You have to be incredibly relaxed to use a cheese grater right.

Toni Erdmann

(2016)

(SPOILERS) It’s easy to see why Maren Ade’s rambling, rumpled – it rather resembles its protagonist in form – tragi-comedy was instantly snapped up by Hollywood (or more especially by Jack Nicholson, promising to come out of retirement for a golden role; we shall see…), as, with a few minor tweaks and a directive to over- rather than underplay, it bears all the hallmarks of a classic uplifting Hollywood narrative. I’m not sure I buy into its miraculous hype, however (including a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination and Sight & Sound’s best film of 2016). The performances in Toni Erdmann are top notch, the scenarios often funny, sad, excruciating, but it’s also content to meander and overly devotes itself to the idea that vérité equates to depth.

The S&S synopsis summarised the picture thus: “A shambling baby boomer pushes his high-achieving daughter’s buttons with a series of increasingly bizarre practical jokes”. Which makes it sound like it would have been ideal for Robin Williams. But suggesting Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek) is so calculated is to falsely present the picture. His guise as Toni Erdmann is as improvised and unstructured as Ade’s directorial style, and his jokes often come nowhere near to paying off – commonly amounting to little more than his ever-ready upper dentures, a brunette wig and announcing himself as variously a life coach or the German Ambassador to Romania. Indeed, Ade resists so consistently the opportunity for a cathartic comic set piece (Winfried puts the corporate machine in its place! Winfried humiliates the priapic boyfriend!) that you can practically see the Tinseltown hacks salivating at the potential.

That’s because the essential arc is that of your classic big screen comedy; free-spirited parent imposes himself on his uptight, emotionally-sterile daughter’s life with hilarious and meaningful results. Add in the disguise aspect, albeit not even remotely fooling anyone who knows – the most mirthful results come at the outset, when Winfried poses as his twin brother for the postie, speaking enthusiastically about the mail bomb he’s just received and can’t wait to defuse – and you have potential for schmaltz-heavy sentiment and Mrs Doubtfire hijinks.

Toni Erdmann doesn’t play that way, and resists the easy fix/resolution. Winfried is no paragon of virtue; in many respects, he’s just as lost as his daughter, only with a less overtly debilitating approach to how he deals with it. But still, his wife left him for reasons that don’t need spelling out, his best friend is his on-his-last-legs dog, and with an approach of always being “on”, it isn’t hard to see why even moderate and well-rounded offspring would have reservations about spending swathes of time with him.

Ines Conradi (Sandra Huller) is a consultant advising the oil industry on downsizing, so a combination of turn-offs right there. She entirely goes with the get-ahead flow, soullessly giving her assistant (who hangs on her every instruction, and even found Ines’ apartment for her) performance tips. And as much as she may know her job, her iciness inevitably backfires when trying to impress, particularly with her father hanging on. He’s already told the CEO (Michael Wittenborn) she’s attempting to get on board that he has hired a substitute daughter (later, when Ines attempts to ditch dad for drinks with the CEO, the latter scolds her attitude). She feigns concern for Winfred being ditched while she spends hours shopping with the CEO’s wife (“Are you really a human?” he responds) and proceeds to scornfully dismiss the loss of his beloved pet to friends (only to find her father sitting at the bar next to her).

But something of him begins to work its way into her psyche. “Toni” has struck a chord, such that, even though she can accuse her father of being as lacking in perspective as she (“Do you have plans in life, other than slipping far cushions under people”: “I don’t have a fart cushion”), she can’t help laughing a few scenes later when her father, on a bench, interrupts her boss with an explosive outburst (“Did he just fart?”)

Ines slow breakdown manifests in increasingly bewildering/humorous fashion (and from the first, we can see she’s her father’s daughter, matching him for cutting ripostes – “Great. She can call you on your birthday so I don’t have to” is her reaction to “news” of his substitute daughter), instructing her colleague/lover to ejaculate on a petit-four (which she proceeds to consume) and her outpouring of emotion in song – under pressure from Toni, for whom she is posing as his assistant – in a manner she cannot otherwise express.

