Oscar Hopefuls – 2012

So, the film awards season draws near again, kicked off in earnest by the (hopefully) irreverent Ricky Gervais taking the mick out of various celebrities as he hosts the Golden Globes for the third and apparently final time, and ending with the grand dame of them all, the Oscars. As ever, it’s been a funny year for seeing what is on the radar, and what isn’t. The excellent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Drive haven’t had much of a showing so far, while the mediocre-looking The Descendants has attracted what seems like an undue amount of attention. Indeed, it’s been a year where slight films have prospered, with Woody Allen’s pleasant but unexceptional Midnight In Paris being lauded to the skies, apparently on the grounds it’s better than anything he’s done in years. Well, at least it isn’t Match Point or Cassandra’s Dream.

Anyway I’ve now seen a few of the more obvious hopefuls, and have a few thoughts on each:

The Artist

Apparently the current frontrunner at the Oscars, Michel Hazanavicius’ charming film has attracted much attention because it’s both in black and white, and silent. (Purists might note that it’s also filmed in academy ratio of 1.33:1.) I’d hesitate to call it the epoch-defining classic that some have called it, but it’s undeniably extremely compelling. It retreads the time-honoured story of A Star Is Born, with the difference that the fading actor George Valentin (played, in a star-making turn, by Jean Dujardin) is a thoroughly decent and honourable sort, and that the up-and-coming star, Peppy Miller (the equally charming  Bérénice Bejo) wants nothing more than to do right by the object of her affection. It isn’t as deliriously feelgood as the reviews might suggest, with an air of gentle melancholy being the pervading atmosphere, but it’s a lovely tribute to the good ol’ days of Hollywood, helped by indelible supporting performances by John Goodman (as a cigar-chewing studio head) and James Cromwell (as Dujardin’s loyal chauffeur). And, of course, the dog (Uggy) is excellent.

Girl With A Dragon Tattoo

Early reports indicated that uber-producer Scott Rudin and David Fincher wanted to set up a new franchise with their American (although, crucially, not Americanized) adaptation of Steig Larsson’s best-selling trilogy, but that this franchise would be defiantly R-rated and adult, containing all the charming details that the books are known for, not least anal rape, incest and serial killing. This has been borne out, perhaps rather too well, given the film’s as-yet uncertain box office performance. Its main draw is the astonishing performance by Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, the presumably autistic computer hacker who is recruited by disgraced journalist Michael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to help solve an age-old murder on a Swedish island. Mara, playing down her usual good looks, is appealingly vulnerable at the same time as being tough, and is helped by Fincher’s muscular direction, incorporating his usual touches of jet-black humour; a serial killer, preparing to dispatch his victim, puts on Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ as mood music. Only a rather superfluous globetrotting last act spoils it, but the strengths until then (including a nicely judged performance by Christopher Plummer as the patriarch of a truly rotten family and the stunning credits sequence) are considerable.

War Horse

Or, Spielberg makes a British film. Based on both Michael Morpugo’s novel and, more obviously, the National’s ever-running show, it showcases most of his strengths and most of his weaknesses, often at the same time. As ever with Spielberg, the casting (Cumberbatch, Hiddleston, Mullan, Niels Arestrup) is impeccable, the production values superb and the action scenes brilliantly choreographed and executed. Unfortunately, by choosing to make literal what both the book and play treated at least partly metaphorically, there’s a certain clunkiness, not least in the first act, which plods almost as much as the rejected shire horse that the titular thoroughbred Joey is bought instead of. As he forms a bond with his young owner (Jeremy Irvine, less impressive than some young Spielberg stars), and the wicked landlord (David Thewlis) schemes to evict the family from their cottage, you wonder why on earth the director bothered. As it goes into more episodic territory with the arrival of WWI, it offers tremendous set-pieces and indelible cameos, even as it serves up unlikely plot developments and all the sentiment you’d expect from a collaboration with Richard Curtis. Still very worth seeing, mind.

 

A Tale Of Two Sherlocks

Sherlock Holmes is now big business, lads and lasses. It was clear from the rapturous reception given both to Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ 2010 TV reinvention of the character that there were still substantial audiences who wanted to see new or reimagined exploits of 221b Baker Street’s great inhabitant. Granted, they were entirely different in outlook – Ritchie’s film was a laddish caper that leant heavily on the charisma of Robert Downey Jnr as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, whereas the Gatiss/Moffat series had a stunningly multi-faceted performance from Benedict Cumberbatch as a strange, apparently autistic Holmes – but both succeeded admirably as highly enjoyable mainstream entertainment.

