2012
Cambridge Film Festival Diary: Days 7 and 8
Note to readers: although the festival finished a month ago, I am determined to get to the end of my write-up, so do bear with me. Many of the films on here haven’t yet seen a wide release, and I’ll be sure to point out the great and good here when – and if – they get a wider circulation.
When I was younger, I had a real love of many different things, but most of those were driven out of my one true love: numbers. Apparently I used to sleep around two hours a night and then sit up for the rest of it doing sums and driving my poor mother slowly crazy. (This was not helped when my sister came along two years later and slept for sixteen hours a night, regularly causing my mother to think she was dead. Who’d be a parent? But I digress.) As an example, I always loved cricket, but that love initally grew out of the wealth of statistics and record-keeping that surround the sport, and I would never be seen at my local county ground without a copy of Wisden or another almanac to refer to. Then as I grew older, my appreciation of the game, of reverse swing, googlies and a stout forward defensive took hold, and now I love cricket for the game itself, rather than for the numbers that go with it.
With film, it’s been almost the reverse process. Over the last twenty years I have slowly but surely developed an increasing love of the form, which started to peak in 2008 when I made my first trip to the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge, now practically my second home. However, I also discovered at this time the ability of websites to catalogue and record what I’d seen, and then to be able to use spreadsheets to analyse my own viewing patterns. Film itself is still the main love, but again the statistics have become a nice personal sideline.
For anyone following my Twitter feed, they’re hopefully used to this by now, or would have unfollowed long since. But it was during this period that I hit a number of personal milestones, including the most cinema films I’d ever seen in a calendar month (I ultimately achieved 50 in September), the second most I’d seen in a calendar year (127 in 2010; my record of 164 last year is now just six films away at time of writing) and the most films I’d seen at the festival (beating the 19 of 2010 and the 27 of last year).
But the one thing I’ve always tried to do is to maintain the quality level; there’s no point in setting out to see a certain number of films if you’re not going to get something from them. I went into days seven and eight with high hopes, and there were a couple of real gems, but again it proved to be something of a mixed bag.
Here, then, is my write up for Wednesday 19th September.
Bestiaire If you’re a fan of animal documentaries, then Bestiaire may appeal to you, but what documentarian Denis Côté has produced is less a David Attenborough-style insight into the inner workings and social developments of the animal kingdom, and something more akin to the world’s most expensive live action animal screensaver. Côté mixes footage of the zoo animals with that of their human handlers, and there are occasional profound or witty observations that arise naturally out of the footage captured, but the simple footage, lacking narrative, voiceover or any other directive techniques, leave Bestiaire sorely lacking in real insight. The Score: 5/10
Reported Missing (Die Vermissten) Jan Speckenbach brought his modern morality tale to the festival’s contemporary German stream (although regrettably, the need for food prevented me for staying for his Q & A). When a 16 year old girl goes missing, her estranged father is called in to help find her, but the more he investigates, the more he discovered disturbing patterns of behaviour among more and more children of her age. Speckenbach both writes and directs, and weaves a modern take on a familiar fable which becomes more interesting the more it reveals itself. The first act is somewhat glacial and unfocused, but slowly the treads are drawn taut and there’s a moderately chilling comment on the position of youth in society and our responses to them within it all. The Score: 6/10
Frank The Microcinema strand saw the debut feature from music video director Richard Heslop, starring Darren Beaumont as Frank, a troubled loner who struggles with the reality of life around him, but finds friendship only in a young girl that lives next door with her collection of snails. When he finds Fidel on a beach, he takes him home and attempts to form another relationship, but Fidel proves unusual company and soon Frank finds himself more tormented than ever. It’s an assured debut from Heslop, with an unusual mixture of black comedy, deep feeling and stunning imagery, capturing the bleakness and the beauty of the surroundings perfectly. It’s difficult at the best of times to capture mental illness successfully on screen, but Frank looks at a number of aspects of the psyche and manages in them to find some surprising shades of both light and dark. Darren Beaumont is excellent as Frank, and is well supported both Con O’Neill as the brusque house guest Fidel, but it’s Heslop who’s the real star, and hopefully his first feature will be just the start of a longer career in full length features.
Following the film there was another Q & A, which included writer / director Heslop and star Beaumont, the first revelation for me was that I’d been sat two seats away from Beaumont for the duration of the entire film and actually spoken to him before the film started. Getting over that shock, it was fascinating but also somewhat frustrating to hear the struggles that Heslop even had to get the film in front of the cameras, and the struggle to get it to a wider audience. Here’s hoping Frank finds one, even though it might be an acquired taste for some. The Score: 9/10
Sleep Tight My fourth Late Night Fright of the festival was the new thriller from Jaume Balagueró, director of the first two [Rec] films and starring Luis Tosar as the janitor at an apartment block who isn’t quite the dutiful custodian that he first appears. Taking advantage of his position, he’s a silent participant in the night time life of resident Clara, but his motives are more clouded than first appears. However, he’s attracted a certain amount of attention – including another nosy girl in the block – and it could be only a matter of time before his night time visits are discovered. Balagueró works the tension of the situation masterfully, Alberto Marini’s script manages to throw up a few surprises and Tosar succeeds in switching from genial to creepy at the drop of a hat. Sleep Tight may well have you checking the wardrobe and under the bed before you put the lights out. The Score: 8/10
That was Wednesday. I always try to work in some form of rest day at some point in the festival, so most of Thursday consisted mainly of sleeping as I tried to deal with the effects of doing little but eating, travelling and watching films. However, refreshed and revitalised, I headed back for a further round of films in the evening. These were my selections for Thursday 20th September.
Yossi From Before Sunset to Clerks II, there’s been a small trend in recent years to visit characters in dramas after a long break. It would seem that our perpetual diet of sequel and follow-ups has given us a taste for living longer lives with characters from even the smallest dramas. Following this trend, Eytan Fox has decided to revisit the character of Yossi from his 2002 film Yossi & Jagger, a tale of two gay men in the Israeli military. Although the fact that there’s no Jagger in the title might be considered a spoiler for the original, Yossi covers enough ground of its own for those who haven’t seen the original. The older, more mature but now deeply repressed and frustrated Yossi we find in 2012 is struggling to find happiness, but discovers both the possibility for closure through a chance encounter at the hospital where he now works. Yossi works on two levels, further exploring the social stigma still associated with homosexuality and the effect on family relationships, but also working in the style of last year’s Weekend as a frank, honest and affectionate modern relationship movie that just happens to star two men. The sight of Yossi and his new suitor Tom walking and talking together while Tom sits on a ride-along toy giraffe was, for me, one of the highlights of the festival. The Score: 8/10
All Divided Selves The line between art and film is a tricky one to judge. Luke Fowler has made a number of works looking at the life and career of Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing over the past few years and this latest work has gained a higher profile by virtue of its nomination for this year’s Turner Prize. Fowler has assembled a mixture of newly shot footage, mainly used to construct the mood and to suggest further themes from Laing’s ideals, into a collage of comprehensive archive footage which takes a no-holds barred look at Laing, his public perception and tries to understand to some extent whether his ideas remain relevant. Psychiatry seems to be a very opinionated science, grounded much more in theory than hard fact and Fowler plays with that idea, never allowing the film to settle on a definitive view of Laing, but as a consequence it’s hard to escape the feeling that this works better where it’s showing as an art installation than it does as a feature film; on the big screen, it’s the more direct archive footage, especially a bitter confrontation with Irish talk show host Gay Byrne, that proves most compelling.
Life then had a decent stab at imitating art in the Q & A afterwards, when in one uncomfortable moment a writer for the Festival’s in house publication asked, among other things, why Fowler had refused them an interview, to which Fowler again refused to respond. While I’m not sure that question would have ever been answered in that context, one can only hope that Mr Fowler is able to give slightly more graceful declines to questioning than the one he gave that evening.
The Hidden Face (La cara oculta) Spanish horror has seen a resurgence in the last few years, and this creepy thriller was the last of my Late Night Fright of the festival. Somehow I could have seen this being an episode of the old Seventies series Tales Of The Unexpected, with the creepy atmosphere slowly ramped up, but the South American country setting feeling oddly remote and almost otherworldly. Quim Gutierrez plays a conductor whose girlfriend has left him, but when he quickly takes up with a new woman he finds himself quickly a suspect in the disappearance of his former lover. While director Andrés Baiz manages to stir up a reasonable atmosphere through subtle scares in the first half of the film, there are two main problems: the central conceit not only requires a certain lack of awareness of their surroundings, but also that you swallow it without question. More than that, the major reveal, which in a better film would come nearer the end and allow you to join the dots yourself, here comes too soon and replays too many events; second time around, the film gradually deflates and sucks energy out of what could have been a powerful ending. The Score: 6/10
Next time: I reach the final weekend of the festival, with icebergs, cross-dressing and Zac Efron in a hat.
Cambridge Film Festival Diary: Day 6
Day 6, the halfway point in the festival, and also the halfway point in my viewing plans for the festival. Seeing so many films now starts to take on something of the feeling of being halfway down a long, dark tunnel; my skin is starting to suffer slightly from the lack of sunlight – some moisturiser soon sorts that out, at least on a temporary basis – but more than that, the effects of sitting down in the same position for six to ten hours a day are starting to affect both my body and my mind.
The solution to that problem is a little more obvious – stop spending six to ten hours a day in the cinema – but it’s a solution I won’t have the luxury of for nearly another week. So by this point I started to dispense with the normal facing forward sitting position, adopting an increasing number of variations, including a sort of side-saddle and a splayed crucifix where only a small amount of me was in contact with the seat. I had to try to keep the variations down as the week went on, lest people think me a horrendous fidget, but it did just about save me from pins and needles, or worse, as the week wore on.
This, however, was what was on screen in front of my fidgeting on Tuesday 18th September.
Jiro Dreams Of Sushi For the second time in two years, I saw a documentary about a three star Michelin restaurant at the film festival. Jiro was a noticeable improvement over last year’s El Bulli, not least because it spends as much time understanding the proprietor as it does the restaurant. Sushi looks deceptively simple, just some rice, some raw fish, a little wasabi and some seasoning, but David Gelb’s documentary successfully illuminates quite why chefs need to spend up to ten years learning some of the more refined techniques before they can truly call themselves proficient, and why a man of eighty-five is still working day in, day out to create some of the finest cuisine in the world. It also takes a look at what the future might hold for both this restaurant, and a second run by one of Jiro’s sons (not the only one to enter the family business), given the longevity and dedication of their respective head chefs. I had sushi for lunch straight after the film, but I know it wasn’t a patch on Jiro’s. The Score: 8/10
Notorious The second of my Hitchcock films of the week, and while still in black and white, this now benefits from the addition of sound. It also benefits from the addition of some of the finest stars to ever grace the silver screen, including Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains. It has a fairly tortuous MacGuffin, but Notorious just goes to show why the details of those were never important, when the central love triangle is so strong. One of Hitchcock’s most successfully romantic films, it’s also a stunning example of just how good a director he was, getting supreme performances from his actors but also working his camera incredibly well, and the whole party sequence is an absolute joy and a thrill from start to finish. Grant and Bergman make a satisfying screen couple (due in no small part to Grant’s off screen coaching, apparently) and seeing it on the big screen confirmed its place in my top 5 Hitchcocks. The Score: 10/10
The Idiot Another carry-over theme from Monday, this time the Estonian cinema thread, but unlike the previous day’s Temptation Of St. Tony I found The Idiot a somewhat frustrating experience. Based on the Dostoevsky novel of the same name, The Idiot is the story of a Russian prince who returns to his homeland after years away in an asylum in Switzerland. Once back, he manages to fall for not one but two women, and slowly but surely his innocence in such matters and the personalities of the two women start to make all of their lives unravel. The first act is strong, not only setting out the narrative clearly but with excellent staging and some nice touches, including a contemporary twang to the soundtrack. Sadly, as the film progresses the staginess takes over, the invention becomes more and more absent and the whole production becomes dry and airless.
By the last act, the courage of any convictions has been lost and certain scenes – for example, when one character sends another a hedgehog as a metaphor for their relationship – lack any sort of sense that they belong in the same film. (It would be worth mentioning that it was at this point I became slightly hysterical, which may be the reaction every time I see a hedgehog from now on.) If only the mood and inventiveness of the first third could have been maintained, The Idiot would have been excellent, but sadly it goes down as at best a brave attempt. The Score: 4/10
Anda Union All of the other films in the festival I saw were showing at the spiritual home of the festival, the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, but I had determined I would make one trip out to one of the other venues to take in a film. That turned out to be the last in a series of films showing at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre, in this case a documentary about Mongolian music group Anda Union. I wasn’t 100% convinced about the venue; while the projection and sound that had been set up were excellent, my first attempt at a seat (in what could be best described as the stalls, in what was originally a Victorian theatre) left me craning my neck too much to see the screen, my second seat was behind a curtain with no view of the screen at all and my third had a flip chart board blocking half the screen. Thankfully the screening was only sparsely populated, otherwise I may have been struggling for a decent seat.
In terms of the film itself, the documentary tracks the group on a 10,000 kilometre journey across the steppes and plains as they meet with family and friends and take their music wherever they go. Showing everything from the production of their instruments through to concert footage, it’s a fascinating insight into a life in another world, and while there are no earth-shattering revelations from the footage following them travelling, the music itself is thrilling. It’s a mixture of string instruments and percussion, coupled with both throat singing and more conventional singing, and with track names like Ten Thousand Galloping Horses, the passion for their people and their culture shines through. The Score: 7/10
Sinister Last up was my third visit to the Late Night Frights thread, for a haunted house chiller starring Ethan Hawke. The premise is stripped back to the bare bones, and all the more effective for it; Hawke plays a novelist who’s based his career on true crime investigation, but his last hit is disappearing into the distance at an ever increasing rate, and he’s going to increasing lengths to get a few more minutes of fame to add to the fifteen he’s already had. Alienating the police before he’s barely set foot in the town, he finds a box of Super 8 footage and a camera in the otherwise empty loft space, which hold the key to the horrors of more than he realises.
Sinister absolutely nails the atmosphere, and has the feel of a high end, high quality Stephen King adaptation about it. The last time I jumped out of my seat in the cinema was during Neil Marshall’s The Descent, so credit to Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill for causing my seat and I to part company. The one real flaw is with Hawke’s character, who has two unfortunate afflictions required to maintain the tension; he repeatedly makes poor decisions in terms of his own and his family’s safety, happy to hide behind an unspoken truth not being a lie, but that’s compounded by the fact that every single person in the audience will have put all the pieces together before his character does. If you can forgive these flaws, then Sinister is surprisingly creepy and well worth a late night visit. The Score: 7/10
Next time: with the home stretch in site, I’ll be covering days seven and eight, with more scares, more giraffes and some micro-budget cinema.
Review: Looper
The Pitch: Witness to the future.
The Review: Is it possible to know that you’ll love a film before you even see it? If I look through the list of my favourite films, then certain types of films keep cropping up: action movies, thrillers, science fiction and in particular time travel movies. Despite their tricksy ways with time, everything from The Terminator movies to Twelve Monkeys has been a particular favourite of mine over the years, and Back To The Future still retains its place as my favourite film of all time. But it’s not just the possibilities of time travel that cast their spell over me, it’s the rich tapestry that each of these films uses time travel to weave, in each case skilfully combining different story elements into a compelling tale. But for each of those classics, there’s a Timecop or an A Sound Of Thunder. So does Looper have all of the required elements to add it to the classic list?
First, there’s the setting. Looper raises the bar on other time travel movies by having no passage set in contemporary times, and using that to derive its unique selling point. Think of most time travel movies and they consist of characters from our time travelling forwards or backwards in time, or vice versa. Looper is set entirely in the future, and predominantly in two different futuristic years; time travel, having been invented by 2074, allows the criminal underworld to dispose of their evidence by sending it back in time thirty years to 2044. Loopers are the clean-up crew of the relative past, instantly killing off the criminals of the future as they are sent back in time, then cleanly disposing of the evidence. They do this in the knowledge that one day, they’ll be the one on the mat facing them on the other end of the a giant gun, at which point the loop is closed, with a pay-off sent along to help the last thirty years of their life run smoothly. And heaven help anyone who doesn’t manage to close their loop when their future self comes visiting…
In addition to the entirely futuristic setting, it manages to be an entirely convincing futuristic setting, regardless of the time period, feeling both a natural extension of current times, but at the same time suitably lived in. Not since Minority Report have we seen such a well thought out and absolutely convincing future setting, with not a single detail feeling out of place. That feeling of reality is also down to the characters, who while feeling totally of their era have issues and problems which are universal, even if they are set up by time travel shenanigans. The biggest trick for any film set across two periods to pull off is a convincing pair of actors playing the same role at different times, especially when one of those actors has one of the most famous faces on the planet. But thanks to some convincing prosthetics and the power of the actors concerned, you will never doubt for one second that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a young Bruce Willis; an impressive trick to pull off when they have so many scenes together.
Two things have elevated those other time travel movies to classic status: their mind and their soul. By their soul, I’m thinking of the tone of the story, the emotions that support the narrative, be it the comedy and romance of Back To The Future, the pulse-pounding threat of the Terminator or the poignant inevitability of Twelve Monkeys. Looper has a sense of humour, in keeping with director Rian Johnson’s previous films (Brick and The Brothers Bloom) but also an occasionally sick and sadistic touch, more darkly comic, revelling in the abilities of messing with characters who straddle two time periods. It also has soul, revealed in the second half of the movie which takes in a complete change of setting – and one which may prove to much of a right-angled turn for some audiences revelling in the futuristic nature of the backdrop to deal with – but one which allows the acting talents of Emily Blunt and young newcomer Pierce Gagnon to shine.
The other aspect is the mind, the high concept which instantly nails the story in your mind. What would you do if you went back in time and met your parents? Or if you were the mother of the future saviour of the human race, but spent your life hunted because of it? Looper’s hook seems to be initially whether you’d be able to kill your future self if the price is right, but in that Emily Blunt-based second half reveals itself to be something more basic and profound. The time travelling logic is as nebulous as that of many of its classic forebears (trying to make sense of timelines in most time travel movies will leave you scratching your head if you look too closely, and Looper actively plays with these expectations), but that shouldn’t detract from writer / director Johnson’s achievement; to create a time travel film which calls back in subtle ways to the greatness of its forebears, but also creates a unique vision with a mind and a soul all its own. I suspect people will still be talking about this one thirty years from now.
Why see it at the cinema: Movies like this are made for the big screen, and the sheer level of incidental detail in the background of the first hour needs to be seen as big as possible to truly appreciate, but it’s also best seen with an audience, as you’re bound to want to talk about it afterwards.
The Score: 10/10
Cambridge Film Festival Diary: Day 5
Day 5 of the festival, and this was the peak I was working to. Like a gym exercise bike attempting to mimic riding up and down a mountain, I’d started slow with days of three or four films, but the Monday of the festival was always destined to be the big day. If you’re at the festival morning, noon and night then each screen gets through typically six screenings or programmes in a day, so with some careful planning and no care for your own personal sanity, it is possible to squeeze in six films. That, on Monday, is precisely what I did.
I’ve blogged before on the challenges of seeing seven films in a day, and the care that needs to be taken. Seeing six at a festival is a slightly different challenge, as choice is reduced and the planning made somewhat easier, but the logistics of taking in food – not to mention avoiding a DVT – still make it a challenge not to be entered into lightly. The real key is ensuring variety, and the selections I’d made, from Estonia to London (in two eras) via Germany and France, helped to prepare me for the day ahead.
These were the films I saw on Monday 17th September.
The Temptation Of St. Tony (Püha Tõnu kiusamine) Long time readers will know I’m not a fan of awards, as they get more right than they do wrong. Despite quite liking the Danish film In A Better World which won the Best Actor, there was already a long list from that year’s official submissions I liked more (Incendies, Of Gods And Men, Dogtooth, Confessions, Biutiful and Tirza, in case you were wondering), and that list has now gotten one longer. It’s also testament to the benefit of occasions such as the film festival, as this was showing in a short Estonian season, and as far as I can tell has never had a theatrical release in this country before.
Given how few of the list of 66 submissions from that year have surfaced in this country, that can only be regarded as a crying shame, especially if Temptation is anything to go by. Divided into half a dozen separate chapters, but with overlapping narratives and characters, each explores facets of mortality as Tony reflects on life and existence. It starts as a black comedy and isn’t afraid to explore some darkly dramatic places as well, with some stunning and occasionally surreal images; the humour and the unique images will hook you in before director Veiko Õunpuu takes things up a notch, going to some deep, dark places on Tony’s journey of self-discovery. Taavi Eelmaa’s poised and often expressionless face marks his initially passive journey through events around him, becoming crucially more involved as he attempts to break away from and subvert his safe, domestic middle-aged existence. Look out also for an appearance from Denis Lavant, who stars in Holy Motors and which could also be a companion piece to this film. (Spoiler for day 11: I preferred this. I think. More on that later.) The Score: 9/10
Untouchable (Intouchables) It’s a French film, it’s already been a massive hit across the continent and it’s been picked up by the Weinsteins, and it currently sits at position number 73 on the Internet Movie Database’s list of the top 250 films of all time, as voted for by users. So what’s not to love? The story of a grumpy, frustrated quadriplegic who decides to shake up his life a little by hiring a Senegalese man just looking to meet the minimum requirements for his benefit claim, it’s a feel good film of epic proportions that isn’t afraid to have a laugh along with the characters at either their backgrounds or their afflictions, and there’s a huge amount of chemistry in the relationship between disabled but wealthy Phillippe (François Cluzet) and troubled but charismatic carer Driss (Omar Sy). Indeed, what’s not to love?
Quite a lot, actually. If you approach the film with blinkers on, just looking at the relationship in isolation, it’s easy to see the charm and entertainment of the lead pairing, but as you cast your gaze wider the stereotypes and clichés stack up with an alarming frequency. Black man likes Seventies disco music but upper class white man is into classical music? Fair enough. Black man has a view that modern art is just squiggles on a paper and anyone can do it? Erm… White rich man has disaffected, troubled daughter (with boyfriend in tow), carer comes from a troubled background with disappointed mother and even more troubled siblings? White rich man also has a PA who’s the only one immune to the charms of his black carer, but she turns out to be a… I’ll let you guess; if you can’t, this may be the film for you, but it certainly wasn’t for me, the engineered storytelling (based on a true story, but with so many details put through the poor storytelling mangle that it always feels fake) and the inability to give any of the subplots the time they need simply because so many have been stacked up makes Untouchable start to feel top heavy and ultimately a rather cynical attempt to play on your emotions and engage your sympathies, almost an entertainment-seeking monster than an actual film. The Score: 5/10
The Big Eden It seems every country has one; a good time entrepreneur with a seedy image but charisma to burn and an almost inexplicable ability to charm the ladies. America have their Hugh Hefner, Britain their Peter Stringfellow and Germany their Rolf Eden. Eden came to notoriety through a set of Berlin nightclubs that he set up (and which all failed dramatically once he’d sold them off), and The Big Eden presents Rolf’s life story, interspersed with interviews from both his contemporaries and the many women he’s been with over the years. A number of those women have also produced children, and their stories help to add a contemporary perspective to a story that is, by nature, slightly rooted in the past. Other than the significant age range of the children he’s sired, The Big Eden is a little unremarkable, but it does succeed to an extent in getting underneath what’s made such a success of the man, and how he’s become so appealing to the ladies. The Score: 7/10
The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog Thanks to the BFI and their restoration efforts, a number of Alfred Hitchcock films have now been returned to cinemas looking better than ever, and the Cambridge Film Festival had a season of a dozen of the master’s top works, both from his rich Hollywood period and from his silent British days. The Lodger is one of those earlier films, but bears all of the hallmarks of his later work, not least in his willingness to corrupt the image of a screen idol of the time, in this case Ivor Novello as the shady traveller who takes room and lodgings at the same time that a serial killer named The Avenger is terrorising London every Tuesday. The methodical nature, the plot twists and the direct camera work are all present and correct and it clearly demonstrates that it wasn’t just in Hollywood and in colour that Hitch was able to work his magic.
The only slight downside about this particular print was the score by Nitin Sawhney, which while evocative of both mood and period for the most part, used a couple of more contemporary sounding songs which jarred slightly, but since they were out of the director’s control I’m willing to let him off this time. The Score: 8/10
Now Is Good The second film I’ve seen at the festival, after Come As You Are, to ostensibly feature a character or characters searching for sex as part of a wider purpose, Now Is Good isn’t really about that at all. Sex is just one of many narrative diversions that this story, based on Jenny Downham’s fiction novel “Before I Die”, takes along the road of trying to understand what life must be like for a teenager dying of leukaemia and whether or not she can encapsulate a lifetime of experiences into a few short months. Dakota Fanning plays the stricken teen Tessa, perfecting a cut-glass English accent (which does occasionally feel at odds with the very contemporary Brighton setting), and Jeremy “War Horse” Irvine is saddled with the unfortunate job of being the eventual object of her affections, which mainly consists of standing in the background of scenes, alternating between looking shocked, repulsed and a bit gorgeous.
Where Now Is Good really resonates is with the characters and performances of Tessa’s parents, played by Paddy Considine and Olivia Williams. Considine is the overly controlling father who is struggling to come to terms with the fact he’ll outlive his daughter, and Williams the estranged mother who’s doing her best to take apathy and incompetence to new levels. Without their performances, Now Is Good would be just another teen drama, and possibly a slightly exploitative one; with them it becomes a rounded drama, which will engage the emotions of anyone with half a heart. If you can put aside a poorly handled sub-plot involving Tessa’s best friend (a cheery Kaya Scodelario) then Now Is Good succeeds on its own terms, and any of a sensitive disposition should make sure they pack a couple of hankies for the last act. The Score: 7/10
The film was followed by a generally cheery and pleasant Q & A with star Jeremy Irvine and producer Peter Czernin. Ranging from insights into what it was like to act opposite Considine (apparently him waving a butter knife around at the breakfast table during a scene came across as particularly menacing) to the experience of a girl with leukaemia actually coming to set, which was apparently surprisingly life-affirming. It’s only a slight shame that more of Irvine’s genuine charm that came across in the flesh wasn’t captured in the film.
Tower Block A very British take on the high rise drama, it’s a simple set-up that tries its hardest to wring tension out of a set of generally unsympathetic and unlikeable characters. A murder takes place on the top floor of a tower block, but the residents are either too scared or too partisan to get involved with finding the culprit. The block is being evacuated by developers, and eventually those top floor residents are (conveniently) the last residents left in the building, all the easier to be picked off by a mystery sniper. The quality of the actors is good, with new British talent such as Sheridan Smith and Russell Tovey mixing with the likes of more established names of the likes of Ralph Brown and Julie Graham, but the only real standout in a coterie of people you wouldn’t want to live next to is Jack O’Connell as the protection money collector Kurtis, who makes unpleasantness an art form and is all the more watchable for it.
Directors James Nunn and Ronnie Thompson do what they can to wring tension from the situation and there’s some moody scenes, but genuine tension proves harder to come by. It’s not all their fault; while James Moran’s script does deal out a few good lines to O’Connell, Smith and Tovey, it’s a little pedestrian and often predictable, and doesn’t match up either to his work on the likes of Doctor Who and Torchwood, or indeed to his Danny Dyer-featuring horror Severance from 2005. This is one middling Brit thriller it’ll be hard to get stuck into. The Score: 6/10
Next time: sushi, suspicion, Sinister and some amazing Mongolian music in my not quite alliterative day 6.
Cambridge Film Festival Diary: Day 4
Sunday is supposedly a day of rest, but it’s also an ideal day for the cinema. Taking on something like the film festival requires a certain level of pacing if you’re going to see as much as I’ve planned to, so after two very full days on days 2 and 3 day 4 was the chance just to keep my hand in, before the big push over the next few days. Sunday morning’s normal routine was followed by Sunday lunch with Mrs Evangelist, eaten on our laps while attempting to keep up with Celebrity Masterchef. (Never let it be said I don’t know how to show a lady a good time.) Mrs E, as I refer to her on Twitter, is a more average film fan and is also a shift worker thanks to people rather inconsiderately being ill outside of office hours, so the festival is my chance to head off on my own and explore some of the more esoteric delights that cinema has to offer.
Sunday’s particular delights, then, were for fans of Jack Kerouac, Icelandic music and animals, but all in very specific ways.
On The Road This adaptation of the famous Kerouac novel has taken a ridiculous amount of time to come to screen, and in the process has been throug a number of different hands; it’s a shame to say that it doesn’t entirely appear to be worth all that effort. The director who finally brings this to the screen is Walter Salles, and he’s retained his gift for spectacular scenery and mind-searing visuals; what unfortunately is lacking, in both his direction and Jose Rivera’s screenplay, is the lyrical rhythm that has made On The Road so enduring as a work of fiction, and resorting to simply reading sequences of prose out at various points simply shows the gap in interest level between book and screen, the film version never quite managing to come truly alive.
Of the main cast members, the only one that stands out is Garrett Hedlund as the mischievous Moriarty; Sam Riley is a good actor in search of the right role, being as fundamentally miscast here as he was in last year’s Brighton Rock. It’s the supporting turns from the likes of Viggo Mortensen that will live longest in the memory, and while Kristen Stewart has a certain amount of fizz, she gets very little to do. On The Road very much conforms to the stereotype of Stewart’s contemporaries, great to look at but with little of substance on the inside. The Score: 6/10
Grandma Lo-Fi (Amma Lo-Fi) The story of an Icelandic woman in her Seventies who turned her hand to making music with a small keyboard and a variety of household sounds, Grandma Lo-Fi is small but almost perfectly formed, capturing completely the charm and eccentricity of Sigridur Nielsdottir, but also what has made her music so appealing to many. Detailing her background and her approach to her music, right through to the delightful cover art she produces for the CDs she has pressed herself, it’s an inspiration as to what can be achieved through the simple process of application. Despite the short running time, there are a few odd kinks in the tail, but if you’re looking for a documentary to give you a warm glow, Grandma Lo-Fi should suffice, another entry into what is currently proving a stand-out year for music documentaries. The Score: 8/10
Postcards From The Zoo (Kebun binatang) Finally for day 4, a fairy tale of sorts, set in and around Jakarta Zoo in the Indonesian capital. It’s the story of a young girl, Lana, who grows up in the zoo and dreams of being able to touch the belly of the giraffe, frustratingly out of reach for many reasons. The story draws parallels with the conservation of wildlife and the issues facing endangered species in Lana’s journey through the zoo and into the city beyond in the company of a magical cowboy. However, what may sound on the page as a story book piece comes across on the screen as flat and uninspired, none of the various story elements really gelling and the characters just not working. It’s a brave attempt and is willing to explore plenty of facets of life in the Indonesian big city; it’s just a shame that it couldn’t find any to truly engage with. The Score: 5/10
Quote of the day: “Marylou, spread your knees and let’s smoke some weed!” – Dean Moriarty, On The Road
Health update: More walking, mainly to work off the pizza and, ahem, chocolate cake I had for dinner. Just starting to get slightly sore knees. Being tall is not all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to small cinema seats. Only another week to go.
Next time: Day 5, thanks to the unstinting passage of time, and my busiest day of the festival, from Estonian mortality drama to British horror with just about everything in between.
Cambridge Film Festival Diary: Day 2
Day two, the first full day of the festival. By now you’d expect me to be organised, but the sheer volume of my bookings was already working against me. As with the previous two years, I’d arrived for the first film and then all of my tickets had printed out, a long stream like some form of Wall Street ticker tape warning of impending crisis. My crisis came from the fact that, as always, the tickets don’t seem to print off in any particular order; so on day one I had a long stream of 36 tickets from the main booking, and by day two that was four still fairly long streams where I’d taken the previous days’ tickets out of the middle. The sight of me performing what must have looked like the world’s least interesting magic trick I hope at least kept the staff of the Picturehouse entertained.
Anyway, onto the day itself: this was Friday 14th September 2012.
Hope Springs
The day started with a repeat screening of one of the previous night’s opening films. Hope Springs is the tale of a couple in their 31st year of marriage, where Tommy Lee Jones is content to follow the same predictable, pedestrian routine but Meryl Streep yearns to put some spark back into their marriage. A good proportion of the film is either a two-hander with Jones and Streep formulating their issues, or a three-way with Steve Carell (less exciting than it sounds, I can assure you) as the therapist looking to work through their issues for them.
