Pumpkin Eater, TheDirector: Jack ClaytonGenre: Drama Publisher: Columbia Released: 1964 MPAA Rating: Unrated Cast: Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, James Mason, Maggie Smith |
A Review by Dan Callahan
03/04/2005
Based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer, the film features a knock- out, very tricky script by Harold Pinter, filled with "big scenes" that could fall to fake pieces so easily. It leaves out lots of important information, and the viewer must fill in plenty of lacunae. Jack Clayton, the film's director, handles Pinter's script unerringly, with enormous tact and unique sensitivity to the brutal violence lurking underneath smooth bourgeois surfaces.
Clayton is sort of like a romantic Joseph Losey. He only made eight features, and The Pumpkin Eater is certainly his best film. Similarly, Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch give their best performances, while James Mason and Maggie Smith have never been better. The soundtrack is hair-raisingly layered: you hear every sigh, every rustle of clothing, and George Delerue's score is like a suicidal version of his bohemian Jules and Jim music, setting the mood of the piece throughout, as the scenes dissolve and dissolve.
The opening sequence of The Pumpkin Eater evokes the disconnected mood of Antonioni's L'Eclisse, but it isn't as abstract as that; it's based more in reality. Jo (Bancroft) has had eight children and wants more. Her first husband was killed in World War II, and she left her loving second husband Giles (Richard Johnson) for Jake (Finch), an up-and-coming screenwriter. The first scenes establish Jo's despairing state of mind, with brief flashbacks to her happier past. Bancroft is fearless as she sketches in the symptoms of Jo's chronic depression, never lightening her effects just to keep us interested. She moves slowly, lugubriously, as if she's walking underwater. After you get used to Bancroft's performance (and it's tempting to reject Jo's self-pity until you realize how ill she is), anything that breaks her out of her lethargy is a big event. A smile is a miracle.
Flashbacks to the past lead us into The Pumpkin Eater's most famous scene: Jo's breakdown in Harrods' Department Store. Clayton places the camera low, staring up at Jo as she wanders around the store, gazing at mannequins, some with faces, some without. The film hints that affluence has oppressed Jo, and Clayton visualizes this by clogging the foreground of his frames and leaving the background open (never have such vast interiors suggested such sterility).
When Jo finally loses control in Harrods, Clayton switches from an overhead shot of her to a large punishing close-up. The sound becomes muffled, and the only thing we hear is Jo's hoarse laughter, which she can't stop. Tears are streaming down her face, but she's laughing and laughing. This is not Oscar-winning nervous breakdown acting: it's the real, disturbing thing. God only knows what Bancroft had to do to access a state of mind like this.
Back at home, Jo lies in bed, as Jake talks about sending her to a psychiatrist. She listens in on a phone conversation he's having (Jake's an epic adulterer) and then she sinks down to kiss her own arm (another wholly original, almost inexplicable emotion from Bancroft). For the rest of the film, Jo is forced to passively submit to the brutes around her. She grins and bears Philpot (Smith), a chatty woman who becomes Jake's first mistress, and then, while going to a condescending therapist, she has an appalling encounter at the hairdressers with a psychopathic woman, unforgettably played by Yootha Joyce.
This scene is not in the novel; it's an invention of Pinter's, and if ever a scene was Pinter-esque, this one would be it. Joyce's madwoman starts talking to Jo as they sit waiting to go under the dryer, and right away she begins making weird, inappropriate remarks, which keep escalating obscenely. Jo just sits there and takes it, for what seems an eternity. A Dostoyevsky-style confessional scene, it could so easily seem false and "dramatic," but Joyce makes you believe in this nightmarish woman, a reflection of Jo's incipient lunacy.
Even worse, however, is Mason's Conway, who we first meet at what must be one of the most awful high-class parties in film history. Conway airs a tedious observation to Jo, and then she mills around, trying to be a good hostess and listening to crass chatter ("I don't want to meet your people...ever," she had whispered to Jake earlier, and now we know why). Conway's wife praises Jake's talent as a screenwriter, just as Philpot did. It's obvious that when both women are talking about the "swift strokes" of Jake's characterizations that they're really interested in what he'd be like in bed.
Conway ambushes Jo on an outing with her children at the zoo to tell her about Jake's affair with his wife. She tries to go, but Conway grabs her arm and starts talking filth, the camera pulling closer and closer in to his hideous British teeth. Clayton goes in for very baroque effects, but he always manages to keep control of them. The scenes are stylized, and so are the compositions, but the acting and the feel of the film are as lifelike as possible.
After Jake forces Jo to abort her ninth child and get her tubes tied, Conway helpfully phones to tell her that Jake has impregnated his wife. Jo can't hold down her feelings anymore: this woman who has been pushed around by everybody explodes into shocking physical violence, beating the hell out of her straying husband (a startling, if brief, scene). After this release, she sleeps with her second husband Giles, who nicely informs her that she has changed so much that he no longer loves her. As she talks about how her life is "an empty place" (the same phrase used by Joyce's lunatic), the smoke from her cigarette doesn't drift out: it curls back in, as if Jo wants to escape into the past permanently.
Clayton varies the tone with an amusing pissing-contest scene between Jake and Conway, and then wraps the film up with an ambiguous but unconventionally positive ending (which did not please the author of the novel, who had a grimmer end in mind). But The Pumpkin Eater is such a painful film that Clayton was right to give us a small catharsis. Jo's final smile does not offer easy resolutions, only a breather, a respite. It's a sign of the rare quality of The Pumpkin Eater that it doesn't give us a big finish. No car crashes, suicides or obvious tragedies. It leaves us merely with the tragedy of everyday life: drawing room warfare, unforgivable remarks, compromise, hardship, money rotting out people's hearts. And marriage, the worst hardship of all, the salvation of the few.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 03/04/2005
