(Joe & Anthony Russo, 2016)
Considering all of the moving parts, characters in motion, plotlines and subplots, action sequences, back story, expository conversations, locations and ideas in Captain America: Civil War, the movie is a relative model of economy and forward momentum.
In some ways it is an incredibly dense mess: much of it would make no sense to anyone who doesn't already know the Marvel Universe or these characters, and its structure is broken backed; four huge action scenes break up the 140 minute run-time, but the movie seriously drops down to first gear in that first hour as pieces are moved around the board, agendas established, themes nursed to life.
Once it gets going its popcorn pleasures are manifold, and the details are purest geek pleasure.
It has twin plots which entwine from early on. In the first, following the opening battle between the Avengers and mercenaries led by CrossBones (Frank Grillo) leads to civilian casualties, the Governments of the world conspire to introduce the Sokovia Accords, registering and controlling enhanced activity. Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr, who seems more this character than himself at this point), shocked by the results of his actions and possibly grieving the end of his relationship with an unseen Pepper Potts, supports the deal and tries to sell it to the Avengers, who are split. Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), bruised by following orders that he disagreed with in his last film and his experiences with powerful men in WW2, refuses.
At the same time, Zemo (Daniel Brühl, sinister in a way I never suspected he was capable of) is busy incriminating Cap's old friend Bucky/the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) for the attack on a Viennese conference established to ratify the accords.
That attack effects the life of King of reclusive African country Wakanda, T'Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman, excellent), and suddenly it is a race to find the Winter Soldier. That in turn leads to a battle between the forces amassed behind Stark and Rogers, which include the likes of Avengers members Vision (Paul Bettany, doing well with his few big moments), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), but also newcomers Ant Man (Paul Rudd, stealing every scene he's in) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland). Meanwhile Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) do their best in different ways to stop Rogers from getting himself killed.
Miraculously, the movie gives each of these characters at least one big moment without ever losing focus on the friendship between Rogers and Bucky or the conflict between Rogers and Stark. The big airport super-hero free-for-all involves more or less every character and uses them beautifully. In fact, one of the real pleasures of this movie is its action sequences. Using John Wick directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch as a second unit team here really pays off in some incredibly brutal, imaginative action scenes. The airport fight allows everybody to use their specific powers to best effect, but there are smaller moments that have just as much impact - Rogers and Bucky fighting a German SWAT team in a stairwell and trying not to kill any of them is notable, as are any of the fights involving Black Panther.
This is also the first film to get Spider-Man perfectly right: introduced as a a geeky teenager in a small Queens apartment, Holland captures the character's motormouthed humour but also his moral certainty, and his scene with Stark in his bedroom is a definite highlight. He also shines in the action scene, both for his ceaseless chatter and for the way the movie captures his superhuman athleticism and amateur technique.
But that scene comes with the final act just beginning, and it ultimately reduces the action to just Stark, Rogers and Bucky, in an intense climactic battle. And it works because these are characters the audience has come to know and care about, and the Russos have shaped this narrative enough that their conflict is made personal and painful.
And underlying all this is a level of geek-pleasing detail which is frankly awesome. From Wakanda's Vibranium (which is what Black Panther's suit is made from) to William Hurt returning as General Thunderbolt Ross, to the references to Hulk and Thor and Loki, to the spark between Vision and Scarlet Witch, Ant Man's (and Spider-Mans) starstruck response to Captain America, the moments involving Peggy Carter and her niece Sharon (Emily Van Camp), which culminate in a kiss with Rogers and a brilliant bros-giving-respect look from Falcon and Bucky, whose own relationship is similarly deftly observed, to Spider-Man irritating everybody he fights through his constant talking, and Martin Freeman as a smarmy Everett K Ross, together with the Howard Stark references and the Vision's theory that the heroes power has invited challenge, the texture of ideas and details here is so thick and rich that it becomes its own sort of text.
Captain America: Civil War is all the best of Marvels films, and some of the worst too. Which means its a superior piece of blockbusterdom, and then some.
