Clive Owen and David Kelly Make Greenfingers Worthwhile; Jurassic III's a Smart Summer Movie
Clive Owen says more with silence than most actors can say in a page-long monologue. As a convicted murderer placed in an experimental, minimum-security work facility in Greenfingers, he says very little and listens constantly, but unlike some "reactive" performances, this one doesn't telegraph emotions through spell-it-all-out facial expressions. His deep, large eyes promise revelations but deliver only scraps of information, yet rather than drive you away, his guardedness makes you lean in and pay attention. His face remains a blank even when he's feeling intense emotion?and you have to guess what emotion.
It's the kind of performance that's often written off as merely workmanlike, but anybody who would be that dismissive isn't worth listening to. It's damned hard to pare an actor's toolkit down to the barest bones and still connect with the audience, and the handful of actors who can do it?actors like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Clint Eastwood?find themselves caught in a career-long conundrum, adored by the audience and appreciated by the entertainment industry, but dismissed by critics as cautious or limited.
The writer-director of Greenfingers, Joel Hershman, is a smart cookie who knows that such concerns are nonsense. He doesn't make many inspired choices?the movie, based on a New York Times Magazine article about hardened felons who rediscover their humanity through gardening, is a predictable, safe, standard-issue charming Brit comedy, too obviously geared toward the Full Monty/Waking Ned Devine crowd?but he knows a sure bet when he sees it, and Owen's face is a sure bet. When in doubt, Hershman cuts to a closeup of Owen listening, or pretending not to listen, or smoking a cigarette and thinking. Each time, I found myself leaning forward in my seat, wondering what he was thinking, or guessing and then wondering if my guess was wrong. Although the film is just okay, Owen's performance, and the director's appreciation of his performance, verge on greatness, because they remind you that real art lets the audience engage with it.
Greenfingers begins near the end of the story, with Owen's character, Colin Briggs, writing an apologetic note to his girlfriend, then breaking a florist's window, stealing flowers and leading the cops on a chase through town; the cops are in a squad car and he's on a granny bike. Clearly, Colin wants to go back to prison, and in due time, we'll find out why.
An extended flashback shows him a few years earlier, newly transferred to HMP Edgefield, a minimum-security facility in the Cotswolds that boasts no manacles, fences or surveillance cameras. The place is predicated on the notion that even the most violent inmates can get closer to rehabilitation if they're trusted, treated decently and trained to perform a useful job. Colin, a Bogie-style loner, accepts the transfer but is not impressed when the prison's governor, Hodge (Warren Clarke), extols the virtues of the prison's relaxed, congenial vibe and offers him a list of possible trades to study. "I'm not looking to bond with no one," he says. "I just want to do my time and keep my nose clean. With my record, when I get out of here I'll be lucky to have any kind of job at all. So, whatever." The Governor doesn't take kindly to prideful loners, and assigns Colin to clean toilets.
This being an unsurprising comedy, we know Colin is destined to be humanized?broken down into a somewhat warmer, more caring individual?and it's only a question of when. Fortunately, Hershman and Owen think highly enough of the audience to make the process gradual, and to permit Colin to fight his own regeneration. The film has many moments when Colin could reveal a warm, soft interior, but he evades nearly all of them. He resists friendly overtures by an elderly inmate named Fergus Wilks (David Kelly of Waking Ned Devine), a cornball chatterbox who loves to paint; the guy keeps sitting across from Colin in the cafeteria and talking his ear off even though Colin repeatedly and firmly suggests that he shut the hell up.
On a groundskeeping detail, Fergus plants some double violet seeds a short distance from a patch of grass the other inmates use as a soccer field, and Colin thinks Fergus is nuts for even bothering. We know what's coming, but when the moment arrives, we're still surprised, perhaps even moved: Fergus and Colin check in on the flowers months later and discover that they've flourished in what should have been inhospitable limestone soil. This could have been an overdone moment, but the star and director play it as intelligently and coolly as possible.
In short order, the Governor orders gardening added to the list of trades, and assigns Colin to be in charge of cultivating the prison's greenery. To his astonishment, Colin becomes obsessed with gardening, and cajoles some burly inmates into caring as well. Colin, soon to be nicknamed "Greenfingers," learns the value of work and self-improvement by engaging in a pursuit that's still dismissed by many as women's work; his fellow inmates learn the same lesson.
