40Films, Part 1: Comfort and Joy, Life is Sweet

So much as you can call it work, I work in film. And so much as work resembles love — crushing, full of moments of doubt and unpaid overtime— I do love it. Just less lately.

The only happy people on a 16-hour death flight over the Pacific in Economy Minus were sat very close to me. They had been married for thirty years, which is even more jarring (these days) as that is about as old as they looked. They were traveling to keep excited, which they both said required effort, which they both said was worth it, and which they both said they did about once a year when they felt they were forgetting how great everything was. Even flying? “Flying especially.” They shared this and their armrest with me and I gave them my pudding.

This series is an effort at effort and maybe even a kind of travel for the couchbound. I’ll watch a scattershot of 40 new films, One-A-Day, and I will share that with You in some form — bullets, essay, contrast, I dunno. Better over time. There is no grand design, but perhaps a consistent sympathy for the overlooked and second (or third) film of a favourite director. For all my struggle, I still know little about movies; but I do know how miraculously conceived even the worst is. I don’t see disaster. I am focused on what works and, fortunately, with our first films that seems to be just about everything. Shabby as it is, let’s see them as a statement of purpose and all that a film can be.

You aren’t imagining it: If you went to the box office in the past year and invested your time in a film with any quantity of spandex, then you might have left feeling you’d been there before — and you were. More and more, Hollywood is telling the same story and just moving around the perfect faces and tax efficient setting. I’m not just talking about sequels and remakes.

Please have sympathy for the poor studio exec. William Goldman is free to say that no one knows anything in Hollywood; try saying that on an earnings call while remembering the full horror your kid’s involved orthodontic needs. Perhaps that is the purest expression of Fitzgerald’s axiom on first-rate intelligence. Or at least how loathsome it feels to be forced into dishonesty.

We all need comfort when confronting the unknown. Sequels give the appearance of mitigating risk and make a nice scapegoat when things cockup. If Batman did well, is it so much our fault that The Green Lantern was so vomitous? (A case could be made.)

In the pantheon of Hollywood horrors, no being is so unknown and frightening as the blank space that is story structure. It is an unquantifiable felt thing and immune to idiot testing. Worst of all, it is important. In some form or another, it is why the lights are on at night in L.A.

Comfort comes in the form of the story guru. They promise a formula; unlike many of L.A.’s other gurus, you can have at their priestly knowledge for the price or a paperback or, if you feel particularly unwashed, for the price of a 3-day seminar at the airport Ramada. Fine. While they’ve been around for ages (the ideas for even longer), the want seems stronger and their advice has shifted from the descriptive (McKee’s Story) to the prescriptive (Save the Cat). The latter promises to be the last thought on screenwriting you’ll need and, if you’re the kind of person who wants to put an end to thinking, it might serve you well.

It would feel great to pile on (I think Slate has it covered), to blame it for all the narrow visions of heroism you have seen since 2009, but that would leave us with precisely the kind of one-dimensional villain that’s part of the problem. There are some good jumping off points there. And note this on the absence of structure: we’re at paragraph six here and I’ve yet to get to the films I want to talk about.

What you lose with these rigid structures is surprise and rhythm. Comfort and Joy and Life is Sweet are incalculably rich in their feeling for life and in their looseness. The former quality says a lot about Bill Forsyth and Mike Leigh as men and is present in Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero, Happy Go Lucky, Another Year, and pretty much every ever film these directors have worked on, whether comedic or tragic. We could try to figure this out but I think we’d just end up with a series of adjectives and a feeling of unworthiness. It is of their character and what they find interesting.

Looseness, on the other hand, is something we can tighten up on. It’s tough to point this out in scenes as it mainly takes place in the space between, but take this scene from the beginning of Comfort and Joy anyway:

Maddie leaves about 10 minutes into a film that spends the first 10 minutes carefully, quite lovingly setting up a film that seems every bit this couple’s story. So, if the goal is to fall in love fast and then be blindsided by an exit, can you think of a better way to do this than to take our time with three scenes that fade into the next with no agenda (or outright character development) except to cosy us up? Decisions like this make this film so much more than the story of a sad bachelor and ice-cream van turf wars. It makes it possible to love that story.

I’ve said it before: we don’t know enough to truly feel comfortable. But we can have faith. Forsyth was a documentarian, and Leigh works closer with actors than any director before or since. Their faith is placed in people and that people are endlessly fascinating. Forsyth’s camera hangs long and invites strangers into the frame, friendly-like, even if just for a second. Leigh knows that actors can feel a scene the same way you’ll feel frissons when you meet the person you love. If it works for these guys, it will work for the couple at the box office. You can’t quantify this so much as be open to it.

Unlike his later film Another Year, we don’t know how long we have in Life is Sweet. It feels like a summer but that also feels unimportant beyond being a moment in time for a family. You (well, I) happily go with it as it moves between comedy and small tragedy and some menace — threatening like like rain, then fading. As much as the film states its purpose — and the statement holds for Forsyth’s films too — then it is in a well-known later scene with mum Wendy (Alison Steadman) and Nicola (Jane Horrocks).

As I can’t be certain if you’ve seen the film, and I don’t want to have spoiling any of it for you on my conscience, I’ll just describe the scene in the loosest terms (link here if you prefer). Story gurus always drone on about conflict and I think a largeness is incorrectly inferred when they do so. Leigh et al. have everyone avoiding rows as it’s kindest to do so — it’s in character. This is the only shouting match and Wendy only raises the volume out of love. And she says — butchering this in the worst way possible — not to give up, that live is hard but life is sweet and it endures.

“It says to me here’s a man who hasn’t given up.”

There’s a nice gesture that breaks up the rhythm two-thirds of the way in. After a series of minor catastrophes befall her — and, while she meets them full on, they are beginning to seem unbearable — Wendy’s husband gives her her tea in bed. It is a quiet apology. It takes just an extra five seconds for her to sip her tea and to rest but it feels like that bit in the inflight where they tell you to put on your mask before you help others. It’s a modest thing but it is enough, not a grace note but essential and as much the start of things as the end of a sequence. It’s the kind of specific structure that a filmmaker can discover when working with his story rather than some formula. It does what it asks: to pay attention to life.

I hate to have glossed over these films as a statement of purpose. I promise we’ll get back to Leigh and Forsyth later in this series and focus more on the work. Forsyth does a great job of working with ensembles and creating personalities for characters who appear only briefly without resorting to the gross caricatures we see in Fellini. Leigh has these scenes that turn and turn and turn in amazing and envious ways. Both are masters of trickier tones, the wistful, slight, the small mood. Doesn’t that seem real? — GM

Leaving note: I don’t know why Forsyth stopped making films, or why his other films are so difficult to get ahold of. I do think you’ll like them. I also don’t know why there aren’t statues of Alison Steadman scattered around the world. More talent in her shoulders than most. More understanding.

More scattered thoughts: finally, films about Scotland and middle-class England that aren’t bleak, pessimistic, or about heroin; what a primary colour scheme can do to stylise our surroundings; how vanity is the greatest source of comedy and comeuppance; how to laugh at someone and care at the same time; between sympathy and empathy; nice, lost scores; and the great, drawn out meet-cute, meet-Mr. Bunny in Comfort and Joy.