(Christopher Smith, 2010)
Christopher Smith's Black Death follows a disillusioned monk (Eddie Redmayne) and a jaded bunch of Mercenaries during the 14th Century plague outbreak as they journey into eerie marshlands in search of a town reputedly free of infection. Financed and shot in Germany, Smith's film works off some uniquely British influences. It seems to refer to three cult classics which all investigate the old, weird Britain of isolated rural communities and surviving pagan traditions; The Wicker Man, Blood on Satans Claw and Witchfinder General. In Smith's film, the Mercenaries, led by Sean Bean's iron-willed homicidal zealot, are searching for Witchcraft and they get that and more in this creepily mellow community (a sidelong suggestion of contemporary New Age worship is set with the costume design). The directors three previous films were all horror movies and he does a fine job here of maintaining a sense of dread and foreboding throughout, though the avoidance of the supernatural and ultimately human nature of the evil they encounter adds to this film's pessimistic impact. The coda is devastating, and if Black Death does have some aesthetic ambition, it's heart seems resolutely pulpy. It's battle scenes are filmed with real relish and gory aplomb and Smith has described it as a "medieval men on a mission movie" which is as good a description of half of its appeal as any I can formulate. There are quieter, almost meditative moments in Black Death, however, and passages of it reminded me fleetingly of Andrei Tarkovsky and most particularly his extraordinary Medieval Epic, Andrei Rublev. In other words, this is a fascinating little movie.
Showing posts with label Historical Drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Historical Drama. Show all posts
Saturday, 2 January 2016
Wednesday, 30 December 2015
IN THE HEART OF THE SEA
(Ron Howard, 2015)
Ron Howard's Meh-factor cannot be denied. Doesn't matter what the raw material is. The story which allegedly inspired Moby Dick? About a whaling vessel sunk 2000 miles out in the Pacific by a vengeful white whale , so that its crew had to drift for months in small boats, enduring starvation and eventual cannibalism in order to survive? That kind of yarn should make a cracking movie. Howard turns in an ok one.
A cast of exciting British and Irish thespians, from old hands like Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy to youngsters like Tom Holland? Should be creating a savage, human drama. Here their characters seem like the plainest of archetypes, and the actors work overtime to make more of them than that. A genuine movie star with charisma and acting ability, in Chris Hemsworth? He never really seems less than that, dominating the film with his athleticism and presence, even if his character too is defined by a single trait - a terrible temper. That temper leads him to make a decision in the heat of his first confrontation with the great whale; one which he might regret.
He plays Owen Chase (a hero must have a heroic name), first mate on the Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket in the 1820s. He has only been denied the captaincy because of politics, and his relationship with the captain, Pollard (Benjamin Walker), never recovers, and indeed poisons the atmosphere during their first year at sea. An eventual desperate gamble in order to ensure a good harvest of whale oil is what leads them into the path of the white whale and the ensuing tragedy.
Anthony Dod Mantle's work as cinematographer here is absolutely stunning; he depicts the oceans as a terrible living thing, the skies reeling above in a phantasmagoria of hues and colours, from the sunlight battering the men in their boats to the fires illuminating the wreck of the Essex by night.
The story takes a great deal of time establishing its world and (limited) characters, and reaches a peak around halfway, with the whale attack sequence.
It is certainly too long, and feels as if its unbalanced structure is partly to blame for that. The second half patiently traces the mens voyage home and the most awful moments of their ordeal.
So what is it that makes Howard such a pedestrian filmmaker? I think he is so resolutely Hollywood that his films coast by, content with being entertaining, never taking risks or surprising us.
He is a solid storyteller, but there is not one moment of transcendent visual style here. Not that a film should have such a moment, but this film seems made for it, especially with a DP like Mantle on-board. Contrast that with Peter Weir's nautical masterpiece, Master & Commander: the Far Side of the World. That film has tons of narrative yet still contains a few tangential moments of purest visual poetry. Howard seems to lack such poetry. The way he portrays Nantucket is also entirely Hollywood; it seems too cluttered, too busy, too respectful of the production designers and costumers, and never feels like a real place. Even his work with actors is just good enough: this role should have drawn on previously unplumbed depths in Hemsworth. But instead he grows a beard and loses some weight, but always remains a beautiful, charismatic movie star. Then there is that awkward, entirely cliched and unnecessary framing device, wherein Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) interviews an aged survivor of the Essex (Brendan Gleeson). Two great actors reduced to a bunch of pointless scenes that add nothing at all, really, to the film or any of its themes.
While it may be entertaining - as are most of Howard's films - it seems a strange way to short sell such strong material. It also has the unique misfortune to be a historical survival adventure movie released in the same month as Inarittu's The Revenant, to which it compares extremely badly.
Ron Howard's Meh-factor cannot be denied. Doesn't matter what the raw material is. The story which allegedly inspired Moby Dick? About a whaling vessel sunk 2000 miles out in the Pacific by a vengeful white whale , so that its crew had to drift for months in small boats, enduring starvation and eventual cannibalism in order to survive? That kind of yarn should make a cracking movie. Howard turns in an ok one.
A cast of exciting British and Irish thespians, from old hands like Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy to youngsters like Tom Holland? Should be creating a savage, human drama. Here their characters seem like the plainest of archetypes, and the actors work overtime to make more of them than that. A genuine movie star with charisma and acting ability, in Chris Hemsworth? He never really seems less than that, dominating the film with his athleticism and presence, even if his character too is defined by a single trait - a terrible temper. That temper leads him to make a decision in the heat of his first confrontation with the great whale; one which he might regret.
He plays Owen Chase (a hero must have a heroic name), first mate on the Essex, a whaling ship out of Nantucket in the 1820s. He has only been denied the captaincy because of politics, and his relationship with the captain, Pollard (Benjamin Walker), never recovers, and indeed poisons the atmosphere during their first year at sea. An eventual desperate gamble in order to ensure a good harvest of whale oil is what leads them into the path of the white whale and the ensuing tragedy.
Anthony Dod Mantle's work as cinematographer here is absolutely stunning; he depicts the oceans as a terrible living thing, the skies reeling above in a phantasmagoria of hues and colours, from the sunlight battering the men in their boats to the fires illuminating the wreck of the Essex by night.
The story takes a great deal of time establishing its world and (limited) characters, and reaches a peak around halfway, with the whale attack sequence.
It is certainly too long, and feels as if its unbalanced structure is partly to blame for that. The second half patiently traces the mens voyage home and the most awful moments of their ordeal.
So what is it that makes Howard such a pedestrian filmmaker? I think he is so resolutely Hollywood that his films coast by, content with being entertaining, never taking risks or surprising us.
He is a solid storyteller, but there is not one moment of transcendent visual style here. Not that a film should have such a moment, but this film seems made for it, especially with a DP like Mantle on-board. Contrast that with Peter Weir's nautical masterpiece, Master & Commander: the Far Side of the World. That film has tons of narrative yet still contains a few tangential moments of purest visual poetry. Howard seems to lack such poetry. The way he portrays Nantucket is also entirely Hollywood; it seems too cluttered, too busy, too respectful of the production designers and costumers, and never feels like a real place. Even his work with actors is just good enough: this role should have drawn on previously unplumbed depths in Hemsworth. But instead he grows a beard and loses some weight, but always remains a beautiful, charismatic movie star. Then there is that awkward, entirely cliched and unnecessary framing device, wherein Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) interviews an aged survivor of the Essex (Brendan Gleeson). Two great actors reduced to a bunch of pointless scenes that add nothing at all, really, to the film or any of its themes.
While it may be entertaining - as are most of Howard's films - it seems a strange way to short sell such strong material. It also has the unique misfortune to be a historical survival adventure movie released in the same month as Inarittu's The Revenant, to which it compares extremely badly.
Saturday, 12 December 2015
BRIDGE OF SPIES
(Steven Spielberg, 2015)
Whether you love or hate Steven Spielberg, it is impossible to deny his talent as a visual storyteller. The talky dramas which are scattered throughout his later career (Lincoln being the most recent example) are chiefly interesting for the ways in which he tries to keep them visually exciting. Sometimes it can feel as if he is struggling against his material rather than attempting to adapt it.
That is not the case with Bridge of Spies, which feels like a large-scale '60s prestige drama, all big themes and important moments. Spielberg treats it that way, shooting it with a respect for classicism which is pleasing and which works.
The script - written by Joel & Ethan Coen, whose presence is evident in a few repeated phrases, alongside Matt Charman - is a little disjointed in its transition from the USA to East Berlin and different phases of the story crank into place without any elegance of subtlety (never a Spielberg strength, to be fair).
Tom Hanks does his honest, intelligent thing as Jim Donovan, a Brooklyn Lawyer chosen to defend Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) when the Government, his family and an angry public all just want it to be done and dusted. But Jim takes this duty seriously and makes the trial a problem, securing life imprisonment for Abel when execution looked likely. This means that a few months later, when the Soviets capture SpyPlane pilot Francis Gary Powers, Jim is the man chosen to travel to East Berlin - as the Wall is being constructed - and negotiate an exchange.
Much of the action, then, revolves around men (invariably) engaged in important conversations in various rooms. Spielberg focuses on keeping it handsome, coherent and well-performed, all of which it is. When the screenplay gives him a chance to cut loose, he takes it: making Powers' shooting down a short, frightening vignette, and showing the capture of US student Frederic Pryor on the very day the wall is erected. His feel for place and atmosphere is still precise and nuanced, for all that he puts a Hollywood sheen on every shot and moment. At this point in his career, Spielberg's strengths are his weaknesses, and that storytelling ability sometimes seems too smooth and too easy ( a late shot of children climbing a Brooklyn fence chiming with an earlier shot of people scaling the Berlin Wall is a groan-inducing moment).
The cast help keep the many expository scenes flow painlessly. Rylance is especially superb, making Abel goo-humoured and melancholy; inimitably human.
Classy grown-up Hollywood entertainment, then, and I would expect no less of Spielberg.
Whether you love or hate Steven Spielberg, it is impossible to deny his talent as a visual storyteller. The talky dramas which are scattered throughout his later career (Lincoln being the most recent example) are chiefly interesting for the ways in which he tries to keep them visually exciting. Sometimes it can feel as if he is struggling against his material rather than attempting to adapt it.
That is not the case with Bridge of Spies, which feels like a large-scale '60s prestige drama, all big themes and important moments. Spielberg treats it that way, shooting it with a respect for classicism which is pleasing and which works.
The script - written by Joel & Ethan Coen, whose presence is evident in a few repeated phrases, alongside Matt Charman - is a little disjointed in its transition from the USA to East Berlin and different phases of the story crank into place without any elegance of subtlety (never a Spielberg strength, to be fair).
Tom Hanks does his honest, intelligent thing as Jim Donovan, a Brooklyn Lawyer chosen to defend Soviet Spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) when the Government, his family and an angry public all just want it to be done and dusted. But Jim takes this duty seriously and makes the trial a problem, securing life imprisonment for Abel when execution looked likely. This means that a few months later, when the Soviets capture SpyPlane pilot Francis Gary Powers, Jim is the man chosen to travel to East Berlin - as the Wall is being constructed - and negotiate an exchange.
Much of the action, then, revolves around men (invariably) engaged in important conversations in various rooms. Spielberg focuses on keeping it handsome, coherent and well-performed, all of which it is. When the screenplay gives him a chance to cut loose, he takes it: making Powers' shooting down a short, frightening vignette, and showing the capture of US student Frederic Pryor on the very day the wall is erected. His feel for place and atmosphere is still precise and nuanced, for all that he puts a Hollywood sheen on every shot and moment. At this point in his career, Spielberg's strengths are his weaknesses, and that storytelling ability sometimes seems too smooth and too easy ( a late shot of children climbing a Brooklyn fence chiming with an earlier shot of people scaling the Berlin Wall is a groan-inducing moment).
