45 Years (**3/4)

The famous William Faulker quote goes, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” In Andrew Haigh’s (Weekend) adaptation of a David Constantine short story, which takes place over the course of a week, two events bring the past forward with suddenness. One is the impending anniversary party of Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay); the other is news that the body of Geoff’s old girlfriend has been discovered, having been buried under snow for 50 years. This is a movie that starts out quietly (really—I missed some dialogue) and builds slowly, but even then to an understated, or even slight, conclusion.

The pleasures of the movie are in observing the couple, whose everyday dialogue reveals an intimacy that can only grow over a long period. The movie is essentially from her point of view, wondering if, after decades together, she really knows all there is to know about her husband, or whether that’s possible. And Rampling is always a welcome screen presence. But Courtenay is extremely affecting as the husband, just a few years older, but certainly, in multiple ways, more fragile.

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viewed 1/18/16 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 1/18/16

The Theory of Everything (***1/4)

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This movie is probably slightly better if you don’t know about Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne). For those who do, the story should seem familiar. Covering roughly 25 years, it can only sketch in broad outline Hawking’s major life events — the diagnosis (ALS), the dissertation (on black holes), the debilitation, and the devilishly difficult bestselling book (A Brief History of Time) that made him a household name. Perhaps less familiar will be the love story that director James Marsh focuses on. The movie is in fact based on Jane Hawking’s book.

It’s a story that truly begins after a typical romantic story ends. The scenes in which Stephen, a doctoral student at Cambridge with some unexplained physical lapses, courts Jane (Felicity Jones) are charming — Stephen’s offbeat posture, sly wit, and (later-useful) economy of expression are already apparent — but a prelude. It’s one thing to pledge fidelity to a sick man and another to become the sole caregiver for an invalid who almost literally cannot lift a finger to help around the house.

In all long-term arrangements, the romantic must make room for the domestic. This is that ordinary story, combined with the extraordinary intelligence of Hawking and the fact that time, Hawking’s special area of interest, is not his friend. His speech increasingly slurring, his movements increasingly limited, he yet defies the survival odds. It’s thus an inspirational story that, nonetheless, suggests at once the horror of such a disease and the magnitude of the gift Jane gave him. Marsh, gently eliding over the decades, doesn’t peer deep into the souls of his characters but movingly portrays the way their relationship changes with time, perhaps not as expected. The actors are very good, with Redmayne utterly convincing in evoking the entire range of Hawking’s physical decline, then using his eyebrows to convey emotion and thought. Those interested in more than the barest outline of Hawking’s ideas will want to turn to his books, or Errol Morris’s documentary version of A Brief History of Time, but this is a fine general-interest drama that avoid the clichés of disease movies.

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viewed 11/5/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/6/14

Pride (2014) ***1/4

In theory, a good story is a good story, and whether it really happened shouldn’t affect whether it’s a good movie. But if you’d thought first-time screenwriter Stephen Beresford had simply invented a tale about a group of gay-rights activists who, all on their own, decided to raise money for striking rural miners, it’d have seemed rather unlikely and strange. The 1984 National Union of Mineworkers strike is well-remembered in Britain and were a marker of the changes that came to the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  But this Pride, which shares its title with a 2007 film about a Philadelphia swim team, is more likely to remind you of working-class underdog stories like The Full Monty and Billy Elliot than of a more overtly political film.

Beresford and director Matthew Warchus stick to the personal, showing the unlikely path by which a small group of London-based activists wound up in an out-of-the-way town in Wales. At first, it seems like the main character might be young, closeted Joe (George MacKay), but the other characters, especially loud-and-proud Mark (Ben Schnetzer), and spiky-haired Steph, the sole lesbian (Faye Marsay), get about equal attention. Despite plenty of humorous moments, the accent is on the personalities, not fish-out-of-water stereotypes. The men and women of the town exhibit the range of reactions you might expect, from deep hostility to unmitigated gratitude toward their unexpected benefactors. The ubiquitous Bill Nighy stands out as a man who seems deeply uncomfortable with all of this, yet remains unfailingly polite.

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viewed 8/29/14 10 am at Ritz 5; posted 10/9/14

Starred Up (***)

This is worth watching for those who like films about the internal dynamics of prison life. The screenwriter, Jonathan Asser, worked as a prison therapist, perhaps something like the one, played by Rupert Friend, who tries to help the main character, Eric (Jack O'Connell). The unusual aspect of this film, compared to other such dramas, is that Eric’s father (Ben Mendelsohn) is incarcerated in the same institution.