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Olsen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Olsen. Show all posts
Sunday, 1 May 2016
Sunday, 26 April 2015
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
(Joss Whedon, 2015)
This is a film which is so dense and crammed - with gags, one-liners, action sequences, characters, easter eggs, plot twists and cgi - that it is curiously exhausting. It feels like watching an entire season of a tv series in one sitting. But crucially, it's a really entertaining, fun tv series, made by a writer-director who understands and loves the genre he's working in.
Setting the Avengers up against a villain partly created by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr, as comfortable and funny in this role as ever) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, still finding new depths in this character), Whedon manages the tricky job of balancing storylines and arcs for each of his principals while also keeping an epic, propulsive guiding narrative in ceaseless motion.
That involves Ultron (nicely voiced by James Spader), an artificial intelligence with multiple bodies whose ultimate goal is the usual destruction of the world. He enlists twins Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who give the Avengers a bit of trouble with their respective "he's fast, she's weird" abilities before eventually switching sides to fight against Ultron.
Whedon loves and understands these characters, which is why this film is always better during their conversations and exchanges than it is during the many cgi-heavy action scenes studded throughout the two-and-a-half-hour running time.
Perhaps most interesting is the relationship between Banner and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. She talks him down out of his Hulk state, and reveals an unexpected vulnerability to his dorky integrity, which terrifies him, so afraid of hurting anyone around him. Their tentative romance is the emotional core of the film, and gives the ending much of its sting. Jeremy Renner is given much more to do this time around, revealing a solid, warm, normal home life with a wife and children, while also acting as the human glue bonding the "Gods" around him together. Evans and Hemsworth as Captain American and Thor do more of what they have done with aplomb across three films each at this point, their highlights mainly coming in their banter with Stark as Whedon ensures much of the focus is on the trinity at the heart of any decent Avengers story. There is a little set-up done for the next big film involving the characters, as the idealogical differences between Cap and Iron Man are emphasised, the battle lines subtly drawn.
That is the strangest thing about the Marvel films: because they are all part of one big ongoing narrative, it sometimes feels like nothing can ever really matter. We know another film is just around the corner, another villain, another threat, another epic battle. This is written in the DNA of the comics, but they are structured around it, whereas the architecture of a motion picture is different and built to supply a certain amount of third act catharsis or satisfaction that the Marvel films by necessity are unable to deliver.
Another problem is action. For an action genre, super-hero films generally don't handle action all that well. It is the achilles heel even of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (which do splendid spectacle but fudge combat consistently until the third film), and has been uncertain in most of the Marvel films so far. Captain America: The Winter Soldier perhaps fares best here, but Avengers: Age of Ultron struggles. Whether it is down to Whedon's limitations as a director - unlikely, given that the fight scenes in Serenity are pretty good - or, more likely the overuse of cgi and accompanying spectacular camera movements to track it, many of the big action sequences here are visually incoherent and chaotically choreographed.
Luckily: there are ancillary pleasures and many of them.
Whedon has always had a gift for one-liners and Avengers: Age of Ultron is stuffed with them, from the others chiding Captain America for his dislike of bad language, to Thor and Vision discussing the perfect balance of Mjolnir. Of the newcomers, Bettany is most arresting as Vision, ably handling some great gags and action beats, while Olsen and Johnson act as crucial new blood to the mix.
The details here are crucial and brilliant: from the Irish accent (Voiced by Kerry Condon) of F.R.I.D.A.Y to Stark's asides during his battle with Hulk to Ulysses Klaw (Andy Serkis) being involved in supplying Vibranium from Wakanda, to Stark and Thor bragging about their girlfriends and War Machine's (Don Cheadle) angst that his story does not impress the Avengers they all play well and give the story and the world more texture and life.
The cast is filed out with some unexpected class in tiny roles: Linda Cardellini, Julie Delpy, Idris Elba, Anthony Mackie and Hayley Atwell all pop up alongside Serkis and Cheadle, again making this world feel populous and lived-in.
For all its flaws, as summer blockbusters go, this is a sumptuous piece of purest entertainment; funny, exciting and consistently impressive.
