Review of Local Hero - Tolland High School
Review of Local Hero
from Taking It All In by Pauline Kael
Night Life
The Scottish comedy Local Hero is misleading in the most disarming way imaginable. Experience at the movies has led us to expect a whole series of clarifications, but they don't arrive. After a while, their non-arrival becomes a relief, and we may laugh at ourselves for having thought we needed them. The film also offers a special pleasure to those of us who grew up listening to the recording of Sir Harry Lauder singing "Roamin' in the Gloamin'." We finally have a chance to experience that Scottish form of entrancement when the gloaming – an opalescent twilight – is made visible to us; night is magical in this movie, as it should be. In the opening section, set in a Houston skyscraper that houses the headquarters of Knox Oil, an ace mergers-and-acquisitions executive, Mac (Peter Riegert), is being sent to Scotland to buy Ferness, a fishing village on a bay which the conglomerate (headed by Burt Lancaster)
has decided should be the site of a new refinery. It's a cheesy, coy opening, with poorly timed satirical gags, but there's a hint of something more subtle and original when Mac uses a phone to talk to someone who's only a glass partition away. And even before Mac reaches Ferness – when the tall Danny
(Peter Capaldi), a young Scots employee of Knox, is driving him to the coast, and fog swirls around their car and causes them to hit a rabbit – the atmosphere, the tempo, everything changes. The two men, who spend the night in the fogbound car, seem becalmed. And by the time Mac and Danny (with the
stunned rabbit in the back seat) reach the village, Mac, the fireball master of the telex, with a beeper watch and a briefcase that has a battery-powered lock, has internalized the fog. He's stunned, too; he has gone soft in the head.
The writer-director Bill Forsyth observes the people in the movie – and especially his young heroes – as if they were one-of-a-kind creatures in a peculiarly haphazard zoo. Riegert brought off some stoned double takes as the amiable, sponging friend of the hero in Chilly Scenes of Winter; here his role
requires him to sustain one big, rapt double take for the whole picture. He's the butt of Forsyth's humor, and at the same time he's the person we empathize with. That may be part of the film's seductiveness, and it helps that Forsyth is rarely explicit about anything – the picture is like one of those lovely Elizabethan songs that are full of tra-la-la-la-la-las. Riegert's tranced-in Mac never formulates his infatuation with the villagers, the crescent of beach, the glistening bay, the starlight, and the good, dark beer; we see the effect it all has on him in his wistful, stupefied face. He's experiencing something new to him: happiness. And he doesn't know what to make of it – for Mac, happiness is indistinguishable from lunacy. Capaldi's Danny, who observes what's going on around them – that the practical-minded villagers are secretly holding meetings to discuss how they can get the highest prices out of Mac – doesn’t intrude on Mac's preoccupation. Danny, with his child's head smiling from on top of his galumphing body, as if it weren't quite sure how it got up there, grabs his chances to go off and spend time in the bay with a marine
biologist (Jenny Seagrove), who also works for Knox. Danny has a stiff, jerky walk; when he makes a getaway from Mac he hunches his shoulders, pulls his elbows in close to his body, and takes off at a run, his lower arms gyrating. He's like a big, floppy gooney-bird. The enticing biologist, who seems to
live in the water, has a hint of iridescence about her; the possibility that she's a mermaid doesn't faze Danny any more than anything else in life does.
The other young hero – the most relaxed actor of a large, relaxed cast – is Denis Lawson, as Gordon, the village innkeeper, pub owner, accountant, unofficial mayor, and great lover. Lawson plays Gordon's functions as different aspects of his personality. Gordon the pub owner is a genial companion,
but Gordon the innkeeper is brusque and formal: he will do exactly what is required of an innkeeper, and not a hairbreadth more. Gordon the accountant is a slippery fellow – he oozes insincerity. Gordon the leader of the community is frank and good-humored. And Gordon the man-of-the-world lover is smugly pleased with himself when he's alone with his bride (Jennifer Black). There's something of the dandy in Denis Lawson's approach to comedy; he makes each of Gordon's functions funny in a suavely different high style – each has its own tics and gestures, its own type of self-satisfaction. Dark and intense, he's an ideal screen actor – he draws the camera by the control inside his ease.
