The Amen Corner, National Theatre, 12.6.13

James Baldwin’s heavily autobiographical early (1954) “gospel” play focused on a Harlem pastor’s attempt to reconcile her church leadership with her family and her past.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste powerfully headed the all-black cast as strict pastor ‘Sister Margaret’, whose authority is undermined when her irreligious alcoholic ex-husband Luke returns. 

There was excellent support from Sharon D Clarke (as ‘Odessa’ her full-figured sister, feet firmly planted on the ground), from Lucian Msamati (as the dying jazzman husband Sister Margaret had deserted years earlier) and from Eric Kofi Abrefa (as the son who flees the nest; a clearly autobiographical figure). 
 

It's invidious to single out one performer from a great ensemble but special mention is due to Cecilia Noble as ‘Sister Moore’ (the pastor’s vast, virginal and Machiavellian rival), whose comic timing was impeccable, and who generated a rousing audience response from lines like:
 
"I want to praise the Lord for being here ... I want to thank Him for keeping me pure and set apart from the lusts of the flesh, for protecting me--hallelujah!--from all carnal temptation.  When I come before my Maker, I'm going to come before Him pure.  I'm going to say 'Bless your name, Jesus, no man has ever touched me!' Hallelujah!" 
 
After a slightly underwhelming start to the season, this has to be the stand-out NT show of the year (counting ‘This House’ as belonging more to 2012).  Directed with brio by Rufus Norris (who, it's just been announced, will be taking over from Nick Hytner as the National's Artistic Director), the production featured a two-tier set by Ian MacNeil (chapel on the upper floor and pastor’s living quarters below): typical strong NT production values. The piece was infused with humour and verve and the glorious live music from the London Community Gospel Choir really brought it alive:  “Praise the Lord!” 
 


Jimmy Baldwin in NYC

Baldwin, who first honed his inimitable skill with words from a pulpit, showed how street churches proved both refuge and straitjacket for the 'respectable classes' of Fifties Harlem, most of them first-generation arrivals from the violence of the 'Jim Crow' South.

The 'message' was the same one Baldwin preached all his life, from the Northern slums to his voyages of discovery in the South in the early years of Civil Rights, from the cafes of the Rive Gauche to the steep streets of Istanbul and the heady scents of the St-Paul de Vence villa where he died:  that to go out into the world is to live, to take risks, to embrace love.

Or, as Sister Margaret puts it, in her preacher's vernacular: 

“To love the Lord is to love all His children -all of them, everyone! -and suffer with them and rejoice with them and never count the cost!”.    

Dans La Maison / In The House, 11.4.13

A cuckoo-in-the-nest fable, this French hit previewed at the 2012 London Film Festival and was adapted by director François Ozon from Juan Moyoraga’s novel 'The Boy in the Last Row’ (‘El chico de la última fila’). There were echoes of “Notes on a Scandal” as the pic played with themes of voyeurism, power games and the interplay between fiction and reality.

Pupil-Teacher roles reversed:
Ernst Umhauer and Fabrice Luchini 

Ageing teacher and écrivain manqué Germain (masterfully played by the versatile Fabrice Luchini, an actor equally convincing as villain or fool) returns to work appalled to find the Head has reintroduced school uniforms.  The general cluelessness of his new class is redeemed only by the creative writing of new pupil Claude (‘the boy in the last row’), played with withdrawn intensity by 21yo Ernst Umhauer (a wiry Norman blond with a sly grin). 

Plotting his next move: 
Ernst Umhauer as Claude

The boy hands in a series of intriguingly sarcastic stories about his attempts to worm his way into a wealthier classmate’s house and family.  Claude, an outsider with a gift for observing others’ weaknesses, betrays his classmate Rapha by briefly infiltrating his way into the affections of his mother (relentlessly mocked as ‘une femme typique de la classe moyenne’).  But bedding the housewife isn't his primary goal.  Power's the thrill and the real fun's to be had from twisting others around his little finger, like a novelist with his characters.  'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods' and the prof is no match for this wanton boy. 

Kristin Scott Thomas (Jeanne) & Fabrice Luchini (Germain)

A first-rate score by Philippe Rombi craftily accelerated the pace and ramped up the irony. Ozon coloured the scenes with a deceptive brightness to disguise the games afoot (France has never looked more like America). The art gallery run by Germain's wife Jeanne (briskly played in French by Kristin Scott Thomas) provided a particularly rich comedic vein, its initial exhibition of phallic art mistaken for a porno shop by the pupils.  

