Category: film reviews

Reviews of current and classic films

Napoleon

by admin, posted in film reviews

There is much to admire in Ridley Scott’s latest historical epic, Napoleon. It has a stellar cast, namely Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby in the principal roles of Napoleon and his erstwhile paramour Josephine, a lavishly designed production that spares neither man or beast in its evocation of Napoleon’s great set piece battles, and a screenplay that, while bloated in parts, still gallops along at an engaging and watchable pace.

However, Scott’s film, for all its merits and obvious ambition, still manages to be much less than the sum of its parts. For me, the main problem is Phoenix, an actor with an undoubtedly heroic profile but also a highly mannered and idiosyncratic acting style which seems profoundly unsuited for the role.  Scott and the screenplay allow Phoenix to retain a distinctive east coast American accent and speech pattern, which is highly incongruous, to say the least, in a portrayal of the pre-eminent European statesman of the early 19th century. Now, I realise that Napoleon is primarily intended for an English speaking (i.e. North American) audience, and it is obviously unrealistic to expect this audience to assimilate the fact that Napoleon might speak with a distinctly un-American accent.  Nonetheless, for me Phoenix spent much of the film acting and sounding like he had wandered in from the set of a Martin Scorcese film, and this massively undermined the credibility of his performance in the film’s central role.

As Josephine, Vanessa Kirby seems a much more fully rounded character in her own right and more than deserving of her own biopic; the film seems very uncertain of what to do with her. She, too, is an enigma; apart from the heady aphrodisiac of power, it is not at all obvious as to exactly what she sees in Napoleon. Certainly, the forced, mechanical nature of their intimate encounters would not seem to inspire endless devotion on her part. Kirby battles heroically to make an impression in what could have been a thankless and marginal role, but even her efforts can’t overcome the deficiencies of the script. Her performance might be the film’s most redeeming feature, but that is simply asking too much of it.

It must be conceded that the character of Napoleon was always bound to be enigmatic, and Scott’s film is no exception in this regard. Napoleon was, after all, the self-appointed champion of enlightened and revolutionary ideals, scourge of both the illiberal ancien regime and the murderous excesses of the Terror, who nevertheless took the first opportunity to declare and crown himself emperor and attempt to establish his own dynasty built on a personal brand of demagoguery.  Scott’s film, and David Scarpa’s script, does not shy away from the complexities and contradictions of Napoleon’s story, but one feels the need to reserve judgment; any film in our current age is invariably conveyed to its audience via more than one platform.  There is a conventional cinematic version, the limitations of which present a severe challenge to the many complexities of the Napoleon story.  However, the alternative streamed version has the scope and latitude to be more elaborate and episodic, and Scott himself has already foreshadowed an expanded director’s version, so one might hope that the many underdeveloped elements that detract from the cinematic version might yet find a more complete and satisfying expression.

The combination of Scarpa’s pastiche of a script and Phoenix’s seemingly disinterested, detached performance makes it difficult to discern the film’s true attitude toward Napoleon.  On the one hand, Scott’s film eschews the sentimental, and the inclusion of the tally of deaths incurred by each of Napoleon’s campaigns serves to confirm this view, emphasising Napoleon’s callous disregard for human life and his well-deserved reputation as one of history’s greatest butchers.  But Napoleon only truly comes to life during the brilliantly conceived and staged battlefield scenes such as Toulon and Austerlitz. This is clearly where Scott feels most at home, and the great eye for spectacle that Scott has honed and refined over the many years of his long career serves him best in these sequences. Much of the rest of the film, and Scarpa’s hollow script, feels like little more than a perfunctory interlude awkwardly filling the space between these stunning combat sequences.

Elvis

by admin, posted in film reviews

On the surface, Elvis (2022), a new biopic of Elvis Presley, rock music’s original and most theatrical global superstar, and Baz Luhrmann, one of filmdom’s most exuberant and ostentatious filmmakers, would seem to be an ideal union of director and subject. Luhrmann, as director, also wrote the screenplay in league with Craig Pearce, Sam Bromell and Jeremy Doner.  And there is much to admire in Luhrmann’s sprawling epic, particularly in the elaborate set-piece stage performance sequences at both ends of Presley’s career, which are convincingly and thrillingly recreated courtesy of a stellar, breakout performance by Austin Butler as Presley. Indeed, it is in these sequences that Luhrmann’s film really takes flight and transcends the standard biopic fare. Butler conveys all of the young Presley’s visceral and, let it be said, uninhibited sexual on-stage energy that so transfixed, entranced and horrified several generations of Americans. Butler is equally compelling in his portrayal of the late career “Las Vegas” Elvis characterised by a series of sweat-soaked, bloated yet undeniably charismatic performances. Presley’s enduring relationship with his audience is in many respects the most crucial centrepiece of the film.

Less compelling are the off-stage sequences which are meant to convey the drama of Presley’s complex relations with his family, his long-suffering wife Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) and most significantly, his manager and self-styled “snowman”, Colonel Tom Parker. These sequences seem to lack a sense of purpose and energy, and the screenplay in these areas seems cursory at best and painfully flabby at worst; this is not a unique observation on Luhrmann’s career. As director he seems profoundly ill at ease with the human dimension of his characters, preferring to hurry through the more intimate scenes and take refuge in his vast familiar bag of pyrotechnic tricks. One doubts that there has ever been a more distinctive filmmaker in the history of cinema, in both a positive and negative sense.

Many of Luhrmann’s trademark flourishes are present here, and one has ample reason to suspect they are used primarily to take shortcuts through the more problematic and contradictory aspects of the Presley biography. There is an abundance of “smash” cuts, quirky dissolves (Parker’s intravenous drip bag becomes the Las Vegas skyline, to cite just one memorable example.) Luhrmann does a reasonable job of dealing with most controversial aspect of the Presley legacy, that being the charge thar he merely “appropriated” black rhythm and blues music without ever giving its black progenitors and performers their due credit. Luhrmann is at pains to portray the young Elvis willingly soaking up the sundry and diverse musical influences that surrounded him in his youth in the American south. There are the energised foot-stomping gospel beats to be heard in travelling religious roadshows, side-by-side with the much looser, sultry rhythm and blues that leaked out into the street, specifically the iconic Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, a city that would eventually become synonymous with Elvis and his legacy. The reality that the debt Elvis owed to black music and culture has gone largely unacknowledged is, the film seems to allege, the fault not to Presley himself but his omnipresent and overbearing manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

There is a significant omission here, unfortunately, being the admiration for, and the profound influence of, country and western music on Elvis’ career. Country music is really given short shrift by Luhrmann, personified by Hank Snow (David Wenham) who initially topped Parker’s bill ahead of Elvis. Snow’s subsequent sole purpose seems to be to serve as the voice of old-school conservatism and to be a mere speed bump on the path of Presley’s relentless ascent to the top of the bill.

