The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (13 page)

He was the victim of a stroke in the early nineties, but still inclined to work.
Beyond the Clouds
—done with Wim Wenders at his shoulder—indicated a real decline, and his episode from
Eros
was minor. When he died (in the same moment as Ingmar Bergman), it was clear that together they stood for art-house cinema of the modern era. But Antonioni is more than that—he is the modern novelist at the movies. Take your pick
—The Passenger, L’Eclisse, La Notte, L’Avventura, Le Amiche
. It is an extraordinary achievement. If he had liked laughter a little more, he would stand with Renoir.

Judd Apatow
, b. Flushing, New York, 1967
2005:
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
. 2007:
Knocked Up
. 2009:
Funny People
.

At 146 minutes,
Funny People
is about three-quarters of an hour fat—and then it ends with a tame cop-out. Like so much of Apatow’s work it risks compromising a true adult sensibility with monotonous raunchy dialogue and penis jokes that bespeak the imprisonment of a teenage audience. It has a lazy self-indulgent air that includes walk-ons for whatever celebrity Apatow met at dinner the night before shooting. Moreover, the entire film hardly knows whether to be ironic about the luxurious lifestyle that Apatow and his star, Adam Sandler, now enjoy. A part of the film is mocking of and critical of their success. But another part can’t stop pushing the details in our face—even to the point of casting Mrs. Apatow, Leslie Mann, as the female lead, and including their two disreputably adorable daughters.

So there’s a lot to regret. But the most pressing reason for that regret is that this is one of the more intriguing and involving movies of 2009. Judd Apatow has problems, and it may be that he’s not in the best position to work them out. But don’t doubt the man’s talent, don’t take lightly his own claim—that no one has influenced him more than John Cassavetes.

As a high-school kid, Apatow was involved in radio and so he fell into the company of stand-up comedians. It was while still a teenager that he roomed for a time with the equally up-and-coming Sandler (who is a year older than Apatow).

There’s a moment in
Funny People
when we see some home movie of Sandler from that period—a wild-eyed, exuberant kid making out like an improv bandit. The film lingers on the footage, and for good reason, for the cinematic core of
Funny People
is the sadness that has overtaken Sandler (as he became a huge star). In
Funny People
, he plays George Simmons, a giant star of the comedy circuit, but a man in whom metaphysical despair has turned into a blood disease that may be fatal. As he considers that his own death is at hand, he surveys the emptiness of his life and takes on a would-be comic, Ira (Seth Rogen), as his writer, assistant, and forlorn friend.

Naturally enough,
Funny People
is filled with jokes and the process that creates and refines them, but deeper down it is a portrait of disillusion with show business. Apatow and Sandler made the film together and they are still friends who went on the road to promote it. Still, I’d love to have the right to ask Sandler just how far he understands the melancholy of the film and the degree to which that undeniable mood comes from his eyes and body language—places that do not lie. Equally, I wonder how far the length and raunch of the film came at Sandler’s bidding, in an attempt to cling on to his kid audience.

This was Apatow’s third direction—after
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
and
Knocked Up
. It is his most untidy film by far, yet the most promising. We know Apatow as a furious worker: he wrote for
The Larry Sanders Show
and
Freaks and Geeks
on television. He has contributed to the scripts of
Pineapple Express, Fun with Dick and Jane
, and
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
. He has something like a dozen projects in hand, and he is plainly overflowing with talent. But
Funny People
is persuasive evidence that if he does less and disciplines himself more he might be a major comic artist.

Michael Apted
, b. Aylesbury, England, 1941
1963:
7 Up
(as assistant director) (d). 1968:
Number 10
(TV). 1972:
Another Sunday and Sweet F.A
. (TV). 1973:
Triple Echo/Soldier in Skirts
. 1974:
Kisses at Fifty
(TV);
Stardust
. 1976:
The Collection
(TV);
The Squeeze; 21
(TV) (d). 1977:
Stronger Than the Sun
(TV). 1979:
Agatha
. 1980:
Coal Miner’s Daughter
. 1981:
Continental Divide
. 1982:
Kipperbang
(TV). 1983:
Gorky Park
. 1985:
28 Up
(d);
Firstborn; Bring on the Night
(d). 1987:
Critical Condition
. 1988:
Gorillas in the Mist
. 1989:
The Long Way Home
(TV). 1991:
Class Action; 35 Up
(d);
Incident at Oglala
(d). 1992:
Thunderheart
. 1994:
Blink
. 1996:
Extreme Measures
. 1997:
Inspirations
(d); 1998:
Always Outnumbered
(TV);
42 Up
(d), 1999:
Me & Isaac Newton
(d);
The World Is Not Enough; Nathan Dixon
(TV). 2001:
Enigma
. 2002:
Enough
. 2002:
Married in America
(TV). 2005:
49 Up
(d). 2006:
Rome
(TV);
Amazing Grace
.

