TRUE GRIT

The unique 'Best Film Nominee' illustration from the BAFTA brochure beautifully evokes the feel of the film

True Grit ends as it begins, with a consideration of death.  Beyond any of the individual characters it introduces us to, then dispatches, the death the film is really concerned with is the death of The Old West.

I must confess a vested interest.  I have written extensively on The Coens in the past and consider them to be the greatest film-makers working today.  That puts a real burden of responsibility on them which, at least so far, they don’t seem to have buckled under.  Whew.  They can be very variable in their output, ranging from the world-beating magnificence of No Country For Old Men (2007) to the good-natured eccentricities of Burn After Reading (2008) via the simply incomprehensible A Serious Man (2009).  One never knows which way the pendulum will swing, will their next film be a screwball comedy, a fantasy or a gritty crime drama.

Well, True Grit is, as its title might suggest, a very gritty, very dramatic film heaving with crime.  It features career-defining performances and is purely and simply majestic.  Although the year is yet young, this is the film of the year and I don’t see anything coming over the horizon to challenge that.  Except maybe Twilight.

The film’s extraordinarily evocative opening shot fades in gradually, like a developing photograph, an old photograph, shrouded in shades of sepia.  It is accompanied by the narration of an old woman, looking back at her lost youth, her lost father and, of course, the lost West.

How does the saying go?  ‘In the midst of life, we are in death’.  Well, that is definitely the case for young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) who, at the tender age of fourteen, finds herself taking on the responsibility of dealing with her father’s estate after his violent and untimely death.  She very soon finds herself sleeping with corpses at the mortuary and, as her quest to avenge her father develops; pretty much everyone she meets is murdered or maimed.  But then, this is a revenge tragedy and, as the name suggests, they rarely end happily. 

That's one bad hat, Hailee

Mattie describes her night in the mortuary as being “… like Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones” but, unlike the bones in the Bible story, these skeletons don’t come back together with tendons and flesh and skin.  However, when Mattie later finds herself surrounded by more bones, they do come to life in a very Biblical way.

Commentators wiser than I have noted that, in the Old West, what literacy there was likely came from reading the only book everyone out there was likely to encounter: The King James Bible.  It would influence everything, from the way people thought to the very words they spoke, and so it is here.  The Coens have long demonstrated a love for precise, often complex, occasionally arcane dialogue and this film gives them ample opportunity to indulge that love, with poetic, florid and deliciously illustrative language issuing from practically every mouth.  I won’t steal the best lines; feel free to discover them yourself.

So the film is rich with its Biblical texture and atmosphere heavy with death.  Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is a man steeped in death.  He is described, before his entrance, as “a pitiless man, double tough …” and, when he does appear, he is being grilled in a court about the twenty-two men he has killed in his four years of duty as a Marshall.  This is why Mattie chooses him to be the agent of her vengeance; she wants an irredeemable man with no fear of killing.  

A pitiless man and double tough, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

Mattie herself is utterly merciless in her determination, she destroys a poor horse-trader by out-witting him with her remorseless logic and rapier-sharp mind and, when the Texas Ranger, Le Boeuf (Matt Damon), introduces himself by entering her bedroom, he is proud and preening and patronising and she effortlessly outwits him, though only half awake.  This not simply a quest for blood for Mattie, her revenge is philosophical, even intellectual … She discusses with Rooster the definition of malum in se, a crime which is wrong in itself, a crime which is, essentially, against God’s Law.

Her two adult protectors have far simpler motivations than she, pride in LaBoeuf’s case, cash money in Rooster’s.  Out on the range, the two cowboys bicker like little girls while the little girl with them is the constant voice of maturity reason, but that’s fourteen-year-olds for you.  When he is alone (and at a good distance from a gin bottle) Rooster gets to show her his considerable tracking skills while they ride through an ever-changing landscape, as though passing through the levels of Hell, taking them ever nearer to Mattie’s prey, the cowardly murderer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin).

As usual in a Coen film, the violence is sudden, messy and definitive and the resulting corpses are generally treated with a cold disregard.  As Rooster ruminates, when considering the four men he has killed, all lying on the frozen ground: “They wanted a decent burial; they shoulda got themselves killed in the summer”.

Without wishing to discuss the film’s dénouement in too much detail, it is fair to say that it is satisfyingly bloody and Biblical, and leads to Rooster taking on a burden of responsibility which, before meeting Mattie, he probably wouldn’t have shouldered, and which earns him the redemption he doesn’t particularly want.

I love the period feel the publicity people have given to the teaser posters.

And so, our tale of the Old West ends as it began, bathed in sepia light and fading into memory.  This leaves only the film’s coda – and the point where this version and the John Wayne original part company most significantly – which considers how, by the early years of the 20^th century, the legends of the Old West, such as Cogburn, Younger and James, have become a sideshow attraction.  An ignominious reward for those who carry the wounds of a nation’s birth-pains.

Once again, the Coens have hewn-out a masterpiece.  Every line of dialogue, every moment, is rich with detail and significance and I am sure that deeper layers of subtext will offer themselves to me as I re-watch the film many, many times over the coming years.  It needed brave directors to take on territory already charted by Henry Hathaway and, as for the main role … The Duke won his only Oscar for this role, although it was really in recognition of his whole career … Possibly the only man big enough to fill those boots was The Dude, fresh from winning his own career Oscar. 

Bridges’ performance retains the gruff exterior of Crazy Heart’s Bad Blake, but, unlike that role, Rooster is utterly incapable of communicating his feelings.  This comes across by turns as hilariously funny and deeply tragic when, for example, his desperate insecurity in front of LaBoeuf drives him into a destructive drinking binge.

But the performance of the film and, to my mind, the performance of the year, is Hailee Steinfeld’s.  She is the age Jodie Foster was when she was Oscar nominated for Taxi Driver (1976), and has a similar towering confidence on screen.  This will take her a long way and, if there’s any justice that doesn’t have to be taken at the muzzle of a gun, it will take her all the way up to the podium to accept her gold statue on Sunday the 27^th.






Dir: Joel Coen
Stars:  Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin
Dur: 110 mins
Cert: 15

BLACK SWAN

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Anyone who has seen Jennifer Connolly’s performance in Requiem for a Dream (2000) will know that director, Darren Aronofsky, is not averse to doing disturbing, invasive things to beautiful women in his films.   Furthermore, anyone who remembers Natalie Portman’s debut in Leon (1994) or her shaven-headed turn in V for Vendetta (2006) will know that she’s not frightened of taking on challenging, unpleasant roles. 

Put these two factors together and you might well expect Black Swan to be a harsh viewing experience, which it is; but it’s also ravishingly beautiful in a cold, controlled sort of way.  It is a film which, from the very outset, tells you that it is playing with subtext and metaphor and you better have your Thinking Head on or you’ll get left behind!

We begin with a nightmare, showing Nina Sayers (Portman) dancing The Swan Queen with a jet black, feathered, be-horned ballerino … presumably her inner demon.  So, we know from the get go that all is not well in Nina’s mind.  When she wakes, she finds herself surrounded by mirrors and reflective surfaces and regards them with suspicion.  Even the rest of the corps de ballet is filled with reflections of Nina as every woman in there – from the departing prima ballerina, Wynona Ryder, to the understudy, Mila Kunis – bears a passing resemblance to Nina.  

