One Night at the Video Store

It was time for a little Ewen MacGregor feast, and nothing was at the theater, so it was off to the local videostore where two films featuring Ewen were available: Brassed Off, nominally about a Yorkshire pit-crew's brass band, and Emma, an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel that had gotten a few good reviews.

Of the two films, the one that did not inspire me to hit the fast-forward button on the remote control was Brassed Off. This was billed as a comedy but the comedy was of the rather Chekhovian sort that leaves one with a rather melancholy feeling. Despite being somewhat centered on the travails of the brass band, which is made up of coal-miners in a town in Yorkshire whose pit is threatened with closing, the actual plot had little to do with the travails of the band. That the band gets to go to London and win the trophy in the contest is a foregone conclusion, since that is not what the movie is about anyway. The plot instead centers around the problems of the miners and some of their families as their coal mine is shut down, despite having been shown, by the naive, university-educated hometown girl, to be a profitable mine. I know little about the coal-mine conflict in Britain, but I gather (from this film and other stories I have read or seen) that the closing of the mines was done rather arbitrarily and underhandedly, I think in order to promote the "cleaner" nuclear-power plants, and that those miners that were not rehired to work in the plants were fobbed off with a pittance and told to make the best of it, and in general done dirt by their government. That is the attitude of the film and I don't know enough about the situation to argue with it. And though working in a coal mine seems to be a dirty, dangerous job whose inevitable consequence seems to be a lingering death from black-lung disease, the film manages to show that somehow the miners were fulfilled by their jobs, and certainly did not deserve to be dumped so summarily.

The acting was generally excellent, of course -- all the actors, most of whom I have seen in many recent British films, all were quite believable (to this American anyway - or "anyroad" as they say in Yorkshire) as working-class sorts, and the Yorkshire accents, though at first difficult, were not impenetrable, at least to me. Most other non-British types will probably have a little trouble, however. Ewan was part of the ensemble cast, so his character did not receive a disproportionate share of the focus. (We only get a brief shot of his bum as he cleans off after a day in the mines, and there aren't any sex scenes with him and his love interest, who is Gloria, the hometown girl back from university who plays a mean flugel-horn and who just happens to work for Evil Management.) Especially good was the actor whose name I can't remember now who played the son of the band leader, and whose life is a debt-ridden, dysfunctional mess: he has had to get a part-time job as a clown performing at children's birthday parties to make ends meet, his furniture is reposessed, and his wife takes off with their kids. There are a couple of set speeches - well, more than a couple - which go on a tad too long and flirt with diatribe, but the sentiments expressed therein were sincere enough to keep them from stopping the movie cold in its tracks.

The other film, Emma, was a disappointment. I had enjoyed other filmed adaptations of Austen novels, mainly the Pride and Prejudice miniseries for A&E, and the film version of Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant. There is a way to film Austen's novels, which are mostly about people visting each other, talking to or about each other, writing in their journals, going to parties....without driving viewers mad with boredom. Unfortunately the techniques used in the other two adaptations I mentioned above were not used by the director of this movie. In other words, I am glad I saw this on video, where I could use the fast-forward to go through most of the many long, drawn-out scenes of nothing going on, instead of in the theater, where I may have had to descend to throwing stuff at the screen or leaving before the film's mind-numbing effects (coupled with the theater's darkness) put me in a coma.

I do not know where Gwyneth Paltrow has received the reputation of being a fine actress. Perhaps she acts well in her other films, but I have not seen those films. (A search of the Internet Movie Database turned up a total of 21 films that she has been in, and they were all films I either have not heard of or assiduously avoided, like A Perfect Murder.) Whatever talents she is supposed to have, in this film whatever forward action any scene has stops totally dead while she is on the screen. She gave off an air of phoniness that was totally the wrong sort of phoniness for the character of Emma Woodhouse. She is supposed to be someone who seeks to guide the lives of those around her "for their own good" yet is blind to what is actually good for them, as well as totally blinkered by her own prejudices (most notable in the way she keeps messing up the life of her poor, put-upon best friend Harriette), so her problem is not simple phoniness. It may just be that Ms. Paltrow is not a good enough actress to play the complex character of Emma. Nothing else in the film gave me any reason to believe that there was any other problem. Ms. Paltrow also, as the many (and too long) close-ups of her attest, bears a disturbing resemblance to Macaulay Culkin.

The other actors do their best to keep the film moving, and at least the film manages to pick up some energy in the scenes where someone else, not Emma's character, is the focus. Ewan MacGregor's much-touted appearance in the movie is not all that long - he plays the son from a previous marriage of Mr. Weston, whose marriage to Emma's ex-governess Emma gave herself credit for - and he is not given much to do beyond demonstrate that he can dispense with his Scottish accent when the part calls for it. And a further disappointment: not only do we not get a naked scene with Mr. MacGregor, we get hardly any flesh at all: he was thoroughly covered from neck to toes. He did, however, have a nice head of long, red hair.

A. Harris, 11/26/98

Return to the Movie Review index