Favorites of 2023: Movies and television

Jack Lowden as Steven Morrissey in England is Mine (2017). Image source: rockandpop.cl

In the last Favorites of 2023 post I discussed the films we watched in our year of Alec Guinness. We did watch a few movies and TV shows last year that for some reason didn't feature Guinness, and of those first seen in 2023, a few stood out as particular favorites:

Drive My Car (2021), starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Reika Kirishima, Masaki Okada, and Toko Miura; based on the short stories "Drive My Car" and "Scherezade" by Haruki Murakami; written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his driver Misaki (Toko Miura) in Drive My Car. Image source: Japan Society Film Club

Apart from one misjudged scene added by writer-director Hamaguchi, this quiet and visually striking adaptation of two Haruki Murakami short stories enriches its source material. A meditation on loss, grief, storytelling, performance, and the bonds that—welcome or not—connect us with one another, Drive My Car was one of the most memorable films we watched this year. For my full-length post please see Haruki Murakami part 5: Drive My Car.

England is Mine (2017), starring Jack Lowden (Steven Morrissey), Jessica Brown Findlay (Linder Sterling), Adam Lawrence (Billy Duffy), and Laurie Kynaston (Johnny Marr); written by Mark Gill and William Thacker; directed by Mark Gill.

Image source: themoviedb.org

A warning: this movie won't be for everyone. Any ordinary person will wonder why they are spending the length of a feature film with a teenager who tries to mask his crippling shyness with aloofness, disdain and arrogance; whose fear of disappointment prevents him from taking emotional risks or exposing himself to ridicule; and who constructs an insular world defined by his highly specific tastes. These include pop music (David Bowie, Roxy Music, New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Sparks, early 60s pop, girl groups and Motown, French chanteuses such as Françoise Hardy and Juliette Greco), movie stars (James Dean, Alain Delon, Jean Marais), and eclectic (and sometimes lurid) reading.

The movie is subtitled "On Becoming Morrissey," and as you may have already guessed, that awkward, introverted Manchester teenager went on to become the lead singer and lyricist of The Smiths. As I wrote of Morrissey's Autobiography (2013):

In the first half of Autobiography, Morrissey writes compellingly of his youthful feelings of loneliness and desperation, his struggles to escape the dead-end future planned for him by a routinized and soul-crushing school system, and his conviction that there must be a way to stop being an observer, a fan, and take an active part in the world of pop music that was his lifeline: "I am suddenly full of sweeping ideas that even I can barely grasp, and although penniless, I am choked by the belief that something must happen. It is not enough just to 'be'. . . .I cannot continue as a member of the audience. If only I could forget myself I might achieve." (p. 116)

The dingy palette of hazy browns and dull greens chosen by Gill and cinematographer Nicholas D. Knowland to depict 1970s Manchester is the objective correlative of a mood of hopelessness and despair resulting from the city's slow-motion economic collapse. Colors drained of vibrancy are as effective as the black-and-white images of another excellent film set in 1970s Manchester, Anton Corbijn's Control, in representing the bleak post-industrial cityscape.

Steven meets a kindred spirit, the brash art student Linder (Jessica Brown Findlay).

From SheShe, a series of photographs of Linder Sterling by Christina Birrer with words by Linder, 1981. Photo credit: Christina Birrer. Image source: anothermanmag.com

It's Linder's drive and determination that finally galvanize Steven to risk failure by meeting up with the guitarist Billy (Adam Lawrence), whose notice seeking musical collaborators he'd spotted in a record store. One of the first songs they write together is entitled "I Think I'm Ready for the Electric Chair."

Billy Duffy ca. 1980. Image source: billyduffy.com

Like Sam Riley's portrayal of Joy Division's lead singer and lyricist Ian Curtis in Control, Jack Lowden in England is Mine inhabits, rather than impersonates, his real-life character to an uncanny degree. From England is Mine, Steven's onstage debut with Billy and The Nosebleeds on 15 April 1978, doing a cover of the Shangri-Las' "Give Him A Great Big Kiss" (and unlike his heroes the New York Dolls, Steven doesn't change the gender of the singer's crush).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Lh9_QeSi4U

And here's the Shangri-Las original.

But when Billy leaves The Nosebleeds to join another band and Linder departs for London, Steven is left bereft and directionless—until Johnny (Laurie Kynaston), a guitarist friend of Billy's looking for a singer, knocks on his front door. It's no spoiler to say that we know how this story will continue. As I wrote about Autobiography, the music of The Smiths "gave expression to certain inchoate feelings of loss, regret, and lack of direction in my post-collegiate 20s. Johnny Marr's crystalline guitar was the perfect accompaniment to Morrissey's arch, funny, and bitterly true lyrics." The album Hatful of Hollow remains on my record shelf, despite what Morrissey has become.

If you're curious, a home recording was made in 1982 of Morrissey and Marr performing The Cookies' "I Want A Boy For My Birthday." They gave the tape to their first bass player, Dale Hibbert, so he could learn the song. He has posted it to YouTube, and it's brief sample of what their first musical collaborations sounded like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXEGSRzR1iI

And here is The Cookies original.

A reviewer for The Guardian called England Is Mine "generic." It is anything but, being filled with references to Morrissey's formative discoveries in music and books, and with visuals and dialogue that point to his later use of the materials of his life in his lyrics. [1]

Other reviewers have unfairly complained that the movie soundtrack contains no Smiths songs, even though the entire film takes place before The Smiths are formed. The soundtrack is great; Morrissey's lyrics to The Smiths' song "Rubber Ring" mention "the songs that saved your life," and several of his favorites are featured. [2]

Fortunately there are also some more thoughtful critical engagements with this movie and with Morrissey and The Smiths. Gill's film is obviously a labor of love and of close attention to telling details. It is not perfect, of course. Curiously, we don't see (or hear) Linder fronting her postpunk art-noise band Ludus, whose gigs Morrissey would surely have attended. We also don't see any of the other Manchester bands that were born around the same time: The Buzzcocks (a Linder collage is on the cover of their "Orgasm Addict" single), Magazine (she designed the cover of their first album Real Life), The Fall (though we do see a record-store poster), Joy Division, A Certain Ratio, and many others. 