The cast help keep the many expository scenes flow painlessly. Rylance is especially superb, making Abel goo-humoured and melancholy; inimitably human.
Classy grown-up Hollywood entertainment, then, and I would expect no less of Spielberg.
Sunday, 1 November 2015
HARD TO BE A GOD
(Aleksey German, 2013)
You know the sequences in Spaghetti Westerns where the director (be it Leone or Corbucci or Sollima or Petroni) exposes the audience to the truth of the West by showing us ordinary life? It may just be twenty seconds before our protagonist rides into town, or a glimpse into the dark corners of the saloon he's just wandered into, but it is generally there, in every Spaghetti Western, continuing to demythologise and revise the classical view of the old West. Usually it consists of extras with "interesting" faces, scratching themselves, squabbling, stuffing food into rootless gobs, being lazy or lustful or disgusting, featuring sweat-stained clothes and gleaming, stubbled, frequently misshapen people, with exaggerated sound design so that every grunt and muttering is audible. This is what the world is like, these sequences seem to say; full of filth and brutality and idiocy, signifying nothing.
Well Hard to be a God is like that. Except it is set in a Medieval world. And it lasts for three long hours.
The sci-fi basis for the story - from the novel by the Strugatskys - is laid out briefly, then basically ceases to be relevant as German gets carried off by his self-indulgent - if genuinely astonishing - technical brilliance. The film follows Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolink) on a journey across the planet Arkanar. Discovered years earlier by scientists at a Medieval stage in its development, an experiment was carried out to try to spur it into a renaissance. Only the experiment has backfired disastrously and the culture has utterly rejected intellectualism. Men have been hanged, the university closed down, and a war has broken out. Don Rumata wanders among these people, who fear the power of his armour and weapons while he remains indifferent, beyond caring.
German shoots all this in beautiful, shining black and white in his signature long-take style, and the way he seems to have constructed a flawless 360 degree reality around his camera is stunning. But that effect wears off after half an hour or so, while the film runs for another two and a half, repeating itself over and over and over. Don Rumata passes something vile or awful, the camera lingers briefly, perhaps he interacts - though rarely in any way "dramatically" - and then he is moving on, to the next iteration of the same thing, the same thematic point, restated. And though I know that that itself is German's point; that nothing changes or progresses, that mankind is doomed, I was bored after that first 40 minutes or so, and that lasted right up until the last ten minutes, when the rhythm and the action changes.
All the technical accomplishment in the world cannot make up for how utterly humourless and grim this film is.
You know the sequences in Spaghetti Westerns where the director (be it Leone or Corbucci or Sollima or Petroni) exposes the audience to the truth of the West by showing us ordinary life? It may just be twenty seconds before our protagonist rides into town, or a glimpse into the dark corners of the saloon he's just wandered into, but it is generally there, in every Spaghetti Western, continuing to demythologise and revise the classical view of the old West. Usually it consists of extras with "interesting" faces, scratching themselves, squabbling, stuffing food into rootless gobs, being lazy or lustful or disgusting, featuring sweat-stained clothes and gleaming, stubbled, frequently misshapen people, with exaggerated sound design so that every grunt and muttering is audible. This is what the world is like, these sequences seem to say; full of filth and brutality and idiocy, signifying nothing.
Well Hard to be a God is like that. Except it is set in a Medieval world. And it lasts for three long hours.
The sci-fi basis for the story - from the novel by the Strugatskys - is laid out briefly, then basically ceases to be relevant as German gets carried off by his self-indulgent - if genuinely astonishing - technical brilliance. The film follows Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolink) on a journey across the planet Arkanar. Discovered years earlier by scientists at a Medieval stage in its development, an experiment was carried out to try to spur it into a renaissance. Only the experiment has backfired disastrously and the culture has utterly rejected intellectualism. Men have been hanged, the university closed down, and a war has broken out. Don Rumata wanders among these people, who fear the power of his armour and weapons while he remains indifferent, beyond caring.
German shoots all this in beautiful, shining black and white in his signature long-take style, and the way he seems to have constructed a flawless 360 degree reality around his camera is stunning. But that effect wears off after half an hour or so, while the film runs for another two and a half, repeating itself over and over and over. Don Rumata passes something vile or awful, the camera lingers briefly, perhaps he interacts - though rarely in any way "dramatically" - and then he is moving on, to the next iteration of the same thing, the same thematic point, restated. And though I know that that itself is German's point; that nothing changes or progresses, that mankind is doomed, I was bored after that first 40 minutes or so, and that lasted right up until the last ten minutes, when the rhythm and the action changes.
All the technical accomplishment in the world cannot make up for how utterly humourless and grim this film is.
Thursday, 29 October 2015
CRIMSON PEAK
(Guillermo Del Toro, 2015)
I have a problem with a group of filmmakers who often seem to put production design before storytelling. Oddly, all of them favour a sort of gothic "stylishness" in their work: elaborate sets, lush costumes and rich lighting combine with overripe narratives, bad dialogue and ostentatious camera motion. Tim Burton is perhaps the high priest of such cinema, joined on occasion by the likes of Terry Giliam. And sometimes Guillermo Del Toro.
Del Toro switches from the more action end of pulp (Hellboy I & II, Blade 2, Pacific Rim) to a more gothic, personal sensibility (The Devils Backbone, Pans Labyrinth) every few films, and in Crimson Peak he is - ever the synthesist - paying homage to Hammer and Mario Bava among others, with the story of a rich young woman, Edith (Mia Wasikowska, playing a dull character but still sympathetic) lured from her comfortable life in Buffalo NY by dashing, sensitive Sir Thomas Sharp (Tom Hiddleston). HE woos her against her suspicious father's wishes, and when her father is mysteriously murdered, she marries Thomas and leaves America only to arrive in a sort of Gothic Disneyland in the form of his crumbling, spooky mansion in 'Cumberland". This he shares with his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Of course there are strange goings-on at the mansion. Ghosts prowl the halls, the clay beneath is seeping up through the floor (the house itself seems to bleed), and Lucille and Thomas both act strangely.
Crimson Peak is not remotely the horror film it has been sold as. There are no real scares here; rather it is a gothic romance with some violence and thrills along the way. And while I find Del Toro's visual imagination pedestrian and predictable in this mode, this film is still ravishingly beautiful (credit to cinematographer Dan Lausten for that), and fun it its silly way.
The performers give it conviction. Charlie Hunnam (as the white knight set on rescuing Edith) and Hiddleston are both a little stiff and awkward but that suits the material. Chastain has a great time as Lucille, particularly in the last act, when truths are revealed and Del Toro can indulge himself.
I have a problem with a group of filmmakers who often seem to put production design before storytelling. Oddly, all of them favour a sort of gothic "stylishness" in their work: elaborate sets, lush costumes and rich lighting combine with overripe narratives, bad dialogue and ostentatious camera motion. Tim Burton is perhaps the high priest of such cinema, joined on occasion by the likes of Terry Giliam. And sometimes Guillermo Del Toro.
Del Toro switches from the more action end of pulp (Hellboy I & II, Blade 2, Pacific Rim) to a more gothic, personal sensibility (The Devils Backbone, Pans Labyrinth) every few films, and in Crimson Peak he is - ever the synthesist - paying homage to Hammer and Mario Bava among others, with the story of a rich young woman, Edith (Mia Wasikowska, playing a dull character but still sympathetic) lured from her comfortable life in Buffalo NY by dashing, sensitive Sir Thomas Sharp (Tom Hiddleston). HE woos her against her suspicious father's wishes, and when her father is mysteriously murdered, she marries Thomas and leaves America only to arrive in a sort of Gothic Disneyland in the form of his crumbling, spooky mansion in 'Cumberland". This he shares with his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Of course there are strange goings-on at the mansion. Ghosts prowl the halls, the clay beneath is seeping up through the floor (the house itself seems to bleed), and Lucille and Thomas both act strangely.
Crimson Peak is not remotely the horror film it has been sold as. There are no real scares here; rather it is a gothic romance with some violence and thrills along the way. And while I find Del Toro's visual imagination pedestrian and predictable in this mode, this film is still ravishingly beautiful (credit to cinematographer Dan Lausten for that), and fun it its silly way.
The performers give it conviction. Charlie Hunnam (as the white knight set on rescuing Edith) and Hiddleston are both a little stiff and awkward but that suits the material. Chastain has a great time as Lucille, particularly in the last act, when truths are revealed and Del Toro can indulge himself.
Sunday, 4 October 2015
MACBETH
(Justin Kurzel, 2015)
Macbeth is - by something like common consent - the most cinematic of Shakespeare's plays. It is noirish in its dramatic setting, dark actions and darker characters, its blood and witchcraft and murder and seduction. It is also uncommonly tight for Shakespeare; taut and relatively pacy. It has a tortured anti-hero, a femme fatale, a few rich supporting roles.
And yet: so many of the screen adaptations of the Scottish play mess it up. Too slow, too literal, too gothic, too stagey, too handsome, too cheap, too silly. Always off somehow. Only Roman Polanski really made a decent fist of turning it into a movie (Orson Welles' seems the least of his Shakespeare adaptations to me) and even that bloody, energetic iteration is a little stiff and awkward.
Well: Justin Kurzel seems to have been commendably focused on making his Macbeth work as a movie. He and his three writers throw out material that doesn't work, and recontextualise whole other scenes, sharpening some themes, abandoning others. His movie is ravishing; an every-frame-a-painting piece of cinema with brutally fine acting from a great cast.
Director of photography Adam Arkapaw films medieval Scotland with pin-sharp precision as if it was a post-Apocalyptic wasteland. There is life here, but somehow the landscape seems desolate, either battered by rain or baking under the sun. The early battle scene is an orgy of slow-motion blood and spittle in the air, intercut with the clamour of the carnage and Macbeth, still on the battlefield, hypnotised by the sight of the Wyrd Sisters.
The boldness of Kurzel's version is in making some definitive decisions about how Shakespeare's ambiguities should be read. So here, Michael Fassbender's Macbeth is firmly a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; hallucinating corpses (the dagger which appears to him is in the hand of a dead youth from that opening battle) and unable to control his seesawing emotions, he is easily swayed by his wife. For her part, Marion Cotillard's Lady Macbeth is mourning the loss of her own child. The film's opening shot is of the body of the Macbeth child, lying upon a funeral pyre. Both Cotillard and Fassbender play it as naturalistically as they can, mumbling and whispering much of the dialogue. There is no declaiming, little attempt at iambic pentameter. Some lines vanish in an attempt to make scenes more believable and flowing. Fassbender is best in the early stages; numbed and hollow. Later he gets a little more mannered and hammy, but he is never less than magnetic. Cotillard is beautifully vulnerable and emotional.
The rest of a terrific cast match them, especially an (as usual) intense Sean Harris as MacDuff. All contribute to the sense of mounting dread throughout, as does the score by Jed Kurzel and Arkapaw's immense work, which make Macbeth work as a movie in a way that too few Shakeseare adaptations can match. It is beautiful, emotional, visceral and exhilarating.
It is also confirmation that Kurzel is a great talent.
Macbeth is - by something like common consent - the most cinematic of Shakespeare's plays. It is noirish in its dramatic setting, dark actions and darker characters, its blood and witchcraft and murder and seduction. It is also uncommonly tight for Shakespeare; taut and relatively pacy. It has a tortured anti-hero, a femme fatale, a few rich supporting roles.