Wynona, sorry, Natalie, through a glass, darkly

 This serves to make Nina increasingly paranoid about jealousy from the other dancers and fearful about her own abilities.  It’s worth remembering that Portman has a degree in Psychology, so she brings a wealth of understanding to a role which is, psychologically, very dense.  She gives an entirely convincing portrayal of a girl slowly losing her mind as Nina unravels under the constant, unrelenting pressure of being a professional ballerina.

One can sympathise.  Aronofsky draws comparisons with the behind-the-scenes life of Randy the Ram, in The Wrestler (2008), by showing just how much pain and sacrifice ballet dancers inflict on themselves in their unending battle to achieve a brief moment of perfection.  Even pretending to be a ballerina required Portman to endure months of gruelling training during which, rather like ‘method’ poster boy, Christian Bale, she lost over a stone of weight.  The Red Shoes (1948) famously dealt with the physically and psychologically destructive power of dancing and Nina, like Victoria Page before her, is physically up to the challenge of dancing, but is she mentally tough enough?  

Aronosky and Portman on set (Portman's the one in the tutu, by the way)

Just as Clint Mansell’s score uses Tchaikovsky’s music as a jumping-off point then warps and distorts it, so the whole film’s plot lifts elements directly from the ballet, but re-interprets and re-purposes them.  It also draws on the theme of duality you’ll find in the psycho-thrillers of Brian De Palma - most notably in Sisters (1973), Obsession (1976) and Body Double (1984) - which were, in turn, largely inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).  And, speaking of Hitch, his most famous piece, Psycho (1960), deals with the dark and deadly power wielded by mothers, a theme he played with time and again and which brings us neatly to Nina’s mother, Erica, played wonderfully by Barbara Hershey.

Initially, Erica comes across as a loving, supportive mother who understands her daughter, having been a ballerina herself but, gradually, we realise that Erica’s determination to stop her daughter making her mistake (of falling pregnant and losing her career) has become an obsession.  She has taught her daughter to associate sex with wounding and this has resulted in Nina being fearful and withdrawn.  The ballet’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), appreciates the precision of Nina’s dancing the White Swan role but, for the dual role of the evil Black Swan, he needs her dance to be raw, emotional and seductive.  Unfortunately, thanks to mother’s teachings, she has no idea how to do that; so he sets about trying to unleash that side of her personality, which puts him in direct opposition with the increasingly flaky Erica.  She, like her daughter, is fearful of reflections, yet she is self-destructively drawn to them.  She obsessively paints primitive, cruel self-portraits, and weeps while she does so.  Well, there’s a workable definition of well-balanced!

Cassel gets to play sexual predator again, not a French stereotype at all, then.

 You see, then, that the film is about as far from Glee as a show-must-go-on movie can be!  It is just as harsh visually as it is psychologically.  Even the palette is unrelenting with (apart from one scene in a night-club) almost no colour to be seen.  Thomas surrounds himself with stark black and white furniture, which makes its own statement (another motif which I feel Aronofsky has borrowed from De Palma), yet the rehearsal rooms have cinder-block walls and are therefore separated by a labyrinth of grey corridors.  Behind the scenes, show biz is all moral shades of grey!

A real surprise here, too, is the way that cutting-edge special effects have been woven invisibly into the fabric of the film.  Some of them are punch-you-in-the-face stunning, but you simply don’t notice (or don’t think you notice) a lot of the others the first time you see the film, so skilfully are they employed.   This is what effects are supposed to be, aids to the telling of a story, not a side-show attraction in their own right.  Any effect you fail to notice is an effect that is working!  Aronofsky’s team did their job so well, in fact, that no one noticed when it came to the Oscar ballots.  Ah, well.

Over at Obsessed with Film, they have put together an appropriately obsessive argument for why this film is a masterpiece and, whilst I don’t agree with them all, they make some very well argued and well-considered points.  They have also embedded a fascinating short video showing how (and where) those special effects were used.  The article is here but – and I can’t stress this enough – DO NOT GO THERE until after you have seen the film.  Serious, film-ruining spoilers there are, in abundance!

Visually, the film is loaded with coded images: The mirrors, the wings, the blacks, whites and greys contrasting starkly with the red of the wounds … This is not an easy watch.  It might give you a headache as you realise you’ve been frowning throughout, trying to keep up with the whirling camera and cascade of short, energetic scenes which typically say very little but mean a lot.  It’s a stark, tough and, occasionally, unpleasant film which also manages moments of sublime beauty, visual poetry and even erotica. 

As with The Fighter (which Aronofsky also contemplated directing for a while) this film is full of rich, complex characters being brilliantly acted and, again just like The Fighter, all of this is undermined somewhat by the inevitable melodramatic trajectory to the narrative.  Whilst being careful not to give away too many details, I must confess I found the ending especially frustrating.  It is both the emotional and intellectual crescendo of the drama, but undercuts this with the inappropriately contrived dénouement of a Roald Dahl or Rod Serling television play.  Its lineage and critical reception have given Black Swan greater artistic caché than Tales of the Unexpected or Twilight Zone were ever afforded, but its final act is exactly what you would expect from one of their sting-in-the-morality-tale endings, only executed here with less authenticity and more embarrassment.

So, if you are looking for a female-perspective companion-piece to The Wrestler, this fits the bill as a well-made, brilliantly-acted and carefully constructed film.  But, whilst it is a huge stylistic leap forward from The Wrestler and clearly has a lot more going on upstairs, it simply doesn’t have that film’s heart.

Dir: Darren Aronofsky

Stars: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel

Dur:  108 mins

Cert:  15

THE FIGHTER

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Darren Aronofsky decided to pass on directing this because it was obviously too similar to The Wrestler (2009).  Well, it is, and it isn’t.  While Hollywood is at present chock-a-block with ex-wrestlers starring in action films and comedies, The Wrestler was one of the first films to take the ‘sport’ itself seriously.  However, on the other glove, there are dozens of films about boxing:  from Cinderella Man (2005) and Million Dollar Baby (2004) by way of Ali (2001) then all the way back to Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) and The Champion (1949).  But, for this generation, the contenders for the championship belt are Rocky (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).  You see, as Simon and Garfunkel didn’t say: Boxers are just poor boys but their stories are often told!

So, Aronofsky threw the towel in and concentrated instead on a different form of brutal physicality – ballet dancing – leaving the welterweight David O. Russell to step into the ring.

Alright, I’ll stop with the boxing metaphors now.

Russell is far from over-productive, this being only his third feature in eleven years, but he clearly knew what he was doing: he was channelling the spirits of both Scorsese and Stallone as he tells the true tale of Micky Ward, played by Mark (don’t call him Marky) Wahlberg, a two-bit fighter with a ‘coulda been’ older brother, Dickie, (played by Christian Bale) and a parasitic family of sisters, led by his conniving, exploitative mother, Alice (Melissa Leo).

To a great extent this film is not about its title character, it's more about his brother, who spends his time smoking crack to help him deal with the pain of looking back on the only worthwhile moment in his life – the day he punched Sugar Ray Leonard.  Christian Bale overwhelms the film with his ebullient, loud-mouthed and lanky performance as Dickie.   

