(Phil Joanou, 1990)
State of Grace came out in 1990, something of a banner year for mob stories in Cinema. Goodfellas, The Godfather Part III, Abel Ferrara's King of New York and another Irish-Mob movie, Millers Crossing were all released in 1990, and in the midst of those heavyweights, State of Grace got a little lost. But its a great little movie, surprisingly intense, dark and serious, and featuring three terrific performances from its leading men. it tells the story of Terry Noonan (Sean Penn) and his return to Hells Kitchen, the Irish neighbourhood of New York where he grew up running with teen hoods Jackie and Frankie Flannery (Gary Oldman and Ed Harris). Only now Noonan is an undercover cop, charged with bringing down the burgeoning empire built by Frankie, and Jackie is the neighbourhood psycho. Noonan soon rekindles his relationship with their sister, Kathleen (Robin Wright-Penn) and his loyalties are inevitably torn between duty and friendship. While that sounds like your stock undercover cop movie, its the gravity and intensity of the storytelling that makes State of Grace so memorable. Joanou has never put his visual sense to better use than he does here, with his camera conjuring up a vivid sense of Hells Kitchen in all its seedy glory, the gentrifying elements just beginning to crawl in alongside the taverns and the old tenements. The screenplay, by playwright Denis McIntyre, is resolutely serious and dour - it recalls the work of writer-director James Gray in its unremitting focus on the moral dilemma facing Noonan - and the story drifts inexorably towards a tragedy suggested from the first moments by Ennio Morricone's mournful, beautiful score. While Penn does his young-DeNiro thing and Ed Harris is as magnetic as ever, Oldman delivers what is possibly his best ever performance. If, in recent years, he has played one caricature too many, one shallow villain too many, revealed that manic grin one time too many, here he played a character who demanded such a performance. Jackie Flannery is a force of nature, prone to eruptions of ultra-violence, but loyal and sentimental and charming at the same time. Oldman makes him terrifying and hilarious and real, and he owes every psycho part he has gotten since to this performance. Joanou really gets to flex his directorial muscles in the films climax, an amazing slow motion gunfight in a bar while the St Patricks Day Parade passes by outside. Its a really self-conscious set-piece, the director calling attention to himself in the most obvious fashion possible, but it works brilliantly, somehow retaining the mood and style of the film while simultaneously exploding it.
Showing posts with label Robin Wright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robin Wright. Show all posts
Saturday, 22 August 2015
Wednesday, 17 September 2014
A MOST WANTED MAN
(Anton Corbijn, 2014)
A modern spy story - meaning it details the obsessive efforts of a small team of intelligence operatives to halt the activities of Islamist extremists - A Most Wanted Man deals in the classic iconography and conventions of a Cold War thriller. It is set in an Autumnal Northern European city - Hamburg, in this case. Its characters are rumpled and cynical, broken by their profession. People smoke a lot, drink even more, conduct meetings beneath motorway overpasses and in waste ground. Betrayal is a constant possibility.
Lead Gunther (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) trails a traumatic, career-destroying disaster in the Middle East, where an American error blew his Intelligence networks and agents who trusted him died. Banished to Hamburg, his small team spots the arrival of a Chechen with links to terrorism. Gunther spots a way to use him to trap some much bigger game; a famed Muslim activist named Dr Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), who uses his charitable works to conceal links with Al Qaeda.
The plot follows Gunther's attempts to keep his superiors and rivals within German Intelligence at bay while also fending off the CIA (personified here by Robin Wright's cold, sharp agent). At the same time he is using a Liberal immigration lawyer (Rachel McAdams) to manoeuvre the Chechen into helping capture Abdullah.
Corbijn directs it all with a great feel for architecture and place - the 60s block where Gunther's team are based is a beautifully brutalist location - which helps lend it a nice chilly feel. The people are guarded and paranoid, driven by duty and mostly untroubled by conscience until everything goes wrong, which it does in every spy story ever. This is a Le Carre adaptation and Gunther is a classic Le Carre hero - more of an idealist than he initially seems, excellent at his job, not the smoothest of politicians. Hoffman is typically superb; his wheeze convenys more emotion than most actors can manage in long monologues.