And yet: so many of the screen adaptations of the Scottish play mess it up. Too slow, too literal, too gothic, too stagey, too handsome, too cheap, too silly. Always off somehow. Only Roman Polanski really made a decent fist of turning it into a movie (Orson Welles' seems the least of his Shakespeare adaptations to me) and even that bloody, energetic iteration is a little stiff and awkward.
Well: Justin Kurzel seems to have been commendably focused on making his Macbeth work as a movie. He and his three writers throw out material that doesn't work, and recontextualise whole other scenes, sharpening some themes, abandoning others. His movie is ravishing; an every-frame-a-painting piece of cinema with brutally fine acting from a great cast.
Director of photography Adam Arkapaw films medieval Scotland with pin-sharp precision as if it was a post-Apocalyptic wasteland. There is life here, but somehow the landscape seems desolate, either battered by rain or baking under the sun. The early battle scene is an orgy of slow-motion blood and spittle in the air, intercut with the clamour of the carnage and Macbeth, still on the battlefield, hypnotised by the sight of the Wyrd Sisters.
The boldness of Kurzel's version is in making some definitive decisions about how Shakespeare's ambiguities should be read. So here, Michael Fassbender's Macbeth is firmly a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; hallucinating corpses (the dagger which appears to him is in the hand of a dead youth from that opening battle) and unable to control his seesawing emotions, he is easily swayed by his wife. For her part, Marion Cotillard's Lady Macbeth is mourning the loss of her own child. The film's opening shot is of the body of the Macbeth child, lying upon a funeral pyre. Both Cotillard and Fassbender play it as naturalistically as they can, mumbling and whispering much of the dialogue. There is no declaiming, little attempt at iambic pentameter. Some lines vanish in an attempt to make scenes more believable and flowing. Fassbender is best in the early stages; numbed and hollow. Later he gets a little more mannered and hammy, but he is never less than magnetic. Cotillard is beautifully vulnerable and emotional.
The rest of a terrific cast match them, especially an (as usual) intense Sean Harris as MacDuff. All contribute to the sense of mounting dread throughout, as does the score by Jed Kurzel and Arkapaw's immense work, which make Macbeth work as a movie in a way that too few Shakeseare adaptations can match. It is beautiful, emotional, visceral and exhilarating.
It is also confirmation that Kurzel is a great talent.
Friday, 25 September 2015
LEGENDS OF THE FALL
(Ed Zwick, 1994)
It's not easy to adapt author Jim Harrison to the screen. A filmmaker as vital and distinctive as Tony Scott found that out with Revenge. And if he couldn't quite translate the timeless macho poetry of Harrison to film, what chance did a director as plodding and insipid as Ed Zwick have?
Based on Legends of the Fall: absolutely no chance. Harrison's novella is both spare and epic, but Zwick's movie is instead turgid and ridiculous, an episodic and at times cringeworthy soap opera with beautiful landscapes and bad performances.
Brad Pitt plays Tristan, beloved middle son of Col Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins). They live on a Montana ranch along with Ludlow's American Indian employees, who bring Tristan up as a half-brave with a respect for nature and a certain intolerance for the ways of white society. His older brother Alfred (Aidan Quinn, giving the best performance in the film, full of pain and anger) is more conventional, while the plot is kicked off when the youngest, Samuel (Henry Thomas) brings home a beautiful girl who bewitches all three brothers. She is Susannah (Julia Ormond), and she falls for Tristan, of course, beginning a long series of scenes in which Ormond and Pitt appear to be competing to see who has the shiniest hair.
Samuel wants to go off to fight in WW1, so Tristan goes along to protect him, fails, and takes his revenge by crossing no mans land after dark and scalping Germans. When he returns to Montana, he and Susannah comfort each other after their loss in the most predictable, soft focus way possible, then he goes off travelling the world to quiet "the bear inside him", leaving her to wait at home at the mercy of a smitten Alfred.
In 1994, Pitt had not yet realised that acting meant more than just posing, flexing his cheek muscles and biting his lips. He is awful here; a vacant, beautiful model. Ormond is little better, causing you to wonder why any of the three brothers would be interested in her.
Both are outdone by Hopkins, who gets to play a post-stroke Ludlow as a shambling invalid, and slices the ham thickly here.
Zwick's direction never dodges a visual cliche, from the slow motion during key scenes to the honeyed cinematography, and the score and script all combine to make this feel somehow neutered.
It's not easy to adapt author Jim Harrison to the screen. A filmmaker as vital and distinctive as Tony Scott found that out with Revenge. And if he couldn't quite translate the timeless macho poetry of Harrison to film, what chance did a director as plodding and insipid as Ed Zwick have?
Based on Legends of the Fall: absolutely no chance. Harrison's novella is both spare and epic, but Zwick's movie is instead turgid and ridiculous, an episodic and at times cringeworthy soap opera with beautiful landscapes and bad performances.
Brad Pitt plays Tristan, beloved middle son of Col Ludlow (Anthony Hopkins). They live on a Montana ranch along with Ludlow's American Indian employees, who bring Tristan up as a half-brave with a respect for nature and a certain intolerance for the ways of white society. His older brother Alfred (Aidan Quinn, giving the best performance in the film, full of pain and anger) is more conventional, while the plot is kicked off when the youngest, Samuel (Henry Thomas) brings home a beautiful girl who bewitches all three brothers. She is Susannah (Julia Ormond), and she falls for Tristan, of course, beginning a long series of scenes in which Ormond and Pitt appear to be competing to see who has the shiniest hair.
Samuel wants to go off to fight in WW1, so Tristan goes along to protect him, fails, and takes his revenge by crossing no mans land after dark and scalping Germans. When he returns to Montana, he and Susannah comfort each other after their loss in the most predictable, soft focus way possible, then he goes off travelling the world to quiet "the bear inside him", leaving her to wait at home at the mercy of a smitten Alfred.
In 1994, Pitt had not yet realised that acting meant more than just posing, flexing his cheek muscles and biting his lips. He is awful here; a vacant, beautiful model. Ormond is little better, causing you to wonder why any of the three brothers would be interested in her.
Both are outdone by Hopkins, who gets to play a post-stroke Ludlow as a shambling invalid, and slices the ham thickly here.
Zwick's direction never dodges a visual cliche, from the slow motion during key scenes to the honeyed cinematography, and the score and script all combine to make this feel somehow neutered.
Wednesday, 27 May 2015
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
(Thomas Vinterberg, 2015)
Chemistry is so important to on-screen romance. And in this tale of one woman and three men, it is important that she have some chemistry with at least two of them.
And while Cary Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts have an undeniable bucketload of chemistry as the two leads here - Batsheba Everdeene and Gabriel Oak, and yes, like Dickens, Thomas Hardy had a serious case of give-your-characters-apallingly-unsubtle-clues-to-their-personalities-in-their-names-itis - that mysterious quality is conspicuous by its absence in her scenes with Michael Sheen (as Mr Boldword) and Tom Sturridge (as the caddish soldier Frank Troy). And while that works in the movies favour in one sense (we really really want Batsheba and Gabriel to end up together), it absolutely does not in another (there is never really any doubt that Batsheba and Gabriel will end up together).
Still, three of those four actors are fine, and Sturridge is easily hateable as Frank, partly because the character is utterly unsympathetic and partly because he is so terrible in the role; modern and smug and posturing, he fails to communicate the suffering that has made Frank what he is.
Vinterberg's film does a good job of capturing what makes Hardy, well, Hardy. The landscape is a character here; beautiful and terrible and ever-present. Cutaways of nature between scenes suggest the small scale of the human problems on display. Passion broils beneath the surface of everyone, and Mulligan and - especially - Schoenearts do a good job of showing that, with each of their scenes seeming on the brink of something. It always looks fantastic, with a rich palette of browns and deep greens reflecting the earthy passions of Hardy's world in contrast to the more delicate tones of Jane Austen, say. and while novelist David Nicholls' script skirts romcom cliche, it never quite mis-steps, instead finding the simple dramas in Hardy's tale.
All in all it works because it treats the cliches of period romantic drama as if they are not cliches at all, as if they are the best thing ever. And that makes them feel somewhat fresh.
Chemistry is so important to on-screen romance. And in this tale of one woman and three men, it is important that she have some chemistry with at least two of them.
And while Cary Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts have an undeniable bucketload of chemistry as the two leads here - Batsheba Everdeene and Gabriel Oak, and yes, like Dickens, Thomas Hardy had a serious case of give-your-characters-apallingly-unsubtle-clues-to-their-personalities-in-their-names-itis - that mysterious quality is conspicuous by its absence in her scenes with Michael Sheen (as Mr Boldword) and Tom Sturridge (as the caddish soldier Frank Troy). And while that works in the movies favour in one sense (we really really want Batsheba and Gabriel to end up together), it absolutely does not in another (there is never really any doubt that Batsheba and Gabriel will end up together).
Still, three of those four actors are fine, and Sturridge is easily hateable as Frank, partly because the character is utterly unsympathetic and partly because he is so terrible in the role; modern and smug and posturing, he fails to communicate the suffering that has made Frank what he is.
Vinterberg's film does a good job of capturing what makes Hardy, well, Hardy. The landscape is a character here; beautiful and terrible and ever-present. Cutaways of nature between scenes suggest the small scale of the human problems on display. Passion broils beneath the surface of everyone, and Mulligan and - especially - Schoenearts do a good job of showing that, with each of their scenes seeming on the brink of something. It always looks fantastic, with a rich palette of browns and deep greens reflecting the earthy passions of Hardy's world in contrast to the more delicate tones of Jane Austen, say. and while novelist David Nicholls' script skirts romcom cliche, it never quite mis-steps, instead finding the simple dramas in Hardy's tale.
All in all it works because it treats the cliches of period romantic drama as if they are not cliches at all, as if they are the best thing ever. And that makes them feel somewhat fresh.
Monday, 25 May 2015
MATEWAN
(John Sayles, 1987)
Matewan is a masterpiece. John Sayles' best film, and one of the greatest and most overlooked films of the 1980s, it tells the story of a Miners Strike in West Virginia in 1920 which eventually ends in horrible violence.
Sayles is a fascinating director. A true independent, with a maverick streak, he writes, directs and edits each of his own films, writes novels and short stories, acts in other films as well as working as an uncredited script doctor on bigger movies for the studios, notably Apollo 13. He was in the middle of a rich seam of creativity in the late 80s, when he made Matewan. His next film, Eight Men Out was set in the same historical period as Matewan, but in the utterly different world of East Coast Baseball. The two films do have some thematic similarities, with their stories of groups of comrades facing coercion, moral courage and the damage wrought by politics.
Sayles has always been a great writer. Each of his films, from his first, "Return of the Seacausus Seven" (1980), is beautifully written, with wise, truthful, rounded characters, nice, frequently witty dialogue and unforced, organic plotting. His visual style has been more of an issue. He can be slightly pedestrian visually, though his storytelling is always clear and his editing is natural and smooth. His solution to his visual limitations seems to have been to hire the best Directors of Photography he possibly could.
Matewan had a budget of just $4 Million, which is a tiny amount for such an ambitious film which is so dependent on a convincing, detailed period recreation for its authenticity. Sayles wisely recruited the great Haskell Wexler as his cinematographer, and as a result, Matewan is hauntingly beautiful, full of muted, dusky lighting and striking compositions.