Now, we see the next installments of both, in the shape of the film sequel A Game Of Shadows and the subsequent tranche of TV adaptations. The USP with the film was the much-heralded appearance of Holmes’ nemesis, ‘the Napoleon of crime’ Moriarty (who had appeared briefly in a cliffhanger at the end of the TV series) in an entirely original plot, whereas the BBC version adapted three of the most famous stories, beginning with a version of A Scandal In Bohemia, where the titular scandal is relocated to Belgravia. But which one wins?

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it’s the TV version by a substantial distance. The second Holmes film was much anticipated in the casting of Moriarty, with names such as Brad Pitt and Daniel Day-Lewis being bandied about. The eventual choice – Jared Harris – is a fine actor, who does a more than capable job in the part, but there’s a slight sense of ‘oh…’ to his appearance. This partly works in the film’s favour, but the problem comes when this sort of gimmicky, lightweight entertainment tries to play it at all seriously. Thus, Moriarty has the odd interesting character quirk – he makes a potentially fatal delay to feed pigeons in the park, and appears more genuinely moved during opera than when organising countless deaths – but by and large, he’s an identikit villain, with a Bondian scheme that becomes clear during the finale. The various action scenes are fine, the banter between Downey Jnr and Law again amuses and some of the locations are stunning, but it’s one of those frustrating sequels where the potential to deepen and darken has been muffed. Oh, and Noomi Rapace has about the most perfunctory female role in recent memory.

Not so the TV series. The first three episodes scored more highly in their reinvention of Holmes and Watson and the creation of their milieu than they did in terms of the plotting; the first ended with a run-of-the-mill denouement, the second one wasn’t particularly good and the third ended with a strong cliffhanger but the unexpectedly bizarre characterisation of Moriarty as a camp, psychopathic Irishman. This cliffhanger is resolved for laughs rather than thrills immediately, and then we’re into a rollicking yarn involving Holmes meeting his match in the character of Irene Adler, aka ‘The Woman’, a high-class dominatrix who has the unlikely goods on virtually every figure at the highest echelons of British society.

The episode, written by Moffat, fairly barrels along, with Irene Pulver’s icy, brilliant Adler a worthy match for Cumberbatch’s Holmes. It incorporates a stunningly choreographed scene of slow-motion violence (a possible hat-tip to the films?), Mark Gatiss dialling it right down as Holmes’ icy brother Mycroft, a warm and sympathetic Martin Freeman as the ever-exasperated Watson, a very satisfying denouement and a pleasingly ambiguous final scene. On the basis of this, the next couple of Sunday evenings are about to be very good fun indeed.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Or, as we mortals call it, Mission Impossible 4. 15 years after the first installment in the franchise, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has – once again – accepted an impossible challenge, this time to stop a Swedish madman from creating nuclear war between the US and Russia. That this hoary old plotline, familiar from countless Bond films, has been revived comes as little surprise, as the series has thrived on implausibility and absurdity from the start, sometimes knowingly and at other times with the straightest of straight faces. Even if those faces are sometimes – in a ta dah! moment – revealed to be someone else’s, concealed under an all too accurate mask.

The storyline here is really wafer-thin, frequently incomprehensible and apparently there as an excuse for Cruise and his team (Jeremy Renner as mysterious ‘analyst’ Brandt; Simon Pegg as tech-nerd and comic relief Benjie; Paula Patton as the obligatory woman) to travel between exotic locations including Moscow, Mumbai and Dubai on the trail of Michael Nyqvist’s vaguely camp villain. But you’re not watching a film like this for Chekhovian insights into unexpected quirks of character. Instead, you’re watching it for the action scenes. And these certainly don’t disappoint.

In the live-action directorial debut of Pixar whizz Brad Bird, there’s a vim and energy to the scenes of derring-do that is pretty much absent from most modern thriller filmmaking. Three set-pieces in particular – an opening jail-break scored in part to Dean Martin’ s ‘Ain’t That A Kick In The Head’; a climatic fight in a stunningly futuristic car park; and, best of all, a terrifyingly vertiginous external heist at Dubai’s Burj Khalifa – are pretty much the best things that I’ve seen of this ilk since Inception, and in some respects they top even that, because there’s a wit and playfulness to much of the action that is a world apart from the CGI-heavy ‘robot fighting robot’ sturm und drang that is synonymous with so much blockbuster product.

