The Remains of the Day

It's a little difficult to describe The Remains of the Day without making it sound veddy British, veddy proper and veddy boring. Granted, it's quiet and reserved. It's also engrossing and surprisingly poignant.

The Remains of the Day works as a subtle critique of emotional repression and the neo-fascist direction taken by upper-class English society prior to World War II. It also clicks as a "non-love story," as it dissects the peculiar mind of a perfect servant. And yes, stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are probably going to be nominated again for Oscars.

Hopkins plays a joyless Jeeves, a head butler who has completely submerged himself into the act of serving. He has an exact eye for detail, and is totally devoted to his master. But he acts like a detached automaton, and his voice registers with the impersonal politeness of a recorded phone message. Even when informed of his father's death, Hopkins keeps working through a dinner party with barely a wrinkle in his demeanor.

His life takes a turn for the romantic, however, when the new housekeeper (Thompson) arrives. He finds himself increasingly attracted to her, but simply incapable of dealing with his feelings. Her youth and livelier manner appeal to him, but he's too repressed to admit to the slightest glimmer of feeling.

Meanwhile, his master (James Fox) is busy selling-out the country. It's 1936, and Fox is desperately trying to make peace between England and Germany. It becomes increasingly obvious to everyone except Hopkins that his master — who's mistaken Hitler for a reasonable man and is advocating appeasement — is a dangerous idiot who's being played for a sap by the Third Reich.

Hopkins, on the other hand, stays busy chasing dust bunnies in the hallway while history unfolds around him.

One of the remarkable feats accomplished by The Remains of the Day is its ability to be emotionally moving while presenting a character who's so thoroughly out of touch with his own feelings.

Rude Britannia: the Legacy of Alan Clarke

There’s a reason why Alan Clarke (1935-1990) is one of the least known of recent British directors. His films have been virtually unseen in the United States, and our modern xenophobic mindset dictates that no filmmaker exists until we Yanks say so. However, this oversight of Clarke will be posthumously corrected with the retrospective Rude Britannia, an eight-part program of hardcore English surliness that begins snapping in your face July 20 at the Wexner Center.

Surliness is one of the operative terms for Clarke’s work. Though he spent most of his career within the seemingly polite confines of the BBC, Clarke’s embittered and highly naturalistic films were a direct link to angry-young-man school of the 1950s and the social decay of the ‘80s. Before his premature death in 1990, Clarke directed an extensive list of slash ‘n’ burn critiques on working-class rage and middle-class ennui. He was both a colleague of, and a source of inspiration to, other British directors such as Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette and The Snapper), Mike Leigh (High Hopes and Naked) and Ken Loach (Riff Raff). Furthermore, Clarke was the most uncompromising of the group.

That may be the other reason why he never became well known in the States. Americans are often uncomfortable with – even mystified by – the nearly inarticulate, but vehement, anger contained within the English political cinema. Clarke, especially, was unflinching as he focused his cameras on an England that gave birth to skinheads and rampaging soccer fans. Instead of tea and crumpets, Clarke served viewers double whiskeys, as he tore into a Britain built on institutionalized inequality and violent forms of political repression.

These ugly realities are directly captured in Made in Britain and Psy-Warriors. In the former, Tim Roth (Van Gogh in Vincent and Theo) plays a racist punker who’s filled with enough venom for a rattle snake convention. He’s hell bent on digging himself into the English penal system as deeply as possible. In many ways, prison is a career move for him.

In Psy-Warriors (whose interrogation chambers look like neo-realist revamping of The Outer Limits), three supposed terrorists are subjected to increasingly intense psychological bombardment by a special security force. In fact, they’re not terrorists, they’re soldiers who are being trained for psychological warfare. But the training itself is so extreme that it’s impossible to survive mentally intact.

The rest of Rude Britannia is devoted to drug addiction (Christine), sexual abuse (Diane), corruption (Beloved Enemy), alcoholism (Read) and just plain hooliganism (The Firm).

As relentlessly dark as his work is, remember that Clarke didn’t create this England – he simply filmed it.

Riff Raff

Karl Marx described class warfare, but the English practically invented it. The harsh rigidity of the British class system has resulted in divisions more explosive than a mine field. And as Riff Raff satirically demonstrates, the Thatcher years simply added fuel to an already raging fire.

Riff Raff is a comedy-drama largely set at a construction site – an old abandoned hospital that is being gentrified into plush apartments. It’s a non-union job, and the laborers are a consortium of working stiffs from various parts of the fallen British Empire. An ex-con from Glasgow named Stevie is part of the crew. He becomes our guide to the modern, daily routine of English working-class life.

Since most of the crew is homeless, the first order of business is seizing control of a deserted building for living quarters. Next, they plunder any useful pieces of furniture or bric-brac in the hospital. To help with expenses, there’s the occasional selling of “borrowed” equipment from the construction site. Then there’s the sanitation problem – most of the company-provided johns are busted.

Riff Raff is wry and humorous. It is also very straight-forward and realistic. Stevie and his mates are characters we can sympathize with, but they aren’t particularly noble. Given half a chance, they chisel each other in deals, and their camaraderie is often based on undercutting comments.

But the crew is bonded by a shared disdain for the posh gentry they indirectly serve and by the thickly accented language they have in common. Their stories are full of false braggadocio, but it keeps them going through a back-breaking day. And the air is rich with working-class accents that really do require the English subtitles provided on the print.

