ARTICLE: 2015 Round-Up

I have been a little better keeping up with this year’s films – probably thanks to seeing a lot less of them. Some I didn’t review were:

Fear Itself was an interesting documentary that charts a thematic history of horror cinema exclusively through a parade of film clips. There is a nominal plot about an insomniac who has been the victim of a traumatic experience who now finds solace in the catharsis of old horror films. Clips are often chosen to match her voiceover throughout the film, which usually fit quite well. However, it is difficult to pay attention to the wandering voiceover, as interesting as it sometimes is, when there is so many clips playing out in front of it. The clips are helpfully titled so that you don’t waste time trying to figure out the films. It is a nasty, relentless and effective montage, but it is hard not to think that little has been gained.

Listen Up Philip is another film that achieves little. At the beginning of the film, we hate Philip. In the middle of the film, we hate Philip. At the end of the film, when it finally relents, we still hate Philip. Alex Ross Perry’s script is literate alright, but it isn’t particularly human. Its target is clearly a kind of literary snobbery but, unlike Scorsese’s gleefully shameless and inventive challenges to audience identification, Listen Up Philip simply wallows in bitterness and nastiness. It ends up if not a hateful film then at least a very boring one.

Another film that bores with one idea throughout is (and I will be trying to link each film as thinly as I can) The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. Unlike Shaun the Sheep Movie, which has as many mad ideas as good, solid jokes, Sponge Out of Water’s primary register is shrill craziness and it remains so throughout. It isn’t that it is never funny (there are a few small moments) but it is so overblown and strange that it rarely has time to make us believe in any of it – all right for a fifteen minute episode but barely survivable for ninety minutes. It doesn’t help that the few actual jokes are pretty lazy. Any good will you might have toward Spongebob will be exhausted.

Another film that might leave you incredulous and exhausted is Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye To Language, which defies all categorisation, all simplistic synopsising and most first impressions. The first viewing leaves you clueless, the second gives you a slight thread and in the third, you lose that thread but find another one. It is an examination about the way we think and the way we are brought up to think through language, challenging the conventions of language by some highly complex editing. It is a political film, an historical film and a modern paean to love and nature. And the main character is Roxy, a dog. Most reviews of the film, which went straight to DVD in the UK, focus on the critic’s own incomprehension, but I believe that it is a film to be studied and that each subsequent viewing reveal more. I fully intend to review it properly when I get to it in my ‘Les politiques de Godard’ series.

Last of all was the mini-series Show Me A Hero, The Wire in miniature and an excellent drama about housing, local politics, race, class and the media. The anger of its critique, the honesty of its drama, the power of the performances, the cleverness of the script, even the final shot, all make it the best thing on TV in 2015.

REVIEW: American Sniper (2015)

Having seen this film long after it was released and long after the media attention has passed, it is difficult to watch it without some of the critical commentary staying in mind. Most reviews – apart from the mainstream ones, for which the quality of a film is how exciting it is as a thriller or how moving a drama – dealt with the politics of the film, and seemed fairly split down the middle about where the film stood on its subject, Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper with 160 confirmed kills, and the Iraq war.

The reviews on this blog have of late verged into political commentary – particularly where war films set in Afghanistan or Iraq are concerned – and so American Sniper would seem to be the perfect film to indulge in further political ‘whingeing.’ Though, with this film, there is a stumbling block. Clint Eastwood has kept things fairly reserved in this film, the commentary or critique is essentially in the eye of the viewer and whether one finds American Sniper a glorifying or tragic and accusing spectacle is down to one’s own prejudice. As mine falls towards a distaste for this war, I will empathise the critique supposedly at the heart of the film.