Its plot details the arrival in the town of Matewan of a young, idealistic union Organiser, written by Sayles and played by Chris Cooper as an almost mythic figure. His attempts to unite the striking miners and the immigrant scabs brought in by the Mining company result in an escalation of hostilities by the company's thuggish strike-breakers. Alongside Cooper, there are appearances by actors who would become Sayles' semi-regulars like David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell. There is also a striking performance from Will Oldham as a young miner-cum-preacher. When I first encountered Oldham in his guise as a musician, some years after I had seen the film, I was shocked to discover that the man responsible for this music was the actor from Matewan. He's as startling a screen presence as he is a songwriter, and indeed all of the films performances are strong. Sayles has always been a fine director of actors. But perhaps his most obvious gift is a talent for Altmanesque multi-character narratives, such as City of Hope, Lone Star and Sunshine State. Matewan flirts with this sub-genre, following the effects of the strike and Cooper's arrival upon many of the people involved. Sayles' work generally has a significant political component also, and Matewan is perhaps his most explicitly political film, with its portrayal of a labour dispute as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, informed by the cynicism the distance of 60 years of labour struggle in America has provided him.
That struggle finally erupts in the film's climax, inspired by the historical "Massacre of Matewan", when the Union thugs and the miners battle in the town. Sayles' screenwriting for the studios has tended to take in more genre material than his own directorial career, but Matewan's finale seems to suggest a classic Western scenario, with the two sides meeting on a railway line before an apocalyptic gunfight begins. The shooting of this sequence itself evokes Sam Peckinpah or Walter Hill, with heads exploding like ripe fruit and the air ringing with the reports of fired weaponry. Its a fantastic, ferocious climax, unlike anything else in Sayles' career, and all the more powerful and surprising for that. It also shows him - in collaboration with Wexler - as a visually exciting director, in perhaps the only straight set-piece he has ever attempted in his career. But he shows us the consequences of such violence - characters lie dead and bleeding. Others weep over the bodies of their loved ones, and Sayles' camera takes it all in, just as it had the carnage beforehand. Its a great ending to a great film in what remains an interesting, unique career.
Matewan is a masterpiece. John Sayles' best film, and one of the greatest and most overlooked films of the 1980s, it tells the story of a Miners Strike in West Virginia in 1920 which eventually ends in horrible violence.
Sayles is a fascinating director. A true independent, with a maverick streak, he writes, directs and edits each of his own films, writes novels and short stories, acts in other films as well as working as an uncredited script doctor on bigger movies for the studios, notably Apollo 13. He was in the middle of a rich seam of creativity in the late 80s, when he made Matewan. His next film, Eight Men Out was set in the same historical period as Matewan, but in the utterly different world of East Coast Baseball. The two films do have some thematic similarities, with their stories of groups of comrades facing coercion, moral courage and the damage wrought by politics.
Sayles has always been a great writer. Each of his films, from his first, "Return of the Seacausus Seven" (1980), is beautifully written, with wise, truthful, rounded characters, nice, frequently witty dialogue and unforced, organic plotting. His visual style has been more of an issue. He can be slightly pedestrian visually, though his storytelling is always clear and his editing is natural and smooth. His solution to his visual limitations seems to have been to hire the best Directors of Photography he possibly could.
Matewan had a budget of just $4 Million, which is a tiny amount for such an ambitious film which is so dependent on a convincing, detailed period recreation for its authenticity. Sayles wisely recruited the great Haskell Wexler as his cinematographer, and as a result, Matewan is hauntingly beautiful, full of muted, dusky lighting and striking compositions.
Its plot details the arrival in the town of Matewan of a young, idealistic union Organiser, written by Sayles and played by Chris Cooper as an almost mythic figure. His attempts to unite the striking miners and the immigrant scabs brought in by the Mining company result in an escalation of hostilities by the company's thuggish strike-breakers. Alongside Cooper, there are appearances by actors who would become Sayles' semi-regulars like David Strathairn and Mary McDonnell. There is also a striking performance from Will Oldham as a young miner-cum-preacher. When I first encountered Oldham in his guise as a musician, some years after I had seen the film, I was shocked to discover that the man responsible for this music was the actor from Matewan. He's as startling a screen presence as he is a songwriter, and indeed all of the films performances are strong. Sayles has always been a fine director of actors. But perhaps his most obvious gift is a talent for Altmanesque multi-character narratives, such as City of Hope, Lone Star and Sunshine State. Matewan flirts with this sub-genre, following the effects of the strike and Cooper's arrival upon many of the people involved. Sayles' work generally has a significant political component also, and Matewan is perhaps his most explicitly political film, with its portrayal of a labour dispute as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, informed by the cynicism the distance of 60 years of labour struggle in America has provided him.
That struggle finally erupts in the film's climax, inspired by the historical "Massacre of Matewan", when the Union thugs and the miners battle in the town. Sayles' screenwriting for the studios has tended to take in more genre material than his own directorial career, but Matewan's finale seems to suggest a classic Western scenario, with the two sides meeting on a railway line before an apocalyptic gunfight begins. The shooting of this sequence itself evokes Sam Peckinpah or Walter Hill, with heads exploding like ripe fruit and the air ringing with the reports of fired weaponry. Its a fantastic, ferocious climax, unlike anything else in Sayles' career, and all the more powerful and surprising for that. It also shows him - in collaboration with Wexler - as a visually exciting director, in perhaps the only straight set-piece he has ever attempted in his career. But he shows us the consequences of such violence - characters lie dead and bleeding. Others weep over the bodies of their loved ones, and Sayles' camera takes it all in, just as it had the carnage beforehand. Its a great ending to a great film in what remains an interesting, unique career.
Saturday, 21 February 2015
SELMA
(Ava DuVernay, 2014)
David Oyelowo is astonishing in Selma. It can't be easy to play a historical figure whose voice and mannerisms are so ingrained in public consciousness, but Oyelowo makes his Martin Luther King Jr a breathing, flawed, emotional human being, never seeming to worry about the icon. King here is calculating, funny, worried, righteous but also as authoritative and charismatic as the man must have been. When Oyelowo has to orate before a crowd, he is inspiring and rousing. When he has to charm a smaller group, he can do that too. But he is perhaps best in the moments when his personal life is threatened by the march of the Civil Rights movement and its opponents attempts to squash it. The revelation of his infidelity and the panic in his eyes when he and his wife (Carmen Ejogo, also excellent) discuss it makes King vulnerable and believable in a way nothing else here quite does.
Aside from that magnificent lead performance, Selma is an interesting film.
Basically a piece of prestige Oscar-bait, it seems edgy thanks to the (still topical) racial content of the story it tells, but that edginess is entirely absent from the style or storytelling. Director DuVernay instead settles for an extremely conventional approach, often lapsing into hackneyed scenes and moments. There is that honeyed period look to everything here, reminiscent of Driving Miss Daisy or Forrest Gump in its warm portrayal of the South in the 1960s. There is the often cringeworthy use of music. If for the majority of the first act, DuVernay eschews any music at all, creating a terse, factual tone, when it starts to seep in, she abandons all semblance of taste, and runs a gospel-folk number over a key scene of marching and violence. Her treatment of the death of four young girls in a church bombing also feels somewhat off; she depicts them within a scene of almost Spielbergian perfection and innocence, and her cutting underlines what is about to happen before it actually does.
The story follows the efforts of King and a group of his colleagues to organise a protest march from the town of Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in order to encourage Lyndon B Johnson's Government to introduce a change to the laws of the nation, allowing blacks to vote without interference or difficulty. This is met with imprisonment, police brutality and intimidation, until media coverage sparks public outcry and Johnson seems forced to act.
A huge cast of black actors are all impressive, and despite the sporadic moments of tonal uncertainty, DuVernay generally maintains great control over this material - this is a film impressively content to linger on long conversations between activists over policy decisions and political strategy.
That is to say; Selma rarely patronises its audience, instead assuming that they will follow it wherever it goes. It is also nicely restrained; sorrowful rather than coruscatingly enraged about the awful events it depicts.
David Oyelowo is astonishing in Selma. It can't be easy to play a historical figure whose voice and mannerisms are so ingrained in public consciousness, but Oyelowo makes his Martin Luther King Jr a breathing, flawed, emotional human being, never seeming to worry about the icon. King here is calculating, funny, worried, righteous but also as authoritative and charismatic as the man must have been. When Oyelowo has to orate before a crowd, he is inspiring and rousing. When he has to charm a smaller group, he can do that too. But he is perhaps best in the moments when his personal life is threatened by the march of the Civil Rights movement and its opponents attempts to squash it. The revelation of his infidelity and the panic in his eyes when he and his wife (Carmen Ejogo, also excellent) discuss it makes King vulnerable and believable in a way nothing else here quite does.
Aside from that magnificent lead performance, Selma is an interesting film.
Basically a piece of prestige Oscar-bait, it seems edgy thanks to the (still topical) racial content of the story it tells, but that edginess is entirely absent from the style or storytelling. Director DuVernay instead settles for an extremely conventional approach, often lapsing into hackneyed scenes and moments. There is that honeyed period look to everything here, reminiscent of Driving Miss Daisy or Forrest Gump in its warm portrayal of the South in the 1960s. There is the often cringeworthy use of music. If for the majority of the first act, DuVernay eschews any music at all, creating a terse, factual tone, when it starts to seep in, she abandons all semblance of taste, and runs a gospel-folk number over a key scene of marching and violence. Her treatment of the death of four young girls in a church bombing also feels somewhat off; she depicts them within a scene of almost Spielbergian perfection and innocence, and her cutting underlines what is about to happen before it actually does.
The story follows the efforts of King and a group of his colleagues to organise a protest march from the town of Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in order to encourage Lyndon B Johnson's Government to introduce a change to the laws of the nation, allowing blacks to vote without interference or difficulty. This is met with imprisonment, police brutality and intimidation, until media coverage sparks public outcry and Johnson seems forced to act.
A huge cast of black actors are all impressive, and despite the sporadic moments of tonal uncertainty, DuVernay generally maintains great control over this material - this is a film impressively content to linger on long conversations between activists over policy decisions and political strategy.
That is to say; Selma rarely patronises its audience, instead assuming that they will follow it wherever it goes. It is also nicely restrained; sorrowful rather than coruscatingly enraged about the awful events it depicts.
Sunday, 28 December 2014
MR. TURNER
(Mike Leigh, 2014)
Director of photography Dick Pope's attempts to paint with light - an obvious nod to the subject of this sprawling biopic - make Mr. Turner easily Mike Leigh's most beautiful film. For a director most obviously acclaimed for his studies of modern British life, class and morals, it is telling that I find his period dramas effortlessly superior to his films on contemporary themes. Part of that is his approach to setting and texture; Leigh's historical dramas are visceral and earthy, keeping his characters front and centre, never distracted by the costumes or locations many examples of this particular genre obsess over. The caricatures which litter his work also fit better into this period world where class seems so much more starkly demarcated than in the complex landscape of modern Britain, where some of Leigh's characters are impossibly stagey, self-indulgent creations, walking embodiments of the flaws in his improvisation-and-rehearsal-to-create-a-script approach. There is still some of that in Mr. Turner, to be sure; a particular weakness for a funny voice or a gurning facial expression is a real Leigh signature, his fallback when he needs a laugh.
It's even there in Timothy Spall's fine lead performance - his Turner grunts more than he speaks, often to great comic effect. A telling character detail, yes; but also a decision made by an actor that does not always work.
Mr. Turner elliptically, messily chronicles the last quarter century of the artists life; already an illustrious and controversial master, he is increasingly eccentric, pursuing his art and his passions with little regard for anything else. He has several complex relationships with women; (barely) endures the death of his father, meets with patrons, friends and rivals, and paints, paints, paints, using food and spit to achieve the effects he needs.
