Director: Gillian Armstrong
Starring: Guy Pearce, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Saoirse Ronan, Timothy Spall
Since launching Down Under Flix in 2016, I’ve reviewed much of Gillian Armstrong’s wholly Australian output, covering Starstruck, High Tide, and The Last Days of Chez Nous on Down Under Flix, and revisiting Starstruck as well as an early documentary, Fourteen’s Good, Eighteen’s Better, for Senses of Cinema. The contemporaneity of this line-up is striking given our popular conception of Armstrong as a period film director. Certainly her feature debut, My Brilliant Career, was a period film, as were her subsequent Hollywood films (Mrs Soffel, Little Women) and Australian-international co-productions (Oscar and Lucinda, Charlotte Gray), but she was not beholden to this mould for her wholly home-grown features. This suggests Hollywood and international film financiers have been beholden to a view of Armstrong’s work that emerged largely from My Brilliant Career, and we in turn are beholden to that typecasting.
Death Defying Acts, another period film and Australian-international co-production, centres on Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her daughter Benji (Saoirse Ronan), a mother-daughter faux psychic act on skid row after their theatre closes in 1920s Edinburgh. The famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) visits Edinburgh on his world tour, with a side gig—to the chagrin of his manager (Timothy Spall)—of exposing phoney spiritualists. When he offers $10,000 to anyone who can reveal his departed mother’s final words, Mary and Benji take up the challenge, using both legitimate and illegitimate means. As the story unfolds, it emerges that the chicanery is not entirely one-sided.
As a celebrity, Houdini continues to exert an impressive hold on our imaginations almost a hundred years after his death. Having said that, most of what I know about Houdini I know from movies, which is to say I know very little about Houdini, apart from what movies choose to tell me. There are certain historical figures (monarchs, mobsters, military and Old West figures, J. Edgar Hoover, etc.) who have become hollowed-out signifiers that Hollywood re-customises, not unlike a movie prop, from production to production to suit different functions. Howard Hughes, for example, can be a tragic visionary (The Aviator), romantic match-maker (Rules Don’t Apply), or benevolent benefactor of superhero equipment (The Rocketeer) or inheritances (Melvin & Howard), among other things, and either completely lucid of mind or loonier than the looniest of looney toons, depending on the needs of the narrative. Houdini is absolutely one of those figures, most notably played by Tony Curtis opposite Janet Leigh in a biopic by 50s & 60s sci-fi/fantasy maestro George Pal, and elsewhere by actors as disparate as Adrien Brody, Harvey Keitel, and Jeffrey DeMunn.
In Death Defying Acts, Houdini is customised as a dashing, broken man. At the beginning of the film, Benji compares Houdini to a superhero, and Houdini’s wink to camera after escaping death in the opening sequence evokes Christopher Reeve’s wink to the audience as he flies out of frame at the end of each Superman film. However, this breaking-the-fourth-wall wink to the viewer is also a signal that what follows is artfully made bunkum. Much as Judy & Punch served as a commentary on the #MeToo-era entertainment industry, the period-set Death Defying Acts has something to say about the nature of public celebrity past and present. Though I’m sure any parallels were not deliberate, and I write this with an extra 13 years of context, Tom Cruise jumped to mind more than once in the film’s treatment of Houdini: another superstar with a megawatt smile who performs death defying stunts and exudes confidence and charisma, but also an extremely private figure with a small inner circle and a dark side of sorts.
While Houdini serves as catalyst for the story, screen-time is distributed fairly evenly between Houdini, Mary, and Benji, with the film sketching Houdini’s reckoning with his past, Mary’s reckoning with the implications of her profession, their tentative romance, and Benji’s coming of age. I use the term sketching because these arcs never feel completely realised; this is in part due to the lean running time, though I don’t think a longer version of this fictional episode in Houdini’s life would have necessarily been stronger. Nonetheless, the material is served well by Pearce (an Australian playing Hungarian-American), Zeta-Jones (Welsh playing Scottish and at one point performing an Orientalist double act), and Ronan (the same year as her breakthrough role in Atonement, albeit noticeably older and more tomboyish here) with friend-of-Australian-cinema Spall (Gettin’ Square, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories) providing typically droll support.
Aesthetically, the film’s smoky visuals—captured by DP Haris Zambarloukos, a regular Roger Michell/Kenneth Branagh collaborator—make subtle use of haze, shadow and light, and reflective and glossy surfaces, accentuating the deceptive appearances and professional duplicity of the characters. The film showcases the upper class environs Houdini circulated in well, but is less effective in conjuring the impoverished environs of Mary and Benji, lacking the authenticity and texture of, say, an Angela’s Ashes. Then again, authentic squalor is not what cinemagoers pay to see in a Houdini-themed period romance co-starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. On a side note, before Zeta-Jones’ casting, Rachel Weisz was attached to star; had the film been conceived and made a decade earlier, it might have starred Julia Roberts (given her accented appearances mid-1990s in Michael Collins and Mary Reilly), which would have amplified the Pretty Woman of it all: a wealthy man entering into a business transaction with a woman from the opposite side of the tracks. But the vibe Armstrong and screenwriters Tony Grissoni (a regular Terry Gilliam collaborator) and Brian Ward are going for is neither Mills & Boon romance nor Pretty Woman. Despite the built-in charm of its stars and the glow of Zambarloukos’ cinematography, Death Defying Acts is not a warm film: there’s a coolness to it, arguably befitting a tale of smoke and mirrors and subterfuge.
Whatever its faults, Death Defying Acts is well-crafted and worth seeing. It also remains, thirteen years later, Armstrong’s most recent narrative feature film (though she’s made some documentaries since), a situation I’d love to see remedied soon, with corsets or otherwise ...
Ben