Although this is the type of film where everybody speaks English in a German accent, it is never less than utterly convincing, and it builds up slowly into a quietly riveting thriller for grown-ups, no set-pieces, just engrossing dialogue scenes.
A modern spy story - meaning it details the obsessive efforts of a small team of intelligence operatives to halt the activities of Islamist extremists - A Most Wanted Man deals in the classic iconography and conventions of a Cold War thriller. It is set in an Autumnal Northern European city - Hamburg, in this case. Its characters are rumpled and cynical, broken by their profession. People smoke a lot, drink even more, conduct meetings beneath motorway overpasses and in waste ground. Betrayal is a constant possibility.
Lead Gunther (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) trails a traumatic, career-destroying disaster in the Middle East, where an American error blew his Intelligence networks and agents who trusted him died. Banished to Hamburg, his small team spots the arrival of a Chechen with links to terrorism. Gunther spots a way to use him to trap some much bigger game; a famed Muslim activist named Dr Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), who uses his charitable works to conceal links with Al Qaeda.
The plot follows Gunther's attempts to keep his superiors and rivals within German Intelligence at bay while also fending off the CIA (personified here by Robin Wright's cold, sharp agent). At the same time he is using a Liberal immigration lawyer (Rachel McAdams) to manoeuvre the Chechen into helping capture Abdullah.
Corbijn directs it all with a great feel for architecture and place - the 60s block where Gunther's team are based is a beautifully brutalist location - which helps lend it a nice chilly feel. The people are guarded and paranoid, driven by duty and mostly untroubled by conscience until everything goes wrong, which it does in every spy story ever. This is a Le Carre adaptation and Gunther is a classic Le Carre hero - more of an idealist than he initially seems, excellent at his job, not the smoothest of politicians. Hoffman is typically superb; his wheeze convenys more emotion than most actors can manage in long monologues.
Although this is the type of film where everybody speaks English in a German accent, it is never less than utterly convincing, and it builds up slowly into a quietly riveting thriller for grown-ups, no set-pieces, just engrossing dialogue scenes.
Saturday, 25 February 2012
RAMPART
(Oren Moverman, 2011)
By this stage plenty of films have attempted to adapt the work of James Ellroy. And they get various aspects right: the plotting may be impossible to replicate fully in all its insane detailed density, but movies get close when they're willing to trust in epic length and huge casts. His world: a brash, widescreen pulp America, filled with sleaze and amorality, is easier to recreate and seen in all sorts of American genre entertainment. His characters - those unforgettable bad White men, doing violent things in the name of the law - are archetypes, and though nobody does them quite as well as Ellroy, they too are not uncommon in crime movies and thrillers, where rendered badly they register only as cliches.
What it is obviously impossible for any film to really capture is Ellroy's prose. His mature style is simultaneously both extraordinarily pared-down and hyper-inflated, a jazz-like series of short sentences and phrases that verge on self-parody while remaining utterly evocative, often feverish and absolutely distinctive.
Rampart - written by Ellroy himself, together with director Moverman - actually makes a decent fist of finding a filmic style to match Ellroy's writing. Moverman shoots and cuts this story of a corrupt LAPD Patrolman sliding ever closer to his own destruction with a fluid, sensual poetry. The colours alternately seem washed out and over-exposed; nicely reflecting the moodswings undergone by Woody Harrelson's lead, and there are elliptical moments and enough material devoted purely to mood and effect that the film has a strongly-felt identity of its own; this is feverish, like Ellroy, caught up in its own downhill slide, spasmodically violent, very macho in a damaged, inwardly vulnerable way, and strangely, lushly beautiful.
The cast are of a similarly high standard. In what amounts to an arty character-study, Harrelson is thrilling; funny, frightening, falling apart, he lets us see this intelligent man realise that he can't stop himself, showing us how trapped he is by his own personality and how it's too late to drop the act. He is backed by the classy likes of Steve Buscemi, Sigourney Weaver, Anne Heche and Ice Cube, but only Robin Wright gets enough screen time to really challenge Harrelson's dominance of the film.
