forward to, a regular joy from a unique talent.  If Poliakoff recognises that he can create his best work in television, I think it would be rather churlish for me to turn my nose up at it.

Shooting the Past is the film/play that first established his name in the medium*, and still stands as arguably his finest work.  A beautifully paced and constructed homage to memory and the huge breadth of human experience, given emotion by a superb cast, Poliakoff offers us an image of just how much we stand to lose - and how little we're often aware of it - when we unthinkingly choose the modern over the past.  Progress and change are important, yet so frequently we let the brightness and energy of the dawn take all of our attention, so easily we lose our grip on what we had before.  And that's something which, once lost, can never be recovered; when we all forget, the past dies, scattered on the winds, forever out of our reach.




*before the brief venture into cinema, Poliakoff had a successful career writing and directing for the stage.

Love Is The Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)

Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon - the artist, not the philosopher-scientist.

Directed by John Maybury

Written by John Maybury

Starring Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton

Call it what you will: divine intervention, sudden happenstance, the random element; a chance development drops in and entirely changes the direction of the plot. Banal Michael Caine vehicle Blue Ice gives us a large piece of, well, blue ice plummeting from the sky – as per the urban myth –and on to an invitingly shady character. Rather more credibly, Janet Leigh was doing just fine, set to build a new life with all that stolen money, until she happened upon the wrong motel. Robert Rodgriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s grammatically flawed From Dusk Till Dawn shifts from heist movie to action-horror with an unexpected stop amongst a den of vampires. The Toy Story world is transformed by the out-of-the-blue arrival of a shiny new Buzz Lightyear action figure (who then himself bursts unexpected into the try-your-luck world of the three-eyed alien toys).  

The new story dropping on to the old through means beyond anyone’s control crops up, rather literally, in John Maybury’s Love Is The Devil. Whether there’s actually any truth in the tale of small-time criminal George Dyer falling through a skylight into Francis Bacon’s studio is a secret that the two men took to their graves – not that it matters. It’s a fine tale, and were it ever to emerge that they met on a night out or bumped into one another while out shopping, we may be wiser but also a tad disapponted. And Maybury’s certainly not too concerned with such historical questions: his Dyer plunges from the heavens, his Bacon (Jacobi) invites the visitor to bed, and from there the erstwhile burglar rapidly slips over into being the artist’s lover, model, muse.

It’s the rise and fall of this relationship about which the picture revolves, as simple, working class Dyer (Craig) tries to adapt to his new life, the new world he occupies, Bacon’s world, the artist’s fame and friends and wants and demands. Tries, and fails. Bacon needs Dyer, artistically and physically, yet he’s irritated by a man so unlike himself or those he normally spends his time with; the artist grows tired of his muse, but cannot let him go – so ends up funding his collapse into alcoholism and despair, whilst the art, inspired by and often depicting Dyer, reaches extraordinary new heights.  

And Jacobi’s performance is every bit as towering; indeed, it rather holds the film together in places, for whenever we move beyond the boundaries of Dyer and Bacon’s storm, the fire dies and the picture slows to a drab, staid, predictable progress. The artist’s circle of friends are a muddle of by-numbers stereotypes, straight from the cinema’s big book of extroverted homosexuals – while Dyer’s equivalent, if rather smaller, cluster of acquaintances are all Cockney ne’erdowells, a little bit dodgy, and blimey mister they don’t rightly trust these toffs, folk who aren’t like us, who’ll just use you and throw you away. Had they been on screen a little longer, I’m sure one of them would’ve started selling eels.  

Maybury could easily have found himself also slipping up over the presentation of the picture. After all, his subject was a figurative, abstract painter, one indelibly associated with dramatic and vivid bursts of colour; it’s only natural for the director to bring a comparable artistic sensibility to the movie. However, there’s a fine line between an expressionist touch and outright pretentiousness, and after all, Maybury has not the same talent in that area as Bacon had. There’s a risk of the director ending up looking as though he's simply trying to imitate Bacon, and although he managed to stay on the right side of that rather fine line, it wasn’t by much.  

Perhaps he was able to do so because the picture as a whole is lifted by Jacobi’s performance. And I really can’t stress this enough – the performance was exceptional, powerful, magnificent; ably supported by a typically effective and engaging display by Craig, but it remains the veteran’s turn as Bacon that stands out, that carries the film from worthy mediocrity to something far more impressive.

 

In recent weeks, I’ve seen a film – Tomas Alfredson’s superb Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – in which an outstanding cast built upon the lustre of an otherwise very fine picture, and another – Franklin J. Schaffner’s frankly embarrassing The Boys From Brazil – in which the outstanding cast didn’t and couldn’t rescue a shockingly poor film. Love Is The Devil falls between these two stools, a reasonable enough movie made far better by its cast. In that respect, it’s definitely worth watching; in that respect, it could never be a masterpiece.