The title is likely to be obscure to non-UK audiences — it refers to the process of transferring an offender from a juvenile facility to an adult one. Also obscure may be much of the dialogue, which is spoken in a variety of mostly non-posh British accents. (The entire film was shot in two prisons in Northern Ireland, with no scenes set on the outside.) Best to use the subtitles, if available, though some of the most powerful scenes employ no dialogue. Asser and director David Mackenzie depict prison as an unsentimental place full of people, not least protagonist Eric, with anger issues. It’s not cheery.

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viewed 5/21/14 7:30 pm at Gershman Y [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/21/14

Locke (***1/2)

For awhile, screenwriters didn’t know what to do with cell phones. They’d have characters  bizarrely toss them away (e.g., Wild Hogs) or wander improbably into places with no signal, just so the characters wouldn’t be able to escape elaborately concocted predicaments with a call. But, a decade on, whole plots are being predicated on the existence of mobile technology. How different, and dull, would a film like Buried have been if its main character had been buried alive without a phone?

Locke is like Buried in that it features just one actor (Tom Hardy) on screen for the entire length of the film, plus a number of characters who are only heard. Locke is in a car, and is only buried in responsibilities. Driving toward London, he will be missing the football match he’s promised to watch with his son. Also, he will be missing the first day of his company’s most ambitious project, a skyscraper on which he is the construction supervisor. Also, the woman, not his wife, whom he slept with on a business trip is about to give birth to his baby. He intends to be with her. These are the key plot points, all provided in the first 15 minutes.

Imagine you are having an argument with the sort of person whom, no matter how much you yell at him, he continues to speak in a calm voice to the point where it becomes irritating. Imagine it with a Welsh accent and you may well picture the character of Ivan Locke, who imagines that all mistakes can be put to right, and that it is important to do the right thing, even if in doing so he must let down his family and coworkers.

This is the setup for a high-concept thriller, and yet most of suspense is about how Locke will behave, not what, in the larger sense, will happen. The writer-director, Steve Knight, was the screenwriter on some excellent, character-driven thrillers — Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises, Closed Circuit —and, with Redemption, his directorial debut, gave Jason Statham perhaps his most fleshed-out role to date. Locke may take place on a fast highway, but its title character always drives the speed limit.

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viewed 5/22/14 7:25 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 5/22/14

Philomena (***3/4)

Britain may not be as class-bound as it once was, but its history gives it a comfort with the topic. At any rate, class is a subject I’ve seen explored far more often in British films than in American ones. Some of the UK’s best known filmmakers, including Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, and this film’s director, Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen) touch on class themes frequently. The story here is the reverse of the one in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, in which the main character tracks down her birth mother. Here, Philomena (Judi Dench) is trying to find the son she gave up for adoption 50 years earlier. The two films aren’t otherwise similar, except in the way they bring together women who are not sophisticated with characters who are, and who are also better off financially. That other character is journalist Martin Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan. Coogan also co-wrote the screenplay, based on a book by Sixsmith, who really was, as portrayed here, a former BBC reporter who had been forced to resign from a government post and was thus free to research the story of an Irish woman whose child was taken from her while she toiled seven days a week in a Magdalen laundry.

Another such laundry, a place where Catholic “fallen women” provided unpaid labor, was the subject of The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a bleak but moving film. Adding odd-couple humor and a kind of modern-day detective story makes this film much less bleak, but still moving. In the course of the story, Sixsmith comes to respect Philomena. It would be accurate, but make the story seem trite, to say that she has a different kind of wisdom that he does. Better to say that the film respects both of the characters, the cynical, atheistic Sixsmith, and the open-hearted Philomena, whose faith is unshaken by her betrayal by her church. The mystery of her son’s whereabouts is solved, of course, but in a way that is dramatically satisfying, somewhat bittersweet…and not at all trite.

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viewed 12/3/13 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 12/3/13; revised 1/24/14

How I Live Now (***)

This has all the hallmarks of a teen coming-of-age movie. Sixteen-year-old Daisy (Saoirse Ronan)—don’t use her given name, Elizabeth—is a New Yorker sent to summer with relatives in Wales. With mild-self-loathing (we hear this as whispered injunctions) buried under an obnoxious exterior, she’s the perfect candidate for a big learning experience under the guidance of her country-living relations, consisting of a mother and her three kids, and how convenient that the oldest is handsome, age-appropriate, and not actually biologically related to her. But wait, what’s this about a bombing in Paris, and the mother being an expert in World War III planning?

