Nell Campbell | Through the Shattered Lens

1982’s Pink Floyd — The Wall is a film that I have mixed feelings about.

Some of that is due to my feelings about Pink Floyd. On the one hand, I can’t deny their talent and I do like quite a few of their songs, if they do all tend to be a bit on the portentous side. On the other hand …. Roger Waters! Bleh, Roger Waters. Waters was one of the founders of Pink Floyd and, for a while, the band’s de facto leader. He’s also a rabid anti-Semite and a defender of Vladimir Putin’s. That said, I’ve discovered that I can justify listening to Pink Floyd by remembering that the rest of the band hates Roger Waters as well and that Waters himself eventually left Pink Floyd. Waters’s bandmate, David Gilmour, has flat-out called Roger Waters an anti-Semite. Last year, when we had a total eclipse of the sun, I was happy to be able to play the last two tracks of Dark Side of the Moon while enjoying the early and temporary evening. It just felt appropriate.

Outside of Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall is probably Pink Floyd’s best-known work. (When I was younger, I can remember my Dad playing it whenever he was driving across the country.) A concept album about how much it sucks to be a wealthy Englishman, The Wall is one of those albums and films that are beloved by people who consider themselves to be alienated. Even more so than the average Pink Floyd album, The Wall was the brainchild of Roger Waters and, when the movie version was made in 1982, Waters wrote the screenplay. That said, I think you can argue that, much as with Tommy, The Wall was ultimately more about the vision of the film’s director than that of the man who wrote the songs.

The Wall is definitely an Alan Parker production. It’s big. It embraces the sordid. It’s stylish almost to the point of parody. Every image has been carefully constructed by a director who got his start doing commercials and whose main goal was to get an immediate audience reaction. Much like Parker’s Midnight Express or Evita, it’s a film that grabs your attention while you’re watching it and only afterwards do you stop consider that there really wasn’t much going on underneath the surface.

Pink (Bob Geldof) is a self-loathing rockstar who is haunted by his childhood in post-WWII Britain and whose marriage is failing. He’s building a wall, brick-by-brick, to keep himself separated from pain but the price of becoming comfortably numb is to be so alienated that you imagine becoming a neo-Nazi who orders his followers to follow the Worm. The imagery is powerful. The animated sequences by Gerald Scarfe still make quite an impression, especially the marching hammers. The score features songs like Another Brick In The Wall, Comfortably Numb, and Run Like Hell. The film is relentless, full of downbeat imagery that is often excessive but which Parker understood would appeal to the film’s target audience. Indeed, it’s such an overwhelming film that it’s easy to overlook the fact that, even before he transformed into a fascist, Pink is a drab character and his main problem seems to be that he can’t seem to find anything good to watch on television.

That said, I have to admit that, despite myself, I do like The Wall. It’s just so shameless that it’s hard not to enjoy the silliness of it all. Add to that, Comfortably Numb is a great song. (Another Brick In The Wall is also a great song though perhaps not for the reasons that Waters thought it was.) The Wall is a monument to the joys of cinematic excess.

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were awake at 2 in the morning last night, you could have turned over to Starz and watched the 1998 film, Great Expectations.

Great Expectations is an adaptation of the famous novel by Charles Dickens, the one about the orphan who helps a fugitive, is mentored by a bitter rich woman who lives in a decaying mansion, falls in love with the beautiful but cold-hearted Estella, and then later is helped out by a mysterious benefactor. The thing that sets this adaptation apart from other version of the novel is that the 1998 Great Expectations is set in modern-day America, as opposed to Victorian-era Great Britain.

Actually, beyond retaining certain aspects of the plot, it’s interesting how little this version of Great Expectations has to do with the original novel. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. While Charles Dickens deserves to be remembered as one of the fathers of modern literature, he could also be a terribly pedantic writer. This adaptation only touches on the novel’s overriding concerns about class and wealth in the most simplistic of ways. It also abandons most of the novel’s subplots and instead concentrates on the love story between Estella (Gwynneth Paltrow) and Finn (Ethan Hawke).

Oh yeah, did I mention that? The hero of this version of Great Expectations is not named Phillip Pirrip and we never have to listen to him explain that, as a child, he was nicknamed Pip because he apparently could not speak. Instead, Pip has been renamed Finn, short for Finnegan. If you believe the trivia section of the imdb, Finn was apparently the name of Ethan Hawke’s dog. And again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. One of the main reasons why so many readers automatically dislike the narrator of Great Expectations is that he is named Pip.

Anyway, in this version, ~~Pip~~ Finn grows up in Florida, an orphan who is raised by his blue-collar brother-in-law, Joe Gargery (Chris Cooper, giving a very Chris Cooperish performance). The escaped convict is played by Robert De Niro and, towards the end of the film, there’s a hilarious scene where Finn and the convict meet for a second time and Finn somehow does not recognize him, despite the fact that he still pretty much looks the same and still acts exactly like Robert De Niro. The eccentric woman who mentors the young Finn, Mrs. ~~Havisham~~ Dinsmoor, is played by Anne Bancroft and Bancroft, made up to look like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, gives a performance of almost transcendent weirdness. And, of course, Estella — who has been raised to seduce and then destroy men — is played by Gwynneth Paltrow and, as usual, Paltrow is a lot more believable when Estella is remote and self-centered than when she has to soften up towards the end of the film.

It’s an odd film, to be honest. This is one of those films that you watch and you try to be cynical but it’s all so lushly shot and deliriously (and manipulatively) romantic that you can’t help but occasionally get wrapped up in its spell. Hawke and Paltrow, both of whom are incredibly young in this movie, may not have much chemistry but they’re both so achingly beautiful that it almost doesn’t matter.

Great Expectations was the second film to be directed by Alfonso Cuaron and it’s just as visually stylish as his later films. It’s a frequently shallow and somewhat silly film but oh my God, is it ever pretty to look at.