This is a film which is so dense and crammed - with gags, one-liners, action sequences, characters, easter eggs, plot twists and cgi - that it is curiously exhausting. It feels like watching an entire season of a tv series in one sitting. But crucially, it's a really entertaining, fun tv series, made by a writer-director who understands and loves the genre he's working in.
Setting the Avengers up against a villain partly created by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr, as comfortable and funny in this role as ever) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, still finding new depths in this character), Whedon manages the tricky job of balancing storylines and arcs for each of his principals while also keeping an epic, propulsive guiding narrative in ceaseless motion.
That involves Ultron (nicely voiced by James Spader), an artificial intelligence with multiple bodies whose ultimate goal is the usual destruction of the world. He enlists twins Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who give the Avengers a bit of trouble with their respective "he's fast, she's weird" abilities before eventually switching sides to fight against Ultron.
Whedon loves and understands these characters, which is why this film is always better during their conversations and exchanges than it is during the many cgi-heavy action scenes studded throughout the two-and-a-half-hour running time.
Perhaps most interesting is the relationship between Banner and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. She talks him down out of his Hulk state, and reveals an unexpected vulnerability to his dorky integrity, which terrifies him, so afraid of hurting anyone around him. Their tentative romance is the emotional core of the film, and gives the ending much of its sting. Jeremy Renner is given much more to do this time around, revealing a solid, warm, normal home life with a wife and children, while also acting as the human glue bonding the "Gods" around him together. Evans and Hemsworth as Captain American and Thor do more of what they have done with aplomb across three films each at this point, their highlights mainly coming in their banter with Stark as Whedon ensures much of the focus is on the trinity at the heart of any decent Avengers story. There is a little set-up done for the next big film involving the characters, as the idealogical differences between Cap and Iron Man are emphasised, the battle lines subtly drawn.
That is the strangest thing about the Marvel films: because they are all part of one big ongoing narrative, it sometimes feels like nothing can ever really matter. We know another film is just around the corner, another villain, another threat, another epic battle. This is written in the DNA of the comics, but they are structured around it, whereas the architecture of a motion picture is different and built to supply a certain amount of third act catharsis or satisfaction that the Marvel films by necessity are unable to deliver.
Another problem is action. For an action genre, super-hero films generally don't handle action all that well. It is the achilles heel even of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy (which do splendid spectacle but fudge combat consistently until the third film), and has been uncertain in most of the Marvel films so far. Captain America: The Winter Soldier perhaps fares best here, but Avengers: Age of Ultron struggles. Whether it is down to Whedon's limitations as a director - unlikely, given that the fight scenes in Serenity are pretty good - or, more likely the overuse of cgi and accompanying spectacular camera movements to track it, many of the big action sequences here are visually incoherent and chaotically choreographed.
Luckily: there are ancillary pleasures and many of them.
Whedon has always had a gift for one-liners and Avengers: Age of Ultron is stuffed with them, from the others chiding Captain America for his dislike of bad language, to Thor and Vision discussing the perfect balance of Mjolnir. Of the newcomers, Bettany is most arresting as Vision, ably handling some great gags and action beats, while Olsen and Johnson act as crucial new blood to the mix.
The details here are crucial and brilliant: from the Irish accent (Voiced by Kerry Condon) of F.R.I.D.A.Y to Stark's asides during his battle with Hulk to Ulysses Klaw (Andy Serkis) being involved in supplying Vibranium from Wakanda, to Stark and Thor bragging about their girlfriends and War Machine's (Don Cheadle) angst that his story does not impress the Avengers they all play well and give the story and the world more texture and life.
The cast is filed out with some unexpected class in tiny roles: Linda Cardellini, Julie Delpy, Idris Elba, Anthony Mackie and Hayley Atwell all pop up alongside Serkis and Cheadle, again making this world feel populous and lived-in.
For all its flaws, as summer blockbusters go, this is a sumptuous piece of purest entertainment; funny, exciting and consistently impressive.
