Hilary And Jackie
1998
A Collection of Article/Review Exerpts
HILARY AND JACKIE is based on Hilary Du Pré's book (written with brother Piers) A Genius in the Family, and as such, is by definition a biased account of the relationship between a somewhat talented flutist (Hilary) and her younger, more attractive, and ultimately more successful sister (Jacqueline). The story of the two musician sisters is one of a relationship that is both close and adversarial, and therefore emblematic of the conflicts that characterize the interactions between many pairs of sisters.
Hilary Du Pré is portrayed as a rising young musician when her younger sister Jacqueline eclipses her achievements and goes on to become the toast of classical music fans all over Europe. Seemingly living a charmed life, including critical acclaim, international travel, and a musical marriage to classical pianist Daniel Barenboim (played hunkily, yet sensitively by James Frain as an Exotic Jewish Genius); she is shown as profoundly ambivalent about her career. She experiences a breakdown which appears to have been related to her contracting multiple sclerosis, which ended her career at age 28, which she battled until her death in 1987 at age 42.
Because Jacqueline is not here to write her own story, we rely totally on Hilary's point of view, and therefore she is portrayed at the selfless mother and sister and her husband Kiffer Finzi (David Morrissey) is handsome, charming, boyishly adorable, and perfect. Jacqueline is selfish, bitchy, and unsympathetic, until multiple sclerosis ravages her talent, and then her life. In a sequence played slightly differently in the two point-of-view segments, the ascendant Jackie deflates her sister with a comment so withering that this viewer winced both times. In the "Hilary" segment of the film, the onset of her illness is portrayed as more a descent into madness, while in the "Jackie" section it is more harrowingly portrayed in the first person as first a loss of ability to play -- in the middle of a concert, then as the fog characteristic of MS patients, and finally as complete disability and death, presented harrowingly and hauntingly by cinematographer David Johnson.
An unexpected treat in the film is the all-too-brief appearance (her first in twenty-five years) of Nyree Dawn Porter, (familiar to Masterpiece Theatre veteran viewers as Irene in 1968's THE FORSYTE SAGA), as Dame Margot Fonteyn. In fact, one of the film's most disturbing sequences shows her blithely hosting one of those horribly artsy parties, while Jacqueline lies, dying and writhing uncontrollably, in a darkened back room. The film is rounded out by a powerful score by Barrington Pheloung, punctuated by actual Jacqueline DuPre recordings of music from Elgar, Bach, and Dvorak. HILARY AND JACKIE provides no uplifting moments, no happy endings, no Important Messages, but it is an affectingly told rendition of a heartbreakingly sad story.
As youngsters, the two girls were driven to succeed by their pushy mother (Celia Imrie). Hilary was the early achiever in the family, but when Jackie's prowess with the cello thrust her into the limelight their respective fortunes and careers took very different paths. Hilary (Aussie actress Rachel Griffiths) eventually married and settled down in a remote farmhouse to raise a family, while Jackie (played by Emily Watson, from Breaking The Waves, etc) embarked on a mammoth European tour that took a huge physical and emotional toll. Drawing largely upon Hilary du Pré's own memoir about her sister, British writer Frank Cottrell Boyce (Butterfly Kiss, etc) brings the characters to life in an intelligent and detailed script that avoids the usual clichés of the biopic.
The narrative traces the different fortunes of the two sisters, and some key emotional events are seen from two perspectives. Hilary And Jackie spans some thirty years, moving from the post war austerity of 1950's England through to the 1980's, although Tucker doesn't overload the film with conscious period references or tiresome details. Tucker (best known for The Vampire's Life, his documentary about author Anne Rice) makes his feature debut with Hilary And Jackie, and he brings a sense of gritty realism to the material.
David Johnson's camera constantly prowls around the stage, bringing life and a sense of energy to otherwise static scenes. Tucker draws a pair of superb performances from his two actresses. Griffiths delivers a more restrained performance, but she captures the sense of frustration and failure experience by Hilary, who feels slighted that she is often overlooked and remains in the shadow of her sister's achievements. Watson has the meatier role as the sexually precocious, selfish and intense Jackie. She has to deal with depression and debilitating illness, and she delivers a powerful and draining performance that elicits begrudging sympathy for this doomed figure. Both should have good reason to feel a little miffed that they were beaten at the Oscars by a couple of lightweight performances from Shakespeare In Love. James Frain (recently seen in Elizabeth, etc) delivers a solid performance as Daniel Barenboim, the Argentinian pianist who married Jackie.