This is a dense film, full of detail and characters and complicated inter-relationships and mysterious ambiguities, and though it sprawls in several directions, it always feels controlled and even concise; Leigh knows what he wants to show us of Turner, his visionary genius allied with his difficult personality, his charm with his sentimentality (it does feel a little autobiographical at times). The ellipses largely help the film avoid traditional biopic problems - it is rarely predictable. It feels like life, a life lived by a genius, a full, singular life. Spall is crucial here, letting us see the fleet, quick mind of this man trapped inside the "gargoyle" he sees in the mirror, together with his at-times overwhelming emotional intensity, and the supporting cast are mostly terrific too.
A lovely score by Gary Yershon helps illuminate something of Turner's melancholy and obsession, but it is only fair to return to the work of Pope. This is a film about a man obsessed with light, and Pope and Leigh seem to have understood that light is central to not only Turner, but cinema. Their film makes that case eloquently enough.
Director of photography Dick Pope's attempts to paint with light - an obvious nod to the subject of this sprawling biopic - make Mr. Turner easily Mike Leigh's most beautiful film. For a director most obviously acclaimed for his studies of modern British life, class and morals, it is telling that I find his period dramas effortlessly superior to his films on contemporary themes. Part of that is his approach to setting and texture; Leigh's historical dramas are visceral and earthy, keeping his characters front and centre, never distracted by the costumes or locations many examples of this particular genre obsess over. The caricatures which litter his work also fit better into this period world where class seems so much more starkly demarcated than in the complex landscape of modern Britain, where some of Leigh's characters are impossibly stagey, self-indulgent creations, walking embodiments of the flaws in his improvisation-and-rehearsal-to-create-a-script approach. There is still some of that in Mr. Turner, to be sure; a particular weakness for a funny voice or a gurning facial expression is a real Leigh signature, his fallback when he needs a laugh.
It's even there in Timothy Spall's fine lead performance - his Turner grunts more than he speaks, often to great comic effect. A telling character detail, yes; but also a decision made by an actor that does not always work.
Mr. Turner elliptically, messily chronicles the last quarter century of the artists life; already an illustrious and controversial master, he is increasingly eccentric, pursuing his art and his passions with little regard for anything else. He has several complex relationships with women; (barely) endures the death of his father, meets with patrons, friends and rivals, and paints, paints, paints, using food and spit to achieve the effects he needs.
This is a dense film, full of detail and characters and complicated inter-relationships and mysterious ambiguities, and though it sprawls in several directions, it always feels controlled and even concise; Leigh knows what he wants to show us of Turner, his visionary genius allied with his difficult personality, his charm with his sentimentality (it does feel a little autobiographical at times). The ellipses largely help the film avoid traditional biopic problems - it is rarely predictable. It feels like life, a life lived by a genius, a full, singular life. Spall is crucial here, letting us see the fleet, quick mind of this man trapped inside the "gargoyle" he sees in the mirror, together with his at-times overwhelming emotional intensity, and the supporting cast are mostly terrific too.
A lovely score by Gary Yershon helps illuminate something of Turner's melancholy and obsession, but it is only fair to return to the work of Pope. This is a film about a man obsessed with light, and Pope and Leigh seem to have understood that light is central to not only Turner, but cinema. Their film makes that case eloquently enough.
Saturday, 13 September 2014
KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
(Ridley Scott, 2005)
Balian: You go to certain death.
Templar: All death is certain.
If Kingdom of Heaven - the Directors Cut, not the manifestly inferior theatrical version, which is 45 minutes shorter - starred anybody other than Orlando Bloom in the lead role, it would be one of Ridley Scott's very best films. Bloom has never been better than in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he is required mainly to seem unearthly and beautiful - Legolas doesn't really have any personality in the realistic sense. He is a heroic ideal, and Bloom, blessed with his good looks, manages that without difficulty. In much of his other work he is similarly required to look pretty, but he is hopelessly out of his depth when asked to express any actual emotion. In Kingdom of Heaven, where he is asked to handle huge emotions - grief, despair, love - he is blank-faced. His single expression is a sort of empty smoulder - he seems to have walked off the set of an aftershave commercial. His character, Balian, is driven through the film by a search for his faith, yet Bloom looks like he's searching for his iPod and isn't all that bothered if he finds it or not.
It's a pity, because he is surrounded by a truly classy cast of mainly European supporting actors, most of whom seem totally at home in the Medieval World Scott painstakingly, beautifully creates. Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Jeremy Irons, Kevin McKidd, Martin Csokas and Brendan Gleeson all have big masculine presences, and Bloom seems dwarfed by all of them in his shared scenes. Eva Green is a fascinatingly complicated leading lady here, and Edward Norton offers a somehow Brando-esque but very effective voice performance as the masked Leper-King, Baldwin.
This is a complex, thematically ambitious epic, spending much of its running time detailing the political and religious divisions which beset the factions within the Holy Land during the Crusades. It is also an exploration of ideology and of the difference between faith and religion. That could be dull, but screenwriter William Monaghan, who wrote the dazzling dialogue for The Departed, shows that he can do the same for a vastly different world here, though there are a few clunky exchanges. Its contemporary resonances, dealing as it does with a battle in the Middle East between Christian and Muslim forces, are unavoidable and well-handled. It is fair-handed, with Saladin, the Commander of the Saracens, played by the charismatic Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, emerging as one of the best and most likeable characters, while many of the Christians are plainly rabid animals using their religion as justification for slaughter.
The real glory of this film, though, is Ridley Scott's direction. It seems a synthesis of much of what he has done before - the reconstruction of Old Worlds in Gladiator and 1492 and The Duellists is here attempted on an even bigger canvas, and it is achieved more vividly and more beautifully than in any of those films. The ferocity of the battle scenes in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down is replicated here, again on a bigger, more beautiful scale. The contrast between the wintery mud and misery of Continental Europe in that era with the exotic melting pot of the Holy Land is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the whole thing is textural masterpiece, always sensuous and visceral, with moments of pure poetry scattered throughout the story.
Its commercial failure is still no surprise. Aside from the gaping hole at its heart where a leading man should be, it's flaws are obvious and even its strengths are partially uncommercial - it is more complex and adult than any of the other modern epics, its conclusions about religion and war too ambiguous for popular acceptance. If Gladiator used a simple revenge story to great effect, Kingdom of Heaven has no such basic structure, its tale of a man searching for faith and redemption far too interior to drive such a big narrative emotionally. The film it most reminds me of is Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, another Epic with a miscast leading man and a downbeat, complex tone.
Balian: You go to certain death.
Templar: All death is certain.
If Kingdom of Heaven - the Directors Cut, not the manifestly inferior theatrical version, which is 45 minutes shorter - starred anybody other than Orlando Bloom in the lead role, it would be one of Ridley Scott's very best films. Bloom has never been better than in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where he is required mainly to seem unearthly and beautiful - Legolas doesn't really have any personality in the realistic sense. He is a heroic ideal, and Bloom, blessed with his good looks, manages that without difficulty. In much of his other work he is similarly required to look pretty, but he is hopelessly out of his depth when asked to express any actual emotion. In Kingdom of Heaven, where he is asked to handle huge emotions - grief, despair, love - he is blank-faced. His single expression is a sort of empty smoulder - he seems to have walked off the set of an aftershave commercial. His character, Balian, is driven through the film by a search for his faith, yet Bloom looks like he's searching for his iPod and isn't all that bothered if he finds it or not.
It's a pity, because he is surrounded by a truly classy cast of mainly European supporting actors, most of whom seem totally at home in the Medieval World Scott painstakingly, beautifully creates. Liam Neeson, David Thewlis, Jeremy Irons, Kevin McKidd, Martin Csokas and Brendan Gleeson all have big masculine presences, and Bloom seems dwarfed by all of them in his shared scenes. Eva Green is a fascinatingly complicated leading lady here, and Edward Norton offers a somehow Brando-esque but very effective voice performance as the masked Leper-King, Baldwin.
This is a complex, thematically ambitious epic, spending much of its running time detailing the political and religious divisions which beset the factions within the Holy Land during the Crusades. It is also an exploration of ideology and of the difference between faith and religion. That could be dull, but screenwriter William Monaghan, who wrote the dazzling dialogue for The Departed, shows that he can do the same for a vastly different world here, though there are a few clunky exchanges. Its contemporary resonances, dealing as it does with a battle in the Middle East between Christian and Muslim forces, are unavoidable and well-handled. It is fair-handed, with Saladin, the Commander of the Saracens, played by the charismatic Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, emerging as one of the best and most likeable characters, while many of the Christians are plainly rabid animals using their religion as justification for slaughter.
The real glory of this film, though, is Ridley Scott's direction. It seems a synthesis of much of what he has done before - the reconstruction of Old Worlds in Gladiator and 1492 and The Duellists is here attempted on an even bigger canvas, and it is achieved more vividly and more beautifully than in any of those films. The ferocity of the battle scenes in Gladiator and Black Hawk Down is replicated here, again on a bigger, more beautiful scale. The contrast between the wintery mud and misery of Continental Europe in that era with the exotic melting pot of the Holy Land is brilliantly evoked. Indeed, the whole thing is textural masterpiece, always sensuous and visceral, with moments of pure poetry scattered throughout the story.
Its commercial failure is still no surprise. Aside from the gaping hole at its heart where a leading man should be, it's flaws are obvious and even its strengths are partially uncommercial - it is more complex and adult than any of the other modern epics, its conclusions about religion and war too ambiguous for popular acceptance. If Gladiator used a simple revenge story to great effect, Kingdom of Heaven has no such basic structure, its tale of a man searching for faith and redemption far too interior to drive such a big narrative emotionally. The film it most reminds me of is Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, another Epic with a miscast leading man and a downbeat, complex tone.
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
TROY
(Wolfgang Petersen, 2004)
Has ever a major actor been quite so uncomfortable in period or non-American roles as Brad Pitt? Here he just about gets by on an extremely Californian type of sun-kissed buff beauty, but every single time he opens his mouth to speak, this film runs into a big problem; its protagonist - the legendary Achilles - is faintly ridiculous. That is only made more obvious by the fact that his direct opponent and mirror image, Eric Bana as Hector, is a serious, intense, magnetic presence.
Written by David Benioff in what now seems like a shaky dry-run for the sort of believable heroic historical drama he perfected on Game of Thrones, Troy now seems like a commendably old-fashioned sword and sandal epic, filled with lots of talk of honour, politics and the Gods. Only it's never really all that good.
The casting is one problem. Not only is Pitt horrendously miscast, but Diane Kruger , while obviously beautiful, makes a curiously dull Helen, and Orlando Bloom is his wooden, pretty worst as Paris, which robs the relationship meant to drive the entire plot of any interest or emotion. The old British thespians in smaller roles do better; Peter O'Toole and Brian Cox chew scenery (and there's a lot of it to chew on) to good effect as duelling Kings Agamemnon and Priam, Brendan Gleeson is flat-out terrifying as Menelaus, and Sean Bean is so good as a wily, political old Odysseus you find yourself wishing the film was about him instead.
Benioff's script is filled with good ideas. Achilles here is a warrior as rock star, lounging in a tent surrounded by groupies, followed by a cadre of warriors who worship him, but lazy, contemptuous of normal people, with a seeming death wish. That is all undone by Pitt's empty, superficial work, as is his relationship with Brisseus (Rose Byrne), a Priestess who is taken captive.
In contrast, Hector's love for his wife, family and country is simple and believable, which unbalances this narrative precariously (as does the fact that Agamemnon is such an unscrupulous villian, while Priam is just a bit of an earnest fool).
The material that does work is the spectacle, when it has not been spoiled by some shabby cgi. Huge battle scenes are efficiently directed by Petersen, without ever containing anything that is truly special or even memorable. The fighting has obviously been carefully considered, and Achilles moves like a dancer in stark contrast to the heavy armour and forceful strikes favoured by everybody else.