Yes, he did lose a load of weight again and yes he did have his hair shaved in patches to emulate the real Dickie’s partial baldness; but if this is what he has to do to occupy the character, so be it, it’s certainly worth the effort.   After all, he is actually three years younger than Wahlberg but, with the skin drawn tight across his bony face, he looks far, far older!  Bale is simply magnificent in this, all wounded pride and raging denial and, thanks to his energy and humour, what could have been a pathetic, one-dimensional character really comes believably to life.  They must have felt the electricity on set, seeing how Bale was, consciously or not, heading inexorably in the direction of an Oscar.  I think he’ll win it this year.  I think he deserves it.

Wahlberg, however, deserves credit too.  From the film’s opening shot, with the two brothers sitting side-by-side on a sofa, being interviewed for a documentary, Wahlberg is reserved and quiet and relaxed where Bale is energy and noise and nerves.  It makes for a great contrast throughout the film and helps build the bond of sympathy that you need to have with Micky.

Micky, you see, has a handicap: he loves his family.  His brother is a liability.  His sisters are desperate to have their own failures validated by watching him fail too and his mother babies him, while using him as a meal ticket and favouring Dickie.  They do nothing but take from him and, because he loves them without question, he just keeps giving.

Leo gives an extraordinarily complex performance as the thoroughly loathsome mother who is as deluded as her eldest son, as jealous as her daughters, and coldly unmoved by the battering her youngest boy keeps taking for her.  She, too, richly deserves the Oscar nomination she has received!

Eventually, of course, Micky finds his back-bone, encouraged by the traditional straight-talking barmaid, Charlene (played by Amy Adams).  Her arrival seriously alters the balance of power within the family and quickly creates a spiral of misfortune.  Fortunately, even at the film’s darkest points, there is a vein of wit running through the hurt which alleviates the desperation and makes it all bearable.

Just as Micky breaks his mother’s apron strings, Dickie’s crack habit gets him into the inevitable trouble the wily viewer has been expecting, and takes him away from the family.  So, both brothers escape the pernicious influence of the mother, and both brothers get a chance to heal and grow.

At this moment, when they have both reached their very lowest points, they both rise up and – although it isn’t really there, I swore I heard Bill Conti’s music - they both throw themselves into training montages. 

Ultimately, despite the excellent performances all round and the feeling of gritty cinema verité, this is essentially your standard redemptive American Dream story.  Yes, the first half, with its focus on family feuds and addiction reminded me of Raging Bull, while the second half is pure Rocky.  But, Hell, if you’re going to be evoking the memories of boxing movies, those are the ones to go for!

Dir: David O. Russell
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams
Dur: 115 mins
Cert: 15

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OSCAR NOMINATIONS

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So, The Academy Award nominations are with us once more. The year's biggest popularity contest has begun in Earnest (a small town just outside Hollywood) with lots of well-paid slebs maintaining an air of casual disdain as they desperately compete with each other to win the affection of The Academy.  But, over the last decade or so, said Academy has proven itself to be a wily beast largely immune to the tides of fashion (as evidenced most recently by last year's shock rejection of Avatar's opulence in favour of The Hurt Locker's gritty realism).

Let's have a closer look at a few categories, shall we?

Best Film:

And the nominations are:

• Black Swan
• The Fighter
• Inception
• The Kids Are All Right
• The King's Speech
• 127 Hours
• The Social Network
• Toy Story 3
• True Grit
• Winter's Bone

Unusually, I've actually had the chance to see most of these (reviews of The Fighter, Black Swan and True Grit will be with you shortly).  If I were a member of The Academy (surely my absence is just an administrative over-sight) I'd be divided between hanging my hat on Inception and True Grit but, as a long-time lover of all things Coenical, I'm afraid it wouldn't be a long debate: The clear winner is True Grit!

 Can't see the real Academy going for a remake, especially not when The Social Network has got such a head of steam but, these are my choices, not theirs!

Best Director:

• Darren Aronofsky – Black Swan
• Joel Coen and Ethan Coen – True Grit
• David Fincher – The Social Network
• Tom Hooper – The King's Speech
• David O. Russell – The Fighter

Without wishing to pre-empt my own unpublished reviews too much, I'll simply restrict myself to reiterating that True Grit is the latest in a long line of Coen masterpieces and, as such, would get my vote.  But, again, in the real world, I'm thinking its Fincher's year.

Best Actor:

• Javier Bardem: Biutiful
• Jeff Bridges – True Grit
• Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network
• Colin Firth – The King's Speech 
• James Franco – 127 Hours

This is an interesting year because three of these characters (I haven't seen Bardem's turn so can't speak for him) are really quite unlikeable.  Eisenberg's Zuckerberg particularly so!  Will Jeff Bridges be the third actor ever to win two years on the trot?  Well, since his Cogburn is essentially Bad Blake all over again, just with an eye-patch instead of a guitar, I'm thinking not.  It's a shame they decided to give him a consolation It's-Your-Year Oscar just before he turned in the performance of his decade.  But, hey, a gold statue is a gold statue.  I'd like to see Firth get it, just because he gives jaw-droppingly wonderful acceptance speeches, but I think Eisenberg will be swept along on The Social Network wave.

 Having only seen Portman in Black Swan, I can't comment on the 'Best Actress' noms, save to note there must be a typo somewhere - no Meryl Streep.  I know she hasn't done anything this year but still, surely she's overdue for number seventeen.

Best Supporting Actor:

• Christian Bale – The Fighter
• John Hawkes – Winter's Bone
• Jeremy Renner – The Town
• Mark Ruffalo – The Kids Are All Right
• Geoffrey Rush – The King's Speech

Bale.  Deal with it.

Best Supporting Actress:

• Amy Adams – The Fighter
• Helena Bonham Carter – The King's Speech
• Melissa Leo – The Fighter
• Hailee Steinfeld – True Grit
• Jacki Weaver – Animal Kingdom

 Melissa Leo is quite extraordinarily loathsome as Marky Mark's mum in The Fighter but, Hailee Steinfeld (at just 14 years old) is just riveting as Mattie Ross in True Grit.  Definitely the performance of the year in any category, the little gold doorstop must be hers!


Original Screenplay:

• Another Year – Mike Leigh
• The Fighter – Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson
• Inception – Christopher Nolan
• The Kids Are All Right – Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg
• The King's Speech – David Seidler

Okay, so we'll skim over The King's Speech's debatable originality, given the historical records of the events in question, and recognise that it is a fine piece of writing but, for me, Inception wins hands down.  The Americans are great at assembling complex ole structures in their screenplays and along comes a quietly-spoken Brit who makes as mind-blowingly-complex a structure as I've ever encountered in a script seem so simple.  An extraordinary piece of technical writing.

Best Adapted Screenplay:

• 127 Hours – Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy
• The Social Network – Aaron Sorkin
• Toy Story 3 – Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
• True Grit – Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
• Winter's Bone – Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini

Now this is a more vibrant category than the Original one, this year.  Beaufoy and Doyle's script for 127 Hours manages, I feel, to do more with recent actuality than Sorkin's The Social Network, and it pains me to admit that because I loves me The Sorkin.  For me what broke The Social Network was the flashback framing narrative, it just seemed disappointingly safe!  And, hang on, Toy Story 3  … since when did being a sequel and therefore containing the same characters and situations as a previous film make your screenplay adapted?  Maybe it and The King's Speech have been entered into the wrong categories?  But, anyway, none of that matters because nothing comes close to the richly textured poetry of The Brothers Coen's take on Charles Portis' True Grit.  The statue is theirs.

The Pixar Award for Best Animated Feature:

Goes to ... ehm ... Pixar.

