Monday Monologue: Miss Jean Brodie

With The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (just reviewed) garnering big audiences in limited release, Dames Judi and Maggie have been on the mind. Last week, I remembered my favorite scene from Judi Dench's best performance in Notes on a Scandal (2006), so this week a look back at Maggie Smith's Oscar winning signature role The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) for a companion piece...

What follows from the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is not technically a monologue. This progressive middle school teacher in a conservative girls school invites interjections into her speeches, if not actual participation or dialogue. I was tempted to publish this a day early and call it for a Sunday Soliloquy but it's not really that either. For Miss Brodie isn't speaking directly to herself.

Or is she?

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Monday Monologue: Barbara's Revenge

Dame Judi Dench has been on my mind lately what with the eye condition, a new James Bond film coming and Marigold Hotel in theaters. So herewith an article from 2008. If you only started reading The Film Experience in the past few years, it's new to you! May is also Mental Health Awareness Month so let's appreciate some crazy bitches...

They always let you down in the end."

My contrarian opinion of Dame Judi Dench is that sometimes she phones it in. How many ways can one play the quippy unfazeable grande dame? But in Notes on a Scandal (2006), she's unimproveable. Faced with the atypical character of "Barbara Covett", Dench rises and soars. The film's politics are horrendous: boo hiss --an evil predatory spinster lesbian attempts to destroy a heteronormative marriage! But the actress is magnificent, giving the film a metronome precise drip drip of theatrical malice.

My favorite sequence in the film runs from Barbara's inconsolable grief for her lost feline, through the resulting perceived betrayal by Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), who doesn't have time to console her, to the exquisite sequence when she is confronted with another teacher with amorous feelings for Sheba. She boils with vengeance in mind.

You'd like me to ask Mrs Hart if she's inclined to commit adultery with you? I don't want you to suffer more than is necessary. No one should. I couldn't possibly speak for Mrs. Hart but instinct tells me you might not be her type. 

"She's got a type, then?" is her co-worker Brian's sad response. The film has a few exquisite and small supporting turns and Phil Davis (also terrific as the husband to Vera Drake) is aces in this scene, all befuddled crush turned to shell shock.

Kettle's boiled. Dench likes her tea with bile.

Oh it's no reflection on your attractiveness. My impression is that her preference is for the younger man...surprisingly young; Boys, I'm told. Naturally she doesn't discuss any of this with me but I've been hearing some rather alarming rumors about one in particular.

Playground gossip, staffroom whispers and so on. You might know the boy in question. Ummm... Stephen Connelly."

Brian indicates that her tea is ready.

I think the kettle's boiled.

[V.O.] You say the words and it's done. Easy. Judas had the grace to hang himself. But only according to Matthew, the most sentimental of the apostles. Is this the last night of her old life? I wonder how long my messenger will take?

People like Sheba think they know what it is to be lonely but of the drip drip of long haul no end in sight solitude, they know nothing. What it's like to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette or to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin. Of this, Sheba and her like have no clue.

Dench's every line reading is carved out of the tough bark of decades of loneliness and cynicism; if you could cut through Barbara's hardened shell, you'd see disappointment and repression expanding like rings in an ancient tree. As the words escape her, she sharpens them to a lethal point with fermented emotions and curdled wit, wielding them like weapons. Earlier in the film, Barbara refers to herself as a battle axe. For a woman drowning in self-delusion, it's a surprising lucid self-assessment.

Monologue: "Lone Biker of the Apocalypse"

Michael C. here to drop off your regularly scheduled Monday Monologue

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Coen brothers' screwball, baby-knapping comedy Raising Arizona. Rewatching the film it is striking just how distant the rowdy hayseed comedy feels from cool control of the brothers' recent output. This isn't meant as an accusation that they have gone soft in their middle age. Quite the contrary. But even as they have produced a handful of unequivocal masterpieces I still harbor a soft spot for their wild younger days, much the way a Woody Allen fan can't help but pine for the anarchic spirit of Bananas no matter how much he appreciates the cinematic mastery of Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Take the scene where a premonition of doom visits Cage's H.I. soon after swiping one of the "Arizona Quints" to complete his family unit with Holly Hunter's Ed:

That night, I had a dream. I drifted off thinking about happiness, birth and new life, But now I was haunted by a vision of... He was horrible. The lone biker of apocalypse. A man with all the powers of Hell at his command. He could turn turn the day into night and lay to waste everything in his path.

He was especially hard on little things-the helpless and the gentle creatures. He left a scorched earth in his wake befouling even the sweet desert breeze that whipped across his brow. I didn't know where he came from or why. I didn't know if he was dream or vision. But I feared that I myself had unleashed him. For he was the fury that would be as soon as Florence Arizona found her little Nathan gone. 

