DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
---------------------------------------------------------
MS Speaks
HTML https://msspeaks.createaforum.com
---------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************
DIR Return to: MOVIES, TV
*****************************************************
#Post#: 156--------------------------------------------------
BRIGHTON ROCK (2010)
By: agate Date: February 5, 2014, 6:33 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[font=open sans][/font] Brighton Rock stands out among the
Graham Greene novels I have read because of its setting. I
associate Greene’s best work with far-flung settings–Africa,
Mexico–but [font=inherit]Brighton Rock[/font] captures the
seedy, down-at-heel milieu of the seaside town of Brighton. As I
recall the novel opens with a preliminary statement or epigraph
telling us that Brighton rock is a candy well known in Brighton:
a long column of hard candy with the word “Brighton” indelibly
in its center so that you keep eating the candy, but you never
get rid of that word “Brighton.” That statement, its position as
a prelude to the novel, along with the title, should tell us
that the candy–the type of candy it is–is central to the story.
[font=open sans][/font]
[font=open sans]That doesn’t come through in this movie, which
updates the 1938 novel and sets it in about 1964. This change
works fairly well although the Brighton of the 1930s may have
been the kind of place where you were apt to find someone like
Pinkie, the psychopathic teenage hood, just because of the
rackets that were probably so prevalent there at the time. I’m
not so sure that the Brighton of the 1960s would have been
similar, and the dialogue sometimes isn’t the sort of speech
that would have been spoken in the 1960s as well.[/font]
[font=open sans][/font]
[font=open sans]Critics have faulted the movie for jettisoning
the Catholicism of the novel, and, though I haven’t read the
novel in many years, the movie left a very different impression
on me. A scene with the naive Rose praying the rosary under a
crucifix and another scene involving nuns in a hospital or home
for unwed mothers at the end do not constitute Greene’s
Catholicism as it is usually reflected in his fiction.[/font]
[font=open sans][/font]
[font=open sans]Any statements about the Brighton rock candy,
which Pinkie uses to murder one of his victims, are pretty much
pushed into the background.[/font]
[font=open sans][/font]
[font=open sans]Don’t viewers wonder why the movie had this
title?[/font]
[font=open sans][/font]
[font=open sans]Then there is the ending. I don’t recall the
book’s ending but it certainly wasn’t the one this movie has.
Rose, still stricken by Pinkie’s violent death and about to give
birth to his child, finally gets around to listening to a record
she’d wanted him to make while they were together. As gaga as
she has been over Pinkie, it’s a bit too much of the long arm of
coincidence that when she finally has a chance to listen to it
(some nine months later by my calculation), the record just
happens to stick at the very point where she would have found
out that Pinkie’s statements were full of venom against her.
Eventually she’ll get the record unstuck, of course, and maybe
we can reassure ourselves that she will come to her senses at
that point.[/font]
[font=open sans][/font]
[font=open sans]The acting seems excellent throughout,
however–especially Helen Mirren as Ida and Andrea Riseborough as
Rose. And there are many scenes of Brighton that probably
capture exactly the Brighton Greene described–rundown, crowded,
sleazy–and dwarfed by the powerful ocean. The movie was well
worth watching for those scenes alone.[/font]
*****************************************************