The climax - the arrival of the Wooden horse (nicely designed here) into Troy and all that follows - feels quite rushed, and in any event, the emotional climax has come and gone almost an hour before.
The duel between Achilles and Hector is easily the best thing in the film. So clearly shot and edited it feels like somebody other than Petersen must have been involved, it is visceral and gripping throughout, and the outcome is at least stirring in a way nothing else in this film is.
Has ever a major actor been quite so uncomfortable in period or non-American roles as Brad Pitt? Here he just about gets by on an extremely Californian type of sun-kissed buff beauty, but every single time he opens his mouth to speak, this film runs into a big problem; its protagonist - the legendary Achilles - is faintly ridiculous. That is only made more obvious by the fact that his direct opponent and mirror image, Eric Bana as Hector, is a serious, intense, magnetic presence.
Written by David Benioff in what now seems like a shaky dry-run for the sort of believable heroic historical drama he perfected on Game of Thrones, Troy now seems like a commendably old-fashioned sword and sandal epic, filled with lots of talk of honour, politics and the Gods. Only it's never really all that good.
The casting is one problem. Not only is Pitt horrendously miscast, but Diane Kruger , while obviously beautiful, makes a curiously dull Helen, and Orlando Bloom is his wooden, pretty worst as Paris, which robs the relationship meant to drive the entire plot of any interest or emotion. The old British thespians in smaller roles do better; Peter O'Toole and Brian Cox chew scenery (and there's a lot of it to chew on) to good effect as duelling Kings Agamemnon and Priam, Brendan Gleeson is flat-out terrifying as Menelaus, and Sean Bean is so good as a wily, political old Odysseus you find yourself wishing the film was about him instead.
Benioff's script is filled with good ideas. Achilles here is a warrior as rock star, lounging in a tent surrounded by groupies, followed by a cadre of warriors who worship him, but lazy, contemptuous of normal people, with a seeming death wish. That is all undone by Pitt's empty, superficial work, as is his relationship with Brisseus (Rose Byrne), a Priestess who is taken captive.
In contrast, Hector's love for his wife, family and country is simple and believable, which unbalances this narrative precariously (as does the fact that Agamemnon is such an unscrupulous villian, while Priam is just a bit of an earnest fool).
The material that does work is the spectacle, when it has not been spoiled by some shabby cgi. Huge battle scenes are efficiently directed by Petersen, without ever containing anything that is truly special or even memorable. The fighting has obviously been carefully considered, and Achilles moves like a dancer in stark contrast to the heavy armour and forceful strikes favoured by everybody else.
The climax - the arrival of the Wooden horse (nicely designed here) into Troy and all that follows - feels quite rushed, and in any event, the emotional climax has come and gone almost an hour before.
The duel between Achilles and Hector is easily the best thing in the film. So clearly shot and edited it feels like somebody other than Petersen must have been involved, it is visceral and gripping throughout, and the outcome is at least stirring in a way nothing else in this film is.
Sunday, 27 July 2014
HERCULES
(Brett Ratner, 2014)
Surprisingly short and decently-paced, Ratner's adaptation of Steve Moore's revisionist comic book take on the myth of Hercules is also a tad generic. It's gimmick is that Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) is not the demi-god son of Zeus of legend, but in fact an extremely skilled and fearsomely strong warrior supported by a tight, experienced team of comrades who understand the power of the legend and do their best to further its dissemination.
Hercules' Labours (which feature prominently in the trailer) are all dispensed with within the first five minutes of the film, and then we are introduced to reality - a jolly crew of mercenaries of differing skills and temperaments including the likes of Rufus Sewell as a quick, cynical knife-fighter, Ian McShane as a staff-wielding seer and Ingrid Bolsø Berdal as an amazon archer. Hercules leads the group, and his legend is known throughout Greece, though we see glimpses of his real-life tragedy (a bloodily-killed family, Hercules with gore on his hands) in Athens, from where he has been banished by King Eurystheus (Joseph Fiennes).
In yet another run-through of one of the oldest stories, they are hired to protect Thrace and the kingdom of Cotys (John Hurt) from a murderous, brutal army, and Hercules and his crew have to train an army in a couple of montages before the battle scenes - all flaming arrows, chariots, shield-walls, etc - begin, followed by some predictable plot revelations, more battle scenes, a bit of character development, then a big climax. Johnson could carry a continent, and a film this thin is no problem to him, especially when supported by a cast of slumming British thespians like this one.
The action scenes are competent - even refreshingly coherent - but it is all over-familiar and a tad too generically swords-and-sandals, despite classy Dante Spinotti cinematography. It all feels strangely small-scale even though there are humungous battles and teeming cgi cities.
That helps in that it ensures the human story at the centre of the film is intimate, but since the story is so hoary and undistinguished, it doesn't help as much as it might.
The temptation to blame Ratner - whose dwindling career won't be helped by this - is overwhelming. So I'm going to blame him too. It's Ratner's fault.
Surprisingly short and decently-paced, Ratner's adaptation of Steve Moore's revisionist comic book take on the myth of Hercules is also a tad generic. It's gimmick is that Hercules (Dwayne Johnson) is not the demi-god son of Zeus of legend, but in fact an extremely skilled and fearsomely strong warrior supported by a tight, experienced team of comrades who understand the power of the legend and do their best to further its dissemination.
Hercules' Labours (which feature prominently in the trailer) are all dispensed with within the first five minutes of the film, and then we are introduced to reality - a jolly crew of mercenaries of differing skills and temperaments including the likes of Rufus Sewell as a quick, cynical knife-fighter, Ian McShane as a staff-wielding seer and Ingrid Bolsø Berdal as an amazon archer. Hercules leads the group, and his legend is known throughout Greece, though we see glimpses of his real-life tragedy (a bloodily-killed family, Hercules with gore on his hands) in Athens, from where he has been banished by King Eurystheus (Joseph Fiennes).
In yet another run-through of one of the oldest stories, they are hired to protect Thrace and the kingdom of Cotys (John Hurt) from a murderous, brutal army, and Hercules and his crew have to train an army in a couple of montages before the battle scenes - all flaming arrows, chariots, shield-walls, etc - begin, followed by some predictable plot revelations, more battle scenes, a bit of character development, then a big climax. Johnson could carry a continent, and a film this thin is no problem to him, especially when supported by a cast of slumming British thespians like this one.
The action scenes are competent - even refreshingly coherent - but it is all over-familiar and a tad too generically swords-and-sandals, despite classy Dante Spinotti cinematography. It all feels strangely small-scale even though there are humungous battles and teeming cgi cities.
That helps in that it ensures the human story at the centre of the film is intimate, but since the story is so hoary and undistinguished, it doesn't help as much as it might.
The temptation to blame Ratner - whose dwindling career won't be helped by this - is overwhelming. So I'm going to blame him too. It's Ratner's fault.
Monday, 5 May 2014
POMPEII
(Paul W.S. Anderson, 2014)
The influence of video games on Anderson's work is fascinating. It stands to reason, given that his reputation is founded on adaptations of two leading game franchises; Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil. But it is more interesting when he applies video game conventions to genres not traditionally associated with the form. So Pompeii stuffs the first two acts with gladiatorial combat - arena death-matches of the type featured in many games. Anderson shoots action well; eschewing the handheld, hyperactively edited style so common in modern action cinema in favour of nicely composed long take scenes. He spotlights the stunts and the movement, meaning that his fight sequences are always comprehensible and exciting on that basis.
The third act - after the eruption of the volcano and the transformation into a disaster movie - tips the hat to a different sort of game. Here Anderson's characters struggle to escape from the maze of the city of Pompeii as fireballs rain from the sky.
Those characters are problematic for their thinness. There is the hero, the Celt (Kit Harington) a British gladiator brought to Pompeii from the provinces. He falls in love - at smouldering first sight, naturally - with Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of a Pompeii businessman (Jared Harris), eager to gain the patronage of the new Caesar, represented by Senator Corvus (Keifer Sutherland), who many years before was responsible for the death of the Celt's parents when he crushed an uprising in Britain. The Celt befriends the badass gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinuoye-Agbaje) just before everything goes, well, up in smoke.
Anderson is good at cramming events into shortened time-frames, giving his movies an inbuilt clock, another video-game trope. So that last act of Pompeii, filled with people fleeing, fighting, chasing, is tremendous fun. The first two are more workaday. Surprisingly old-fashioned in its approach, the story makes perfunctory attempts at Roman political chicanery before Anderson's genre mash-up spin the wheel settles on a mix of gladiator movie, disaster film and tragic love story. The love story is given short shrift - it's never been a strength of this director - but the other two genres do fine, helped by the impressive, often stunning action scenes.
Harington and Browning look pretty, but neither has much of a character to play. Sutherland hams it up well enough, but Akinuoye-Agbaje more or less steals the movie, with his malevolent leer and fearsome growl. The cgi is impressive once the apocalypse comes, bringing tsunamis, earthquakes and ash-clouds blotting out the sun in it's wake.
The influence of video games on Anderson's work is fascinating. It stands to reason, given that his reputation is founded on adaptations of two leading game franchises; Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil. But it is more interesting when he applies video game conventions to genres not traditionally associated with the form. So Pompeii stuffs the first two acts with gladiatorial combat - arena death-matches of the type featured in many games. Anderson shoots action well; eschewing the handheld, hyperactively edited style so common in modern action cinema in favour of nicely composed long take scenes. He spotlights the stunts and the movement, meaning that his fight sequences are always comprehensible and exciting on that basis.
The third act - after the eruption of the volcano and the transformation into a disaster movie - tips the hat to a different sort of game. Here Anderson's characters struggle to escape from the maze of the city of Pompeii as fireballs rain from the sky.
Those characters are problematic for their thinness. There is the hero, the Celt (Kit Harington) a British gladiator brought to Pompeii from the provinces. He falls in love - at smouldering first sight, naturally - with Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of a Pompeii businessman (Jared Harris), eager to gain the patronage of the new Caesar, represented by Senator Corvus (Keifer Sutherland), who many years before was responsible for the death of the Celt's parents when he crushed an uprising in Britain. The Celt befriends the badass gladiator Atticus (Adewale Akinuoye-Agbaje) just before everything goes, well, up in smoke.
Anderson is good at cramming events into shortened time-frames, giving his movies an inbuilt clock, another video-game trope. So that last act of Pompeii, filled with people fleeing, fighting, chasing, is tremendous fun. The first two are more workaday. Surprisingly old-fashioned in its approach, the story makes perfunctory attempts at Roman political chicanery before Anderson's genre mash-up spin the wheel settles on a mix of gladiator movie, disaster film and tragic love story. The love story is given short shrift - it's never been a strength of this director - but the other two genres do fine, helped by the impressive, often stunning action scenes.
Harington and Browning look pretty, but neither has much of a character to play. Sutherland hams it up well enough, but Akinuoye-Agbaje more or less steals the movie, with his malevolent leer and fearsome growl. The cgi is impressive once the apocalypse comes, bringing tsunamis, earthquakes and ash-clouds blotting out the sun in it's wake.
Wednesday, 23 April 2014
THE IMMIGRANT
(James Gray, 2013)
James Gray deserves the same status as the most beloved and acclaimed directors of his generation. In terms of talent, he is right up there alongside the Andersons, for instance, both Paul Thomas and Wes.
He will, however, never be fashionable, you feel. He is a classicist, and there is something serious and sober in his work which is slightly out of step with modern taste.
The Immigrant, perhaps more than any other film, is the fullest expression of that classicism. An old-fashioned melodrama in terms of its plotting, it is muted and quietened by Gray until its passions are deep beneath the surface, only visible in the occasional eruption of violence or raw feeling from its characters.
