What's it all about, Jude?

Englishman in New York: Jude Law as Alfie Elkins

10 April 2012

If it money, or merely the conventional narcissistic personality disorder that is movie stardom? Or is it that you just aren't getting the scripts? I only ask because to bare your lovely pecs for a remake of Alfie directed by the man whose only claim to fame is the Parent Trap movies smacks of, well, man, like ... doh! But let's put that to one side for a moment and scoot through the narrative.

Jude is Alfie Elkins, a Brit cocksman on the loose in Manhattan. He may not have much bread (he drives a limo for a living), but by golly he has the threads and the looks to feed it to a whole galaxy of dolly birds.

There's Dorie (Jane Krakowski), a bored housewife who Alfie limbers up in his stretch. There's Julie (Marisa Tomei), a single mum who Alfie runs to when he's feeling in need of a little mummying and playing at daddying.

There's Lonette, the Afro-American girlfriend of Alfie's colleague - and best mate - Marlon (Omar Epps), with whom Alfie well nigh rips the baize of a perfectly good pool table.

There's Nikki (Sienna Miller), a bipolar whirligig of a girl who proves conclusively that up is not the only way. And there's Liz (Susan Sarandon), a peach-facial-scrub millionairess who finally takes him to the cleaners.

Alfie burbles about the Big Apple on his nifty Lambretta, from one fervid liaison to the next. He's an unashamed Lothario, only too keen to clue the audience in on his personal philosophy of successful bedding by speaking direct to the camera.

That's the thing about Alfie, he doesn't do introspection, his unashamed enjoyment of as much FBB (face, boobs and bum) as he can lay his mitts on is as upfront as a man checking a shop window for the angle of his new hat. But then it all begins to unravel.

Alfie dumps Dorie and Julie dumps him. He gets Lonette up the duff, and worst of all he's experiencing flop-on difficulties, which leads him to an encounter in a urinal with a Philosophic Old Man (always a bad sign).

Things look up briefly, when he starts debriefing Nikki and Liz, but it's only the last tilt of the ski jump before Alfie hurtles into the void of self-awareness: He didn't mean to hurt any of these women, but he just did, because he's a common-or-garden selfish git.

So far, not so bad, and to be fair to Alfie it does have a certain rollicking quality to it, weaving through the jammed-up traffic of thirtysomething emotional entanglement with as much brio as its antihero caroms around the city.

True, I could do without Mick Jagger's soundtrack - but then I've wanted to be rid of him since 1973. Charles Shyer's direction tries a few tricks - flashy dissolves, split screens - but basically it goes with the flow; Ashley Rowe's photography has a nice, clean palette which colours a scarified dawn in the meatpacking district just as well as a lustdarkened, uptown boudoir.

Sophie Becher's production design feels meticulous, right down to the right kinds of fag butts in the right kind of ashtrays, yet there's something fundamentally not right about this film which makes it quite forgettable.

The problem isn't Jude - let's get that straight. He still looks fabulous enough to turn this straight eye queer. His vulpine dimples, his glaucous-eyes, the unbelievable luminescence of his skin tones and that perfect body: is he svelte, is he muscled? Why, he's both, of course.

I knew he'd be huge when I first saw him as Bosie in Wilde (1997), and while his roles since haven't exactly stretched him (with the possible exception of Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)), there's always an animalistic satisfaction to watching him pace around the cage of a screen. Tomei, Miller, Sarandon et al. are also up to speed, although none of them runs away with their part.

No, the weakness is the script (by Elaine Pope, who won an Emmy for Seinfeld and should've done better). It isn't funny, it isn't clever and it certainly isn't profound. Alas, we have to go back to the 1966 original to see what went wrong. Michael Caine's Alfie was such an iconic figure because he signposted the dark side of the Sixties; after all the swinging came the backstreet abortions, the abandoned children and the shattered psyches of runaway girls.

In 1966, Alfie was given pause to think by the sight of an aborted foetus lying in the kitchenette of his pad; in 2004 he cries hot tears over an adorable mixed-race baby. In 1966, Alfie abandons his own toddler; in 2004, it's someone else's. In 1966 Alfie's patter is a self-invented idiom which precisely locates the social tipping point where cockney and mockney fused; in 2004 Alfie's patter is deracinated and asocial.

And lastly, the point about 1966 Alfie was that even then, with the Female Eunuch still struggling to be born, a mainstream film was capable of precisely delineating a womanhating-culture. Because that's the real key to Alfie now and then; he isn't just a selfish git, he's a selfish, misogynistic git.

To make a film now which manages - as the original does - to deal with the darkest of subject matter with the lightest of touches, you need a writer and a director infinitely more adventurous than Pope and Shyer, who would be prepared to drag us into the unsavoury, Aids-infected mores of contemporary sexuality. Unlike Alfie himself, they stayed too faithful to the original.

Alfie
Cert: cert15

MORE ABOUT

1960s Cinema

What's it all about, Jude?

Read More