However, the film’s main problem is the character of Colonel Parker, and the casting of Tom Hanks in the role, buried as he is under several prosthetic layers. This casting choice must have been a dilemma for Luhrmann as well; on the one hand, Hanks is the marquee name who doubtless made the whole production possible, and Hanks is to be commended for his preparedness to shed his familiar nice-guy persona to portray Parker, who emerges as the clear and obvious villain of the piece.

But Hanks’ fame and instantaneous recognition factor, even under layers of prosthetic makeup, present a significant problem and leave the whole film with a distinctly incohesive and unbalanced feel. Luhrmann’s fast-paced scatter-gun and pastiche style of filmmaking doesn’t leave much room for Parker to come across as much more than a cartoon villain, despite Hanks’ best efforts.  It must be said that the Hanks problem bedevils much of modern cinema; like Meryl Streep or Russell Crowe and many others, Hanks is just too famous as himself to convincingly portray any real-life character, and his dominating presence leaves the film feeling very lopsided and ultimately unsatisfying.

Perhaps this failure is to some degree unavoidable; Parker is an enigmatic character, even in real life. His origins to say the least are shrouded in mystery, despite claiming to have been born in Virginia it was revealed in later years that he was actually born in the Netherlands and emigrated illegally to the United States, and there is no evidence that he ever served in the military in any capacity. The decision to have him serve as the film’s erstwhile narrator gives the biopic a unique and innovative framing device, but does mean that the entire film pivots around his characterisation, which never really comes off. As narrator, Parker’s self-proclaimed mission is to absolve himself of the blame for Elvis’ premature death, but the film strongly subverts this objective.

Luhrmann’s film clearly endorses the tabloid version of the Elvis/Parker story: Parker was the opportunist carnival barker who saw Elvis as a ‘cash cow’ and wrangled him onto stage to and past the point of exhaustion, in the process turning a blind eye to his hedonistic self-indulgence and excessive drug dependence. As such, Parker was at least complicit in Elvis’ physical decline and death. Compounding this view is a key scene in the film that has Parker hovering over a prone, clearly dangerously ill Elvis in a corridor and loudly proclaiming that “nothing is more important than that boy takes the stage tonight”.

There is even an overt suggestion in the film that Parker’s famous reluctance to let Elvis tour internationally was related to the fact that Parker, as a non-citizen, had no passport and the attempt to acquire one would obviously cause the elaborate façade that he had created around his identity to crumble into dust. The lasting impression is of the “Colonel” as the obligatory, black-hatted scoundrel in the story. Hanks toils heroically but the screenplay allows him little scope to add more dimensions to this portrait.

It’s not the first time that Luhrmann has sought to bend his subject matter into a shape that seems to suit a comfortable and preferred view.  One need only consider his love of musical incongruity; his proclivity for injecting contemporary popular music into the ‘la belle epoque’ Moulin Rouge, of having Lana del Rey provide the soundtrack for Jay Gatsby’s lavish parties in The Great Gatsby. In Elvis, Luhrmann makes only fleeting reference to Presley’s film career, and whilst Elvis himself was eventually dismissive of it, it was nonetheless a crucial element of Parker’s strategy to make Elvis the biggest star in the world, and it was via these films, dire though most of them were, that people of my generation encountered Elvis, especially given the fact that he never toured internationally. Also, in Luhrmann’s hands, Elvis becomes something of a liberal hero, ignoring Parker’s objections and injecting a political slant into his famous 1968 comeback TV special which happened to coincide with the assassination of Robert F Kennedy. Perhaps Elvis really was on the side of the angels in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but this portrayal conveniently ignores the gun-toting martial arts student’s enthusiastic endorsement for President Richard Nixon. This fact alone would seem to undermine the view of Elvis sympathising with the rising liberal zeitgeist of the sixties and straining under the leash of the arch conservative Parker.

In the end, as with so many of Luhrmann’s cinematic offerings, one is left with a profound ambivalence. You have to admire the skill and conviction apparent in the often compelling recreation of Elvis’ stage performances, but the lack of nuance and dimension in the other aspects of the screenplay means that the characters of both the ‘real’ Elvis  and Parker remain frustratingly out of reach.

Belfast

by admin, posted in film reviews

Belfast (2021) represents a significant milestone in British writer/director Kenneth Branagh’s career, being the first time he has mined his own personal history, namely his upbringing in working class Belfast in the late 1960s. Belfast is clearly a passion project for Branagh in a way that can scarcely be said of his previous directorial forays, which include a number of Shakespearean adaptations and the recent workmanlike Agatha Christie updates Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. The semi-autobiographical Belfast appears to engage Branagh’s emotional IQ as well as his technical proficiency as a director. Some critics have derided the film for its overt sentimentality and its undeniably rose-tinted view of the origins of the sectarian conflict known to history as the Troubles.

But I would defend the film’s standpoint on the grounds that it deliberately views the world with the eyes of a nine-year-old; specifically those of the film’s main protagonist, ”Buddy” (impressive newcomer Jude Hill, whose nuanced, un-self-conscious performance is by far the best thing in the film), who is essentially a lightly fictionalised younger version of Branagh himself. Seen through Buddy’s eyes, his parents (played in laconic style by Jamie Dornan and Catriona Balfe) and even his grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and regular Branagh alumnus Judi Dench) are heroic figures. The incipient sectarian conflict, while obviously distressing, is really just background noise to Buddy, whose immediate concerns are gaining academic promotion at his school (as measured by the proximity of his desk to the front of the classroom) and winning the romantic favour of his fair Catholic classmate Catherine (Olivia Tennant). The Troubles may have been a source of great angst and no small amount of terror for Buddy’s family and a primary factor in their eventual wrenching decision to emigrate, but for Buddy they were just another baffling aspect of the mystifying adult world just beyond his horizon.

