Don't Make a Scene: Sense and Sensibility

The Set-Up: Emma Thompson, Emma Thompson, and Emma Thompson. The answer to the question du Carnack "Who are some of my favorite actors, comedians, and screen-writers?"

That would actually be "Dame" Emma Thompson, whose work never ceases to amaze me or enchant me. She's one of those handful of actors whose work goes beyond portrayal to fully inhabited, without any tell-tale signs of performance or artifice. That's a very rare commodity. And she ranks with Vanessa Redgrave, Katherine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Alfre Woodard, Barbra Stanwyck, Taraji P. Henson, Ingrid Bergman, and Viola Davis as actresses who are a treat to watch, personally.

Her double-duty as lead actress and chief scribe of Sense and Sensibility, though, has always knocked me out, because she took the work seriously enough to risk accentuating the comedy of it...something that the ardent frequently object to. You can't have light without dark, good without evil, and you can't have drama without a sense of the absurd (Well, you can, but it's a little melodramatic, which some folks like—but not me).

So, here is this scene from S and S, that has no comedy whatsoever. If there is, it's of a cruel variety and it is Thompson that risks it by making her practical and stiff-upper-lip Dashwood daughter, Elinor, completely lose it in this scene (only one of 2 1/2 instances where she allows herself to do so). Her Elinor suffers through so that her other family members do not, and she maintains a brave face throughout, but Thompson's facility playing it is so adroit that she allows the audience in to see the cracks of the veneer.

Like here...the almost mad fear she displays when pleading with her unconscious sister to pull through is heart-breaking, but so, also, is the look in her eyes when told by the doctor to "prepare" herself for the worst. It's an amalgamation of things—hurt, betrayal, anger, fear, loathing of the doctor, all mixed in her look back as he exits. A flash of...well, the five stages of grief in one composite stare.

It's open, it's vulnerable, it's strong, and it's...masterful.

The Story: The Dashwoods are in desperate straits. The death of the father, given the complexities of his relationships, has left his family by second wife (Gemma Jones) at loose ends. With an inheritance of only £500 a year, the second Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters—Elinor (Emma Thompson), Marianne (Kate Winslet) and Margaret (Emilie Francois)—must move from the palatial Dashwood estate, and, seemingly, go begging. The situation might be eased if the elder daughters could be married off, but their financial situation does not entice, and Elinor's affection for Edward Farrars (Hugh Grant) is thwarted, while Marianne forsakes a comfortable marriage to Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman) for the more dashing but inscrutable John Willoughby (Greg Wise).

Returning from a visit to London, the Dashwoods stay at the estate of the Palmers, which overlooks Willoughby's estate. Marianne, heartbroken by his choosing to wed another, goes out in a driving rain, walking miles hoping to catch a glimpse of her lost love. When she does not return, she is found by the visiting Colonel Brandon, but she becomes gravelly ill with pnuemonia. Brandon, at Elinor's request, fetches a doctor. But, his analysis, one fears, is grave.

Commence...

INT. CLEVELAND - ELINOR AND MARIANNE'S BEDROOM - LATER

The room is very still. MARIANNE is pale as wax. DR HARRIS puts on his coat. ELINOR looks at him fearfully.

DR HARRIS I must fetch more laudanum.

DR HARRIS I cannot pretend, Miss Dashwood, 

DR HARRIS ...that your sister's condition is not very serious.

DR HARRIS You must prepare yourself. 

DR HARRIS I will return very shortly.

He leaves the room.

DISSOLVE:
INT. CLEVELAND - ELINOR AND MARIANNE'S BEDROOM - LATER 

MARIANNE lies in the grip of her fever. ELINOR sits watching her. Slowly she rises and walks to the bed. When she speaks, her tone is very practical. 

ELINOR Marianne, Marianne, please try-- 

Suddenly, almost unconsciously, she starts to heave with dry sobs, wrenched out of her, full of anguish and heartbreak and all the more painful for being tearless. 