The script for Riff Raff was written by the late Bill Jesse, a caustic comic writer who often made his living in the construction trade. Partly autobiographical, Riff Raff was Jesse’s attempt to capture the experiences – and routine indignities – of manual labor.

But the crucial figure behind Riff Raff is director Ken Loach. Despite his critical acclaim for such features as Hidden Agenda, Loach is still one of the least seen of major British filmmakers. The lives of the working class have been his dominant theme for nearly 30 years – which is part of the reason why his films aren’t widely screened.

A lot of viewers don’t want to watch a group of blowhards with shovels. Yet their talks are lively, lusty, bitter and direct. Right or wrong, at least they’re trying to make a go of it.

Riff Raff is funny. It is also very accurate in its presentation of working-class life and culture. It’s also honest enough to flaunt one of the great ironies of contemporary England: those guys know they’ve gotten the shaft from Thatcher's “revolution.” But a lot of them voted for her – repeatedly.

Naked

The decay of England’s economy and social structure in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s slash ‘n’ burn administration has become a virtual obsession with British filmmakers. Peter Greenaway took the raw appetite of the nouveau riche to its logical conclusion in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. Ken Loach’s Riff Raff offered a working class that was so thoroughly disenfranchised that petty theft and arson had become the common bloke’s most rational alternative to unemployment.

Violent alienation and complete social breakdown are the order of the day, and in Mike Leigh’s bitter new satire, Naked, the day grinds into a cold night of spiritual annihilation. Leigh is best known for such comedies as High Hopes and Life Is Sweet, rough-hewn works of improvised humor that presented a fresh and naturalistic view of lower-class English life. But Naked is closer to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange – except that the latter’s nightmare fantasy has become Naked’s harsh reality. Naked has the crazy, but matter-of-fact, feel of just another day in the apocalypse.

Much of Naked is devoted to the wanderings of Johnny (David Thewlis), a highly unemployable young man who comes across as half-devil and half-prophet. He may also be thoroughly insane. Johnny’s intensely angry at society, and he directs that anger at any woman near him, while carrying on in a nonstop ramble that’s a hellish brew of philosophical posturing, biblical posing and crude sexual brutality.

A bungled date-rape sends Johnny running from the law, in a stolen car, from Manchester to London, where he plans to sponge off of his ex-girlfriend, Louise (Lesley Sharp), for a while. Louise is convenient, but it’s Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge), Louise’s druggie roommate, who Johnny finds most interesting. She offers the tantalizing combination of sex and a fresh audience for his continual harangues.

But just as Johnny seems in the process of scoring a new conquest, competition arrives in the form of Jeremy/Sebastian (Greg Cruttwell), a demonic figure who’s perfectly at home in the crumbling modern order. While Johnny cruises the streets in search of the anti-Christ (whose coming is foretold in supermarket pricing bar-codes), Jeremy/Sebastian is busy with ruthless business deals and even more ruthless bouts of S&M.

Naked is harsh, brutal and vicious. It’s also a frighteningly accurate view of the pure chaos of the post-industrial wasteland that’s engulfing the modern world. Naked is an honestly disturbing film whose soul burns with rage while its face wears an icy, sarcastic sneer.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

It always helps if a movie has a great script. It's also a big plus if the director is really good. On these counts, Four Weddings and a Funeral comes close, but no cigar. The screenplay is passable, and the direction is okay, but we're not talking Citizen Kane.

What Four Weddings and a Funeral does have, however, is an extremely good piece of ensemble acting by a set of performers who could read fig­ures from the stock market and still earn a warm laugh. It's a triumph of acting over film­making, but who's complaining? Acting may be the one thing that the English are still good at, and this film is a delightful tour de force that deftly lampoons the absurdity of good manners.

Hugh Grant heads a large cast in the central role of Charles, a young London bachelor who much prefers being a best man to being a groom. He routinely catches up with his pals and numerous ex-girlfriends at their various weddings, where it becomes obvious that Charles has a problem far greater than his ten­dency toward embarrassing faux pas. He's incapable of uttering those "three little words" of endearment — which is why he has so many ex-girl­friends.

This especially becomes a problem when he falls hopelessly in love with Andie McDowell. She's a visiting American who keeps popping up at the same weddings Charles attends. She and Charles begin an incredibly disjointed love affair, despite the fact that Charles can't admit that he's in love with her, and McDowell doesn't expect him to. Besides she's already engaged to a stuffy Scottish politician (Corin Redgrave), which is one of the reasons Grant is so unsure of where he stands with her.

Where the couple mostly stands is at the back of the chapel. Charles' friends are moving down the aisle with the predictability of salmon in the spring, but the closest he gets to the altar is when he fum­bles handing off the ring to the groom.

The plot to Four Weddings and a Funeral may sound thin, even contrived. It is. The whole movie is sliding across a remarkably thin sheet of ice, and what really saves it is some solid skating by Grant and McDowell. Also along for the ride is a long list of eccentric friends who are successfully fleshed out as full-blown characters. Even the minor bits are well handled, most notably one by Kenneth Grif­fiths, whose "Mad Old Man" steals a hysterical five minutes of screen time.

Director Mike Newell is clearly looking to reclaim the previous success he enjoyed with Enchanted April. Four Weddings and a Funeral isn't quite in the same league, but it's close enough. It's definitely one of the few bright spots of the season.