Although it's a goddamn crime that 9 wasn't even nominated.  Was that ignored this year or last year?  Can't remember.

Best Cinematography:

• Black Swan – Matthew Libatique
• Inception – Wally Pfister
• The King's Speech – Danny Cohen
• The Social Network – Jeff Cronenweth
• True Grit – Roger Deakins

Now, you see, again this is a very rich category.  Even with the surprising omission of 127 Hours, Pfister’s work on Inception was sublime, but Deakins does it again.  He won it with the opening two minutes of True Grit!


Best Visual Effects:

• Alice in Wonderland
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
• Hereafter
• Inception
• Iron Man 2

Despite my thinking that the ‘Iron Man-in-a-Suitcase’ gag was the best single effect of the year, this statue has gotta go to Alice, hasn’t it?  Because, of course, a lot of the stuff in Inception that you think was CGI, was actually shot in camera.

 If ‘Visual Effects’ still includes things like blowing up miniatures and rotating a set and suspending your entire cast on wires then, well, I think my choice is fairly obvious.

Best Makeup:

Only three nominations, sadly.  Gotta be Baker and Elsey’s Wolfman, for old time’s sake!

Best Costume Design:

I think Colleen Atwood is a shoo-in for the extra-ordinary work she did on Alice In Wonderland, provided The Academy’s collective memory stretches all the way back to this time last year.

Oddly, I notice that the incredible work done by Lee Smith on Inception has been completely ignored in the ‘Editing’ category.

And they are really the only categories on which I have an opinion, apart from ...

Best Original Soundtrack:

• 127 Hour  – A.R. Rahman
• How to Train Your Dragon – John Powell
• Inception – Hans Zimmer
• The King's Speech – Alexandre Desplat
• The Social Network – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Rahman won rightly two years ago, but this year's soundtrack lacked the distinctiveness of his Slumdog Millionaire work.  Powell's Dragon soundtrack was an underappreciated delight and I'm glad to see it getting a nom.  Reznor and Ross' The Social Network is just an hour of ethereal electronic meandering.  Now, don't get me wrong, I paid good money for their Ghosts I - IV album, I am more than receptive to ethereal electronic meandering, but here it just never coalesced into a stand-out soundtrack.  Inception, on the other hand, is wonderful, powerful piece of work and I imagine it will win ... but it doesn't really advance the work Zimmer achieved with James Newton Howard on The Dark Knight, which was magnificent and revolutionary and completely ignored by The Academy in 2009.

But, here's a thing:  Irrespective of the qualities of the film, the single stand-out element of Tron Legacy was Daft Punk's soundtrack.  From its Coplandesque Overture to the dance floor remix of the single, Derezzed, it is by turns spine-tingling, moving and thrilling and it's a FUCKING TRAVESTY that it hasn't been nominated!



Are they all deaf over there?  I'm sorry, but no amount of Randy Newman-warbled sentimental syrup will make up for the absence of those crash helmets on the big night.

I've decided that if Daft Punk aren't going, neither am I.  So just don't expect to see me on the red carpet, alright.  I've made my mind up.  So there! 

127 HOURS

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If you read a paper or saw the TV news in 2003, you already know this story and you probably know how it ends.  If not, you’d best not read on, because I have to discuss the story’s resolution.

 

This film, based on Aron Ralston’s autobiography, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, begins with a montage of hectic city life, of crowds buzzing around neon-lit city streets and of Ralston, looking haunted and pale, escaping from it all into wilderness where he can come back to life and ride his mountain bike across … mountains.  He is the kind of guy who likes living on the edge and prefers his own company and the wilderness.  The wilderness du jour is Blue John Canyon in Utah which is, frankly, exquisite enough that no one could blame him for wanting to be there.  However, Ralston is also the kind of guy who likes to ignore the beaten path and clamber around parts of the canyon that no one else visits which is, of course, how he gets himself into trouble.

To be fair, he comes across as something of a self-important, arrogant prick.  But, maybe this confidence, this self-belief, is what carries him through the ordeal he is about to experience.  He accidentally slips into a narrow crevasse, pulls a rock down on himself and ends up wedged, with his arm crushed.  Showing remarkable presence of mind, the cool, logical engineer in him very quickly comes to the fore and he applies himself dispassionately to the matter at hand (sorry).  He is disciplined with his water and imaginative with his problem-solving, as he, initially, sets about patiently chipping away at the rock to free his arm.

To spend so much time alone on camera, running through such a spectrum of emotions is a dream role for James Franco, it’s the sort of role for which any leading man would give his right arm (sorry, sorry).  There is the better part of an hour at the heart of the film when it is just him, his motivation and his internal monologue. Coming off the back of Milk (2009), where he played Harvey Milk's partner, Scott, and the as-yet-unreleased-in-the-UK Howl (2010), where he played Allen Ginsberg, Franco has quickly built himself a reputation as a serious actor and an expert at playing real people.

Like last year’s similarly-themed Buried, this film is shot in unflattering, penetrating, distorting close-up.  We get so close to Ralston we can actually see inside his head, to him remembering tender moments with his dad and regretting not answering the phone to his mum and fantasising about student parties with that certain girl.  Gradually he realises that people actually are important to him!

Director Danny Boyle’s usual DP, Anthony Dod Mantle is present and correct, ably abetted by a newcomer to the Boyle posse - Enrique Chediak.   There is, as yet, no explanation of how the two cinematographers broke down the workload, but I imagine one of them may have worked on the hallucinations, leaving the other to do the real-world stuff.

Boyle proved himself a master of the cinematic hallucination with Trainspotting (1996) and he employs these skills repeatedly throughout 127 Hours as Ralston’s starvation and dehydration send his mind wandering into juxtaposed split-screen montages.

The film is certainly as visually audacious and energetic as we have come to expect from Boyle.  Ralston has a video camera with him, which he uses to make video diaries and, ultimately, record what he believes will be his last will and testament.  Boyle’s DP’s invest the film with the crude intimacy of held-held, home-made videos, to emphasise the verisimilitude of this true story.

What could be a remorselessly grim film is enlivened by a very welcome vein of humour, especially when he is talking directly to his camera and imagines himself appearing on a chat-show which, let’s be honest, we’ve all done on occasion, even when not pinned under a boulder and facing almost certain death.   

Much of this material is taken from the videos the real Ralston recorded, extracts from which can be viewed as part of this documentary.  Looking at them, you appreciate just how accurate the movie adaptation of the real event is!

If I have any criticism of the film, it is that the hallucinations make their point, then re-make it, then re-remake it.  Yes, we know he has regrets.  Yes, we know he wants to see his family and that girl again.  We also know how this story ends and, after the one hour of screen-time that stands for the 127 hours he endured, we really are ready for the moment we have been awaiting anxiously.

Ralston’s will to survive is extraordinary (even if it does fall short of Bear Gryll’s obsession with eating live insects) as is his presence of mind throughout the ordeal.  He even finds the poetry in his surroundings and finds time to enjoy watching the sun-rise! 

Finally, having reached the point where he has nothing to lose, Ralston makes the decision which saves his life, a decision which, frankly, I feel few of us would make in his stead.  And, even if we did, would we have the strength to go through with the horror and the unimaginable pain of it?  He decides that, yes, finally, he must use the cheap, all-but-blunt multi-tool that has been taunting him for five long days and cut off his own arm. 