Saturday, 24 May 2014
GODZILLA
(Gareth Edwards, 2014)
Though it does finally reveal itself to be a movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city, Godzilla is an uncommonly intelligent, even poetic movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city.
Director Edwards brought a sense of haunting stillness and surprising beauty to his low-budget debut, Monsters, and he manages to replicate some of that here too, despite the massive budget and epic scope of this undertaking. What is perhaps most impressive however, is the way he is able to stay true to some of the spirit of the many Japanese iterations of Godzilla while making a film which is decidedly his own. That isn't to say that this Godzilla is entirely satisfying. Instead, for all its accomplishment, it is an oddly flat film, told at a curious remove.
Edwards borrows a lot from Steven Spielberg, introducing his creatures in stages, hinting and teasing, giving us a series of glimpses of Godzilla long before we see him proper. There is a a great deal of exposition early on, and Edwards handles it well, skilfully introducing scientists Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, part of an organisation devoted to tracking Godzilla. In the opening scene, they find something else; evidence of the emergence of a prehistoric giant creature which has come from deep underground in the Phillipines. That creature heads for the nearest source of Nuclear radiation , which happens to be a Japanese reactor. Its arrival there causes a meltdown, and is covered up by the Government. A decade later, Edwards introduces a family drama to add a little human interest. The family are whats left of the Brodys. After his wife (Juliette Binoche) dies in the meltdown, and executive at the plant (Bryan Cranston) becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the cover-up. His son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is dragged into this when he travels back to Japan to get his Dad out of jail. Together they discover that the creature, named a MUTO by the organisation, has survived the meltdown and has been feeding on the radiation until, fully grown, it is ready to mate.
It escapes a containment facility and heads across the Pacific towards a female MUTO somewhere in North America, creating havoc in Hawaii and summoning what the scientists believe is an alpha predator. Thus the scene is set as Godzilla sets about tracking and killing the two MUTOs while various human characters attempt to get out of his way or stop him entirely.
Those human characters are a definite weak point here. After the terrific early meltdown scene establishing the tragedy that defines the two Brody men, the stakes never seem quite so high. Instead the film seems to quietly work a theme of nature's absolute indifference to humanity, and it is as if the film itself shares some of that indifference. Edwards focuses, Terrence Malick style, on insects in the background, dogs and wolves in Godzilla's path, the seagulls that cloud around him as he moves.
The people tend to stare dumbly at his enormity when he appears.
While the plot works overtime to allow Ford Brody to trail Godzilla across the pacific, he is never an interesting or compelling character. Part of that is down to Taylor-Johnson, a dull performer, but much of it is because the script gives him nothing but reactions to the situations he finds himself in. His wife (Elizabeth Olsen) is even less corporeal, a faint sketch of a character.
But Edwards still works some magic, engineering a handful of excellent set-pieces, imbuing some of them with that odd poetry he created in Monsters. The sequence where a squad of paratroopers HALO jump into a blacked-out San Francisco, trailing red smoke, is startlingly beautiful.
But soon after, the film focuses, as it must, on that enormous dinosaur, breathing blue flame at the two colossal monsters. And thats fine, and this is probably as good as any film about that could be, in one regard. But it is lacking something. For all that it is commendably devoted to shooting its monsters from a human-eye ground level, it seems to be lacking any humanity.
Though it does finally reveal itself to be a movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city, Godzilla is an uncommonly intelligent, even poetic movie about an enormous dinosaur fighting with a pair of colossal monsters in the middle of a city.
Director Edwards brought a sense of haunting stillness and surprising beauty to his low-budget debut, Monsters, and he manages to replicate some of that here too, despite the massive budget and epic scope of this undertaking. What is perhaps most impressive however, is the way he is able to stay true to some of the spirit of the many Japanese iterations of Godzilla while making a film which is decidedly his own. That isn't to say that this Godzilla is entirely satisfying. Instead, for all its accomplishment, it is an oddly flat film, told at a curious remove.