I didn’t mind at all the combination of sci-fi adventure story and teen romance. Do threats of martial law quash desire? Not at all. What was jarring was the way the story requires fresh Daisy to transform from snotty girl who can barely sit in a messy car to lovelorn teen to plucky self-starter in about a week. Perhaps Ronan is channeling her role as another Daisy, this one a teen assassin, in Violet & Daisy. I suspect, however, that the effects of compressing a novel (by Meg Rosoff) into feature-length movie account for the whiplash transformation, as well as the too-brief appearance of the mother character, whose job sounds rather interesting. Alas, we never learn what she was working on, or exactly why Britain may cease to exist. We do learn that the UK government will be pretty darn efficient at organizing things if the shit ever hits the fan. An intriguing premise, aided by director Kevin Macdonald’s great use of rural landscapes. At the end, we get the usual lessons-learned voiceover I was expecting.

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viewed 11/14/13 7:05 at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/14/13

Diana (***1/4)

If a UK film gets a wide release across the pond, it’s as likely as not that there’s magic or the royal family involved somehow. Or is written by Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, Bean), whose About Time is opening the same weekend as Diana. The American fascination with British royalty has always escaped me, but it would have been difficult to have lived through the 1980s and '90s and not been aware of the marriage and subsequent divorce of Prince Charles and the Diana Spencer, or of the car crash that killed Diana (Naomi Watts) on August 31, 1997. The movie, based on a book by Kate Snell called Diana: Her Last Love, is about the last two years of her’s life. I assumed that it would be about her relationship with Dodi Fayed, the wealthy Egyptian who died with her. In fact, the “last love” is not Fayed, but Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews, of NBC’s Lost), a Pakistani-born surgeon she met in a London hospital. At the time, Diana had separated from Charles, but not yet divorced.

The story the movie tells is a little like a real-life Notting Hill, the Richard Curtis-penned romantic comedy in which bookstore clerk Hugh Grant romances movie star Julia Roberts. Its best-known line, “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” could have been dialogue for Diana, who is the pursuer in the relationship. Admittedly, such dialogue would be a bit florid for this movie, which is neither comedic nor so overtly romantic. We don’t find out if the Hugh Grant character gets tired of having paparazzi follow his movie-star girlfriend, but Khan has no interest in Diana as a celebrity, or in giving up his privacy. This is the central conflict in the film.

The best thing I can say about the movie is that it also has little interest in Diana as a celebrity. The director is Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made the excellent German films The Experiment and Downfall as well as the 2007 thriller The Invasion. Thus, Diana is worth watching even if you were not especially curious about its title character. The film also handles the death with subtlety, neither showing the accident nor addressing the possible role of the paparazzi in causing it. It does show Diana as having found frequently found the press a nuisance, but also willing to use it for her own purposes, both public (in her campaign to publicize the dangers of land mines) and private. That last bit is the least flattering aspect of the film’s portrayal, but it’s one of the things that makes her a real character, not just a princess. Both Watts and Andrews are a cut above the type of actor you’d have expected to be cast were this a cheesy celebrity biopic.

IMDB link

viewed  10/30/13 7:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and posted 11/2/13

The Fifth Element (***)

You could be forgiven, after watching the opening sequence of this film, that you’re watching the beginning of some James Bond knockoff. But is Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), founder of WikiLeaks, James Bond or the villain of the story? Or both?

Assange burst into prominence with news that WikiLeaks had obtained the classified information, including hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, provided by Army intelligence analyst Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning in 2010. This story begins there, but flashes back two years to Assange’s meeting at a Berlin conference with Daniel Berg (Daniel Brühl, of Rush), a German hacker who, in this version, anyway, becomes lured by Assange’s talk of righting wrongs as well as his own story, difficult childhood and all, some of which is true. Pretty soon, the two of them, with just a little help, are spreading news of assassination plots and banking law violations.

Since Berg’s book is one of the sources for the movie, it’s natural that the movie makes Berg the hero of the story, perhaps Assange’s right-hand man, perhaps the victim of his manipulations, like a battered wife. He’s the ordinary guy/audience stand-in contrasted with the charismatic Assange, whose self-satisfaction possibly covers deep self-doubt. Cumberbatch, who also plays the title role in the BBC’s modernized Sherlock series, knows something about playing smug, and he’s memorable in the role.

Director Bill Condon’s (The Twilight Saga) attempt to give this the look and feel of a techno thriller doesn’t disguise that fact that it isn’t, save perhaps in the last half hour, and most of the shots of computer screens don’t illuminate anything important about how WikiLeaks worked. I wondered how David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, the team behind The Social Network, might have approached this story.