I’d hesitate to call this a great film, or even a particularly good one. It drags between action scenes, there are presumably remnants of an excised twist that never quite comes and Cruise, while still athletic and limber at 49, is beginning to seem faintly ridiculous in his desire to remain an action hero forever. (As a random example, Gregory Peck was 46 when he played Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, a role that seems associated with a vastly more mature actor than that of Ethan Hunt.) But, if seen in full jaw-dropping excess at an IMAX cinema, this is pretty much a must-see, at least once.

Noises Off

Michael Frayn’s 1982 play is rightly regarded as one of the greatest comedies ever written. Dealing with the attempts of a failing theatrical troupe to present a hoary old farce, ‘Nothing On’, under the tutelage of a past-it director, it combines verbal wit with a quite astonishing array of dramatic devices that illuminate the failure of the cast and crew to keep the show going. Frayn’s particular genius is to have three separate ‘Act Ones’, the first being a disastrous run-through at a dress rehearsal, the second being the action of the play observed from backstage, and the third being the incompetent presentation of it towards the end of its run.

If this sounds at all pretentious, then rest assured it isn’t in the staging. Lindsay Posner’s new production at the Old Vic provides comic bliss from start to finish, thanks to an incredibly well-drilled and very game cast, all of whom relish the opportunity to demonstrate split-second timing and remarkable comic poise. It is slightly invidious to single out particular actors from the uniformly strong company, but Celia Imrie’s grand dame thespian playing a comic housekeeper, Robert Glenister’s philandering director Lloyd Dallas, Karl Johnson’s elderly drunk and Jamie Glover’s petulant leading man are all particularly hilarious.

And, oh yes, it’s funny. Along with One Man, Two Guvnors, it’s the most uproariously hilarious night that I’ve had at the theatre this year. I’d seen it before about a decade ago with a starry cast including Lynn Redgrave and Stephen Mangan, but I don’t remember that production reducing me to the helpless paroxysm of mirth that this one did. By the end, the simplest of objects – a plate of sardines, a bag, a telephone receiver – have become so freighted with comic significance that their very appearance sends a roar of appreciative laughter through the audience.

Saying anything more detailed about the play is not only unfair, but verges on the incomprehensible for the uninitiated. All I can say is that this is a guaranteed hit, and yet another splendid addition to the run of excellent plays at the Old Vic. For this, Mr Spacey, many thanks.

Hugo

Martin Scorsese has been on an exceptional run of it lately. After the flawed-but-occasionally-interesting Gangs Of New York, he has set himself up as a maker of exceptionally well crafted mainstream films, normally starring Leonardo DiCaprio, but has also dipped into music-related projects as eclectic as the recent George Harrison documentary Living In The Material World and the Rolling Stones’ concert film Shine A Light. He even won the much overdue Best Director Oscar a few years ago for the excellent The Departed.

He’s certainly a man who can do whatever he wants, joining a select few including Spielberg, Nolan and Fincher in a club where they can make passion projects at ludicrous expense and know that their commercial success or failure is all but irrelevant to their personal prestige, as the artistic quality of the films is likely to be high. All the same, Hugo (renamed from the book’s title The Invention Of Hugo Cabret) is a surprising departure. His first foray into what appears to be children’s films, as well as his first 3D film, it suffers from a slow opening and unfortunate detours into irrelevance, but has a central theme and message that represents Scorsese at his most heartfelt and sincere. Quite who it’s aimed at is anyone’s guess.

It begins with much exposition. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living in a 1930s Paris train station after the death of his mechanic father (Jude Law, in a tiny cameo) and the disappearance of his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone, similar). Making a living of sorts by petty thieving and avoiding the station master (Sacha Baron Cohen), he seeks to mend a broken automaton that his father brought home from a museum. Unfortunately, his plans are thwarted when the miserable toyshop owner, Georges (Ben Kingsley) confiscates his notebook as a punishment for Hugo’s stealing. His only hope is to elicit the help of Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Moretz) in an attempt to retrieve the notebook, repair the robot and see if, as he suspected, his father left him a last message.

The above summary doesn’t really do justice to what Scorsese’s grand aim is. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Georges is in fact Georges Melies, founder of modern cinema but fallen on hard times when the film begins. Thus, about halfway through, Hugo turns into a wonderful and thrilling paean to the early days of silent cinema, conveying the fun and excitement of an unknown world in which anything seemed possible and everything could be achieved by hitherto unsuspected means. The film’s helped by excellent performances by Kingsley, Helen McCrory (as his wife and muse) and Michael Stuhlbarg (as the Melies-obsessed academic responsible for his eventual rehabilitation). It’s some of the most heartfelt and affecting stuff you’ll see at the cinema this year.

