High-Rise Review

Ballardian Stumbling Blocks

♦ Tripwire gave contributing writer James DC, clad in his loudest flares, the task of reviewing Ben Wheatley’s eagerly-awaited adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise

High-Rise

Director: Ben Wheatley

Stars: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elizabeth Moss

There seems to be an increasingly annoying tendency for the ‘higher’ end of film critics, as well as avowed Ballardian aficionados (who should know better) to over-emphatically rave about the supposed myriad merits of British filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s cult 1975 novel, High-Rise. I don’t know exactly why this is. Perhaps some of it has to do with the fact that it’s a British based production and said critics are subconsciously proud that a British director has taken on the prodigious feat of attempting to translate another of Ballard’s masterpieces, as opposed to some Hollywood hack (which – troublingly – seemed to be in the offing, on and off, ever since the esteemed producer Jeremy Thomas bought the rights to the novel in the mid 1970’s). And so this nationalistic pride is insidiously tainting the critics’ otherwise more objective evaluation of the film. It’s just my impulsive, casual theory, but it’s as good a theory as any.

So what else is causing the disproportionate praise for High-Rise, which is only averagely ‘ok’ in some ways, but woefully lacking in others? I am quite puzzled by this, but perhaps I will glean some insight into the causes of this critical myopia as I systematically analyse, deconstruct and list the many problems – as well as the few positive aspects – of the film, after a brief contextualisation, in this essay/review. But before I lay some groundwork, I can state, without hesitation, the main reason why Wheatley’s High-Rise, like David Cronenberg’s 1996 film version of Crash before it, just doesn’t work: it is, simply, because both directors fatally misinterpreted Ballard’s unique, other-worldly sense of atmosphere and parallel reality disjunction.

This may not seem like a major problem, if, as a director, one has studiously placed all of the requisite, ostensible Ballardian elements in place, via the story, cast, mise en scene and production, as Wheatley has obviously done, but he just hasn’t created the right type of ‘holistic’ atmosphere or undertone in order to anchor Ballard’s weird, psychotic world view in a smoothly digestible form and thus create a credible fictional world for the viewer. None of it feels ‘real’ enough – Wheatley has somehow misjudged the Ballardian recipe; the potentially all-important undercurrents, or vibes of the film, normally brought about by the accurate mixing of elements, are missing in most of the scenes or sequences. Basically, it’s a question of getting the atmospheric tone right, via the correct application of technique, style and aesthetics, which, for all the appropriate trimmings in other ways, is one of the most important factors when adapting such a sensual, immersive writer as Ballard.

The complex concepts of ‘atmosphere’, or ‘gestalt’, will usually coagulate and result from the accumulation of the multifarious facets and vectors of the cinematic medium and technique; ergo, the film is more than the sum of its parts. So, if Wheatley and his regular screenwriter Amy Jump had brought many of the proper constituents together, why have these not alchemically fused and given us a suitably Ballardian ambience, in the final reckoning? The answer is that they have either under or over-egged the pudding – and in some cases, simultaneously both – and the soufflé has ultimately flopped. More on this, later.

JG Ballard – the British science fiction writer who gave the world an awesome, prophetic body of work from the mid 1950’s up until his death in 2009 – created a loose trilogy of dystopian, suburban set novels, which comprise Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975). The author created an alternate history setting of mid 70’s Britain in which to disinter and dissect, in his own terminology, the Inner Space of the protagonists: the subconscious psychopathology hidden beneath bourgeois social mores, the psychosexual symbiosis of the automobile and the human, the Freudian sex-death impulse of media-celebrity, and the compulsive violence triggered by Brutalist architecture and its desolate, yet claustrophobic, surroundings. There is much else, on various symbolic levels, in these dense, glistening gems of literature. The three novels are the epitome of surrealistic, phantasmagorical world building; Ballard effortlessly employs precise, lyrical description in order to convey a sublime, transformative journey of the collective psyche. In a nutshell, the three stories raise the art of hyper sex and violence to new heights of hallucinatory, grotesque beauty, all bathed in pellucid prose.

A big order, then, in terms of cinematic adaptation? Sure, but certainly attainable with the right screenwriter, director, producer and team of filmmakers. Two of the aforementioned books have now been adapted to film, but both, unfortunately, fall far short of Ballard’s genius on the page. The first, David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), was an odd, unwieldy beast, with many inherent problems, despite the fact that the director did get some things right. There are other reasons, but the main fault line, as elucidated above in regard to Wheatley, was that Cronenberg hadn’t fully understood the distinctive, Surrealist, Ballardian ambience of the book, built up over pages of profound, exquisite yet detached descriptions of – for instance – car crashes in slow motion. The fact that (if memory serves) there isn’t one sequence of slow-mo in the film of Crash simply shows up the perverse and wrong-headed attitude that Cronenberg took towards the adaptation. Certain scenes in the novel were positively crying out for oblique, hallucinatory sequences, rendered in slow-mo or other ‘abstract’ techniques, but these were absent, leaving a huge gap in terms of the cinematic mindscape.

