June 02, 2006
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
Young As the New Old
My mom's birthday was this weekend. We had planned to catch a film at the Seattle International Film Festival but decided against it after considering that 1) we wanted to take it easy, and not have to bother with parking and festival crowds; and 2) we wanted to save some cash. So instead, we went to Seattle's premier second-run $3 theater, the Crest, and caught a matinee of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. An easy-going low-budget feature about aging with grace, it fit the occasion to a tee. (Oddly enough, the film's director, Dan Ireland, co-founded the Seattle International Film Festival).
If I had torn up all the reviews out there that describe the recent Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont as "deceptively simple," I would have had a fresh batch of confetti for mom's birthday. But there's really nothing deceptive about it. It's the straight-forward tale of aging Brit Mrs. Sarah Palfrey [Joan Plowright], who quite literally stumbles into the life of one Ludovich Meyer [Rupert Friend], a struggling young artiste who narrates the story to us from behind his typewriter.
The first scene brings Mrs. Palfrey to the Claremont Hotel, fine retirement lodging for the London elderly. Palfrey arrives with great expectations of big ball rooms and exquisite cuisine, but after confronting the reality of a small room without a view and lukewarm soups, she realizes she's all dressed up with no where to go. With a slight look of a sigh on her face, she settles in, not quite sure of what she's doing and why. We soon learn Mrs. Palfrey is a widow with a distant daughter and a disinterested grandson. A few brief sequences — one involving a black taxi driver, another with a Muslim woman, and the last concerning Sex and the City — imply that Palfrey is out of touch herself.
That is, until she meets Ludo. On an errand to mail a letter and to fetch Lord Chatterly's Lover at the library as a favor for a fellow Claremont denizen, Palfrey trips to the ground. Spying her fall from a street-level window, Ludovich Meyer emerges from the depths of a basement flat to see if she's all right. As he consoles her in his apartment, the two settle in for tea.
When Ludo first rushes up from his flat, the particular motion blur betrays the picture's use of digital video, serving as a rather happenstance introduction to the film's interplay between the new and the old. A series of mishaps soon has Ludo stepping into the role of Palfrey's grandson, the real grandson being AWOL. As Ludo and Palfrey's relationship grows, so do they; in a unique twist on a moldy genre, this is coming-of-age as a cross-generational give-and-take. Palfrey gains a new sense of independence from Ludo, confidently turning down proposals from suitors. Palfrey, meanwhile, is Ludo's muse. She inspires him with stories of the Claremont, and even directs Ludovich to where love lies, waiting, silently…
For Ludo, perhaps, not for me. In the process of viewing Palfrey's favorite film, Brief Encounter, Ludo gets a girlfriend. In seeing Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, I did not take away half as much. The issues I have with the film are the same I have with Ludo's wardrobe — somehow it manages to be cleanfully unkempt. As the film's portrait of the artist as a young man, Ludo looks and acts like a picture of a model that came with the frame. As played by Rupert Friend - who is apparently a new addition to People's 100 Most Beautiful - he's not hard to look at, and certainly dons a winning grin, and in doing so remains the spitting image of what a Romantic is supposed to be. He reads Blake and Wordsworth, busks in the London Underground, and his girlfriend even sports a kicky beret. His love life is similarly clichéd; it is all pillow fights, strolls in the park, naked kisses and blankets placed on his shirtless back whilst writing his breakthrough master work.
Ludo is supposed to embody the Romantic values Palfrey cherishes, and which she thought lost to history; significantly, her real grandson is a bookish, annoying archivist. But Ludo embodies Palfrey's values too well, to the point he hardly seems real. One wonders what a different kind of film this would be if Ludo had been, say, a heroin addicted metal head. I kid of course, but the film is lacking in any challenging contradictions for its characters. A scene or two give us the sense that Ludo certainly has some issues - with an ex-girlfriend, his mom, and an American/British identity - but these are far too brief to complicate the picture.
The story of Mrs. Palfrey, no doubt, is meant to be simple; it tells us that on the way to the grave, life, sigh, is good. I only wonder how that sigh could be elaborated into questions of ethics, questions that that go beyond "the bridges will be crossed" metaphor contained in select bits of dialogue, and conveyed by the film's final shot. I know bridges will be crossed; which bridges? I also wonder which bridges need to burned.
Of course, at 22 years old, it's only appropriate that my problem would be with the film's take on youth and the life I have ahead of me. As we settled into our seats, my mother remarked that I would likely be the youngest person there. I wasn't — someone brought their kids, or grandkids. But the Crest Theater nevertheless resembled something of the Claremont itself that afternoon, full of elderly white folks, women especially. My mother is hardly elderly, but given it was her birthday weekend, I'm sure aging was on her mind.
By the end, the film had my mom in tears, and young ‘un though I am, I coould understand why. I certainly felt a few tugs on my own heart strings, because there is a charm to Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont that can not be feigned. The script asks of Mrs. Palfrey many, many moments of hushed surprise, of "Oh…. oh my," and each of these moments makes the picture. In the hands of actress Joan Plowright — a longtime British stage actress who also happens to be wife of Laurence Olivier — these moments gain feeling, they develop and become more nuanced before they finally disappear along with Palfrey's old age anxieties. Plowright is the real artist here, not Ludo. Consider it yet another strike against the supposed liberal values of Hollywood that this year's Oscar nominations again favored pretty, pretty actresses over studied veterans like Plowright (consider Judi Dench, as always, the token dame).
