Enough to make a grown man cry

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 4 Comments

Robert De Niro and I had a good little cry together the other day, which came as a bit of a shock. He’s not the kind of guy you’d expect it from. Neither am I. But I should have seen it coming. The occasion was a screening of De Niro’s new movie, Everybody’s Fine, a Hollywood remake of Stanno tutti bene (1990), starring Marcello Mastroianni. De Niro plays a retired blue-collar worker who lives alone and tries to reunite with his grown children eight months after his wife’s death. They fail to show up for a holiday dinner, so he sets off on an impromptu train trip to surprise them, visiting each in turn. But he is the one who’s in for a surprise. Turns out everybody is not fine. I saw the film at a press screening with a gang of jaded critics, and you could hear them sniffling in the dark. Which is a rare thing.
Actors like to say that tragedy is easy and comedy is hard. But from where I sit, it’s often the other way around. As a critic, it’s dead easy to figure out if comedy works because it triggers a physical response. When a movie makes you laugh out loud, you can’t really turn around and claim it’s not funny. Even thrillers have a visceral impact, as your stomach clenches or a chill runs down your spine. But the impact of tragedy isn’t always so tangible. I don’t know about you, but at the movies, as in life, I find it much easier to laugh than cry. It’s not that I remain emotionally aloof. I can be deeply moved by grand tragedy—pictures like Schindler’s List, Titanic and The English Patient—but hardly ever weep when I’m supposed to. Then I’ll be watching some dumb romantic comedy, stubbornly resisting the formula, only to be ambushed by tears when the guy finally declares his love for the girl after chasing her down in an airport or train station. What’s up with that?

Well, I have a theory or two. In a theatre, laughter is public and, unless you’re bawling like a baby, crying is private. The cinema is just about the only place I can cry—it’s safe, dark and cheaper than therapy. Even so, the conditions have to be perfect. Surprise is key: the tears have to sneak up on me. That’s why banal romantic comedies work. As I become disengaged and start to daydream, my emotional defences drop. Take The Proposal. After I’d become convinced the movie was dreck, in the final act, like clockwork, my eyes moistened as Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock made good on their marriage of convenience. But my heart was really going out to the actors, who rose above the cliché of their own typecasting to generate genuine chemistry. Continue…

Maclean's Interview: Nora Ephron

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

Nora Ephron is a celebrated journalist, author and a writer-director whose movies include Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. Her latest film, which will be released on Aug. 7, is Julie & Julia, a romantic comedy inspired by Julie Powell’s 2005 book Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen, based on the 36-year-old’s 2002 blog chronicling the year she spent cooking the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I. It also draws from Child’s own memoir, My Life in France, which describes the process of writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a culinary classic published in 1961.

Q: One of the wonderful surprises of Julie & Julia is its depiction of Julia Child (Meryl Streep), this beloved dowager and culinary icon, as a romantic, vibrantly erotic figure in her relationship with her husband Paul Child (Stanley Tucci). In fact, that relationship is far more electric than that of Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and her husband, Eric (Chris Messina), living in New York. Were you intentionally being subversive in showing how hot a middle-aged marriage can be?

A: No, I was just telling the truth. That’s what Julia Child’s marriage was. She wrote letters about it and so did Paul—he wrote to his brother and she wrote to all her friends. And one of the first things I loved when I started writing this is that the two of them had such a lusty sexual relationship and that the modern couple simply didn’t have time. And I loved that. If you looked at these two couples you would not have guessed that this is how this would have shaked out, if you had to guess which one of them had a really sexual marriage. I really loved that. It was a heavenly thing.

Q: Did you ever meet Julia Child?

A: No, it’s so sad but I never did.

Q: The movie is constructed with two parallel stories—one set mostly in Paris in the 1950s, the other in modern-day New York City. It’s a clever conceit. Was that your idea?

A: No, unfortunately. The credit has to go to Amy Robinson, one of the producers of the movie.

Q: If there’s a criticism to be made of the movie, it’s that the scenes of Julia and Paul Child in Paris are so transcendent and glamorous compared to those depicting Julie Powell and her husband in Queens, N.Y.,—so much so that you don’t want them to end. Did you anticipate that would happen, that the Queens scenes would sharpen the glamour?

A: Oh yes, it was entirely intentional. The whole movie starts out with the contrast between the Eiffel Tower and that awful water tower in Queens. It couldn’t be more obvious.

Q: Meryl Streep is brilliant as Julia Child. She appears to literally shape-shift in order to play a character who was imposingly large and six foot two. How did you achieve that?

A: We did every single trick in the book to make that happen. But we did only things that happened 40 years ago. In other words, there is nothing digitally done, just the normal tricks done to make people look bigger. All the clothes are designed just slightly short in the waist so that she looks bigger. I didn’t cast anyone tall to work with her. And every so often we would have extra-tall extras work in the scene and Meryl would glare at them, like “Move them out the way.”

Q: Julia Child is such a larger than life character that it would be easy for Streep’s performance to become a caricature, which never happens. Yet you do include a scene set that shows Dan Aykroyd’s famous parody of Child from an old episode of Saturday Night Live. Why did you do that?

A: Actually, one of my proudest moments was getting that into the movie. I had many thoughts about it. I knew that there would be a lot of people who didn’t know who Julia was, and who wouldn’t know how iconic she was, that she is part of the popular culture. And I also wanted people who didn’t know who she was to know we weren’t making that up that she talked that way—that it wasn’t just an actor’s choice. And I also just loved that clip we used. I just thought it was hilariously funny.

Q: This film will introduce a lot of people to Paul Child, who was happy being in the background, either taking photographs of her recipes or later producing her television show. What was your take on him?

A: Well I was only thinking about what I knew, which is that she believed that the handsomest man on the earth had fallen in love with her. And she was, I was sure, positive that no one would marry her; and along came this man that she just thought was the most sophisticated, debonair human being. And if you look at pictures of Paul, he’s always beautifully dressed. Clearly he had a very healthy vanity about what he looked like. And he was also a wonderful photographer. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to be the most successful civil servant who ever lived, he found this other thing, which was this adventure Julia had embarked on and she made him completely a partner in it.

Q: This movie seems like a homage to supportive husbands who are nice guys. Rather ironic, don’t you think? Given that you’re so well known for your novel Heartburn, a roman-à-clef based on the breakup of your marriage to Carl Bernstein who walked out on you when you were seven months pregnant?

A: That was a long time ago. I’m now married to a really nice guy [the author Nick Pileggi].