Clint Eastwood is not a great filmmaker, though he is a very good one. His aesthetic (I imagine he would grunt derisively at the word, just as John Ford would have) is easy and unrushed, giving his films, particularly the later ones, a feeling of cool confidence. Where a film like Mystic River didn’t really work, its subject matter too traumatic for such level-headed treatment (this issue was somehow resolved by the time we get to Changeling), something as daft as Hereafter can be elevated by a convincing sadness and a judicious and effective use of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2. His best film as director is, of course, Unforgiven, but Eastwood has always had a fondness for debunking myths and questioning how they come about and impact on reality from the time of his apprenticeship with Leone and Siegel (to whom Unforgiven is dedicated). This is present in Flags of Our Fathers, J.Edgar, Jersey Boys and now American Sniper (though a lot less visible in Invictus). Chris Kyle was even named ‘the Legend’ by his army buddies.

American Sniper, then, may take a less patriotic and optimistic look at Kyle and the Iraq war and America’s fascination with violence. Remember again that Eastwood has lately avoided any idea of redemptive violence – the final shoot-out of Unforgiven is a psychopathic bloodbath, the hanging at the end of Changeling is ugly no matter what the characters onscreen think, the promised shoot-out in Gran Torino is slyly taken away from the audience. The opening scene, in which Kyle’s sights are trained on a young boy running towards US soldiers with a grenade, is suddenly replaced by a sequence in which Kyle’s on edge father teaches him to hunt, drawing a parallel (and here I am reading the film as I want to) between America’s warmongering abroad and their glorification of guns and strength at home. We see Kyle’s pre-army days – all machismo and guns and faux-cowboy silliness – as being essentially leading to his signing up for the army – the direct causal link is, awkwardly, the advent of 9/11 but the seeds had been sown earlier. The film does not condemn Kyle for what he does, but more subtly criticizes a culture that too readily puts men in war without the support they need to survive it.

The depiction of the war is rightly ugly and violent and largely without context. Kyle’s different tours are numbered 1 to 4, but we are not given an insight into specific dates or events, making the war appear confused and seemingly endless. Eastwood never allows his audience to enjoy the action, instead making war hellish. Scenes of Kyle’s life on tour and back home on leave are intercut, creating a jarring shift in registers. Kyle’s confusion is heightened in a great sequence when, on leave, he suspects a jeep with closing in on him and his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) – a sequence shot and cut as if we really are back in Iraq. Eastwood does not hold back on the gruesomeness of the war, but he also never makes it heroic or positive. We are always aware that it is having a negative effect on Kyle.

The film complicates the audience’s enjoyment further by having Kyle’s first killing be a child. Further talk of Kyle having ‘popped his cherry’ in the next scene only feels thoroughly crass and further emphasises the issue of a culture that can normalise the murder of a child (later, an injured veteran will hit a target on a firing range and say, in triumph, “Damn, if that doesn’t feel like I got my balls back”, drawing another parallel between guns and sex). Another great sequence acts as a further counterpoint – a child approaches a murdered man’s rocket launcher and picks it up, Kyle, the child in his sights, begging him to drop it – a horrifying moment, brilliantly made. Where the previous scene had ended negatively, this scene ends positively, only further emphasising the horror and the loss that could have been. However, these critiques are not limited to the culture around Kyle. The final scene in the film – incongruously given a date - has Kyle approaching his wife with a gun. We are clearly set up to think that there is about to be some kind of horrible accident. It is a frightening scene and again emphasises the dangers of being so comfortable around a gun.

The film ends with this scene, making the tactful decision to not depict Kyle’s recent death, and actual footage of his funeral and a procession of American flags hung from overpasses, revealing that the film is primarily a tragedy of a man trapped by a gun-loving culture and its result, an endless war. American Sniper, then, is an anti-war film, in that war is only depicted as damaging. It suggests that the war is as much to do with the American gung-ho character by showing how perverse this character is. Too often misunderstood as a celebration of slaughter, it is more a grim attempt to show that America’s problem abroad have roots at home. That said, American Sniper continues the long tradition to American war films of showing the damage wrought on the American side and no other. For all its critiques, American Sniper remains a film that ignores the horrors of war for non-Americans – an ethno-centric view that is arguably just as damaging as an outright bloodthirsty celebration.