Then, without warning, he deliberately breaks both bones in his arm.  This is a shocking moment for which I was not prepared.  But this sickening start to the proceedings, which you know is inevitable, is not the worst of it.  There is one literally nerve-wracking moment which uses sound brilliantly and which will live with you long after you’ve left the cinema. 

The camera doesn’t dwell, doesn’t relish, but neither does it shy away from Franco’s incredibly convincing performance.  Handled differently this could have become parody but, as it is, you believe it completely, you are caught up completely in super-human endurance and imperviousness to pain and, only afterward, do you remember that it felt true because it is true! 

Having read up on the real Ralston since seeing the film, I can admire the way he has lived his life since (even if the damn fool does still go climbing mountains) and this has increased my regard for the film but, as a standalone viewing experience, I found it to be a minor addition to Boyle’s CV.  I don’t know if this is because I am comparing it to Buried which surprised and delighted me in roughly equal measure.  127 Hours certainly has its moments and a stunning central performance but, ultimately, the fireworks of Boyle’s hectic and eclectic visual style try too hard to compensate for the perforce stationary nature of the story. 

Maybe he should have gone the route Kevin (brother to Boyle’s ex-producer, Andrew) MacDonald chose for Touching The Void (2003), which tells a similar tale of unfathomable human endurance, but intercuts it with interview footage from the real people, helping you to get into their mindset without the need for a palette of visual tricks.

Maybe you should watch the two films as a double-bill and make up your own mind!

Dir: Danny Boyle

Star: James Franco, Kate Mara, Treat Williams, Kate Burton

Dur: 94 mins

Cert: 15

THE HURT LOCKER

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Full, Unexploded 1,700 word Version

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.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

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Here, on the eve of its Academy Award shoot-out with Benjamin Button, I feel I ought to put down my thoughts on Slumdog Millionaire the, if you will, Oscar underdog.

The first thing that is worth noting is that the ad campaigns which have touted this as “the feel-good film of the year” are shamelessly failing to prepare you for the shocking cruelty and tragedy you will see in the film’s first half. If you walk in expecting this to be another Millions (2004), you're in for a steep learning-curve but, by the same token, if you go in expecting something as stark and edgy as Trainspotting (1996) you, again, will be surprised because Slumdog Millionaire manages to bridge the apparent chasm between both those films. It isn't scared of staring into the abyss of human weakness, like Trainspotting did but, like Millions, it also never loses its faith in the tenacity and raw humanity of children.

In typical style, director Danny Boyle doesn’t make things easy for himself as he weaves together no fewer than three narrative strands, cutting backwards and forwards between them in a way that could, in lazier hands, be very confusing.

The three stories are: The childhood of our hero, Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar / Tanay Chheda), an infant scavenging on the mountainous rubbish tips of the city then known as Bombay. Fast forward about fifteen years to modern-day Mumbai and the second strand, where we have the grown Jamal (Dev Patel) sitting in the hot-seat in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The third strand then takes place during the night after the Millionaire recording, where Jamal is being tortured by the police because they think he has somehow cheated on the show.

The way these three threads are drawn together, informing and supporting each other throughout the film, making a ferociously complex structure clear, dramatic and deeply moving, is an admirable example of good construction, a job of work achieved initially by Simon Beaufoy’s unflinching script and then by Boyle and his editor, Chris Dickens, who has rightly been nominated for one of the film's Oscars.

The game-show is the key to this structure as every question Jamal is asked sparks off a memory flashback to a key incident in his life, which tells us his story and tells him the answer. This framing technique really is a thing of beauty and lifts this film far above the mere travelogue/life story the film could have been. In my (not especially) humble opinion, it is, like the editing, entirely worthy of the Oscar nomination it received and, if Beaufoy doesn’t take the statue home, he can consider himself robbed!

I can’t sing the praises of the script highly enough, but I think I’ve made my point, so I’ll move on.

The flashback scenes show us a life that we, in The West, cannot easily (or willingly) imagine existing in our modern world. If this film does nothing else, it shines a light into the dark and ignored corners of the world that we, in our own comfortable, privileged little corner, prefer not to think about but, rather than dogmatically pounding us about the head with the injustice of it all, Boyle’s style and pace gives these scenes a vibrancy and aesthetic which is almost ecstatic. Saturated in turmeric yellows and cayenne reds, Slumdog is very (one suspects, deliberately) reminiscent of Cidade de Deus / City of God (2002), since that film deals with a very similar world of corrugated shacks, rank squalor and casual brutality.

The performances of the children in these heart-breaking early scenes are a revelation. One is lost in awe of them and fear for them as we see their big, trusting eyes looking out at a world where they are completely alone and where a human life has no value whatsoever. Quite how Boyle managed to get such consistent and convincing acting from pre-school children, who don’t speak English (when he, presumably, doesn’t speak Hindi), is just one of the many secret treasures buried in this film. In fairly short-order, we see these children orphaned, then gathered up by the Fagin-like crime-lords who operate gangs of beggars. But, far from the avuncular image we may have in our minds of Ron Moody or, now, Rowan Atkinson, these loathsome parasites deliberately maim the children, because this elicits greater sympathy from the tourists, and therefore more money.

Jamal and his brother, Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail / Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala), make their escape, unscathed, and begin fending for themselves, surviving on their considerable wits. In this, the film also reminds me of the harrowing anime Hotaru no Haka / Grave of the Fireflies (1988) but, here, the children’s stoicism in the face of unremitting brutality stops the film from tipping over into maudlin sentimentality or high tragedy. One wonders if this would be the case if an American director had made it.

At one point, after we’ve been lulled into a deceptive sense of security by watching the boys, now about ten or twelve years old and fluent in English, enjoying themselves by harmlessly hoodwinking the cow-eyed American tourists flocking round the Taj Mahal; Jamal is caught by an Indian taxi-driver and savagely beaten in front of the tourists. Picking himself up, he wipes the blood from his face, turns to the Americans and informs them: “You wanted to see the real India, well, here it is!”

These early scenes very much reflect the way that a lot of Western eyes (and all Western films that I can think of) see India, as a vast, incomprehensible and frightening beast; but, as the boys travel from infanthood through their teens to eventual adulthood, so the film travels in style and content from this out-dated Westernised image to a more contemporary, better-informed, more Eastern perspective.

This is where the casting of Anil Kapoor as the game-show question-master, Prem Kumar, is a master-stroke. His performance will be seen very differently by the two audiences this film will attract – the Western and the Eastern. For us in The West we see him as merely an increasingly arrogant, sarcastic and conniving egotist, but for those familiar with his Bollywood work, this performance will be all the braver and more powerful, rich with the echoes of Amitabh Bachach, Kapoor’s Bollywood contemporary, who used to host the real Indian Millionaire show, Kaun Banega Crorepati and who is referred to early on in the film in the notorious toilet scene.

He and the show he hosts and the vision of Mumbai it represents, demonstrate how far India has come even in Jamal’s short life-time. As an adult, he works in a call centre and, in one significant moment, he stands with his brother, dozens of floors up in an unfinished sky-scraper, looking down at the other buildings rising from the land which had, a few short years before, been the rubbish-tip of their birth. As the country has crawled out of The Dark Ages into the light and prosperity of Modernity, so the innocence of Jamal and Salim falls away, but not the love that runs just beneath the surface of this film, finally to break through in these latter scenes.

