REVIEW: The Big Short (2016)

Adam McKay may seem like a strange filmmaker to opt for an awards season biopic of the beginnings of the global economic meltdown of 2008, given his previous form as the director of Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys. Though it is clearly something close to his heart (remember the serious animated lecture that acted as an appendix to the not-awful The Other Guys), can a filmmaker like McKay pull off something so dense and complicated and, yes, serious.

The Big Short, a title that recalls more The Big Easy or The Big Lebowski than The Big Sleep, is about a few (all-male) groups who saw evidence of a housing bubble and who bet against the seemingly rock-solid housing market, reaping millions as millions lose homes and jobs. We have Michael Burry (a largely restrained Christian Bale), a solo financial wizard, who first sees the inevitable collapse due to the precarious way in which all of the banks had tied their money and capital up in potentially worthless mortgage bonds. His plan inspires others including Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) and Mark Baum (a quite good Steve Carell), who all tie up their funds in betting against the housing market.

The film traces the risks that these characters take, the pitfalls and the dark moments in which bankruptcy looms before the ultimate pay-off. Here, particularly in the Burry storyline, the film is closest to that other Michael Lewis adaptation, Moneyball, about the lone innovator who takes a serious risk and ends up triumphant and vindicated in the end. All fine with baseball (though that film was rather dull), but more troubling in the case of The Big Short. The film’s primary focus is on these financial traders who saw the fall coming and bet on it, making a quick buck in the process, which is not the greatest angle from which to address the serious greed and avarice that led to the economic collapse that ruined lives. The film does sort-of address this upside-down morality with Baum having doubts about what he has done, but ultimately the film strives to get an underdog triumph storyline out of something that can only be negative, if not fully misanthropic. Surely that misses the point about what this purely-financial collapse ought to represent.

The film does try to offer a serious critique of what brought about the collapse and the leniency of the response of the world’s governments. There is a running sense of disbelief at the stupidity of the bankers (how did they not know that this was going to happen? Did they really think this kind of policy was going to be sustainable?), that is nicely countered when we hear from Baum about the government’s bailouts, i.e. they knew that there were doing damage, but they were confident that the taxpayer would foot the bill and so simply didn’t care. The film does rouse your indignation, possibly even more effectively than the too-often misunderstood The Wolf of Wall Street. However, the film is not enough of a sustained critique. Though it will inspire a new ire in people who find the news boring, it is just not serious enough, working too hard to be an entertainment with heroes, an underdog storyline and a damaging, slightly desperate comedic strain that does it no favours. So we have Margot Robbie in a hot tub and Selena Gomez playing blackjack to explain CDO’s, stupid jokes that are wholly out of place and stupid pop culture montages. McKay seems to believe that too serious a critique will only confuse and irritate audiences, so he has tried to make the film as entertaining as possible, but it only makes it look foolish, hysterical and jumpy. Sadly, the filmmakers simply do not have enough trust in their material.

And that is it. The Big Short is a story of the outsider vindicated, which severely misses the point; it largely avoids the darker side to this story (the homelessness, the poverty) in favour of out-of-place comedy and easy pokes at villainy and greed; it lacks the intellectual heft to truly tackle its subject. It may be a good primer for the initiated, but with its hot tubs and poker games, it may feel like an insult to one’s intelligence. Though given how the collapse came about and the ease with which a stunning critique like The Wolf of Wall Street can be taken as a celebration and an inspiration, maybe that is what we deserve.

REVIEW: 12 Years A Slave (2014)

12 Years A Slave is the third feature film from artist turned director Steve McQueen, who is developing into a surprisingly mainstream filmmaker, following the somewhat esoteric Hunger and the challenging yet disappointingly conventional Shame. 12 Years A Slave is initially off-putting, being too much of an Oscar-friendly drama to fit easily alongside McQueen’s other work. In fact, it is when one forgets McQueen’s involvement that the film begins to work in its own right, an odd example of an auteur’s disappearance.

Based on a true story, the film follows Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man in 1841 New York, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Over the next twelve years, he is passed between a variety of masters, learning along the way to keep his head down and tell no one about his previous situation. Northup thus leads a dangerous and precarious existence at the hands of white masters in the Deep South.

