Stow, Schepisi, White, Craven, Joyce, McCaffrey, Stow

7.8.10

Took A Counterfeit Silence to work to look at it. Towards midday I found I wasn't feeling well and looked forward to being lunch behind a closed door... Then I made what turned out to be the mistake of reading an article in The Australian.

Fred Schepisi filming The Eye of the Storm – Charlotte Rampling, Judy Davis, Geoffrey Rush – Schepisi doing an Australian pic (at last, again), doing White, and I hadn't known, hadn't known, and it was happening, and it was going well –

Except that the article was by Craven. Sprawling, sloppy, fundamentally unorganized, reeking of stale alcohol (no Hepworthian lyric or charm, nor even Gopaleen anger/wryness); just critical gush about White, the sensitivity of Schepisi's direction and its necessary femininity in this case.

Now look: I've read enough over the years to know that Schepisi doesn't normally whisper emotions into his actors' ears. Rampling only had 3 weeks for the shoot. So this essentially feminine whispering, this seductive mesmerism, instead of being a function of Rampling's schedule, is, in Craven's universe, Schepisi becoming a Rampling-White Svengali, channelling gayness and White, bringing forth the hidden feminine –

Schepisi's never less than sensitive! Doesn't Craven remember Uluru at the beginning of A Cry in the Dark, remember how The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith turns on the difference between a cut and a dissolve?

But that's not enough. Now Craven has to claim that The Devil's Playground is "the greatest representation of an Australian Catholic childhood ever done"…

What does he know of Australian Catholic childhood? He doesn't know that nothing had changed since The Dead, not even the cooking: there were still heavy, thick, cut-crystal bowls at Sunday lunch, the big meal of the day (roast lamb, also had cold for dinner), long discussions about Irish tenors (the Irish tenor voice now in Gilbert and Sullivan, the G&S societies everywhere), lace curtains, Sunday afternoon visits, verbal political brawls, all held below hung portraits of those gone to The Great War and in front of mantlepieces with smaller upright photographs of those from Changi and Tobruk.

He has no idea how as very very small kid you dreamed in all but Gaelic, how those Sunday afternoon visits took you to the house of the great-aunt who remembers Sydney Kidman coming to say goodbye to her mother when he left for the interior, to create an empire and the over-grazing that has been Australia's bane.

He has no idea about the Pellegrini's, suppliers of incense & other necessities: rosary beads, prayer books, missals, scapulars, holy pictures, Immaculate Conception medals, first communion medals, confirmation medals, ordinary saints' medals, statues – he has no idea of the bric a brac made a Catholic childhood of that era, the happiness of the school holiday on St. Patrick's Day, the rose-petals on Holy Thursday (still weeping for Adonis)...

He has no idea that The Dead is more relevant to Australian Catholic childhood than Portrait of the Artist or The Devil's Playground. He doesn't mention Catherine Keneally's books at all. He doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, doesn't care because it doesn't matter: the copy's in, the paper's out, right, wrong, or blue in the face – no one's going to challenge it or him because Australia can only have one eminence at any one time – critic, climate scientist, poet, director, jurist.

Craven knows The Devil's Playground is a critique of the Catholic Church; he doesn't bother or have to bother to distinguish the church from the childhood. He's read Portrait, and there's a speech in Devil's Playground straight from it, so there's Irish Catholic Australian childhood for you: subject signed, sealed and delivered. The church stands in for the childhood and male stands in for all. There's your bloody article and that's that.

As for Devil's Playground itself: Arthur Dignam will never be convincing as a heterosexual, Thomas Keneally will never be convincing as anything; the speeches about The Rules, The Rules, are heavy-handed, forced and false; the ominous music by Bruce Smeaton laid over the opening shot as we peer around the bend in the very muddy river makes us wonder if Picnic at Hanging Rock has taken to the water. It's a far less perfect film than we thought it was or wanted it to be. It was a first feature by a new director; it was achieved against formidable odds; it was the work of a potentially great film-maker with an already impressive control of sound perspective and a visual technique that remains unique, and who has done outstanding work since.

So why does Craven even bother to make the claim? He doesn't know the subject or he'd know The Dead is more relevant than Portrait. He's telling us, again, that he knows more about everything than any of us ever will, no matter what experience or expertise we may have been forced to inherit or internalize, no matter what knowledge or experience he actually lacks.

And the writing! The badly-constructed sentences, the implicit dissing of everything he's not in the act of praising,  the self-aggrandizement via the utterly unnecessary inclusion of his own history ("now so different from reading it at 20"), the sheer sense of dissipation the prose always exudes: reading it's like being within reeking-range of a drunk man spewing.

A spewing drunk. That's what we've got for a critic. No wonder I feel ill.

And so, lunch. A closed door, some cold water. Some more cold water.

After a while I betook myself to the Stow. When he died I looked him up – Wikipedia, probably – and found a biography so painfully discreet it screamed. The first paragraph of The Merry Go Round in the Sea, quoted somewhere on the web, a detailed description of the central iron post of the of the merry go round rendered in terms of tailoring / costume, is not something any straight man would have written. Well, no straight man after Henry James.

And it was clear as I read, with greater and greater depression and horror, that Stow's closeting had destroyed the poetry: it was opaque, portentous, hysterical, and twee; lots and lots of borrowing from Judith Wright, and not much done with that… The best thing in the book was the adaptation of Lao Tsu, though at times he seemed to be calling the Tao God (I can see why, but no)… But if I want to read Lao Tsu I'll read a translation that starts at the beginning and goes through to the end.

It was miserable… I won't be critiquing Stow, though; I've heard and am glad to have heard that the novels and the stories are good.

For the rest of the day I read an inept Anne McCaffrey book, that being all the strength I had; it was derived from The Sword at Sunset and The Crystal Cave and the knife-fight at end of Dune; it had an utterly Sutcliffian plot-structure.

It seems I like the story of Artos the Bear getting horses from southern Gaul no matter how badly it's told – hope at the beginning of the tale set far in the past, all the arguments done with.