(Pierre Morel, 2015)
So hilariously generic in its particulars that it plays almost like a parody, The Gunman is a pretty waste of an awful lot of acting talent.
Sean Penn plays the action lead here, but he is not really fully committing to a Liam Neeson career revival which this was obviously envisioned as. Instead, he co-wrote the screenplay and presumably ensured that this otherwise stock Euro-spy action thriller has some worthy stuff about mining in the Congo and multinational culpability. He's in good shape for a middle-aged man and does well with the action stuff, but director Morel seems more concerned with making everything look painterly than mounting effective action sequences.
Then there's the fact that the characters are all flat and underwritten. And no matter how charismatic Idris Elba, Javier Bardem and Ray Winstone are, they can't make puppets any more realistic. Only Mark Rylance really animates his role. The love triangle is awful - pointless and desultory.
The locations look great, Morel has a fine eye and a nose for ambience, and there are a few divertingly well-done action beats, but overall, and considering it is based on Manchette's The Prone Gunman, this feels like a major missed opportunity.
Showing posts with label Javier Bardem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Javier Bardem. Show all posts
Sunday, 13 March 2016
Tuesday, 19 November 2013
THE COUNSELOR
(Ridley Scott, 2013)
Just like No Country For Old Men, the last dark Tex-Mex thriller written by Cormac McCarthy, The Counsellor is plotted like a boilerplate action thriller from the late 80s. Double-crosses, shady middle-men, emotionless contract killers stalk this neo-Western landscape, mingling with the "normal" people foregrounded by the story.
In this case Michael Fassbender plays the titular (nameless) hero, investing in a massive drug shipment from Colombia via the Mexican cartels alongside his associate Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Westray (Brad Pitt). But Reiner's mysterious girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz) is making her own moves, which result in the wrath of the cartels descending on everybody. Suddenly the Counselor, always so self-assured, is desperately trying to survive and protect the woman he loves, the innocent Laura (Penelope Cruz). But the cartels are an inescapable evil, and nobody gets out of this story clean.
McCarthy's theme is the existence of evil, our relationship with and perception of it, the way it can seem unreal until it lands in our lives in a splatter of blood, implacable and unyielding, and nothing we care about means anything any longer, and Scott does that theme justice, and then some.
As such, this is a pitch black nightmare of a film, dressed up in designer threads, full of beautiful cars and magnificent houses and its starry cast, but keening a mournful, insidious death-song under its breath. As the cartels - drawn out by a coincidence after the Counselor performs a simple favour for the son of a client, a rather unsubtle statement on the nature of chance in the cosmos - close in, McCarthy's thesis becomes obvious. Evil is real, inescapable, utterly corrupting. There is no escape, no bargaining, no heroic rescue or confrontation.
The journey taken by Fassbender's character is dreadful, his fate devastating, and the actor - always so committed - makes us feel every step of his descent until he is choked by his own despair. Early on he is rather the straight man, moving from one long, metaphor-laden conversation with a colourful supporting character (the likes of Bruno Ganz and Toby Kebell each take a scene) to another as McCarthy nudges at his themes and suggests ideas. Later on, it becomes clear that this is the film, its story mainly told in long dialogue scenes wherein people philosophise and Fassbender tries to keep up.
All the while Ridley Scott keeps it looking slick and occasionally stunning, capturing the outskirts of Santa Fe with a dusty grittiness and finding his characters swimming in their excess and glamour. The actors make McCarthy's often baroque, overwritten dialogue work. Pitt and Bardem do especially well with their monologues, and only Diaz slips at all, her Malkina a touch one-noted and cartoonish.
But then as written she is a very pulp character, the uber-capable femme fatale, the whore to Cruz's Laura, very much the flawless Madonna; and I think it would take an extremely strong actress at the peak of her powers to bring such a creation convincingly to life.
For all its thematic baggage, this is still a thriller, and Scott throws in a couple of thrilling action scenes to buoy up the talkier passages. But it is the talky passages, direct from McCarthy's script, that really stick. Two days later this film is still with me. That would be recommendation enough, but this is a superb film; provocative, fascinating and powerful, beautifully made and with its own ideas.