Steve McQueen’s films have always stridden a thin line between the art house and the multiplex. Hunger and Shame were both bleak and muted in a rather minimalist way and yet both remain fairly conventional in terms of story arcs. Shame fit neatly into a three-act structure and even offered rather simplistic explanations for its protagonist’s urges. It is difficult to see 12 Years A Slave as anything other than a Hollywood drama – something that is not helped by one traditional crane shot’s dodgy CGI landscape or by a few rather manipulative scenes. McQueen’s trademark long takes are still present, though they are much shorter and more embedded within the film’s storyline. Aside from some extreme violence, which is justified for the purposes of realism but which nonetheless represent a breaking from the tradition of the Hollywood drama, 12 Years A Slave is almost entirely conventional. The star cameos (Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt) are often off-putting, their sudden appearance taking you out of the film just when you were beginning not to notice the mechanics of the screenplay and direction.

That said, the film's moral complexity confronts the audience, forcing them to question their own feelings about the action onscreen, suggesting that American slavery was not a battle between innocent slaves and the evil white slave owners. Benedict Cumberbatch's Ford is a less obviously loathsome character than Fassbender's Epps - but then he is all the worse for his moralising does not extend as far as the question of slavery. As compassionate as he is, he is happy to turn a blind eye to what cruelty and suffering when he needs to. Steve McQueen is too good a filmmaker to let Ford off the hook, but neither does he openly berate him, instead showing the more corrosive side to the evil of slavery. Meanwhile, other slaves hold the whips and openly collude with their evil bosses. As well as this, the film offers a much more violent and bleak representation of American slavery yet seen, McQueen refusing to look away in order to represent what slavery is like without any respite for the audience. As a result, the film can be depressing and suffocating but then what true representation of slavery wouldn't be?

The film’s primary focus is on how Solomon Northup survives his ordeal and the alterations in his personality that are required to do this. Initially, Northup is outraged and indignant. Soon realizing that his past could be dangerous to him, he must act like a normal slave and not allow his masters to see him as anything different. He is thrown into a series of morally compromising situations and is constantly in danger of losing any sense of who he was. The film also focuses on his despair and his decision not to give up in the face of his apparently hopeless future. The film requires a strong performance to bring across this character’s duality and it has one in Ejiofor’s work, which avoids big Oscar-friendly histrionics (where other actors in the film itself may not) in favour of a quiet pain and anguish that is all the more believable. These themes coupled with a great central performance ensures that 12 Years A Slave succeeds both as a drama designed for mass entertainment and as something more interesting.

It is interesting to note that, in Django Unchained, Tarantino tries to develop a similar idea of the adapting that Django must overcome in order to survive – though he fails since he is much more interested in film references, long bouts of monologue and exploding bodies. Conversely, it is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave and not wish for the kind of bloody satisfaction so gleefully though tediously doled out by Tarantino, although McQueen makes short shrift of the idea of violent revolution all too quickly and, it has to be said, convincingly. It is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave so soon after Django Unchained – especially since one early scene in the former looks identical in terms of lighting and framing to the latter. 12 Years A Slave works in some ways as a riposte of Django Unchained, particularly in its much more honest focus on the victims of slavery, in their much more three-dimensional characterization and in the fact that Solomon Northup survives thanks to his own skills and not through the advice and assistance of a nice white man.

As a drama, 12 Years A Slave is most effective in its quiet moments, McQueen showing a flair for the more subtle drama of single scenes as well as in the more uncompromising scenes of institutional racism and brutality. As a whole, 12 Years A Slave moves through a variety of registers usually under the influence of its performers. Fassbender, Dano and Sarah Paulson overplay their scenes and the film seems over the top when they are centre stage, while it plays best when Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o and Adepero Oduye are given the space to act. Since it is tied so closely to its performances, 12 Years A Slave ultimately succeeds or fails on the quality of the work of its actors in individual scenes, making it a flawed and overblown yet effective and moving drama.

Monthly Film Challenge Part 6: The Tree of Life (2011)

Many film critics hailed Terrence Malick’s ambitious fifth feature, The Tree of Life, as a masterpiece at Cannes, where it won the Palme D’Or. But the film was highly divisive since its first screening, leading to a major backlash. When audiences got a hold of it, there was very little fence sitting with people either loving it or hating it. It is a film that has been endlessly argued over, in terms of both its quality and its meaning. It is also a film that is particularly hard to be objective about. Your tolerance or intolerance of it will ultimately act as a reflection on how and why you love cinema.

