PSA :: Prick Up Your Ears

[pauraque_bk]

PSA

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Prick Up Your Ears

Thanks to noblerot, I was finally persuaded to see Prick Up Your Ears, otherwise known in fandom as the one where Gary Oldman makes out with guys. (Had it been explained to me in the first place that one of the guys he makes out with was Alfred Molina, I doubt I would have waited so long.)

If you want to see a young Oldman making out with guys, in bed with guys, going out for rough trade, and smirking in an appealing fashion, the film certainly delivers that. It's also (and no one bothered to tell me this, either) a very good movie.

It's humanistic and mostly episodic, which of course is just the sort of thing I like. It comes to a gruesome end, but it's a true story, so you know that going in... it spends far more time on how these people lived than how they died. Despite the lurid qualities of their lifestyle, the structure of their relationship is strikingly ordinary-- a marriage that goes south.

The movie is rather cruel to its main characters, in differing ways. Ken is nakedly pathetic; at times one cringes at the humiliation to which the character is subjected. Joe is simpering and vulgar, and very difficult to read. Is anything that comes out of his mouth sincere? Is there a "real" Joe (John) Orton beyond the relentlessly coy façade?

These are not nice people. Joe is initially attracted to Ken on a nonconformist whim, simply because Ken is strange and morbid and unpopular (watch Oldman's face during the "cat" exercise in the acting class). Yet, a real friendship is present, visible when they're brought up on charges for defacing library books together, or when they fall down laughing at a private joke. It's that friendship that makes them interesting and... well, bearable.

One thing that threw me out was that it wasn't as sexually explicit as I thought it was going to be, or should have been to be entirely effective. These are indeed very vulgar people, and it seems strange to modestly cut away, particularly since this is all meant to be based on Joe's diaries, and we know what's in there. Also, I think being in fandom has accustomed me to a style of storytelling that understands that the way people have sex tells us a great deal about who they are and how they relate. I would have been very interested to see how these people fucked, just as we see how they did nearly everything else.

I wasn't enthused about the framing device, which didn't seem to add much or go anywhere. I also thought they pushed too hard at the end to "explain" the murder-suicide, breaking the show-don't-tell rule that had been followed so beautifully until then.

Nonetheless, I'd recommend the movie. The performances are excellent, and it ends up being a pretty raw portrayal of human jealousies and desperation. Due to a series of unfortunate events, I ended up having to buy the DVD to see it, and I'm not sorry I did.


I was going to discuss Boogie Nights in this post as well, which I also saw recently and actually liked better than Prick Up Your Ears, but I think I've already rambled on enough. Another time.

Comments

[misslucyjane]

Alfred Molina as in Doc Ock in Spiderman 2?

Mmmm, baby. My mind went blank from the pretty.

[pauraque]

Yup, that's the guy. Alfred/Gary OTP! Er, I mean... oh dear, I've been corrupted. How could that have happened...?

[misslucyjane]

I can't imagine! ::whistles innocently::

[threeoranges.livejournal.com]

I adore PRICK UP YOUR EARS (and have a fondness for smutty English double-entendre too, so the title rather predisposed me to it!) I would argue, however, that the sex in the film rather reflected the gay sex of the 'Fifties and Sixties - furtive, hidden away in corners and darkened lavatories and in woods at night. Consenting gay sex wasn't legal until 1967, the year of Orton's death, and I thought it both sad and fitting that it was never completely explicit in the film. (It was a stroke of anti-Establishment genius on Alan Bennett's part to set Joe and Kenneth's "first time" during the b/w live television broadcast of the Queen's Coronation, though.)

As for Joe's and Kenneth's sex life, I can certainly speculate on what happened - Kenneth was the dominant at first, then Joe started to refuse him sex as he realized his greater power and allure, leading to Halliwell strung along in a sexless and increasingly joyless relationship, a helpless voyeur if he was anything at all. I can speculate, but I don't need it writ large on the screen because Bennett's dialogue sparkles so much I'd rather have them talking than fucking. Like Halliwell's monologue on how much concentration he needs to have a wank - "You could probably do it right here and now, but for me it needs weeks of preparation! Armies need to be mobilized!" Tells me all I need to know about how he'd probably make love, actually.

I also didn't think Bennett "explained" the murder/suicide too much - it was poignant that Halliwell's last cry for help was delivered to Joe's slumbering body, and yet the dialogue was still funny. "You even SLEEP better than I do!" And then, as the audience is still chuckling, down comes the hammer. A nice shock tactic, I thought.

Poor old Halliwell. Molina played him superbly, all his resentment, arrogance and finally his crumbling self-belief. Twisted my heart, he did. Oldman's Orton was, as you pointed out, mostly an artificial construct because Orton took so much care to make himself an icon of callous beauty. "Mr Sloane, c'est moi!"

So yes, I love this movie. I have yet to see BOOGIE NIGHTS, but considering it has both William H. Macy and Philip Seymour Hoffman in it, I really should, shouldn't I?

[wootsauce.livejournal.com]

Man, your comment makes me want to see this movie. And I don't ever want to see movies!

[pauraque]

I see what you mean about the sexual concealment's symbolism; you may be right about the intent. There is a lot of that irony in the movie -- the other characters are clearly fascinated by this man and what he does, yet there's always a buffer of fiction protecting them from what the details of what he *actually* does (and who he actually is, in more ways than just his habits in bed). However, our perspective on the movie is not theirs; we're looking through his diaries, after his death, after that buffer's been torn down. I'm thinking of the scene where the writer's wife has her mother read Joe's shorthand... the modest old woman finding herself reading aloud the diary entry about having a wank on his mother's bed... So, I didn't really want to speculate, I wanted that intimacy.

Shock tactic or no, I just didn't really want that last monologue from Ken. It didn't add anything for me that I didn't already know, and felt oddly theatrical after such a long stretch of realism. You could argue he's truly become one of Joe's characters by that point, which is interesting, but it didn't quite work for me.

But I certainly agree with you that many elements of the movie are brilliant, and you couldn't have asked for more from the actors.

And yes, you should see Boogie Nights! (It has Alfred Molina in it as well, though briefly.) I think there were some interesting similarities between the two, which was why I wanted to talk about them together.

[pauraque]

Since we're at it, what was your take on the whole framing device? I was very unimpressed by Vanessa Redgrave's character... it seemed to me that she *wanted* to be important in Joe's life far more than she actually *was*.