I certainly wouldn’t devalue the idea of couples therapy as such, but the film never convinces in terms of the therapy itself, feeling far too superficial to really get at the deep roots of the couple’s problems. In terms of entertainment value it’s a moderate success; Streep can normally be relied upon to be a class act, but she comes across as slightly mannered here, and Carell is required to simply turn up and be as calm as possible while keeping a straight face while saying words like “masturbate” or “penis”. Most of the joy comes from watching Tommy Lee Jones be a spectacular grump for as long as possible, which also makes his character slightly unsympathetic. Recommended if you’ve been married a while and can’t afford $4,000 dollars for counselling, although I would suggest avoiding a repeat of what Streep and Jones get up to in their movie theatre visit. The Score: 6/10
Avalon
Scandinavian art cinema takes a step backwards in the form of this mercifully short study of the trials and tribulations of nightclub promoter Janne (Johannes Brost). Enjoying life without complete regard for others, an unfortunate accident leaves him with a number of problems on his hands, but neither he nor the film are interested in getting anywhere near solving those problems. A dark film offering little hope for any of its characters, lifelessly shot it’s only the weathered performance of Brost that’s likely to keep you invested. Don’t expect to see a huge return on that investment. The Score: 4/10
Camp 14: Total Control Zone
I was going to start this paragraph with “harrowing”, but I’m not sure that any words come close to capturing the dehumanising brutality that Shin Dong-Hyuk had to endure growing up in a North Korean labour camp. While there’s a small element of talking heads from other participants who’ve also escaped the North’s regime, the majority of the film is based around Shin’s reflections on his experiences and his attempts to cope with life in a more civilised world. His memories of the camp are captured in some part in animation, with a Schindler’s List colour palette giving way to an understated animation style that worked so well for Waltz With Bashir a couple of years ago, but the most powerful sequences are actually set in Shin’s flat, his silences and difficulties in recalling his experience making the viewer uncomfortably complicit in asking him to review this. A heartbreaking sense of a life almost irredeemably lost isn’t totally well served by the structure, and a better edit could take this up by a point or even two, but it’s still a deeply affecting portrayal of the human spirit and its attempts to overcome adversity. The Score: 8/10
Barbara
Germany’s entry for the 2012 Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film is another tale exploring life in the divided Germany of post war years, in this case a tale of two doctors in a small country hospital in East Germany. Barbara (Nina Hoss) is under close scrutiny in her relocation, and for good reason given that she has a number of secrets she’s trying to hide; André (Ronald Zehrfeld) has different reasons for being there, but both are working through their own lives while trying to do their best for the succession of young patients coming through their doors. Zehrfeld has charisma to burn and nicely offsets Hoss’s colder, but still sympathetic, performance. Director Christian Petzold tells his tale in a measured fashion, but doesn’t quite succeed in generating tension where all of the possibilities present themselves; it’s still a well fashioned story, kept alive by the performances of its two leads. The Score: 7/10
Tridentfest 2012
And so to Tridentfest, the collection of short films and music videos that has claimed the first Friday night of the festival for the past few years. If you’ve never been, then it’s a collection of very local film makers (often filming in their own houses or the Picturehouse bar) exploring different facets of film making, sometimes thoughtful, occasionally gory, but almost always very funny.
This year there was nothing to match last year’s The Purple Fiend for length (the longest film clocking in at barely 10 minutes), but variety is the spice of life and we certainly got that again this year. Highlights for me were some of the music videos, especially one to a song from British Public (I think) which seemed to have a chorus consisting of chanting “bears” over and over again – which, unsurprisingly, stuck in my head for days – and Chess Man, a real life insight into a man who plays lots of chess and makes the occasional piece of artwork, much of it shot on VHS-C tapes acquired off the internet.
But it’s the eccentricity, the laughs and the just plain down right oddness that make Tridentfest so memorable; from Teaching Simon To Skate, mixing a sense of British sporting endeavour into some Jackass-like skateboarding pain, to Andy Needs His Milk, an utterly disturbing but memorable tale of a disembodied but demanding head. The evening was rounded off with one of the many shorts from The Fantastic Poo Brothers, called Powers; it might be one of the most pointlessly stupid things I’ve ever seen, but four days later I’m still smiling when I think about it. That is the quite literal joy of Tridentfest, and hopefully a second screening later in the week will give you chance to see what you may have missed.
The evening was rounded off with a chat with a couple of the members of the Project Trident team, which brought to light the fact that the poster in the foyer for Tridentfest bears a poster quote from my review of The Purple Fiend last year, as indeed does the DVD case, which they were kind enough to give me a copy of. Possibly my greatest achievement as a blogger to date. Possibly as a human being. (Sorry, I don’t get out much.)
Next time: Day 3, featuring Hemel, V.O.S., Dead Before Dawn 3D and how traffic nearly killed the radio star before he even got started.
Cambridge Film Festival Diary: Day 1
One of the highlights of my year for the past two years since I started this blog, the Cambridge Film Festival kicked off again this week. For my third year at the festival, thought I’d try something a little different, given that the rate at which I manage to review films makes me the Geoffrey Boycott of blogging. (I promise not to state that my grandmother could have directed that better or that even a stick of rhubarb could have out-acted Kristen Stewart, as Mr Boycott invariably would.) So this year, I’ll be picking up more of a diary feel, which means I can at least give an opinion on everything, not just the feature films, and also share my experiences of the festival when I’m not sat in front of a cinema screen. (I would expect me to be sat mainly in the bar, although there’s already been a few other highlights.)
So here’s my rundown of day 1, Thursday 13th September 2012.
About Elly The first film I’ve seen at the festival in the past two years was a 10/10 both times, and ended up in my top 10 of the year (Winter’s Bone and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy respectively, thank you for asking). While gratifying to see an outstanding film first up, it then leaves the problem that everything coming after it proves to be anticlimactic. About Elly neatly sidestepped that problem for me by just being great.
Actually the film before A Separation, Asghar Farhadi has now two definite pieces of work to show his ability to blend compelling narratives with suspense, to shade his characters rather than casting them as completely black or white and to be able to comfortably mix Iranian social issues with a more general backdrop. For the first half, About Elly could be set on a beach just about anywhere but events unfold in such a way that social pressures and gender issues help to shape the drama but to keep it accessible.
