Dead Babies Rough Cut
posted by Chet Desmond (a.k.a. Jim Murphy), the Martin Amis Discussion Web, 12/9/99
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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
