Hilary & Jackie
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Movie Reviews of Hilary & Jackie
Movie Review: evocative, gritty, and tragic
Summary: 4 Stars
"Hilary and Jackie" is highly similar to the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind." Both films paint intriguing if somewhat embellished portraits of brilliant oddballs, but then how many biographical films aren't embellished? This movie follows the lives of the musical sisters Hilary and Jacklyn DuPre. In the beginning, a very young Hilary shows promise on the flute while her little sister Jacklyn is introduced to the cello. As the dedicated Hilary struggles to improve, the precocious Jacklyn grows increasingly accomplished and stuns the world with her pyrotechnic playing. All in all the film is a poignant look at the ramifications of genius. Emily Watson is pleasing to watch as the passionate cellist, and Rachel Griffiths (of Six Feet Under fame) does a heartbreaking job of portraying a girl living in the shadow of her brilliant sister.Movie Review: It's hard being the "good kid"
Summary: 4 Stars
Coming from a family of musicians, I know that sometimes creative people can think that they are above conventional morals, that general rules (like marital fidelity) don't apply to them.
Isn't it sad how the stable, the level-headed kid in the family is expected to be compassionate and understanding? This is the cross that Hilary takes upon herself when her sister Jackie develops psychological problems. When Jackie starts sleeping with Hilary's husband, Hilary makes no attempt to confront either one of them. Because Hilary is no longer performing, being a wife and a mother, she thinks of herself as inferior to her famous sister. She just swallows the hurt and crawls into her children's bed. That act was very symbolic. She was denouncing her womanhood and devoting herself 100% to motherhood.
Movie Review: Fascinating story and great music
Summary: 4 Stars
Terrifically acted (a little over the top by Emily Watson), haunting music by Elgar, got this for a great price and worth every penny.Movie Review: The Presence of A Cello
Summary: 3 Stars
While I often post reviews of films I've only seen once, I sometimes wonder how wise that really is. When I saw this film on the big screen several years ago, I rather disliked it. It didn't ring true for me overall (not that I can pretend to KNOW the actual story as some of the film's critics claimed at the time--but then again, at least, I didn't mistakenly think it was about the historic meeting of two former First Ladies). But it does seem wise to be little skeptical about bio-pics, however, and this one just did not get off to a good start with me. In fact, I'm surprised that none of the other reviews I've read of HILARY AND JACKIE seemed to have much quarrel with the opening sequence of the two protagonists as children frolicking on the beach. When they see a strange woman staring at the ocean, the younger, seemingly more impulsive blonde child breaks away from her sister and approaches the "stranger."
"Ohmigawd," I said to my wife, "I can't believe this. She's meeting up with her adult self." Now, in all fairness, that's not revealed with 100% clarity until the very end of the movie (give the filmmakers credit for that much subtlety at least), but what else could it be? And how much hokier could it be? Young Jackie does tell her sister what "the stranger" told her. Namely, that it would be "all right." How TWILIGHT ZONE can you get? And how much more manipulative?
But the movie got enough good press and additional acclaim over the years, that I decided that I would watch it again and see if I couldn't get over this particular hurdle. Given that I knew it was coming, I found--perhaps not too surprisingly--that I could. And watching it at home, on a smaller screen, I found some of the other cinematic cliches that I felt bogged the movie down the first time out were also forgivable. Overall, in fact, it held together pretty well.
Interesting in a way, that I found I liked it better on the small screen, since some of the films harshest critics seem to have found it too much like an "illness of the week" TV movie. I actually don't object to that kind of TV film myself and find that they often give actors a chance to shine. Television is, in many ways, a more intimate medium than the cinema (I forget which one McLuhan said was the "cooler" medium, but is seems self-evident that the small screen typically makes for a more intimate experience than we typically get in a movie house.
Thus the smaller scaled HILARY AND JACKIE did work for me. The story that had somehow seemed cliched (even if based on a true story) when I first saw it during its first run, seemed relatively direct and honest when I saw it again in my living room. And I cannot say for certain now why I initially thought Emily Watson's performance was too mannered. On second viewing, she seemed fine. Jackie apparently adopted certain affectations of her own (such as strange accents), which gave Watson the challenge of portraying her character's artifice in an authentic way. For the most part, she pulls it off rather well.
The RASHOMON quality the picture exhibited in its different (symphonic-like) segments also lends the picture a certain richness. The truth of anyone's real life story is hard to know, of course. Few viewers expect the absolute truth from a film biography, of course. But on a deeper level, the film challenges the memories and the individual perspectives of nearly all its characters. Who really said what? And just what was actually said? If the two protagonists' take on the "truth" is dubious, I guess it goes without saying that the filmmakers' take is open to question too.
And that's what makes Hilary and Jackie's respective segments work as well as they do. What appear to be totally selfish acts on Jackie's part (e.g. mailing her washing home while on a whirlwind tour) turns out to have a different significance when portrayed from her point of view (namely that it's a way of reaching out to her family and recapturing a sense of "what home smells like"). Of course, enclosing a card or a letter would have helped.