Just like No Country For Old Men, the last dark Tex-Mex thriller written by Cormac McCarthy, The Counsellor is plotted like a boilerplate action thriller from the late 80s. Double-crosses, shady middle-men, emotionless contract killers stalk this neo-Western landscape, mingling with the "normal" people foregrounded by the story.
In this case Michael Fassbender plays the titular (nameless) hero, investing in a massive drug shipment from Colombia via the Mexican cartels alongside his associate Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Westray (Brad Pitt). But Reiner's mysterious girlfriend Malkina (Cameron Diaz) is making her own moves, which result in the wrath of the cartels descending on everybody. Suddenly the Counselor, always so self-assured, is desperately trying to survive and protect the woman he loves, the innocent Laura (Penelope Cruz). But the cartels are an inescapable evil, and nobody gets out of this story clean.
McCarthy's theme is the existence of evil, our relationship with and perception of it, the way it can seem unreal until it lands in our lives in a splatter of blood, implacable and unyielding, and nothing we care about means anything any longer, and Scott does that theme justice, and then some.
As such, this is a pitch black nightmare of a film, dressed up in designer threads, full of beautiful cars and magnificent houses and its starry cast, but keening a mournful, insidious death-song under its breath. As the cartels - drawn out by a coincidence after the Counselor performs a simple favour for the son of a client, a rather unsubtle statement on the nature of chance in the cosmos - close in, McCarthy's thesis becomes obvious. Evil is real, inescapable, utterly corrupting. There is no escape, no bargaining, no heroic rescue or confrontation.
The journey taken by Fassbender's character is dreadful, his fate devastating, and the actor - always so committed - makes us feel every step of his descent until he is choked by his own despair. Early on he is rather the straight man, moving from one long, metaphor-laden conversation with a colourful supporting character (the likes of Bruno Ganz and Toby Kebell each take a scene) to another as McCarthy nudges at his themes and suggests ideas. Later on, it becomes clear that this is the film, its story mainly told in long dialogue scenes wherein people philosophise and Fassbender tries to keep up.
All the while Ridley Scott keeps it looking slick and occasionally stunning, capturing the outskirts of Santa Fe with a dusty grittiness and finding his characters swimming in their excess and glamour. The actors make McCarthy's often baroque, overwritten dialogue work. Pitt and Bardem do especially well with their monologues, and only Diaz slips at all, her Malkina a touch one-noted and cartoonish.
But then as written she is a very pulp character, the uber-capable femme fatale, the whore to Cruz's Laura, very much the flawless Madonna; and I think it would take an extremely strong actress at the peak of her powers to bring such a creation convincingly to life.
For all its thematic baggage, this is still a thriller, and Scott throws in a couple of thrilling action scenes to buoy up the talkier passages. But it is the talky passages, direct from McCarthy's script, that really stick. Two days later this film is still with me. That would be recommendation enough, but this is a superb film; provocative, fascinating and powerful, beautifully made and with its own ideas.
Saturday, 23 February 2013
TO THE WONDER
(Terrence Malick, 2012)
Since his return to cinema with the sublime The Thin Red Line in 1998, Terrence Malick has refined and honed his style into something utterly singular, ambitious and earnest. Nobody else makes films quite the way Malick does; and in Tree of Life and To The Wonder he has arrived at a newly personal place in his work, semi-autobiographical but still pursuing the themes which have been present since Badlands and Days of Heaven in the 1970s. In doing so, he has slowly lessened his reliance on narrative. His mature films are intent on other qualities, the stories elliptical vehicles for Malick's ruminations on nature, faith, love and death.
To The Wonder is basically a love story: it begins in Paris, depicting the blossoming relationship between an American named Neil (Ben Affleck) and a vivacious Frenchwoman, Marina (Olga Kurelyenko). That relationship is tracked by Emmanuel Luzbecki's ceaselessly mobile camera through the boulevards and parks of the city, and onto the "wonder" of the title, Mont St Michel, which the couple visit and admire in silent awe. When Neil returns to the USA, Marina and her young daughter Tatiana accompany him, but they are out of place in the wide spaces and new suburbs of the Great Plains, and when they return to France, Neil rekindles a relationship with Jane (Rachel McAdams), an old flame. But Marina misses him, and they marry to ensure she can stay in the States with him, a move which does not solve the problems between them. Meanwhile, their Parish Priest (Javier Bardem) is experiencing his own crisis of faith.