A question the film presents, but does not address, is whether we should treat people like Assange as journalists; and, secondarily, does Wikileaks and its online cousins represent a new paradigm for information transfer that governments and organizations will need to adjust to regardless of what the law can do? These questions go beyond the story of Assange, whose ultimate fate remains unclear. The movie does a competent job of presenting that story, despite its annoyingly slick beginning. But it won’t stick with you.

IMDb link

 

viewed 10/9/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening]

Closed Circuit (***1/4)

--> The specter of international terrorism has figured into many a movie plot, but not so much the revised legal framework that has arisen in parallel to the perceived threat. In Britain, we learn from this thriller, the mechanism for dealing with national security-related information involves providing two counselors to an accused terrorist. A Special Advocate, like the one played by Rebecca Hall, is allowed to see the secret evidence against the accused and argue for her fellow barrister’s (Eric Bana) right to use it. A judge decides. The twist here is that the two counselors, who are supposed to have no contact, had formerly been romantically involved. (Apparently, no one had time to investigate, as the predecessor of  Bana’s character had suddenly committed suicide. Hmm.) And there are twists that make both of their jobs difficult, and mysteries, like how the Turkish-born man said to have masterminded a bombing that killed 120 in London, managed to emigrate from Germany to England.
This is too brightly lit to be film noir. but has some of the things people like about noir — clandestine meetings, coded language, things being not what they seem. It also has some of the same tropes as typical thrillers — turncoats, hints of conspiracy, villain (or villains) with nearly unlimited power, etc. — that in this national-security context are more plausible than would otherwise be the case. It doesn’t have any car chases, but, as the title suggests, makes use of security camera footage to build tension. The sexual tension between the leads is expected, but it’s nicely understated, without deep exposition about the breakup or dramatic declarations. The past relationship of the two counselors also figures into the plot. Screenwriter Steve Knight, incidentally, also is credited with Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things, two of the better thrillers of the last decade.

Closed Circuit is a notch behind those two. It doesn’t reveal a hidden subculture; nor does it shed on the proper way to fight terrorism. It does suggest that claims of national security can be a pretext to avoid disclosing information embarrassing to government agencies. But mostly it’s just a smart, entertaining thriller.

IMDb link

viewed 8/29/13 7:45 pm at Ritz 5; posted 9/3/13

The World’s End (***)

Some people are calling this the third in a trilogy, because it’s the third movie, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, from the team of Edgar Wright (writer/director), Simon Pegg (writer/actor), and Nick Frost (actor). The only other thing that unite them is their certain brand of bro-centric humor, sometimes smart but rarely highbrow, frequently vulgar but not too low-brow (i.e. a minimum of pratfalls and jokes about body functions). Unlike the other two films, this is not really a genre parody, though it could be argued that there’ve been so many movies about groups of men trying to recapture their lost youth that it constitutes a genre of its own, and it is the expectations of those of those films (Old School, Wild Hogs, The Hangover, etc.) that are being subverted.

In this one, the story centers on five 40-year-olds who set out to re-create a legendary 12-stop pub crawl (the “Golden Mile”) that they failed to complete back in 1990. Pegg plays Gary King, the de facto leader of this bunch. Where the other men, played by Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Eddie Marsan, have moved on with their lives, King has gone from the 12-stop program to the 12-step one, and doesn’t like it. So, he gathers up the old gang to return to his hometown and finish what was started.

The World’s End turns out to be the name of the last pub, the rest of which have names like The Trusty Servant and The Two-Headed Dog.

IMDb link

viewed 9/22/13 2:00 pm at Riverview; posted 9/23/13

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (**3/4)

Say what you will, you’ll not likely find a better quasi-romantic comedy premised on a sheik’s plan to introduce fly-fishing to the desert, and a British government’s support of that plan as a way to distract folks from bad news about the Middle East. The important thing, though, is that it provides the premise for Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), who works for the sheik and Dr. Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a fisheries scientist who thinks the whole plan is daft, to get together in an exotic setting. The other thing is that both of these characters, who refer to each other by last name, are attached (to a boyfriend off to fight in Afghanistan in one case, and to a wife on a business trip in the other). However, these existing relationships are too underdeveloped to be other than plot elements.