By establishing that much ambiguity, director Anand Morgan and screenwriter Frank Cottrall Boyce successfully move their film beyond "the artist as outsider" cliches that, on first viewing, may seem to threaten it. They are, in a sense, fortunate to have source material that apparently grants them that ambiguity (Hilary and brother Piers' book). Was Jackie's outrageous behavior due to suppressed rage at her family and the world? Was it just artistic temperament run amok? Or was a good part of it, her incipient illness. Even viewers like me, who knew only the barest outlines of DuPre's life and career, had to wonder just what drove Jackie to such extreme behavior as demanding to sleep with her sister's husband. How much was sheer self-indulgence, how much was a self-conscious acting out of the "difficult artist" role, and how much was a kind of genuine madness. Finally, how much of it WAS her illness? Rhetorical questions all. Viewer's of the film can never know. People in Jacqueline DuPre's actual life can probably only make their best guesses too.
Which brings us back to the childhood sequences that, as it turns out, frame the movie. A review I read of Hilary and Piers DuPre's book indicated that Jackie did indeed have an eery childhood premonition of the illness that would cripple her in her adult life. Apparently, she once told her sister, "Don't tell Mum, but when I grow up I won't be able to walk or move." Why this spooky presentiment, which seems pretty dramatic to me, was discarded in favor of the trumped up "mystery lady on the beach" scene is beyond me. Handled right, a brief scene of Jackie as a child making that stunning prediction would likely have been downright bonechilling.
The two "Jackies" on the beach was less than that.
Movie Review: the movie is NOT the book !
Summary: 3 Stars
I am amazed when I read people condemning various things based on this movie. Some condemn Hilary. Some (like the Amazon reviewer) condemn the book itself--obviously without having first taken the trouble to read the book. Some condemn what went on sexually.
To set the record straight (from the book and from another biography of Jackie):
The book does not "dish dirt" on Jackie. Quite the contrary.
There is not the slightest hint that the grown-up Hilary was jealous of Jackie (though she was briefly as a child). Both she and Jackie saw the many disadvantages of Jackie's fame. Hilary expresses relief that it is not her life. Jackie expresses envy of Hilary's happy life. She hated being pushed into concert tours by her ambitious husband, Barenboim. She often simply rebelled and left.
Hilary did not "give permission" for her husband to sleep with Jackie. Jackie was terribly upset and ran away across the fields. She asked Kiffer to have sex with her and he did because she thought it would help her. Kiffer told Hilary about it as soon as they returned. (What is covered up by the clumsy, "arty" anti-chronological approach of this movie is that Jackie had ALREADY noticed that her hands were sometimes numb! Imagine the effect that must have had on a cellist!)
The nonsense in the movie about Jackie losing her mind is garbage made up by the screenwriter. AT NO TIME did Jackie think that she was crazy. The idiot psychoanalyst that Hilary and Kiffer finally referred her to when they saw that the sex wasn't really helping Jackie thought that Jackie's numbness was hysterical (all in her mind). Jackie NEVER believed that. And no one in real life thought that she had any other psychopathological symptoms.
The bits about Jackie's abusing her cello are also garbage made up by the screenwriter. She loved her Strad. She never left it out in the cold. She was a vigorous performer and the Strad sometimes collapsed under her playing and had to go to the shop, but that was not deliberate abuse.
The insults in the movie--viz. Jackie telling Hilary that she was not special--are also totally made up by the screenwriter.
The drum incident at the BBC. Jackie was not allowed to play a real instrument because the BBC had a minimum age requirement for performers and Jackie was too young. Jackie was never jealous of Hilary's playing. Jackie practiced because she loved to play.
The portrayal of the flute teacher at the Royal Academy of Music was accurate. Moreover, Hilary's daughter Claire took up the cello, won the Suggia Prize at 11, the same age as Jackie, and went to the R. A. M. After one year, she quit the cello and never played again! I hope somebody in England is looking into the Royal Academy of Music and their ability to drive away talented musicians.
Well, enough. Read the book if you want to know what happened. Don't condemn Hilary or condemn Jackie because of what is in this movie. Condemn the movie. They had the facts. Why did they make these deliberate distortions?
I've also read that Barenboim condemned this film as untrue. Well he might, considering what the movie reveals about him. But wait! Read the other biography, the one commissioned by Barenboim himself, and the facts get even worse: Before Barenboim accepted the conductorship of the Orchestre de Paris and moved to Paris (leaving Jackie to cope with her illness as best she could), he had been offered the London Symphony Orchestra and turned it down! His leaving was therefore not a job necessity (as the movie implies)! And both biographies agree with the film in revealing that Barenboim did shack up with another woman in Paris and proceed to have two kids (while Jackie struggled on alone in London with her crippling illness).
Yes, buy the recordings! Yes, buy the two documentary films and see the real Jackie. Emily Watson gave a good performance, she was just not right for the part. She does not have the face, the strength of character, the commanding presence that the real Jackie had.
And if you haven't seen this movie, see it. Just take it with a grain--with a couple of spoonfuls--of salt.
Footnote: the "widescreen" is achieved by blocking out the top and bottom of the scene. It is no wider than the standard. You merely lose the sky (or whatever) and the foreground.