Overall, Cronenberg’s take was a bit too refined, safe and Mannerist. This is highly ironical, because Cronenberg had made some very Ballardian-type films beforehand, which weren’t actually direct adaptations of Ballard’s work, but nevertheless conveyed, almost incidentally, a real sense of the writers’ particular mindset; films such as Shivers (1975), Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) could all be mistaken for arising from Ballard’s oeuvre (if you want to see the kind of liminal filmic techniques and aesthetics that were needed for this adaptation, then search out the brilliant short film Crash!, directed in 1971 with experimental panache by Harley Cokeliss). But I digress – on to Ben Wheatley’s folly, itself.

Previously, Nicolas Roeg and Richard Stanley were slated to direct the High-Rise project, and Roeg, in his early 70’s prime, would have been a match made in heaven for any Ballard novel. Eventually, the job fell to Ben Wheatley. Personally, I had very high hopes for Wheatley when I heard he was taking on High-Rise. I was, in fact, ecstatic with excitement, because I greatly admired, and still do, some of his previous films; the jet-black horror comedy Sightseers (2012) and the hallucinatory English Civil War drama A Field in England (2013). Wheatley seemed to possess just the right type of off-kilter, oddball temperament and sense of hypnagogic, dark humour with which to fully translate and interpret Ballard’s unique vision. Alas, when seeing High-Rise for the second time recently, I was even more disappointed than when I first set eyes on it.

As the film begins, we are introduced to the main character and narrator of the story, Dr. Robert Laing (played with cool measure by Tom Hiddleston), who has just moved into a spanking new, Modernist skyscraper on the outskirts of some unnamed city. The building is set in the urban sprawl of a kind of alternate Shepperton (where Ballard lived for most of his life), in a similarly alternate reality 1975. The high-tech high rise is designed to cater to every conceivable need, the eccentric architect of the building, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) living in a top floor penthouse replete with regency type landscape gardens and a riding horse. Yes, a horse.

The tower block seems to be divided into a class and economically bound system, with the lower orders near the ground level and gradually rising up through the ranks to reach the upper classes at the top (Ballard seems to have borrowed the template of H.G. Wells classic The Time Machine where, in the far future, the opposing classes have devolved into strange new forms; the effete Eloi and the subhuman Morlocks). It is telling that in both the novel and film of High-Rise the tribal war is fought only between the narrower spectrum of lower and higher middle classes, not the working class or aristocracy – this is a titanic struggle between society’s high achievers or proto-yuppies, who are wedded to the culture of materialism and status, and all that entails.

After an unfortunate series of accidents and incidents, like an electricity blackout, refuse getting left and uncollected, and a party of boisterous children swarming into the upper class adults’ plush swimming pool, events begin to take a sinister turn. The third major character, filmmaker Richard Wilder (played by Luke Evans, who is a bit too hammy for my liking), spearheads raiding parties on the higher floors, as the residents become increasingly tribalistic and descend into utter chaos, debauchery and random violence, all psychologically imbued with, and influenced by, the claustrophobic, prison-like confines of the tower block and its conspicuous social strata. The building becomes a self-supporting hive of primordial psychosis.

And that’s it. There is no ‘plot’, as it were, but a series of tableaux and vignettes, all mirroring, and conjoining with, an internal psychic terrain, and this is in keeping with Ballard’s novel – which is a good thing. One cannot criticise the film for want of a ‘properly’ structured plot or narrative, as the book isn’t really about that. In this sense, Wheatley and Jump have kept to the spirit of Ballard’s modus operandi and done the right thing. The filmmakers have – thankfully – been reasonably faithful to the books freewheeling, impressionistic structure and style, rather than overlaying their own blatant narratives. But they fall down badly, elsewhere, with a huge misstep in terms of all-important tone and ambience. For one thing, the general feeling is far too comical and not grim or dark enough; it is more a surreal farce than a disturbing descent into a group id. In some respects Wheatley’s film is like a mutant hybrid of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party (focusing as it does, especially, on the cultural tics of 70’s set class conflict) and an imaginary, acid-tinged episode of the 1970’s Carry On sequence; the title perhaps would have worked better as ‘Carry On, Turn on, Tune in and Drop Out’.