The transformation from Western perspective to Eastern continues, with the film adopting more and more Bollywood motifs. As the colour palette shifts from the warm rural colours to colder urban greys and blues – and white – the film becomes a love-conquers-all tale, where the brothers war over the heart and soul of the girl, Latika (Rubiana Ali / Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar / Freida Pinto), who had stolen Jamal’s heart when he was too young to know he even had one. Mix in some obvious Gangster Movie tropes, involving Salim transforming into a Tony Montana clone, and you have all the ingredients you need for a traditional Indian melodrama.

These latter scenes, shot through with the miasma of textures, colours and perspectives that we have come to expect from Boyle and his Cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, are designed, I feel, to show Hollywood, that it doesn’t own the copyright on the big, universal themes like love, loyalty and trust which drive we poor, fragile human beings, even in moments of extremis.

The conclusion of Slumdog is pure schmaltz, with an explosion of joy, movement and music that finally, stamps the Bollywood hallmark on the film so you can emerge from the cinema and back into your life with a grin and a skip in your step and only, after, will the memories of those eye-opening early scenes leak through, serving to make the joyous achievement of the film’s dénouement all the more emotional, and all the more impressive.

So, composure regained, do I think this film will win the ten Oscars for which it has been nominated? The short answer is … no. I don't think it'll get the Best Film award, or Doyle the Best Director because, as I mentioned earlier, Slumdog Millionaire eschews sentimentality until the very end, also because it is set in an almost completely alien world and, ultimately, because it has no big name (American) stars. I think Slumdog should and will win some significant statues for its craft and technical virtuosity but, if it comes down to a straight decision between this film and the no-less impressive Benjamin Button, I suspect the latter will win the big categories because it is a more conventional, more American tale, and history suggests that American Academy members favour American stories.

Still, as I type this, I'll know for sure in about twenty-four hours.

If Slumdog does lose the big statues to Benjamin, I feel this would still be an honourable result. I am convinced that Slumdog will take home the less-prestigious-but-no-less-important behind-the-scenes awards and that would, I feel, be the best of both worlds: East and West.
POST-AWARDS ADDENDUM:
And so, as the slumdog immigrant workers in their high-vis jackets are pushing brooms down the wrinkled, heel-scuffed red carpets and the millionaires are heading-home after the high-vis parties in the hotels and night-clubs all across town ... The 81st Academy Awards are now about twelve hours in the past and, it turns out, I was wrong. I underestimated the Academy members. This wasn't a protective, patriotic Awards at all. I confess I'm surprised that Benjamin Button ONLY won for its make-up and effects (and art direction) ... But not as surprised as I am that Mickey Rourke won't be taking a statue back home to his Chihuahuas. Just goes to show ... even after twenty-five years of watching Oscars, I still can't tell which way things'll go. Sometimes the Should Wins and the Will Wins are the same thing ... and that's when cinema wins!
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Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Simon Beaufoy
Starring: Dev Patel, Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor
Dur: 120 mins
Cert: 15
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image © Celador Films / Film Four
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FROST / NIXON

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Well, who’d’a’thunk it, the Imagine logo at the beginning of serious, intense little political movie!? You have to credit Ron Howard with being brave enough to try his hand at something new. Very much like his mentor and obvious role-model, Steven Spielberg, after frittering away his best years re-making the same tired crowd-pleasers, he’s achieved the status of ‘elder statesman’ and this seems to have inspired him to take a few trips outside his DMZ (Directing for Money Zone). Yes, he’ll aim at stationary targets like EdTV (1999), The Grinch (2000) and Cinderella Man (2005) but, every now and then, he’ll take pot-shots at films like Ransom (1996) and The Missing (2003).

This is his most grown-up film (not before time, he is now in his mid-fifties) and his most focussed. Michael Sheen and Frank Langella share top billing which, whilst The Screen Actor’s Guild might not approve, is only right as they share much of the screen time and all of the responsibility for the film's success or failure.

Sheen, as we have come to expect, gives us an uncannily precise impersonation of David Frost yet, and once again this is very much as usual for Sheen, he manages to project a real, fully-rounded person through the impersonation. His Frost is a vain, ferociously ambitious, morally dubious and internally quite hollow man. Langella, although he lacks Sheen’s physical similarity to his character, very much has the bearing and the manner of the disgraced ex-president. His Nixon is a shameless game-player, with a somewhat-misunderstood dry-as-bone sense of humour, always attempting to project whatever image he feels is in his best interest: shuffling somewhat clumsily from avuncular grand-father figure to wounded lion as the occasion demands. He oozes the caustic confidence which clearly makes him dangerous to those who cross his path.

Frost/Nixon's opening scenes are essentially a montage of interviews with the supporting players, cut together in a manner deeply reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), not least because of the presence of Kevin Bacon (who is in both films). These quotes lay the groundwork for what we are about to see, informing those who never knew, reminding those who’ve had time to forget, of just what the mood was like in America when Nixon committed crimes in The White House and was then exonerated by Gerald Ford, his successor. The American people felt they had been cheated out of a trial and an apology. Sam Rockwell’s character, James Reston, sums this all up with the great line: “He devalued the Presidency and he left the country that elected him in trauma!” Suddenly one becomes aware of the reasons original-playwright-and-now-scriptwriter, Peter Morgan felt the need to tell this particular political tale at this particular time. It is partly good fortune and partly good timing that this film was released in the UK the week our generation’s Commander-in-Thief took a step into long-overdue retirement.

The remainder of the first half of the film concerns itself with the preparations for the interviews; an absolutely fascinating insight into the wheeling and dealing which managed to get Frost, perceived then as merely a chat-show host and something of a has-been (the glory of TW3 very-much in his past, the dire misery of Through The Keyhole very-much still in his future). His ace in the hole throughout this is his friend the BBC producer, John Birt, played with typical pinch-faced solemnity by Matthew MacFadyen. I was working at the BBC in the early nineties during Birt’s frostily puritanical reign as DG and only now, finally, do I understand why such a dull, listless, paper-clip-counter of a man rose to wield supreme executive power. It wasn’t because he’d been separated at birth from the then-Prime Minister, John Major, but because he was trading on the reputation he’d built-up as the producer of The Nixon Interviews.

The BBC Four biopics which have been surfacing on our Freeview screens over the last couple of years (including, of course Fantabulosa! starring Mr. Sheen as Kenneth Williams) may be heavy on the insight and the acting, but they’re light on kinetic energy. To enliven things here and help the film break-away from its stage-bound roots, Howard has borrowed a few tools out of Paul Greengrass’ box. We get whippy editing, we get harsh, cold colours and we get the wobbly, tight-focussed close-ups with the fuzzy objects in the fore-ground that help make essentially dull images of people sitting talking look more interesting.

The period details are deftly woven into the fabric of the film without intruding too much and they are shot so skilfully by Howard’s regular DP, Salvatore Totino, that they make the mid-seventies seem exotic and stylish. Well, I was only a scrap of a lad, but I was there and I don’t remember it being all that glamorous.