However, it bears comparatively little resemblance to the children’s film around it, which Scorsese doesn’t seem particularly interested in. Butterfield and Moretz are both fine, if increasingly peripheral, presences, but it’s the oddity of casting Baron Cohen, in a substantial role, that really mystifies. The character as portrayed is a wounded WW1 veteran with a leg support, a fierce dog and a penchant for sending unaccompanied children to the local asylum. Fine, a cartoonish Dickensian stock villain, to add some otherwise absent jeopardy. But there seems no rhyme or reason for his presence in the film, which bears no relation to the central plot, or his eventual rehabilitation as a sympathetic figure of sorts. It’s perfectly possible to see a Chris Cooper or a Ray Winstone doing very well in the role, as a bitter older man haunted by the memories of the trenches, but Baron Cohen’s arch and rather annoying performance doesn’t convince at all, meaning that all the various chase scenes, while visually impressive, are just so much padding.

So, a curate’s egg, then. But the good stuff is so good that one hesitates to describe this as a misstep, more as a fascinating curio that will always occupy a unique place in Scorsese’s extremely distinguished canon. Unless he makes Alvin And The Chipmunks: Chipfellas, that is.

Against Nature

This is a piece I wrote for the current issue of Five Dials magazine about ‘decadence, dandyism and debauchery’. 

Judged by most standards of polite behaviour, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, protagonist of J.-K Huysmans’ 1884 novel A Rebours or Against Nature, falls somewhat short. Huysmans makes the case early on for his anti-hero being one of the less clubbable of men when des Esseintes is said to ‘realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels.’ Although he allows himself the odd moment of fun – ‘unnatural love affairs and perverse pleasures’ – it is not long until he hides himself away in a lavishly decorated villa on the outskirts of Paris, making sure that he was ‘guarding against hankering for human society, any nostalgic regrets.’ And that, which concludes the novel’s prologue, is more or less it for plot. If you’re looking for incident, stick with War and Peace. Plenty of both there.

If analysed from a literary perspective, Huysmans’ novel is simultaneously beguiling and hugely frustrating. Beguiling, because in its otherworldly marriage of naturalistic description and surreal incident, it summons up a world quite different to virtually any that had been seen in literature before. And hugely frustrating, because it tantalises the reader with the thought that, had the likes of Joyce and Eliot been born 20 years earlier, they would have read Huysmans and taken the whole concept of modernism in an entirely different direction. Eliot’s Prufrock might seek to assert his necktie rich and modest with a simple pin, but des Esseintes has beaten him to it by wearing ‘suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoats’ and ‘by sticking a bunch of Parma violets in his shirt-front in lieu of a cravat’. Yet, like Prufrock, he is unimpressive of appearance; he is ‘anaemic and highly strung’, with ‘hollow cheeks’ and the lingering remnants of childhood illness.

From such unprepossessing beginnings comes one of the greatest examples of the literary decadent and dandy. The great dandy should feature some, and preferably all, of the following examples of unusual behaviour:

1)      Unusual, flamboyant and eccentric dress sense.

2)      A healthy contempt for the universe, whether religion or his fellow man.

3)      An exceptional intelligence, often not academic but made up of a fierce desire to question society’s norms and values and hold in contempt what others hold sacred.

4)      An affinity for the perverse in all its forms.

5)      A self-destructive side that will ensure a youthful death.

6)      A fierce loyalty to a few people and ideas, ranging from the trivial to the profound.

Des Esseintes scores highly on this scale; the last doesn’t apply at all, given his essential nihilism, and arguably the fourth is less relevant after his youthful debauchery, but the crucial mix of personal vanity and contempt for the universe is here in spades. He doesn’t score as high as Lord Rochester, for whom all the above apply, but it’s hard not to see Huysmans looking at such noted French decadents as Edmond de Goncourt (who had, one imagines in the voice of Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty – we shall return to him – instructed Huysmans to only be interested in ‘cultured beings and exquisite things) and, especially, Baudelaire, from whose work the title and central philosophical conceits of the novel are taken. Like Les Fleurs du Mal, Against Nature is essentially a sensual book where impression and surface are all, where the gaudy pleasures of rich and almost cloying language wash over the reader, for whom resistance against the sybaritic excess can only be futile.

Des Esseintes proudly describes himself as a Pessimist, not in the sense of a miserable bugger shrugging but in something closer to Schopenhauer, with the clear-sighted vision that you can only be saved from utter disillusionment with the world if you never expect anything from it in the first place. Perhaps ironically, he shares this with Larkin, the ultimate miserable bugger poet of the twentieth century. When Larkin writes in ‘Aubade’ of religion, ‘that vast moth-eaten brocade created to pretend we never die’, or sneers in ‘Vers de Societe’ of how ‘the big wish/Is to have people nice to you, which means/Doing it back somehow/Virtue is social’, one sees how clearly the strain of intelligent cynicism that Huysmans is espousing stretched into the literature of the next century. Perhaps tellingly, in 1884 the significant literary developments – Tolstoy’s publication of The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, the first staging of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and Engels’ The Origin Of The Family, Private Property and the State, as well as the publication of Against Nature – were all taking place outside the English language.

Which is not to say that the literate English-speaking audience weren’t taking note of this extraordinary book.  Whistler went out and bought several copies on the day it was published, telling all and sundry who would listen that it was a work of timeless genius. One of those who didn’t tell him to go and copulate with goats was Wilde, for whom Against Nature was a key text.  He announced that ‘the heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain’, and makes veiled but extensive reference to it in The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, referring to it as ‘the strangest book that he had ever read‘, going on to comment that ‘it seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him.’ It would have been clear to any of Wilde’s circle which novel he was referring to, something that he discussed avidly with correspondents and, more reluctantly, at his trial. Yet there is a crucial exchange between Dorian and his Wildean mentor Lord Henry Wootton, which sums up the book’s extraordinarily complex appeal:

‘I am so sorry, Harry’, Dorian cried, ‘but really it is entirely your fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time was going.’

‘Yes: I thought you would like it’, replied his host, rising from his chair.

‘I didn’t say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.’

‘Ah, you have discovered that?’ murmured Lord Henry.

Against Nature is not a likeable or particularly enjoyable book. It has no plot to speak of, no sympathetic characters or even many notable events. What it does do is to exert a weirdly woozy hypnotic fascination, somewhat akin to smoking a huge amount of opium in some lavishly upholstered velvet-draped boudoir and half-listening to some rambling yet utterly compelling story, told by an adventurer.

The book’s most influential appearance in the 20^th century was possibly in Bruce Robinson’s seminal film Withnail and I. While the book itself only appears once (as Marwood prepares to pack and leave the decadent life he has been embroiled in behind), its influence is clear throughout the film. The two protagonists of the film lead a similarly debauched life to Des Esseintes, although their existence is less one of gilded luxury and sumptuous furnishings as it is drug-fuelled paranoia and hysterical squalor. Yet there is the same sense of Withnail, in particular, being as much a man out of time and place as Des Esseintes, with his arch, Byronic hero-meets-Dickensian grotesque persona reinforcing the sense of a misanthrope who simultaneously loathes and is misunderstood by society. And of course, the character of Uncle Monty represents nobody so much as the decadent outcast with charm, money and lechery in equal measure, simultaneously discoursing on the finer points of Baudelaire and attempting to rape Marwood.

At the end of the film, Withnail is left alone, doomed to recite Hamlet’s ‘I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth’ soliloquy to a group of uninterested wolves in Regent’s Park. This is the unifying factor between dandies, decadents and debauchees, the certain knowledge that they are doomed, and that, like Eliot’s Gerontion, they will stiffen in a rented room before their time. Whether it is Rochester dying at 33 of his alcoholism, coupled with syphilis and the all-encompassing ‘the pox’, Sebastian Horsley’s heroin overdose or Julian Maclaren-Ross finally succumbing to poverty and despair, it is a sad but essential aspect of the dandy that their life and career should eventually end in a tragic end.

Des Esseintes does not expire at the end of Against Nature. For Huysmans, one feels, this would be all too straightforward an ending. Instead, he, like Withnail, is condemned to a fate rather worse than death, as his iconoclastic lifestyle leads to a descent into ill health. At first, he appears to have achieved his crowning achievement by taking no other food or nourishment than a peptone enema three times a day, but the cruel irony is yet to come, when his doctor (‘who was imbued with all the prejudices of a man of the world’) informs him that, in order to recover his strength, he must ‘abandon this solitary existence, to go back to Paris, to lead a normal life again, above all to try and enjoy the same pleasures as other people.’

This strict edict – that the dandy and decadent must come to ignore their own inclinations and tastes in favour of embracing organised fun, the safe, everyday excitements and distractions that are considered acceptable for the average person – is society taking its revenge, a more refined and long-lasting revenge than simply allowing the dandy to die. Des Esseintes might retort, as any dandy would, ‘But I just don’t enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy’, but it is no good. The book ends with true tragedy, as he realises that ‘like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge’. The dandy will seek refuge, spiritual and physical, in trying to escape these waves of mediocrity, but a flesh and blood human is no match for the inexorable tide of uncaring, implacable destiny. Yet their words, and lives, serve as an example to the rest of us. Whether it’s Wilde, Rochester, Des Esseintes, Byron or anyone else, their willingness to stand outside society and condemn banality serves as far more inspirational than any prurient account of simple carnal pleasures. For ultimately, dandyism must stem from one man, a man who had the courage to stand up in a rulebound, restrictive and cruel society and, armed with little more than faith and certainty, could declare that he was the way, the truth and the life. Those who follow in the footsteps of such men will never truly be alone.

Immortals

University Challenge. Jeremy Paxman is asking the questions to UMIST. 

PAXMAN: The nicknames Cheesemongers, Cherrypickers, Bob’s Own, The Emperor’s Chambermaids and The Immortals have been used to describe which groups of men?

BRIGHT: (Of UMIST). Homosexuals.

PAXMAN: (Disbelieving): No! They’re regiments in the British army, and they’ll be very upset with you, UMIST!

When it comes to discussing Tarsem Singh’s latest opus, Immortals (no definite article here), it bears to keep the above exchange in mind. Although there is a female character played by Frieda Pinto, apparently a priestess, this is very much a man’s film, and by ‘man’s, I mean predominantly a confirmed bachelor’s fantasy. The male characters are all so buff and ripped that one wonders whether CGI was used. Then good old Mickey Rourke’s reassuringly saggy and middle-aged torso hones into view, like Moby Dick, and the suspicion is allayed, at least for a moment.

The plot is simultaneously simplistic and muddled, as in the subsequent Pirates of the Caribbean films. Theseus (Henry Cavill) is a lowly bastard and peasant, who has been trained from childhood by a kindly old man (John Hurt). The kindly old man is REALLY Zeus, king of the gods (Luke Evans), who is aware that wicked King Hyperion (Rourke) is after something magical called the bow of Ephesus, which he will use to liberate the imprisoned Titans from their mountain stronghold. And this will apparently bring him immortality, or something like that. (It’s not particularly clear, despite a scene-setting Hurt voiceover.) Theseus, whose mother is conveniently slain by Hyperion, seeks revenge, and also finds himself serving as a rallying figure for his oppressed and betrayed countrymen.

If it sounds familiar, this is because this is essentially yet another sword ‘n’ sandals CGI-fest in the vein of 300 (its closest match), Troy, Thor, etc etc. It almost entirely lacks a sense of humour or fun, is very indifferently acted (whoever cast Cavill in the new Superman film on the strength of this should be fired, as he’s one of the weediest and least convincing protagonists in this sort of thing for ages), has a rambling and at times nonsensical plot and feels like a retread of other, better pictures. The one saving grace, as with his earlier films, is Tarsem Singh’s astonishing visual sense, which makes countless scenes feel far more compelling and grand than they actually are,with some breathtaking shots and imagery that almost make the typically poor post-conversion 3D cinematography worth watching. Calling it ‘Fight Club meets Caravaggio’, as Singh has done, is hyperbolic, but at least it shows more ambition than your average hack job.

All the same, this isn’t a film that one could actually recommend with a clear conscience, unless one wanted to get thoroughly tanked up on a Friday night and heckle the very earnest members of Bob’s Own as they spar and tussle homoerotically at near-interminable length.

 

LFF 2011 – a round up

So, the LFF draws to a close. As usual, there are several big films (A Dangerous Method, The Artist, The Descendants, The Deep Blue Sea) that timings didn’t allow me to catch, but no doubt there will be other screenings before too long. However I did see a few others, and my thoughts in brief are below.

There was a plethora of starry attendees this year, but the sense remains that the London Film Festival is remarkably low on genuinely unique premieres – most of the hottest films on display had already screened at Venice, Cannes or elsewhere, and those that did appear first tended to be extremely low-key. Still, there’s no denying the quality of much of what did appear, such as:

Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut is bold, an effective precis of one of Shakespeare’s most difficult and demanding plays, and, in its Balkan setting, makes some grimly effective parallels between a failing Roman empire and modern-day Eastern Europe. An obviously extremely low budget stifles its ambition to some extent (Fiennes was very candid in a post-film Q & A about the near-impossible strictures that he was working under), as does Fiennes’ inexperience behind the camera, but excellent performances from a committed cast (including Brian Cox, Vanessa Redgrave and, surprisingly, Gerald Butler) and the essential strength of the material carry it through.

