Under the volcano. - movie reviews

National Review, July 27, 1984 by John Simon

The result is a film that is much more linear, logical, comprehensible than the book, but, alas, even more boring. One of the strengths of the book is its conceivably definitive depiction of a lush in literature, including "this precarious stage, so arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he [the Consul] was sober!" But after the point has been made, endlessly repeated, and worried to death, it becomes, to quote again, "the obscure language known only to major adepts in the Great Brotherhood of Alcohol." Known perhaps to others as well, but of (so to speak) consuming interest only to the GBA. Yet why does this man drink? The novel offers only a few feeble, disingenuous, and misleading hints, the foremost of which is: "Even almost bad poetry is better than life, the muddle of voices might have been saying, as, now, he drank half his drink." In other words, this is yet another of those tiresome works (e.g., Morgan!, King of Hearts, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) in which craziness, drug addiction, or alcoholism is made out to be braver, truer, finer than sober, sane adherence to an allegedly c corrupt world drained of all decency and nobility. Tendentious rubbish!

I have little doubt that Malcolm Lowry drank out of either repressed homosexuality or an obscure sense of artistic failure, or, most likely, a combination of the two. He bestowed this condition on his semi-autobiographical protagonist who cannot begin to satisfy Yvonne, lovingly restored to him, and who does not do a lick of work on his magnum opus, toward which he has been collecting and reading esoteric tomes all his life. But there is almost no such insight in the novel, and none whatever in the film. The novel tries to redeem Firmin by making him, as Lowry thinks, infinitely witty and charming while still pointing an occasional accusatory finger at him. In the movie, because the interior monologue is excised, the Consul is less witty and charming, for which, however, Albert Finney's supposedly magisterial performance is meant to compensate.

It doesn't. Finney is heavy-handed and obvious, playing the Consul with a bug-eyed, wordless despair, which may be appropriate, but without the lightness, the redemptive finesse, which is mandatory if we are to feel for the character. I don't know whether this performance is too honest or too hammy--given the Consul's besotted outrageousness, it could be either--but Finney forfeits compassion, too high a price even for honesty. The part of Hugh suffers worst in the adaptation, for Hugh represents mostly young Lowry's running away to sea, all of which the script cuts. Anthony Andrews is not the actor to fill in such lacunae, though his face has filled out into a deplorable pudginess. As for Yvonne, although Lowry had two wives to base her on, she emerges as only half a character because, being no part of himself and a woman to boot, she did not exercise his imagination (or, rather, his lack of imagination) much. Jacqueline Bisset manages to look right and to do nothing conspicuously wrong, which, for such a passive role, proves amply sufficient. Among the minor characters, the comic Englishman is done best, by James Villiers, who knows how to wear the old school tie as if it were the Order of the Garter.