The exchanges among these three men are low-key and very odd, with Gordon handling the negotiations for the villagers and sizing up Mac, figuring out how far he can push him, and Danny taking sidelong glances at Mac and vaguely wondering if he's as out of it as he seems. (Danny is too giddy to
give it a lot of thought.) The humor is dry, yet the picture is romantic in spirit, and Burt Lancaster has something to do with that. He doesn't have a large role, and he's at a disadvantage because most of his scenes are in crosscuts back to unenchanted Houston, but Lancaster is convincing as a sturdy, physically powerful man, and even more convincing as a man of authority whose only intimacy is with the stars above. In his penthouse office-apartment in the Knox skyscraper, this tycoon presses the button that opens the sliding dome of his planetarium and he stands under the constellations. Lancaster has an
imperial romantic aura; he belongs there, on top of a tower under the stars, and I doubt if there are many actors who could convey so much by just standing there. The tycoon's telescope has an echo effect in moviegoers' memories: Lancaster was also devoted to astronomy in Visconti's The Leopard, and Forsyth may have carried that theme over. But there's something more deeply right about the image here. A stargazing reserve has become apparent in Lancaster's recent performances: it's as if he finally felt free enough to be himself on the screen – to let us see that he has thoughts he feels no need to communicate. The welcome familiarity of his speech rhythms tells us something: he, too, is one of a kind. There's nobody else in the world with a voice like that-the smoothness with the remnant of roughness underneath.
Forsyth, by glorying in the plumage of each person's singularity, somehow makes one-of-a-kindness seem infinitely wonderful and absurd.
This young (thirty-five) writer-director has invented his own form of poetic comedy. His style is far more personal and aberrant than that of the popular British comedies of the fifties, which, in general, were made from tightly knit, cleverly constructed scripts. Forsyth seems to go where impulse and instinct guide him; he's an entertainer-filmmaker who gives free play to his own sense of the ridiculous and his own sense of beauty. He gets a lyrical performance from the silvery surf at night, and there are great happenings in the luminous skies – the aurora borealis and a whizzing meteor shower. The village and the bay live up to the dream-stricken expression on Mac's face. Mac has found paradise, and in a place where English is spoken – a transformed English, made softer and more lulling by cadences that drift upward.
Local Hero isn't any major achievement, but it has its own free-form shorthand for jokes, and it's true to itself. No conflict ever emerges in this film (though one is clearly seething inside Mac's head); nobody even throws a punch. Forsyth's understatement – his muting of effects – creates a delicately
charged comic atmosphere. There are no payoffs to gags; you get used to some oddity and then it disappears. The humor is in people's idiosyncratic behavior, and once Forsyth gets into his stride everything is unexpected and nothing is forced. (The only thing that isn't distinctive about Local Hero is its prosaic title, which doesn't seem to refer to anyone in particular.) Sometimes Forsyth's ideas are close to quaint – as in the character of Victor (Christopher Rozycki), the captain of a Russian trawler, who is as robust as all getout. But Forsyth carries out even this idea in a way that redeems it – the Russian's accent is just what's needed at a Ferness celebration when he sings "Lone Star Man" with The Ace Tones, a group of adolescent local boys whose country rock has a slightly woozy cross-cultural sound. (One of the musicians is John Gordon Sinclair, who was the hero of Forsyth's last film, Gregory's Girl.) You
may hear yourself laughing at jokes you can't really explain, such as Mac's unwitting violation of protocol: he's talking to a group of village men who hang out together, and, pointing to an infant in their midst, he asks "Whose baby?" Nobody answers.
In the scene that I like best, Mac, alone on the misty beach, takes off his watch, so that he can stick his hands into the water and scoop up shells. He puts it on some rocks and moves a small distance away. And the forgotten watch, inundated by the tide, beeps underwater to the sea creatures swimming by. That's an almost perfect example of how Forsyth handles the theme of the collision of cultures. It isn't the Scots who are offended by the American hotshot's business equipment; it's the fish.
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