ELINOR Marianne, 

ELINOR please...try-

ELINOR -I

ELINOR cannot--I cannot

ELINOR ...do without you. 

ELINOR Oh, please, 

ELINOR I have tried to bear everything else-- 

ELINOR I will try--

ELINOR but please,

ELINOR ...dearest,

ELINOR ...beloved Marianne, 

ELINOR ...do not...

ELINOR ...leave me alone.

She falls to her knees by the bed, gulping for breath, taking MARIANNE's hand and kissing it again and again.

DISSOLVE:

Sense and Sensibility

Words by Emma Thompson (and Jane Austen)

Pictures by Michael Coulter and Ang Lee

Sense and Sensibility is available on DVD and Blu-Ray on Columbia-Tri-Star Home Video and Twilight Time.

Sadly, I could not find a video of this scene anywhere on the Internets, but give myself (and you) solace with Emma Thompson's wickedly funny acceptance speech for winning the Golden Globe for Best Adapted Screenplay:

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Written—in the dark—at the time of the documentary's release...

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005) This "buy the book" documentary scrupulously tells the unscrupulous story of Enron, the energy-trading company whose fall was so huge it sucked down the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, as well as the pensions and retirement accounts of its employees. At the eye of the "Big Suck" was a triumvirate of robber-barons with grandiose schemes on how to shuffle energy it didn't have, and what energy it did have was used to "cook the books." Those smartest guys are now infamous--Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andy Fastow. They began as all fortunes do--they came up with an idea no one else had. 

Deficit Financing--don't get rich making a profit, get rich saying you're going to make a profit. And when you don't, offset the loss with dummy corporations set up solely to take the hit. And in this shell-game where money is a concept more than a commodity, the longer you can keep the plates spinning on the sticks, the more successful you might become. You just have to know when the plates begin to fall, then cash in. 

The film-makers have access to company films, P.R. pieces, and, most damning of all, the ribald voice recordings of the taders on the floor, famously yukking it up about gramma freezing in California. Skilling and Lay built up a cult of personality that gives them access to powerful friends who can manipulate the market to their advantage, delay investigations, and blue-sky security ratings (The speculation is that Lay helped formulate the Bush Energy Policy, which is why Dick Cheney has fought so strenuously to keep the names secret). The hubris becomes so great that soon they think they can sell a sunny day--tape recordings have company officials speculating on selling "weather futures." 

There is a damning wealth of information provided on the durth of anything approaching ethics and the depths to which the greedy can sink. One wonders if there's something deeper about Enron's company slogan: "Ask why."

Patton

Patton (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970) Patton was a different kind of war movie. Where most films of that genre would concentrate on the cinematic battles, or use the war as a back-drop for soap-stories, Patton chose to take the more quixotic route of Lawrence of Arabia (or more appropriately, The Desert Fox about Patton's "player on the other side" in Africa, Erwin Rommel) by making a personal story about war and how it shapes the human being. Of how the warrior makes the war, but war also makes the warrior. The world war is the most important story, of course. But the story of General George S. Patton, Jr. (played by George C. Scott, with all the eerie command he brought to every role, probably far more than the real Patton personified) is so intertwined with that war's European campaign, as a mover and shaker of it, and his fortunes so changed by it (and not for the good) that even as it revels in the eccentricities of the man, it also shows how out of touch a professional warrior and student of conflict can be in this day and age.