Of course, we must not forget that Ballard was, above all, a satirist (as well as, to all intents and purposes, a psychiatrist and philosopher) and casual readers often miss the spiky wit and acute humour inherent in his work. But the film-makers’ take this trait of Ballard’s too far; they often make the humour too overt and too silly, emphasising a ludicrous, whimsical interpretation of the novel’s action and narrative, as opposed to one imbued only with mordant, barbed wit. Hence the film loses a lot of the subtle piquancy of the original.

The film’s trajectory generally follows the narrative, thrust and ostensible themes of the novel – if not all of the particular details or scenes – but it doesn’t help much. Some essential ideas and set-ups are truncated or missing, while there are a few unnecessary additions which hinder the story. I may be wrong, but I don’t remember, in the book, the child ‘observer’ Toby, who affectively acts as a Greek Chorus to the orgy of destruction, and the lyrical, pristine lines of dialogue, lifted from the novel, when shoved through the mouth of this smug little brat, come across as preposterous and far too blatant; when he is seen atop a balcony, looking through a kaleidoscope, Laing says to him “What can you see through that?”. The kid gloomily, imperiously replies “The future”. A similarly pretentious moment comes later when a character asks Laing, who has left loads of unpacked boxes lying around his flat, “What’s in all these boxes, anyway?”, to which he replies, with deadening sincerity “Sex and paranoia”. I actually squirmed with embarrassment at the glaring ostentatiousness of sequences like these and they felt like an awful pastiche of Ballard’s adroitness and finesse with words.

Another problem is that we don’t see or hear enough of Laing, the main protagonist. My memory may be fading, but I remember him being more of an omnipresent narrator in the book – or at least it felt like that. And because he is the most sympathetic character, it should be vital to focus on him in a film version, in order to give the audience something to work with. But the factory fodder-like line of bombastic sequences only serves to fragment and dissipate any narration or scenes Hiddleston is given to play with. This lack of a central performance with which to empathise and engage with would be fine in a more abstract or minimalistic film, but it is a glaring mistake in a more mainstream enterprise such as this. Consequently, we end up not really caring about any of it.

Some of the casting compounds the aforementioned tonal problems also, as quite a few of the secondary actors have been filched from television sitcoms, like Reece Shearsmith and Dan Renton Skinner, with the accompanying, unwelcome association of goofy slapstick. Apart from the main, well known players, who can be justified in terms of star-power gravitas in order to sell the movie (and who don’t hurt the project, seeing as they are grade A professionals) the rest of the cast should have been relative unknowns. Why on earth would a director want to fill a Ballardian universe, with its alien environs, entropic degradation and ominous, crystalline atmosphere, with an ensemble of quietly mugging, oik-like comedians, straight out of domestic British TV comedies? If there is one prime example of how this film has misfired, this is it.

Moreover, Wheatley’s film sometimes feels like a by-the-numbers adaptation, making sure to hit all the right notes, but never quite capturing that remarkable, curious feeling when you read Ballard; it doesn’t fully disconnect one from one’s familiar, external surroundings. In one sense it mimics that other great ‘unfilmable’ adaptation, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which was equally criticised for a sense of just ‘going through the motions’, in some respects.

Amy Jump, Wheatley’s regular screenwriter (and editor), must take her fair share of the blame. She obviously understands, to a point, certain trappings and motifs of the world of Ballard, but hasn’t quite grasped the full apocalyptic import of his concepts, themes and prose – many of the right ingredients are there, but the pure essence of Ballard is somehow missing. The novel describes a type of Bourgeois Gotterdammerung; a compulsive, collective breakdown of polite society via the release of the demented and transmutable subconscious desires of its citizens. Ballard’s stories are a Stygian, surreal journey into the uncharted territory of the Postmodern psyche, laced with deadly satire; this is more like a cleaned up, farcical, ‘parental guidance’ version of that.

For instance, I always remember the brilliant sequences in the novel where Wilder is traversing the indoor fires, corrupted metal, dead bodies, roaming gangs, bloodied apartments and darkened corridors of the High-Rise, whilst using his tape recorder to copy and then incessantly replay, like a total madman, the various notes and noises of turmoil, as well as his own primal screams and feral growls. He has become a Caveman-Shaman of Postmodernity, ritualising the fetishised accoutrements of consumer culture, perhaps in order to ultimately negate their affect. It plays as one of the stronger metaphors in the story. But, in the film, this loaded, fecund concept is thrown away in a lightweight, slightly comical manner – this should have been a stunning scene, but it is just another case of getting the tone all wrong and mixed up.

