Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Sheldrake's musings on PICCADILLY JIM with a cast that I really love... Sam Rockwell, Brenda Blythn and Tom Wilkinson. I'm not too sure what Sheldrake's opinion on the film was after reading the below review, but I think he liked it? Yeah? I'm pretty sure he liked it... and I hope I agree with him because seeing just Rockwell, Blythn and Wilkinson play off each other (not to mention Allison Janney) seems like a helluva fun time to me. Enjoy the review!
PICCADILLY JIM
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2005
Directed by John McCay
Written by Julian Welles (writer of Gosford Park)
Adapted from PICCADILLY JIM by P.G. Wodehouse
Sheldrake here, reporting from one possible New York of many, a New York of concrete and stone and fallen towers and deteriorating subways, of hyperrich and corrupt mayors and ballplayers. There are other New Yorks: among many others, there's Scorcese's or Polonsky's New York of corruption and murder and survival with odd moments of tenderness ; there's the triumphalist New York of HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS'S (polished)and THE PRODUCERS (seedy), a city of on-the-make showbizs and business people. Then there's P.G. Wodehouse's New York in his earlier novels and the very early Jeeves and Wooster stories, before they settle into the clockwork country-house-bit in Edwardian England: a strangely small-town New York of bohemian restaurants and townhouses in the Village. And now there is John McCay's completely reimagined and hyper-designed New York of the thirties as depicted in his new film of the P.G. Wodehouse novel PICCADILLY JIM, which looks like nothing Wodehouse ever saw or thought of. No, that's not quite right—he might have seen something like this on a richly designed Broadway stage set. The buildings, the apartments, the clothes and the cars—ESPECIALLY the cars—are deliriously over the top drunken hypercubed overdesigned reinventions of the way things SHOULD have looked. And the way things should have looked, looks great.
Jimmy Crocker (Sam Rockwell) a.k.a. Piccadilly Jim is an American party animal who floats, literally, on the Cunard line, between New York and London and wreaks drunken violent havoc wherever he goes. He meets his love-spark in Ann Chester, a girl who wounded walks the earth with a spirit broken by a bad review of her first book of love poetry, the review having been penned and published with J. Crocker's name attached—which is not to say he wrote the review. (One of the little jokes of the movie is that when Crocker finally reads an idiotic poem of hers about little birdies, he's the one man alive actually moved to tears by the wretched thing.) She hates Crocker, of course, and so of course it is into Crocker's company she's thrown. Mixed in with this are Crocker's mother's (Allison Janney) ambition to ascend to the peerage, her sister's (Brenda Blythn) desire to stop her, the desire of one husband (Tom Wilkinson) to escape London and watch baseball back in New York, and another husband (Austin Pendleton) to gain control over the vile young boy Ogden within his household. There's also a plot about an explosive and a spy mixed in here that lifts the comedy of manners into the realm of vaudeville, or at least some modern descendant of vaudeville. The kinetic energy and love of anarchy in the movie owes more to the Marx Bros. than it does to Wodehouse. That's a recommendation, not a slur.
If this were Shakespeare, you might call it a "modern dress" version. There are little elements of it that are anachronistic – for example, one of the lounge singers is singing a jazzy version of "Tainted Love" in the Embassy Nightclub, which itself resembles a 1970s disco palace more than the a period jazz club, at least if my viewings of The Thin Man (itself a highly artificial New York) have any informational value at all. But to think of this movie as taking place in any 1930s that ever existed is to miss the point entirely. This is a 1930s of stage artifice, and that's all it is and all it intends to be. The world of PICCADILLY JIM is an hermetically sealed space of bakelite colors and perfect design and improbable constructions. It's gorgeous to look at. The movie begins with a wildly high stack of empty champagne glasses—Crocker going for the record again—and ends with a shot of a new stack, each glass filled with the bubbly. It's a little figure for the movie's notion of plot: carefully built, deliberately unstable and liable to come down around your ears at any moment—yet somehow it never comes down. The plot creates its own suspense: how many more twists can he stack on? how far does this lunatic dare to go? For anyone who had read Wodehouse, and in particular PICCADILLY JIM, they'll know the answer is "far." By chance, I've read the novel for the first time in the last six months and can report to its fans that it adheres closely to the books plot. When you're doing Wodehouse, there's little need to rewrite: the thing's plot is usually perfect as published.
Sam Rockwell gives a definitive performance here, for himself and for the movie. You're let to know early on we're not in for a Hugh Laurie Bertie Wooster performance. Jimmy Crocker is an American. He doesn't wrinkle the nose and brow, take a meditative puff on the cigarette, puzzle things out ineffectually and then give up and call for his butler. The cig is dangling half bitten off from Crocker's mouth. If you piss him off, he looks at you like you're an idiot, then balls up his fist and clocks you. Problem solved. And he's rich, too, so screw you if you don't like it. I liked him immediately! The other actors are great too, though the oddly miscast Tom Wilkinson (the lead scientist/doctor in ETERNAL SUNHINE) gives a vague and understated performance here that's out of place. Allison Janney in particular should be noted for delivering a perfect over-the-top characterization of a parvenu in London..
This movie sets out to reinvigorate our ideas of Wodehouse, and seeks to latch on to the clockwork plot devices that make this kind of comedy work but identify it with American screwball comedies like BRINGING UP BABY or IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT instead of the mining the exhausted vein of Masterpiece Theater drollery. Go see it. God help any pretentious twits you run into after the movie at the local watering hole. You'll feel like hauling off and clocking them.
Mr. Sheldrake
NY, NY