The critics who have given voice to disapproval of the film’s sentimentality are given some ammunition by the stark black-and-white cinematography by Haris Zambarioukos. The scene is set in the film’s opening minutes, when a commanding full-colour aerial shot pans over contemporary Belfast before dissolving into a monochrome portrayal of the ‘mean streets’ of Buddy’s youth. Might we be going back in time? The omnipresence of Belfast native son Van Morrison on the soundtrack borders on cliché, as does the showing of an episode of “Star Trek” on the living room television. (Branagh does have the confidence to include an in-joke; at one point Buddy is shown reading the Marvel comic-book “Thor”, and the like-named cinematic version was Branagh’s own directorial contribution to the Marvel comic universe.)

But these criticisms might be said to fall under the category of quibbles. Branagh’s intent is clearly not to portray his personal origin story with Ken Loach style slice-of-life realism. Instead, the film is really a love-letter by Branagh to his extended family and the community that nurtured him. His portrayal of the Troubles really serves as a way for Branagh to contrast the more humane, liberal attitude of Buddy’s father, played with stoic understatement by Dornan, with the snarling, malignant intolerance of the Protestant stand-over man Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan). The father has a defining moment late in the film where he tells Buddy that the object of his awakening desire, Catherine, would be welcome in their house because the content of her character was far more important than any sectarian difference. The mother is more than a match for him, as witnessed in a semi-comic scene when she forces Buddy to return the ii-gotten box of detergent that he had purloined from a looted Catholic-owned grocery store.  The family’s parlous economic circumstances, which compel Buddy’s father to leave and seek work in Britain, combine with the impact of the Troubles to force the family to resolve to emigrate in search of a better life.

And at the film’s conclusion Branagh includes a tribute which gives an eloquent testimony to the oft-neglected, lasting effects of migration: grief and guilt.

The Matrix Resurrections

by admin, posted in film reviews

The principal challenge facing The Matrix: Resurrections its director Lana Wachowski and her fellow screenwriters, David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon, is to justify its own existence. Alert readers will know that both main protagonists, Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) were dead, at least in theory at the end of Revolutions (2003), the second of the two underwhelming sequels spawned by the original Matrix in 1999. As well, the story arc, such as it was, that began in the first film seemed complete.  Unfortunately, the fourth most recent instalment in the franchise largely fails to rise to this challenge. This is a real shame, because Resurrections has within it the makings of a truly interesting film, potential that sadly goes unrealised.

As the film begins, we find that Neo, in the guise of his original “character” in the first film Thomas Anderson, is a burnt-out middle-aged interactive game designer whose singular claim to fame is the creation of the original Matrix trilogy, which in this version of events is a trio of immersive ‘virtual reality’ -style computer games.  A reluctant and seemingly chronically depressed Anderson finds himself under pressure from his business partner (Jonathan Groff) and their parent company Warner Brothers (not coincidentally, the studio from which the “real world” Matrix franchise originated) to produce a follow-up to his original trilogy. Herein we get an insight into Anderson’s tormented mindset; he is haunted by recurrent lucid dreams which are actually key episodes from the earlier films. So immediate and vivid are these dreams that Anderson can scarcely distinguish them from reality, as he discloses to the audience and to his therapist, (Neil Patrick Harris) who will assume a much more pivotal, if predictable, role as the film’s plot unfolds.

It is easy to forget, especially now at a distance of more than twenty years, just how impactful and genuinely ground-breaking the first Matrix film was in 1999. I can personally vouch for this fact; at the time of its release, I worked in a software development company, and for many of the twenty-something IT professionals among my colleagues the first Matrix film was a well-nigh religious experience. Its use of advanced CGI such as the super slow-motion (commonly known as “bullet time” and referenced as such in Resurrections in one of the screenplay’s several ‘mega’ moments) was truly revolutionary and quickly became a new standard in contemporary cinema. Which soon became a problem, because what was new and innovative in 1999 quickly became a hackneyed cliché in the four years that elapsed between the original film and its two sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, in 2003. In the interim it seemed that every Hollywood ‘blockbuster’, even the dire Charlie’s Angels reboots of the early 2000s, were relying heavily on ‘bullet time’ and similar CGI in which marquee cast members featured in elaborately choreographed fight sequences; so commonplace was the use and abuse of this form of CGI that by the time Reloaded was released in 2003, it looked like little more than a pale imitation of itself.  The provocative ideas that propelled the first film had been exhausted by the first of the sequels. A hallmark of the first film was that the celebrated CGI sequences are actually few and far between, which served to maximise their impact. In both the sequels, the filmmakers seemed to have adopted the time-honoured Hollywood mantra that ‘nothing succeeds like excess’; the CGI was at saturation level in virtually every frame and often seemed to exist for its own sake, serving little if any narrative purpose. Regrettably, the Matrix franchise has earned an unwanted reputation as one where the sequel(s) are so undistinguished and lacklustre that they diminish the reputation of the original that inspired them.

The new film, Resurrections, leans heavily on the same CGI trickery that the original film made famous, but it has become so familiar that where it once had freshness and originality, its sole appeal has more to do with nostalgia. Early on, Resurrections seems to be heading down a more daring and compelling path by suggesting that the events of the trilogy existed purely within Neo/Thomas Anderson’s fevered imagination and are in fact part of a deep-seated psychosis. The screenplay actually goes to some lengths in preparing the ground for this scenario.  Neo/Thomas Anderson offers this self-diagnosis to his therapist, who concurs and suggests that Anderson has integrated various elements from his real life into his alternate Matrix reality in a fictionalised form.  Thus, his mistrusted and manipulative business partner is transformed into the malign Agent Smith, the friendly yet unattainable woman who he encounters in a coffee shop becomes Trinity, his paramour and soulmate, and the therapist’s black cat, whom Anderson despises, finds its way into the Matrix as the cat in the iconic ‘deja-vu’ episode.  Even the mute impotence that Anderson feels when trying to voice his opinions to his business partner is given expression in the notorious CGI torture interrogation scene in the Matrix during Neo/Anderson’s first encounter with Agent Smith. This interpretation would seem to tie in with the famous quote from Morpheus in his first meeting with Neo/Anderson in the original film:

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?