Despite these many issues, High-Rise does contain some redeeming features, in the way of specific scenes and filigrees which, paradoxically, make one feel worse by lamenting the paucity of such artfulness in the rest of the film.

The main actors are uniformly very good and there are a few terrific pieces of dialogue, which are either straight from the book, or close approximations. When the group of upper class ‘twits’ briefly capture Laing towards the end, they try to coerce him into using his surgical skills to lobotomise Wilder, who is making their life hell (although this is set out rather vaguely in the film – I’m going by my recollection of the novel, in the main). Laing steadfastly retorts to this proposition with “I won’t lobotomise Wilder – he is possibly the sanest man in the building”.
In other scenes, one of the characters explains away the anarchy by saying that there was “a logic more powerful than reason” behind it all, and Laing sardonically states that it was akin to “a children’s party which had got out of hand”.

There is a clever bit of word play and double meaning when Laing, still quietly resisting the unburdening of his base desires, turns up at a lavish top floor party where the upper classes are all dressed in lush Regency costumes and wigs, but he is still dressed in his suit and tie.They look at him in disdain and one says “You haven’t changed?” to which he replies “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can”. The Regency-twit comes back with “Oh well, your loss”. Later, in the stupefying aftermath of the party, Royal’s wife, a doppelganger for Marie Antoinette, gets down on all fours, lifts up her skirt and shouts “Which one of you bastards is going to fuck me up the arse?!”. On paper, this sequence sounds as if it could potentially be disastrous, but it works fine, because the tonal balance is basically correct – it isn’t too comedic or silly, it isn’t overly serious, unlike many other parts of the film. I suppose, in a way, it’s a case of having to find the ‘Ballardian Goldilocks Zone’, when adapting his work, but Wheatley’s film is only nominally successful at this.

At another point, one of the guerrilla-classist-twits says to Simmons, the bodyguard/manservant to Royal, “You’re hired”, and he replies “I don’t work for you, I work for the building!”.

All good stuff. But, unfortunately, these few little gems of subtly performed, captivating dialogue aren’t enough to redeem the rest of the film’s blatant pronouncements and pretentious-sounding, overburdened statements.

However, the soundtrack is one of the high points of the film, with Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) creating a strings and electronics based accompaniment to the action, which isn’t too obtrusive, but vigorous enough. He (presumably) also curates some cult classic tracks which reference 70’s counterculture and film perfectly; Can, The Fall, Devo and Portishead (with a blinding, apposite version of Abba’s ‘SOS’) are all heard. Film buffs will remember the astute use of Can’s lengthy track ‘Mother Sky’ in Jerzy Skolimowski’s cult 1970 film Deep Ends, but their exposure in High-Rise unfortunately reminded me of that magnificent film, which was a lot more Ballardian in essence than this direct adaptation. Again, there is a feeling of the filmmakers simply ‘ticking all the boxes’, because, just as we hear the beginning’s of the brilliant Can on the soundtrack, they are swept away about half a minute later, leaving us wanting more of that slightly discordant, invigorating music, perfectly suited to the bizarre goings-on. But I suppose, in this cookie-cutter type movie, giving the audience a few moments to breathe in and savour the atmosphere of weird little details like this is not conducive to the Ballardian Blockbuster which this film more and more resembles as it trudges along toward the vapid, wrong-footed ending.

There are some cute film references and borrowings (or cases of plagiarism, through a paucity of original ideas?) throughout Wheatley’s endeavour: we see a poster of the cult, British swingin’ 60’s film, Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment a few times in the background, and I listed the following cult films as overtly referenced or copied in various scenes; Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Macon and The Draughtsman’s Contract, Psycho, Get Carter, Sunset Boulevard, The Lady from Shanghai, THX1138, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Brazil, They Live, and Videodrome, to name but a few.

The production design is, in the main, good and efficient, with scenes which authentically parlay the combination of real locations, studio bound sets and CGI effects into an authentic and believable milieu. All of the requisite retro signs and symbols are present and correct: the shag pile carpets, the enormous sideburns, the flowery décor and camp fashions, the sleek gadgets and funky furniture. Ahh, but the set designers made a huge cultural faux pas by forgetting to include that 70’s de rigueur kitsch painting of the blue skinned woman by Vladimir Tretchikoff! I also didn’t see a lava lamp anywhere.

