A Descent Into Madness

I've been going to the cinema quite a lot recently, which is partly a post-lockdown splurge and partly the coincidence of the London Film Festival, so I thought I'd regale you with my observations on two very different films with a common link. No, not Timothée Chalamet in The French Dispatch and Dune, though I'm sure there's a piece to be written about Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve's different approaches to fantasy. The two films are Robert Egger's monochrome The Lighthouse, which came out in 2019 but which I only got round to seeing at the Wimbledon Film Club this week, and Pablo Larrain's colourful Spencer, which premiered at the London Film Festival and is on general release from today. What links them is a descent into madness: the one in an extreme form that evokes Greek tragedy at its most prophetic and bloody, and the other in a more symbolic manner, centred on the slipperiness of personal identity, whose literary touchstone is Shakespeare rather than Sophocles (despite the ready-made parallel of Antigone, a princess condemned to a living tomb).

The Lighthouse is a two-hander that has obvious echoes of the dramatic form, from Beckett and Pinter to Steptoe & Son. Willem Dafoe plays the veteran lighthouse keeper (or "wickie") Thomas Wake, while Robert Pattinson plays Ephraim Winslow, the tyro with an obscure past (he turns out to be another man altogether, Thomas Howard, who has assumed the identity of a dead colleague). Brought together for the first time, they must spend a month on a remote island lighthouse, somewhere off the coast of New England in the late nineteenth century. On the day before their relief, after a grumpy co-existence marked by very different views on the apprentice keeper's character and work-rate, they are trapped by a fierce storm, which the superstitious old-timer thinks was brought about by the younger man's killing of an annoying one-eyed gull. With their supplies exhausted or spoiled and only strong drink for solace, they slowly, and then quickly, descend into madness. 

In terms of cinema, it's The Birds meets a low-budget Apocalypse Now, though you can also find visual references to everything from L'Atalante to Oh! Mister Porter and any number of classic Westerns. It's a supremely referential work, though this perhaps leads to excess in the screenplay, written by Eggers and his brother Max. The film could have been shorter than its 110 minutes. The largely voiceless scenes featuring other actors, notably the mermaid and the recollection of the actual Ephraim Winslow, whose identity Thomas Howard has taken after the former's accidental (but preventable) death, felt like off-stage references expanded in the translation to a more expansive medium. The debate over whether the film could best be described as a horror or a psychological thriller really relates to its length. If cut down to nearer an hour, and with less show (and blood) to augment the tell, it would have been closer to the tradition of the BBC's A Ghost Story at Christmas. Expanded, its padding tends towards the Hitchcockian, even in its conscious nods to George Cukor's Gaslight.

The literary references are extensive: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and Greek legend are perhaps the most obvious. Indirectly, the evocation of Coppola's masterpiece, which famously featured a shot of Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer's The Golden Bough on Colonel Kurtz's bedside table, points to a mysticism that marries Christianity and pagan ritual. There is confession ("spilling the beans"), thrice-times denial and blood sacrifice. The central motif is the theft of fire, in the form of the lantern, which Thomas Wake jealously guards. Winslow spies the old fella disrobing before it at night in an ecstatic, sexualised communion that reminded me of Danny Boyle's 2007 film Sunshine. The final scene sees the Promethean Winslow on a rock having his liver plucked out by a bird. Wake is both Triton and Proteus (the sons of Poseidon), the former explicit in one of his thundering speeches, the latter implicit in Winslow's suspicion of the older man's honesty and clichéd mannerisms. 

But Howard/Winslow is also protean and one of the features of the film is how Robert Pattinson seems to look at different times like a callow youth and at others like a hard-bitten veteran. This is less the actor's mercurial skill than the director's determination to unmoor the characters and make them seem more plastic and unreliable. In this vein Willem Dafoe revisits some of the madness of his Vincent Van Gogh (2018's At Eternity's Gate), while at other times he looks, and acts, like a miniature version of Charlton Heston's Moses from The Ten Commandments. Weaker actors would have buckled under the strain of a story that is often silly - the ripe language, the petty squabbles, the wanking and farting - but expected to carry a huge symbolic freight. The gap could have led to unintentional bathos but it's a mark of the film-maker's skill and that of the actors that it largely maintains the tension between the two, even indulging in some moments of outright comedy, such as the argument over the quality of Wake's cooking, which justifies the comparison to Steptoe & Son. 

