|
|
|
|
 |
|||
|
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
| ||||||||||||
|
|
Agnes Browne Review by
Cynthia Fuchs
Back
in 1990, some years after Prizzi's Honor won Anjelica Huston all kinds of
accolades and publicity, I saw her in person. I was standing on line at an
American Express office in Cannes, during the Film Festival for which she was
serving as an official jury member. She came in behind me, and stood on line
like every other person there, chatting with a companion about some movie they'd
just seen that afternoon. She was tall and striking, dressed in a stylishly
unflashy black jacket and jeans: several of us turned to look at Huston, some
discreetly, some not so, but she didn't seemed to notice either way. For all her
presence - and it was considerable -- Huston was completely regular, by which I
mean, she never called attention to herself, stepped ahead in the line, or asked
for special service. This
five-minute-or-so memory has stayed with me for a long time, in part because
Huston was so plainly different from most of the movie stars in town, so busy
schmoozing and limousining and performing for the omnipresent cameras every
second of every day. She seemed substantial, serene, and self-assured. You
see this self-assurance in her movies. Whether playing the ghoulishly romantic
Morticia Addams, the desperately unhappy Gretta Conroy (heroine of The Dead),
or Vincent Gallo's Buffalo Bills-obsessed mother in Buffalo 66, Huston
conveys a kind of dignity that eludes most movie stars. In her latest film, Agnes
Browne, which she has also directed, Huston plays the title character, a
mother of seven in Dublin 1967. Written by John Goldsmith and Brendan O'Carroll,
and based on O'Carroll's best selling novel, the movie is an ode to
working-class stoicism and female endurance. Unlike Angela's Ashes, which
covers similar narrative ground (poor Irish widow overcomes unbelievable odds to
raise her kids), Huston's film is unabashedly corny, embracing all that mushy
stuff that cool, cutting edge movies can't be bothered with. Agnes
Browne
opens as she and her best friend Marion (Marion O'Dwyer) try to file for Agnes's
widow's pension just hours after her husband's death. While the clerk at the
pension office is startled and a bit offended by Agnes's apparent haste, it soon
becomes clear that Agnes is just being as painfully practical as she needs to
be: she has to pay for the dead man's funeral, feed the kids, and pay for her
daughter's (Roxanna Williams) communion, costs which the meager proceeds from
her fruit-and-vegetable stand won't begin cover. When she has to borrow cash
from a local loanshark, Mr. Billy (Ray Winstone), Agnes refuses to be tractable
or properly deferential. Her fellow vendors applaud her pluck, but of course,
Mr. Billy then has it in for her (since you can't have rabble-rousers acting up
in front of an audience). Such
films -- the difficult life of a single mother, set during historical periods or
not -- are becoming a bit of a subgenre, which means that there are certain
predictable plot and character points to be touched. Here, Agnes works hard to
pay back the loan, while running into family problems that threaten to derail
her efforts and enhance her admirability quotient. Agnes must deal with her
fatherless pre-teen sons (sober Mark [Niall O'Shea] has hairs growing on his
"willy"; red-headed firebrand Frankie [Ciaran Owens] is smoking
cigarettes and gambling on street corners instead of going to school), as well
as the younger kids, who, for all their fine patience and faith in their mammy,
are increasingly needing attention, for which she has precious little energy at
the end of her long days. Though she steals a few moments to go drinking with
Marion and have one date with a solicitous French baker named Pierre (Arno
Chevrier), the bulk of her time is spent dealing with crises, full blown and
minor. By the time Marion is diagnosed with breast cancer, you have to wonder
what else might go wrong. Agnes has a good sense of her life's limitations: she
loves her kids and her most fervent and immediate dream is to see Tom Jones in
concert, who happens to be coming to town for one night only. (Given that he's
listed in the film's credits, you might imagine the broad outlines of how this
part of the plot turns out.) The
best parts of the film have little to do with plot: they are all about Agnes and
Marion. You see them smoking cigarette after cigarette (though I suppose a link
might be found here to Marion's illness...); laughing uncontrollably when they
find that their stick-up-his-ass-looking driving instructor is named not Dick as
they suppose, but... O'Toole; or discuss the possibility that one might actually
have an "organism" during sex with a husband. The friends share
everything, from their joy and frustration to their stubbornness and
saintliness. Everyone around them -- suitors, gangsters, kids, dead husbands --
is just window dressing, a way to develop the women's relationship, which is
defined by their giddy joking as by Agnes's penury or Marion's cancer. And
so, the most important question raised by Agnes Browne might be, just how
does a film like this -- what you might call literate melodrama -- get made at a
time when moveable product is all the rage? It's clear that the film has a
certain "adult" aspect, meaning that viewers, as well as distributors
and advertisers, might appreciate that this is not a film made with
fast-consuming teenagers in mind. At the same time, it also makes assumptions
about what "women" (as in, those who go to see "women's
pictures," to use that quaint mid-century term) want to see, much as the
Lifetime Channel might make assumptions: Women want to see misery and survival?
Women want to see triumph over adversity? Women want to see smart women and
foolish men? Women want to see children appreciate their mothers? Women want to
see Prince Charmings, even if they are self-consciously silly as hell? Despite
and because of its annoyingly reductive finale, Agnes Browne is slightly
less didactic than other recent single mom pictures (for high-profile instances,
Tumbleweeds, Anywhere But Here, Anna and the King, in which
strong-willed women learn to be humble from their kids or kid-like companions).
Agnes learns humility from her best friend, or rather, they learn together.
Moreover, the sheer excessiveness of Agnes Meeting Tom Jones is so ridiculous
that it both undermines and underlines the previous hardships, and gives the lie
to melodramatic conventions per se, those society-sustaining conventions which
suggest that women need men, institution-sanctioned monogamy, or community
approbation to be happy. Agnes Browne does suggest these things, but in a
way that makes them secondary to what makes Agnes even vaguely admirable or, as
played by Huston, self-assured. Contents | Features | Reviews
| Books | Archives | Store |
|
|