The slowly poisonous consequences of a job in which she is causing others misery and destitution hits home when Toni takes issue with the sacking of an employee as a result of a joke remark he made. She dismisses his “green” attitude and conciliatory gestures (“I can’t believe you told them not to lose their humour”), leading to her alarming/hilarious meltdown decision to turned her birthday into a “naked party”. At which Winfried also appears, dressed as a Bulgarian kukeri (I assumed it was a yeti) leading to her heartfelt hugging of her hirsute father.

It’s appropriate that there’s no upbeat resolution to Toni Erdmann, though. Ines hasn’t left her job; rather, she’s sidestepped from Bucharest to Singapore. Toni may have reconnected with her, but his world is one of increasing isolation (his dog and then his mother die), and he finds himself contemplating how the precious moments can only be perceived with hindsight. His life, and ours, are “so often about getting things done”. So yeah, put a positive spin on that, and it could be a goldmine. Let’s face it, there isn’t much depth to its critique of globalisation (it hurts people, and you most of all when you go along with it), so that could probably stay as is. And when Jack drops out, perhaps find someone who more approximates Simmonischek’s bearish gait – Ron Perlman springs to mind. Also, honing the material a touch would do no harm either.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

You're not only wrong. You're wrong at the top of your voice.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
I’ve seen comments suggesting that John Sturges’ thriller hasn’t aged well, which I find rather mystifying. Sure, some of the characterisations border on the cardboard, but the director imbues the story with a taut, economical backbone.

She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

It's a trip I won't forget, Avon.

Blake's 7 4.11: Orbit

Robert Holmes’ fourth and final script for the series is a belter, one that combines his trademark black comedy with the kind of life-or-death peril that makes some of his more high stakes scripts for Doctor Who (The Deadly Assassin and The Caves of Androzani for example) stand out.

You must find the keys for me!

Doctor Who The Keys of Marinus
Most of the criticisms levelled at The Keys of Marinus over the past 50 years have been fair play, and yet it’s a story I return to as one of the more effortlessly watchable of the Hartnell era. Consequently, the one complaint I can’t really countenance is that it’s boring. While many a foray during this fledgling period drags its heels, even ones of undeniable quality in other areas, Marinus’ shifting soils and weekly adventures-in-miniature sustain interest, however inelegant the actual construction of those narratives may be. The quest premise also makes it a winner; it’s a format I have little resistance to, even when manifested, as here, in an often overtly budget-stricken manner.

Doctor Who has dabbled with the search structure elsewhere, most notably across The Key to Time season, and ultimately Marinus’ mission is even more of a MacGuffin than in that sextology, a means to string together what would otherwise be vignettes to little overall coherence…

So you made contact with the French operative?

Atomic Blonde (2017)
(SPOILERS) Well, I can certainly see why Focus Features opted to change the title from The Coldest City (the name of the graphic novel from which this is adapted). The Coldest City evokes a noirish, dour, subdued tone, a movie of slow-burn intrigue in the vein of John Le Carré. Atomic Blonde, to paraphrase its introductory text, is not that movie. As such, there’s something of a mismatch here, of the kind of Cold War tale it has its roots in and the furious, pop-soaked action spectacle director David Leitch is intent on turning it into. In the main, his choices succeed, but the result isn’t quite the clean getaway of his earlier (co-directed) John Wick.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

It always seems a bit abstract, doesn’t it? Other people dying.

Game of Thrones Season Six
(SPOILERS) The most distracting thing about Season Six of Game of Thrones (and I’ve begun writing this at the end of the seventh episode, The Broken Man) is how breakneck its pace is, and how worryingly – only relatively, mind – upbeat it’s become. Suddenly, characters are meeting and joining forces, not necessarily mired in pits of despair but actually moving towards positive, attainable goals, even if those goals are ultimately doomed (depending on the party concerned). It feels, in a sense, that liberated from George R R Martin’s text, producers are going full-throttle, and you half-wonder if they’re using up too much plot and revelation too quickly, and will run out before the next two seasons are up. Then, I’m naturally wary of these things, well remembering how Babylon 5 suffered from packing all its goods into Season Four and was then given an ultimately wasted final season reprieve.

I’ve started this paragraph at the end of the eighth episode, No One (t…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog