Since I'd been asked to introduce it for the local Lit.Com festival, I thought I'd best see the film. Through various real-world reasons I won't bore you with, I didn't get to see a preview before launch day but, since I was talking about The Shakespeare Authorship Question in general, rather than the movie's specific take on it, that wasn't such a big deal.
But, purely out of a sense of professional courtesy, I felt that I should go see it. So I did. I am forced to wonder if, out of the same sense of professional courtesy, either writer John Orloff or director Roland Emmerich have bothered to see any Shakespeare plays, or were they working from the Cliff Notes?
I am by no means a Shakespearean scholar. I have read no more than a handful of his plays and they have all been in a school or college environment. Never-the-less, I detected a fairly free-wheeling attitude towards his work and its historical context.
It's obviously set in some alternate version of history where Henry V was Shakespeare's first performed play, followed closely by Romeo and Juliet, then Hamlet, Richard III and, finally, King Lear. All in about a year. (It's possibly the same Emmerichian alternate universe where the pyramids were build by aliens riding woolly mammoths).
Okay, so this is a work of fiction and maybe these details aren't that important. After-all, one of the things the film is concerned with is the cloud of doubt that surrounds Shakespeare so, I don't know, maybe the documents that have always told us when the plays were first performed are fake.
Could happen. So, let's leave that and move on.
The mission here was to create an Elizabethan political thriller, concerning the machinations of court (inspired, possibly, by the similarly Machiavellian activities depicted in Elizabeth's dad's court in the hit TV show The Tudors). That, at least, seemed perfectly feasible to my historically-uncultured eye. Indeed, Edward Hogg has a considerable amount of fun playing the villain, Robert Cecil - who has a hump! I imagine some imaginative stage director will already be casting him in a revival of Richard III.
All of this courtly behaviour, however, is portrayed with a lack of conviction and subtlety, which results in it seeming nothing more than camp! Particularly in the case of Rafe Spall who plays the talentless actor called William Shakespeare who becomes the front, the patsy pretending to be the writer. As the film progresses he degenerates from an interesting possibility to a pantomime bad guy.
So, how do I do the Ifans eyebrow? Is this it?
You know that look Rhys Ifans has on his face in Notting Hill, that mischievous arched eyebrow he has when he can't believe what he's getting away with? Well, he wears that expression through pretty-much this entire movie. He plays Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, who has written these heartfelt plays, using the most sophisticated language and most gripping narratives ever put on paper ... But can't come out because, well, being a writer is vulgar and beneath an Earl. I suppose one character hiding behind the facade of another is an idea that occurs time and again in Shakespeare's plays, though none of the ones seen here.
Unfortunately, as wafer-thin as his character's motivation is, I would have probably swallowed it, and Ben Jonson's inexplicable willingness to go along with all of the repercussions that arise from the deceit, if only I believed one word coming out of any of the actors' mouths.
"Dude, even his moustache is, like, as unconvincing as the dialogue." "Totally!"
This is an unfortunate occurrence when an American script-writer and a German/American director clearly decided they knew more about the way English actors spoke four hundred years ago, than the English actors actually reading the lines. Consequently, there is a general air - and not just in Ifans' performance - where the actors simply don't believe what they're saying.
With one or two exceptions ... Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave are astonishingly similar as young and old Elizabeth ... Leaving one to feel that a time machine had been employed to allow one person to play both ends of their own life.
Joely Richardson, just 74 years young!
This leads to the film's other major problem ... The film isn't just set in one hazily-sketched-in historical period, but two. So we have DeVere played by Ifans in one period, and by the red-hot-cos-he's-in-Twilight-so-let's-overlook-the-fact-that-he-looks-nothing-like-Rhys-Ifans Jamie Campbell Bower opposite Richardson's Young Elizabeth. It then makes things even more complicated by chopping-and-changing between these two narratives.
Apart from Richardson/Redgrave, no one looks like their younger selves (well, okay, David Thewlis is pretty good at playing his younger self) but this makes everything appallingly complicated and you just know that it isn't worth the brain-power of trying to figure out who is meant to be whom.
Sorry, who did you say you were, again?
To be fair, there is a pretty-good pay-off to explain all this, but, as I was watching it, I was getting increasingly irritated and confused by it all.
The film is, then, a mess on several levels. Not least because it is hilariously funny in places; a fact which, I imagine, will come as a depressing surprise to the writer and director but not to the cast.
It's just a shame Derek Jacobi decided to take the money (for what must have been just a day's work) because his presence at the beginning, serving the role of the Chorus introducing the drama, lends the film some credibility which it certainly doesn't deserve.
So, it’s 1199AD. The bad old days of 1066 are a distant memory … except; the French are still trying to invade. The country is without leadership because the King, Richard the Lionheart, has been out of the country on Crusade. And that’s where we find him: hacking and slashing his way across Europe, going home. He’s made it as far as Northern France but, unfortunately, will make it no nearer English soil.
This is worrying because that god-awful abomination featuring Kevin Costner in a mullet and Alan Rickman cancelling Christmas all kicked-off with Robin Hood on Crusade with Richard. Fortunately, that’s where the similarities end.
This is Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood! It’s not a camp Hollywood vanity project; it’s a proper muddy medieval movie (which conveniently allows him to use up any spare props he had left over from Kingdom of Heaven - 2005).
Richard’s crown needs a courier to take it back to England and place it on the head of the weaselly Prince John. One Robert Loxley gets the job and is then promptly ambushed by the evil Godfrey (played by Mark Strong in entirely too much eye-liner) and killed. Now, hang on; the more perceptive of you may be thinking that Robin Loxley is Robin Hood’s real name. Well, you’d be right. And wrong.
Russell Crowe is actually playing lowly archer Robin Longstride, a trooper who has no property and no title to call his own, so he’s just a peasant like all the rest of the grunts he surrounds himself with. There’s the ginger fellow called Will, the big bloke called Little John … you get the idea. He finds the dying Loxley and the Lionheart’s crown and sees an opportunity. His only sure way of getting back to England alive is to go as Robert Loxley, the courier of the crown. Got that now? Good.
Once in Sherwood, Robin finds it populated by his ‘father’ (Max Von Sydow) who is old but, of course, infinitely wise and his ‘wife’, (Cate Blanchette) who is, as the Americans might say, spunky. There’s also a gang of feral kids, the orphans of the local towns and villages, who seem more and more like The Lost Boys, desperately in need of a father figure.