Scant though they be, there are a couple of wonderful set pieces which perfectly encapsulate the novel’s perverse, erratic obsessions. In one scene, we see a character committing suicide by lunging off a high balcony to his death. As he falls, in beautifully rendered macro-slow-motion, his self-destruction becoming a sublime ballet, his rump slowly crumples the bonnet of a parked car, with its metallic petals unfurling as it receives his body like a robotic venus flytrap. Moreover, the plunge to his death reminded me of the famous ‘Falling Man’ photo of 9/11. (Although it’s a shame that the CGI effects team – who no doubt created a lot of this scene – didn’t seem to understand basic, Newtonian physics; the guy falls for what must be tens of metres in a perfectly straight line, parallel to the building, rather than in a slight arc, which any intelligent schoolkid knows is what happens when objects with momentum are pulled back to Earth by gravity. Altogether it’s a jarring, obvious mistake which briefly pulls one out of the suspension of disbelief).

The supermarket sequence is also successful in transferring the books aberrant, unhinged mood. Laing impulsively decides to paint his apartment and so proceeds toward the indoor supermarket, where all the groceries and products have the same, bland, ‘no frills’ banding – as if Andy Warhol had designed these nondescript labels. Just as with Pop Art (along with Surrealism, Ballard’s other favourite art movement) this nicely ties into Ballard’s condemnation, but also antithetical celebration, of rampant, automated consumerism and its ensuing conditioning of society. As Wilder roams about the aisles filming the burgeoning bedlam, while the other residents ransack the shelves for the last remaining food, Laing get’s accosted by another ‘customer’ who wants the last pot of navy grey paint for himself, and a violent, but also childish fight ensues. Wilder eventually get’s the better of his opponent, swinging the can at him and repeatedly roaring “Get off, it’s MY paint!!!’. This is an almost perfectly judged episode (which unfortunately points up the failures of the rest of the film).

Another good bit is the ‘dinner scene from hell’, when Wilder’s slinky, sexy neighbour, Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller) begrudgingly serves him a can of Chunky dog food on the balcony porch, after he has just viciously raped her, off-screen, in her bedroom. He energetically munches away on the jellied gruel, as Portishead’s fantastic cover of Abba’s ‘SOS’ plays over the top. This is a very affective montage scene, epitomising the caustic wit and steely horror of Ballard’s ideas and, again, it’s a real shame there isn’t more of this kind of thing.

But, somehow, none of this is enough and the parade of ill-thought-out, ‘zany’ spectacle – a kind of hodgepodge of lightweight surrealism – increasingly grows dull and repetitive. Wheatley, Jump and producer Jeremy Thomas all deserve points for effort but, in the long run, the truly Ballardian vibe somehow got lost in translation, the exigencies and anonymities of the mega-budget production line tainting the project and ultimately conferring the impression of a lost opportunity.

A pertinent anecdote may shed some light here, in conclusion. When I first discovered Ballard, as a science fiction loving teenager in the early 1980’s, I raved to all and sundry about his incredible body of work, but hardly any of my intelligent, and supposedly ‘in-the-know’ friends and associates knew of, or cared about him. Then, in 1987, Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood adaptation of Ballard’s WW2 novel Empire of the Sun came out. This huge advertisement, for better or worse, gave the shove Ballard needed to enter mainstream culture. However, without this change in Ballard’s cultural status, it is doubtful that, later on, big name directors like Cronenberg and Wheatley would have found the multimillion dollar funding to adapt some of his other, controversial novels (or at least the process would have been a lot slower, as it is with William Burrough’s even more intractable oeuvre).

All in all, perhaps it would have been better for the more obscure, avant-garde filmmakers – with the associative experimental freedoms such low budgets can afford – to continue adapting Ballard’s works, as with Solveig Nordlund’s Low-Flying Aircraft or Jonathan Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition, rather than the mainstream directors muscling in on the act. But this is all ‘academic’ now, anyway.

Nowadays, if you walk into a trendy London bar, there will be good odds that every other ‘hipster’ you meet will know of Ballard and sing his praises. This is a double edged sword, though. Yes, it’s fantastic that Ballard is now basically seen as a ‘national treasure’. But it also weakens the power of – not the original work which is untouchable – anything associated with, or adapted from, his work. And Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise is the latest case in point. Just as mainstream, corporate culture has now almost entirely appropriated, and thus fatally diluted, the radical ethos and wild danger of street-birthed Punk Rock, so it seems with Ballard, and this new, bowdlerised iteration is just another nail in the coffin, in that sense. I hope I am wrong, but I am beginning to dread the next big-budget translation of the next Ballard novel. Anyone for ‘The Atrocity Exhibition Universal Park Ride’?

Whatever happens in the future, just stick to the incandescent genius of Ballard’s original work and you won’t go wrong….

High-Rise www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk

JAMES DC

High-Rise  is out now in UK cinemas.

Read the chat with director Ben Wheatley

Ben Wheatley interview