REVIEW: Macbeth (2015)

‘Macbeth’, the play, is difficult to get right. It isn’t that it’s a bad story – the warning about ‘vaulting ambition’ is, of course, still relevant, the trickery of the witches feels cruel and modern in its existentialism, the endless cycle of suspicion, jealousy and murder. But the play is not flawless. In place of character development, the play favours soliloquys about the tasks to be done – Macbeth too quickly turns to murder where most of us would not. The best film versions of the play are distanced. Orson Welles’ adaptation is Brechtian in how obviously stagey it is, while Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood is heightened beyond all recognition. Justin Kurzel’s new version strikes a balance between modern re-reading and overblown supernatural spectacle and doesn’t come off at all.

Michael Fassbender is a grieving Macbeth, who has just lost his only child (thus robbing the brutal, vengeful ambiguity of Macduff’s line “He has no children” in Act 4, Scene 3). He and his wife, Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) then fall on the plan to assassinate King Duncan (a clueless David Thewlis) and set themselves up as king and queen, taking the idea from some deeply suspicious witches. Once crowned, however, the couple descend into bitterness and madness.

There isn’t much that really works with this new Macbeth. Fassbender plays the character mostly as a raving sociopath – the line ‘full of scorpions is my mind’ has never before sounded so sinister – but it doesn’t hold the film together, getting instead repetitive. We understand that the witches’ prophecy gives hope to a man who has lost an heir, but it isn’t convincing – especially when we see Macbeth putting Macduff’s family, including some youngsters, to the stake. Cotillard has one good scene, where she performs the ‘out damned spot’ soliloquy more as an act of sheer despair than of anything else. This works, but the film doesn’t have the material to make a believable transition from her earlier talk of smashing a baby off a wall (how this line works with a grieving parent is anyone’s guess) to this depression. Equally, Malcolm (Jack Reynor) and Macduff (Sean Harris) are left with little to do.

The battle scenes are admirably grotty and unheroic, but there is a feeling of dullness about them. They resemble too many other films (Braveheart, Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and on and on) and they are not peopled with enough characters that we care about. The orange-tinting of some sequences and the sudden slo-mo don’t help, giving more a feeling of stylistic desperation.

Finally, the film emphasises the play’s secondary subtext about violence begetting violence (a cheap theme that has been used to praise such tawdry films as The Last House on the Left) over the warning about ambition, but it doesn’t do much with it beyond suggesting that all this violence and murder is a bit extreme and offering a silly ending with Fleance. This new adaptation then offers little that we haven’t seen before and many of its chief innovations don’t really work. Fassbender and Cotillard do fine work, but it is hard to credit them, given that they are playing characters that fundamentally do not make sense. By the end of the film, the characters are exhausted and fed up and it is not hard to feel their pain.

REVIEW: Bridge of Spies (2015)

Is there another filmmaker quite like Steven Spielberg, where something painfully tacky is largely forgivable because it feels sincere, where even blunt, icky American patriotism can be taken as nothing worse than a paean to more innocent times (even if times were never innocent)? Nearly everything wrong with a good number of the serious Spielberg films is forgivable in some way or another. Saving Private Ryan is a very pro-war film (the focus on the horrors of war is there only to increase the sense of the heroic sacrifice made), but it is a very well made film and its nastier view of WWII, so often sentimentalised, is genuinely powerful. Lincoln is a talky film about the political process and virtually ignores all contributions towards the abolition of slavery by African-Americans and it is hopelessly patriotic and sentimental at others – particularly the beginning and the ending – yet it is thoroughly compelling. Bridge of Spies is a film you can pick apart, but it keeps you largely on-side while it plays out.

The film begins with the arrest of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance, clearly told to do Wolf Hall again), who is charged with being a Soviet spy. In an effort to make the American legal process look fair, insurance lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is hired to defend him before he is found guilty and killed. Donovan, almost despite himself, keeps Abel out of death row and they both become key players in a significant spy exchange between East and West Berlin.

Bridge of Spies works because it is a very well made film with a very well told story. It is a very classically told film, slow and reflective with well-rounded characters and a clear series of oppositions. Hanks gives a great performance, doing his normal everyman shtick with an element of tongue in cheek, near improvisatory glee. Rylance and Scott Shepherd, as Donovan’s CIA minder, have less to do, but stand out anyway. The rest of the cast is largely filled with less well known people (Alan Alda and Amy Ryan have tiny roles, too tiny in Ryan’s case), most of whom make a great impression. The film is well paced and holds your attention throughout, even when the story rambles between Abel’s trial and the introduction of Francis Gary Powers and the U-2 spy-plane in the middle section. The script is good, keeping the themes clear and interesting, and with enough humour to keep it reasonably funny throughout (the Coens doctored the script, but to pinpoint the best bits and suggest that they are their lines would be a disservice to Matt Charman and probably inaccurate given their invisible work in the awful Unbroken). One initially tacky early spiel about what makes Donovan and Hoffman (Irish and German respectively) American is saved by some nice anti-CIA ribbing.

Indeed, the film is somewhat ambiguous about where it stands on the Cold War. The film is clearly opposed to the Soviet Union – at one point, even using an ‘evil empire’ score that sounds like something written for Star Wars, at another, the public trial for espionage of Francis Gary Powers looks very Nazi. The Soviet and East Berlin negotiators are also clearly much more taciturn and untrustworthy than the American counterparts, and there is little talk of America’s aggression against the Soviet Union even as far as the U-2 spy-plane. That said, America does not come across as entirely virtuous. There is an element of mob rule about the reactions to Donovan defending Abel, saving Abel from the death penalty and their newfound fondness for Donovan after the spy exchange. The CIA are represented as sinister and a tad useless and their eagerness to abandon a second American prisoner in East Berlin, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), is clear. As with Lincoln, it is the ending that really lets Bridge of Spies down, with an overlong and painfully sentimental return to America, family and esteem for Donovan that is too self-congratulatory and twee. Depending on your sensibilities, this ending will be unforgivable, destroying all that came before, or it can be taken and, well, left.

However, the film, despite the patriotic presumptions barely offset by some few Cold War ambiguities, works. It is funny and likable and it looks fantastic. Early shots of Abel in his painting studio/ apartment/ headquarters are so well controlled and composed that they look instinctual, not intellectual. Even if the film’s story and characters hadn’t been as compelling as they were, the film would have remained watchable. One moment of a shooting at the Berlin Wall is genuinely shocking in its brutality and the final exchange on the bridge itself is remarkable.

It is possible to enjoy a film that one might disagree with totally, politically speaking, and yet still like it for other reasons. Bridge of Spies is a fantastic example of modern classical filmmaking, more sincere even than Carol, whose ‘50s aesthetics are lauded while those of Spies were met with rolled eyes. A real success for Hollywood, then, and worth celebrating because there hasn’t been one of those since, well, Lincoln.

REVIEW: Dreamcatcher (2015)

Few documentaries these days align themselves as concretely and directly with a particular cause or worldview as Dreamcatcher does. Most documentaries prefer to expose and to criticize without ever offering much in the way of alternatives or positives. Equally, many documentaries prefer hard-hitting action film camerawork and editing over stories about people eloquently and humanistically presented. Dreamcatcher then is a true documentary – a tough view of a world that needs fixed and a clear-sighted but non-judgemental view of the people on all sides of this world, an angry but compassionate, affectionate film about people and their world.

The film follows the Dreamcatcher Foundation, a Chicago-based movement that provides a framework for women to get out of sex work on their own terms and in their own time. The co-founders, Brenda Myers-Powell and Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, are both former sex workers themselves, are first seen driving around the streets of Chicago at night, offering help and assistance or simply condoms to anyone they find. Their approach to the problem is to act as a movement of solidarity, to support women who want to get out and to provide for them when they are ready.