The story of a beach trip with turns to near tragedy and then an unfolding mystery, Farhadi keeps his characters grounded and believable and it’s to the credit of all involved that I genuinely couldn’t predict the outcome. Without being outlandish, there’s enough subtle twists and revelations of motives to keep you hooked throughout. Following in the footsteps of the likes of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panadi, Farhadi is part of a strong generation of Iranian film makers, and About Elly and A Separation put Farhadi at the forefront of that group. The Score: 8/10
Come As You Are (Hasta La Vista) Thanks to the Paralympics this summer, issues of disability and equal rights have been at the forefront of the minds of the nation, so this Flemish import may be arriving at just the right time. Loosely inspired by the experiences of Asta Philpot, three Flemish youths of varying degrees of disability have decided that they can no longer face the prospect of a lifetime of struggling to lose their virginity, and on hearing of a brothel in Spain that caters for those with similar conditions they determine to set off on a road trip, which goes about as well as road trips in comedies generally do, except with more jokes about disabilities.
During the Paralympics, certain tweeting comedians caused a furore by some of their humour, drawing a clear line where jokes should be fearful of crossing. Hasta La Vista understands this line well and always invites you to laugh with, never at, its participants when it comes to their disabilities, but to laugh at them for the same human fallibilities shared by everyone, whether disabled or not. The idea of heading to a brothel certainly won’t generate sympathy with everyone, but the plight and frustrations of these three lovable losers will keep you consistently entertained. A fantasy sequence near the end, intended to illustrate the liberation of the characters as they near the fulfilment of their quest, may actually cause you to question the reality of what you’ve watched and the ending feels a little pat while also leaving threads unresolved, but Hasta La Vista is still a journey well worth taking. The Score: 7/10
The Snows Of Kilimanjaro (Les Neiges Du Kilimandjaro)Robert Guédiguian has been to the Cambridge Film Festival before, and this time returns with a film inspired by a Victor Hugo poem, La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries). Set in and around a French shipyard town, Jean-Pierre Darroussin plays Michel, a French trade union representative whose show of solidarity in entering his name into a redundancy lottery at the shipyard sees him made redundant along with nineteen others. The film explores the ramifications on both Michel and his family and friends, but also on another of the nineteen, Christophe (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who is attempting to raise his two younger brothers in the absence of their work-away mother.
Guédiguian is keep to explore the social ramifications of the decision, reflecting the current economic climate more sharply than even when the film was first shown at Cannes last year, but this makes for a slightly uneasy marriage of political discourse and family drama. Views of the characters are kept broad, but somehow the film never quite gets truly to the root of some of their motivations, and the eventual resolution to the plot strains credibility somewhat. Still, the performances of the whole cast are generally strong and evoke a suitable amount of empathy, but Snows may not last in the memory for as long as the recession might. The Score: 6/10
The film was followed by a Q & A session with Guédiguian, who spoke through the use of an interpreter, feeling that he could more correctly convey his answers in French than in English. I studied French for five years at school and a further year at uni, and can often follow decent chunks of French films without reading all of the subtitles, but confronted with an actual fluent French speaker discussing the finer elements of his film left me feeling the need to scurry back to my worn copy of Tricolore from school and do some urgent revision. Guédiguian was a delight, though, charming and erudite and fielding a long procession of questions in both French and English.
In summary:
Film of the day: About Elly
Quote of the day: “F*** Ryanair!” – various characters, Come As You Are
Festival stamina: I should explain; I’m trying to lose three stone at present, put on by poor eating due to a busy work life, and am trying to maintain that over the course of the festival, in addition to regular exercise. Hopefully this diary will help me to keep track of how that’s going. Day 1 was a firecracker chicken at the nearby Wagamama, and was suitably filling and low calorie. I also got around forty minutes’ walking in two and from my car, so energy levels remain high one day in.
Coming on day 2: Hope Springs, Avalon, Camp 14: Total Control Zone, Barbara and Tridentfest 2012.
The Half Dozen Special: Cambridge Film Festival 2012
This is a local blog, and for eleven days a year it becomes one for local people, too. Far away from the bright lights, the razzle-dazzle and the overpriced food of London, many other major cities have film festivals during the course of the year and tomorrow the 32nd Cambridge Film Festival gets underway. I’ve often thought about trying to get down to London for some of that festival action (happening in October, in case you’ve been living under a rock), but with this much varied, and quality, film entertainment right on my doorstep then surely it makes sense to take advantage?
And take advantage I have. I packed in 19 films in my first visit in 2010 and, despite a slightly reduced programme due to other factors, still caught 27 last year. So, in what is now becoming something of a tradition, I’ve assembled every trailer I can find for the films I’m seeing. It’s not been easy – the likes of more mainstream releases such as On The Road and Liberal Arts are easily accessible, but two films have eluded me completely (both from the MicroCinema thread); another, from the Catalan stream, has no online trailer (but I did find the whole film, without subtitles; the first of four parts is here for your viewing bemusement) and a number of other trailers are again appearing in a foreign language without subtitles, a situation which will thankfully be rectified once I get to the cinema.
Sadly, time travel hasn’t yet been invented so I can’t see everything. The likes of Woody Allen’s new one, Ashes (with Ray Winstone and Jim Sturgess) , Blind Spot and Big Boys Gone Bananas have all eluded me due to scheduling conflicts – and that’s just A to B! Still, with 39 films and 2 short programmes, I’m not going to complain too much. So if you’re not local, get a cup of tea and a biscuit, sit back and spend around an hour and a half getting a flavour for what’s possible at a film festival. And if you’re there in person, don’t forget to say hi. I”ll be the tall one with square eyes and an even squarer posterior.
Review: The Imposter
The Pitch: All in the family.
The Review: Who am I? You’re somewhere, reading this review and this blog, and will likely fall into one of two groups. You may have somehow come to this site via the wonder of the internet, somehow curious as to the thoughts of a random stranger on blockbusters and documentaries, possibly one with similar tastes. You may have wandered over via Twitter, read a few reviews and begun to form a picture in your mind. An over-zealous student looking to make his way in the film world, perhaps? Or a grumpy old man with a love of both films and the sound of his own voice. Already those two sentences have limited your options by 50% – if, of course, you believe a single word I say. And why should you? You don’t know me from Adam. Indeed, maybe I could even be Adam – maybe attempts to name myself to the contrary are just an idle attempt at misdirection. I could be a five foot tall coal miner or a greying Cabinet minister, and unless you met me, you just wouldn’t know. But surely if you’d met me, you’d know who I was. Wouldn’t you?
Identity and integrity are the common themes of Bart Layton’s documentary, which attempts to lay out the curious tale of Nicholas Barclay, a thirteen year old American boy who simply goes missing one day in 1994, to the complete horror of his family. Three years later, they get a phone call from Spain, where the boy has been reported found. Time changes all of us, especially at that age, but Nicholas seems to have undergone a transformation that even Edmund Blackadder would find hard to pull off. Three years in Spain, poorly treated by his abductors, have left him unable to speak without an accent, and thanks to his mistreatment his hair colour has also gone much darker. As have his eyes. But his family know immediately that they’ve found their long lost son, so why is the only person seemingly doubting this a private investigator who comes upon the case almost by accident?
