Colin Marshall

Topsy-Turvy (Mike Leigh, 1999)

Suppose you entered a screening of Topsy-Turvy with no knowledge of its director. (Pretend also that you spent the director-revealing opening credits in the bathroom.) You might expect a whirlwind cinematic tour of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, its surface lavishly period, the productions themselves separated by banter between the two icons, perhaps a dash of romance, a false crisis, a false dawn, a real crisis, a real dawn, so on, so forth, done in time for dinner. You might thus expect a garish, unsubtle mess, but your expectations would, happily, be disappointed. Everything would fall into place when you learned the name of the man so flagrantly defying your assumptions: none other than Mike Leigh.

In his very selection of the project, Mike Leigh defies assumptions about Mike Leigh. Opting to focus closely on the difficulties of being a chatty socialist in modern-day urban England's seedy underbelly, his typical films have little energy remaining to examine the creative struggles of famed Victorian composers and librettists. The ostensible clash between creator and material works here to the good, however, as Leigh's keen eye for social dynamics and contempt for triviality lock in no less steely a fashion onto Gilbert, Sullivan and milieu they have has anyone else. Though it remains unclear, exactly, in how much cultural esteem Leigh holds the likes of H.M.S. Pinafore, his respect for and interest in the long, uncertain gestation of theater itself, now vividly committed to celluloid, lies well beyond question.

As cinematic experiments go, few sound more fascinating than the effective re-creation of the work of 1884's Mike Leigh equivalent. If any movie could be expected to deliver that, here it is. Unfortunately, the burden of constructing Gilbert and Sullivan's London — or at least, given the picture's relative thrift, a couple dozen of its interiors — seems to have necessitated a substantial, though not totally enervating, alteration of the filmmaker's method. Where the relatively low rate of budget percentage spent per minute in a film like Naked accommodates extended, no-depth-off-limits character plumbing, Topsy-Turvy's visual and historical complication forces Leigh's hand to keep the crank turning. Scene after scene stops just short of achieving the satisfying fullness that is Leigh's standard. None are ruined, but it's hard to banish the mental image of a glowering producer tapping away at his wristwatch's face.

The choice to cover only a brief cut of Gilbert and Sullivan's collective career ameliorates this haste somewhat. Rather than performing the workman's trudge from Thespis to The Grand Duke, Leigh concentrates on the final, floundering days of Princess Ida and the conception and execution of its much more successful follow up, The Mikado. I feared a falsely drama'd-up rendition of the facts — a backstage fistfight here, an inconvenient love triangle there, and bam, boffo B.O. — but no such misfortune. The story hews reasonably close to the history, eschewing theatrical roil for the roil of the theater: the pain, craftsmanship and unlikely intellectual point-counterpoint involved in bringing an elaborate (if now slightly embarrassing) show to life.

But it's what goes on in front of the scenes rather than behind them that lifts Topsy-Turvy into the rarefied ranks of pictures about theater that also manage to contain theater. Films about the creation of any internal work of art tend to disappoint when it comes to the work of art itself: most of the time, when the big painting or monument or tapestry or, indeed, stage production is finally revealed, we furrow our brows, wondering what all the fuss could possibly have been about; not this flimsy, unreal construction, certainly. No such skimpy artificiality for Topsy-Turvy, which presents its selections of The Mikado as the real deal, a piece of theater with all its material detritus, logistical heft and seemingly Sisyphean reiterative sculpting. And the substance of the developmental material matches that of the performative: One scene, quite possibly the picture's best, has Gilbert looping three actors through a mere scrap of the script, wittily but sternly correcting, prompting, adjusting and perfecting.

For all Leigh's deft handling of the subject, he doesn't reach far below the surface of its large cast of characters. Would that another 30 minutes — at the least — could have been spent on the working relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan, whose onscreen interactions feel like the tip of the iceberg's tip. The film also falls victim to an infatuation with the illustration of its own period technology: a dentist works crudely with pliers, a pen that contains its own ink isn't quite believed, telephones are shouted into. (We're at least spared "ahoy hoy.")