Where many documentaries will have a political agenda and then find the people to fit, Dreamcatcher approaches the issue of sex work entirely from the perspective of the people both involved directly with the Dreamcatcher Foundation and those who came under their wing along the way. As a result, the film moves along with a world view that is totally undeniable and thoroughly authentic. Film culture is remarkably poor when it comes to the sex worker – they are common enough on screen, but they are usually confident and well-rounded and ultimately happy. Dreamcatcher has the effect of an angry polemic, but it is only angry as far as it makes the viewer angry – the film itself is relatively restrained, it does not even use much score to guide the viewer, rightly aware that the life stories told on screen are enough to make the point.

And these stories are powerful. In one shocking scene, Myers-Powell sits quietly in an after school meeting in which student after student offers up their experiences of sexual abuse and deprivation. We move from this to a scene of Myers-Powell in her day job, talking to sex workers in prison. The point is obvious – that sex work is not a choice but is being prosecuted as if it is – and powerful (there are still enough people in the world with delusions about the sex trade) but it is the stories of these women that is the focus, providing the true corrective. As much as Dreamcatcher is a film of solidarity, it is a film of collective action and experience.

Where other documentaries will settle for providing a villain for the audience to despise, Dreamcatcher and the founders of the Foundation itself do not settle for vilification. We also hear the story of Homer, Myers-Powell’s former pimp and now a key speaker in her organisation. Again, his story provides a further corrective, being another story of sexual abuse and economic deprivation, providing again a political point (the victimisers are often as much a victim of the cycle as the more obvious victims) through and because of a human story.

As a result, Dreamcatcher is a powerfully humanist film, addressing an argument in human terms where it has too often been presented in terms of statistics and criminality. Being a story of a grassroots movement and the good work that they do, the film provides more than a powerful push for change. It shows this change in motion and working. The film is not an easy watch but few films give as much hope.

Offering a view that cannot be ignored or belittled as well as providing an insight into how revolution can be achieved through collective action, Dreamcatcher is one of the most important political and humanistic documentaries ever made. It is an urgent and thoroughly moving film that bears witness and gives hope. Find it and see it.

REVIEW: Inside Out (2015)

Inside Out is the new Pixar film (or at least it was until the recent The Good Dinosaur) and yet another highly regarded animation that both adults and children can watch and enjoy. But is it any good?

We are probably all familiar with the concept now, but to quickly reiterate – Inside Out takes place largely inside the head of eleven-year old named Riley, focussing on her emotions personified here as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. When Riley suddenly has to move house, this shock causes a major upset to her personality – before then, it had been developing smoothly with a strong emphasis on happiness. Joy and Sadness become trapped in Riley’s long term memory – leaving Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge (an obvious disaster). Joy and Sadness attempt to make it back into Riley’s consciousness before something terrible happens and Riley becomes changed forever.

It seems compulsory now to write about how clever the idea behind Inside Out is, and it is for the most part. In a rushed opening, we are shown the dynamics of this imagined head – from the emotions themselves to the long term memory bank, Imagination Land, the film studio that produces Riley’s dreams and the core memories that make Riley who she is. It is all very imaginative and it is well mapped out and easy to follow – each emotion is specifically coloured and any memories that they produced all equally colour-coded. However, a film cannot rest on the cleverness of its concept alone.

There are a few things that don’t add up – as silly as it might be to look into this too much. The film suggests that long term memories can be forgotten (visualized here as being dropped into a pit and bursting into ashes), but does not account for unexpected recall – the Proustian rush, if I was going to be pretentious (which is certainly the way this review is looking). Equally, as poignant as it might be to have Riley’s imaginary friend disappear into the pit and out of her memory (the theme of putting away childish things from Toy Story 3 is back in earnest in this film), it nonetheless doesn’t seem realistic that Riley, or anyone, would just forget the fact of an imaginary friend. More troubling is the fact that as Riley becomes more and more reserved and emotionally numb, ultimately deciding to run away from home, the film suggests that these sorts of problems are the result of someone’s Joy and Sadness being sucked accidently into one’s long term memory. Obviously the film is not supposed to be taken in this way, but it is a problem that the film’s whole concept only works if you ignore everything about it that doesn’t add up.