It’s only a “quasi” romantic comedy because it’s not that romantic (excepting, mostly, Harriet’s early tryst with her boyfriend), and it’s only sometimes aiming for laughs, and light ones at that. Directed by Lasse Hallström, who’s helmed such light fare as Chocolat and Casanova, it’s mostly content to bring us pleasant characters in pleasant settings acting, mostly, very pleasant, with pleasant quirks. (Mostly, he’s slightly uptight.) Harriet once acts, understandably, unpleasant, then apologizes for it. I found the movie perfectly…pleasant without finding any outstanding qualities to it

Presumably no one involved with the production of this movie knew about the Arab Spring that would topple the government of Yemen, or anything much about the country except that there were sheiks there, and desert, and highlands, which is all that’s necessary for this movie. The script is by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), who adapted a satirical novel by Paul Torday. This should have provided resources for something with a little more edge, or at least a good fish-out-of-water story, pardon the pun, but the satirical edge is largely absent except in the character played by Kristin Scott Thomas, the PR rep for the prime minister. Possibly I am downgrading the movie slightly so as to overcompensate for the effect of Blunt force on me. (To me, the actress makes everything she’s in just a little classier.) Probably if the movie sounds charming you will find it so.

IMDb link

viewed 2/23/2012 7:30 pm at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 2/23/2012

The Shore [short] (***1/4)

Almost as gentle and lovely as the coast of Northern Ireland it depicts, this half-hour comedy-drama from Terry George (Hotel Rwanda, Reservation Road) reunites old friends who’ve fallen out. One man has moved to America and is visiting with his adult daughter; the other has stayed behind, poor but happily married.

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viewed 2/17/12 9:35 at Ritz Bourse [Oscar-nominated live-action shorts program] and reviewed 2/18/12

The Iron Lady (***)

This is perhaps two thirds of a very good biopic about the life of Margaret Thatcher, British counterpart to Ronald Reagan, yet his temperamental opposite. Unfortunately, the employment of a mostly useless framing device — Thatcher (Meryl Streep) spends half a dozen segments in the near-present day as she struggles with dementia and has conversations with her late husband (Jim Broadbent)—mars it. Not only does it rob the narrative of some momentum with a storyline that emphasizes the artificial nature of the medium—how could screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame), or anyone, know that Ms. Thatcher is turning on her radio and other noisy appliances to drown out the sound of the imagined husband she’s bickering with?—but it also uses up time that would have better spent, say, showing us how a grocer’s daughter came to such firm conservative beliefs that, even today, she is a controversial figure in her hometown in the English Midlands. Or how young Margaret Roberts became so determined to break into the nearly uniformly male field of electoral politics in the 1950s. (Director Phyllida Lloyd depicts some of the sexism that greeted her efforts, but wisely doesn’t make it the main focus; the visual statement of the pearl-necklace-wearing Thatcher among a sea of grey suits makes its own statement.)

Other than Thatcher’s landmark achievements as 1980s prime minister—the taming of the trade unions and the victory in the Falklands War—the film elides over her specific political policies, not to mention her four years as opposition leader, in favor of emphasizing her forcefulness and disinclination to yield. (The vehement opposition to her is also depicted without the film seeming to take any position on whether it was justified.) Indeed, American Tea Party sympathizers will find her an appealing heroine, and even firm liberals may fantasize about a President Obama who’s as unwilling to compromise.

Streep, of course, is entirely convincing; another actress, Alexandra Roach, plays Roberts/Thatcher as a college student, newlywed, and 1950s candidate for a seat in parliament. At least the makeup artistry that makes Streep look 80 can be admired. Broadbent is a fine actor, but not one who can be made to look young. So we see Denis Thatcher in the earliest scenes played by another actor; then he seems to age about 40 years to Thatcher’s 20. Oddly, Broadbent appears more as a ghost than in the scenes when Denis is alive. Although Denis was ten years the senior of Margaret and an archconservative, his possible role in shaping her political views is not explored.

For some reason, too many biographies of current or recent figures (e.g., J. Edgar) seem to insist on some sort of flashback structure so that the story is told from a present-day perspective. Yet less frequently is this done for those who died long ago. A Dangerous Method, for example, is perfectly content to dispense with the last 40 years of Carl Jung’s life in a brief epilogue. This would have done just fine to sum up the post-office life of Lady Thatcher. As it is, depicting the Iron Lady in her doddering dotage, possibly lamenting neglecting her husband and children, and the grandchildren off in South Africa, would seem to sentimentalize a woman for whom sentimentality would seem wholly inappropriate.

IMDb link

viewed 1/26/12 7:35 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 1/30/12

Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (**1/2)

Previously adapted into an acclaimed BBC miniseries in 1978, this pared-down version of John le Carré’s novel stars a well-cast Gary Oldman as George Smiley, the British spy played by Alec Guiness role in the miniseries. Smiley is aptly referred to as “The Anti-James Bond” in a recent Atlantic article by that name and is, one imagines, probably more typical of anyone whose profession requires the utmost care and covertness. A man in late middle age, he has recently retired, or been retired, along with his old boss, “Control” (John Hurt). He spends his time on ordinary chores like getting his glasses repaired and wonders what went wrong in his marriage. He does not stand out in a crowd or make a fuss over how he likes his martinis, if indeed he drinks martinis.