This theme is even explicit in the name chosen for Morpheus’ character: the god of sleep. Frankly, Resurrections would have been a far more interesting and watchable film if the screenplay had chosen to explore this theme, of the indistinct overlap between Neo’s dream and reality, in a more definitive way.  As it is, most of the film is given over to a predictable CGI heavy re-run of the first Matrix film, with seemingly the only narrative objective being the restoration of the supposedly epochal, Matrix-overwhelming romance between Neo and Trinity. 

This might have been more compelling had the screenplay in any of the four films had allowed for even the slightest spark of chemistry between them, their ‘grand romance’ (despite being seemingly ‘divinely’ ordained by the Oracle) always had a distinctly perfunctory feel.  Even more problematic is the re-casting of the iconic roles of Morpheus and Agent Smith.  Yahya Abdul Mateen II as the new version of Morpheus is colourful and dynamic in an underdeveloped role, but Lawrence Fishburne had a cool elegant gravitas that was crucial to the first film’s success. And Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith conveyed a singular, refined malevolence that made him into one of the great screen villains. Jonathan Groff toils valiantly as the ‘new’ Agent Smith, but his role in the narrative seems unclear at best.  In the 2003 sequels he was the ‘unplugged’ wildcard with his own agenda who ultimately inspired the uneasy alliance and truce between humans and the machine world. Now he is – what, exactly? A contractual obligation, perhaps? The occasional appearance of both Weaving and Fishburne in ‘flashbacks’ from the first three films only underlines how sorely their presence is missed in the new iteration.

The lack of clarity surrounding the role of Agent Smith is one of the many underdeveloped elements that leads one to conclude that the creation of a fresh instalment in the Matrix franchise owed, in common with so many big-screen sequels, more to economic imperatives than the needs of cinematic storytelling. This is a genuine shame because there does exist within the Matrix universe, teased by Resurrections but never quite delivered, the promise of a far more interesting and engaging story that goes sadly unfulfilled.

Dune

by admin, posted in film reviews

French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has a well-earned reputation as one of filmdom’s more visionary and ambitious practitioners. He has trod the path of the science-fiction epic before, with Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Dune was reportedly a long-term passion project for him; so much so that he was willing to commit to two full-length films just to cover the first novel, with the production of the sequel being conditional on the box-office success of the first instalment.  His vision for the project is all the more laudable when one considers that the inherent density and scope of Frank Herbert’s source material has defeated more than one gifted and eminent filmmaker before him. The most noteworthy example of this failure was probably David Lynch, whose bold, eccentric and largely unsuccessful 1984 attempt to film the ‘unfilmable’ was, perhaps unsurprisingly, largely unwatchable.

Of course, Herbert’s original novel presents an immense challenge to Villeneuve and Lynch and others who have attempted to translate his work to the screen. There is the far-reaching scope of Herbert’s vision; perhaps only Tolkien and Asimov have presumed to create an entire universe complete with alien cultures, ecosystems, and mythology. But to add a further degree of difficulty, there is the challenge presented by Herbert’s dense, circular prose style; the author himself openly admitted that he conceived and wrote large parts of his novel whilst under the influence of ‘magic mushrooms’. This is an insight which sheds new light on the novel’s elaborate faux mysticism, premised on the mysterious and much-coveted substance known as “spice” which, among other things, somehow makes interstellar navigation possible. This enigmatic theme might help to explain Dune’s status as a counter-culture classic dating from its halcyon days in the 1960s, and its frequently impenetrable prose has cemented its status as possibly the most celebrated, ubiquitous yet unread book in the English language, at least until the publication of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time.

In his previous ventures in the realm of the science fiction epic, Villeneuve has revealed a deft hand in storytelling on a very broad canvas whilst simultaneously evoking character and internal conflict on a far more intimate, personal level. There exists the danger that in a large-scale sci-fi epic such as Dune individual characters and actors can get lost and overshadowed; this was certainly the case in Lynch’s ill-fated 1984 version, where otherwise accomplished actors such as Kyle McLachlan and Francesca Annis looked profoundly ill at ease. But here Villeneuve’s cast generally serves him well. Timothee Chalamet has hitherto made his name in much smaller independent or “art house” films such as Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name, but in the pivotal role of Paul, the scion and heir apparent to the Atreides house, he exhibits an intriguing mixture of brooding Hamlet-like diffidence (when contemplating his seemingly predestined role) and caught-between-worlds angst and curiosity (as he begins to explore his alternative destiny as a kind of alien messiah to the Fremen, the long-suffering indigenous desert dwellers of Arrakis).

The enigmatic Fremen woman Chani, portrayed with a beguiling combination of mystery and allure by Zendaya, appears in Paul’s premonitory dreams and her relationship with Paul serves as a gateway for him into his new alien home; her role promises to become more significant in the upcoming second instalment. She also serves to frame the narrative from the opening scenes, and to give explicit expression to the theme of colonialism and exploitation; it is Chani who initially gives voice to the perception that oppression by off-world powers is all that she has ever known. This theme is present in Herbert’s novel but is very much in the background, with the initial focus more occupied with the political machinations between the all-powerful Imperium and the rival ducal houses of Atreides and Harkonnen. Villeneuve’s screenplay, which he co-wrote with Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts, places this theme squarely in the foreground, and the portrayal of the Fremen as desert dwelling pseudo-Arab tribespeople with their own distinctive cultures, language and customs, makes the parallels with our own contemporary real world all too obvious.

As Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother and consort to the doomed Duke Leto Atreides (a stoic Jason Isaac), Rebecca Ferguson has the more difficult assignment; the film makes gives her a more ambiguous role. As Paul’s mother and erstwhile protector, her adherence to the obscure Bene Gesserit religion means that she has divided loyalties, clearly on display when she and Paul are forced to fight for survival in the aftermath of the violent Harkonnen coup. Ferguson’s performance as a conflicted mother, who seemingly knows more than she is able to say, is finely calibrated and certainly whets the appetite for her further character development in the sequel.

