Section:GDN 1N PaGe:60 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 15:03 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Saturday 7 September 2019
60The week
in culture
It’s back. The second half of Stephen
King’s horror bestseller about a
terrifying clown (is there any other
kind?) has now been adapted as a
frankly laborious fi lm. Chapter One
told the story of a bunch of middle-
school kids in a small American town
in the 1980s, and how they banded
together to defeat a homicidal
harlequin of hell called Pennywise.
Now, almost 30 years later , they
are all grown up and must return to
their home town to face the horrible
Pennywise all over again as adults.
There is some lively stuff here, and
interesting ideas about confronting
one’s personal demons. It is also a
fi lm about the ubiquitous availability
of the past in the digital age and the
permanent reunion-stalkerthon
of social media , and about the way
guilt and shame are built into what
we choose to remember and forget
about our teenage years. But, like
the fi rst fi lm, it practically becomes
a non-narrative anthology of standard
jump-scares that could be reshuffl ed
and shown in any order. The second
time around, your tolerance for this
is tested to destruction and beyond
because, unlike the fi rst movie, it isjust so pointlessly long: approaching
three hours. And director Andy
Muschietti has even been hinting at
a possible third chapter.
The way the characters battle
Pennywise as grownups is not
much diff erent from the way they
did it as kids , and Chapter Two
seems to consist of an indefi nite
number of big set pieces featuring
interchangeable snaggle-toothed
creatures lurching grotesquely up
out of nowhere. These scenes deliver
scares reasonably effi ciently , but
with the tension level repeatedly
and disconcertingly reset afterwards
to zero. The y don’t develop or
accumulate anything within a story
arc, and it feels as if the movie is
jumping the shark and jumping back
again, increasingly spending more
and more time the wrong side of the
shark, and fi nally staying there.
The situation is that Pennywise
(played again by Bill Skarsgård )
mysteriously returns to the little
town of Derry, Maine, metaphysically
reincarnated, perhaps, by an ugly
display of homophobic abuse. Mike
(played now by Isaiah Mustafa) is the
only one of the gang to have stayed
behind in Derry, and he gets in touch
with everyone. Smart, fl ame-haired
Bev is now a well-off professional
played by Jessica Chastain , with
troubles in her private life that
chillingly mirror what she endured
as a child. Nerdy bespectacled Richie
( Bill Hader ) is a wisecracking standup
comic. Ben (Jay Ryan) has lost all
his plumpness and is a wealthy
architect and serious hottie – to the
astonishment of those who knew him
way back when. The sensitive Stanley
(Andy Bean) is a troubled, complex
adult. And Bill (James McAvoy), the
boy whose kid brother was fatefully
abducted by Pennywise at the story’s
beginning, is now a bestselling author
whose work is lucratively adapted for
the cinema – remind you of anyone?- but is wrestling with the problem
of endings, which are troublesome
in art as in life.
They have all suppressed
the supernatural horror they
experienced , and the movie
amusingly shows how the news of
Pennywise’s reappearance triggers
a convulsive spasm of irrational
anxiety in each case: the return of
the repressed. But disappointingly,
It: Chapter Two fi nds no clear and
satisfying way of engaging with the
obvious question: is Pennywise
a metaphorical expression of the
gang’s inner horrors, or a standalone
devil whose existence has nothing
to do with the psychology of those
ranged against him. Or something
between the two? Pennywise can be
read in any of these ways, but there
is nothing very interesting about his
fi gurative possibilities because they
are not teased out within the story.
The grownup gang may or may
not be taming their private demons
in tandem with Pennywise, and
tackling one’s private agonies is a
lifelong process. But the thought of
these people lumbering back to Derry
as oldsters in Chapter Three to do the
same old scary-movie things all over
again fi lls my heart with the kind of
dread that nothing here approached.
Peter Bradshaw
What others said
“There’s some truly scary nightmare
material in here [but] the fi lm has to
deal with King’s habit of narrative
excess. There’s no escaping how
egregiously bloated it feels.
Clarisse Loughrey Independent.co.uk“A bold, fi tfully stylish, frequently
shocking fi lm that somehow does
justice to King’s mad and very hard
to pin down novel.”
Charlotte O’Sullivan Evening Standard▲ Fears of a clown ... James McAvoy▼ Genial authority ... Bernard Haitink
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRIS CHRISTODOULOUFilm
It Chapter Two
Cert 15
★★☆☆☆The scariest
thing is the
possibility
of a part three
B ernard Haitink ’s fi nal UK concert was
always going to be a big event. The day
began with a queue for tickets forming
outside the Albert Hall before most
people had eaten breakfast. It ended
inside with the audience on its feet,
the arena full of glowing smartphone
screens as people took the pictures
that would prove they had been
there. The performance lived up to
all of that: here was evidence that
some conductors’ powers don’t
diminish with age.
Haitink, who celebrated his 90th
birthday in the spring , had chosen
to bow out in front of the Vienna
Philharmonic with Beethoven and
Bruckner. This short concert series ,
ending in Lucerne on Friday, was
billed as a farewell tour. With Murray
Perahia ill, the pian ist in Beethoven’s
Concerto No 4 was Emanuel Ax ,
ideally teamed with Haitink and the
orchestra in an interpretation that
was elegant and often deceptively
gentle, but with darkness at its heart.
The piano trills that led the slow
movement towards its close were
fearsome, the music around them
pregnant with possibility. Ax’s encore,
Schubert’s Impromptu Op 142, No 2,
was perfectly judged for the occasion- simple and meaningful, without
upstaging what had gone before.
For Haitink, though, the last
word had to be from Bruckner.
The Symphony No 7 was where we
got to luxuriate in the sound he
drew from the Vienna Phil, with
its velvety strings and perfectly
blended brass section. The ensemble
breathed together each time the
opening melody bloomed, and
sounded almost like an organ during
the climactic second-movement
passage, when Bruckner gave us
just a glimpse of the size of the work
we we re listening to. It’s a cliche to
talk of Bruckner’s vast symphonies
as cathedrals in sound: it suggests
you can see the whole edifi ce from
the start, which is a forbidding and
limiting way to think about music
that is so beautiful in the moment.
Perhaps it would be better to think
of a journey on a dark underground
river, with the conductor holding
the lantern : you can see each rock
formation as you pass, but only
towards the end does someone turn
on a light and make you realise you
have been passing through every
inch of a vast and spectacular cavern.
Haitink, as ever, emphasised
beauty over structure, yet did not
allow the music’s sense of shape to
slacken for a moment. One episode
fl owed into the next, Bruckner’s
melodies coming back again and
again, turning themselves upside-
down and back to front. Haitink
retained his almost birdlike poise and
precision of movement, and kept his
authority even when the orchestra
weren’t playing: a genial fl ick of the
hand at the start told the audience to
stop cheering and let him get on with
it; another broke the thick silence that
followed the symphony’s fi nal note.
According to his programme
biography, Haitink is not retiring,
merely taking a sabbatical. He’ ll
always be welcome back.
Erica JealWhat others said
“By the time we reached the fi nale, the
entire audience seemed under a spell.
Then the sorcerer quietly said goodbye.”
Neil Fisher The Times“This Prom was an epitome of the
natural, unforced music-making
that has always been Haitink’s
trademark.”
Richard Fairman Financial TimesProms
Vienna Philharmonic/
Ax/Haitink
Royal Albert Hall, London
★★★★★Beauty, shape
and precision
as a maestro
bids farewell
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