There are two other problems, which are more damaging. The concept is interesting, but it is unwieldy, and the storyline that has been used to showcase it isn’t very involving. The story is a rather tired re-run of the journey home with obstacles arc which has been done to death. Equally, the characters unsurprisingly are very one-note. Joy is irritating and hardly develops throughout the film, whereas the other four are barely better than caricatures. As far as drama and character, Inside Out offers less than even some of their less ambitious work, such as the Monsters films.

There are great moments in Inside Out. The mid-film, sudden trip into the heads of both of Riley’s parents are funny and welcome – they offer some insight into directions the film could have taken but didn’t. Equally, there are a few moving moments, particularly the revelation towards the end that one of Riley’s key core memories was not the result of Joy alone, but primarily Sadness. The film has a nice view about maturity involving the mix of all emotions, rather than the prevalence of the positive ones – a nice spoiler is noticeable in the scene inside the parents’ heads, in which the emotions are a team and are barely discernible beyond their colours.

Problematically, Inside Out is too much about a ‘clever’ idea and not enough about drama and character. With what it gains in imagination, it loses in those moments where other Pixar’s could hit you at some unexpected emotional level – see primarily Wall-E, Up and Toy Story 3. And with the limited range of the characters, you are never taught to care.

REVIEW: Carol (2015)

Those expecting another Sirk tribute from Todd Haynes may be disappointed. Carol, like his version of Mildred Pierce before it, is a different film entirely and has more than likely been mis-sold to the public. Carol is less a film of political outrage and more a stylish and slow paced film of mood and thought.

Therese (Rooney Mara, now miles away from that disinterested turn – though who could blame her – in that awful Nightmare on Elm Street remake) is a shopgirl who does a kindness to one of her customers, mailing her back her misplaced gloves. This customer, however, is Carol, a seductive and glamourous divorcee. Carol invites her to lunch as a thank you and an attraction begins to develop between the two women before they even know it.

Early in the film, we have a character who is watching Sunset Boulevard for the sixth time and who is taking notes, his subject the disparity between what is said by the characters and what is meant or felt. A signal then to the audience that Carol will be a film of quiet, meaningful silences and yearning emotion masquerading as mundane small talk. The relationship between Therese and Carol develops slowly, the two women’s reserve as much a fact of the morals of the time as of their own fear, shyness and confusion. It is an unlikely relationship that may not initially make much sense, but it develops convincingly. Haynes keeps his camera distanced, the women frequently kept inside window frames and doorways. Kept back like this, we are always aware that the characters are a little more than we can understand – like in Sunset Boulevard, we see the front but not the mind. And, especially with the ending, we know that they will continue to exist after the film.

The characters are rarely allowed to lose their composure, but when they do, it matters. Carol’s husband, Harge, who forces Carol to stop her ‘deviance’ by taking her child away from her, loses his hard skin with an impassioned but hopeless “I love her.” The same line, slightly altered (“I love you”), similarly breaks from Carol towards the end of the film and has a truly powerful effect.

There are other times, however, where the film overplays its hand. Carol stands up to Harge and two male custody lawyers in one barnstorming scene that trespasses onto the wrong side of tacky. The Hollywood cinema of 1950s had a lot of such moments, but transplanted here it feels too jokey, too winking and knowing – as if the film has, for a moment, lost its serious veneer. The film lifts the opening and closing bookending from Brief Encounter, which works well enough while the film is playing but is quite irritating afterwards (particularly if you rewatch Brief Encounter in between – the moment in that film is perfect and heart-breaking and ought not to have been repeated). Quite why the film needed such an overt homage is anyone’s guess. Equally, the sequence in which Carol and Therese go away for a trip to Carol’s home in upstate New York literalises the idea of the ‘tunnel of love’ in a way that feels overdetermined.

