Ids
Alive:
The Madness of King George
Nell |
DIRECTOR
Nicholas
Hytner
SCREENWRITER
Alan
Bennett
based
on his play
The Madness of George III
PRODUCERS
Stephen Evans
David Parfitt
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Andrew Dunn
MUSIC
George Fenton
EDITOR
Tariq Anwar
CAST
Nigel Hawthorne (George III)
Helen Mirren (Queen Charlotte)
Ian Holm (Dr. Willis)
Rupert Graves (Greville)
Amanda Donohoe (Lady Pembroke)
Rupert Everett (Prince of Wales)
Julian Rhind-Tutt (Duke of York)
Julian Wadham (Pitt)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 107m
U.S. release: December 1, 1994
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other movies
by Nicholas Hytner
reviewed on this site:
- The
Crucible
- The
Object of My Affection
DIRECTOR
Michael
Apted
SCREENWRITERS
William
Nicholson
Mark Handley
based
on the play Idioglossia by
Mark Handley
PRODUCERS
Jodie Foster
Renée Missel
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Dante Spinotti
MUSIC
Mark Isham
EDITOR
Jim Clark
CAST
Jodie Foster (Nell Kellty)
Liam Neeson (Dr. Jerome Lovell)
Natasha Richardson (Dr. Paula Olsen)
Richard Libertini (Dr. Alexander Paley)
Nick Searcy (Sheriff Peterson)
Robin Mullins (Mary Peterson)
Jeremy Davies (Billy Fisher)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 113m
U.S. release: December 23, 1994
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other movies
by Michael Apted
reviewed on this site:
- Extreme
Measures
- The
World Is Not Enough
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The Madness of King George is an eloquent, many-sided study of
the effects of absolute power -- which, as we know, corrupts
absolutely. It's alternately one of the funniest, saddest movies
of the year. In 1788, a decade or so after we Americans so ingraciously
refused our British hosts, King George III (Nigel Hawthorne)
still obsesses about the country he has been denied. He has a
way of pronouncing "United States" as if it were the
name of a disloyal son who's gotten too big for his britches.
The king, however, has more on his mind than the States. That
is to say, he has everything on his mind and nothing on his mind;
the king is going mad, and the assembled officials and hangers-on
of the court find it harder and harder to chalk up his ravings
as normal royal eccentricities.
Watching Madness unfold, I kept thinking, If only Caligula
had been made this way! The movie, directed by Nicholas Hytner
from a script by Alan Bennett (adapting his play), gives the
monarchy its due while suggesting that the power of God, placed
in man's imperfect hands, can derange the soul. The king dashes
around, spewing "blasphemies," chasing ripe young women.
Who is to stop him? No one may even look at him directly, much
less challenge him. For a while, Hytner and Bennett play the
king's robust instability for laughs. He could almost be Mel
Brooks in History of the World Part I, who kept saying
"It's good to be the king" as bouncing breasts
made his eyes pop. But the spectacle of a monarch with no self-control
is not only funny. Gradually, the notion becomes disturbing;
with surprising force, the movie slips into tragedy. The king
is incontinent and pathetic; he embarrasses everyone around him,
and he embarrasses himself.
Few movies -- few works in any medium -- can shift gears this
way without leaving us in the lurch. As we move between laughter
and pangs of sadness, we can become resentful of the manipulation.
Madness, though, is amazingly supple and generally unsentimental,
and it acquires depth when it moves into the viewpoints of those
who love King George and wish him well, and even those who simply
want a well-appointed throne. The kingdom is about to revert
to the next in power -- the Prince of Wales (Rupert Everett),
the king's son, a useless, dispassionate wretch. The moviemakers
feed us bits of court intrigue as the duplicitous officials fantasize
about everything that will be accompished once mad old George
is out of the way. We're offended at the idea of the king being
supplanted -- an unusual sentiment for Americans to have. But
the king, as played by Hawthorne, is worth saving. Polished by
two years in the role on the stage, Hawthorne's performance is
a study in extremes, and he pulls us into his emotions. When
George's wife, Queen Charlotte (the touching Helen Mirren), speaks
wistfully of the great, gentle man he used to be, we believe
her even though George is bonkers almost from the start. Even
at the peak of his delirium, an odd decency comes through.
The movie turns into a gripping melodrama, and also a comic contest
of wills, when the king's supporters call in a big gun. Dr. Willis
(Ian Holm), who runs an isolated farm for the insane, deduces
that the king needs brute therapy. He must be torn down, made
into a mere man, and then built up again. Holm, who even today
looks as if he could head-butt his way through a brick wall,
uses his pugnacious features to make Willis an intimidating authoritarian
even when he isn't saying anything. Forgetting himself and lapsing
into babble, the king is silenced by Willis' annihilating frown.
This psychiatrist is up against the formidable obstacle of the
very concept of monarchy. Willis' outrageous notion is that the
king must be responsible for himself before he can be a responsible
leader. Our hopes for his recovery operate on many levels, and
his journey back to lucidity is gradual and convincing.