But, following a botched Hungarian operation in which an agent is shot, he becomes the ideal man to flush out a probable mole within “the Circus,” as the London MI6 headquarters is known. The Hungarian fiasco is the tense beginning; merely by varying his shots, director Tomas Alfredson (the Swede best known for Let the Right One In) creates a good deal of suspense. After that, not so much.  Despite telegraphing a good deal of story into a two-hour window and featuring several significant characters, the pace is measured without particularly building tension. That is, it manages to be confusing yet slow, being most noteworthy for its sense of English gloom. Rather than the glamor of the Bond series, the emphasis is on the mundane and drab surroundings at headquarters, where in 1973 microfilm represents new technology. That’s fine, but only if used as a counterpoint to what is quietly happening, which is only the case sometimes. The story is reasonably revised to fit the needs of a feature, but the characters probably seem less noteworthy with screen time reduced.

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viewed at Ritz 5 12/19/11 [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/19/11

Submarine (***1/2)

An affecting coming-of-age story set in Wales. The hero is teenage Oliver Tate, who like many an unpopular boy imagines himself the hero of his own movies. His object of affection (Yasmin Paige) is chosen, he tells us, for her own modest unpopularity, which makes her possibly attainable. She’s not the nerdy kind kind of unpopular but the edgy kind. They have a charmingly odd romance that involves lighting small fires and such, but, in the manner of many a teenage boy, it barely occurs to Oliver that there may be tender feelings behind her cool exterior. And so he hides his, which prominently involve worrying about his parents’ low-functioning marriage. The quiet, odd father is played by Noah Taylor, who long ago starred as the same character in a pair of equally good coming-of-age stories, The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. The mother is always-good Sally Hawkins.

While maintaining humor throughout, director Richard Ayoade (adapting a Joe Dunthorne novel) evokes the drama of teenage existence with particularity as to character and setting (although the time, probably in the near past, is vague) and universality as to the feelings.

IMDB link

viewed 6/6/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17/11

Nowhere Boy (***1/2)

This drama begins with a chord lifted from the start of the Beatles song “A Hard Day’s Night,” whose title might be some sort of metaphor for the career of John Lennon. The song was released in 1964, during the height of Beatlemania. The next year, they recorded “Nowhere Man,” which obviously inspired this movie’s title. The song, though, is about a man with no “point of view” making “plans for nobody,” whereas Lennon (Aaron Johnson), though without direction as a teenager, had a cockiness and drive that made him the opposite of the nonentity in the song.

Lennon’s fame came well after the period memorialized here, saving the producers a bundle in music rights. Beatles aficionados may recognize the early originals “Hello Little Girl” and “In Spite of All the Danger,” which didn’t make it onto their proper studio albums, and “Maggie Mae,” a non-original that did. They may notice John riding by Strawberry Fields in Liverpool near the start of the film. And they will anxiously await the inevitable moment when he’s introduced to the 15-year-old Paul McCartney after a performance by Lennon’s band, the Quarrrymen. But ultimately, this is the story of a teenage boy, not the story of a rock star. Judged strictly on that basis, the movie is still surprisingly entertaining, even moving.

It is the story of a somewhat rebellious teenager caught between two women. His magnetic personality seems drawn from his mother Julia (Anne Marie Duff), memorialized in a somber 1968 song of that name. But he was largely raised by his aunt Mimi, a hard woman portrayed with subtlety by Kristin Scott Thomas. In the movie version of things (a little simplified), Lennon barely knows his mother until he sees her at the funeral of his uncle, a surrogate father who dies at the start of the movie. It is the push-pull of these strong women that helps shape him. The one teaches him to play banjo, the other actually buys him a guitar. (Though in real life, Julia did both.)

Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy is based on a memoir by Lonnon’s half-sister Julia Baird. The screenplay is by Matt Greenhalgh, who adapted another musical memoir in Control. That movie told the story of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who committed suicide less than seven months before Lennon’s death. This movie, though, is full of life and worth seeing even for middling Beatles fans. Duff and Johnson capture the charisma and pathos of their characters. There is one solo Lennon recording, “Mother,” in the film. “You had me,” sang Lennon in the 1970 song, “but I never had you.” It plays over the closing credits.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/29/10

Never Let Me Go (***3/4)

It is 1978. Life expectancy in England had exceeded 100 years in the previous decade, and this had changed things, although, for three young people at an isolated boarding school, there was little sign of that. (Think of Hogwarts without the eccentric professors, or the magic, or Harry Potter.) The first third of the drama (adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel) takes place at the school. Director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) and screenwriter Alex Garland carefully telescope years of experience into brief scenes. A girl’s friendship with an outcast boy. The jealousy of her friend. Nothing confusing, but something mysterious there. Children who are afraid to leave the school grounds for fear of disappearing. This beginning is suggestive of a certain type of psychological horror film, and indeed this can be regarded as such, although it is not at all “scary” in that sense. Talk of “donors” and “carers” in Carey Mulligan’s introductory voiceover is another hint that something is amiss. (We learn what fairly early on, but it’s better not to know.)

The rest of the film takes place later, when the three children have become young adults, played by Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield. By then we already know, mostly, the paths their lives will take. Although the plot is nothing like that of Remains of the Day, the Ishiguro novel previously adapted into a film, the same feeling sticks with me. Both stories are of people whose lives are circumscribed by both their own natures and the roles in society. They are stories of longing, and lost years, and sadness. In each case, they are told with a kind of economy of expression. I felt I knew these characters, even though the film is brief and skips forward in time.

I’ve deliberately downplayed the science-fiction aspect of the story, because that is not the kind of movie it is. As Romanek admitted in a recent interview, those looking for a conventional sci-fi film will be disappointed. There is no explanation of why things are as they are; there is no suggestion that the characters will rebel, or that doing so would be effective. I would enjoy seeing a more sci-fi/action take on the same story. (Screenwriter Garland has, in fact, written movies like that—Sunshine and 28 Days Later, both directed by Danny Boyle.) But the absence of these aspects didn’t annoy me, because it seemed like they were beside the point. The point is not how the world got to be that way, but to observe the behaviors of these characters in their situation. Though its spareness (not slowness) may not suit all tastes, Never Let Me Go is like a sad song so beautiful you that you still want to hear it.

IMDB link

viewed 9/20/10 at Ritz East [PFS screening]

Eastern Promises (***1/2)

Viggo Mortensen reunites with History of Violence director David Cronenberg for another story in which ordinary people get mixed up in the criminal underworld. Naomi Watts plays the London nurse whose attempts to find a home for a baby whose teen mother died in childbirth lead her to a restaurant that turns out to be a front for Russian mobsters. Mortensen’s character is merely the driver for the family of the boss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), but he’s clearly smarter and more competent than the heir apparent (Vincent Cassel). We can see this as he calmly snips off the fingers of a recent murder victim so that the corpse can’t be easily identified. The nurse’s earnest attempts to do the right thing figure into the internecine conflicts.

Working from a script by Steven Knight (Amazing Grace, Dirty Pretty Things), Cronenberg uses the nurse as a audience proxy to draw us into a dangerous world. This isn’t a Russian Godfather, emphasizing brutality rather than myth in its Mafia tale, but it does bring in particulars of the Russian criminal culture, notably the elaborate role of tattoos in establishing heirarchy. The brutality doesn’t translate into frequent violence, but the violent scenes that do exist remove any sense that there is honor among thieves. I won’t describe the incredible fight scene in which the film climaxes except to say it’s original, utterly realistic, and extremely memorable.

There’s something detached about Cronenberg’s cinematic approach, yet this only emphasizes the ugliness of what’s being depicted and draws us into the story, which offers a couple of shocks of its own.

IMDB link

reviewed 10/21/07

Sicko (***)

Having failed to rid the world of the George Bush administration with Farenheit 9/11, Michael Moore uses the American president to open his broadside against the American health care system. But, bipartisan in his criticisms, director Moore notes that, after failing to overhaul that system in 1994, now-Senator Hillary Clinton has become nearly the largest benefactor of the industry’s campaign contributions. Her 2008 presidential quest finds her avowing none of her former grand ambitions. Moore also runs through a brief, entertaining history of the HMO and of earlier attempts at reform.

But most of the documentary’s first half is devoted to visits and interviews with a number of Americans whose care was affected by financial considerations. Cannily, he doesn’t focus on the “almost 50 million” uninsured, but on people who thought they were covered until they found themselves at war with their insurance companies. Former insurance company employees recall working hard to find ways to deny coverage of patients who became expensively ill, such as by finding minor omissions on their applications. A mother talks about a dead child denied a life-saving operation by the refusal of her insurance company to pay for it. The point being, even if you’re insured, the American health care system is your problem too.