There is very little that can be said definitively about The Tree of Life, and any pieces written on the film may be more telling of the interests of the writer as opposed to the qualities of the film. Terrence Malick presents a clear dichotomy between “the way of nature and the way of grace” in the first line of the film, but from there on the film is left remarkably open to interpretation. Forgetting any pretence at objectivity then, for me, The Tree of Life is really about two different things, one massive and wide-ranging and the other, in comparison, highly specific. It is about life, the universe and everything, but also it is about Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) maturation from childhood to adulthood via puberty. The former encompasses a huge amount, from the place of human beings in the world to an examination of the need for compassion in spite of a fiercely natural world. We move from parents grieving over the death of a son (a hint of the specific to come) to the creation of the world, the beginning of life on earth and finally the joy of reproduction. The family is seen in a highly positive light, a cocoon against the ruthless competition that remains prevalent in many guises throughout the earth’s lifespan – the grace of the family versus the brutal realities of nature. It suggests the rather insignificant place that humans hold in the grand scheme of things, but gives hope. The human way of life may be meaningless, but the little things are what matters. It is not an original message, in fact it may seem rather conservative but this ceases to matter since the film’s aesthetics are entirely unique (to Malick’s cinema at least) and absolutely breathtaking. These preoccupations allow for a film that is majestic, beautiful and really rather moving. In a sense, it is Malick’s masterpiece.

With the birth of Jack, the film becomes more specific, less meta-physical, though the bridge between the birth of the universe and the birth of Jack is surprisingly seamless. The film now meditates on the act of growing up, from difficulties with parents to a burgeoning sexuality to the awareness and acceptance of difference. Here also, in the figures of Jack’s parents (Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt), we see how the world works and the grace-nature dichotomy comes to fruition. The family becomes less a cocoon than a synecdoche of the world – full of dissatisfaction and rivalry, but also friendship and love. With this, the film successfully comes full circle, its two strains – the universal and the familial – coming together under the same themes, presented big and small.

However, having said all of this, the film’s greatest achievement is its lyricism. The Tree of Life is a visual and poetic film, which succeeds primarily thanks to the sheer beauty of its images, their marriage with music and the meaning through montage. The brilliance of The Tree of Life is not accurately expressed through its plot, or through an analysis of its themes – the above cannot take in the sombre modern-day scenes with the older Jack (Sean Penn), as interesting as it is, or the admittedly awkward impressionistic ending. What makes the film so powerful is that, by watching it, you find out something about yourself based on your reaction to what happens onscreen, whether you laugh out loud or get a lump in the throat. This may sound crude (and it is), but The Tree of Life is a film that can stun and move you while driving your best friend out of their mind with boredom. The Tree of Life is not as much a challenge to some people as it is for others, and working out why it worked or didn’t work for you might just tell you something about how you watch films and, maybe, how you see life.

The Tree of Life is a meditation, rather than a story. As a result, it is a unique and fascinating film that rewards multiple viewing. It is a film that is unashamedly, gloriously arty, if not particularly profound then remarkably beautiful and a fascinating example of the expressive potential of the language of cinema. Malick's images are beautiful, especially when considered alongside the editing and the brilliant music chosen to accompany them. There is another thing that is fresh and brilliant about The Tree of Life that has not really been touched on. It is a film about life and love and grace and nature made with ambition and an eye for beauty, but it is also extremely brave. Not politically brave, but artistically brave because it lays itself bare, dares you to laugh and succeeds in making you see and think about the world in ways that you never have before, all by virtue of one of the film’s most powerful attributes: its fearless honesty.

See the original, inaccurate review from the film's release in 2011 as an indication how one's opinion can change here.

La Jetee

Un Chien Andalou

The Seventh Continent

F For Fake
La Chinoise

REVIEW: Killing Them Softly (2012)

Killing Them Softly is an adaptation of George V. Higgins’ crime novel Cogan’s Trade. Aside from adding a dodgy title, Andrew Dominik’s (who previously made the excellent revisionist western The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) film brings the story forward into the 2008 presidential handover between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Like George Clooney’s recent The Ides of March, Killing Them Softly is a new example of the post-Obama film filled as it is with a palpable disillusionment with the American political process.