Last year she resurfaced with a vengeance in A Genius in the Family, the warts-and-all memoir with which her sister Hilary and brother Piers sought to displace the holy icon she had been turned into. In October, Weidenfeld will redress the balance with an academic, Barenboim-approved biography by the music writer Elizabeth Wilson.
Meanwhile, today the Venice Film Festival sees the world première of a film called Hilary and Jackie, which draws on the same sources as the anguished siblings' book.
Indeed, the film and the book developed in parallel. When the producer, Andy Paterson, and the director, Anand Tucker, got sight of Hilary and Pier's initial four-page book proposal they were immediately fired by it and proposed a cinematic collaboration. They warned the authors what it would feel like to have their innermost feelings put up on screen; the authors pondered, then acquiesced, and when the screenplay was finished, they gave it their blessing. After seeing the end-product recently, they left the viewing room, says Tucker, with tears of gratitude. "They told me they recognised their own story."
All of which makes the film's disclaimer - "No implication should be drawn that any of the persons depicted have authorised or approved this production" - seem a shade nugatory. But caution is in order, for this is incendiary territory: the film is likely to be greeted with as much hysteria as the book was a year ago.
That hysteria focused on the revelation, serialised in the British Times, that Hilary had encouraged her husband, Kiffer, to sleep with her emotionally distraught - and incipiently ill - younger sister, setting up a sexual ménage ã trois. Prudes found the revelations disgusting; spilling the beans this way and presenting Jacqueline as intermittently foul-mouthed and vicious was a gross betrayal of one of the music world's favourite saints.
And when it became known that Hilary and Piers had been spurred into action by the knowledge that another writer was planning a biography, they were accused of an additional crime - commercial opportunism. Yet as anyone barring prudes and feminist bigots who reads it will discover, A Genius in the Family is neither a betrayal nor a piece of vulgar kiss-and-tell. Its prose style may be Mills & Boon, but its purpose is deadly serious.
After burying their mother, sister and father in brutally quick succession, the two survivors had a colossal load of grief to exorcise. The book was also their way of reclaiming their sister after her hijacking by classical music's global publicity machine. They wrote this book to survive, and its honesty is painful.
Tucker came to the story as a life-long du Pré fan but was hooked anew by Hilary's account of her relationship with her sister. "We all have someone in our lives whom we can't say no to," he observes, and we all hope to come home again after we've grown up and left it. In both those senses it's a universal story."
He and the writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, were able to draw on the research that Hilary and Piers had amassed - most never made it into their book - and it was a full year before the first words of the screenplay were written.
The film-makers made a point of chasing up additional musical informants, including the cellist William Pleeth (du Pré's mentor) and the pianist Stephen Kovacevich (co-performer and ex-lover). They also pursued medical leads, talking to the doctors who treated her and to those now at the forefront of research.
"One of the big unanswered questions," says Paterson, "is when the disease began for her. You could argue that she was suffering from some of the symptoms for much of her life. Multiple sclerosis is not very well understood now, but then it wasn't understood at all."
The spookiest moment in the book, incidentally, was Hilary's recollection of her nine-year-old sister confiding to her that, when she grew up, she would not be able to walk or move.
The film may not set out to be a biography but it has inevitably had to face the challenge that confronts all films portraying famous people: is its protagonist believable?
Added to this challenge has been another: is the music believable? You don't have to be a musician to know when an actor-pianist's hands are in the wrong place for the notes he is supposedly pounding out.
Enter Emily Watson, best known for Breaking the Waves and currently starring in Metroland, physically unlike Jacqueline and a mere grade one cellist. Impossible? "Well, a huge responsibility," she replies. "I couldn't in a million years play like her, but I had to capture some sense of her art. Only by doing that do you have the right to tell the personal story."