So, despite how complicated this all may sound, the characters are introduced and the set-up is constructed at a fair old lick. The scenes are short and sharp, the dialogue terse and to the point; but then scribe, Brian Helgeland, has proven himself in the past to be a dab hand at snappy dialogue in everything from LA Confidential (1997) to Payback (1999 / 2006). Just an aside: But one wonders how he found the time to write this since he also wrote the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, The Vampire’s Assistant and Green Zone.
The velocity of constantly moving characters, constantly changing scenes and constantly evolving plots and sub-plots give the film the roller-coaster feel of recent TV shows like 24 or Lost. Unlike those programmes, however, this film doesn’t have time to develop deep, complex characters so everyone is a hastily sketched-out stereotype and the actors are then required to fill those caricatures with wit and personality.
Kevin Durand does particularly well with Little John, while Mark Addy follows in the grand tradition of Eugene Pallette as the epitome of Tuck. But it’s seasoned trooper, Von Sydow who steals the show as Loxley Senior, revelling in the chance to play a good guy for once. These characters are played so lightly that you really enjoy their company, even though they aren’t really given anything very substantial to do.
Crowe himself is typically earnest and gruff. Which, of course, means he’s trust-worthy. Indeed, he is identified in the film’s opening moments as one of the few honest brave men in the English army. The accent he chooses to assume never ceases to amuse, ranging across the full spectrum of English regional brogues, from Scouse to the West Country to Yorkshire to the occasional dash of Irish.
This film is nasty, brutish and … quite long, but it carries its two hours and twenty minutes lightly and keeps up the pace and the sense of fun throughout. Even the necessary political intrigue is dealt with simply and succinctly so that the film doesn’t get bogged down in the tedious history-lesson that dogged Kingdom of Heaven.
But, of course, there’d be no thrills without a sense of danger and, indeed, a darkness is approaching in the shape of black-cape-wearing Godfrey and his militia of French soldiers, burning their way through the cities in the North in an attempt to create Civil War in Britain.
Civil War along the North/South divide? Never happen. Utterly preposterous.
The French invasion of Dover at the film’s show-down is disturbingly reminiscent of the D-Day landings, only in reverse. Oddly, I don’t think we’ve seen the invasion of Britain depicted in many movies, which is odd for a country that has been invaded so frequently.
The film isn’t without its faults, of course. The arc of the characters is all fairly predictable and not everyone gets a fair crack at the whip. Not entirely sure what Matthew Macfadyen, for example, was doing there as a rather limp and invertebrate Sheriff of Nottingham; apart from laying the ground-work for a much-expanded role if Crowe and Scott get their way and get to make a sequel. Further, the taming of The Feral Children happens immediately and off-screen, suggesting that an entire sub-plot featuring Marian and the boys has hit the cutting-room floor (or the ‘extended, uncut Blu-Ray’ as we now refer to it).
Also, in view of the wished-for sequel - and despite all the marketing imagery - they haven't really made a big deal out of Robin's extraordinary archery skills, not until the end does he get the opportunity to show off by hitting a few impossible targets. That, you see, will all come into its own in the second film. If they get to make it. But, y'know, don't hold your breath, Ridley's got two back-to-back Alien films on his plate for the next couple of years!
This film isn’t as visually striking as, say, Gladiator (2000), but it has the same heroic, mythic quality. This isn’t an Epic, like Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven and 1692: Conquest of Paradise (1992) were, but it isn’t trying to be, it’s an adventure yarn on a grand old-fashioned Hollywood scale and, as such, a worthy successor to Errol Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
Sir Ridley, congratulations, you have delivered the second best Robin Hood film ever made. Yes, that’s right, it’s almost as good as the Disney cartoon!
Dir: Ridley Scott
Writer: Brian Helgeland
Stars: Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Cate Blanchette, Max Von Sydow.
As I write this, I’m listening to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ soundtrack on The Spotify. Its atonal scrapings and wheezings are helping me evoke my feelings and order my thoughts about the film. I’ve been chewing over this review for some days. It’s about time to spit it out.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know. You’ll know the bleak, icicle-sharp precision of Cormac McCarthy’s vision. You’ll know that the world he envisions for the future is more metaphysical poetry than a serious attempt at science-fiction prediction. You’ll know that it is the story of a man’s love for his child and how, even if the rest of the world went away, that would endure. You’ll know how tense you were reading the book, teetering permanently on the brink of an explosion of emotions you couldn’t bear to feel. You’ll know.
If, however, you come to the film innocent, you’ll have to learn.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize. I have yet to find a review of it that is anything other than awe-struck and reverential in its praise. The last time a Pulitzer winner was so universally adored and then adapted into a film was, I think, To Kill A Mockingbird (book 1960, film 1962). That’s a lot to live up to … which is why, after just one viewing, my thoughts on John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel tend to focus on the differences, which irritated me at first like grit on the tongue, but I am now coming to terms with them.
As I watch the film again and again, as I surely shall, the memory of these irritations will fade and I will be able to see the film as a work unto itself. Yes, it is different, because that is what a process of adaptation necessitates, but is it better? No, of course not. Such notions are irrelevant when you are dealing with a work as subtle and layered as this. Is it, then, worthy? Is it a suitable counterpoint to the book, a fitting interpretation and representation of the themes? Will it break your heart? Yes, yes and avowedly, yes.
McCarthy’s vision is more nightmarish than Hillcoat’s, sketched in charcoal tones, imperfect and indistinct and all the more chilling for it. Two unnamed pilgrims, a father and son, slowly trudge through the ash and snow and dead leaves of a dead land, also nameless, heading vaguely South … trying to stay ahead of the ever-worsening perpetual winter in which the world is suspended, timeless, unmoving. Evolution has come to an end, all that is left is the inevitable devolution and decay.
Those who have read the book may be relieved to know that the most grotesque, most inhuman moments in the book (or the most human, depending on your perspective), the starkest realisations of the depths to which civilisation has so completely sunk, the ones that burrow into your imagination and revisit you long after you’ve put the book back on the shelf, are mostly missing. They would seem too prurient on the big screen, I imagine.