Villeneuve’s previous experience with cinematic sci-fi epics certainly helps to ensure the success of his version of Dune, in particular his eye for detail, essential to any convincing evocation of an alien world. The cinematography by Greg Fraser is exceptional, and the film’s seamless combination of big canvas spectacle and intimate character study is a rare commodity indeed. If the film’s strengths are many and obvious, so is the main defect.  The film’s pacing is leisurely to say the least; sci-fi aficionados might be inclined to compare the film’s stately rate of progress to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey (1969). This is perhaps an inevitable consequence of Villeneuve’s choice to divide Herbert’s first novel across two films. In doing so, he has given Herbert’s vision the time and space to be realised on-screen like never before. The overall end result is that the viewer is left with an authentically novel experience; to actually look forward, with genuine enthusiasm, to a “blockbuster” sequel.

No Time To Die

by admin, posted in film reviews

The American director Cary Joji Fukunaga faced an exacting and unenviable task when chosen to helm the 25th instalment of cinema’s most enduring franchise, James Bond. The film entitled  No Time to Die, (courtesy apparently of the random title/word generator used on these occasions) is the latest, long (pandemic) delayed, and the fifth and last to feature Daniel Craig in the eponymous role. As a filmmaker (and co-writer with Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Fukunaga had to pay due homage to the franchises’ six decades of history, studded with some of the most familiar (dare one say overused) cliches in cinema) to avoid alienating the franchise’s long-established fan base. He also faced the competing demand to somehow strike out and find fresh territory in such a perennial and familiar film universe. His efforts in this regard centred on Bond’s accumulation of emotional baggage through his five-film journey. Prior to Craig’s tenure in the 007 tuxedo, every portrayal of Bond, even those featuring the same actor, began each film as essentially a blank slate, carrying no physical or psychological scars forward from the various traumas he negotiated in the previous film. Craig’s Bond is supposed to be different.

As a result, Fukunaga’s film is a rather patchy compromise. There are the all-too familiar large scale action sequences, which are staged expertly and are never less than extremely watchable but nonetheless highly improbable. Bond as ever manages to defy death, serious injury and logic in these sequences (at least until the film’s climax, when Fukunaga’s film does find genuinely new territory). But the film’s unsatisfying compromise is always apparent.  The entire Bond franchise has never really recovered from the damage incurred in the 1990s when the Austin Powers films so effectively demolished its cliches (with an honourable mention going to “You Only Move Twice”, the 1996 Simpsons ‘Bond spoof’ episode which featured the wonderfully named Hank Scorpio (pictured), a moniker which would sit easily in the rogue’s gallery of Bond villains.) Many of these cliches are still on show in the latest film; the chief villain of the piece (Rami Malek) rejoices in the first name Lucifer, and a last name, Safin, that evokes the indeterminate Eastern European origins of many of Bond’s Cold War era nemeses.  Safin even devises his dastardly plot in a remote island lair (yes, really) protected by a loyal yet somewhat incompetent private army. Which, like so many previous Bond adventures, provokes the obvious yet unanswered question: how exactly does the average supervillain source and recruit an army of skilled henchpeople? Is there a website named Goons R Us or somesuch?

His name and choice of hideout location are not the only implausible aspects of Safin’s villainy. In a plot twist that stretches credulity to breaking point, Safin’s motivation metastasizes from a quest for personal revenge to a vastly more ambitious goal of widespread genocide. It as if the screenplay’s writers felt an imperative to raise the stakes, to produce a climax worthy of Craig’s 007 swansong. It is a gambit that might have succeeded if Safin’s character were more developed, but Malek’s performance in the role is uncertain at best.  There are similar problems with Bond’s grand romance with Dr Madeline Swann (Lea Seydoux). The latter enjoys the extraordinary privilege of being the first female protagonist (it is probably high time to formally retire the outdated, misogynistic term “Bond girl“)  Seydoux seems an odd choice for such a distinction, if only because her performance is so thoroughly anodyne and uninvolving, and there is so little chemistry between them, that she seems an unlikely object of Bond’s grand passion, which supposedly provides the rationale for his ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Their supposed mutual devotion suffers by comparison with the much spikier and engaging interplay between Bond and his doomed former flame Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) in Casino Royale (2006). And Bond in return seemingly has little to offer such a relationship. Many critics have written approvingly of the greater insight we are given into Bond’s emotional hinterland, but this character evolution seems to me only marginal at best; at his core, the Bond of No Time to Die appears to be largely unreconstructed from the “blunt instrument” to quote the memorable early assessment offered by M (Judi Dench) in Casino Royale. For all the greater willingness to exhibit his emotional side, he is still the stern-visaged, unsmiling assassin familiar from virtually every Bond incarnation, who spends much of the film casually despatching a large array of faceless henchpeople without the merest sign of remorse or even hesitation.

Despite the oversold and overhyped attempts to project greater emotional sophistication in the leading character’s persona, the formula for success in a Bond film hasn’t really changed that much over the years. You need at least a plausible chemistry to exist with the main female protagonist, and a singular villain who is both believably mendacious and charismatic without lapsing into a “Doctor Evil” style caricature.  Without these crucial elements, No Time to Die is left to rely on the essential silliness of the plot which makes just too many demands on the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief.

No Time To Die’s shortcomings are by no means unique to this particular film. Other long-running cinematic series have fallen victim to the exact same syndrome of ”franchise fatigue”; certainly Star Wars ,Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and the ironically interminable Terminator series, among many others, have similar problems. No Time To Die remains a very watchable and engaging film, and its surprising and quite spectacular denouement does pack a wholly unexpected emotional punch. But regrettably it is not a patch on Casino Royale, and the energy and sheer chutzpah with which Craig revitalised the franchise in that film have largely dissipated over his five-film tenure behind the wheel the 007 Aston Martin. It is unquestionably the right time for him to depart.

Dementia on Film: Supernova & The Father

by admin, posted in film reviews

It is an extremely  rare event to see a major cinematic offering that deals with the decidedly less than crowd-pleasing subject matter of dementia. It is perhaps a consequence of the pandemic, that has upset the cinema world’s schedule, as it has so much else, that two such films come to the screen almost simultaneously. Supernova and The Father both have central characters who are afflicted with dementia, and the devastating impact of this ailment on their world and that of the people around them.