Edwards borrows a lot from Steven Spielberg, introducing his creatures in stages, hinting and teasing, giving us a series of glimpses of Godzilla long before we see him proper. There is a a great deal of exposition early on, and Edwards handles it well, skilfully introducing scientists Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins, part of an organisation devoted to tracking Godzilla. In the opening scene, they find something else; evidence of the emergence of a prehistoric giant creature which has come from deep underground in the Phillipines. That creature heads for the nearest source of Nuclear radiation , which happens to be a Japanese reactor. Its arrival there causes a meltdown, and is covered up by the Government. A decade later, Edwards introduces a family drama to add a little human interest. The family are whats left of the Brodys. After his wife (Juliette Binoche) dies in the meltdown, and executive at the plant (Bryan Cranston) becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the cover-up. His son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is dragged into this when he travels back to Japan to get his Dad out of jail. Together they discover that the creature, named a MUTO by the organisation, has survived the meltdown and has been feeding on the radiation until, fully grown, it is ready to mate.
It escapes a containment facility and heads across the Pacific towards a female MUTO somewhere in North America, creating havoc in Hawaii and summoning what the scientists believe is an alpha predator. Thus the scene is set as Godzilla sets about tracking and killing the two MUTOs while various human characters attempt to get out of his way or stop him entirely.
Those human characters are a definite weak point here. After the terrific early meltdown scene establishing the tragedy that defines the two Brody men, the stakes never seem quite so high. Instead the film seems to quietly work a theme of nature's absolute indifference to humanity, and it is as if the film itself shares some of that indifference. Edwards focuses, Terrence Malick style, on insects in the background, dogs and wolves in Godzilla's path, the seagulls that cloud around him as he moves.
The people tend to stare dumbly at his enormity when he appears.
While the plot works overtime to allow Ford Brody to trail Godzilla across the pacific, he is never an interesting or compelling character. Part of that is down to Taylor-Johnson, a dull performer, but much of it is because the script gives him nothing but reactions to the situations he finds himself in. His wife (Elizabeth Olsen) is even less corporeal, a faint sketch of a character.
But Edwards still works some magic, engineering a handful of excellent set-pieces, imbuing some of them with that odd poetry he created in Monsters. The sequence where a squad of paratroopers HALO jump into a blacked-out San Francisco, trailing red smoke, is startlingly beautiful.
But soon after, the film focuses, as it must, on that enormous dinosaur, breathing blue flame at the two colossal monsters. And thats fine, and this is probably as good as any film about that could be, in one regard. But it is lacking something. For all that it is commendably devoted to shooting its monsters from a human-eye ground level, it seems to be lacking any humanity.
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
LIBERAL ARTS
(Josh Radnor, 2012)
Combining two distinct sub-genres of the romantic comedy: the "manic pixie dream girl" movie and the "stunted manchild is forced to find a new maturity through trauma" movie into a single entity, Liberal Arts is something of an odd beast.
Its not really a romcom, in fact it's barely a comedy at all. For much of its running time it's a likeable romantic drama with a few obvious comic elements, such as Zac Efron's barefoot new age guru, dispensing wisdom and anecdotes to writer-director-star Josh Radnor's sensitive lead Jesse.
Jesse, a thirtysomething graduate working in admissions at a Manhattan College, is tired of his lonely, book-filled life, and he returns to his old College campus in Ohio for his favourite Professor's (Richard Jenkins, who gets a couple of great scenes of quiet regret) retirement dinner, where he meets Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen) an 'advanced' 19-year old student. There is an immediate spark between them - signalled by their thoughtful expressions and off-key wit - which develops and deepens after they exchange precious, oh-so-sensitive letters about classical music, the beauty of the city and their states of mind. She invites him to return, and then things get really complicated.
Radnor's film strains a little too hard for cinematic poetry, but its at its best when it stays modest, revealing a few of the simple truths of the disappointments and compromises of life in ones thirties. Its also a nice portrayal of bibliophilia; Jesse reads books constantly, as he walks in the street, and he and Zibby have their first real fight about her liking of a series of unnamed vampire novels and his snobbish dismissal of them. Olsen is charming and attractive in a role which could have been extremely grating, and Radnor is a likeable lead. A surprisingly strong parallel strand in the narrative has him counsel a depressive student he randomly meets in a coffee shop, and the film has a nice, believable ending.