The next part of the film finds Moore visiting Canada, Britain, France, and Cuba to examine their systems of providing care. Although there are differences, the uniform thread is that in none of these systems is cost a factor in the way individual patients are treated. The Cuban excursion, which got Moore in some trouble with the U.S. government, follows an attempt to get some 9/11 rescue workers treated at the American facilities in Guatanamo Bay. Terrorists get free quality health care, we are told, so why not these heroes? Undoubtedly, Moore knows that many of the people at Guatanamo Bay are not terrorists, and he knows equally that his people will be turned away, just as he knows what a British hospital employee will say when asked how much the patients are going to have to pay for their care. This is Moore at his coyest and most tedious, but except for this Guantanamo segment, this sort of stunt-making, ever present elsewhere in his oeuvre, is absent. Still, it’s useful to find out that a poor country like Cuba has an infant-mortality rate below that of the United States. (This is according to a United Nations report, as documented on Moore’s web site along with other facts stated in the movie.)

But Moore’s big sloppy wet kiss is reserved for the French. In this land of lengthy paid vacation and maternity leave, not only is the health care free, but so is someone to help with the housework during the difficult first few months. This is startling whether you think it’s a great idea, as Moore clearly does, or an unwelcome and quite literal extension of the nanny state. Moore also visits the well-appointed home of one doctor and asks about his income. He does something similar in Britain, where the doctors make less because they are government employees. (The distinction between socialized insurance, which is widespread, and socialized medicine, which Britain and relatively few other countries have, is worth noting, but you could fail to notice it in Sicko.) The point is, don’t worry, national health care won’t turn doctors into minimum-wage workers.

Yet the scene also may inadvertently make the point that it will cost something to do this. This will be the easiest shot for critics to take—reform will cost money. Herein lies what I think is the biggest flaw in Sicko, if indeed the goal is to persuade. There’s actually an economic argument as well as a compassionate one to be made on behalf of national health care. There’s a large group of Americans like me who already agree with Moore, a somewhat smaller group who opposes national health care on libertarian or conservative principles, and a group in the middle who kind of agree that everyone deserves the same health care but worry about practicality and cost. The visits to the faraway lands should convince them of the viability of a government-run system, but Sicko only hints at the way equity can be achieved while reducing the amount spent overall on health care. The hints come when we see the amount of resources insurance companies put into accepting and rejecting new policies and in finding loopholes that will allow them not to cover people who already have policies. These efforts save the companies money but in the aggregate add to the costs of care without making us healthier. The lack of uniformity in plans and the array of paperwork they require create burdens that doctors, hospitals, and patients must suffer also, which is one reason why in the United States the non-treatment costs for private entities are several times that of Medicare. A single-payer system (one in which government is the sole insurer) also means that the government has a greater ability to negotiate costs with drug companies and other providers. The U.S. spends much more, absolutely and per capita, than any other country on health care, by far, and in return has a population that by most measures (such as lifespan) is less healthy than most other wealthy countries. This is the point that should be hammered home.

Of course, such a system would mean just a little bit less money for some doctors, a smaller insurance industry, perhaps decreased revenue for advertisers, etc. Perhaps dwelling on cost issues would mean acknowledging that all systems have trade-offs. Moore has defended his one-sided portrayal of national health care as counterbalancing what’s already out there about its supposed detriments. A fair point, I think, but in taking this approach he is unable to effectively argue against some of the critics. For example, the most frequent objection to the Canadian system is that there are waits for some procedures. The web site acknowledges this, but the film merely shows one not-busy waiting room with no waits to counteract the point. By not granting that there are waits (but for procedures, not office visits), Moore can’t make the counterpoint that this isn’t an implicit feature of government-run systems, or even that Canadians nonetheless have a much higher support for their system than Americans do for theirs, even though they see its flaws. He can’t point out that by simply choosing to spend a little more (but still much less per capita than Americans do) Canadians would be able to eliminate the waits.

I don’t want to overemphasize the criticisms. Merely showing the alternatives is a public service, as is the inside look at HMOs. While making perfect sense for their shareholders, it’s hard to argue that the private bureaucracy dedicated to discovering pre-existing conditions is, from the consumer’s perspective, money well spent. The thread running through nearly all of Moore’s work is that people have some responsibility for each other, and that’s really the premise of Sicko, too. It’s not as funny as Roger & Me, or as fun and freewheeling as Bowling for Columbine, but it’s more level-headed than Farenheit 9/11 and is, Moore or less, a revealing look at a subject Americans currently rate near the top of their concerns.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/13/07