Gray instead finds much of that feeling in the beautifully haunted eyes of his leading lady. Cotillard has something of the silent movie siren about her, and he is able to locate the pain and longing in that face, which takes up much screentime here.
The story centres on Cotillard's Iwa, a Polish immigrant who arrives with her sister Magda at Ellis Island in 1921. Magda is immediately dragged away, suspected of suffering from tuberculosis, and Iwa is to be deported back to Europe when she is spotted by Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), who pays off a guard and takes her back to his house. He offers her work, but is gradually revealed to be a pimp, who first takes Iwa on as a dancer in his troupe at a club, then arranges for her to become a prostitute. All this time she is saving money to rescue her sister, and further, brighter hope arrives in the shape of Emil (Jeremy Renner), a magician who is kind and poetic and takes an instant shine to Iwa.
This is all patiently, calmly paced by Gray, the story moving forth only in increments. But what beautiful, magical increments they are. Shot by Darius Khondji on a relatively low budget, The Immigrant looks ravishing; it's evocation of the tenement world in '20s New York is shocking but utterly compelling. That tenement world is crucial to Gray's work here; this is a creation myth of the American Dream, and it plumbs very deep.
Gray's style is unfussy, classical, but his superb eye allows the odd dazzling composition (such as the ones that begin & end the film). However, his favoured shot here is of Marion Cotillard's face. So much rests on Cotillard here, and she is sublime. Though the film demands that she remains still and reserved for much of the running time, her eyes signal all of the repressed emotion she is suffering, all the pain and shame and loneliness. Renner is a charming match for her, but Phoenix's glowering pimp is a more interesting character. In love with this girl, he nonetheless makes her a prostitute, twists and manipulates her and does his best to ensure she stays by his side.
That sort of psychological complexity - and the arthouse trappings - is what makes such an old-fashioned film feel so thrillingly contemporary. Gray's talent and ability as a storyteller is what makes it so hypnotic.
A magnificent film.
James Gray deserves the same status as the most beloved and acclaimed directors of his generation. In terms of talent, he is right up there alongside the Andersons, for instance, both Paul Thomas and Wes.
He will, however, never be fashionable, you feel. He is a classicist, and there is something serious and sober in his work which is slightly out of step with modern taste.
The Immigrant, perhaps more than any other film, is the fullest expression of that classicism. An old-fashioned melodrama in terms of its plotting, it is muted and quietened by Gray until its passions are deep beneath the surface, only visible in the occasional eruption of violence or raw feeling from its characters.
Gray instead finds much of that feeling in the beautifully haunted eyes of his leading lady. Cotillard has something of the silent movie siren about her, and he is able to locate the pain and longing in that face, which takes up much screentime here.
The story centres on Cotillard's Iwa, a Polish immigrant who arrives with her sister Magda at Ellis Island in 1921. Magda is immediately dragged away, suspected of suffering from tuberculosis, and Iwa is to be deported back to Europe when she is spotted by Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), who pays off a guard and takes her back to his house. He offers her work, but is gradually revealed to be a pimp, who first takes Iwa on as a dancer in his troupe at a club, then arranges for her to become a prostitute. All this time she is saving money to rescue her sister, and further, brighter hope arrives in the shape of Emil (Jeremy Renner), a magician who is kind and poetic and takes an instant shine to Iwa.
This is all patiently, calmly paced by Gray, the story moving forth only in increments. But what beautiful, magical increments they are. Shot by Darius Khondji on a relatively low budget, The Immigrant looks ravishing; it's evocation of the tenement world in '20s New York is shocking but utterly compelling. That tenement world is crucial to Gray's work here; this is a creation myth of the American Dream, and it plumbs very deep.
Gray's style is unfussy, classical, but his superb eye allows the odd dazzling composition (such as the ones that begin & end the film). However, his favoured shot here is of Marion Cotillard's face. So much rests on Cotillard here, and she is sublime. Though the film demands that she remains still and reserved for much of the running time, her eyes signal all of the repressed emotion she is suffering, all the pain and shame and loneliness. Renner is a charming match for her, but Phoenix's glowering pimp is a more interesting character. In love with this girl, he nonetheless makes her a prostitute, twists and manipulates her and does his best to ensure she stays by his side.
That sort of psychological complexity - and the arthouse trappings - is what makes such an old-fashioned film feel so thrillingly contemporary. Gray's talent and ability as a storyteller is what makes it so hypnotic.
A magnificent film.
Thursday, 16 January 2014
12 YEARS A SLAVE
(Steve McQueen, 2013)
McQueen's first two features - the exceptional Hunger and Shame - both still had the scent of the gallery lingering around them. The director's past as an artist, responsible for installations, was evident in the precision and control and self-consciousness of the effects he brought to bear on his work in cinema. That was no bad thing when applied with his intelligence and sensitivity.
12 Years a Slave is different, however. Adapted by John Ridley from the memoir of Solomon Northrup, it is a raw, intimate story of suffering, torture and survival. And McQueen's approach is leavened somewhat, perhaps, by his own desire to transmit this story beyond the arthouse sector, which embraced his first work, and right into multiplexes.
So his style is toned down somewhat. Though still recognisably a Steve McQueen film, there are fewer extended takes, fewer ostentatiously frozen breathtaking compositions. The filmmaking is, generally speaking, more conventional.
But that is enough - this is a great story, brilliantly told.
Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free man living in Saratoga, New York in the 1840s. He works as a musician and lives happily with his wife and two children in a nice house. He is respected in the local community, hos race seemingly not an issue in the liberal North. And then he is tricked by two men who offer him work, and awakens after a night of heavy drinking in Washington DC to find himself chained and imprisoned. He has been sold into slavery, and after being savagely beaten and humiliated, he is transported downriver to New Orleans, where he is sold to a plantation owner for $1000. Over the years he encounters vicious overseers (Paul Dano), benevolent masters (Benedict Cumberbatch) before winding up in the possession of Epps (Michael Fassbinder). Epps is a terrifying cotton plantation owner, sexually obsessed with his slave Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o) and driven to "break" difficult slaves like Solomon, whose slave name is "Platt". His wife (Sarah Poulson) is just as dangerous in her quiet way, and Solomon endures years of fear and terror on the plantation.
This story plays out like a horror movie in certain passages, so grimly violent and frightening it is. There are scenes of shocking cruelty and utter degradation, and yet the hardest moments to watch are those which depict yet another layer of Solomon's identity and hope fall away at a fresh horror. The moral force of McQueen and Ridley's vision compensate for how brutal much of this material is, however. The subject matter earns the violence. The subject matter demands it.
It also demands some recognition of the complexity of the issue, even as it's moral position stands obvious and unquestionable. That is there in the character played by Alfre Woodard, regarded as the Mistress of a nearby plantation, though really a slave, and in the arguments solomon has with other slaves on various issues.
As Solomon, Ejiofor is lovely; soulful eyes always burning bright with a lust to survive, with his own belief in who he is cutting through. The rest of the cast are as good, with Fassbender particularly fearsome as Epps, Poulson a haunted presence as his wife, while Nyong'o is stunning as Patsey.
This being a Steve McQueen film, it looks beautiful (fine Sean Bobbitt cinematography) and Hans Zimmer's unusual score - much of it drowned in industrial noises - is also impressive. But it is McQueen who inserts much of what makes 12 Years a Slave special into the film, and he who should ultimately take all the plaudits.
McQueen's first two features - the exceptional Hunger and Shame - both still had the scent of the gallery lingering around them. The director's past as an artist, responsible for installations, was evident in the precision and control and self-consciousness of the effects he brought to bear on his work in cinema. That was no bad thing when applied with his intelligence and sensitivity.
12 Years a Slave is different, however. Adapted by John Ridley from the memoir of Solomon Northrup, it is a raw, intimate story of suffering, torture and survival. And McQueen's approach is leavened somewhat, perhaps, by his own desire to transmit this story beyond the arthouse sector, which embraced his first work, and right into multiplexes.
So his style is toned down somewhat. Though still recognisably a Steve McQueen film, there are fewer extended takes, fewer ostentatiously frozen breathtaking compositions. The filmmaking is, generally speaking, more conventional.
But that is enough - this is a great story, brilliantly told.
Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free man living in Saratoga, New York in the 1840s. He works as a musician and lives happily with his wife and two children in a nice house. He is respected in the local community, hos race seemingly not an issue in the liberal North. And then he is tricked by two men who offer him work, and awakens after a night of heavy drinking in Washington DC to find himself chained and imprisoned. He has been sold into slavery, and after being savagely beaten and humiliated, he is transported downriver to New Orleans, where he is sold to a plantation owner for $1000. Over the years he encounters vicious overseers (Paul Dano), benevolent masters (Benedict Cumberbatch) before winding up in the possession of Epps (Michael Fassbinder). Epps is a terrifying cotton plantation owner, sexually obsessed with his slave Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o) and driven to "break" difficult slaves like Solomon, whose slave name is "Platt". His wife (Sarah Poulson) is just as dangerous in her quiet way, and Solomon endures years of fear and terror on the plantation.
This story plays out like a horror movie in certain passages, so grimly violent and frightening it is. There are scenes of shocking cruelty and utter degradation, and yet the hardest moments to watch are those which depict yet another layer of Solomon's identity and hope fall away at a fresh horror. The moral force of McQueen and Ridley's vision compensate for how brutal much of this material is, however. The subject matter earns the violence. The subject matter demands it.
It also demands some recognition of the complexity of the issue, even as it's moral position stands obvious and unquestionable. That is there in the character played by Alfre Woodard, regarded as the Mistress of a nearby plantation, though really a slave, and in the arguments solomon has with other slaves on various issues.
As Solomon, Ejiofor is lovely; soulful eyes always burning bright with a lust to survive, with his own belief in who he is cutting through. The rest of the cast are as good, with Fassbender particularly fearsome as Epps, Poulson a haunted presence as his wife, while Nyong'o is stunning as Patsey.
This being a Steve McQueen film, it looks beautiful (fine Sean Bobbitt cinematography) and Hans Zimmer's unusual score - much of it drowned in industrial noises - is also impressive. But it is McQueen who inserts much of what makes 12 Years a Slave special into the film, and he who should ultimately take all the plaudits.
Tuesday, 24 December 2013
JANE EYRE
(Cary Fukunaga, 2011)
For all that Fukunaga was meant to infuse another hoary old literary classic with some modern style and crackle, his adaptation of Jane Eyre feels much like the majority of period melodramas made over the last decade or so. Yes he pulls off some nicely inventive shots, yes the cinematography is impressively rich and textured, but that makes surprisingly little difference to the narrative experience. Its still a load of familiar plot developments and characters - most of them so common in this particular genre they are beyond cliche - with actors working hard to make stiffly formal period appropriate dialogue sound natural.
This adaptation takes a few liberties with the novel; mainly through emphasis and emotional weighting, but is otherwise quite faithful.
What elevates it is the cast. Mia Wasikowska is terrific as Jane, and her chemistry with a similarly excellent Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester carries the film. These are both tricky roles - Jane is a saintly sufferer, Rochester unlikably grumpy but ultimately loveable, and the way the actors conjure their mutual passion in very few dialogue-heavy scenes is remarkable, and finally quite moving. The likes of Jamie Bell and Judi Dench offer good support.
For all that Fukunaga was meant to infuse another hoary old literary classic with some modern style and crackle, his adaptation of Jane Eyre feels much like the majority of period melodramas made over the last decade or so. Yes he pulls off some nicely inventive shots, yes the cinematography is impressively rich and textured, but that makes surprisingly little difference to the narrative experience. Its still a load of familiar plot developments and characters - most of them so common in this particular genre they are beyond cliche - with actors working hard to make stiffly formal period appropriate dialogue sound natural.