That makes it sound more interested in plot than it is; instead Malick is interested in movement, light, and his usual questions about the mystery of existence. Here he equates the love between a man and a woman with the love between human beings and God; both being relationships filled with yearning and doubt. In voiceovers Kurelyenko wonders at her own capacity for love and the mystery of her lover's thoughts, echoed by Bardem's curiosity about God's love for his creations. The often extraordinary visuals follow all these characters in something like a ballet; Malick soundtracks everything to a wide range of classical music, and we watch people as they twirl and circle one another, coming together for embraces and caresses, then separating. The states of the central relationships in this film are always evident through the body language and mise en scene, and never through the dialogue - there is barely any - or the voiceovers, which are always thematically relevant but rarely give us any story information.
Affleck speaks only a few words in the entire film, and spends much of his time skulking slowly in the corners of the frame, basking in the light cast by Kurelyenko and McAdams. That doesn't really suit him as an actor - his best work has come in roles where he is fast-talking or boorish (Dazed & Confused, Boiler Room, Good Will Hunting), but his awkward hesitancy fits with the character in a way. He is meant to be a little uncomfortable with the natural spark and uncomplicated spontaneity of the women in his life, and his bent, embarrassed shuffling around them communicates this nicely.
It is startling throughout how adept Malick is at visual shorthand and just how much he is able to suggest with his fluent editing.
Many of the criticisms of this film - and there have been many - have called it self-parodic, but that is the danger of a style so distinctive and an authorial voice so focused as Malick's. He dares to make serious films about profound subjects; he asks what is love, what and where is God, what does it mean that we need such a deity, how can the world be so terrible and yet so beautiful at the same time...and he asks these questions in a hushed, awed whisper, unashamed of its own need. He never answers his queries, either (but then how could he?), understanding instead that sometimes it is enough to pose the right questions.
His visuals have become instantly recognisable, and the way he has managed to divorce them from any narrative content seems to be what makes his work so difficult for many to take. To The Wonder is full of his trademark magic hour sequences, of beautiful, seemingly random shots of nature, of endless shots of Kurelyenko, in particular, dancing and cavorting through fields and on beaches.
Here she is revealed as one of the great beauties of modern cinema, and her intuitive performance carries a good deal of the film. She has some background in ballet, which suits Malick's apparent aims here - in seeking to break from traditional narrative forms he has made his recent films feel more like the musical pieces he has used within them, and she is his lead dancer here, her movements and body-shapes expressing ideas more simply and beautifully than any clumsy dialogue could. The other star here is the sun, glimpsed dipping below the horizon or through a haze of cloud, throwing shadows in long grass or bathing lovers in morning light. For Malick it - and nature, by extension, here seen not only through landscape but in buffalo, horses, bugs on a window - suggests the very presence of God in the physical world.
Let us not forget; this is the first Malick film set wholly in the modern world, and without the supporting excuse of a historical setting, some of his reliance on gesture, on whispered invocations and such self-conscious poetry might seem jarringly unmoored to some viewers, but to me they seemed absolutely magnificent. He addresses modernity fleetingly - Affleck seems to work as some sort of environmental scientist, and we see him take readings and measure levels of lead in water, the suggestion being that the Earth itself has been poisoned by man and his doubt, greed and lust. Shots of his leading man trudging across quarries and up to his knees in mud offer a dissonant echo of earlier shots of the lovers on the sand at Mont St Michel and in the streets of Paris.
There is always that sense with Malick; however much detractors can claim that his work seems almost randomly generated, his guiding intelligence is obvious behind every image. His is a cinema of ideas and of sensuality, of meaningful beauty. Which is a nice way of describing To the Wonder, I think.
Since his return to cinema with the sublime The Thin Red Line in 1998, Terrence Malick has refined and honed his style into something utterly singular, ambitious and earnest. Nobody else makes films quite the way Malick does; and in Tree of Life and To The Wonder he has arrived at a newly personal place in his work, semi-autobiographical but still pursuing the themes which have been present since Badlands and Days of Heaven in the 1970s. In doing so, he has slowly lessened his reliance on narrative. His mature films are intent on other qualities, the stories elliptical vehicles for Malick's ruminations on nature, faith, love and death.