The narrative is where Rampart suffers; it substitutes a long slow slog downward for a plot, making it feel overlong and tonally samey. Luckily, the acting and direction just about compensate. As The Messenger, their first collaboration, suggested Moverman and Harrelson make a fine director-actor team, and long may they work together.
By this stage plenty of films have attempted to adapt the work of James Ellroy. And they get various aspects right: the plotting may be impossible to replicate fully in all its insane detailed density, but movies get close when they're willing to trust in epic length and huge casts. His world: a brash, widescreen pulp America, filled with sleaze and amorality, is easier to recreate and seen in all sorts of American genre entertainment. His characters - those unforgettable bad White men, doing violent things in the name of the law - are archetypes, and though nobody does them quite as well as Ellroy, they too are not uncommon in crime movies and thrillers, where rendered badly they register only as cliches.
What it is obviously impossible for any film to really capture is Ellroy's prose. His mature style is simultaneously both extraordinarily pared-down and hyper-inflated, a jazz-like series of short sentences and phrases that verge on self-parody while remaining utterly evocative, often feverish and absolutely distinctive.
Rampart - written by Ellroy himself, together with director Moverman - actually makes a decent fist of finding a filmic style to match Ellroy's writing. Moverman shoots and cuts this story of a corrupt LAPD Patrolman sliding ever closer to his own destruction with a fluid, sensual poetry. The colours alternately seem washed out and over-exposed; nicely reflecting the moodswings undergone by Woody Harrelson's lead, and there are elliptical moments and enough material devoted purely to mood and effect that the film has a strongly-felt identity of its own; this is feverish, like Ellroy, caught up in its own downhill slide, spasmodically violent, very macho in a damaged, inwardly vulnerable way, and strangely, lushly beautiful.
The cast are of a similarly high standard. In what amounts to an arty character-study, Harrelson is thrilling; funny, frightening, falling apart, he lets us see this intelligent man realise that he can't stop himself, showing us how trapped he is by his own personality and how it's too late to drop the act. He is backed by the classy likes of Steve Buscemi, Sigourney Weaver, Anne Heche and Ice Cube, but only Robin Wright gets enough screen time to really challenge Harrelson's dominance of the film.
The narrative is where Rampart suffers; it substitutes a long slow slog downward for a plot, making it feel overlong and tonally samey. Luckily, the acting and direction just about compensate. As The Messenger, their first collaboration, suggested Moverman and Harrelson make a fine director-actor team, and long may they work together.
Monday, 2 January 2012
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
(David Fincher, 2011)
An object lesson in what a strong director can bring to questionable source material.
Stieg Larsson's mega-bestseller and the literary phenomenon it sparked - the rest of the Millennium trilogy - were posthumously published, which may well account for the repetitive sloppiness of much of the writing. The Swedish adaptation from 2009, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, plays like a tv movie, stylistically mundane, dramatically plodding, enlivened only by Noomi Rapace's performance as Lisbeth Salander.
Salander is the key to the success of the books. A truly iconic lead character, excitingly modern (a bisexual goth-punk hacker-biker) yet with an uncomplicated moral worldview and the aggressive personality required to take on the evils which cross her path, any filmmaker who gets her right has a good chance of making a watchable film. Well, watchable isn't enough for Fincher. Currently operating at something like peak level, in that few other directors on earth so consistently excel on a scene-by-scene basis, he (alongside screenwriter Steve Zaillian) elevates and inflates this parlor detective story into a dark, classy thriller, full of incidental pleasures.
They also get Salander right. Much of that is down to strong work from Rooney Mara, who makes her a little more vulnerable than she is in the books or in Oplev and Rapace's version. Only a little vulnerable, however. Her righteous vengeance upon her rapist case worker and final heist are infused here with an almost mischievous sense of fun. She enjoys getting her own back, it seems, and is unapologetic about her looks or difficult personality. The slight, slow thaw we see in her here is down to her relationship with her research partner, and she communicates much behind Salander's consistent poker face.