In Harry McQueen’s Supernova, Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play Sam and Tusker, a middle-aged couple touring the verdant and oh-so scenic northern districts of England in their battered campervan. The film is essentially a two-hander, and at first glance appears to be a road movie, traversing much of the same territory (literally) as The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. In this respect, the cinematography by Nick Pope is superb and a real feature of the film. However.it soon becomes clear that McQueen’s film, and Sam and Tusker’s journey, has a quite different and much more serious intent. Tusker has been diagnosed with a degenerative version of early on-set dementia, and hence the trip is actually a “farewell” sojourn to re-connect with family and friends before Tucker’s deterioration, is too severe.  And what were his prodigious mental powers are apparently in precipitous decline. (He is a celebrated novelist, whilst Sam is a concert pianist of repute.) I say “apparently” because we learn of the dire nature of Tucker’s condition largely from his own commentary and that of Sam and other characters. There are a few episodes that are suggestive of Tucker’s decline, such as one where he wanders off while the pair are parked at a roadside convenience store, and one particularly telling scene where he is unable to read aloud a prepared speech for Sam’s birthday, and has to hand off the task to Sam himself. But for the most part Tusker seems perfectly lucid, never more so than when he offers avuncular advice to Sam’s young niece Charlotte (Nina Marlin). Ironically, this scene coincides with Sam’s pivotal discovery of Tusker’s clandestine plan to take matters into his own hands and spare Sam the burden of witnessing his inevitable decline.

Tucci and Firth are old friends off-camera (apparently each of them read for both parts). Their easy rapport and interaction, and the sheer quality of their nuanced performances, is the film’s chief saving grace and the main reason for seeing the film. Their performances are the crucial glue binding the film because McQueen’s script seems slightly underdeveloped and often teeters on the cusp of maudlin. It is perhaps not helped that the film’s cast, especially Tucci, has a well-developed screen persona, not least as an in-demand talk show guest where he is a witty and erudite presence.  McQueen’s script has flashes of this type of humour, such as the early scene where the two principals light-heartedly bicker over driving directions, and a later scene where, on an overnight stay in Sam’s family home, the two are forced to share the bed that Sam slept in as an adolescent. But these scenes are all too rare; a few more would have leavened the film’s emotional impact and provided even sharper relief for the reality of Tusker’s plight, and the extreme solution that he has planned.

But there is one other noteworthy aspect of the film. Sam and Tusker are obviously a long-term same sex couple, but whereas another film would have emphasised the political implications of this, it goes largely unremarked in McQueen’s screenplay, which has larger concerns to deal with.  Ultimately, Tucker’s journey is the one that we must all take, in one way or another. Which might just be the most profound political statement of all. Nonetheless, the lasting impression left by Supernova is of an end result that is considerably less than the sum of its parts, as impressive as some of those parts are.

The Father, though it ostensibly deals with similar subject matter as Supernova, is an altogether different beast.  Conventional wisdom says that Anthony Hopkins won his first Best Actor Oscar thirty years ago as Hannibal Lector in Jonathan Demme’s iconic horror/thriller drama, The Silence of the Lambs. As Lector, Hopkins embodied the calculating psychopath like few other characters in cinema history, and the character’s embedding in popular culture bears eloquent testimony to this.  But Hopkins’ actual performance as Lector was showy and left large teeth marks in the scenery (though perhaps appropriate given the proclivities of the character).  Lector was a tour de force by Hopkins but was never remotely believable.

Whereas in his eponymous role in The Father by writer/director Florian Keller, Hopkins is only too believable, as a retired engineer struggling with the ravages of dementia. Unlike Supernova, Keller puts the audience in the shoes of the main character, so that we experience the world of the film through the fractured, distorted lens of his disordered consciousness. Anthony (Hopkins) is (or perhaps was) a fiercely independent, voluble, and somewhat cantankerous father, struggling to piece together the random fragments of his memory into a coherent whole. We as an audience view an increasingly confusing and hostile world through Anthony’s eyes, and hence relate to his paranoia, impatience and growing sense of isolation and impotence, which manifests itself in the details. Hence, we witness Anthony’s seeming obsession with the location of his watch, and his paranoid belief that others have stolen it; after all, the watch represents Anthony’s desperate attempt to assert some measure of control and connection to a reality that seems ever more ephemeral and tenuous, seemingly always slipping from his grasp.

The originality and impact of the film lies in the way Keller subverts the standard audience expectation: that at some point the swirl of mystery and confusion surrounding identity, time and location, will be resolved into something approximating coherence.  Of course, no such resolution is available to Anthony, nor will it ever be.  No one with Anthony’s affliction ever comes out the other side.  And so, as an audience, we are left to wonder if Anthony’s daughter, played with an appropriate mix of stoicism and weary resigned frustration by Olivia Colman, is actually divorced or still married to the gruff and abusive husband portrayed by Rufus Sewell? And is she living in Paris or not? And was there ever really a painting by his daughter over the fireplace in his apartment? And is the character of Bill, as portrayed by Mark Gatiss, really his former son-in-law, or a senior staff member at the nursing home where Anthony finds himself at the film’s end?

Or, as seems increasingly, likely, has Anthony been in the nursing home all along, and the film’s previous events have just been broken shards of memory randomly colliding in his disordered mind?

The Father has its origins as a stage play, and its one defect is to have an excessively stagebound feel at times.  But this is a minor quibble with a film that is never more resonant than now, in our anxious age with its rapidly ageing population. Hopkins may have played the most infamous psychopath in cinema history, but as The Father, he has created his most genuinely terrifying character.