Educated at City of London School and Cambridge, Apted trained with Granada TV and went on to work on
World of Action
and
Coronation Street
. He directed many films/plays for British TV before he broke into features in 1973. Yet he has never given up on television or documentaries. He has done commercials and he has produced several projects for cable in America.

Apted is not just an Englishman who has made an unusual commitment to American regionalism. He was born eight days before I was, and only fifty miles away—so I try to keep up with him. But since Apted’s interests are so varied, and his personality so fleeting, this is no easy task. We have only to note that, in 1998, he put together the latest installment in his survey of a group of English lives
and
the latest James Bond movie with equal fairness, never letting one part of his mind judge the other.

That is barely the beginning. In successive years, Apted did what he could to handle that odd English mystery about the brief disappearance of Agatha Christie,
and
directed
Coal Miner’s Daughter
without being glaringly un-American. Throw in a very bad Richard Pryor film,
Critical Condition
, that fetching mix of documentary and career-woman melodrama,
Gorillas in the Mist
, and you can see how hard it is to account for Apted.

In truth, I do not detect more than proficient execution in his feature films. Apted’s most lasting work is the series of English documentaries, begun when he was an assistant on the program
World In Action
and continued with
21, 28, 35
, and
42 Up
. I’m not sure how many more of the series I want to see: many lives, but English lives especially, gather sadness as they grow older, and Apted is stuck with the people he found at the outset. How many are ready to die onscreen? How far could Apted’s rather removed, polite scrutiny stand up to all that demise? Still, the series was a great idea, and anyone hoping to understand England should watch the films.
28 Up
is the best of the bunch, probably because the people have energies and hopes still to burn.

I have to wonder whether Apted can yet find a way to deliver himself onscreen with something like the desperate or exuberant force that drives some of the people in that series. Or is he really just a calm, faithful watcher?

By the end of the nineties, he was was widening his documentary interests, keeping faith with his original English kids (and they were turning out pretty well), being prepared to make a Walter Mosley novel for television, and then getting the prize of a Bond film.
The World Is Not Enough
was no better or worse than the others, but it was clearer than ever that the
7 Up
series was a labor of love and enlightenment for all.

Roscoe
(Fatty)
Arbuckle
(1887–1933), b. Smith Center, Kansas
On Labor Day, 1921, in San Francisco, Roscoe Arbuckle, actor Lowell Sherman, and Freddy Fishback gave a party. Hollywood parties of that era were often uninhibited, and the movie colony either deserved or aped its own reputation for wild living. This party drifted on for a couple of days and no one has ever accused it of being good clean fun. But a model, Virginia Rappe, died and, after initial accusations of rape and murder, Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter. The case against him was always thin, but he was a juicy suspect and two juries failed to reach a verdict before the third acquitted him, in March 1922, and went out of its way to remark, “We feel that a great injustice has been done to him.… Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.” But you had only to look at Arbuckle to know that, in many ways, he was far from innocent; the combined forces of scandalmongery and puritanism would not be dissuaded. Arbuckle was made a scapegoat, as though after calling a man “Fatty” for years and rejoicing at his humiliation on film the public could only move in on him with trained hostility. The Hearst press led the campaign against him, ensuring that many moviehouses boycotted his films. Will Hays then put pressure on Arbuckle’s immediate employers, Joseph Schenck and Adolph Zukor, and he was barred from acting in movies again.

Thus the fat owl of the silent screen was removed, and this early spasm of rejection showed how fickle the public’s faith in its stars could be. The moral realities of Hollywood life were something the public hardly dreamed of; even so, one hint was enough to furnish it with nightmares that demanded cleansing action. Arbuckle’s own exaggerated ugliness drew upon him all the public’s hypocritical loathing of depravity. For some seven years he had been one of the leading figures in comedy. From vaudeville, he had gone to Keystone in 1909. By 1913, Sennett was giving him leading parts so that he was the featured player at the studio when Chaplin arrived from Britain. By 1914 he was directing his own films—one-or two-reelers, often in the company of Mabel Normand:
Fatty and the Heiress; Fatty’s Finish; An Incompetent Hero; Fatty’s Wine Party; Leading Lizzie Astray; Fatty’s Magic Pants;
and
Fatty and Minnie-He-Haw
. He also appeared in some of the Chaplin films at Keystone:
A Film Johnnie; The KnockOut; The Masquerader;
and
The Rounders
(14). Fatty stayed at Keystone for two years after Chaplin’s departure:
Mabel and Fatty’s Wash Day; Fatty and Mabel’s Simple Life; Mabel, Fatty and the Law; Mabel and Fatty’s and Married Life; Fatty’s Reckless Fling; Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World’s Fair at San Francisco, Cal.;
and
Fickle Fatty’s Fall
(15);
Fatty and Mabel Adrift; He Did and He Didn’t; His Wife’s Mistake; His Alibi;
and
A Cream Puff Romance
(16). In 1917, Arbuckle and Schenck formed the Comique Film Corporation with Fatty continuing to direct his own films. Mabel Normand did not go with him, but Fatty recruited the young Buster Keaton who appeared in a run of Arbuckle comedies:
The Butcher Boy; Rough House; His Wedding Night; Fatty at Coney Island; Oh Doctor!; Out West
(17);
The Bell Boy; Goodnight Nurse; Moonshine; The Cook
(18);
A Desert Hero; Backstage;
and
The Garage
(19). In 1920, Fatty made
A Country Hero
and in 1921 he played in
The Dollar-a-Year Man
(James Cruze) before disaster befell him.