And apart from a single letter from Steven that gets printed in the New Musical Express, there's no hint of why the rock journalist and scenester Paul Morley would have called Morrissey "minor local legend Steven Morrison" [sic] in a 1978 NME review of one of his few appearances with The Nosebleeds. 

It's also true that the film is not attempting to be a documentary, and is more concerned with evoking a state of mind than with strict verisimilitude. The film rearranges chronology, omits events (Morrissey published a book on the New York Dolls in 1981, a time when the film presents Steven as isolated, lost, and deeply sunk in depression), eliminates real people (Steve Pomfret, for example, who showed up on Morrissey's doorstep with Johnny Marr in 1982) and invents fictional characters. But the film's narrow focus heightens its intensity, and I thought that, one scene excepted, it was brilliantly conceived and executed. I can't guarantee that you'll feel the same way.

Documentary

Moonage Daydream (2022). Produced, written, edited and directed by Brett Morgen.

Speaking of labors of love and of close attention to detail, Brett Morgen's impressionistic montage of David Bowie's ever-changing image and music (as well as other artistic endeavors) is mesmerizing. Many pop stars would have tried to build an entire career around just one of Bowie's many musical personae. Bowie, as Keith Jarrett once said of Miles Davis, would rather risk producing bad music than repeat himself endlessly. Amazingly, he produced music worth hearing at virtually every stage of his life.

Morgen's two-hour documentary does not attempt to be comprehensive; to do so would require spanning more than 50 years of Bowie's music, art, and self-fashioning. But what he does include, primarily the period from "Space Oddity" (1969) through Let's Dance (1983), is compelling not only for its inherently interesting subject, but for the associative way that it is presented.

"Life on Mars?" from Bowie's album Hunky Dory (1971), filmed by Mick Rock in 1973:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZKcl4-tcuo

Television

Our Flag Means Death, first season (2022). Starring Rhys Darby (Stede Bonnet, the Gentleman Pirate), Taika Waititi (Edward Teach/Blackbeard), Con O'Neill (Izzy Hands, Blackbeard's first mate), Rory Kinnear (Royal Navy officers Captain Nigel Badminton and Admiral Chauncey Badminton), and many others. Created by David Jenkins. Produced by HBO Max.

Rhys Darby (Stede Bonnet), Taika Waitiki (Blackbeard), and Rory Kinnear (Captain Nigel Badminton) in Our Flag Means Death. Image source: Markham Froggatt & Irwin

A dear friend thought we would enjoy this series, and he couldn't have been more right. Of course, pirates (and their flamboyant outfits and square-rigged sailing ships that were floating socialist communities) have an inherent appeal. But that appeal is multiplied when the pirate captain is played by Rhys Darby. The role of the incompetent manager in Flight of the Conchords was clearly excellent preparation for playing the incompetent Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet.

In the show (and in history) Stede feels stifled by his life as a wealthy Barbados plantation owner and decides to become a pirate, even though he has no sailing experience. As you might guess, he encounters a steep learning curve, a skeptical crew of misfits, and near-disaster when the first ship they try to capture turns out to be a pirate-hunting Royal Navy man-of-war. More hairbreadth escapes and a meeting with the fearsome Blackbeard (the excellent Taika Waitiki) shortly follow. The two pirate captains decide to join forces; as they spend time together, each realizes that the other possesses qualities that they themselves lack, and a bond begins to form.

Our Flag Means Death is unusually casual about same-sex affection and gender nonconformity (as, apparently, historical pirates could also be). It's also extremely funny. Season 2 has just been released, and will feature the appearance of the historical women pirates Zheng Yi Sao, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. We're looking forward to the further adventures of Stede, Blackbeard, and their crews. [3]

Posts in this series:

• Favorites of 2023: Our year of Byron
• Favorites of 2023: Our year of Agatha Christie
• Favorites of 2023: Movies and television
• Favorites of 2023: Our year of Alec Guinness
• Favorites of 2023: Music
• Favorites of 2023: Our year of French Baroque Opera

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1. We see Steven with a book on the Moors Murders, for example; one of The Smith's earliest songs, "Suffer Little Children," was about the killings, and contains the line "Oh Manchester, so much to answer for." Also on Steven's bookshelf is the Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, a gift from his librarian mother; in "Cemetry Gates" (Morrissey's spelling) he sings "Keats and Yeats are on your side, but you lose. . .Wilde is on mine." A scene in England is Mine set at a fun fair recalls The Smiths' "Rusholme Ruffians," where fairs are depicted as places where sex and violence lurk: "A boy is stabbed and his money is grabbed / And the air hangs heavy like a dulling wine. . .Then someone falls in love, then someone's beaten up / And the senses being dulled are mine." A more passionate fan of The Smiths than I am could probably find many other instances.
2. The soundtrack sent me to YouTube to explore early 60s pop stars I'd either never heard of, or never (knowingly) heard: The Cookies, Diana Dors, Vince Eager, Billy Fury, Johnny Tillotson. I should have known The Cookies, though: they sang "Don't Say Nothin' Bad (About My Baby)," "Chains" (later covered by The Beatles), and backup on Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion."
3. Irrelevant historical note: While Anne Bonny and Mary Read were active around the same time as Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard, Zheng Yi Sao lived almost a century later.