But, of course, what works on the page and in the mind’s eye cannot always be relied upon on the screen. The book has the chaotic atmosphere of a Bosch painting … take, for example, the description of a passing caravan:
“They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys … Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harnesses … and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each …”
Hillcoat’s vision doesn’t have the timeless, placeless quality of the novel and, therefore, the tragic waste is more specifically American and less universal. I wondered about this, I couldn’t pick out quite what made this so, then I realised … It’s the baseball caps. The few people they encounter on the road, are usually wearing baseball caps. In the book the fashion is for rags. You get descriptions like “Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators” and “He looked like a pile of rags fallen off a cart”. In one scene in the film, a colourfully-dressed mother and child are chased across a field by a band of cannibals and it is, for all the world, a moment lifted from any one of a dozen zombie movies. This film needs the unearthliness Hillcoat brought to The Proposition (2005) but, instead, it gets an occasional unwelcome whiff of Romero pastiche. The recognisably modern, recognisably American clothes in the film have limited the vision of the book to a specific where and when.
Ironically, the world in the book is blessed with limited vision. Because of the constant haze of falling ash and grey clouds of pollution the travellers get only rare glimpses of the full scope of the hellish landscape, more familiar are lines like “ … he could see the shape of a house and barn … Shrouded in the carbon fog.” Often the boy’s young eyes see things older, tired eyes will miss. But this myopia serves a narrative, tonal and metaphorical purpose: “He looked at the sky. As if there were anything there to be seen”.
This perpetual haze, too, is missing from the film, but that may have been a visual decision forced upon Hillcoat by the producers, keen to avoid making the film look like Darabont’s The Mist (2007) which was excellent, but died on its arse at the box office. Never-the-less, we still get an impressionistic world of greys and browns, of bare, broken, dead trees. We see the tree-line burning in a subtly Biblical way, and the flash-backs to the unstated apocalypse are lit from without by the burning of the world.
The film has a little more narrative drive than the novel and a barely perceptible vein of irony has been added to the film’s last moments (which I won’t discuss, in case you haven’t read or seen them). Previous to this, one or two things are stated that, in the book, were implied. The reason why it is important to have two bullets in their gun, for example.
Further, the film displays more overt emotion. The role of the mother (here played by Charlize Theron) has been greatly expanded, partly, I imagine, for marketing reasons, but also to ground the man in his memories. The culmination of these flashbacks is the realisation of just how immensely strong the man has been to weather this endless storm, of how Sisyphean a labour his protection of his son is and, therefore, how complete the failure of the mother.
In the book, the man is stoical under the weight of this responsibility, he is numb, he has suffered so much he can suffer no more. This is why he has no place left in his heart for memories. In the film, he is haunted constantly by his memories. In the book, he leaves all his memories in the middle of the road and walks way from them. That had a stark, awful, simple poetry. In the film, he drops them from a nose-bleedingly tall road-bridge, and this gives the gesture a grandiosity it doesn’t need.
By pointing out these differences, I am not denigrating the film. I’m sure I will come to love it for its differences as much as its similarities to the book. It is a different take on a tale which deserves to be told to as many people as possible. A grown-up, heartfelt, pure tale which tells us more about the power of love than a thousand simpering rom-coms or a year’s supply of silly love songs.
The only sustained dialogue scene in the book to involve anyone other than the man and his son is here brought to life by Robert Duvall, whose rough-hewn, time-worn tones can deliver McCarthy’s lines with the doomy, elusive, terrifying honesty they require. A perfect piece of casting, there.
And Viggo Mortensen, a man who typically looks as though he bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, is undoubtedly the person I would trust to carry The Fire – the love that binds man and boy together. McCarthy made him nameless because he is Everyman. Viggo Mortensen is not every man, but looking at the steadfast dread etched in his drawn face, every man must marvel at his fortitude and quietly fear that, one day, we might be so tested and be found wanting.
The boy, Everyboy, doesn’t carry the baggage of a fallen world. He was born during the fires and therefore has no memory of the before. He cannot know that life was once plentiful and cheap, to him all life is precious. His father thinks that his son is The Word of God, but his son thinks that of all souls.
The boy is the heart and the hope of both the film and the book. McCarthy, of course, wrote the book because he became a father surprisingly late in life and wanted to celebrate the fact. Yes, he chose an odd way to show his love, by depicting it tested beyond endurance. But then, what other love is there between a parent and child? As played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, the boy’s mix of deep wisdom and beautiful innocence is far more moving, I felt, on screen than on the page.
For me, the book belonged to the man. The film belongs equally to them both and, through the film, I realised, that the man belongs to the boy.
If you know the book, you know the end of the road. If you don’t, you need to know that it will break your heart, but leave you with a newer, fuller heart than before. For that is McCarthy’s point … if you have a heart to break then you, too, are that rare and precious thing in which his boy believes with fierce, unshakeable faith: You are someone who carries The Fire. You are a heart filled with love and a soul worth saving!
Dir: John Hillcoat
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall
I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’m about to review an Adam Sandler film.
Adam Sandler: The man who did for comedy what Benito Mussolini did for … flower arranging.
Adam Sandler: A man who (along with The Farrelly Brothers) drove the American feature-film comedy vehicle down an intellectual dead end, parked it there, let the tyres down and threw away the keys.
Adam Sandler: Without whom, there would have been no rise of adult morons acting like children, no American Pie atrocities, no Freddie Got Fingered abomination. No Harold and fucking Kumar.
Adam Sandler: he of the whiney, nasal voice and blank, vacuous face that I would never tire of punching.
Adam Sandler: in a film that is about comedy, rather than a failed attempt at being a comedy.
Thing is, I didn’t bother with this before because, well, it’s a God-damn Adam Sandler film. But I love films about comedians. Lenny (1974), Man On The Moon (1999), Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian (2002), The Aristocrats (2005); can’t resist them. So, eventually, I gave in.
What appealed to me was Funny People’s parentage. Writer/Director Judd Apatow and Sandler were room-mates twenty years ago when they both arrived in LA. So they have a lot of history. Seth Rogen’s Ira Wright is essentially Apatow then, just starting out as a stand-up. Sandler essentially plays himself now, household name movie star George Simmons who, on the rare occasion he does sand-up, needs someone else to write his jokes. The only difference is, George has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia.
He hires Ira ostensibly to write those gags, but really just to keep him company. You see, Simmons is that tragic American hero, the impossibly wealthy, ludicrously famous man living alone in his palatial mansion. The Charles Foster Kane of comedy.
We’ve all seen the pity-the-lonely-millionaire Hollywood biopic before. Does this film add anything to the form? No. Does Sandler shine any great insightful light into the psychology of the modern comedian. No. Do we really care whether George dies and whether Ira learns any life lessons? No. See, the problem is that Sandler can only act broad emotions, he can’t do subtle, he’s never had to. Unlike a Jim Carrey or a Will Smith, Sandler does not come across as a likeable, sympathetic straight character and he is incapable of imbuing Simmons with any real depth because, let’s face it, he’s built his career creating characters who have no depth. Unfortunately, because Apatow is his friend, he apparently can’t see this.