Legend has it that Keaton cushioned some of the fall for Fatty—just as he often had in slapstick—by keeping him in funds and suggesting that he direct, under the name of “Will B. Goode.” In 1927—as William Goodrich—he directed Marion Davies in
The Red Mill
for Cosmopolitan (Hearst’s company—such is the stamina of scandal) and Eddie Cantor in
Special Delivery
for Paramount. Apart from that, he made educational films until 1931, when he directed some comedy shorts for Warners:
Smart Work; Windy Riley Goes to Hollywood
(31);
Keep Laughing; Moonlight and Cactus; Anybody’s Goat; Bridge Wives; Hollywood Luck; Mother’s Holiday;
and
It’s a Cinch
(32). He died in New York in 1933 still fat, but Fatty forgotten.

Fanny Ardant
, b. Monte Carlo, 1949
François Truffaut fell in love with Fanny Ardant in 1979, on television, when he saw her play the lead in the miniseries
Les Dames de la Côte
. She was the daughter of a soldier, who was advising the royal family of Monaco at the time of her birth. A study of political science led her astray—to the theatre—and in the seventies she became a notable figure on the Parisian stage in works by Racine, Claudel, and Montherlant. She appeared first on TV in 1978 in
Les Memoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées
, adapted from Balzac.

Truffaut’s love was real, even if the small screen had prompted it. He liked “her large mouth, her deep voice and its unusual intonations, her big black eyes and her triangular face,” and she became not just the muse of his final years, but his lover and companion, and the mother of his last daughter.

She made her movie debut in
Les Chiens
(79, Alain Jessua) and then in
Les Uns et les Autres
(81, Claude Lelouch), before doing her first film for Truffaut,
La Femme d’à Côté
(81), with Gerard Depardieu. Then she did
La Vie Est un Roman
(83, Alain Resnais); the fond secretary in
Vivement Dimanche!
(83, Truffaut);
Benvenuta
(83, André Delvaux);
Swann in Love
(84, Volker Schlondorff);
L’Amour à Mort
(84, Resnais);
Les Enragés
(85, Pierre-William Glenn);
L’Été Prochain
(85, Nadine Trintignant); the wife in
Family Business
(86, Costa-Gavras);
Le Paltoquet
(86, Michel Deville);
Mélo
(86, Resnais);
The Family
(87, Ettore Scola);
Paura e Amore
(88, Margarethe von Trotta);
Pleure Pas My Love
(88, Tony Gatlif);
Australia
(89, Jean-Jacques Andrien);
Afraid of the Dark
(92, Mark Peploe);
The Deserter’s Wife
(93, Michel Bat-Adam);
Amok
(93, Joel Farges);
Colonel Chabert
(94, Yves Angelou);
Sabrina
(95, Sydney Pollack);
Beyond the Clouds
(95, Michelangelo Antonioni and Wim Wenders); very handsome still in
Ridicule
(96, Patrice Leconte);
Pédale Douce
(97, Gabriel Aghion);
Elizabeth
(98, Shekhar Kapur);
La Cena
(98, Scola); the mistress to
Balzac
(99, Josée Dayan);
La Débandade
(99, Claude Berri);
Le Fils du Français
(99, Gérard Lauzier);
Le Libertin
(00, Aghion);
Change-Moi Ma Vie
(01, Liria Begeja);
Callas Forever
(01, Franco Zeffirelli);
8 Femmes
(02, François Ozon);
Sin Noticias de Dios
(02, Agustín Díaz Yanes);
Nathalie X
(03, Anne Fontaine);
L’Odore del Sangue
(03, Mario Martone).