Two (very) small-time hoods, Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) fall in with Johnny “Squirrel” Amato (Vincent Curatola), who has a plan to knock over an underworld card game. It seems like a safe bet since the blame will almost certainly fall on Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta), who once previously knocked over the same card game. When Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) gets involved as a mob enforcer charged with dealing with the fallout from the robbery, things do not go as Frankie and Russell had hoped.

Killing Them Softly looks like it is set in the 1970s, with only the constant television and radio broadcasts from 2008 to remind us that it is set closer to our time. In fact, thematically the film is very specifically of our time, despite the throwback mise en scéne. The film is more than the by-the-numbers gangster film that it might at first appear. Instead, the film reflects the constant broadcasts, with the collapsing American economy being compared to the smaller but equally volatile Boston underworld economy. The card game acts as a microcosm; its importance to the economy of the underworld is stressed. Nothing gets done and nobody makes any money when there are no card games. It is a bit of a stretch, but one that is sometimes worth making. The film is often very successful in suggesting parallels between the conventions of the gangster film and the development of the government's response to the recession, especially in the figure of Ray Liotta – a scapegoat whose punishment acts as a symbol to regain consumer confidence in the underworld economy, although it is in itself ineffectual and misguided. Though it is hard to see the logic in a gangster-run card game being as integral to the underworld economy as banking is to the world bank, the film nevertheless has some valid points to make. Probably since it is much easier nowadays to see links between violent gambling gangsters and shady bankers.

So, the film has some points to make about what is going on now and it has a palpable feeling of isolationism, in which no one looks after anyone else and your troubles are absolutely your own. As Cogan says in the histrionic closing speech, “This is America. And in America, you are on your own.” It is better shown in a seemingly throwaway moment in which the raving mad man who is disturbing the peace is quickly silenced, a moment that remains in the background and out of focus as Cogan walks blithely on. The film is deeply critical of what America has become and the aforementioned closing speech acts as an unnecessary clarification and a summary of the film’s message, while also suggesting that it is still relevant, coming as it does as a response to Barack Obama’s inauguration speech. The film uses the growing disillusionment with Obama as an example of how little things have moved forward, showing that even if things are shaken to their rotten core, the reestablishment of the status quo remains oddly the key objective. However, is all this politics effective?

One of the key questions that 1960s political cinema engaged in was the question of how to make effective political cinema. Jean-Luc Godard and his disciples preferred to “make political films politically”, avoiding the distracting features of narrative cinema, such as stories and characters that one could empathise with. Narrative cinema was judged ineffectual because it was felt that the audience would not be able to take a step back from the drama and consider the questions that are being raised in any significant way. Though dated, these films, Godard’s La Chinoise or Vera Chytilova’s Daisies are good examples, remain arresting and thought provoking. Killing Them Softly, though clearly angry and passionately argued, does little to educate or challenge since it merely addresses the already converted and those who feel obliged to draw its tenuous parallels to the real world. Most viewers might not even be interested in the politics that are placed prominently in front of the film, preferring to ignore it and find instead a slightly atypical and, hence, dramatically unsatisfying genre movie.

The tropes of the gangster film are all here, with small-time hoods, a rather misjudged drug sequence, some unconvincing Tarantino-esque diversions and a lot of grim violence. In fact, it is too much of a gangster film for all of its otherwise serious pretensions. One killing is presented entirely in slow motion with a love song playing over it, a sequence with absolutely no substance but a lot of rather clichéd stylistics. Similarly, there’s a whole thing about dogs and an exploding car that feels horribly like a scene from a bad Tarantino imitation. The casting nods back to Goodfellas and The Sopranos while a flashy and heavily orchestrated beating scene is somehow allowed to take precedence over any of the political statements that the filmmakers are supposedly so driven to make. Often it seems that Dominik is making up for the fact that his film is at heart a stagy political parable by emphasising trendy camera movements and edgy musical counterpoints for no good reason. In the end, it makes Killing Them Softly feel a lot less serious and sincere than it should be and, hence, it does not really have much of importance to say. As political cinema, as a result, it is far from radical.