To The Wonder is basically a love story: it begins in Paris, depicting the blossoming relationship between an American named Neil (Ben Affleck) and a vivacious Frenchwoman, Marina (Olga Kurelyenko). That relationship is tracked by Emmanuel Luzbecki's ceaselessly mobile camera through the boulevards and parks of the city, and onto the "wonder" of the title, Mont St Michel, which the couple visit and admire in silent awe. When Neil returns to the USA, Marina and her young daughter Tatiana accompany him, but they are out of place in the wide spaces and new suburbs of the Great Plains, and when they return to France, Neil rekindles a relationship with Jane (Rachel McAdams), an old flame. But Marina misses him, and they marry to ensure she can stay in the States with him, a move which does not solve the problems between them. Meanwhile, their Parish Priest (Javier Bardem) is experiencing his own crisis of faith.
That makes it sound more interested in plot than it is; instead Malick is interested in movement, light, and his usual questions about the mystery of existence. Here he equates the love between a man and a woman with the love between human beings and God; both being relationships filled with yearning and doubt. In voiceovers Kurelyenko wonders at her own capacity for love and the mystery of her lover's thoughts, echoed by Bardem's curiosity about God's love for his creations. The often extraordinary visuals follow all these characters in something like a ballet; Malick soundtracks everything to a wide range of classical music, and we watch people as they twirl and circle one another, coming together for embraces and caresses, then separating. The states of the central relationships in this film are always evident through the body language and mise en scene, and never through the dialogue - there is barely any - or the voiceovers, which are always thematically relevant but rarely give us any story information.
Affleck speaks only a few words in the entire film, and spends much of his time skulking slowly in the corners of the frame, basking in the light cast by Kurelyenko and McAdams. That doesn't really suit him as an actor - his best work has come in roles where he is fast-talking or boorish (Dazed & Confused, Boiler Room, Good Will Hunting), but his awkward hesitancy fits with the character in a way. He is meant to be a little uncomfortable with the natural spark and uncomplicated spontaneity of the women in his life, and his bent, embarrassed shuffling around them communicates this nicely.
It is startling throughout how adept Malick is at visual shorthand and just how much he is able to suggest with his fluent editing.
Many of the criticisms of this film - and there have been many - have called it self-parodic, but that is the danger of a style so distinctive and an authorial voice so focused as Malick's. He dares to make serious films about profound subjects; he asks what is love, what and where is God, what does it mean that we need such a deity, how can the world be so terrible and yet so beautiful at the same time...and he asks these questions in a hushed, awed whisper, unashamed of its own need. He never answers his queries, either (but then how could he?), understanding instead that sometimes it is enough to pose the right questions.
His visuals have become instantly recognisable, and the way he has managed to divorce them from any narrative content seems to be what makes his work so difficult for many to take. To The Wonder is full of his trademark magic hour sequences, of beautiful, seemingly random shots of nature, of endless shots of Kurelyenko, in particular, dancing and cavorting through fields and on beaches.
Here she is revealed as one of the great beauties of modern cinema, and her intuitive performance carries a good deal of the film. She has some background in ballet, which suits Malick's apparent aims here - in seeking to break from traditional narrative forms he has made his recent films feel more like the musical pieces he has used within them, and she is his lead dancer here, her movements and body-shapes expressing ideas more simply and beautifully than any clumsy dialogue could. The other star here is the sun, glimpsed dipping below the horizon or through a haze of cloud, throwing shadows in long grass or bathing lovers in morning light. For Malick it - and nature, by extension, here seen not only through landscape but in buffalo, horses, bugs on a window - suggests the very presence of God in the physical world.
Let us not forget; this is the first Malick film set wholly in the modern world, and without the supporting excuse of a historical setting, some of his reliance on gesture, on whispered invocations and such self-conscious poetry might seem jarringly unmoored to some viewers, but to me they seemed absolutely magnificent. He addresses modernity fleetingly - Affleck seems to work as some sort of environmental scientist, and we see him take readings and measure levels of lead in water, the suggestion being that the Earth itself has been poisoned by man and his doubt, greed and lust. Shots of his leading man trudging across quarries and up to his knees in mud offer a dissonant echo of earlier shots of the lovers on the sand at Mont St Michel and in the streets of Paris.
