The Caretaker is a stimulating and intimate film that is deceptively simple. It's about two days in the lives of three ordinary men in and around a rundown flat; two brothers and a homeless man and their rights to inhabit a space. It is not Gunga Din, or Amadeus, it is not an escape, it is an inscape. Whilst the events cannot be considered pivotal in the lives of these three nondescript men, the film also has got as much in it as you can bring to it, match it in effort and it expands. It is a very well shot and deliberate movie, it reminds me that every moment of every individual's life has a preciousness, a nobility, a significance, however saturated they might be by fallibility and ignorance, which they unfortunately almost always are.
What does the title "The Caretaker" mean? Most obviously it's the role of building caretaker, but it's also about the care Mick takes of his brother Aston, even if he does it in a misguided way, the care Aston attempts to take of broken household items and Mac, and maybe about how Mac takes care to keep warm. It's a film that reminds me that one of a human being's core objectives is to maintain body temperature within a very tight range, we construct what we call houses mainly to achieve this objective, and that's why housing is so emotive. I was glad to have watched this in British January, as the film was clearly shot over a cold Winter (the actors breathing often condenses).
It spoke to me a lot about power. What does it mean to have rights over a property, how easy it is to exert power over someone who has dropped out of a system; how we both fight attempts to control us in one breath, and in another attempt to control others; how we are both aggrieved and pitiless. Is any social interaction untainted by this wrangling? Aston certainly seems to have withdrawn from society and may well believe so. He is consoled by a plan to build a shed in the garden, an authentic space that he will have made with his hands and his labour, that he can own and feel pride in.
One of the excitements of the movie is to see actors who were never really given room to astound on screen being given exactly that. Robert Shaw, talented stage Shakesperian playwright and novelist gets a rare chance to impress in front of a camera outside the limitations of character acting; Donald Pleasance entrancing in a role he honed to perfection in the stage version of the play. It is not possible to single out Bates, Shaw or Pleasance as "leading man", they are a triskelion.
The Caretaker felt in general like a labour of love, many celebrities felt that this adaptation of Pinter's play was worth funding (Peter Sellers and Elizabeth Taylor among many others are mentioned in the credits as funding the movie) and culturally significant, commercial imperatives be damned. Nic Roeg, who would go onto achieve widespread public acknowledgemnt as a director was the principal photogrpaher on this movie and does a lot without showiness or insistence, some of the micro tracking shots are worthy of study and greatly enhance the psychological effects of certain scenes.
Each character is allowed moments to emblazon the screen, Aston when he recounts his electroconvulsive treatment, Mac in his terror in the dark, Mick as he wordlessly empathises with his brother in the garden. In the end every man does as he sees fit and has the same right to exist as any other. Even Mick's abject villainy is an attempt to help his brother. By whatever miracle or obscure sequence of events we humans, we "ancient race", come to be here, we have not been gifted with much capacity for self reflection. Each character in the play is well aware of the faults and delusions of the other characters, but their own dubious gameplans and blemished histories seem well formed to themselves, as at the fairground when our images are distorted and sent back by funny mirrors, but here the characters are wonky whilst the mirrors reflect back coherence.
The original play is inspired by moments from Pinter's own life and characters he knew and made impressions on him during his struggle years. It is worth noting the small mercy that by the time the film was made, the crude and drastic measure of electroconvulsive treatment was performed under anaesthesia as standard (Aston's character received it on the wrong side of history, circa twenty years before the events of the film if we assume Aston's age was the same as the actor Robert Shaw's). It is now no longer used as a standard treatment for schizophrenia.
What does the title "The Caretaker" mean? Most obviously it's the role of building caretaker, but it's also about the care Mick takes of his brother Aston, even if he does it in a misguided way, the care Aston attempts to take of broken household items and Mac, and maybe about how Mac takes care to keep warm. It's a film that reminds me that one of a human being's core objectives is to maintain body temperature within a very tight range, we construct what we call houses mainly to achieve this objective, and that's why housing is so emotive. I was glad to have watched this in British January, as the film was clearly shot over a cold Winter (the actors breathing often condenses).
It spoke to me a lot about power. What does it mean to have rights over a property, how easy it is to exert power over someone who has dropped out of a system; how we both fight attempts to control us in one breath, and in another attempt to control others; how we are both aggrieved and pitiless. Is any social interaction untainted by this wrangling? Aston certainly seems to have withdrawn from society and may well believe so. He is consoled by a plan to build a shed in the garden, an authentic space that he will have made with his hands and his labour, that he can own and feel pride in.
One of the excitements of the movie is to see actors who were never really given room to astound on screen being given exactly that. Robert Shaw, talented stage Shakesperian playwright and novelist gets a rare chance to impress in front of a camera outside the limitations of character acting; Donald Pleasance entrancing in a role he honed to perfection in the stage version of the play. It is not possible to single out Bates, Shaw or Pleasance as "leading man", they are a triskelion.
The Caretaker felt in general like a labour of love, many celebrities felt that this adaptation of Pinter's play was worth funding (Peter Sellers and Elizabeth Taylor among many others are mentioned in the credits as funding the movie) and culturally significant, commercial imperatives be damned. Nic Roeg, who would go onto achieve widespread public acknowledgemnt as a director was the principal photogrpaher on this movie and does a lot without showiness or insistence, some of the micro tracking shots are worthy of study and greatly enhance the psychological effects of certain scenes.
Each character is allowed moments to emblazon the screen, Aston when he recounts his electroconvulsive treatment, Mac in his terror in the dark, Mick as he wordlessly empathises with his brother in the garden. In the end every man does as he sees fit and has the same right to exist as any other. Even Mick's abject villainy is an attempt to help his brother. By whatever miracle or obscure sequence of events we humans, we "ancient race", come to be here, we have not been gifted with much capacity for self reflection. Each character in the play is well aware of the faults and delusions of the other characters, but their own dubious gameplans and blemished histories seem well formed to themselves, as at the fairground when our images are distorted and sent back by funny mirrors, but here the characters are wonky whilst the mirrors reflect back coherence.
The original play is inspired by moments from Pinter's own life and characters he knew and made impressions on him during his struggle years. It is worth noting the small mercy that by the time the film was made, the crude and drastic measure of electroconvulsive treatment was performed under anaesthesia as standard (Aston's character received it on the wrong side of history, circa twenty years before the events of the film if we assume Aston's age was the same as the actor Robert Shaw's). It is now no longer used as a standard treatment for schizophrenia.