Subscribe It's fair warning: there'll be no fear of the obvious in this movie
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It's fair warning: there'll be no fear of the obvious in this movie. Rose, who also wrote the screenplay, has borrowed the structure of Immortal Beloved from Citizen Kane, and its "Rosebud" is the true identity of the woman Beethoven addressed so fervently in a mysterious, much-discussed letter which he wrote from Teplitz, probably in 1812, and which was never delivered.Scholars have put forward various plausible candidates, notably Antonie Brentano; Rose has other ideas. Biopics stand and fall, though, not by their scholarship but by their imagination. Rose's doesn't quite fall, though it certainly staggers a bit.
Some of it is risible, as when Beethoven's executor, Schindler (Jeroen Krabbe), curses "zat demmned sonata, zer Kreuzer"; some of it is simply dull, and the pay-off turns on a coincidence that might have made Hardy wince. But Rose's main vice is a compulsion to harness music to narrative with excessive literal-mindedness - a habit gloriously transcended at one risky moment, during the "Ode to Joy", when a flashback to Ludwig as an abused child gives way to a vision of his naked body floating among the stars Kitsch, yes, but weirdly transporting. And the score is wonderful.There are many things to carp about in Gillian Armstrong's Little Women (the dialogue is tinny, the ice looks like fibreglass and Dickens never wrote a novel called Dombey and Sons, plural), but it would be churlish to grouch for long: by and large it's immensely well done. When Greg ventures out to a gay bar, and goes home with the charming Graham (Robert Carlyle), is this his first experience of sex? Presumably not: he moves unhesitantly from the squeezy-nibbly to the penetrative Nor is it a mechanical act. As their excitement mounts, the men's hands mesh, and we hear the Angelus bell on the soundtrack. The director, then, thinks that sex between men can have a sacramental aspect - but what does Greg think? When did he lose his virginity? Did he commit himself to God before he realised he was gay? Can we have a little background here, please? These are hardly side-issues. It isn't a grand miracle - it involves the grill of a domestic cooker - and Greg doesn't even know that he's worked it as he kneels in his room in anguish, calling on the crucified Christ not just to "hang there" but to "do something".
The impression of his intervention is created entirely by Bird's editing of the sequence, but we privileged ones in the audience are left in no doubt about the efficacy of prayer.McGovern's screenplay was in three parts for television, and then four, before being reconstituted as a single theatrical feature Useful information seems to have got lost along the way. The film has it both ways, by showing the utter irrelevance of the Church to the world of graffiti and the vertically mobile suspended urinals known as council-estate lifts, and then by showing the troubled priest working a miracle. On the level of storyline, though, this amounts to hedging your bets - too bad-faith about faith.If the Catholic Church is simply a human institution, then it has no right to make inhuman demands of its workers; but if a consecrated priest has supernatural power, then perhaps it does. Fair warning: the film will consider priests from the point of view of a pulpit, looking down, and also of a hassock, looking up.
If you were to put together a "controversial" film on an interactive basis, with people voting on their phones ("If you think gay Catholic priests have the same obligation to celibacy as their straight counterparts, please press One..."), you might end up with something this muddled, full of the desire to take up a position, but capable in the end of offending virtually any shade of opinion. Bird's first shot starts off looking down on a Liverpool priest in crisis - his dismissal and breakdown will make room for the film's hero Greg (Linus Roache) - and then cranes down so that it ends up level with his ankles and pointing upwards. This is a talented team (Cracker was first-rate television, and the Bird- directed Safe, broadcast in 1993, was rather better than that), but audiences of Priest are unlikely to feel safe in their hands. It must be enough to convince the makers of Priest, writer Jimmy McGovern and director Antonia Bird, that they are in the hands of a higher power. It isn't often that a British fiction film arrives on the screen just as the controversy over the issues it exploits - homosexuality and the clergy - suddenly comes to a rolling boil after simmering for months and even years. It allows us to cry without feeling manipulated, and to relive the whole delicious experience of reading the book without giving in to it Do you want to join the Marches? the film asks And in the US thousands of women have said yes And I'm willing to bet that Bill Clinton wants to, too.. This helps us to collapse the contradictions between the cloying, sentimental bits and our own cynicism. Costumes look like they've been repaired and worn in; make-up is scarce.
The Alcotts' opposition to slavery is also given an airing, as are Louisa's views on suffrage and the corset.All this takes place in a family home modelled as a kind of Arcadia, with clouds of forget- me-nots around the garden and soft, candlelit interiors. and so he is not so easily demeaned" and pragmatic scolding: "I won't have my girls being silly about boys", along with a powerful sense of community responsibility. (While Alcott's father talked Transcendentalism, Alcott's mother, Abba, was often the breadwinner.) In place of her Christian homilies comes practical advice: "Laurie is a man... In place of the dutiful wife, Marmee, comes Susan Sarandon, wry and brisk and well able to take care of herself and her family.