Nomadland

by admin, posted in film reviews

Nomadland

Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century from 2018 is a non-fiction work of first-person journalism which shines a forensic spotlight on a hitherto neglected underclass: workers, normally of retirement age or beyond who, as have taken to America’s highways in RVs or modified vans in search of seasonal work in soul-destroying fast food outlets or cavernous Amazon warehouses. The subtitle of Bruder’s work makes it clear that she sees them as casualties of the “Great Recession”, pitiable economic fringe-dwellers who, rather than spending their declining years in leisure, are forced to lead a makeshift, itinerant lifestyle scrounging a meagre subsistence income. At first glance, this would seem to be unlikely source material for a mainstream motion picture, but Chinese American film-maker Chloe Zhao’s screenplay for Nomadland (2010), whilst ostensibly a work of fiction, draws heavily on Bruder’s journalism, is rather more nuanced. Whilst taking care to avoid an overly romantic Jack Kerouac-like depiction of the footloose, “on the road” lifestyle, Zhao does convey a sympathetic portrait of the diverse characters that comprise the community of nomads and their mutually supportive network. Many of these characters, such as Linda May and Charlotte (“Swankie”), featured in Bruder’s original piece, and as non-professional actors play lightly fictionalised versions of themselves in Zhao’s film.  Indeed, it is the presence of so many so-called “non-actors” in the cast, allied with Zhao’s naturalistic dialogue and film-making style that give the film such a feeling of documentary-style immediacy and authenticity.

The film’s central performance is an improbable star turn by Frances McDormand as Fern, a recently widowed 60-something who stows the remnants of her former life in a storage locker in the grandiosely named town of Empire in Nevada and hits the road in a battered van which she christens Vanguard.  (The use of the name ‘Empire’ might seem like a heavy-handed metaphor in a film in which the theme of economic decline and entropy is explicit, except that Empire is a real place, a small town virtually wiped off the map by the closure of the gypsum plant that sustained it). Fern is initially taciturn, only becoming more ebullient as she forms friendships with some of her fellow travellers like the aforementioned Linda and Swankie, but she has a hard outer shell and only rarely, if ever, does she drop her guard. We do get the occasional hint that Fern has a much richer inner life than her circumstances might suggest, such as the occasion when she launches into a word-perfect recitation of a Shakespearean sonnet to help out a young fellow traveller in need of romantic inspiration. Gradually we piece together enough of her back story that we realise that her straitened financial plight is only a partial motivation for her; that a rootless, transient, ‘wanderlust’ lifestyle has always suited her temperament. Significantly, when presented with the opportunity to “settle down”, put down roots and lead a more conventional, stable existence, she rejects it in favour of the habits and customs acquired in her nomadic life. As Fern says, early in the film, she is “houseless, not homeless.”

David Strathairn (Dave), one of the few other professional actors in the cast, also portrays a fellow nomad who repeatedly crosses Fern’s path. In a more conventional, mainstream screenplay, his tentative romantic overtures toward Fern would have come to fruition and offer her character a clear if contrived path to redemption. But in Zhao’s carefully constructed universe, Fern needs no such redemption, and Dave is also navigating his own fraught personal path to redemption via a reconciliation with his estranged son.  Instead, it becomes clear that Fern’s never-ending journey is her way of dealing with grief and loss, not only bereavement, but the loss of the life and the community that she shared with her late husband. McDormand conveys Fern’s complex depths, complete with her complicated hinterland, in a finely observed and executed performance. As one of the film’s producers, she doesn’t shy away from Zhao’s need to portray all dimensions of the nomad life, including the least glamourous; surely McDormand is surely the only multiple Oscar winner to be filmed defecating into a bucket.  But McDormand is also allowed to depict Fern’s capacity for wonder. There are memorable scenes (brought vividly to life by cinematographer Joshua James Richards) where Fern is shown exploring the giant redwoods of the Pacific northwest, and, with no evident self-consciousness, swimming naked in an isolated natural spring.    In one especially poignant scene late in the film, Fern is seen returning to the now deserted Empire and wistfully exploring her former home and workplace, now derelict and desolate. It is this encounter that leads to Fern’s singular moment of catharsis. Despite her stoic resolve, Fern cannot outrun the dark cloud of desperation, isolation and fatalism that seems to hang over her and the entire film.

And that seems a recurring theme with the various travelers that cross Fern’s path; they are all dealing with loss in one form or another, whether it be the loss of a livelihood, a loved one or the ultimate loss that awaits us all, occasioned by age, infirmity and mortality. Even Bob Wells, the self-styled guru and seer of this mobile nomad community, has a similar back story.  When we first encounter Bob, he is expounding his world view on the decline of the American economy and the desirability of the road-based, mobile life in a latter-day, improvised Sermon-on-the-Mount setting. His long white beard makes him reminiscent of an Old Testament prophet and adds to his air of avuncular authority and mystique, as he exhorts his followers in invest in “wheel estate”.  And yet Bob, too, is struggling with his own burden of loss, the suicide of his son. And it is this theme, more than economic privation or the contemplation of old age and mortality, that creates the film’s lasting impression. Nomadland elicits profound reflection on the human condition by inviting the viewer to reflect on human beings, seemingly tossed aside and left to fend for themselves by the impersonal society at large, still able to seek out and find crucial and meaningful human connection.

1917

by admin, posted in film reviews

The English director and writer Sam Mendes sets his new World War I epic on the ravaged and scarred battlefields of the Western Front in early spring of the year that gives his film its name. Two young corporals, Blake (Dean Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George Mackay) are sent on a perilous mission to prevent another battalion from being sent obliviously into an ambush, as engineered by a strategic German withdrawal. Aerial reconnaissance has alerted the young corporals’ commanding officer, General Erinmore (Colin Firth) to the enemy ruse, and the fact that Blake’s own brother is a member of the doomed battalion adds a piquancy and urgency to the mission for him that is lacking for his seemingly more war-weary companion.

The two corporals are obviously friends and have an easy rapport and banter, although we never know their first names or much of their backstory.  This is perhaps a deliberate ploy by Mendes, as was the decision to have two lesser known actors play these two principal roles and carry the film’s entire narrative.  There is a marked contrast in stature between them and the cameos by English acting heavyweights such as Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong and Benedict Cumberbatch that punctuate the film at regular intervals. The lasting impression is perhaps intended to be of two “Everymen” who are left to endure the various and plentiful horrors of trench warfare with only their own sense of duty, and reliance on each other, to sustain them.

