Dead Babies Rough Cut
posted by Chet Desmond
(a.k.a. Jim Murphy), the Martin Amis Discussion Web, 12/9/99
[To visit TOBOR, Jim Murphy's "Sci-Fi 3D Models Page," click
here]
Mission Accomplished. Last night, folks, I saw the ‘Dead
Babies’ film. I won’t bother you with the backstory, but I attended a
preview screening at the RSA (Royal Something or Other), a stylish subterranean
bunker tucked under the Strand. Before the filmmakers themselves come howling
that it was only a roughcut I saw, I will pre-empt them by saying that, yes
indeed, I understand it was only a roughcut I saw, with compromised sound and
picture quality and what seemed to be a spot score (is that what they call it?
I’d like to pretend I know the parlance, but what I mean is that random bits
of music were tacked on to appropriate the sort of moods which the
as-yet-unfinished soundtrack will bring to the picture).
Apart from that, though, it looked close to
complete, with all the editing and special effects nailed. However, please read
what follows as a response to a work-in-progress…I’m sure many of the
crinkles and crannies will be ironed out of this baby before it hits the big
screen.
So, how was it? Well, actually, better than expected. The
real triumph is just how close they’ve stayed to the novel. Movies aren’t
ever usually so faithful. It’s all more or less here, save the neighbours, and
sadly, a few of the flashbacks. I was actually quite stunned, though, to see
scenes like Skip, Andy and Roxanne’s Final Exit in all its glory. It really
retains its balls.
Alexander Walker is going to be in his element reviewing this
little confection. The characterisation was generally pretty accurate, although
we’re paddling in subjective pools here, I guess, because we probably all
perceived the characters differently when we read the book. The best of the
bunch, in my eyes, was Keith, which again constitutes another triumph, because
that’s probably the hardest character to pull off. He is physically
extraordinary, and although the boots don’t quite retain their magnificence in
the post-Spice-Girls-superstackheels-era, he is still a truly freakish
concoction, waddling around Appleseed, several feet below all the other
protagonists.
The film tends to dwindle excessively on his flatulence
problems (and please, guys, call back the foley artists to generate some genuine
fart sounds), but then the picture as a whole has an all-too frequent tendency
to get childishly vaudevillian and kinda ‘Carry On’ in places - like the
bull chase, which comes over very Benny Hill. This has perverse effects on the
consistency of the drama, but we’ll come back to that.
Returning to the characters, I thought the
women were all pretty good, Celia and Lucy were fine, and it was nice to see
That Bird from ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ in all her fabulous fleshy glory once again,
playing Roxanne, but Diana certainly suffers by being paired with Andy, who, in
my opinion, constituted the big disappointment of the proceedings. In the book,
Andy is Batman, a huge black shining minaret of male ego. Here, he is just a
slob. A fat clueless pussy with little esteem. He has no chin, neither. He
doesn’t cut it, and I consequently found the idea of him having any sort of
friendship with super-suave Quentin (full marks) a bit implausible. I guess this
is where the film began to slip for me. In the book, because we ourselves are
half-involved in the creation of the characters, our imagination plies them
together allowing us to determine why this particular ensemble of misfits is
holed up in this hellhole. In the film, they remain diffuse. They just don’t
seem like cohorts, some of them.
The redeeming feature could well come with the music. Film
music is a great binder…it welds disparate elements in a film like no adhesive
known to man…so if they get the score right (and I recommend loud, vibrant,
extraordinary sounds, not the dated ‘Brimful of Asha’ we heard murmuring at
one moment), this will help us believe. It would also bring coherence to the
succession of shifting tones which lurch without Amis’s sense of panache.
So getting back to Diana momentarily, because I didn’t
believe in Andy, I didn’t believe in his relationship with her either, and as
they’ve sadly cut their crucial flashback, I found this pair dully disjointed.
Giles is very cute, although it felt like they’d stretched him into too much
of a camp caricature, so again I didn’t really believe this creature would be
friends with any of the others. Marvell was okay, and Skip, well, it’s a weird
character anyway, but he looks like the third offspring of the Addams Family,
and his accent perambulates around almost every American state.
The last remaining character is of course Johnny, and
although they remain true to his campaign of anarchy, I think this is where a
film of ‘Dead Babies’, any film of ‘Dead Babies’, is gonna come undone.
You see, it hadn’t occurred to me till I saw it, but [HERE FOLLOWS A
"SPOILER", AS THEY SAY ON THE GROOVY MOVIE CHAT SITES, FOR ANYONE WHO
HASN’T READ THE BOOK] although we discover Quentin is Johnny, they still
retain two different personas in the reader’s mind. This, of course, can’t
be achieved in the film. Johnny is only Johnny in name. It’s Quentin who runs
around the house killing everyone at the end. And this, I felt, robbed Johnny of
his power, of his enigma. Johnny is indeed Quentin, but to me, he always felt
like more than that, like he was What’s Coming To These Fools, he’s What
They Deserve. Johnny was in a sense The Inevitable. Now he’s just Quentin.
But then, I can see no way to avoid that in film. Something
else which didn’t help is that whenever Johnny struck throughout the course of
the weekend, the camera would start to convulse and spin and flash into
negative, and in effect, do all the anxiety-bit for you. Surely Johnny’s
calling cards are disquieting enough for them to be presented straight. The tart
pop-video trickery at these moments robbed us of the interior feelings we should
have been having ourselves, and ultimately made Johnny seem far less threatening
than he really is. Big big shame, that.
I also suspect I benefited from knowing the book, because the
narrative is sometimes submerged by the film’s frenzied editing. Certain
scenes like Celia’s discovery of offal in her bed and later when the girls
speculate as to who Johnny truly is, lose their punch because they’ve been
sliced up and interspersed with subsidiary action. As I said, it’s also
somewhat unclear as to why on earth these disparate entities have gathered at
this strange place for a weekend anyway - odd too that Appleseed wasn’t
actually namechecked; I liked the colourful design of the picture, but did find
the Rectory incredibly sanitised and bright.
The only other significantly uneven aspect was, I felt, the
Lumber trip on Saturday night, which once again catapults the picture into an
alarmingly different tempo. The effect is something like a prolonged Marilyn
Manson promo, without the music. Whether the filmmakers are trying for some kind
of unconventional anti-textual cinematic passage here, I’m not sure, it sort
of half worked, even, but we’ve seen tripping done this way already in
‘Trainspotting’ and ‘Human Traffic’.
Once again, though, the right music will undoubtedly fix this
sequence. I can’t think of much else to say about it. Despite the various
wounds inflicted above, the good stuff tremendously outweighs the bad - and as I
said, they hugely respect Amis, so much so that it almost counts against them in
those scenes (which you’ll have fun pinpointing) where they occasional divert
from his dialogue - like the one in which a stream of uninspired profanity
dribbles from Andy’s lips whilst playing badminton - which clearly lack the
Amis pepper evident everywhere else.
There are loads of good moments, though, like Lucy’s
stylish arrival, Celia’s first trip setting in, Andy dropping his pants, and
the quite extraordinary appearance of Giles’ mother. I wish the guys all the
very best with it. Keep the title. The alternatives they suggested (‘The
Appleseeders’ anyone? Or ‘The Conceptualists’) aren’t gonna do the movie
any more favours than the one it’s already got. I liked it more than I thought
I would. I look forward to seeing the finished thing.
Jim