Director & screenwriter
Francois Ozon

Any film that starts with a line about coming back to work having spent the holidays reading Schopenhauer can’t be all bad and this was black comedy at its best.  Flick revelled in its dry but literate humour, with Celine's 'Voyage au bout de la Nuit' (a hymn to cynical nihilism) being pressed into action as a weapon at one point!  The French have a talent for films about strangers causing havoc ('La Page-Tourneuse’, 'Carnage') and for sardonic treatment of the sociopathic ('Les Diaboliques', 'Ridicule').  'Eight Women' and 'Potiche' were fun, but this was Ozon's most enjoyable film yet, worth every last centime.

Lincoln, 3.2.13

Daniel Day-Lewis as Spielberg's Lincoln

Arguably Spielberg’s best film yet and, if not, certainly up there with ‘The Color Purple’, this wasn’t a traditional biopic as such but a look at the last four months of Lincoln’s life, between the battle of Jenkins’ Ferry in January and his assassination on 14 April 1865. 

This (on the assumption readers are as ignorant of the finer points of US history as Motley is) was the period when “Honest Abe” was caught between the demands of a “peace now” campaign on his own party’s conservative wing and the need to ensure the Union Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment (outlawing slavery) before the Confederate states were readmitted to Congress on conclusion of a peace (which would have swung the vote the other way). 

The problem was securing a two-thirds majority with an obstructive Democrat House minority and a shortage of twenty votes.  The solution was to lie to the House about the forthcoming peace negotiations, to force the Confederate State delegates to dawdle by boat between Richmond and DC and, quite simply, to buy the flakier representatives' votes.  James Spader, unrecognisable from his Eighties' pretty-boy days ("Sex, Lies & Videotape" etc), was in fine fleshy cigar-chewing mode as the rogue distributing the Wonga on Lincoln's behalf.  'Lincoln' was that rarest of phenomena:  a war movie more interested in political mechanics and processes than in the fighting.

Scriptwriter Tony Kushner

With a strikingly literate script by Tony Kushner (who else would insert a digression on Euclidian maths in a mass-market movie?), the film captured the moment when pork-barrel Tammany Hall politics was alchemised, through the skill, daring and conviction of America’s greatest President, into moral gold.  Before his untimely demise, Lincoln had successfully secured the end of slavery in a legally unassailable way. (His earlier Emancipation Proclamation, in contrast, might have been struck down as a wartime exigency once a Peace Treaty was signed). 

In effect, the film was a resounding statement of faith in America’s "liberal mission", however much that’s been honoured 'more in the breach than th’observance' ever since.  The ironies that, 150 years ago, it was the Republicans who were on the side of the angels and the Democrats who were the obstructive element, are too obvious to belabour.  By focusing on the political procedurals more than the battles, Kushner & Spielberg seemed to suggest that, even from backroom deals and grubby compromises, worthy oaks can grow.  Given the continuing gridlock in the US political system, which at the time of writing has just come within twenty-four hours of a default, this modest message carries real contemporary force. 

'Keeper of the liberal flame',
the inimitable Mr Spielberg

Motley doesn’t mind admitting that (most uncharacteristically) he cried, briefly discovering a hitherto unsuspected Yankee corner in his, ahem, soul. Spielberg has an uncanny knack for piercing the tear ducts of even the most sceptical viewer. 

Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln was quite simply magnificent (you wouldn’t have believed he'd once been the young punk in ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’), commanding his disparate backers through force of personality and anecdotal sleight-of-hand.  Even the American accent didn't waver (so far as this Brit could tell).  The wonderfully craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones (as leading Congress radical Thaddeus Stephens) was in career-best form, and the ever-reliable Sally Field was also strong as Lincoln’s neurotic wife Mary. 

Kushner found clever ways of giving African-Americans more of a voice than they would have had at the time, while not shrinking from giving airtime to the horrendous racism of the day.  He daringly hinted at Lincoln’s platonic attraction to younger staff-members and soldiers, while wisely resisting re-enacting the assassination.  Flick was well-photographed (in chiaroscuro) and its emotional force accentuated by a powerful John Williams score, never more so than when surveying the battlefields. (The American Civil War entailed the grimmest casualty rates in history to that point, exceeded only by the trenches of the First World War.) 

[Incidentally, this was Motley's first visit to the swanky new Barbican Cinemas on Beech Street.  These were definitely an improvement, in terms of ambience, on the dingy basement that's still home to Cinemas 1 & 2. However the profusion of high-end eateries, with their high-end prices, did create rather a 'them-and-us' feel, separating clients from staff.  Is this what the arts are meant to be about?]