It is a small film with small pleasures, nice performances and a few small flaws.
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
RED LIGHTS
(Rodrigo Cortés, 2012)
There's something appealingly redolent of 1970s filmmaking about Cortés' Red Lights. It is determinedly downbeat and mostly done in a minor key, for one thing, insistent on it's own atmosphere, which is wintery, rainy, full of blurred, grim backgrounds and sad, broken characters. The sustained tone of quiet menace and off-key dislocation grows as the film proceeds to a big, climactic revelation which is no great surprise to a viewer schooled in the M Night Shyamalan brand of paranormal thriller.
It is mostly a success, spinning a couple of genuinely tense sequences from it's premise. It follows paranormal debunkers from an American University, Doctors Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Buckley (Cillian Murphy) in the run-up to the great comeback of America's most famous Psychic, the mysterious blind showman Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro) who reads minds, bends spoons and cures the sick onstage.
Along the way they expose a few other frauds and hoaxes and Buckley begins a relationship with student Sally (Elisabeth Olsen), while rival Doctor Shackleton (Toby Jones) strives to prove that such phenomena are real.
Cortés writes, edits and directs, and his talent is obvious. His film is always good to look at, depends on mood and a couple of old-fashioned edge of the frame occurrences and shock cuts for its big scares, and always feels solidly, earthily textured, from the car Buckley drives Matheson around in to Silver's creepy appointment room in an anonymous building. The narrative is less successful; losing steam midway when it should really be amping up, it is a little too familiar in the way it sets up then delivers jolts and in its plot trajectory toward final showdown and twist.
But a strong cast helps make it absorbing; Weaver effortlessly suggests the baggage and anger driving her search for truth, DeNiro gets by on his presence and easy ability to intimidate, and Olsson (in quite a thankless "girlfriend" part) and Jones lend it some more class. But Murphy is the standout, his disturbingly piercing eyes and exhausted, occasionally manic presence compelling us to keep watching as he gets deeper and deeper.
Thursday, 16 February 2012
MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE
(Sean Durkin, 2011)
Is this an art house drama with elements of a horror film, or a horror film framed within the borders of an art house drama?
Whatever else it may be, Durkin's film is a tremendous exercise in subtle, slow burn dread. Sliding beautifully back and forth between two time frames, Martha Marcy May Marlene begins when Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) steals out of a farmhouse in the Catskills at dawn, plainly terrified of those she is leaving behind. She calls her estranged older sister (Sarah Paulson), who collects her and brings her to the lakeside country house where she and her architect husband (Hugh Dancy) spend weekends and holidays. Over the next few days they will be baffled, frightened and angered by her bizarre behaviour while she tries to cope with her memories of her life and slow brainwashing as part of Patrick's (John Hawkes) cult on the farm. Then there is also her fear that Patrick and his people will track her down. And given her knowledge of their nocturnal invasions of isolated country houses, that is not a pleasant prospect.
Based around an astonishing performance from Olsen, Durkin's film is a terrifically well-modulated piece of work. While the tension seldom lets up from the opening moments, when the ambient noise on the soundtrack informs us correctly that this will be an ambiguous, disturbing experience, individual scenes contain some fine black comedy and character work. Durkin's time structure allows him to play scenes and even passages off against one another to occasionally superb effect.
If he seems to agree - to some extent - with Martha's speech to her brother-in-law, dryly observing the conspicuous wealth on display in their cathedral of a house and criticising it as the "wrong" way to live, his telling use of detail would effectively bury Patrick's "family" if the narrative didn't make it impossible to see them as anything other than horrendously twisted already. Hawkes plays Patrick as a twinkly, charismatic, folksy preacher, with a hint of violence in the inner steel seen only a few times - memorably - in his interaction with them. He is magnetic throughout, whether lecturing, manipulating, or singing a Jackson C Frank song with a guitar on his knee.