The characters are both beloved Coen brother templates. The Biker (memorably embodied by former pro boxer Randall "Tex" Cobb) is one in a long line of remorseless heavies that reached their apex in Anton Chirgurh, while Cage's H.I is in the grand tradition of Coen brothers morons that continued through the escaped bumpkins of O Brother right up to the glorious idiocy of Brad Pitt's Chad Feldheimer.

Likewise giving even their most dimwitted characters memorable turns of phrase like "befouling the sweet desert breeze" is an unmistakable Coens trademark. See: Lebowski, Big.

What stands apart is the wild, improvised feel of the sequence. The series of gags that introduce the Biker - including the grenading of a cute, fluffy bunny - would be right at home in a Road Runner cartoon. The capper on the whole sequence is a doozy of a shot where the camera, which we had assumed to be the Biker's POV, goes unexpectedly airborne and flies right through a window landing in the open mouth of Mrs. Arizona as she screams. The moment can't help but bring to mind the fluid insanity of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series.

When Joel and Ethan have returned to screwball material in flicks like Burn After Reading the execution more closely resembles the deliberate style of Arizona's follow-up, Miller's Crossing. And while I repeat this is neither good nor bad, and that all great artists evolve, I can't deny I would kill to see what some meticulously controlled later day title like, say, A Serious Man would look like if it was made with the same unhinged, shoot from the hip style the Coens brought to Raising Arizona a quarter century ago.

Recent Monologues:
"My name is Charlene" -Missi Pyle in Spring Break
Megan and the Dolphins - Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids

Monologue: "My name is Charlene. What are you wearing?"

Time for our Monday Monologue...

Missi, Uggie and Jean DujardinOne of the unexpected joys of this year's edition of Endless Awards Season has been the presence of the very funny, very talented Missi Pyle. She's kind of blink and you'll miss her as "Constance" the 'Lina Lamont' silent star archetype in The Artist. But she's been everywhere at the events. That's oddly appropriate given that she always seems to be blink and you'll miss her in movies but she makes the best of it. Often when I see her in that big ball of joy that is the cast and crew of The Artist (winning makes the joy part a lot easier) I think back to my favorite moment in her filmography to date.

She was the comedy MVP of the oft-delayed and then underseen and weirdly trashed Spring Breakdown (2009) which is much funnier than it gets credit for. Her MVP status says a lot since the three leads Amy Poehler, Parker Posey, and Rachel Dratch have been known to wring laughs from even the weakest material. Somehow Pyle steals the show out from under them.

Pyle plays Charlene a Spring Break junkie well past age appropriateness for the Endless Summer cruising and bingeing. She takes this trio of new girls under her drunken wing.

After a particularly booze-fueled night she stumbles home with her new friend Gayle (Amy Poehler) and goes all weepy pontificating drunk. 

Every spring this place she flares up like a cold sore and I'm back for more, you know? The kids and the sex and the booze. And you think it'll go on forever but it's like one of those videos, you know, of a fireplace that you put on your TV.

And, like, no matter how close you get to the screen it's never going to warm you up."

Suddenly then, she's all nonsequitor.

Her moods tilt and slide around like formerly coherent thoughts sloshing around in alcoholic waves.

I just wanted to be a stylist to the stars.

[Suddenly high pitched] 'You think so?' 

Oh hello there fine fella! Who is this?

She veers towards... a tree.

"Oh honey, that's a tree," Gayle tries to stop her but Charlene is already making her move. 

[To the tree] My name is Charlene. What are you wearing?

[Glancing to the side. Suddenly crying] I love him!

 
[To Gayle] Don't touch me. Please touch me. Thank you.

Let's just stay here for awhile.

Pyle keeps this comic train hilarious, frisky and sharp even as it jumps right off the tracks careening towards its next blackout: Crying jags, weird bursts of horniness, pickled blood stream, and yet she's weirdly touching.

It's comic magic.

It's hot mess tragic. 

Her name is Charlene. I love her!

Monologue: Megan & the Dolphin

Have you missed Monologue Mondays? I know I have. So let's start again and try to do this weekly.

Though Bridesmaids' Melissa McCarthy probably won her Oscar nomination for a variety of reasons, you almost always need one Oscar "clip" to make the lineup. You know the kind. It's an instant fix of the performance, which works in the way soundbites do for politicians or catchphrases do for sitcom stars. It's something they can play at the Oscars or at awards shows that will a) remind people why they loved the performance b) remind them why they liked the movie and c) pack a mini dramatic punch that justifies the nomination for the millions who might not have seen it yet. This can be true even if the person is nominated for a broadly comic role, as rare as those nominations are.

 

I think you're ready to hear a little story about a girl named Megan, a girl named Megan that didn't have a very good time in high school. I'm referring to myself when I say 'Megan'. It's me Megan.

Now the Oscars don't always select clips this way. Continued after the jump...

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