A famous British gardening expert, Georgina Woodhouse (Helen Mirren), is shanghaied into visiting the inmates' garden and pronounces it messy but promising, and highly original; soon the program becomes the subject of media attention, and Georgina invites the crew to work the grounds of her estate, which paves the way for their entry into the prestigious Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.
It all sounds terribly inspirational and cutesy, I know?and for the most part, it is. Hershman doesn't trust the material the way he trusts Owen. He seems not to realize that he doesn't need the romantic subplot between Owen and Georgina's beautiful but neglected daughter Primrose (Natasha Little); he doesn't need the overly explicit dialogue that dummy-proofs themes that already came through loud and clear in the images?such as when a fellow inmate grouses, "This is woman's work," or when the Governor quotes George Bernard Shaw: "The best place to seek God is in a garden; you can dig for him there."
The soundtrack is a bit much as well; when Tears for Fears' "Sowing the Seeds of Love" makes an appearance, you wait for a joke that never comes.
Owen's performance is immune to such mistakes. He holds your attention by doing nothing more than is necessary; when in doubt, he doesn't do or say anything. His tactical restraint lends both the character and the movie an emotional gravity it doesn't always earn. He imbues even simple gestures with mystery and weight, yet you don't sense the thought behind his choices. By today's buffed-up, exfoliated standards, Owen isn't pretty?but that's what makes him handsome. His face is lined from life, and his deep-set eyes promise more than his characters are prepared to deliver. He doesn't have a stereotypically theatrical speaking voice; it's a reedy tenor, slightly fuzzy around the edges, introspective, well-suited to voiceover narration. Either he's drawn to reactive, alienated roles?the novelist-blackjack dealer hero of Croupier, the nearly blind detective in the BBC series Second Sight?or it just turned out that way (you never know with actors). In any case, he's already established himself as the rare actor who can turn melodrama into drama by refusing to do more than the audience requires.
The bone-thin, ascot-clad Kelly nearly pulls off the same miraculous feat, but because Fergus is a much more talkative, obviously "colorful" fellow, his job is even more difficult than Owen's. Yet in quiet scenes between Fergus and Colin, Kelly still manages delicate exchanges that hint at a surrogate father-son relationship and explore it more eloquently than Hershman's on-the-nose dialogue. And Kelly achieves one moment of sublime eloquence without even showing his face?a closeup of Fergus' aged hands, smoothing the dirt over buried bulbs with a nearly sacred tenderness. "I'm not the confessing type," Colin says at one point. No matter: the best actors don't need words.
This is a smart summer movie, made with a sense of both craft and common sense, and unburdened by pretensions towards allegory; and when director Joe Johnston (October Sky) lifts gags and moments from earlier sci-fi action pictures, including James Cameron's Aliens, he doesn't pretend, like Spielberg, that he's not doing what he's doing.
Sam Neill, who made surprisingly little impact in the first Jurassic Park, returns as the dinosaur expert Alan Grant, who's hired under false pretenses to revisit the critter preserve and find a missing child. (Like Newt in Aliens, the kid has learned how to survive by understanding the habits of his would-be predators.) There's a new super-beast on hand, a fin-backed, razor-toothed dragon known as the Spinosaurus, who's so big and bad that he can snap a T-rex's neck like a cat administering the coup-de-grace to an unwary sparrow; the Velociraptors reappear, sporting what appears to be the primitive equivalent of language; and there's an extended sequence involving winged, needle-beaked Pteranodons that's as spooky and intricately choreographed as anything in the first two films.
William H. Macy and Tea Leoni are surprisingly affecting as the lost boy's divorced parents, who predictably reunite under pressure (they do dumb things not because the plot requires it, but because they're civilians who are in over their heads). And Jurassic I costar Laura Dern makes a gracious cameo that actually adds up to something in the end.
There are no moments of unbearable suspense akin to the T-rex attack in the first movie, but the whole contraption works better overall. And Johnston pulls off one running gag involving a missing satellite phone that's the funniest, creepiest bit of business I've seen in quite some time; you'll know what I'm talking about when you see it.
It's not a great movie?none of the Jurassic Park movies was great?and it recycles the same damn plot as the previous ones. Still, in the summer of Tomb Raider, you might find yourself feeling grateful to the filmmakers for staging coherent action scenes involving characters who look and act like people instead of Sony PlayStation images. Jurassic Park III proves that big, playful, elegant entertainment has not become extinct.