Carol then is a film both quiet and intense. It is slow and mannered, as much as a means for intellectual distanciation as an expression of suppressed emotion. The final scene, while moving, is so clearly meant to make a critic write the word ‘swoon’ that it becomes as much a success of form as it does a success in character or story or emotion. Carol then is a very good, well made and moving film, but it also has a degree of practised coldness to it, a feeling of technique where honesty ought to be. It will work on the mind, and with the critics, but will it stay in the heart?

REVIEW: Sicario (2015)

In the heyday of the political thriller, which we will put as the 1970s for American cinema, ambiguities were often less moral in nature and more in terms of the extent of the problem. The Conversation, a masterpiece by the way, is ambiguous as to the exact nature and motivations of the forces ranged against poor old Harry Caul, but the film itself is less ambiguous about what it thinks of the culture of surveillance. We see the same questions of the nature of the crime and the criminals in The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. Those murky days were, ironically, a simpler time – the enemy was hidden and seemingly omnipotent, but they were not us. The films are never in doubt about what they felt were wrong with the world. Nowadays, however, this division is less clear, as are the films. Sicario sinks under some of the same issues that made something like Zero Dark Thirty such a hateful film.

Emily Blunt plays Kate Macer, an FBI agent recruited into a secret task force which aims to take down the leader of a Mexican cartel. Under Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), Kate is told to watch and learn. However, Matt and Alejandro may have other reasons for wanting Kate around, and they may not be trusted.

Sicario is a thriller about Mexican drug cartels, the American’s complicity in both the crimes and the general demand which funds and fuels the cartels, the moral ambiguities in policing across borders and outside the rules. It is a great-looking film, brilliantly shot by Roger Deakins, tightly directed by Denis Villeneuve and scored by Jóhann Jóhannsson. It moves at a good pace, which keeps it serious and largely engaging throughout (apart from a seriously poor coloured rubber band plot contrivance), a dense and complex plot that keeps you interested and some tough performances. It is effective, slightly shrill entertainment, with some fantastic, tense set pieces that largely hold the film together. As such, it is a very well made and watchable film. But…

Most political thrillers have a problem striking a decent balance between the complexity of their politic commentary and entertainment value. Sicario is dark and complex, even uncompromising, plot-wise, but it is hopelessly shallow in other ways. Its representation of Mexico is downright insulting – American agents casually climb to the roof of their compound on the Mexican border and watch gunfights and explosions in Mexico with binoculars. We do see short sequences detailing small aspects of American corruption (a few scenes) and complicity (one line), but we get a lot more focus on Americans getting the job done, state murder compared to finding a vaccine and talk of the ends justifying the means. Using Kate Macer as an audience surrogate, finding out as we do how the Mexican drug war ‘really’ works, the film makes its own world view clear. But since this is primarily a thriller, this world view is hopelessly inadequate to any real and true understanding of the problem and strongly stacks the deck to favour of the Americans as emotional identifiers for the audience. We are always standing on the American side of the border, looking at the Mexican drug war through the eyes of Americans. The film offers then a severe view of Mexico and a queasily ambiguous view of the Americans’ collusion with criminals and their willingness to break the rules. Where a fairer and more complex film might want to question this very American idea of the ends justifying the means, Sicario prefers to avoid this issue.

Sicario is a very well made film, but it remarkably shallow in terms of what it depicts. It is hard to work out what the film wants you to think of the Americans’ use of torture and their collusion with criminals who slaughter whole families. It represents this world as murky, dense and confusing, but does not dare offer an opinion, happy presumably that it is largely across the border and not here – a presumption that is self-serving and certainly not good enough. Where it should confront and shock but stand above the nastiness shown onscreen, Sicario instead remains mired in the same ambiguities as the film’s American characters. But when these ambiguities involve assassination and torture, that’s an uncomfortable place for a film of any sort to be.