As for Rogen, I struggle to see what his function is in the film. I understand that his stumbling, unfocussed style is meant to reflect the way we all are in real life, but real life tends to be a rambling mess. Unfortunately, so is this film.
The film has the feel of Boogie Nights (1997) helped, in no small part, by Janusz Kaminski’s exquisite seventies throwback photography, but Apatow doesn’t have the ability of Paul Thomas Anderson. Having established his cast of wise-cracking characters, Apatow then forgets all about them for the second half of the film, which seems divorced from the first half, concerning, as it does, Simmons’ attempts to rekindle the relationship he ruined with the love of his life, Laura, played very effectively by Apatow’s real-life wife Leslie Mann. During this extended aside, Ira becomes a passenger, standing in the background a lot, or playing with the children while the adults go off and have sex.
The film which is already over-indulgent at two hours twenty-odd, is also available on this Blu-Ray as an extended version with an extra seven minutes. Woo.
The saddest thing about this film is that, however satirical it tries to be about Sandler’s alleged comedies, you just know that, with his producer’s hat on, Apatow is prepping to earn big money by actually making Re-Do, featuring Sandler’s head and the lame remnants of his New York accent on a chubby babies body. Oh, the horror, the horror.
So, Funny People is a mixed bag of half-formed moments and half-drawn characters. The main reason for watching it is to prepare you for watching the far superior Funny People Diaries documentary that accompanies it on this disc.
The Disc:
Funny People Diaries – 75 mins
This documentary is as much about Apatow as the main feature is but, unfiltered by fiction, it succeeds in being both more revealing and more entertaining. Apatow’s opening comment to camera is quite telling, he knows this is the only chance he’ll ever have to make a film this self-indulgent, so he’s going to go for it shamelessly.
The process of making the film began with assembling his cast and forcing them to write then perform stand-up routines to, let’s be honest, sympathetic LA audiences. This comedy boot camp clearly helped put everyone in the proverbial zone, though I must admit it was revealing to see the brain-storming sessions where they only seemed capable of creating dick jokes.
This process set the tone for the whole production, which included improvisational rehearsals which reveal that one of the film’s best moments, Eric Bana’s skin-crawlingly embarrassing routine about Cameron Diaz, sprang from his improv.
It transpires that Bana, who has never played comedy on film, was originally a stand-up in his native Australia. It’s also interesting, in other scenes, to see that Sandler is quite useful with a guitar and has a lovely singing voice. So, in some alternate universe, he’s a pop-star and the alternate me doesn’t hate him so much.
One of the delights of this documentary is the inclusion of much more footage of the cavalcade of comedians appearing and playing themselves. Unlike the characters in the film, these are established, confident comedians who are comfortable enough to actually laugh at each other’s jokes.
This documentary tells you far more about the brutality of a life in stand-up comedy and the anxieties suffered by its practitioners, than the main movie does. It is worth the price of admission in its own right!
We are also told that the first cut of the film ran to three and a quarter hours yet, oddly, with so much material having been hacked out, the disc doesn’t contain any deleted scenes.
What it does have is:
Line-o-Rama – 8 mins
A series of alternative one-liners, as Apatow continued the improv process even during shooting, often shouting suggestions to his actors from behind the camera. The diamond in here is Eminem railing at Ray Romano. A riot!
Gag Reels – 10 mins
The inevitable montage of mistakes and corpses that you would expect to have on a set where lines are being added and improvised in an ongoing basis.
Writer/Director: Judd Apatow
Stars: Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana
I like Gerard Butler. I’m the one person on Earth who liked Gamer. I thought he was brilliant in RocknRolla last year. I appreciate his unimpressed, sardonic, Celtic no-nonsense-ness. He humanises (and humourises) extreme, uncommunicative and occasionally one-dimensional characters. A thousand years ago, when I was at college, the ultimate accolade one could bestow upon another was the assertion: “I’d buy him a pint”; well, I’d buy Butler a pint!
Here, in the frankly awfully-entitled Law Abiding Citizen, he plays Clyde Sheldon. His story begins without preamble but with a knock at the door, two weapon-wielding villains burst in. Stab-stab, scream-scream, kill-kill. The destruction of Sheldon’s life is done with far greater economy and less lascivious attention to the gory details than, say Death Wish (1974) or Death Sentence (2007)
Cut to ambitious, politicising Assistant DA with the deliberately pale name of Nick Rice, played by Jamie Foxx, whose speciality is creating the illusion of justice. He cuts a deal with Darby, the home invader who raped and murdered Sheldon’s wife and daughter. Darby blames the murders he committed on his henchman, who will get the death sentence while he will be out in a few years. Sheldon will not be put on the stand, the jury will not hear his testimony and justice, in his eyes, will not be served. When he protests, Rice simply assures him that, in the judicial system: “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove” that matters. You just know that Sheldon is going to make him eat those words, along with Darby’s repeated assertion that “You can’t fight fate”.
Foxx was obviously drawn to this project because it gave him the chance to portray a bad guy who is, really, just a false hero. He isn’t a bad person and he is wracked with guilt over his actions, but that doesn’t stop him from profiting from them. Of course, the family he goes home to has to mirror that which Sheldon lost.
Fast-forward ten years. Sheldon suddenly and unexpectedly reappears, determined to right the wrong that was done him. He arranges for the painful death of Darby’s home-breaking henchman, then kidnaps Darby himself. Unfortunately Christian Stolte, who plays Darby, looks distractingly like Johnny Vegas, which does somewhat undermine the tension in the torture scene where he is systematically shopped up.
Hang on? So, this is a legal drama that turns into a torture porn movie? Yes. Then it turns into a long-con caper movie as we realise that Sheldon has spent his ten years out of the limelight carefully and methodically laying his plans. Who knows what atrocity he has laying in wait next?
The narrative hook is that Foxx has him chained-up in a maximum security prison and yet still he seems able to orchestrate the untimely demise of everyone associated with his original court case. You see, Butler was a weapons designer working for the CIA, his specialty was James Bond type gadgets which could kill people in exotic ways from a long distance. Not the kind of guy you really want to annoy, it turns out.