Similarly, Brad Pitt is badly miscast as Jackie Cogan, not because he doesn’t look the part or because he isn’t convincing – in fact it is probably one of his best performances – but because he is hopelessly out of context. He is too glamorous and too much of a star to appear in a film with Killing Them Softly’s kind of message. Everything about Killing Them Softly is cynical and disappointing and grim, except its star. Ultimately, for the film to have any point, Jackie Cogan should be as pathetic as the rest of the characters just as the film’s flashier moments should be as toned down as the rest of the film. Stars, and directorial pyrotechnics, should be kept out of political cinema. When Godard and co-director Jean-Pierre Gorin cast Jane Fonda in Tout va bien, they were making an ironic nod to the kinds of compromises that films have to make in order to get financed - see too their subsequent Letter To Jane, a rumination on the disparity between stars and effective politics. Here Brad Pitt appears in a didactic role in a political film that he partly self-financed through his production company Plan B Entertainment. Like Johnny Depp and his partly self-financed and vacuous, dreary pseudo-political The Rum Diary, through Infinitum Nihil, the overall impression of the film is that of a vanity project, the initially good intentions undermined by the ego of the star. As Killing Them Softly plays out, it feels more and more as if Brad Pitt is the film’s subject and driving force, rather than the political rhetoric that it supposedly advocates.

Killing Them Softly works as a grim, moody gangster film most of time, though too often it falls into avoidable stylistic clichés – its ironic use of pop music in particular feels ancient. With a political agenda that can be interesting, the film has some valid points to make, but the violence, the exposition and the star too easily divert it. The lasting impression is of a failed experiment or a step backwards, one that could have been better if Dominik and Pitt had watched less gangster films and had done more research into the developments of political cinema.

REVIEW: The Tree of Life (2011)

  Many film critics hailed Terence Malick’s ambitious fifth feature, The Tree of Life, as a masterpiece at Cannes, where it won the Palme D’Or. The film then went on to have a major backlash, and then a clear division between lovers and haters. It is a film that has been endlessly argued over, in terms of both its quality and its meaning. It is also a film that is particularly hard to be objective about. Your tolerance or intolerance of it will be a personal choice.

  For me, The Tree of Life is really two films of about equal length, one about life, the universe and everything and the other about Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) maturation from childhood to adulthood via puberty. The first film is a lyrical film about the place of human beings in the world and an examination of the need for compassion in spite of a fiercely natural world. This film is majestic, beautiful and really rather moving. In a sense, it is Malick’s masterpiece. We move from the feeling of dislocation and lose that comes with being an adult in a materialistic society to the creation of the world, the beginning of life on earth and finally the joy of reproduction. The family is seen in a highly positive light, a cocoon against the ruthless competition that remains prevalent in many guises throughout the earth’s lifespan. It suggests the rather insignificant place that humans hold in the grand scheme of things, but gives hope. The human way of life may be meaningless, but the little things are what matters. It is not an original message, but the film presents its idea brilliantly, using images to suggest ideas rather than to advance narrative cause and effect.

  However, the film soon shifts its attention to a similarly, though less successfully, lyrical portrait of the troubles that come with growing up. The film takes on new concerns and preoccupations to such an extent that the only signifier that it is the same film as the fact that it has the same actors playing the same parts. In this second film we follow young Jack as he experiences a sexual awakening, peer pressure from friends and intolerance from his domineering father (Brad Pitt). The family becomes less a cocoon than a site of dissatisfaction and rivalry. It is such a drastic shift in tone that the film never really recovers and had the two films been released separately, critics would argue that Malick was actively disagreeing with himself.

  Unfortunately, the second film is less original and a lot less exciting. Taken together, the two films tear each other apart and the main reaction once the film ends is one of extreme disappointment, not least because the last five minutes are something of a misstep. What makes the first film nearly a masterpiece is that, by watching it, you find out something about yourself based on your reaction to what happens onscreen, whether you laugh out loud or get a lump in the throat. With the second film, there is less room to manoeuvre. Malick becomes more blunt, more opinionated and no longer leaves the film open to whatever its audience might want to take out of it. While the first film allows you to see and feel what you will (whether positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic), the second film is more of an obviously didactic work.

  The film is entirely a visual work, one that lets the images move the film forward, rather than any plot points or dialogue. It is a meditation, rather than a story. Whether it is a good or great film may remain undecided, it is a breath of fresh air that such an ambitious film can be made in this day and age. After all, not every film should fit into a box designated by accountants in Hollywood. Some films can and should be unashamedly arty, whether profound or pretentious. It is a film of ideas in which some work better than others and the quality of the film, as well as its message, is, refreshingly, entirely up to you.