There is always that sense with Malick; however much detractors can claim that his work seems almost randomly generated, his guiding intelligence is obvious behind every image. His is a cinema of ideas and of sensuality, of meaningful beauty. Which is a nice way of describing To the Wonder, I think.
Friday, 26 October 2012
SKYFALL
(Sam Mendes, 2012)
Skyfall is the classiest film in the history of the long and occasionally glorious Bond franchise. Avoiding the usual genre journeymen who have directed more or less every other official instalment in the adventures of 007, the producers have this time opted to hire Sam Mendes as director. And while Mendes is far from an auteur - he is, in a way, a sort of tasteful hack, with extremely good taste in collaborators - his presence does guarantee a certain pedigree. His films all play like high-quality, big-budget middlebrow entertainments, which is quite a rarity in dumbed-down, lowest common denominator modern studio film-making. He has in turn hired Roger Deakins as his cinematographer, ensuring that this Bond film is visually sumptuous, filled with breathtaking compositions, colours and camera glides, and textured in a way that makes it feel unlike any of the films that preceded it. There are still an awful lot of helicopter establishing shots of cityscapes - some of the visual conventions of the series are unshakeable, it seems - but Deakins finds some incredibly rich and evocative imagery in the exotic locations spread through the film. Mendes' name also attracts the sort of cast rarely seen in the Bond world, and so Skyfall features Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris in some new takes on iconic characters. Whishaw in particular is excellent as the boyish new Q, darkly witty and smug about his own intelligence to just the right extent, while Harris and Daniel Craig concoct a genuine chemistry in their scenes together.
Craig, who looks like a battered old kettle with big ears, owns the role of Bond by this stage, and his confidence in the part carries much of the film. The plot disables Bond in the pre-credit sequence ( a fantastic pursuit through Istanbul which might just be the films single standout action scene) and, much as predecessors Connery and Brosnan both endured in different films, questions his potency and efficiency for the majority of the first act.
Craig is at his best here - not coincidentally, the portion of the film where he is asked to do the most acting - with a convincingly hollow, haunted quality to his work. The script reassures him and us repeatedly that age is not necessarily a bad thing - nostalgia is a big part of the DNA of the modern Bond film, and this film positively wallows in it, with characters stressing that they like to do things the "old-fashioned way" and that "the old ways are the best ways", while the climax strips away all gadgetry and computer hacking to make it a battle between hunter and hunted in a very 19th Century, near-elemental landscape.
But the film itself really goes up a gear with the introduction of its villain, arguably the best in the franchises history. Victor Silva is an ex-agent with a grudge against M (Judi Dench) and a genius for hacking, and Javier Bardem makes him charismatic, hilarious and terrifying. Mendes aids that with a brilliant introduction, Silva exiting an elevator at the far end of a huge hall and walking towards a bound Bond while he tells a story about an infestation of rats, all in one shot. Their exchange thereafter is electrifying; sexually ambivalent and ironic, with Silva zeroing in on Bond's perceived frailties and identifying them as both mistreated by "Mommy".
The plot is simple - someone has stolen a hard drive containing the identities of all of MI6's undercover agents, and is threatening to reveal them week by week. At the same time they attack the heart of the Agency, blowing up the London Headquarters and hacking the computer networks. Bond, thought dead after that opening Istanbul operation, returns and is sent to find the source of the attack. The plot then takes him through Shanghai and Macau - and Silva's eerie headquarters on a deserted Island-City - before returning to Britain for its last act in London and the Scottish Highlands, where something of Band's past is revealed.
The writing is a strange mix of clunky lines and witty dialogue, but the acting and technical credits make it a consistent pleasure to watch. It is the Bond film as a high-class heritage drama, ticking off boxes with class, beauty and humour throughout. But that status as a drama - not surprising from a director like Mendes - does suggest its possible flaw: it is relatively light on action.