REVIEW: The Look of Silence (2015)

Considered one of the best films of the year in 2012/3, The Act of Killing was a disturbing documentary about the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide of 1965 who still live in impunity, considered heroes for their slaughter. Joshua Oppenheimer’s new film The Look of Silence has often been considered as a film that addresses the criticisms that The Act of Killing encountered, though the two films were really made concurrently. While the earlier film was questioned for its lack of context and its willingness to allow the perpetrators to speak in place of their victims – even going so far as to almost complicit with their crimes – The Look of Silence offers a more confrontational approach to the killers and places the victims in the centre of events.

The film follows Adi, an ophthalmologist, whose own brother Ramli was murdered before Adi was born. After watching some footage shot by Oppenheimer of two killers bragging shamelessly about their crimes in scenes similar to those in The Act of Killing, Adi and Oppenheimer embark on a series of confrontations with some of the killers, using his experience as an ophthalmologist as a cover.

The Look of Silence is a tough watch, but it is also easier to like, freed as it is of the moral complicity of The Act of Killing by focussing on the pain of the victims and by confronting the killers. In each interviews, Adi casually asks the killers about what they did and what they think about it, allowing them to boast and confess their crimes, before revealing his identity and the details of his brother’s death. Interviewees includes the heads of local families, leaders of death squads and even M.Y. Basrun, speaker of the legislature. Each, when told the truth about Adi and his motives, offer similar, depressingly human, rationalisations for their crimes, feeble threats and panicked denials. Oppenheimer’s camera lingers on the faces, both of Adi and his interviewees, often concentrating on their faces when there are no words left to say – the titular look of silence.

Beyond the trickery and the sight of the murderer’s finally having to squirm out of the facts of the past (shades of Shoah here), the film is constructive. It displays the silence and fear of the victims. Adi is told by Basrun that the killings will begin again if the victims’ families continue to want justice. Another interviewee suggests that Adi is part of a communist plot and threateningly attempts to find out what his name is and where he is from. It also shows that, despite the frequent calls of the killers and some of the victims to forget the past, Indonesia will not overcome its problems until these questions are asked and the impunity of the killers is removed. The film ultimately makes the case for truth and reconciliation, but also shows that the victims who remains in Indonesia are still in a very tenuous and dangerous position – a criticism of the here and now in Indonesia and, hence, important and valuable.

More than The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence is about the lies that surround Indonesia’s past. Early in the film, we see archive footage of an American news report about the genocide which, though not hiding the violence and the suffering (how could it?), complacently suggests that the killing was being done with the support of the population, was indeed being carried out by the people themselves, was not being orchestrated by a military dictatorship. We see footage of Goodyear Company’s Sumatran rubber plant, where the workers are all accused ‘communists’ working as slaves at gunpoint – the American reporter is sickeningly casual about this open abuse. Later, we are in a classroom, during a history lesson, hearing a teacher shamelessly indoctrinating his students, including Adi’s son, giving gruesome lessons about communist atrocities and recommending full compliance with the state. Though both scenes are about the past, they are also about the present, and reveal the film’s strategy of talking about the fear, suffering and silence of the modern Indonesian state by revealing the horrors of the past. The film acts as a powerful corrective to the lies of Indonesia and the West today.

Centring on Adi, who confronts the killers with a remarkable bravery and composure, The Look of Silence puts the focus on the victims and, in the meetings between the victim and the killer, on the future. Though Oppenheimer is not particularly interested in authenticity – there are many scenes here that feel staged – he has created a work that confronts the lies about Indonesia’s past and which gives a voice to the victim’s, one expressive not of their wish for revenge but of their wish for the truth, justice and ultimately safety and security. It is a powerful statement and an important, disturbing film about Indonesia and about all of us.