Finished off by the Museum yesterday afternoon, I was good for nothing but watching movies at home. Happily, something new arrived in the (Royal) mail, a DVD of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. I didn’t know anything about this film until I read a snatch of what Wesley Morris had to say about it (in the Globe, I presume); Wesley Morris, the fourth film critic to win a Pulitzer ever, was hailed by Jim Emerson at Scanners; I’d never heard of Morris, either. When Weekend was over, I watched Runaway Jury. I’d been tempted to watch it whilst cleaning the refrigerator on Monday afternoon, but I hadn’t been up for the grim opening sequence, in which a disaffected day-trader (remember them?) goes haywire and takes a rifle to his brokerage office. I wasn’t up for that yesterday, either; I contrived to be in the kitchen making dinner for most of it.

Weekend is such a delicate picture that synopsis can only mislead. Wesley Morris writes,

Sometimes you don’t want to escape. You want to connect with a movie that’s really about something, to listen to a filmmaker talk things out, to watch him amp everyday life without calling attention to his turning up the sound.

And what Weekend is about is, again in Morris’s words, “the way intimacy compounds sex until it begins to sprout feelings.” It is not about this-happened-then-that. Of course things have to happen: on a Friday night, a lifeguard and an artist meet in a gay bar and go back to the lifeguard’s apartment; on the following Sunday afternoon, the artist leaves Nottingham for Portland, Oregon and a two-year course, and the two men, who are now lovers, are as heartbroken as if they’d known each other for years. Weekend is, indeed, about the sprouting of feelings, and Andrew Haigh is a magician, because the sprouting of anything is pretty slow watching, and yet Weekend is never boring. He knows how to keep his material fresh. He perches Russell, for example, in a fourteenth-floor flat in what seems to be a well-maintained council estate. This allows for several interesting variations on the theme of his new friend’s several departures, seen walking away along an angular path from the high distance of Russell’s window.

Then there is the brilliance of excising the entire one-night-stand experience that brings the men together. We realize, with the dawn of the morning-after, that the foregoing scenes have been by way of introduction, and that the movie is starting now, when Glen pulls out a voice recorder and solicits Russell’s assessment of the sex that they’ve had, “for an art project,” he says. Russell is immediately put off, and before you know it, he and Glen have had their first fight, without raising their voices. Glen, the artist, is a sharp-tongued connoisseur of the self-hatreds of gay life; Russell, more cautious in every way (he is a lifeguard), thinks that it’s right to want to be happy. As the two men realize that they really click, Glen becomes distraught: he grasps Russell’s arms and says, “I don’t do [being] boyfriends, and I don’t want us to fall out about it.” Which is to say, I want us to be friends about not being friends. It’s impossible of course, just as the prospect of maintaining any kind of relationship for two years across thousands of miles is impossible. But Weekend,  gloriously, is not about problem-solving. As for the sex, Haigh has a genius for highlighting surrender, which registers in heads and shoulders as well as it does in any other parts of the body. His discretion is never coy.

Tom Cullen (Russell) and Chris New (Glen), appearing in their first feature, have the look of indie amateur innocents that a movie like Weekend needs; I can’t imagine how the film will read when the actors’ faces become familiar, as I’ve no doubt that they will, from other projects. That alone is a great reason to get hold of Weekend now.     

Runaway Jury, which I watched quite a number of times when the DVD came out, feels older than it is, possibly because it was shot in New Orleans before Katrina. Like Fracture, which is the movie that I did watch whilst cleaning the refrigerator, it is a game of cat-and-mouse that uses the law for tokens in much the way that Monopoly uses battleships and steam irons. This would be objectionable if the movie weren’t so fast-paced that it can dispense with absolute coherence. At the very end, the characters played by John Cusack and Rachel Weisz are presented as the Good Guys, but their justice is a little rough and certainly not legal. You forgive this, because, good or not, they whip the dickens out of Gene Hackman, whose Bad Guy status is certified from the beginning. As a “jury consultant” who will stop at nothing, not even suborning jurors, to win a favorable verdict for his clients, his Rankin Fitch flies an enemy-of-democracy flag that must have been picked up at a Cold-War souvenir shop, and Mr Hackman invests him with all the gleeful malevolence of a Bond villain. Unlike a Bond villain, however, he does not perish invisibly in the explosion of his bunker. No, he is reduced to wobbling sobs at a rundown bar, his career (and life) in utter ruins — and he’s still alive!

It’s also fun to watch Jeremy Piven before.

***

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 at 11:12 am.