Books, Arts & Manners: Film Chronicle

Charlie Bubbles, Albert Finney’s contemporary and fatiguing first effort at acting in and directing a film, has something for everybody but not enough for anybody. The Beckett-Pinter crowd will delight in the pauses-between-pauses that are occasionally pocked with “meaningful” dialogue. Students of film arcana will note that the film’s musical theme is a sour restatement of a song from Citizen Kane. Acolytes of Antonioni will recognize the blank walls, stares and souls from the maestro’s most mordant movies. Devotees of minor British films will be pleased to find Yootha Joyce, a Cockney caricature for most of her reel life, speaking perfect Received Standard British, and Billie Whitelaw, the poor skinny drudge in No Love for Johnnie, blossoming forth as washed-out writer Charlie Bubbles’ over-ripe but undernourished wife. Fellini fans will discover a denouement as hokey as 8 1/2 ’s (Charlie Bubbles could, in fact, be called Finney’s 1/2), although Fellini’s bathetic brio is missing.

But what about the disaffiliated viewer? Is he given any chance to understand the eponymous anti-hero? Not really. For a start, he hardly says anything; Finney gives Charlie as few lines and as many solemn grimaces as any leading film character since Johnny Belinda. We can see that his writing career has come to a full stop: meetings with the other writer, his wife and son, acquaintances old and new, all offer nothing to Charlie, and Charlie offers nothing to them. Finney seems to have taken acting lessons from the sponge that appeared in all his early kitchen-sink films. On the theory that the less a film implies, the more a critic infers, the film has received glowing notices. But if you’ve been led to think that Charlie bubbles, be warned: it’s as flat as last year’s shampoo.

RC

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Richard Corliss

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Charlie Bubbles, Albert Finney’s contemporary and fatiguing first effort at acting in and directing a film, has something for everybody but not enough for anybody. The Beckett-Pinter crowd will delight in the pauses-between-pauses that are occasionally pocked with “meaningful” dialogue. Students of film arcana will note that the film’s musical theme is a sour restatement of a song from Citizen Kane. Acolytes of Antonioni will recognize the blank walls, stares and souls from the maestro’s most mordant movies. Devotees of minor British films will be pleased to find Yootha Joyce, a Cockney caricature for most of her reel life, speaking perfect Received Standard British, and Billie Whitelaw, the poor skinny drudge in No Love for Johnnie, blossoming forth as washed-out writer Charlie Bubbles’ over-ripe but undernourished wife. Fellini fans will discover a denouement as hokey as 8 1/2 ’s (Charlie Bubbles could, in fact, be called Finney’s 1/2), although Fellini’s bathetic brio is missing.

But what about the disaffiliated viewer? Is he given any chance to understand the eponymous anti-hero? Not really. For a start, he hardly says anything; Finney gives Charlie as few lines and as many solemn grimaces as any leading film character since Johnny Belinda. We can see that his writing career has come to a full stop: meetings with the other writer, his wife and son, acquaintances old and new, all offer nothing to Charlie, and Charlie offers nothing to them. Finney seems to have taken acting lessons from the sponge that appeared in all his early kitchen-sink films. On the theory that the less a film implies, the more a critic infers, the film has received glowing notices. But if you’ve been led to think that Charlie bubbles, be warned: it’s as flat as last year’s shampoo.