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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Samantha Morton rules the screen in Lynne Ramsay's strange and powerful tale of a young Scottish woman dealing (or not dealing) with her boyfriend's Christmas suicide.
Dec 20, 2002 | Even within the strange and wonderful world of contemporary Scottish novels, Alan Warner's 1995 "Morvern Callar" was a revelation. Written in the first person, in language that's partly Scottish dialect and partly impressionist dots and dashes, it's the story of a young woman -- the Morvern Callar of the title -- whose boyfriend commits suicide on Christmas Day. What she does afterward is sometimes a bit puzzling and other times completely baffling. But she becomes less and less foreign to us as she finds her way through her grief -- Warner seems to be suggesting that there are times when we don't know how to feel things, and fumbling our way along is the only route. The book's emotional landscape is stark and direct, denuded of the flora of sentimentality. It's a picture of a woman who has been scraped raw by grief, but who also reaches out to the chance at freedom it affords her.
I would have thought "Morvern Callar" an unfilmable book, or at least one that would be easy to botch. But Lynne Ramsay, director of "Ratcatcher" -- and the director who has signed to adapt Alice Sebold's bestseller "The Lovely Bones" -- has turned it into a work of astonishing delicacy and force, a tone poem about the Frankenstein jolts that all of us, at one time or another, have to live through. (Ramsay co-wrote the screenplay with Liana Dognini.) "Morvern Callar" is a small movie and not a particularly detailed one; it drifts by on mood and nuance and suggestion. But the picture grows richer and more mournful as it moves along -- its sense of rhythm always pushes forward, like the tide forcing its way up the shore inch by inch. It has no formal dramatic structure whatsoever, and yet what's there is so wholly felt that it seems almost classical -- a sustained fugue that catches us up gently and carries us to a place we never would have expected.
Recalling "Morvern Callar" days afterward, I found myself remembering it as almost a silent movie, even thought it does, of course, have dialogue, not to mention a great deal of suggestive and very carefully chosen music. "Morvern Callar" feels silent because of the face of its star, Samantha Morton, who plays Morvern. Morton played an endearing young mute girl in Woody Allen's "Sweet & Lowdown," and then a virtually mute (and mutant) character in Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report."
Much as I acknowledge Morton's role in the Allen movie as brilliant casting, I don't think it's why I associate her with the tradition of silent-film acting. Her features are nothing like those of Lillian Gish, but I see something of Gish in her. There's sweetness and vulnerability, of course, but there's also something else. Silent film, for obvious reasons, often favored actors who could write their feelings in large loops on the screen. But Gish's performances were shockingly interior. The camera opened up to her to drink in all she had to say, to get every wordless drop. I think Morton has a similar command over the camera -- it's not egotism but rather a special kind of gentle, unspoken authority. In a world of beautiful or even just striking actresses, she's a face. That face -- it has the acorn shape of a girl on a '20s valentine -- is all eyes, and it's possible to find yourself searching them intently, sometimes at the expense of actually listening to her lines. They have a language all their own.
"Morvern Callar"
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
Starring Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott
Morton is the perfect actress to play Morvern. The movie opens with a shot of her lying on the floor, curled protectively around a man we can't quite see, gently stroking his face. The camera pulls back to show us the pools of blood that have collected under his wrists; he used to be a man, but now he's just a dead body sprawled in a doorway, animated by the false hope of blinking Christmas tree lights.
Later, Morvern seems almost blasé about the body -- she circles it curiously, eyeing it almost suspiciously, as if there were actually some need to weigh the obvious evidence in front of her. Her boyfriend -- about whom we learn almost nothing throughout the course of the movie -- has left a note: "Sorry Morvern. Don't try to understand. It just seemed like the right thing to do." The note explains that he has left money in a bank account that Morvern is to use for his funeral. He has also left his completed novel on the computer; Morvern is to print it out and send it to the publishers he has indicated, starting with the first one on the list.
There aren't a whole lot of logical explanations for the things Morvern does next. But that's precisely the point. "Morvern Callar" is about the inexplicability, and the fierce and deep individuality, of grief. Morvern tears into the presents her boyfriend has wrapped up for her, a last act of generosity before that knife-twisting act of selfishness: A cowhide jacket, a cigarette lighter, a Walkman and a tape labeled "Music for you." She scrutinizes the presents, absorbing the reality of them through her fingers.
Next thing we know, she's readying herself for a night out, putting on a black dress, some sheer stockings, a pair of sandals, a gold name necklace (not, incidentally, her own name). She heads out to meet her friend, Lanna (the quietly sensational Kathleen McDermott, who has never acted before) for a night of drinking and dancing and falling into bed with whomever. She doesn't tell Lanna, or anyone else, what has happened. Eventually, she simply says numbly, "He left."