Unfortunately, the lack of backstory, meaningful character development or much memorable dialogue means that the audience doesn’t feel much engagement with the two main protagonists.  Their fate, even though it is the film’s sole reason d’etre, tends to take a back seat to the central technical conceit – the illusion of being shot in a continuous single take. Mendes, of course, is no stranger to this type of cinematic trickery; the opening sequence in Spectre (2015) also employed the same single shot artifice, but there it provided what was the only talking point in an otherwise lack-lustre, unremarkable Bond instalment. In 1917, the continuous shot cinematography is sustained for the film’s entire length. It is certainly an impressive technical achievement and is designed to give the myriad horrors and confronting brutality of the battlefield an immediacy and immersive quality by putting the audience quite literally in the shoes and at the shoulder of the two soldiers.  But the film’s technical sophistication has the effect of undercutting any truly immersive quality.  The depiction of the grimy, blood-caked, corpse-strewn realism of trench warfare is meant to be overt and realistic, and it certainly is, but the showy nature of the film’s technical aspirations subverts any attempt at naturalism by so constantly drawing attention to itself.

There is still much to admire, particularly in the artfully managed set pieces where the single shot cinematography is shown to its best effect. Most notable among these is the sequence where the two soldiers have a seemingly random encounter with the (albeit temporary) survivor of an aerial dogfight, an encounter with dire and fateful consequences for one of the protagonists. The sheer audacity of the logistics and choreography involved in this this sequence is an extraordinary cinematic achievement in itself.  Other scenes seem at odds with the movie’s erstwhile grisly setting by depicting a transcendent, almost surreal beauty. One of these scenes is of a devastated, evacuated village bathed in an eerie, luminous beauty at night; the camerawork by veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins has been deservedly nominated for an Oscar. The production design, too, is impressive; the portrayal of the Danteesque hellscape of No Man’s Land that the two soldiers must traverse may be graphic and unsparing, but the exposure of similarly forensic depictions of total war in such films as Platoon (1986) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) may have inured contemporary audiences to such scenes. However, at other times, the film’s abiding technical conceit is so obvious and transparent that its impact is inevitably diminished.  And it is, of course, a conceit, however proficiently executed. There are numerous editing points, most expertly camouflaged, but one in particular so jarringly obvious that it provoked an audible groan in the session I attended.

Whilst there is much to admire in Mendes’ film, its most striking achievements would appear to be technical and technological, rather than more satisfying and dramatic, and the overall impression it leaves is of a film that is just a little too enamoured with its own technique. The main cinematic conceit of the single shot illusion is masterfully and successfully sustained, but seemingly at the expense of coherent storytelling, character development and convincing dialogue.  Whilst 1917 is, in most respects, a superior film to Mendes’ preceding venture, Spectre, it does share that film’s main shortcoming: a superabundance of style over substance.

Ad Astra

by admin, posted in film reviews

James Gray’s new sprawling, ambitious science fiction epic Ad Astra confounds many initial expectations.  The Buzz Lightyear-type sentiment suggested by the title (a literal translation of the Latin phrase is “To the Stars”) seems somewhat ironic, given that a pall of something like existential dread seems to hang over the film’s events and is the abiding impression left afterwards, even if the main existential crisis is ultimately resolved.   The film sits neatly alongside other recent sci-fi epics such as Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), also concerned with profound questions of human destiny confronted with a vast, timeless and indifferent universe. Ad Astra also shares a cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, with the latter film, which accounts for its familiar, often arresting visual style, and evocative rendering of landscapes and spacescapes far beyond Earth.

The film’s setting is an indeterminate “near future” where the scarcity of resources has bequeathed a fraught era of global conflict that seemingly leaves no quarter of the solar system untouched, even the lunar surface itself. This conflict, with its attendant lawlessness, would be bad enough, but the film’s immediate existential threat comes in the form of massive power surges thought to emanate from the mysterious Lima Project, a mission attempting to locate intelligent life beyond Earth.  The mission and its crew disappeared without trace 16 years previously in orbit around Neptune, and its commanding officer, the revered astronaut H Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) was thought to be long dead, until new evidence suggests that he has not only survived but may well now be the instigator of the mysterious power surges. McBride’s son, Roy (Brad Pitt) is also an accomplished astronaut who narrowly survives a fall from a giant space antenna caused by one of the power surges and is consequently tapped by SpaceCom to attempt to communicate and reason with his father and thereby head off the looming apocalypse.

However, ironically for a film whose chief protagonist is an emotionally distant astronaut, searching for a similarly impaired father, Gray’s screenplay also keeps us, the audience, at arm’s length. Pitt’s McBride is a driven, single-minded, solitary figure, whose resting pulse rate, we are told early on, never rises above 80. Clearly, he is meant to exude the kind of “right stuff” always portrayed as the NASA ideal: calm, rational, unflappable, superbly trained even in such esoteric skills as zero gravity hand-to-hand combat. But his singular resolve has obvious negative ramifications for his personal relationships; his estranged wife (Liv Tyler in a fleeting, thankless, virtually non-speaking role) is the principal wronged party in this regard. Pitt’s is a curiously bloodless performance; the only real insights we are afforded into his inner life come in the form of his narration of regular psychological evaluations rendered in a flat, dispassionate monotone.  And as such, the film asks a great deal of the audience’s suspension of disbelief, even more so than most similarly themed sci-fi epics. We are asked to believe that McBride is able to stow away in clandestine fashion on board a mission to Neptune that seems strangely devoid of basic security measures, even in an overriding atmosphere of global tension.  McBride’s unauthorised presence on the Neptune mission also results, somewhat mysteriously, in the death of the entire crew, an outcome for which McBride expresses remorse but only briefly, and for which he seemingly suffers no adverse consequences after his (very) unlikely return to Earth. Ah well, omelettes and eggs, or so we are apparently meant to assume.

Certainly no one could accuse Gray’s film of lacking ambition, normally no bad thing in a modern cinema environment characterised by formulaic conservatism.  It purports to tell an intimate, personal tale of father /son estrangement and (possible) reconciliation, set against a backdrop of interplanetary adventure and existential crisis.  The ever-present problem with this kind of ambitious science fiction epic is that it falls between stools: either there is too much windy exposition, of which the most egregious example would be The Matrix trilogy, or not nearly enough, as would seem to be the case in Ad Astra. Whilst never failing to be visually engaging and often spectacular, Ad Astra is nonetheless an austere cinematic experience.  The absence of any real emotional resonance, and the presence of so many elements that are dubious and enigmatic, ultimately weighs down and undermines the screenplay long before the end.