She devised her own system for learning the pieces she would have to be filmed playing, took lessons and practised nine hours a day, and sought advice from Pleeth himself. "And he said, 'Watch her on film and study the look in her eye.' But I also found that the music she plays is great for an actor, since it's all to do with emotion and imagination."
Almost all the music we hear du Pré "play" is actually played off screen by Caroline Dale, a former Young Musician of the Year who comes with an agenda of her own.
The drama has the authentic queasiness of the book. With Celia Imrie as the ambitious, forcing mother, Charles Dance as the recessive father, and two batches of tots as the siblings' younger selves, Hilary and Jackie really feels like the du Pré family chronicle.
Here is their dreadful, anodyne Blytonishness, and here - in the brilliantly cast James Frain - is a completely believable Barenboim (who emerges in a quietly heroic light). And here, in its encroaching, denaturing horror, is the onset of MS, as hard to watch as the ghastly neurotic couplings earlier on.
There are moments when you feel you're watching a disability movie, and the structure at times echoes that of Shine. But the bold sincerity with which this film tackles the unspeakable sets it apart. As they may well agree in Venice.
Like many, I first encountered du Pré in the Elgar cello concerto in D minor, a work of aching disillusionment that somehow rises to heights of sublimity. (Who'd have thought the old Tory had so much blood in him?) It wasn't du Pré's tone that hooked me--there are more limpid cellos--but the intensity of her bowing. You don't need to have seen du Pré in the flesh to feel an immersion that stops just short of hysteria. Indeed, footage shows her strawberry-blond hair whipping around her head, her skirts hiked up, her thighs tightly gripping her Stradivarius: The ecstatic sexual component is hard to ignore. She was unconventional, too: She played with un-English emotional abandon, married a Jew (Daniel Barenboim, the pianist and conductor), and experimented with drugs. So it was probably inevitable that her life and music would turn into fodder for a cautionary parable about the counterculture, complete with the kind of lingering death that lends itself readily to familiar depictions of classical musicians' physical and mental illness.
The instrument of Jacqueline du Pré's defilement is A Genius in the Family, a memoir by Hilary du Pré and their brother, Piers (who gets all but lost in the transfer to film). As the title implies, all was not equal in the du Pré household. Although Hilary got off to a blazing start as a flutist, her little sister eventually left her in the dust, and the family's life came to revolve around the needs of its increasingly demanding young star. The film, from a screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce, accords the sisters equal status, telling the story of each in a separate strands, first Hilary's life, then Jackie's. At the end the two strands converge. After her own musical career recedes, Hilary (Rachel Griffiths) retreats to a bucolic country cottage with her love-smitten swain of a husband (David Morrissey) and her children. There are plenty of animals and no shortage of healthy (i.e., amateur) music-making. Then we take a similar journey with Jackie (Watson), who, denied a proper childhood and family life, pines away in foreign capitals, behaves with increasing waywardness and vulgarity (she adopts a bogus Continental accent), and expires in near solitude, with only her loyal sister to remind her of God's love.
Friends and colleagues of Jacqueline du Pré have attacked Hilary and Jackie for both its factual distortions and its unflattering depiction of an allegedly generous artist--but I frankly don't care if the picture is accurate or not. The larger point is that's it's all dashes and ellipses, skipping lightly along the surface of both Jackie's career and Hilary's noncareer, and wanton in its exploitation of both Elgar and MS to generate pathos and awe. Watson does an exquisite impersonation of a troubled soul; it's probably not her fault that this lonely fruitcake doesn't connect with anything I hear in du Pré's fearless playing, which manages to be both willful and restrained in equal measure. Many talented musicians are unstable; the wonder is how they also manage to be so disciplined. In Hilary and Jackie genius is too vulnerable to plague.
"It's a story about compassion, about non-judgement. There are no goodies or baddies in the story, just proper people."