Carnage

I didn’t like Roman Polanski’s last film, The Ghost, at all, and was amazed at the positive response it got. He’s on far safer grounds with this adaptation of Yazmina Reza’s play about two sets of warring New York couples, one of whose child has injured the other. It’s very stagey, but not in a bad way, and it’s impeccably acted by Jodie Foster (as an anguished, impotent liberal), John C Reilly (as her boorish husband) and Kate Winslet (as an uptight control freak). What skews the material is that Polanski’s sympathies clearly lie with Christoph Waltz’s sardonic corporate lawyer, forever tied to his mobile and coming out with cuttingly Albee-esque one-liners when he’s not. His best (to Foster) is ‘I saw your friend Jane Fonda on TV the other day. It made me want to go out and buy a Ku Klux Klan poster.’ And, at 79 minutes, it’s blessedly short.

The Ides Of March

Clooney does politics. That will no doubt be recommendation enough for many, but this well-made, sensitively written and excellently acted film suffers from a certain flatness and ‘is that it’ quality, in its account of the shenanigans behind the choice of the Democratic presidential contender. As the conflicted campaigner, Ryan Gosling is as good as ever, and Clooney does wonders with a small role as the candidate who might be considerably less upright than he appears, while a reliably excellent supporting cast (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei) all bring their A-game. But one longs for something more bitingly satirical and complex.

Anonymous

I didn’t see Madonna’s apparently dire W.E, but in terms of unremitting tosh there can’t be anything else at the festival to touch Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous. Revolving about the Shakespeare authorship question, the film takes it as a given that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans,tormented) was the author of the greatest canon of drama in the Western world, and that Shakespeare (Rafe Spall, playing the part like he’s in a comedy) was a boorish, barely literate drunk. Fine – an examination of the relationship between the two men, each mutually symbiotic, could have been a nice little chamber piece about talent and jealousy. But Emmerich makes BIG FILMS and so there’s an enormous conspiracy theory plot that explains why, precisely, de Vere had to keep his real name schtum. It’s ludicrous from start to finish, mostly pretty enjoyable if you’re in the mood for this sort of hokum, and Edward Hogg as the hunchbacked villain Robert Cecil deserves some sort of award for keeping a straight face beyond the call of duty.

Hunky Dory

Here we go again – ‘inspirational teacher puts on a show with various troubled pupils against the wishes of the stuffy authority figures, and the pupils have their own issues’. But Marc Evans’ film offers something genuinely fresh and rather affecting amidst the myriad cliches and the odd twist – the headmaster, for instance, is mostly supportive of the maverick teacher, even down to taking the lead role in the play. The main action revolves around the staging of The Tempest complete with 70s songs performed by a school orchestra and band, which offers glorious renditions of classics including Life On Mars, The Man Who Sold The World and Strange Magic, amongst others. Minnie Driver, as the teacher, offers a very affecting rendition of the Carole King standard Goin’ Back at the end. It might be worth skipping the film, but the soundtrack will be one to pick up.

Shame

Ah, Michael Fassbender. Currently enjoying something of a meteoric rise to fame, courtesy of eye-catching roles in everything from Inglourious Basterds to X-Men: First Class, he is on record as saying that he owes it all to Steve McQueen (the artist-turned-director, rather than the actor). His breakthrough role, as IRA prisoner Bobby Sands in McQueen’s directorial debut, Hunger, showed his remarkable versatility, as well as a desire to push boundaries and challenge audience’s expectations. Along the way, he’s been remarkably prolific, collaborating with the likes of Steven Soderbergh, David Cronenberg and Ridley Scott, and attracting a great deal of tabloid attention due to what’s been rumoured to be a turbulent love life.

Following on from his appearances as Rochester in Jane Eyre and Magneto in X-Men, Fassbender now essays his third role in a year as a charismatic, magnetic figure with troubling secrets and a dark past. As Brandon, he plays an apparently successful, affluent man who is beset by crippling sex addiction, manifesting itself in near-constant sex with prostitutes and casual flings, a heroic amount of pornography, incessant masturbating at work and an apparent desire to be in continual carnal congress. When his troubled sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) unexpectedly comes to stay, it sends him into overdrive, the only result of which is further degradation and self-loathing. Hence the title.