As we proceed through this neither-fish-nor-fowl plot-line, there are one-or-two surprisingly effective cattle-prod shocks, all the more effective because, unlike in a stalk-n-slash film, you don’t expect them here. But, arrayed against these are some contrivances of which even a Bond movie would be ashamed. In the film’s silliest scene, he sets up an automatic rocket-launcher at the side of a road in, significantly, a graveyard and three car-fulls of body guards fail to spot it before it opens fire. Headstone, headstone, rocket-launcher, headstone … yep, everything’s fine here!
Like Foxx, Butler will have also been drawn to this for the moral complexity of his character and the range of emotions it lets him essay. Sheldon swings from bumbling innocent to cunning super-villain to raving psycho and Butler relishes each performance equally.
The damage done to him first by Darby then by Rice runs deep and has undermined his sanity. Therefore, like Rice, he isn’t a clearly defined bad-guy. But, given the amount of ‘collateral damage’ he is responsible for, he clearly can’t be mistaken for a good-guy either. They are both grey and grey tones lead to a lack of contrast.
Visually, the film is also grey and lacking in contrast, in-keeping with director F. Gary Gray’s pallid career. He’s had several chances to make powerful, imagination-grabbing films: The Negotiator (1998), The Italian Job (2003) and Be Cool (2005) and succeeded in making each of them indifferent, compromised and forgettable. This is, therefore, entirely consistent with his career so far.
Ultimately none of these characters are especially redeemable. The moral core of the tale is clouded by compromise and the proceedings leave something of a bad taste in the mouth. The film tries to be serious, then flies off into fantasy as the final act unravels ever-more ludicrous plot twists, so it succeeds in being convincingly neither.
I rather felt that this was a film which, in some alternate dimension somewhere, Tony Scott could have made much more of. Sure, it wouldn’t have had the gritty dramatic edge, and yes it would be far sillier, but the transition from serious drama to inconsequential revenge fantasy would have been less jarring under his direction. Of course, he would have cast Denzel instead of Jamie and probably Russell Crowe instead of Butler. But I can’t escape the suspicion that the end product would be far more satisfying and would probably address the issues at hand far more successfully.
Dir: F. Gary Gray Writer: Kurt Wimmer Stars: Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Colm Meaney Cert: 18 Dur: 109 mins .
There is a particularly unpleasant, but nonetheless irresistible thrill to be had from watching a vigilante movie. Possibly because we share the cold, clammy feeling of vulnerable impotence common among all who do not take the law into their own hands, possibly because, however liberal our sensitivities, we wish we had the nerve to throw caution and the rule of law to the wind; whatever base, tribal instinct it is that these films tap into, it’s a powerful one.
This latest rendering of the Death Wish (1974) gestalt takes place on a bleak English housing estate and, although it articulates thirty years’ worth of prejudices we have about such places (since a few of them went up in flames in the early eighties), it is set very much in the today.
It begins with a sequence shot on a mobile phone of the feral children of the estate killing a young mother for committing the cardinal sin of … well, of pushing a pram across their turf when they were bored.
This sets the tone of what is to come. But first, a change of pace. We are introduced to Harry (Sir Michael, of course) a stiff, sanguine old man, making his breakfast in his grotty little flat, very much as his namesake Palmer did in the opening moments of The Ipcress File back in 1965. Now, as then, there is an air of sad loneliness about Harry. Even the pub he frequents has the air of a funeral parlour. When he ventures out through the cold grey streets where the only splash of colour is the ugly, illiterate graffiti, he avoids the ominous darkness of the subway, because of the uncaged animals he can hear in there. The estate is an untamed wilderness where the young run wild and everyone else keeps their heads down and their eyes averted.
The fact that Harry used to be a Marine is rather clumsily introduced into a discussion with his sole surviving friend, Leonard (played by David Bradley) and even the dumbest of the low-brow mouth-breathers Harry fears would note the significance of this revelation.
The kids of the estate all talk like black Jamaicans, as poor white-boys with no identity or positive role-models tend to do. Deprived of any direction or schooling, all they have is their rage. They don’t know what they are raging against, of course, nor why, they just know that they must.
Meanwhile, inevitably, Harry’s own rage is building until, finally, he reaches flashpoint. He does have a target. And a purpose. The drugs industry has destroyed the estate … so that’s where he starts.
Harry is determined to protect himself. To this end he enters the Hellish abode of the utterly loathsome Stretch, played with captivating, spine-tingling menace by the deathly Sean Harris – who recently played a vicious thug cop in the mini-series Red Riding and is best remembered for his mesmerising turn as Ian Brady in the Moors Murders TV movie See No Evil (2006). This sequence is quite extraordinary, and signals the transition from Harry’s normal, mundane world to a far darker, scarier, uncontrollable place ruled by fear and adrenaline. The music drones like wind in pipes, like memories haunting Harry, as Stretch symbolically uses a World War Two Luger as a crack pipe. The explosion of violence that follows is inevitable and horrifyingly satisfying.
And Harry is unleashed. He becomes a predator, stalking the darkness he so-recently feared, striking suddenly and viciously and never looking back. It speaks volumes about the consistent quality of Caine’s career and the sheer range of characters he has brought to the screen, that he so effortlessly makes Harry sympathetic without being maudlin, then allows hi to evolve believably into a stone-cold killer. We see flashes of Harry Palmer, Jack Carter even Mortwell from Mona Lisa (1986). Harry is the sum of everything good that Caine has ever been on screen.
Unfortunately, the film is less convincing than Caine’s performance. It begins to take liberties with logic, the police presence is ridiculously small given the death-toll, and the prints Harry obligingly leaves everywhere would have brought even the few coppers on show to his door very quickly. But the velocity of his rage is so intoxicating you don’t care about logic, you just want him to continue his cull.
Then, as any graduate of a good script-writing course will tell you, there has to be a twist, a reversal, when suddenly the rug is pulled from under the audience. This is handled, I must confess, very cleverly and very satisfyingly. The film turns into a sort of modern urban Wild Bunch (1969) at its climax, but manages to remain convincing throughout.
Dir: Daniel Barber Stars: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Liam Cunningham, Sean Harris Dur: 103 mins Cert: 18 .
Like Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, this film starts with the old Universal logo and, like Drag Me To Hell, this film is the product of a fan-boy playing with the elements of the movies he loved in his adolescence. Well, when did Quentin Tarantino ever do anything else?