Poulson and --- almost match him, sketching the nuances of the complex web of relations -formed of tension, politeness, curiosity and regret - in their own house nicely.
But really this is Durkin's film, and he does an incredible job, managing to suggest much of the unease coursing through the narrative veins through his compositions and cutting, without ever compromising on the visually poetic images. Plenty of negative space dominates the framing, isolating Martha against sky or wall, just as she is generally isolated by the story and her inability to open up to others. Durkin largely portrays both Patricks farm and Martha's Sisters house as beautiful idylls where people work simply, surrounded by nature, without any bad behaviour or negativity. These scenes can be dull, but here Durkin makes the countryside appear honeyed, lovely. The late reveal changes the complexity of that entire thread and indeed, of the film, and these isolated houses appear terribly vulnerable and even a little sinister.
This may in fact be the film's most impressive quality. Martha Marcy May Marlene is ambiguous throughout. Ambiguous in the best way; it allows you to decide for yourself. The abrupt, open ending is the most obvious example of this, and it means that it doesn't matter if this film is an art house drama or a horror film; it is simply stunning.
Is this an art house drama with elements of a horror film, or a horror film framed within the borders of an art house drama?
Whatever else it may be, Durkin's film is a tremendous exercise in subtle, slow burn dread. Sliding beautifully back and forth between two time frames, Martha Marcy May Marlene begins when Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) steals out of a farmhouse in the Catskills at dawn, plainly terrified of those she is leaving behind. She calls her estranged older sister (Sarah Paulson), who collects her and brings her to the lakeside country house where she and her architect husband (Hugh Dancy) spend weekends and holidays. Over the next few days they will be baffled, frightened and angered by her bizarre behaviour while she tries to cope with her memories of her life and slow brainwashing as part of Patrick's (John Hawkes) cult on the farm. Then there is also her fear that Patrick and his people will track her down. And given her knowledge of their nocturnal invasions of isolated country houses, that is not a pleasant prospect.
Based around an astonishing performance from Olsen, Durkin's film is a terrifically well-modulated piece of work. While the tension seldom lets up from the opening moments, when the ambient noise on the soundtrack informs us correctly that this will be an ambiguous, disturbing experience, individual scenes contain some fine black comedy and character work. Durkin's time structure allows him to play scenes and even passages off against one another to occasionally superb effect.
If he seems to agree - to some extent - with Martha's speech to her brother-in-law, dryly observing the conspicuous wealth on display in their cathedral of a house and criticising it as the "wrong" way to live, his telling use of detail would effectively bury Patrick's "family" if the narrative didn't make it impossible to see them as anything other than horrendously twisted already. Hawkes plays Patrick as a twinkly, charismatic, folksy preacher, with a hint of violence in the inner steel seen only a few times - memorably - in his interaction with them. He is magnetic throughout, whether lecturing, manipulating, or singing a Jackson C Frank song with a guitar on his knee.
Poulson and --- almost match him, sketching the nuances of the complex web of relations -formed of tension, politeness, curiosity and regret - in their own house nicely.
But really this is Durkin's film, and he does an incredible job, managing to suggest much of the unease coursing through the narrative veins through his compositions and cutting, without ever compromising on the visually poetic images. Plenty of negative space dominates the framing, isolating Martha against sky or wall, just as she is generally isolated by the story and her inability to open up to others. Durkin largely portrays both Patricks farm and Martha's Sisters house as beautiful idylls where people work simply, surrounded by nature, without any bad behaviour or negativity. These scenes can be dull, but here Durkin makes the countryside appear honeyed, lovely. The late reveal changes the complexity of that entire thread and indeed, of the film, and these isolated houses appear terribly vulnerable and even a little sinister.
This may in fact be the film's most impressive quality. Martha Marcy May Marlene is ambiguous throughout. Ambiguous in the best way; it allows you to decide for yourself. The abrupt, open ending is the most obvious example of this, and it means that it doesn't matter if this film is an art house drama or a horror film; it is simply stunning.
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