What there is is beautifully handled - a fist-fight in silhouette against the Shanghai skyline is particularly memorable, and the usual jaw-dropping stunt work abounds - but after the credits, the first hour or so concentrates on the dramatic aspects, at the possible expense of the genre side. The climax corrects this, and the emotional kick delivered in the last act justifies Mendes' careful attention to characterisation and dramatic conflict in the early stages.
There is plenty here aimed straight at Bond fans, references to various scenes, moments and characters from across the series' history - one or two truly groan-inducing - but generally they are nicely worked into the material, and they only serve to make the overall product more satisfying. Skyfall operates then as a tremendously well-crafted, crowd-pleasing Bond film, indeed, one of the best in the series' history, which ends by pointing a new way forward for these films.
Thursday, 3 February 2011
BIUTIFUL
(Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, 2010)
Javier Bardem is extraordinary, as usual. As Uxbal, a terminally ill single father mixed up in the frequently criminal exploitation of illegal immigrants in Barcelona, he has a lot to convey. His ex-wife is a bipolar party girl with substance issues who is sleeping with his wheeler-dealer brother and cannot be trusted with their two children. He is a necromancer, able to speak to the dead in the brief instant after they have passed, and is abused by people who think this is a con and troubled by the visions this power induces. He has problems with the African immigrants he supplies with pirate DVDs and fake designer bags, but also with the Chinese suppliers of this merchandise and the policeman he pays to turn a blind eye. And, of course, he is dying of cancer.
This is the films problem: everything is too much. Inarittu piles on the story strands, each of them heavy and serious, relevant and soulful, and as the film strains harder and harder for profundity it becomes suffocatingly intense. Inarittu's style doesn't help; that immersively jittery camera and a visceral, almost painful sound mix gives the viewer little space in the film as the characters pain and the grimness of the milieu press on you. He cannot resist adding more detail, either, filling in the characters of a Senegalese couple involved with Uxbal and giving a few scenes to the gay affair between the married Chinese boss and his Lieutenant.
Worse is that, as in previous films Babel and 21 Grams his conclusions are so trite and disappointing. From a film that takes itself so immensely seriously, I would expect more insight and ambiguity. At least Inarittu's gifts as a visual director are still sharp. Biutiful is filled with unexpected moments of startling beauty and striking images : mainly of Barcelona's urban sprawl in Winter, and for all it's other flaws, is always engrossing. This is chiefly down to Bardem, reasserting himself as both a great, magnetic movie star and an incredible actor. He is moving, believable, always human. All that in a mullet and tracksuit.
Javier Bardem is extraordinary, as usual. As Uxbal, a terminally ill single father mixed up in the frequently criminal exploitation of illegal immigrants in Barcelona, he has a lot to convey. His ex-wife is a bipolar party girl with substance issues who is sleeping with his wheeler-dealer brother and cannot be trusted with their two children. He is a necromancer, able to speak to the dead in the brief instant after they have passed, and is abused by people who think this is a con and troubled by the visions this power induces. He has problems with the African immigrants he supplies with pirate DVDs and fake designer bags, but also with the Chinese suppliers of this merchandise and the policeman he pays to turn a blind eye. And, of course, he is dying of cancer.
This is the films problem: everything is too much. Inarittu piles on the story strands, each of them heavy and serious, relevant and soulful, and as the film strains harder and harder for profundity it becomes suffocatingly intense. Inarittu's style doesn't help; that immersively jittery camera and a visceral, almost painful sound mix gives the viewer little space in the film as the characters pain and the grimness of the milieu press on you. He cannot resist adding more detail, either, filling in the characters of a Senegalese couple involved with Uxbal and giving a few scenes to the gay affair between the married Chinese boss and his Lieutenant.
Worse is that, as in previous films Babel and 21 Grams his conclusions are so trite and disappointing. From a film that takes itself so immensely seriously, I would expect more insight and ambiguity. At least Inarittu's gifts as a visual director are still sharp. Biutiful is filled with unexpected moments of startling beauty and striking images : mainly of Barcelona's urban sprawl in Winter, and for all it's other flaws, is always engrossing. This is chiefly down to Bardem, reasserting himself as both a great, magnetic movie star and an incredible actor. He is moving, believable, always human. All that in a mullet and tracksuit.
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