Boy Gone Wild
ALFIE PROVIDES AUDIENCES the indulgence withheld by Mike Leigh's Vera Drake. It's a bachelor's romp about sex without consequence. At best, it features only the self-pity of its title character (played by pretty Jude Law) who, here, is far less bound by the strictures of his society than in the original 1966 Alfie. The heartless bastard played by Michael Caine seemed more genuine, a playboy corrupted by the early uncertainties of the sexual revolution. Caine's Alfie was "real" in the same way as the title character of Vera Drake, who is foiled by her world's undiscussed class and gender repression. Law's Alfie stands in contradistinction to both.
Comparing Alfie to Vera Drake might seem surprising since Alfie is being sold as a sex comedy and Vera Drake as a serious drama, but there is more to this parallel than just a contrast between commercial junk and art cinema. These films illustrate the difference between exploiting the ideas people live by and credibly reflecting them. More bluntly: One movie lies, the other reveals.
The original Alfie was pop product created to explain changing mores to its audience just as Mike Leigh looks back to the "dark ages" of the 1950s to reexamine presumably clearly defined issues about sexual behavior. This Alfie is not conceived so well. Made as an opportunity to resell what is misremembered as a sex farce, it caters to the hedonistic thrill of the reality-tv era. (Law struts by billboards proclaiming DESIRE, WISH, SEARCH.) Our culture is not reflected back in Law's insincere adventures; the film's artificiality guarantees that contemporary cultural norms remain unexamined.
The digital-video style of this new Alfie immediately indicates some form of flashy prevarication. Director Charles Shyer takes the prerogative to evade the dilemma-abortion-that was at the heart of the 1966 Alfie. That morality tale about a British playboy who crushes the hearts of several women found its emotional core and exposed his callousness when one of those women (played by Vivien Merchant) had an abortion. Scenes of Merchant's loneliness, anguish and vomiting put brakes on Swinging London's sexual free-for-all. At that moment Alfie did more than revel in its raconteur's priapic privilege.
Of all that era's movies to deal with abortion (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Love with the Proper Stranger and The L-Shaped Room), only Alfie focused on the male's obligation. It showed the emotional wreckage of its characters' lives-the same insight that distinguishes Vera Drake. Leigh's protagonist (played by Imelda Staunton) is a working-class woman who busies herself with duty and benevolence (each indistinguishable in her eyes). That she helps other poor and younger women "in trouble" by inducing abortion makes her representative of a barely defined-and naively understood-social good. Vera does a society's dirty work; just as the original Alfie grasped the liberty to do dirty deeds. Both unconsciously embody mainstream ideology. But the new Alfie is so oblivious to dirt and dishonesty that this remake undergoes a morality shift. When Lonette tells Alfie she is pregnant, he drives her to the abortionist as if it ain't no than.
Vera Drake becomes the year's most powerful movie by reminding audiences that abortion isn't merely political; that good deeds can look criminal under the law, that even our social needs can be morally contradictory. Because abortion is an issue the media has slanted toward liberal bias, there has been little recent dramatic discourse (only fractious polemical discourse). Alexander Payne's 1996 Citizen Ruth was issue-oriented (yet committed to character idiosyncrasy) but Leigh's ultra-humanist approach-his most intensified filmmaking since Naked-goes straight down the middle of the controversy. And yet its truth (Vera=truth, critic John Demetry pointed out) moves all sides.
We've become so accustomed to filmmaking that is socially unconscious that polemics are all we expect, even the dramatized polemics of HBO's first installment of If These Walls Could Talk films where each generation of a house's inhabitants suffers an abortion horror story (as if it were The Amityville Abortion House). This Alfie camouflages its polemics in sentimental sex farce, which may be the most disingenuous tactic of all. It fits too easily into blithe polemic. Not only is the plot already familiar, but Alfie's irresponsibility is predictable (it even lacks the post-feminist sense of inconvenience). However, Vera Drake has real suspense. We don't know where Leigh's story is going, because the gravity of abortion and the ramifications of heterosexual license have never before been dealt with in such a frank and complicated way. A political/moral breakthrough occurs when Vera stands on trial and Leigh dissolves from this little woman trapped in a huge predicament to an intimate image that represents her interior state: the blank blue eyes of someone utterly without political sophistication. This Vera, whose laughter registers as both innocence and fear, whose tears flow from a bottomless lack of awareness, isn't a martyr for the left; she's a casualty of her times.
That was nearly the jolt of the original Alfie. The abortion subject raised that movie above the stylish hedonism that is this new film's heartless, audience-baiting purpose. The original more honestly linked a vision of moral behavior to social customs, cautioning against the thrall of new erotic opportunities. Leigh similarly captures a social mood. Although Vera Drake is set in the 50s, it shows that regardless of the era, people still shape their lives according to social trust and faith (beautifully confirmed in a pledge by Vera's son-in-law). The film doesn't simply describe its title character's life, but through Vera's personal behavior and patterns of thought, a society's conflicted moral structure is analyzed. In '66, Alfie's idea of social climbing required keeping women on their backs; Vera's idea of survival is to help her cohorts sustain themselves through (as Morrissey has sung) "the next great wound."
Shockingly, these circumstances as reflected in 2004 Manhattan are merely carnivalesque for Charles Shyer; that's why he casually degrades the look of the real world with this Alfie's trendy digital-video blur and artificially enhanced color (shot by Ashley Rowe). Manhattan's Soho looks like London's Soho due to Shyer's insulting video esthetic. One of the marvels of Vera Drake is its art direction that evokes 50s England without nostalgia, but pinpointing the era when fashion (silk slips, men's pyjamas) displayed sexual conformity. We see how the romantic habits of both affluent and working-class people reflect distance-and fear-between men and women. Leigh knows this has passed only superficially, that confusion persists as a matter of nature and custom.
A new Alfie ought to share this same awareness, but Shyer has traduced Alfie's "adult" content to fit the frat-boy mischief of the American Pie demographic. Alfie's openness as a white man willing to betray his black friend Marlon (Omar Epps) seems doubly opportunistic and less insightful than the bigotry Leigh points out when Vera defends a black "client" to an associate (Ruth Sheen) who is caught-up in post-war illegal trade as a white person's social entitlement.
Shyer never questions Alfie's entitlement to conquer American women. During Alfie and Lonette's mutual seduction, Shyer's glitz ignores nature and custom and inputs all the clichés (Teddy Pendergrass' "Love TKO") that signify hipsterism. Never mind that Jude Law's Alfie was made irrelevant by his performance in A.I. as Gigolo Joe-the sex machine robot who became aware of his own obsolescence. ("I am. I was.") This Alfie takes audiences as far as possible from the profound fantasy of A.I. and the profound naturalism of Vera Drake. Shyer retools Alfie to promote envy for lives lived without feeling. If ever there were a movie that proved we have forgotten where we came from-politically, spiritually and culturally-this is it.