 |
| At
the edge of an abyss: (l-r) Richardson and Fiennes in
The White Countess. |
Unhappy
Farewell
By
Ann Morrow
The
White Countess
Directed
by James Ivory
The
White Countess, the fi- nal collaboration between James
Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant, is not one of the partners’
memorable achievements, though it does boast all the hallmarks
of a literate and socially meditative Merchant-Ivory movie:
authentic production values, high-powered cast (two Redgraves),
and a melancholy languor indicating that the world is changing,
and not for the better. This elegiac tone is eminently suitable
for the film’s setting of late-1930s Shanghai during the advent
of the Sino-Japanese War. Yet The White Countess—the
title character is a refugee from Communist Russia—has to
be considered a failure. It’s an elegant failure with noble
intentions, but a failure nonetheless; even some waterfront
cinematography from the great Christopher Doyle cannot make
this enervated drama any easier to sit through.
The problem is the script by Kazuo Ishiguro, which takes far
too long to reveal important information about the lead characters,
leaving the story to wallow in moody, exaggerated funks until
shortly before the melodramatic fillip of an ending. Countess
Sofia (Natasha Richardson) is a White Russian who lives with
her young daughter in squalid exile along with, among others,
her mother-in-law (Lynn Redgrave) and her mother-in-law’s
sister, Sara (Vanessa Redgrave). Sophia works as a dance-hall
girl and professional mistress to support the family. Her
prim sister-in-law (Madeleine Potter) is angrily disapproving
of Sophia, intoning that God will punish her even as she sits
down to the dinner that Sophia’s prostitution has purchased.
Sophia’s air of tragedy (not quite conveyed by Richardson)
attracts the notice of another world-weary foreigner, Tod
Jackson (Ralph Fiennes).
Jackson is a former diplomat from America who mysteriously
lost his vision. (While Fiennes’ accent is credible, the character
is not.) Disillusioned with Western influence in China, he
retreats from politics into Shanghai’s louche nightlife. He
opens his own establishment, in the hopes that it will have
glamorous entertainment, the vague promise of sex, a hint
of danger, and “political tension.” He hires Sophia as his
hostess, and is so taken with her aristocratic gentility that
he names the bar after her. Jackson’s Japanese acquaintance,
Mr. Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada), helps him with the clientele,
adding Japanese businessmen and Communist soldiers to the
mix. The cognac-fueled dream world of The White Countess
is, of course, too ephemeral to last. In the only illuminating
line of dialogue, Sophia compares the club’s heavy doors to
the symbolic doors of upper-class Russia, which were not heavy
enough to shut out the world.
This laboriously constructed scenario, strategically placed
amid the foreign quarters of Shanghai, wastes its potential
for excitement, romance or realpolitik with repetitious scenes
of people talking at polite loggerheads. In particular, Jackson’s
punctilious conversations with the obviously shady Matsuda,
and Sophia’s hand-wringing over the future of her child (what,
better she should starve than to be raised by a bar hostess?)
suffocate the plot beyond resuscitation. By the time the sampans
set sail during the Japanese invasion, it’s impossible to
care what becomes of any of them.
Hack
Work
Firewall
Directed
by Richard Loncraine
Staring at a computer screen as it scrolls down thousands
of names and numerals isn’t exactly compelling cinema, yet
that’s the lynchpin of Firewall, a techie thriller
about online banking that’s sometimes literally by-the-numbers.
Those numbers indicate bank accounts, accounts that are hacked
by Jack Stanfield (Harrison Ford), a security expert forced
to break through his own firewall and rob the bank that employs
him.
And why would Jack do such a thing? Because a smooth-talking
thief, Bill Cox (Paul Bettany), has taken Jack’s wife and
children hostage in their own home, that’s why. Cox and his
crew of henchmen (per formula, the crew includes one super-
talented computer geek, one muscular gunman, and one weirdo-watchdog)
barge in on the family in the guise of pizza deliverymen (so
much for Jack’s at-home security system). They force Jack
to go to work the next day as if everything were normal, so
he can begin processing the transfer of thousands of customer
accounts to Cox’s offshore repository. But things are not
normal at Jack’s bank; it’s in the process of merging with
another bank. That other bank has its own security expert
(Robert Patrick), and he, at least, has the good sense to
be suspicious when Jack starts acting strangely stressed and
is seen roaming the vaults with Cox, his new and unexplained
associate.
Alan Arkin and Robert Forster are wasted in small parts as
bank executives, and Virginia Madsen as Jack’s wife has little
to do except remain calm when things go awry and the crew
gets nasty: Cox has a disconcerting passive-aggressive streak,
which he takes out on Jack’s youngest child, a boy with allergies,
and (also per formula) other heart-tugging health problems.
Since Ford is miscast, there’s little he can do to zip up
the film’s boring heist scheme. It’s not so much that Ford
looks too old to be bashing around bad guys; the problem has
more to do with his dimming charisma and always-limited ingenuity.
His Jack has only two moods: pissed off, and really pissed
off.
It doesn’t help that Bettany, an intriguing British actor
(A Beautiful Mind) has been homogenized to the point
of being a totally uninteresting villain; Cox’s CEO-style
reserve might’ve been livelier if he’d been given a personality
trait to go along with it, like, say, intelligence. Only Robert
Patrick—best known as the sleek T-1000 in Terminator 2,
and who recently resurfaced with a vivid turn as Johnny Cash’s
alcoholic father in Walk the Line—brings any chutzpah
to his role, miniscule as it is. Firewall might’ve
had a bit more fire if Patrick, rather than a fading brand
name like Ford, had been cast as the hard-pressed paterfamilias.
—Ann
Morrow
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