I remember, my first encounter with him was at Birmingham’s now defunct Film and TV Festival, back in the autumn of 1991, when I was young and alive and still had my hair. I saw Reservoir Dogs at the Triangle Cinema on Birmingham's Aston University campus, having got there on public transport and on foot (this was before buying my first car and thusly using it as an excuse to keep the soles of my shoes clean by never again letting them touch the ground). I was there because its write-up in the festival programme made it sound like a heist movie (and always enjoy a good heist movie) and it starred Harvey Keitel who I’ve always thought of as giving good value (who, then, could have imagined his execrable turn in the superfluous Life On Mars remake?)
If you can imagine such a thing (and even if you can't) this was the world before the internet. There was no rumour-mill generating a head of hysterical steam about this film, and the controversy it had already generated at festivals around the world was relatively unknown to we few brave souls who turned up that afternoon. So, I walked in completely unprepared for what I was about to experience.
About half an hour in, several people got up and left. During the ear-cutting scene, several more did the same. By the time the film was over, the afternoon crowd I’d seen it with had dwindled down to roughly half its original size. But those of us who stayed knew we’d seen something special.
Obviously Reservoir Dogs went on to be something of a phenomenon in British cinema-going. Even after its video release, it continued to pack cinemas at midnight screenings for years. It was, to the best of my knowledge, the only American film to have made more money at the British box-office than at home.
And then Pulp Fiction emerged. I went to an official press showing of that, some weeks before it was due for general release. The journo in the row in front of me sparked up a joint as the opening strains of 'Misirlou' filled the auditorium. He giggled through the first ten minutes of the film then, presumably, fell asleep. Nowadays, when you aren’t allowed to smoke anything indoors - nor within a thousand yards of another human being - that would be shocking behaviour, but back then I merely thought of it as a waste of perfectly good dope. Or a waste of perfectly good Tarantino. One or the other.
Pulp Fiction changed everything. It wasn’t the first independent film to be a massive success, but it was arguably the one that had the biggest influence on other film-makers, studios and film-going audiences. Yes it is cool, yes it is funny and exciting and mischievous and yes, it does contain some very big movie stars doing some very uncharacteristic things. But, you know what? The reason that it deserved all the hyperbole and the hysteria was because it was so brilliantly written.
By this point, it’s fair to say that I felt I had a special relationship with Mr T’s films. I had discovered them before the hype machine had got to them and I had seen the quality before anyone else had had chance to point it out to me. We don’t get the privilege of making our own minds up very often in this country, most decisions are made at the American box-office before we even get a sniff at a film. So, on the rare occasions we do get a film first, get the chance to appreciate it first, it feels deeply satisfying!
Recently, I sat down and watched Pulp Fiction again for the first time in many years and it still stands up as a magnificent, mature, miraculous piece of writing. Note that word ‘mature’. There is a stylistic sophistication to Pulp Fiction that still impresses fifteen years later. The young Tarantino had a skill, a confidence and a voice that few writers develop after decades behind the keyboard. But, his characters are beautifully drawn ciphers, nothing more. They have been designed to fit perfectly into the unique situations Tarantino dreams up for them, but you can’t imagine they have any life beyond that situation. You can’t imagine them growing up or, indeed, growing old. They aren’t people. They aren’t fully-rounded humans and don’t interact in any human way.
Jackie Brown, on the other hand, was full of people interacting in a very human way. The world was still at one remove from the real world, the soundtrack still marked it out as a Tarantino film, but with the emphasis leaning towards the female characters who had had fairly short shrift from his other scripts. He also made Jackie and bail bondsman ?? credible, believable people. You could imagine these people having a life beyond the constraints of Tarantino’s beautifully-tooled script (and, in the case of Michael Keaton’s Ray Nicolette that literally came to pass, as the same actor, playing the same character, appears a year later in Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight) This was Tarantino still doing what he does best – two-hander dialogue scenes featuring one-liners so sharp they cut – but adding to his arsenal, developing his skills in turning that stylish mastery into drawing characters the viewer believed in and cared for. But, for me, Jackie Brown lacks the narrative flare, the energy, of its predecessors.
Then came the mindless fun of From Disk Till Dawn (1996), Kill Bill pt 1, The Rest of Kill Bill (2003 - 4) and Death Proof (2007). At least two of which are delightful, stylish, empty-headed bubble-gum, the other two a betrayal of all the promise he’d shown earlier. None of them were fitting successors to Pulp Fiction.
I waited for my Tarantino to return.
And waited.
And waited.
And, now, finally, with Inglorious Basterds … he's back!
As with all his films, this is divided into chapters. As with all his films, it is at its best when it features two people doing nothing more than talk. As with his latter films, the main character is a woman after revenge (not, surprisingly, the Brad Pitt character all the publicity is centred around). As with all his films, it is set in a world almost indistinguishable from our own … but not quite our own.
We begin at an isolated farmhouse, positioned like an American pioneer’s homestead in the wide-open country. The inter-title tell us this is Chapter 1, reassuring us that this film will at least be linear, and the location is “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”. The music is Morricone and, as Monsieur LaPadite stands outside his homestead, waiting, the man in black who steps onto his land is not Henry Fonda, but Christoph Waltz, Quentin’s latest discovery, who is given free reign in this exquisitely long prologue, to dig his nails into a film he resolutely refuses to let go of for the next two and a half hours.
This is Tarantino taking a leaf out of Hitchcock’s book. A surprisingly mainstream book for him and a rather over-used one (thanks to Brian DePalma keeping it open for the last thirty years) but, as books go, there are few better. Hitchcock always used to describe the process of creating suspense as one whereby you have two characters sitting at a table, discussing something inane, then you show a bomb stuck to the underside of the table, you show a close-up of the clock, with a minute to go, then you cut back to the characters continuing their conversation, unaware of the existence of the bomb. Suddenly something ordinary and mundane becomes something thrillingly filled with tension.
Hitchcock himself perfectly illustrated this by having a child innocently carrying a package which he is unaware contains a bomb, in Sabotage (1936 - a film which is quite deliberately referenced here later on) Well, Tarantino takes this thought experiment and brings it exquisitely to life in these opening moments – not with a bomb, but with a narrative conceit equally as explosive. He knows his blood-thirsty audience want to get to the violence. They want to cheer as the blood flies … they know it does because it’s there in the trailer … They want to see Brad Pitt with the rope-burn round his neck and his chin stuck out demanding a hundred scalps … but Tarantino makes them wait. He teases them with exquisite anticipation.
Throughout, Tarantino has, as always, created a montage of music which lifts the story into its own, particular reality. Here the majority of his choices are Morricone, filling the film with the (forgive the pun) hair-raising eeriness of the Spaghettis. That felt a little odd, at first, since the Spaghettis were Westerns and this, at least nominally, is a war film. But why not? There’s no reason why music that works effectively in one genre can’t be just as powerful in another!