But the picture skillfully executes maneuvers that most others of its kind find unmanageable, which mostly bleaches out any misplaced priorities. As a cinematic examination of theater, it both manages to operate with a genuine interest in it and treat it with a respect not often afforded one medium by its successor. And while Leigh seriously observes the human core of a Gilbert and Sullivan production, he avoids treating the men themselves with a fanboy's dour over-regard. Perhaps he errs too far in the opposite direction, but every showman knows you've got to make 'em laugh.

Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother

Judging by the success of exported films and sitcoms, people worldwide find the lives of middle-class Britons -- even, or maybe especially, the unremarkable ones -- highly entertaining. It is upon this lucrative territory that Mark Haddon treads for his second novel, A Spot of Bother. Many readers will fondly recall 2003’s nicely done The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but as Haddon’s sophomore release is not, for one, set inside the head of an autistic savant, they’ll also spend more than a few chapters imagining what’s up the author’s sleeve. The answer, it turns out, is nothing much: the book is nearly devoid of gimmickry. What we have here is a large-cast family drama highlighted with other-side-of-the-Atlantic humor. Haddon’s style, nearly always disciplined and often impressive, stands alone between the reader and some sort of Hugh Grant film novelization.   
    It’s a tumultuous time for the family Hall. Not only has father George begun to drift into the kind of post-productivity retirement anxiety that brightens the younger generations’ outlook on a future without pensions, he’s convinced that melanoma, misdiagnosed as eczema, has stricken him. Motivated in part by George’s idle inattention, mother Jean finds herself involved with her husband’s former co-worker. Against almost everyone’s wishes, daughter Katie prepares to marry a man of -- unlike the one she divorced --insufficient refinement. Ever more anguished son Jamie grapples with the question of bringing his equally working-class boyfriend to the wedding.
    With this bunch, what you see is what you get. The Halls do not harbor unspeakable secrets, nor are they gripped by paralyzing neuroses or covered with the pulsating emotional scars currently in literary fashion. Truth be told, it’s something of a relief. They’re all relatives simply dealing with their own crises, all of which boil over, come to a resolution or both during the course of Katie’s wedding. It isn’t much of a spoiler to divulge that the wedding indeed happens and individual issues are indeed resolved; the story grinds through some equivocation, but never real doubt.
    George’s mental state constitutes the single aspect of the book that might be called unusual. Third-person narration follows a different family member in each of 144 short chapters – an effective pacing choice -- and whenever the patriarch is under the spotlight, his increasingly erratic motivations are described as coolly and reasonably as possible. When the text follows, for instance, Jamie, the very notion of his father attempting amateur surgery in the bathtub with mum’s good scissors sounds bizarre; when George decides to go through with it, his rationale reads as just about credible. Shades of Curious Incident, some may say, but it’s less of a coherent, all-encompassing condition than young Christopher Boone’s autism. At its peak, George’s confusion is the reader’s confusion; halfway in, keeping track of his impulses and their consequences tires.
    The novel as a whole loses momentum around the same point. Over the first 150 pages, Haddon’s succinct technique -- the many characters go almost entirely without physical description, for instance -- keeps pages turning rapidly and enjoyably. Then, the narrative engine coughs and sputters, generating more heat than motion. Those seeking a big payoff or vertiginous twist won’t get what they want, and they’ll still have to work hard to keep all the names straight. There is, however, a certain subtle affability to the proceedings, a hint of that quirkily English fatalism that endears so many to the country and its people.
    None of A Spot of Bother’s problems render it unreadable. (As for the straight-to-the-point depiction of George’s auto-operation, your mileage may vary.) The pleasure of the first sixty or so chapters isn’t sustained, and perhaps isn’t sustainable, but if the theme of familial bonds’ redemptive quality is enough to carry one through, perhaps that doesn’t much matter. So what if it lacks the impact of Curious Incident, or if it isn’t particularly groundbreaking? A sizable portion of the book is well-executed, and its ratio of trenchant observations per page exceeds that of most novels of the genre. Like the Halls themselves do, it may be best to settle down, pour some tea and take the good with the bad.