It’s all strongly reminiscent of American Psycho, as the protagonist’s division between his corporate life and his innermost desires comes to dominate him entirely. However, with one notable exception, the emphasis here is on sex rather than violence, with Fassbender’s face contorted in silent screams of despair reminiscent of Bacon’s paintings. It’s not an erotic film to watch, but it’s weirdly fascinating to see the various acts of fucking (and there is no other word for it) shown in such unflinching detail. I imagine it’ll be passed uncut as an 18 in the UK but some of the more outré material, including a threesome towards an end, will no doubt give the American censors, amongst others, headaches.

McQueen, directing from a screenplay by himself and Abi Morgan, prefers to keep the storytelling almost entirely visual, which works splendidly. Favouring long takes allows time for the performances to develop at their own pace, whether it’s Fassbender’s brooding protagonist, occasionally erupting in terrifying moments of verbal violence, or Mulligan’s sad, touching portrayal of an obviously damaged woman whose relationship with her brother may, or may not, have been rather too close for comfort in the past. Filmed in a New York utterly stripped of glamour, it’s tragic in the Aristotelian sense, with Brandon’s plight evoking both pity and terror. It’s not an easy watch, but it’s an extremely accomplished sophomore feature, and one looks forward eagerly to more collaborations between Fassbender and McQueen.

 

The Awakening

Ah, that old standby, the period ghost story. For an apparently moribund genre, there have been quite a few of these over the past few years, including The Others and The Orphanage. (Clearly it’s obligatory that the title begin with ‘The’ – one thinks of The Shining and The Sixth Sense, though those two were cleverly set in contemporary times.) One looks forward to certain pleasures, such as character actors doing Their Bit, sinister red herring bit part appearances, immaculate settings and some ‘made-ya-jump!’ shocks. One also looks forward to convoluted stories with clever twists, almost redolent of mystery novels as much as supernatural thrillers. What one doesn’t tend to expect are edge of seat thrills, genuinely terrifying moments (although The Orphange had at least one sequence, involving Geraldine Chaplin, that’s about as scary as anything I’ve ever seen) and superb acting.

The Awakening, directed by TV veteran Nick Murphy, surprises on one front. The acting, especially from Rebecca Hall, is quite superb. As ghost hunter and hokum debunker Florence Catchcart, an independent woman out of place in a 1921 Britain still reeling from the first world war, she is good enough to convince you within moments that she’s a real human being, not just some artificial and anachronistic construct (a la Romola Garai and Ben Whishaw in BBC’s The Hour). This is just as well, as the film teeters on the fine line between being an involving, clever and unexpectedly moving piece of classy drama, and a derivative and absurd mish-mash of clichés. If it ultimately comes out on the side of the former, it’s a close-run thing.

Florence Catchart, after a well-done opening that sees her expose a fraudulent séance, is visited by schoolmaster and war veteran Robert Mallory (Dominic West), who asks her advice in discovering what appears to be a haunting at his school.  A confirmed sceptic, Catchcart soon finds a logical explanation for the appearances. However, once the pupils disappear on half term, she realises that something altogether more sinister is going on. Might kindly matron Maud (Imelda Staunton) be involved? Why is there only one pupil left behind? And does dodgy groundsman Judd (Joseph Mawle) know more than he’s letting on?

Anyone who’s ever seen more than one film like this will guess many of the developments. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s co-written by genre specialist Stephen Volk, whose credits include the infamous Ghostwatch, Ken Russell’s Gothic and the Andrew Lincoln TV series Afterlife.) The ‘boo!’ moments are competently handled, if occasionally nonsensical, and Hall does an excellent job of managing to make a fairly rote character seem entirely convincing. West broods convincingly, perhaps suggesting a darker side (although one bit doesn’t make any sense, at least not on first viewing – if you need a clue, it involves him saying something off-camera in his room) and Staunton is reliably warm and excellent in the sort of role that middle-aged character actresses excel in.

The problems come with some of the final revelations. I’m fully in favour of films that choose to tie up the supernatural goings-on in a more psychologically grounded way – practically all the best ones do – but the eventual flood of explanations for what happens, including some very credibility-straining actions from characters, stretches believability about as far as it will go. It’s also slightly unfortunate that the denouement bears a startling resemblance to a pivotal scene in the Peter Jackson-directed The Frighteners. All the same, it pays off satisfyingly enough on a narrative level, and there’s a rather sly visual joke in the final scene that perhaps suggests that the film isn’t nearly as po-faced as it might appear to be.

So not a flawless triumph – but well worth a watch, if only for Hall who, on this evidence, could probably make reading the telephone directory a compelling and affecting experience. Repeated viewings will tell whether it holds together, but this is solidly entertaining fare nonetheless.