This adaptation takes a few liberties with the novel; mainly through emphasis and emotional weighting, but is otherwise quite faithful.
What elevates it is the cast. Mia Wasikowska is terrific as Jane, and her chemistry with a similarly excellent Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester carries the film. These are both tricky roles - Jane is a saintly sufferer, Rochester unlikably grumpy but ultimately loveable, and the way the actors conjure their mutual passion in very few dialogue-heavy scenes is remarkable, and finally quite moving. The likes of Jamie Bell and Judi Dench offer good support.
Friday, 5 July 2013
A FIELD IN ENGLAND
(Ben Wheatley, 2013)
Seemingly aiming for a very modern mash-up of Jodorowsky, the Wyrd Albion horror movies of the '70s (Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan's Claw, most obviously), Tarkovsky's Stalker, The Wicker Man, The Trip, Winstanley and Peter Watkins' Culloden, Wheatley's fourth feature is a technically masterful psychedelic odyssey.
Set, as so few films are, during the English Civil War, it focuses on a battle-weary group of men crossing the fields of the West Country who come under the influence of Michael Smiley's sinister, commanding necromancer O'Neill (in the first real hallucinatory moment, the men literally drag him into the film on the end of a thick rope). Starving, the men eat the many mushrooms growing around the field Smiley is searching for buried gold, and as he works to psychologically manipulate and destroy the meek scholar Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), the psychedelics really kick in and the men appear to drift inexorably into insanity.
Gloriously shot on a small budget in crisp monochrome by Laurie Rose, the film is almost entirely set in that field, and as such there is just a whiff of tv production about it. All the fog and smoke drifting across the screen cannot disguise the limited scope of action here, nor can it really distract from the absence of any real substance.
Wheatley, whose filmography grows more interesting with each film, shoots and cuts the whole thing with inventive, punkish energy, and the score, with its pagan, tribal drumming, is compelling. Some of the men's desperate, increasingly fevered exchanges are interesting, and the performances by the entire cast - particularly Smiley - are impressive. The central freak-out, when the black and white imagery intensifies and strobe effects cut the film up into a nightmarish assault on the senses, is a fantastic passage of pure cinema.
But it all amounts to very little. It plays like it was made by somebody who wanted to make a cool little cultish oddity, and knew exactly how to deliver that, but had absolutely nothing to say.
Which is fine, and the film is enjoyable on a purely sensory level. But I can't help but feel that it is also something of a missed opportunity.
Seemingly aiming for a very modern mash-up of Jodorowsky, the Wyrd Albion horror movies of the '70s (Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan's Claw, most obviously), Tarkovsky's Stalker, The Wicker Man, The Trip, Winstanley and Peter Watkins' Culloden, Wheatley's fourth feature is a technically masterful psychedelic odyssey.
Set, as so few films are, during the English Civil War, it focuses on a battle-weary group of men crossing the fields of the West Country who come under the influence of Michael Smiley's sinister, commanding necromancer O'Neill (in the first real hallucinatory moment, the men literally drag him into the film on the end of a thick rope). Starving, the men eat the many mushrooms growing around the field Smiley is searching for buried gold, and as he works to psychologically manipulate and destroy the meek scholar Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), the psychedelics really kick in and the men appear to drift inexorably into insanity.
Gloriously shot on a small budget in crisp monochrome by Laurie Rose, the film is almost entirely set in that field, and as such there is just a whiff of tv production about it. All the fog and smoke drifting across the screen cannot disguise the limited scope of action here, nor can it really distract from the absence of any real substance.
Wheatley, whose filmography grows more interesting with each film, shoots and cuts the whole thing with inventive, punkish energy, and the score, with its pagan, tribal drumming, is compelling. Some of the men's desperate, increasingly fevered exchanges are interesting, and the performances by the entire cast - particularly Smiley - are impressive. The central freak-out, when the black and white imagery intensifies and strobe effects cut the film up into a nightmarish assault on the senses, is a fantastic passage of pure cinema.
But it all amounts to very little. It plays like it was made by somebody who wanted to make a cool little cultish oddity, and knew exactly how to deliver that, but had absolutely nothing to say.
Which is fine, and the film is enjoyable on a purely sensory level. But I can't help but feel that it is also something of a missed opportunity.
Wednesday, 27 March 2013
CLOUD ATLAS
(The Wachowskis, Tom Twyker, 2012)
What Cloud Atlas does is take an "unfilmable" novel, and film it. David Mitchell's wildly ambitious epic novel is considered unfilmable not only because of its vast scale - with six storylines set in six distinct historical locations and dozens of important characters it presents a logistical nightmare - but because of its engagement with big themes of the type with which cinema traditionally struggles.
But the Wachowskis are nothing if not ambitious filmmakers, as anyone who has seen The Matrix trilogy or even their underrated flop Speed Racer will attest. Their collaborator here, German director Tom Twyker, has some history with adapting difficult novels, too, having brought Perfume to the screen in 2006.
Together they have managed to wrestle Mitchell's book into a big, wild mess of a film, replacing his russian doll structure with a more epileptic crosscutting but suggesting the interconnectedness that is one of Mitchell's implicit themes through the stunt of each cast member playing multiple roles across the various storylines. Thus Tom Hanks is the lead in the 2321 segments, playing Zachry, a goat farmer in a post-apocalyptic wilderness ("106 winters after the fall") whose encounter with Halle Berry's Meronym, a member of a society with some technology from before the fall changes both of their worlds, and he shows up in smaller parts in every other segment, as a poisoner-doctor in the 1849 segments, a hotel owner in 1936 Edinburgh, a Nuclear Scientist (who encounters and falls for another Berry character) in 1973's conspiracy thriller, an Irish gangster-author in 2012's dark comedy and an actor glimpsed in an old film in the dystopian sci-fi of 2144. In each story he is buried under make-up, bad teeth and a wig, and his accents jump across the globe, and the rest of the cast suffer exactly the same fate. Bae Doona and Jim Sturgess play a genetically-engineered clone and the underground rebel who releases her from a life of servitude in the 2144 section, and their affecting love story is mirrored by the same actors playing a couple in 1849, while Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant play varieties of evil across the ages, from Weaving's satanic "old Georgie" whispering in Zachry's ear, and Grant's Cannibal Warrior in 2321; to a Corporate CEO and his hired assassin in 1973. Sometimes the directors time their edits with the subtlety of a plane crash to underline the connections, and yet, at others the juxtapositions and similarities are unexpectedly moving.
All of this is a little undermined by the distancing, even distracting effect of all the make-up and the wigs - especially so when there are recognisably white actors playing Asian characters and vice versa - but it works more than it has any right to. Some sections are a lot better than others, and so the two sci-fi stories, directed by the Wachowskis, are the most compelling and beautiful on show here, while Twyker's 2012 black comedy starring Jim Broadbent and 1973 thriller are by far the weakest portions.
The themes the film attempts to engage with are so big and earnest that they need to be handled precisely, but instead there is a vagueness throughout that makes much of it feel a little too fuzzy and new age to have any meaningful resonance. Freedom is important, get it? Love too, thats a good thing.
The last act is filled with climaxes, and since the filmmakers turn more or less all of them into action scenes it plays like a long series of cliches and over-familiar set-ups, no matter that some of them feature excellence on a technical level. A barroom brawl follows a car-chase through a future city follows a skirmish with cannibals in the trees follows a gunfight and pursuit, etc etc.
But there are flashes of dazzling cinema here; with the Wachowskis in particular retaining some of their eye for what really works in genre storytelling and ability to world-build on a grand scale; and the cast are generally extremely impressive throughout. Bae Doona and Ben Whishaw particularly impress, and the photography by John Toll and Frank Griebe is suitably lush and stunning.
For such a long, ambitious film, Cloud Atlas is never remotely boring. If it is never quite good, either, that is down to a variety of factors, the most important of which brings me back to the first thing I said. some books are considered "unfilmable" for a reason.
What Cloud Atlas does is take an "unfilmable" novel, and film it. David Mitchell's wildly ambitious epic novel is considered unfilmable not only because of its vast scale - with six storylines set in six distinct historical locations and dozens of important characters it presents a logistical nightmare - but because of its engagement with big themes of the type with which cinema traditionally struggles.
But the Wachowskis are nothing if not ambitious filmmakers, as anyone who has seen The Matrix trilogy or even their underrated flop Speed Racer will attest. Their collaborator here, German director Tom Twyker, has some history with adapting difficult novels, too, having brought Perfume to the screen in 2006.
Together they have managed to wrestle Mitchell's book into a big, wild mess of a film, replacing his russian doll structure with a more epileptic crosscutting but suggesting the interconnectedness that is one of Mitchell's implicit themes through the stunt of each cast member playing multiple roles across the various storylines. Thus Tom Hanks is the lead in the 2321 segments, playing Zachry, a goat farmer in a post-apocalyptic wilderness ("106 winters after the fall") whose encounter with Halle Berry's Meronym, a member of a society with some technology from before the fall changes both of their worlds, and he shows up in smaller parts in every other segment, as a poisoner-doctor in the 1849 segments, a hotel owner in 1936 Edinburgh, a Nuclear Scientist (who encounters and falls for another Berry character) in 1973's conspiracy thriller, an Irish gangster-author in 2012's dark comedy and an actor glimpsed in an old film in the dystopian sci-fi of 2144. In each story he is buried under make-up, bad teeth and a wig, and his accents jump across the globe, and the rest of the cast suffer exactly the same fate. Bae Doona and Jim Sturgess play a genetically-engineered clone and the underground rebel who releases her from a life of servitude in the 2144 section, and their affecting love story is mirrored by the same actors playing a couple in 1849, while Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant play varieties of evil across the ages, from Weaving's satanic "old Georgie" whispering in Zachry's ear, and Grant's Cannibal Warrior in 2321; to a Corporate CEO and his hired assassin in 1973. Sometimes the directors time their edits with the subtlety of a plane crash to underline the connections, and yet, at others the juxtapositions and similarities are unexpectedly moving.
All of this is a little undermined by the distancing, even distracting effect of all the make-up and the wigs - especially so when there are recognisably white actors playing Asian characters and vice versa - but it works more than it has any right to. Some sections are a lot better than others, and so the two sci-fi stories, directed by the Wachowskis, are the most compelling and beautiful on show here, while Twyker's 2012 black comedy starring Jim Broadbent and 1973 thriller are by far the weakest portions.
The themes the film attempts to engage with are so big and earnest that they need to be handled precisely, but instead there is a vagueness throughout that makes much of it feel a little too fuzzy and new age to have any meaningful resonance. Freedom is important, get it? Love too, thats a good thing.
The last act is filled with climaxes, and since the filmmakers turn more or less all of them into action scenes it plays like a long series of cliches and over-familiar set-ups, no matter that some of them feature excellence on a technical level. A barroom brawl follows a car-chase through a future city follows a skirmish with cannibals in the trees follows a gunfight and pursuit, etc etc.
But there are flashes of dazzling cinema here; with the Wachowskis in particular retaining some of their eye for what really works in genre storytelling and ability to world-build on a grand scale; and the cast are generally extremely impressive throughout. Bae Doona and Ben Whishaw particularly impress, and the photography by John Toll and Frank Griebe is suitably lush and stunning.
For such a long, ambitious film, Cloud Atlas is never remotely boring. If it is never quite good, either, that is down to a variety of factors, the most important of which brings me back to the first thing I said. some books are considered "unfilmable" for a reason.
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