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from the Sunday Times:
06 September 1998
Lifestyle
Touching a chord
The biography of Jacqueline du Pré, which caused such a furore last year, has now been made into a film. It is likely to be just as shocking, says MICHAEL CHURCH
THE living are always haunted by the ghosts of those who have died before their time: of none is this truer than Jacqueline du Pré's restless spirit. We have her incomparable recordings of Bach and Elgar; we have unforgettable footage of her surging through Beethoven's Ghost Trio with Pinchas Zukerman and her husband, Daniel Barenboim; and we have images of her gilded youth and her wheelchair-bound figure at the end. 
It is a very musical film, with hordes of young players from Chetham's school in addition to massed ranks of adult players (some of whom knew du Pré and played with her). For Moscow, Liverpool's grand civic buildings have been tricked out with computer graphics; and the film's concerts have been shot with scrupulous period accuracy.
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By David Edelstein
Posted Sunday, January 31, 1999, at 12:30 AM PT
Hilary and Jackie
Directed by Anand Tucker
October Films
For nearly a decade I've been obsessed by the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose tremulous, frequently rhapsodic recordings of concertos by Elgar, Schumann, and Dvorák formed the cornerstone of my music library. That's why I've been puzzled by my reluctance to tackle Hilary and Jackie, which pretends to tell the story of du Pré and her elder sister from their childhood as prodigies (Hilary played the flute) to Jacqueline's excruciating decline and early death (in 1987) from multiple sclerosis. I suppose I hoped that the movie--which opened on Christmas Day in New York and Los Angeles to qualify for the Academy Awards and has been opening across the country over the last few weeks--would just go away. In England, it has been reviled as a slander by musicians and music critics, but on this side of the Atlantic its reception has been warm, and there's a strong chance that Emily Watson will win an Oscar nomination for her committed turn as the unstable cellist. So I suppose I'll finally have to confront this thing. As drama, Hilary and Jackie is merely sketchy and superficial. As a portrait of the artist, it's puritanical crap.
It's difficult to believe that serious critics have praised Hilary and Jackie for its insight into the artistic mind, since that insight consists largely of the notion that People Like That Are Different From Us. The director, Anand Tucker, views Jackie from an uncomprehending distance, fixating largely on her freakishness. She seems never to rehearse or to hold opinions about the composers whose works she serves, and her rapport with Barenboim (James Frain, whose performance is likely circumscribed by considerations of libel) is chiefly the upshot of their comparable celebrity. The centerpiece of the movie is when the two narratives come together and Jackie descends on Hilary's cottage like an invading parasite. Flouncing about in her furs and miniskirts and drinking heavily, she uses emotional blackmail to convince Hilary to let her bed her husband --before returning to Paris and her own, evidently unsatisfying, marriage. The illness that strikes her down could be viewed as vengeance for a profoundly unnatural existence.
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Excerpts from interviews with James Frain commenting on Hilary and Jackie:
from Empire magazine February 1999:
.......Today the emphasis is on his latest role, that of Daniel Barenboim, husband to Emily Watson's Jacqueline Du Pré in Hilary and Jackie, the biopic of the celebrated cellist. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
from Times article June 1999:
.......He is also very proud of Hilary and Jackie, in which he appeared opposite Emily Watson as Jacqueline du Pré's husband, the conductor Daniel Barenboim. He says that he spent a lot of time studying archive footage of the real Barenboim. "Because he's still around, it felt important to make it as much like him as possible, without being an impression or a caricature. 'Hilary and Jackie' was quite an easy film to make, in a way, because Frank Cottrell Boyce's script was so fantastic. I don't know if Emily would say the same thing because she really had to go through the mill in that role, but it was such a good piece of writing. It was very clear what it was trying to say about compassion and the ways in which we judge people."
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DVD Extra:
A nice surprise on the DVD of Hilary and Jackie, (don't you just love those extras?), is a production featurette with commentary from the producer, director, screenwriter and the four principal actors. The following are the brief comments made by James Frain explaining his character -- "Danny."
"When Jackie became a mature and successful musician, she then moved into circles of musicians and she met Daniel Barenboim who was a world famous pianist and a conductor. They had an instant kind of attraction and rapport and found that they had a musical affinity as well. And so, pretty soon after that, they fall in love, have this worldwind romance and get married."
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IMDB link for Hilary And Jackie