Pretty pictures

I think my first encounter with Mark Romanek (ro-MAN-ik, like "romantic") was the famously expensive video for Scream in 1995. Two years later came the rich treatment he gave Got 'Til It's Gone, and in 2002, yet another video so perfectly married to its song that its images would thereafter for me be inseparable from the music and its musicians. This was Hella Good.

Eels, Novocaine for the Soul, 1996. An indelible image from childhood.

Together with an impressive catalogue of landmark music videos, a quick survey of Romanek's work in commercials (e.g. Nike - ESPN - Saturn) reveals him to be a master of ambience, unusual and arresting imagery, and percussive musicality.

Knowing this, I would never have told from watching the film alone that the same man was the director of Never Let Me Go. Here he held back from making the prettiest shots or the most stunning compositions. The film has a soothing beauty, but nothing that crams the attention. The Ghost Writer for instance
had much stronger cinematography. I got the sense that Romanek made the film with the greatest respect for Kazuo Ishiguro's text, treating the story with the utmost delicacy. It was only half-surprising then to later read that he would even film with the book in hand, referring back to it or deferring to Ishiguro himself whenever questions of adaptation arose. Romanek has said that he didn't want to be an auteur on this film: "I didn’t just come in to shoot it and make pretty pictures. The performances are foremost." Looking back at the film, you realize that most of the time, the camera basically follows where the characters go, and Romanek frames their faces simply as they speak to each other.

Perhaps the shocker for those who for a long time have known only the Mark Romanek of short films and iconic photography is when he says, "This is the film-maker I always wanted to be, this is the film-maker I always worked to be." He calls his music videos "sketches... for when I wanted to finally take up a brush and make a painting". Romanek says the important things in directing a film are "telling the story well, and trying to stay out of the actors' way as much as possible". By these standards, Never Let Me Go is a tremendous success; the film moves the audience through good storytelling and engaging performances. I just wonder what the film would be like had he been more of an egoistic auteur. Maybe it would be easily hailed as a classic or a masterpiece. I wonder if his collaborators are at all short-changed, whether they had expected a prettier painting, something closer to his many unforgettable "sketches".

In Never Let Me Go, Andrew Garfield plays Tommy D ("a big heart, and terrible rages"). As I was trawling YouTube for interviews related to the film, I would invariably seize up with emotion whenever the five-second clip of Garfield screaming at the top of his lungs from the trailer came on. Co-star Carey Mulligan has said that his acting never has a false note. And it's true, of everything I've watched him in, from the opening scene of Boy A, to the role opposite Robert Redford in Lions for Lambs, from trashing Eisenberg's laptop in The Social Network, to playing the most adorable CPU in I'm Here (available online). He endows every character generously with wide-eyed genuine soul.

This was the most obvious for me in The Social Network, a movie I deeply dislike and dread every time I click to find at the top of both the awards and critics lists at Metacritic, far outstripping even the movies in second place. I look around at reviews to see what moved so many critics to give the movie full marks. A lot are vague, and make me suspect that these probably just clicked Like because it had 41 other Likes already. The closest-to-concrete reason for its universal acclaim I find is the wit of Aaron Sorkin's script. This is baffling. Have they seen The American President? The West Wing? Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? I often take issue with how Sorkin makes all his characters speak in the same zero-response-time-required, machine-gun manner, but that aside, the dialogue in The Social Network is far from funny and a lot less sharp than his previous writing. More frustrating than this one disagreement, is that I cannot see how The Social Network is even a decent movie. David Fincher, quite the auteur and master of ambience in the past, offers nothing exceptionally pretty or exciting to the eye. Take the basic elements of story and characters: I didn't care for either. Justin Timberlake is horribly miscast (a real-life pop star acts as a music pirate who acts like a pop star), and interprets his character too much like a straightforward villain. Jesse Eisenberg is phlegmatic beyond phlegmatic, and talks like a robot. At first, it is unusual and interesting. On second thought, the script probably didn't imagine the protagonist to be that unsympathetic, and his relationships, with girl or best friend, are enormously unconvincing. He throws out the sole possibility of a focus in the movie. At the end, I don't know what statement the movie is making, or what question it is asking. It dabbles a little in tech (but requires edgy music to diffuse the tedium, and to combat Eisenberg's droning delivery), tries to drum up some legal drama in mighty offices (to differentiate, one is wood and geriatrics, the other is glass with a view), provides vicarious peeks into the world of the rich and the privileged (they row boats, they wear nice clothes), revels a bit in collegiate diversions (although Eisenberg's lack of enthusiasm is hardly good advertising for clubs or alcohol or fine dining), raises ethical issues (with no satisfying conclusion). On every front, there was no pay off. I only cared for Andrew Garfield's character. I don't think I was supposed to.