Daniel Craig is solid as Larsson's glamourised self-portrait, Mikael Blomkvist, coasting along on his now-unquestionable leading man qualities, and displaying a good ability to let us see him figuring things out. The rest of the cast - mainly a solid roster of experienced British thespians - are effortlessly convincing, with the (somewhat jarringly) single Scandinavian Stellan Skarsgaard as good as ever.
The real star here, of course, is Fincher. Evoking the chilly Swedish winter with an enviable, thrillingly textured feel for place and mood, he makes his film unfailingly beautiful without it ever seeming ostentatious or without any effect upon his storytelling. The soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross helps a lot, a series of atmospheric pieces, hammering percusision, and queasy synth effects combining nicely with Fincher and Director of Photography Jeff Cronenweth's sublimely lit and composed frames.
It may be a largely dazzling experience, then, but there are flaws here. The running time is grotesquely extended for such a disposable thriller, the almost exploitative nastiness present in passages seems damagingly at odds with the theme of "Men Who Hate Women" (the Swedish title of the novel), and there is the unmistakeable whiff of Murder She Wrote or even Scooby-Doo in tired scenarios like the killer explaining his own motivations and methods to his intended victim (and, obviously the audience).
Worst of all, Fincher is such a great talent, a project like this feels like a waste of him. Hopefully he'll do something riskier and more interesting next time..
An object lesson in what a strong director can bring to questionable source material.
Stieg Larsson's mega-bestseller and the literary phenomenon it sparked - the rest of the Millennium trilogy - were posthumously published, which may well account for the repetitive sloppiness of much of the writing. The Swedish adaptation from 2009, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, plays like a tv movie, stylistically mundane, dramatically plodding, enlivened only by Noomi Rapace's performance as Lisbeth Salander.
Salander is the key to the success of the books. A truly iconic lead character, excitingly modern (a bisexual goth-punk hacker-biker) yet with an uncomplicated moral worldview and the aggressive personality required to take on the evils which cross her path, any filmmaker who gets her right has a good chance of making a watchable film. Well, watchable isn't enough for Fincher. Currently operating at something like peak level, in that few other directors on earth so consistently excel on a scene-by-scene basis, he (alongside screenwriter Steve Zaillian) elevates and inflates this parlor detective story into a dark, classy thriller, full of incidental pleasures.
They also get Salander right. Much of that is down to strong work from Rooney Mara, who makes her a little more vulnerable than she is in the books or in Oplev and Rapace's version. Only a little vulnerable, however. Her righteous vengeance upon her rapist case worker and final heist are infused here with an almost mischievous sense of fun. She enjoys getting her own back, it seems, and is unapologetic about her looks or difficult personality. The slight, slow thaw we see in her here is down to her relationship with her research partner, and she communicates much behind Salander's consistent poker face.
Daniel Craig is solid as Larsson's glamourised self-portrait, Mikael Blomkvist, coasting along on his now-unquestionable leading man qualities, and displaying a good ability to let us see him figuring things out. The rest of the cast - mainly a solid roster of experienced British thespians - are effortlessly convincing, with the (somewhat jarringly) single Scandinavian Stellan Skarsgaard as good as ever.
The real star here, of course, is Fincher. Evoking the chilly Swedish winter with an enviable, thrillingly textured feel for place and mood, he makes his film unfailingly beautiful without it ever seeming ostentatious or without any effect upon his storytelling. The soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross helps a lot, a series of atmospheric pieces, hammering percusision, and queasy synth effects combining nicely with Fincher and Director of Photography Jeff Cronenweth's sublimely lit and composed frames.
It may be a largely dazzling experience, then, but there are flaws here. The running time is grotesquely extended for such a disposable thriller, the almost exploitative nastiness present in passages seems damagingly at odds with the theme of "Men Who Hate Women" (the Swedish title of the novel), and there is the unmistakeable whiff of Murder She Wrote or even Scooby-Doo in tired scenarios like the killer explaining his own motivations and methods to his intended victim (and, obviously the audience).
Worst of all, Fincher is such a great talent, a project like this feels like a waste of him. Hopefully he'll do something riskier and more interesting next time..
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