The Imposter plays out with a combination of styles, mixing the standard talking heads approach of the majority of the main players with dramatic reconstructions set at the time of the disappearance and reappearance. Initially the talking heads don’t do the family any favours (Spain, for example, is “all the way across the other side of the country”), but it would be hard to fault their willingness to accept such a miracle if presented to them. But that, in and of itself, wouldn’t make for much of a remarkable story. What does set the story apart are the narrative twists and turns, piling implausibility on top of disbelief which would be impossible to credit if the movie hadn’t credibly presented the evidence, even to the extent of archive TV news footage at the time. The Imposter manages to cram in as many twists as a classic noir, but never loses its through line or its intent.
Much of this is the other half of the film, as in addition to those talking heads the recreations of the events as they unfold help to truly bring the drama alive. To say that the early scenes are a little reminiscent of The Usual Suspects is intended as a favourable comparison, even evoking such direct comparisons as the teenager sat in a police station, casting his eyes over the bulletin board. But it’s also the storytelling rhythm of Suspects and its kin that The Imposter feeds off, with the recreations feeling more at home in the thriller genre than the documentary. Layton tightens the tension like a screw, never allowing it to dissipate for a minute, and by the time the later revelations come The Imposter exerts a vice like grip which it never relinquishes.
Back to that Usual Suspects comparison. While many such films have a slow reveal, The Imposter plays its first trump card immediately; imagine Keyser Soze staring down the barrel of the camera with dead-eyed certainty, wearing a T-shirt saying “I’m Not To Be Trusted!” Layton never attempts to portray his subjects as anything other than the classic unreliable narrator’s extended family, but still it’s to his credit that the techniques he employs will not only help you to empathise, but by the end be as desperate to find the truth as that dogged private investigator. Who am I? That question isn’t actually important, it’s a red herring, as long as you believe me when I say that The Imposter is one of the finest documentaries in years and hopefully not the last we’ll see of Bart Layton. And you know me; I wouldn’t lie to you, would I?
Why see it at the cinema: With the cinematic qualities of a great thriller, coupled with the knowledge that it’s based on fact, you’ll not only enjoy the visuals but also possibly be more drawn in by the sound of gasping all around you. Layton works the cinema screen like an established master and The Imposter is not to be missed.
The Score: 10/10
Review: Lawless
The Pitch: The bad, the ugly and the pretty.
The Review: For two actors who’ve got fairly similar résumés in terms of roles taken, you couldn’t really imagine two more different actors than Shia LaBoeuf and Tom Hardy. Both have mixed more serious roles with blockbuster fair, but LaBoeuf is from the Sam Worthington School Of Modern Acting, where major casting directors inexplicably keep putting him front and centre for major roles, despite his performances being eerily similar from Transformers to Wall Street. Hardy on the other hand is a cinematic chameleon, and comparing his performances in the likes of Warrior and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – and that’s just last year – it’s hard to imagine any role that he wouldn’t take a stab at. LaBoeuf had stardom thrust upon him, but at 26 still has the baby face of a young DiCaprio, another actor who had to earn his years before maturing as an actor, while Hardy at 34 has had a long, hard struggle, and his breakthrough in Star Trek: Nemesis ten years ago was a false start before directors such as Nicolas Winding Refn and Christopher Nolan began to find the best ways to tap his unique talents. So, of course, the next logical step for director John Hillcoat is to cast them as brothers.
They might seem like an uneasy partnership at first, but Hillcoat’s previous features, such as The Proposition and The Road, have done a good job of putting together eclectic casts and getting the best out of them. The Proposition was a Western-cum-road movie in the Outback, and The Road a very literal road movie with a post apocalyptic twist that gave it almost a siege mentality. That mindset is a common theme to the claustrophobic setting of the Western, and is pushed to the fore here, a tale of egos too big for the small town even before the outsiders roll up. The themes might be all Western but there’s a Chicago gangster polish, as if we’re on the set of a Sergio Leone epic, only to discover that The Untouchables is filming next door and they’re sharing props and extras. Throw in an Amish-like church community for good measure, and it’s a volatile melting pot just waiting to go off… the problem being that it never really does.
The fault doesn’t lie with (most of) the actors. There’s quality across the board here, from Guy Pearce’s satisfyingly creepy turn as a law enforcer to Gary Oldman’s all-too-brief turn as a high ranking mobster and even Dane De Haan, last seen in Chronicle, giving a measured performance as LaBoeuf’s willing sidekick. Women’s roles tend to be underwritten in these genres, but Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska both do more with what they’re given than we should have any right to expect. The core of the film rests on LaBoeuf and Hardy; Hardy’s stoicism and quiet mumbling resonate and he makes the acting look effortless, while LaBoeuf feels markedly out of his depth when everyone makes acting look so easy around him, and you can almost see the gears changing when he’s required to emote. However, the role does require him to be mainly the cocksure younger brother, which he does with reasonable success, even if likeable proves too much of a stretch at the same time. The performances that will stick with you when the lights come up are Hardy and Pearce, but both are likely to alienate as many as they are to please given their reliance on mannerisms. Taken as a whole, the ensemble works effectively enough.
The real let-downs come in the form of two previous Hillcoat collaborators, Nick Cave and Benoît Delhomme. Both contributed to The Proposition in the same roles, and while Cave’s music (along with Warren Ellis) has been top-notch on both, here Cave’s script is flat, never giving the actors the memorable lines to get their teeth into that would sear Lawless into your memory. Delhomme’s cinematography is also lacking the character that defined The Proposition, and helps to dissipate any tension that director Hillcoat tries to generate, only the odd scene carrying any sparkle or tautness when Lawless had the potential to carry this through from start to finish. Even the violence feels half-hearted, the occasional moment of brutality feeling oddly out of place with the mild mannerisms of most of the rest of the narrative. Lawless ends up an odd concoction, neither Western nor gangster pic and not able to stand up to the best of either genre, and is likely to be a footnote in the careers of both its leads in years to come, but hopefully if it achieves anything, it’ll be another step on the road to Shia LaBoeuf becoming a good actor, a road that Tom Hardy seems already much further down.
Why see it at the cinema: Hillcoat’s love of landscapes isn’t quite as in evidence here as in his previous works, but the framing works well and the inevitable confrontations should at least pack a bit more of a punch on the big screen.
The Score: 7/10
The Movie Evangelist 