Or in any day and age.
"God, how I hate the twentieth century" is one of the laugh-lines of Patton. But it's one of the truest lines of the script (by Fox scribe Edmund H. North and a very young Francis Ford Coppola). Patton, the soldier, was from another time (he thought so, literally), and his romantic notions of war and warriors made him an "odd duck" of the military, and a "lame duck" when it came to the political strategies inside an Army at war. He held disdain for bureaucratic warriors on both sides of the conflict (including "that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch" in Berlin and his British counterpart Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery—played with birdlike pompousness by Michael Bates), the exceptions being his West Point classmate Dwight Eisenhower, and Erwin Rommel, who had opposing tank battle scenarios to Patton's own. The movie has the Germans studying Patton and his techniques, more approving of Patton than his own fellow Allied Commanders.
Scott's position as the centerpiece of the film is critical, but director Franklin J. Schaffner,* who apprenticed in live television and whose previous film was the better-than-it-deserved-to-be Planet of the Apes, brought his customary expansiveness to the theater of war. With a wide-screen process dubbed "Dimension 150,"** Schaffner created vistas of carnage and blazing battles of ferocity that took a dirtier, grimier and bloodier view of battlefield action than had been seen previously in the "clean-kill" war movies preceding it.
Patton, the man (both in life and on film) romanticized war, reveled in it, but the film bearing his name went further than most in de-glamourizing the traditional heroics of the less thoughtful war films, carefully explaining the strategies, viewing the battles dispassionately, almost like a chess-master reviewing the board, and in the after-math, taking stock of the scattered, shattered pieces. However planned a battle may be, it ends in chaos. Chaos and death. And in Patton, you can almost smell the stench of a battle-field's carnage.
Death is omnipresent in Patton, with detailed shots of dead and wounded in the battlefields, and of the crude graveyards made in haste. Some of the eeriest parts of Patton take place in those moments, backed by the cascading trumpets and marching jig of Jerry Goldsmith's spare score when it is stilled to shimmering strings, and unresolved motifs.****
Schaffner used his locations well, taking a page from David Lean, cramming as much information into the frames as he could, or by presenting stark landscapes that seemed to go on forever, showing the regimentation of war, how vast numbers of human beings could crowd a frame, or how solitary individuals could be lost in a landscape, or for that matter, History. The scenarists and Schaffner choose to end the movie, leaving Patton alive, just days before having his neck broken in a jeep accident. They leave him contemplating the transience of Glory walking mythically (and quixotically) towards a solitary wind-mill.
It is also about showmanship. A lot of actors turned down the role (some, like Rod Steiger, to their regret), but it was a tour de force for George C. Scott, who buried himself in the role, studying biographies, running films of the general over and over, doing an extensive make-up transformation—shaving his head to sport a Patton buzz-cut, matching the moles on Patton's face, and even having his teeth capped to make his smile more like the general's. There were some things he wouldn't do, like try to match Patton's voice—Scott felt simulating Patton's high-pitched voice*** would undercut some of his authority in the role.

The effect was extraordinary. Patton's kids, who were never too keen on the idea of the film, were amazed at Scott's appearance, and the role (which won Scott a Best Performance Oscar—which he famously refused) replaced the real-life General in the imaginations of the Nation, despite ample archival evidence.
Partially, it is the opening. Written by Francis Ford Coppola in an early draft of the script, it is a combination of several of Patton's inspirational addresses to his troops, performed—as if a stage performance—by a solo Scott before an out-sized American flag. It is this section of the script that most intrigued Scott, the stage actor, but also intimidated him. It was the last section filmed, and director Schaffner promised that it would be placed after the Intermission, as the actor—rightly—felt that the address would overpower the rest of the performance.

Schaffner, having a showman's instinct, reneged. And that speech, setting the tone and tenor of the performance that dominated the film, went immediately into pop iconography. It has been parodied and propagated for decades, a radical introduction to one of the more colorful players in the second World War. A thesis, a preamble, if you will, a first movement...but, more appropriately, a shot across the audience's bow.

***

The image most people have of Patton is George C. Scott.'s portrayal, 
but the real Patton was not so theatrical or full-throated.

* Few men were as suited as Schaffner to film this story: during WWII, he was part of the contingent landing at Sicily...under the command of Patton.

** It was camera-maker Todd AO's challenge to Cinerama, and presented a viewing range, or scope, of 150. Only two movies were shot in "Dimension 150"—The Bible and Patton. George C. Scott appeared in both of them.

****

"For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a Triumph—a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Some times, his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot...or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning—that all glory...is fleeting."

Patton Don't Make a Scene's:

The Opening

The Battlefield

The War-prayer