The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Monday, February 05, 2007

Geek Pin-Up #17: Helena Bonham Carter

I haven't done one of these since Casino Royale came out and I'm feeling lonely, so I thought I would spend some time gushing about a pretty lady. This time round we have a personal favourite of mine: Helena Bonham Carter.

She gets a lot of stick in the gossip press these days for mostly looking like she slept in a bush, and gets equal amounts of stick from geek circles for being engaged to director Tim Burton, who mostly looks like he slept in a bush, but she retains a peculiarly nymph-like (old-fashioned meaning, people) beauty, despite committing the sin of being over 30, and has retained a cussed refusal to play into the fantasy beauty myth that makes the nymphy (new-fashioned meaning) sexuality she can portray wonderfully believable. Who, in the real world, doesn't spend a good part of their week looking like they slept in a bush? All the stick she gets tells us a lot more about the truly bizarre cultural trend of needing our beauties scrubbed clean and looking like they are made out of plastic. Why should wanting to look like you live in the real world seem so perverse?

But enough of feminist cultural studies - I want to talk about Fight Club. Spoilers follow, but come on - if you haven't seen it, piss off now and come back when you have. David Fincher's 1999 classic about men beating each other up is full of anger, cynicism, nihilism, and features flashy attention grabbing performances by nerdy careerist Edward Norton and studly anarchist Brad Pitt. The film is full of noise and fury, full of raging against machines, fathers and Ikea furniture and full of the still-impressive sfx whizzbangery that gets male geeks so inflamed. Yet it is a classic not for these reasons, but because it has a very human heart at the centre of it, and it does not belong to Edward Norton, who's character dominates the running time and even has the voice-over. It belongs to the character of Marla, played by Helena Bonham Carter.

Plenty of young men didn't even get past the twist of Norton and Pitt being the same, mentally divergent, character and went off to form fight clubs of their own, with any brain damage they incurred being probably justified and barely noticeable. On the second viewing, once we know the twist, the film seems to be about Norton's character's (never actually named) arc of self-discovery. The film becomes about a redefinition of manhood in a world where even being a rebel has become co-opted by society.

But on further viewings it becomes clear that it is all about humans simply trying to make genuine connections with others in a very alienating modern world. And the only character who is truly trying to do this through the movie is Marla, Norton's long suffering girlfriend. While all the other characters are flying around their neuroses in testosterone fueled delusions, she is standing the centre of things, open and vulnerable, and getting horribly hurt in the process.

Norton's character is trying to create an identity for himself and, due to it being a fake construct, is a big giant mess and ultimately unsatisfying. All those who join the fight club or Project Mayhem are looking for this same sense of identity - as if it was something external to them, something they could put on like a fashionable coat. They are trying to find a means of controlling the world they are lost in, and of course it turns into a horrifying mess. And there is Marla, in amongst all the male wailing, accepting that the world is a painful, confusing and possibly bad place, but trying to offer up some love to what she thinks is the fellow soul in front of her.

The scenes where Norton utterly fails to see this and pushes her away with vicious words become utterly heartbreaking.

Throughout the entire movie, Marla is the only one who is actually being honest.

The film, importantly, ends with Norton's character having been stripped of all delusion and posturing, accepting that he hasn't got a clue what is going on, and accepting her hand. Yes, this most monolithically male film is actually completely female and it is made possible by the performance of Helena Bonham Carter.

By the way - you may want to watch Seven again, and realise that the central scene is in fact the one in the coffee shop where Gwyneth Paltrow talks to Morgan Freeman about her being pregnant.

Helena, here looking like she slept in a goth bush, plays it cool and darkly glamourous in the first act, and proves that she can keep toe to toe with the big spunky boys, with nominally showy-er parts, she is playing against in terms of sheer screen presence and in an excellent line in crudity. 'I haven't been fucked like this since grade school' is a line I kind of wish someone would say to me one day. But she introduces a more open, emotional side as the film moves on and her relationship with Norton's character develops, without ever falling into whining, sobbing or other other cliched 'female' behaviours. Hollywood's standard formulation of an independent, complex or strong woman is an ugly dyke, a sexless mouse or a dead-eyed hard body with penis-envy. Here is a character who is strong but open to being vulnerable, independent but knowing she both wants and needs the love of another, and much smarter than the men around her. No wonder she is such a difficult character for audiences to get, she's far too close to being real.

The truth is something boring like schedule conflicts, but I like to think the reason Fincher, Pitt and Norton didn't do their commentary for Fight Club at the same time as Helena Bonham Carter is because they were terrified of her.

Now, Helena hasn't fared too well in other geek-related movies. She was in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes and she was in Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein, both of which are appalling. But didn't you think the section in Frankenstein from her murder, through her resurrection as the monster's bride to her suicide was the only emotionally resonant sequence in the film? Didn't you want Mark Wahlberg's astronaut character in Apes to cop off with Helena's monkey character instead of that dull blond human, Estella Warren? Equally as the voice of the corpse in 2005's Corpse Bride, didn't you find yourself reconsidering your position on necrophilia? And Helena did that with only her voice.

Helena you are great, and if you ever get bored of the bad-toothed, one trick pony of a fiance you have in Tim Burton, I'll be hanging around in some bushes near your house.