Gotham Diary:
Leonie
12 July 2013
At the Video Room, yesterday — I was returning The Wrong Man, which I’d thought I owned until the moment I was ready to watch it: oops! — I picked up a film that must have gone straight to video, because I’m sure that I’d have noticed an ad for Leonie, starring Emily Mortimer as the mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi. I had no idea what to expect, and I’m still not quite sure what I saw. Based on Masayo Duus’s biography of Noguchi, subtitled A Life Without Borders, the screenplay is credited to the team of Hisako Matsui and David Wiener; Matsui directs. The project appears to have been backed by Japanese funding. I say this because it suggests an explanation for the brittle, almost pedagogic quality of the result. Leonie Gilmour, in 1897 a graduate of Bryn Mawr (the first recipient of a four-year scholarship), was a sort of precursor of Katharine Hepburn, albeit one born without the silver spoon. She was a lady who dared to bend the rules, the high-minded mother of two children born out of wedlock. The screenplay makes far too much use of extracts (voiced over by Ms Mortimer) from Gilmour’s writings (letters? diaries?) — if Gilmour is to be remembered, it will be for what she did and how she lived, not for what she wrote. The wiseacres in Hollywood would have cut the voiceovers out.
To be sure, Gilmour’s story isn’t going to be easy for anyone to tell. At a time of rising nationalism in the two great powers of the Pacific, the marriage of a Japanese man and an American woman would be fraught so long as the couple remained in either homeland, and, as we’ve seen, there was no actual marriage. Gilmour took her son to Japan, in 1907, to protect him from the taunts of nativist boys — she was living in Los Angeles at the time (the movie puts her in a Pasadena that consists entirely of tents — surely not?), and then sent him back to the United States in 1918, this time, to protect him from the growing Japanese military. It’s something of a relief when the movie comes back to New York, where it began, because, as we all know (were it only true), the city accommodates all kinds. If there is a critique of nationalist bigotry, the makers of Leonie are much too polite to make it explicit. Their Gilmour appears to be ingenuously surprised by the force of custom, and then, as a high-minded type, she seems to resolve the conflict by remembering that, as she is more enlightened than ordinary people, it doesn’t matter much whether the ordinary people are Japanese or American. There’s a deeply interesting story here, one full of embarrassment and humiliation. The man whom Gilmour hadn’t married, poet Yone Noguchi, deserted her for other lovers before returning to Japan and taking a lawful Japanese wife. (And yet he persisted in seeking the editorial assistance that had brought them together in New York!.) It’s a classic case of proud lady and caddish rogue, but with an unusual international twist. Instead of telling it, the movie is itself rather embarrassed about the irregularities. They are hinted at whenever possible and never discussed. That the identity of the father of Gilmour’s second child was uncertain is mentioned only once, by the caddish father of her first. (Yone Noguchi is played by Shido Nakamura, here rather pudgily pretty.)
What the film wants to be about is the mother who nurtured a great artist, and perhaps it might have been better to cut the first half of the screenplay and develop the second, in which Leonie pulls the clever Isamu out of school at the age of ten and commissions him to design a house, in the construction of which he participates. This is a truly remarkable business, also a very interesting story, but aside from a few scenes in which a carpenter gruffly encourages the boy to work with wood, the house materializes out of cinematic magic, not narrative logic. Later, in New York, Leonie tells her son that he’s an artist, not a medical student. The persuasiveness of this diktat is not filmed; all we see is the result, Noguchi in an art class. As for any struggles that he might have had attaining notice as an artist, they are omitted. (The Wikipedia entry suggests that there weren’t any.)
Movies about artists are the most difficult to make, because the narrative of artistic development is submerged in the artist’s nervous system and impossible to observe. Nothing is more occult than the wellsprings of inspiration, and the movies’ attempt to photograph them is rarely more than horribly crude. Artists are simply not interesting to watch. (Interesting accounts of artists at work simply leave out the boring stretches.) Leonie gracefully sidesteps the problem by focusing on Leonie’s emphatic support of her son’s creativity, however it might manifest itself. And she gave him the example of her free-spirited passion. But the vagueness of the support, its very blank-checkedness, reduces Leonie’s encouragement to greeting-card generality.
In the end, Leonie is an hommage, a cinematic memorial to the remarkable mother of a sculptor whose remarkable work the filmmakers leave it to you to discover.
I took a gamble on Leonie because of Emily Mortimer, and so far as getting a great performance was concerned, I was not disappointed: Leonie is one of the best pictures that this great actress has made. I have rarely seen fortitude so deeply engraved on a beautiful woman’s face. Ms Mortimer’s Gilmour is not so much a determined woman as a strong human being, endowed with education as well as grit. At the end of the movie, a flashback takes us to her final parting from Yone Noguchi, in a grove of cherry blossoms. The full measure of the man’s narcissism is sounded when he tells her that he wants to give her a kiss unlike any other. She looks at first as though ready to let him, but it’s really only shock; as she gathers herself together, what becomes clear is her decision not to laugh in his face. She quietly turns her back and walks away.
***
And now you’ll excuse me, as I have to prepare for a party. The windows are open to the relatively cool air — I couldn’t have asked for better weather for tidying the blue room, which tends to stuffiness. Before that, I’ve got to do a bit of shopping — beer, wine, and a very few other beverages; a few munchables (canapes from Agata and Valentina will arrive tomorrow), and things like plastic glasses and paper napkins. I should very much like the living-room windows to be clean, something I’ve had nearly three months to see to but have neglected.
Kathleen got back last night, safe and sound — but exhausted. Although surrounded by the tranquility of Thomas Pond, she spent quite a few hours on conference calls, and I almost told her host to impose a one-dollar fine for every outburst about Citrix. I’m not counting on Kathleen to help with any of the preparations, but it’s a relief to have her here.