Cuisine is also central to Spencer, an imagined tale of Christmas at Sandringham in 1991 with all the trimmings. The date places the events shortly before the publication of Andrew Morton's book on the Princess of Wales, which revealed the sham of her marriage, her and Charles's affairs and her suicidal thoughts. Diana, convincingly played by Kristen Stewart, teeters on the edge of a breakdown in the face of the Windsors' coldness and dedication to suffocating habit in food, clothing and blood sports. In the first scene at table she hallucinates eating her own pearls (if you're going to have an eating disorder, make it classy). She is deferentially menaced by a fictional embodiment of the royal establishment, played by Timothy Spall, who bangs on about service while regaling her with a bloody tale of a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, the one intrusion of reality that feels tonally uncertain in a film that is otherwise a clever ghost story in which Diana Spencer haunts the royals ahead of her own death. The subject of the film is identity. The princess is cast in the role of the Prince of Denmark, with a hint that "not to be" is her fate. Given that she's also the ghost, there's an obscure (and perhaps accidental) parallel here to Stephen Dedalus's theory about Hamlet in James Joyce's Ulysses.

In contrast, her husband, who is more usually associated with the tortured prince by our fawning media, is best summarised in the words of Nigel Molesworth as "utterly wet and a weed". In a difficult role, Jack Farthing manages to communicate both the man's fussy irritation and abiding immaturity through an economy of mannerisms and speech. The rest of the Royal Family are eminently forgettable, which is probably the most realistic feature of the film. To provide dramatic foils worthy of this heightened Diana, the screenplay invents not only Spall's menacing factotum but a sympathetic chef and a dresser, played by Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins, who personify elements of the fictional Diana's character (self-care and self-love) and are also representative of the people's otherwise mute chorus (the one scene that involves actual civilians, absent the press, sees them open-mouthed at her appearance in a roadside café as she seeks directions). 

The key scene between Diana and Charles, in which he lectures her about the need to divide oneself into public and private personas, features a snooker table and some passive-aggressive ball rolling. This is one of many clichéd tropes in a film that is perfectly happy to indulge them in spades: long corridors, candlelit dinners (both of which echo Stanley Kubrick), rocking horses and a midnight raid on a room-sized fridge. What holds all this together is a magnetic performance by Stewart and a Diana who is much more unpredictable than she was in real life - summed up by arguably one of the finest masturbation jokes ever commited to the big screen. Though the real-life princess was a fashion icon, the film goes beyond mere dressing-up to employ clothes as a motif of both the uncertainty of identity and the constraints of formality (every outfit has been planned in advance, there is no spontaneity). Early in the film she takes a scarecrow's battered and torn jacket, convinced it belonged to her father when they lived nearby, as a souvenir of her life as a Spencer.

What the two films share, beyond cooking and wanking, is the suspicion that an invented or adopted persona is a first step towards madness, which is obviously an in-joke for people who work with actors. Thomas Howard, pretending to be Ephraim Winslow, never makes it off the rock but Diana Spencer, trapped in the public character of the Princess of Wales, manages to escape temporarily, with her sons singing along in her open-top car, to an afternoon of obscurity and fast-food in London. Of course we all know that this is a temporary reprieve and that tragedy awaits. The other link between the films is that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart became screen superstars together in the adaptations of the Twilight vampire novels. They have moved on to more substantial fare since, but both remain attracted to the roles of troubled characters with uncertain identities. If there is a moral to these two tales, apart from avoid lighthouses and Prince Charles, it is that you must make your own character or have it made for you.