The story proper gets underway outside a cinema in Paris, the city of cinemas, when our main protagonist (to whom Pitt’s Aldo Raine is really just the supporting feature) meets a German soldier who also happens to be a celebrity and a confidante of Goebbles, who is looking for a venue in which to premiere his new propaganda masterpiece.
So the convoluted plot slowly unravels. Sudden explosions of extreme violence punctuating the long, rambling dialogue scenes. Unusually, this film acknowledges that Germans didn’t necessarily hatch their plots in perfect clipped English, nor, for that matter, do the French necessarily resist in English with a vaguely Gallic accent. No, the primary tongues through most of this film’s numerous and lengthy dialogue scenes are German and French. Occasionally the scenes are extended even further by the fact that characters are talking to each other through translators and we get all the lines twice.
Oh, how this must have irritated the blood-hungry youngsters who think that Tarantino’s only previous achievement is the Technicolor chop-socky of Kill Bill.
Of course, to be truly in-keeping with the Italian schlock that Tarantino so loves, these scenes should really be badly dubbed. Maybe we can have that as an alternative dialogue track on the Blu-Ray.
It is during one of these protracted sitting-around-a-table sequences that Waltz’s Landy makes his return. As fastidiously polite as before, with the same oral fixation, he is captivating, hypnotic, his extra-ordinarily elaborate performance is nothing short of genius and deserves a supporting actor nod come next Spring’s Oscars. It is often said that you can measure the quality of a hero by the quality of the villain well, in this case, the villain is Grade A, solid gold!
But let us look at the crowd of heroes Tarantino has assembled … Starting with Pitt’s Aldo Raine, a wonderfully, witty performance, allowing Pitt to show off his comedy timing (which he doesn’t get to do nearly enough) and give us yet another of his Southern Red-Neck accents. Then there are his Basterds, a cadre of blood-thirsty Jewish soldiers, led by The Bear Jew, played with nebbish bathos by film director Eli Roth. But the real heroes of the piece are a cinema manager and a film reviewer.
I’ve done both jobs in my time and I’m glad these crucial, life-and-death roles are finally being afforded the respect they so richly deserve.
The story of how the Basterds earned their name is not this film. It is a different film. A film I’d happily watch but, it is not a what concerns Tarantino here. Their story hovers around this film, just outside the frame. Landy’s story, too, is fascinating and almost entirely absent. How does he earn his name The Jew Hunter? Why does he come to hate that name? All of that is another story for another day. Suffice it to say that all these deep, rich characters are brought together at this time in this place to tell this story.
This perfectly illustrates what a wonderful confidence trick has been perpetrated here. Everything leading to the film’s release gave the anxious, impatient viewer to understand that this would be a magnificent blood-bath in the style of Kill Bill, featuring Pitt’s square-chinned performance throughout. What we get, however, is a film where the Basterds earn their fearsome reputation off-screen. Pitt only puts in an appearance every half-hour or so. Instead we have a film about the two things that Tarantino cares most about: movies and conversation. Oh, and a plot to kill Hitler is thrown in there for good measure.
One imagines Bryan Singer must have watched this movie and wept, for it really is the film that he, in his wettest dream, wishes Valkyrie were. Where Valkyrie was staid and cold, this is vibrant and red-hot, where that was reverential and serious, this is irreverent and hilarious. Where that was a tedious history lesson, this is an uplifting film-making lesson!
By the time Emmanuelle dons her red dress, red nail-varnish and red lipstick, accompanied by the incongruous strains of David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting Out Fire) and descends the curving staircase to meet her Nazi guests like Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), Tarantino’s mischievous sense of humour had the audience I saw this with in the palm of his hand.
Yes this film has moments of brutality, but also moments of almost operatic high melodrama, it has performances which are delicious to digest, with both Waltz and Pitt failing to disguise their grins at several points. It has a show-down which turns Cinema Paradiso into Cinema Inferno. It is peppered throughout with intelligent little nods to Alfred Hitchcock. It has the beautifully-tooled dialogue that we learned to expect from Tarantino after Res Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But more, much more than all of this, it shows a real maturity on behalf of the auteur.
The film will be less parodied than Kill Bill, it is less visual, less visceral, its set-pieces are less instant. But, as a viewing experience, it is far more satisfying, showing measurable progress from Jackie Brown. After the detours of the last ten years, finally Tarantino has produced something that is worthy of the promise he showed early. I imagine his next film will be as different again and, if his track record is anything to go by, I probably won’t be taken with that film. But that’s okay. When someone is capable of producing something of this quality, one is prepared to wait for them to do it again. Meanwhile, it’s entirely possible this might just be his masterpiece.
.
Writer / Director: Quentin Tarantino
Stars: Mẽlanie Laurent, Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth
This film begins with a robot’s tracks rolling over the rubble of an urban battlefield, very much as The Terminator did back in 1984. Given that Kathryn Bigelow was married to James Cameron once upon a time, you might be forgiven for thinking that this, her latest film, was going in a similar direction … but you could hardly be more wrong.
Here, the urban battlefield is not in some non-specific place in some non-specific future, it’s in Baghdad, during the recent unpleasantness there and the robot is a remote bomb disposal unit.
Those who are familiar with Bigelow’s previous films, such as Near Dark (1987), Strange Days (1995) and particularly Point Break (1991) will know that she is fascinated with exploring the relationship between violence with masculinity. Well, there are few places where you can study that more closely than in a theatre of war. And uniquely among the armed forces – the bomb disposal specialists are the guys who walk towards bombs.
The bomb-proof body-armour they wear when doing this is one part medieval armour to two parts deep-sea diving suit … and whenever they put it on, they walk away from the world of relative safety, of support, of some sort of sanity, into a mad, upside-down world where they are all alone … just them and their bomb. Or bombs.
As in Memphis Belle (1990) and Platoon (1986), films about two very different wars, we feel the pressure mount as the end of Bravo Company’s tour of duty approaches … no one says it, but everyone is thinking: “How many more times can we put ourselves in harm’s way … before it’s our turn to not come back?”
Well, that’s a gamble new kid on the Baghdad block, Will James (Jeremy Renner), seems determined to take. When he puts on the armour, he’s an adrenaline-junkie, prone to taking liberties with his own life and his two colleagues’ without hesitation. The other two (played with minimalist restrain by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) see his macho posturing for what it is … unnecessary and dangerous. When he is told that his responsibility is to stay safe, he shrugs, smiles and dismisses the idea with a casual “It’s combat, buddy”.