The Madness of King George strikes notes of absurdity
and horror, slapstick and anguish. By the end of this complex
and satisfying movie, we respect the man on the throne, because
we've seen the pressures that drove him from it and the hard
work that restored him. Should we not give some slack to the
human men and women who occupy seats of power? Would any of us
sit there comfortably?
"Chick-a-bay,"
says Jodie Foster throughout Nell;
loosely translated, it means "Oscar number three, here I
come." Nell is the sort of heartwarming terrible
movie that invites comparisons to Rain Man, Awakenings,
and all the other tearjerkers about innocent, afflicted people
at odds with callous society. The film is stunningly awful on
almost every level; in addition to Foster, whose judgment since
The
Silence of the Lambs seems to have gone to hell, there's
Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson and director Michael Apted
and co-writer William Nicholson (Shadowlands) -- not a
hack in the bunch. So what happened?
Foster, as you may have assumed, is Nell, a young woman living
in isolation in a North Carolina shack. Her mother has died;
the local delivery boy (Jeremy Davies) finds the body, and the
kindly Dr. Jerry Lovell (Neeson) comes to investigate and finds
Nell. Jerry and psychologist Paula Olsen (Richardson) take a
keen interest in Nell, observing her first from afar and then
up close as she grows more comfortable with them. Speaking to
them in her own strange tongue, Nell adopts them as her new parents.
The scenes of Nell and her new guardians trying to communicate
are involving; this stuff gets to you the way it always has.
But then Nell, who has a tragic past to rival the character Foster
played in The Accused, turns out to be far more than just
a woman who doesn't get out much. She's meant to be a free spirit
who heals troubled souls by her sheer primitive purity. When
Nell started her healing shtick, I thought that she and Forrest
Gump would make a great couple.
Mark Handley co-adapted his play Idioglossia (roughly,
"one's own foreign language"), and the material is
still terribly stagy, except for repeated, gratuitous moonlit
shots of Nell skinny-dipping. Executive producer Foster works
maniacally -- this is a real Streep turn -- but even her great
talent can't scrape off the sentimental lint. Nell the backwoods
angel has all her teeth, and they're all perfectly white. And
when she makes her climactic speech in a crowded courtroom --
during a hearing to decide whether to institutionalize her --
Nell reaches deep down and breaks out a string of pieties about
how we all have big things to say but never look in each other's
eyes. Or grunts to that effect. For a woman who's been isolated
since birth, and has also recently been lapsing in and out of
catatonia, she's a pretty damn glib public speaker.
That's only the most shameless moment in a movie full of them.
Second place goes to the scene in which Nell wanders into a grubby
bar; apparently confused as to how best to express her sexuality,
she begins to strip while the barflies (including the delivery
boy from the beginning) leeringly encourage her. Jeremy Davies
was terrific in Spanking the Monkey, but if I'd seen him
here for the first time, I'd never want to see him again; his
crude, one-note performance adds to the tastelessness of the
scene, which inadvertently functions as another chance to give
us a peek at the executive producer's breasts. And why would
this woman, who since childhood has had the fear of rape drilled
into her, suddenly throw caution to the wind? (And is Jodie Foster
drawn to roles in which she's degraded in bars?) Is it because
of the stupid preceding sequence in which Dr. Jerry lets Nell
see his penis, to reassure her that not all men are bad? Didn't
Liam Neeson learn his lesson in The Good Mother, where
he let Diane Keaton's daughter touch his schmecky and got Diane
in big trouble? Liam, keep your goodies to yourself until further
notice, okay?
Sitting there in a funk as Nell devolved further into
sappiness, I wondered how Michael Apted, who has made several
acclaimed documentaries, would have handled this material as
a documentary, if he had found a real Nell somewhere in
North Carolina. (Speaking of which, that state is far prettier
than this movie indicates. Apted and his crew must have scouted
for the blandest, grayest locations they could find.) A real-life
Nell would have been dirty and unglamorous and truly mysterious.
The point of Nell -- solving the mystery of this woman
-- also robs her of any fascination. By the end, we've been spoon-fed
every bit of data necessary to diagnose her. The movie should
have a long life in Psych 101 courses.
Nell begins strongly enough to give you faith in the competence
of the director and cast. Natasha Richardson flawlessly fakes
a Southern accent (at times, she sounds like Foster's Clarice
Starling), Neeson continues his skill with American accents of
indeterminate origin, and Foster -- well, she does Nell about
as well as Nell can be done. But too many other factors work
against the actors, such as Mark Isham's score -- one of those
hushed, rapturous numbers, which swells every time Nell flashes
her ass or remembers frolicking with a little girl. (Are we not
supposed to guess within seconds who the other girl is?) Then
there's the final scene, set "five years later," in
which Nell, happily picnicking with all her nice friends, dances
with Jerry and Paula's little daughter (yes, Nell brings the
two docs together) and, God help us, teaches her to say "Chick-a-bay."
Nell skipping from rock to rock in a nearby river may become
as durable an image as Gump on the bus-stop bench. As a nation,
we're feeling degraded and strung-out and violent, and so we
turn to guardian angels and Gumps and Nells to lull us into complacency.
But complacency in these harrowed times spells doom. That's why
I kick so much at a candied daydream like Nell. The constant
stream of positive life lessons can feel like a pillow being
pressed over your face.
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