As we get into their four extended interviews (there were actually twelve, but this is a movie not a mini-series) we learn more and more about the two men and find that they are, essentially the same. What Morgan realised, and employed as the heart of this drama, is that Frost and Nixon needed each other. Both see the interview as their chance to return to the Big Time. Frost wants fame in America and a red carpet in Hollywood, Nixon wants to talk his way back into Washington. Like Bush, Nixon’s Presidency was under the glare of a microscope which magnified and dramaticised both his strengths and his failings. Of the two, Morgan is probably kinder to Nixon, seeing in him a figure of Shakespearean tragic proportions

Ultimately, the film is about the clash of these two immovable, irresistible personalities and this conflict makes the film’s latter scenes riveting. It’s wonderful watching Langella/Nixon do what politicians do best: avoid answering a direct question at considerable length whilst, like any good orator - Kennedy (John F. not Nigel) , Clinton (Bill, not George) and Blair (Tony, not Lionel) spring to mind – spinning the facts into a great fairy-tale which manipulate the emotions and turn the tables. Watching Frost and Nixon jousting is very much like watching a Rocky film. Nixon wins the first rounds. By knockout. Frost is very much on the ropes, his reputation is entirely on-the-line, the financial burden he personally faces is crippling, meanwhile Nixon is on the crest of a wave of renewed vigour and confidence; then they come to the all-important fourth and final interview …

Inevitably, the weight of the whole production rests equally on the shoulders of Langella and Sheen and it is to the credit of both that they excel under the pressure. Of course, they’d both played these characters on stage in the West End and Broadway so knew them inside out, but that doesn’t make the achievement any less impressive, quite the opposite. While I think it’s understandable that the Oscar Academy have singled out Langella for a nomination instead of Sheen (because they are mostly Americans and therefore have not the faintest idea who David Frost is, so don’t know how fantastically good Sheen’s channelling of him is); I think it’s a shame and simply unfair that the BAFTAs have similarly ignored Sheen’s achievement. It seems that he, like Frost back in the seventies, is criminally underestimated.

Addendum: Not at all as part of the marketing for this movie but purely by co-incidence (!) The Independent on Sunday chose the week of the film’s release to give away a free DVD containing about 70 minutes of edited highlights of the real Frost/Nixon interviews, with about twenty minutes of commentary from Sir Frost himself. These make for a fascinating companion-piece and I hope, when the DVD emerges, it has something similar as an extra so people can compare and contrast the reality to the dramatisation.

The first significant difference is purely an aesthetic one, where the film uses stark side and edge lighting, the TV picture uses flat but far less dynamic studio lights, necessary in the 1970s so the video camera could pick up all the details of Tricky Dicky’s face.

It is actually quite moving to see the real Nixon visibly torn by his dilemma, then deciding to cross the Rubicon, commenting that it was “ … one of those times when you’re not thinking, when you say what’s really in your heart … when you’re not reading a prepared statement.” The real apology is less eloquent and considerably more rambling than that in the dramaticised version, but that’s because he’s off-script, a politician doing what really doesn’t come naturally: speaking openly and honestly, not reciting rehearsed dogma. He admits crying and his voice even cracks slightly when he says “Sorry”. And there it is, the moment when the immovable object was cracked open by the irresistible force.

As for Frost’s modern-day contribution, it’s amusing how much he, now aged 70, looks like Nixon did then at age 74, but his comments do throw some interesting nuggets of information into the mix: Such as the fact that he had grilled Nixon previously, in 1968 and 1970. The film clearly shows that their meeting in preparation for this interview was their first meeting and establishes (for the purposes of creating David and Goliath suspense) that Frost was simply a chat-show host with delusions of grandeur.

So, our generation can only await with bated breath for history to repeat itself … and for Graham Norton to mercilessly bring George W. to his knees on live TV.

Frost/Nixon
Directed by: Ron Howard
Written by: Peter Morgan
Cast: Michael Sheen, Frank Langella, Sam Rockwell, Matthew MacFadyen.
Cert 15
Dur: 122 mins
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image © Universal Pictures in the UK
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BENJAMIN BUTTON

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This is a big, thoughtful and significant film and, as such, I think it deserves some thoughtful and significant column inches here. As do the one or two matters arising, which I’ll deal with after I look at the film itself.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button starts playfully – with a cascade of buttons forming the studio logo like a mosaic, which is not inappropriate since this film is essentially one long, luxurious mosaic of roughly connected scenes which combine to create a portrait of a man who is born very old and lives his whole life gradually getting younger.

It begins in New Orleans in 2005, on the eve of Hurricane Katrina when the historic, mysterious old city is on the cusp of being swept away. Storms run as a motif throughout the film, both natural and literal – like Katrina – or man-made and metaphorical – like World War.

The story then looks back through the previous ninety-odd years. It doesn’t restrict itself solely to New Orleans but, when it does wander away for the occasional protracted aside, it eventually returns loyally home as we all, eventually, return to that from which we reputedly came.

The framing narrative concerns the last few hours on this Earth of Daisy Fuller, explaining her life to her daughter, Caroline, before it’s entirely too late. She begins with an apocryphal tale about Monsieur Gateaux, a blind clock-maker who, during the First World War, builds a clock for the local railway station – a clock which runs backwards. This is his commemoration to his son who, like so many millions of others, was cast away needlessly on the battlefields of France and Belgium. This then offers up a wonderfully-executed visual moment where the film runs backwards, shells unexplode and innocent soldiers undie. This tells us that the nature of the whole film is that of fable and a wistful acceptance of the passage of time. It also shows us that we are going to see some skilfully executed visual audacity over the next 2¾ hours.

Seemingly Daisy’s only possession is a diary, that of one Benjamin Button, from which Caroline, sitting at her mother’s bedside, reads in a motif which bears more than a passing resemblance to The English Patient (1996). With this film as with that, the diary then occupies us for the remainder of the film.

Benjamin was born on the day the first war ended and, in careful observation of Joseph Campbell’s rules, as subscribed-to by most every Hollywood script-writing course this side of Star Wars, his mother dies and his father rejects him, leaving him an orphan abandoned on the steps of an old-folk’s home. Here he is rescued from the bull-rushes (as it were) by Queenie, the young black servant of the house, who instantly takes pity on the old-born.

The boy was born shrivelled and twisted and ancient, riddled with arthritis and given just days to live. But days turn to months which turn to years in the old folk’s home, surrounded by people who are both vastly older and slightly younger than he. The film makes the point that the very young and the institutionalised ancient have much in common.

When Benjamin (now the equivalent of a toddler) starts exploring the home in his wheel-chair, the shrivelled and shrunken enfant terrible becomes something of a surreal creation, drawn at a different scale to the people around him and, of course, heading in a different direction. His huge head wobbling on his tiny frail form, he looks like something out of Chris Cunningham nightmare. Brad Pitt is all-but unrecognisable under the layers of prosthetic and CGI and, presumably, we won’t know quite what is and isn’t him until we get to watch the making-of documentaries on the three-disc Blu-Ray version which will, no doubt, come out in time for Christmas.

These early/late years are dealt with in lavish detail, giving us time to absorb the odd, faintly hallucinogenic air of the film. The other end of his life, mind, is dealt with in little more than a handful of snapshot moments as we head towards the tale’s inevitable denouement, like a car rolling uncontrollably down a hill. Fincher affords Benjamin the consideration he has extended to his other characters by giving the screen-time to his life, rather than his death.

There is what, at first, seems to be a castaway attitude towards death herein. Apart from Daisy herself, the other characters Benjamin meets who die generally do so suddenly. However, alongside this unemotional acceptance of death, comes a celebration of life.