The several bomb-disposal set-pieces are nerve-shredding in their intensity. Watching the lone man, in his armour, walking alone down the middle of a deserted, rubble-strewn street puts one in mind of the recent swathe of end-of-the-world and zombie movies the post-9/11 hysteria has given rise to. Indeed, when he finds himself surrounded by mines, he pulls on the cord that connects them, and they rise up out of the dirt like zombies … but such similarities are merely perceptual and peripheral. This film may be a comment on the hysteria of mainstream cinema, but it’s not a contribution to it.
What makes this film even more disturbing is the knowledge that scriptwriter Mark Boal based it on his experiences as a journalist embedded with a unit of bomb technicians. So the man knows of whence he writes.
When Will is faced with a car full of mines, his first thought is to divest himself of his armour because, with that much explosive, it’ll make no difference. Freed from its restrictions, he doggedly traces the wires through the nooks and crannies of the burnt-out car, determined to defuse the bombs, even as the soldiers around him are becoming ever more panicky, feeling besieged by the onlookers on every rooftop. Yet, such is the skill of Bigelow and Boal, such is their determination to present the truth of the war in all its complicated moral greyness, this scene seems more reckless than heroic.
James is the maverick, the rebel, exactly the sort of character that typically makes for the most engaging Hollywood protagonists, but here he is seen from the perspective of his colleagues and, to their mind, his death wish is simply going to get them killed too. The only back-story we get from him is when the others are looking through the box of mementoes he has, bits of different bombs he has defused, which he describes as a box is full of things that nearly killed him. Significantly, his wedding ring is in there also.
Throughout the film there are deftly-handled references to several other war films, the afore-mentioned Platoon for one, Full Metal Jacket (1987) for another and, inevitably, Apocalypse Now (1979), but these aren’t just post-modern jokes there for the sake of it, they reflect the reality of the lives of these soldiers … it stands to reason that they will see the war they are fighting in relation to the movies they grew up watching and the first-person-shooters they grew up playing.
Back in the safety of The Green Zone, they play Gears of War (which is just the latest iteration of the ideas Bigelow’s ex-husband first had when working on Aliens in 1986). Why do they play this? Well, because this is a controllable sort of war, one where you know who the enemy is, who your friends are and you have a clear objective in mind. It’s nothing like the war they fight on a daily basis, it’s a fantasy!
It is here that Specialist Eldridge is gripped by survivor guilt, which gets keener the nearer he gets to going home. His doctor helpfully counsels him that war is a once in a lifetime experience which “could be fun!” He, unlike Boal and Bigelow, clearly hasn’t understood the difference between Gears of War and the real thing.
Cameo performances from Guy Pearce, as the disposal specialist who demonstrates to us just how dangerous the job is, David Morse as the officer who has clearly watched Apocalypse Now too often and desperately wants to be Colonel Kilgore and Ralph Fiennes, in an extraordinary turn as a mercenary we meet in the middle of the desert, are all so well drawn and bring with them so much texture, they add to the feeling that what we are seeing just one small story in a much larger on-going narrative.
The film succeeds in avoiding the problem I had with Black Hawk Down (20001) by concentrating on a small crew. So there’s only three cloned troopers wearing identical hair and camouflage to tell apart, and one of those is black. Makes it a lot easier to identify with a character when you can actually pick them out of a crowd.
Finally, the three specialists come together as a unit during an extraordinary sequence when they find themselves pinned down by snipers and have to fight back using bullets which are, symbolically, already stained with blood.
This film overflows with extraordinary moments, there’s not just the edge-of-the-seat defusings, there’s also the ambush, there’s Will, fully clothed, standing in a shower which quickly fills up with blood, there’s haunting footage of him out of uniform, running through the neon-lit late-night streets which, for some peculiar reason, reminded me of Taxi Driver (1975).
Jarhead (2005) made the burning Kuwaiti oil-fields look like something out of a Biblical dark fantasy, not that it had to try hard, because they did look like Hell on Earth … here, the site of a night-time bus explosion, rubble lit by burning trees, is a similarly Biblical, similarly diabolical vision … accompanied by the unearthly wailing of women. All of which reminded me of the No Lung Bridge sequence from Apocalypse Now, the moment when sanity finally and completely transformed into insanity … when Willard and his crew stepped off the map. Here Will and his team take it upon themselves to leave the protection of their comrades and plunge into the dark labyrinth of streets and alleys that the bombers, “The Haj”, call home.
Whilst the demilitarised area where some vestige of normalacy exists, might be called The Green Zone, the war is clearly being fought in a perpetual Grey Zone … where nothing quite makes sense and one’s moral compass just goes round and round.
The main performance by Jeremy Renner is a study in caged rage. As impactful as Colin Farrell’s debut in the thematically-similar Tigerland (2000), I hope this does for Renner’s career what that did for Farrell’s, because he deserves it. Thanks to his fiercely intense eyes, he manages to communicate so much intense emotion while saying nothing. The moment when he finally breaks is when he finds the corpse of a child, with a booby-trap surgically implanted inside it. This reminds him of his own son, the one he abandoned to go off and get shot at and, because of this, it’s just one horror too many.
The dialogue is sparse, the narrative fragmentary, yet the performances are humane enough that we come to care for these guys in a very deep and real sense. We’re glad they’re out there, instead of us. The film never shrinks away from the contradictions in their characters, and doesn’t proffer pat, psycho-babble explanations for their behaviour. These guys don’t communicate in an open, healthy way. They deal with their emotions by staging a really-quite-vicious gut-punching contest with each-other instead. Like all real people, they’re complex and contradictory. Sometimes we understand them, sometimes we don’t, and the mystifying decision that James makes at the end of the movie is both horrifying and, sadly inevitable.
Only in the film’s closing moments, do we fully understand the quotation we see at the beginning.
The Hurt Locker has spent much of this year walking its way around the world’s festivals, hoovering up accolades as it goes, and justifiably so. That’s the intelligent way to market a film, especially on as critic-friendly as this one, because it allows you to build up that word of mouth gradually that ensures this film will be the sleeper hit it richly deserves to be.
This is this year’s The Wrestler … a film that comes out of nowhere and stands confident and proud in crowd of complacent, lazy films. In time, The Hurt Locker will be spoken of in the same breath as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and, for an analysis of the greyness of modern warfare, I can think of no greater achievement.