Eventually a teenage/mid-sixties Benjamin cuts the ties and heads off to sea to see the world alongside Captain Mike Clock in his valiant little tug-boat. And so, as the innocent goes abroad, we are reminded almost inescapably of Forrest Gump – another simple man wandering through a colourful world. Fincher would seem to have taken Zemeckis’ crown as the director who is master of sewing extraordinarily complex special effects invisible into the fabric of his films to create a heightened, magic realism. He’s certainly taken his script-writer, since Eric Roth wrote both films (although, it’s worth pointing out, he’s written a wide range of other movies in-between).

Like Mr. Roth, everyone Benjamin meets has a story to tell from which he is, presumably expected to derive a life lesson. In a ram-shackle hotel called The Winter Palace in a suitably snow-bound Russia, Benjamin falls in love for the first time but, in-keeping with the trajectory of his life, this relationship, with a frostier-than-usual Tilda Swinton, takes place entirely during the night-shift, when they are the only two awake in the building.

This is a mature work for Fincher, whose technical abilities have progressively been matched by his creative ambition and his narrative skills since he really started to get it all together with Fight Club some ten years ago. Since this film was quicker to make than Zodiac (2007), it would seem that this tale came to him more easily, yet his lightness of touch is admirable. There is a butterfly-effect-type scene where one event leads to another and so on through several iterations, all making the point, which I’m sure we’ve all mulled-over at one-time-or-another: What if I’d got up late and missed that train or turned that corner and never met that person … how different would my life be?

The special effects are not used to create spectacular set-pieces or toy-manufacturing opportunities, but to paint in the details of a world-spanning, century-encompassing tale with beautifully-rendered detail.

I was particularly taken with the scenes featuring Benjamin in his sixties / twenties where we are presented with the Brad Pitt we remember from Thelma and Louise (1991) and A River Runs Through It (1992). Throughout these brief scenes Brad the-most-beautiful-man-in-the-world ™ Pitt is seen in shadow … not because Fincher couldn’t have CGI’d him up a storm but more, I suspect, to reflect the fact that, even as life’s wear-and-tear falls away from him, he is accelerating towards a point when he will no longer even be an adult, something which Benjamin himself is all-too aware of in the final chapters of the tale.

Clearly this film is a celebration of life, all life, however brief and complicated and abnormal it may appear. I think, if one could boil-down the meaning of this movie into one pocket-size aphorism, it would be the line from the character who repeatedly tells Benjamin: “I ever tell you I been hit by lightnin’ seven times?” On the final announcement of this, he adds, thoughtfully: “ S’God’s way o’ tellin’ me I’m lucky to be alive!” There’s a line that would not have seemed amiss coming out of the mouth of Red in the exercise yard of Shawshank prison. I can think of no greater complement.

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Directed by: David Fincher.
Written by: Eric Roth.
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton and Jason Flemyng.
Cert: 12A
Dur: 165 mins

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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1921)

Having looked at the movie, I thought it worth-while going back to look at the source material of which, I confess, I’d previously never even heard. Since it’s only a short story, it’s a relatively brief read, but offered up these thoughts:

It has often been said that short stories are a better root-source of movie scripts than entire novels, because developing a short subject into a feature-length piece gives you room to add … while converting a full novel is more a matter of removal. Well, with Benjamin Button, much has been added and removed.

The film bears a resemblance to the original story which follows the same trajectory and, indeed, clocks up many of the life experiences just, inevitably, in less detail. There is a mischievous, one could almost say cruel humour about the story’s early chapters, which is not really reflected in the film, but the middle and later years very much follow the tone of the story, building on the air of sadness and the juxtaposition of the long-sought-for youth and the jarring knowledge of its temporariness. Children should be confident and carefree, it is, after all, the only chance they’ll have to be so. But Benjamin’s childhood is tinged with regrets and nostalgias that ruin it for him.

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Something else the short story deals with in a very different way is in the way those around Benjamin relate to him. In the film he is rejected outright, then grows in people’s affections. In the story, Benjamin’s father stands by his son and, gradually, all are won over by the perky old man. Although his circle changes as he goes through the chapters of his life, he adapts, but he is unable to remain in anyone’s company for long because the change is too much. His wife and he become estranged when he cannot accept the age difference between them. Revealingly, she is attracted to him as an older man yet when she is the older woman he is repelled by her. His own son becomes increasingly embarrassed and enraged by him, especially when he gets to the point that his father is younger than him. And there is a tragic lack of understanding amongst those who are nearest and supposedly dearest to him … they all think he is aging in reverse deliberately just to be awkward and thusly have no sympathy. None of this is reflected in the film. Indeed, the film’s Benjamin avoids being a parent for this very reason.

The closing bars of the story are no less affecting than those of the movie; We accompany Benjamin as he fades into dementia and his achievements disappear even from his own mind, leaving him alone and unloved yet utterly unaware. Almost a century after the story was penned, this is a fate all too common for those who genuinely have lived a full life.

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Read the full story here:

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http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Fitzgerald/jazz/benjamin/benjamin1.htm .

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Youth Without Youth (2007)

Further, as I watched Benjamin Button, it scratched away at me that it reminded me of something … Forrest Gump, yes, I’d clocked that, but there was something else. Then, as I wrote up my notes – it dawned on me: Youth Without Youth.

Francis Ford Coppola’s return to the director’s chair after an eleven-year absence, shares many themes with Benjamin Button, but its tone is markedly different. It contemplates life in a colder, more analytical way than BB. This film is not shot through with honeyed sepia tones, its palette is more cold greys and blood reds.

Like BB, Youth Without Youth begins with a clock running backwards and we are introduced to Tim Roth’s aged scientist, Dominic, a man whose greatest regret is that he is too old and frail to complete his life’s work: Of finding the root-source of language. Then, in a moment mirrored almost exactly in BB, he is struck by lightening and he really is lucky to be alive! He is covered from head to foot in burns. But, miraculously, the scar-tissue forms a scab cocoon over him and, when he emerges, he is a young man again (well, younger at any rate – Roth cleverly maintains the gait an demeanour of an octogenarian even when playing youthful).

As with BB, the tale begins at a time of war, which Dominic (like Benjamin) is briefly entangled with and, like BB, this can be seen as one of many storms which punctuate the narrative – one of which results in Veronica, his obsession, being likewise hit by lightening and likewise becoming chronologically charged. Although, in her case, the lightning strike allows her to ‘channel’ an ancient princess who speaks Sanskrit.

Weaving in the philosophy of comparative religions, the power of language, the psychology of the human mind under duress and science-fiction elements concerning the Tesla-esque notion of the transformative power of electricity (also touched upon in The Prestige, 2006) this is a cerebral rather melodramatic film.

Less driven by conventional narrative beats than BB, it does tend to wander and you are left wondering exactly what the 69-year-old Coppola is trying to say about a life’s work. Is it, as one suspects, him looking back over his own career and wishing he’d done more?

Maybe, if he feels that his later work has been disappointing compared to the massive artistic and commercial achievements of The Godfathers and Apocalypse Now, if he feels that his life has been anti-climactic, maybe he should glance at the career of Orson Welles, an equally prodigious, equally significant film maker whose early success and subsequent failure is significantly more marked than Coppola’s own.

Surely Francis can take solace from the fact that he isn’t earning a living in his latter years as a voice-over for frozen pea commercials?

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Image © Warner Brothers in the UK.

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