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: Legend (2015)

The Krays are already a big part of British cinema, and not just because there is a film about them already. The Krays and the apparent mythology that surrounds them has inspired many a queasy British gangster flick (I am obviously thinking here more of the Guy Ritchie types than either John Mackenzie or Mike Hodges, whose gangster films had a purpose). So here’s one called Legend.

Tom Hardy (tell me if you’ve heard this before) plays both Krays – the suave, Bond-like Reggie and the jittery psycho Ronnie, both over-written and over-performed for the movies. The film’s primary focus (despite a voiceover from Reggie’s wife Frances – played by Emily Browning – which unconvincingly tries to take precedence, but never does) is the relationship between the two brothers and how it lead to the undoing of the Krays’ very possibly unprecedented hold on gangland London.

First, the obvious. The film is called Legend (and, again, despite the wholly unconvincing ‘It’s All True’ narration) and it is a complete work of fiction, written and directed by a relative outsider in American Brian Helgeland. The two points to make about the outsider status of Helgeland are significant if contradictory. First, this is a film that no British filmmaker would be able to make – British cinema being somewhat less false and less at ease with its fondness for gangsters. And yet, secondly, therein lies its unexpected fun, since the film is made by a filmmaker clearly enthralled with this material and totally willing to disrespect the brutal realities behind his version of events and have fun with it. The film is indeed largely played as a comedy. Even a brutal torture scene is played for laughs.

Helgeland has clearly seen a fair share of Scorsese. His film is full of pop tunes, violence, swearing, posturing and long tracking shots roaming through the gangsters’ dens. However, what he hasn’t lifted is the seriousness of Scorsese’s cinema. The challenges to the audiences’ willingness to emphasise with whatever scumbag is projected in front of them and the truthful examinations of the damage that this violence, cruelty and largesse causes that are all consistent in his films all the way from Who’s That Knocking At My Door? through to The Wolf of Wall Street is totally missing from Legend, which prefers its Hollywood myths free of such real-world complications.

As a result, there is something utterly misjudged and unsavoury about Legend underneath the undeniable fun and frivolousness. Because it is based on real people and real murders, such a sugar-coating of Reggie Kray may make one uneasy. Worse is the fact that we never see the legendary Krays’ muscling in on and threatening some hardworking small business owner – surely their trade – only evil members of other gangs. Worse still is the scene in which Reggie rapes Frances. It is hard here not to imagine Helgeland making some kind of mental calculation – that the film will be pilloried if the scene is left out and yet will be too damaging to the film’s glossy, carefree feel if allowed to be presented honestly and truthfully. The latter would never have bothered his hero Scorsese, but Helgeland’s troubling solution to this dilemma is the only time that the camera decides to back away from the violence.

Legend then seeks to have fun with these characters and these events without having to show too much of the real pain and suffering and as such it is a classic Hollywood story, but where it could have had a challenging edge, instead it has a rotten core.

REVIEW: The Zero Theorem (2014)

Robert Altman always felt that you could only get the measure of a film if you see it at least twice. Terry Gilliam’s cinema, intentionally or not, bares this out, since many of his recent films have required more than one viewing in order to entirely make sense of them. Tideland, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and now The Zero Theorem are all somewhat difficult works, the former two becoming easier after more than one viewing. Alas, for The Zero Theorem, I’ll have to make do.

Set in the near future – more a utopia than a dystopia, as Gilliam has called it, though presumably only for certain people – Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) leaves his home, a disused church, and goes to work. He is an ‘entity-cruncher’, which is a job that seems to combine complex mathematical theory with pedalling. He wants to work from home as he is waiting on a phone call that may explain to him the meaning of his existence. He has been waiting on this phone call for years. Management (Matt Damon) decides to allow him to work from home but on the condition that he works on the Zero Theorem, a theorem that might just prove the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. He is overseen by his supervisor (David Thewlis) and helped by Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry) and Management’s son, Bob (Lucas Hedges).

If you didn’t know this was a Terry Gilliam film going in, you would be certain of it before the end. The script, written by Pat Rushin, is imbued with Gilliam references. Christoph Waltz looks like Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys; he is bewildered like Jonathan Pryce in Brazil, while the fantasy worlds are from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, albeit this time the result of technology and not magic. As such, however, The Zero Theorem feels slightly dated. The virtual reality suits recall The Matrix and some moments, meant to represent the depressing future, are now a little too recognisable – particularly the party scenes in which everyone dances to their own iPod, which actually exist in the form of headphone discos. In a way, The Zero Theorem feels like a film behind the times, a film Gilliam made over ten years ago and didn’t release until now.

The film has big themes about the meaning of life and the possibility or impossibility of proving that all is for nothing and it is not without interest here. Gilliam has dealt with big themes before but he has never seriously engaged with these questions – certainly not in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. There are few interesting ideas about life being a horrible mistake and death being the ultimate entity, the idea that faith allows people to waste their lives waiting for death, that it is much better to come to terms with the finality of a meaningless existence so that the business of living can be engaged in properly – which is presumably what the slightly opaque ending represents. These ideas come to fruition late in the film, where the entire film is reassessed – and thus requiring a second viewing. The Zero Theorem may just be Gilliam’s most intentionally symbolic film, since the plot here of ‘entity-crunching’ is not important and the film is ultimately just about how we spend and cope with our lives. Leth moves from depression, to madness, to romantic fervour, to disappointment, to anger, to a strangely therapeutic acceptance – somewhat similar to the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief. This becomes more apparent as the film goes along, and this is ultimately what is problematic with the film.

Terry Gilliam has always worked best with a degree of chaos, and even his best films have their messy elements, often very successfully integrated into the film as a whole. This ramshackle nature, however, has become more and more apparent in his later work as ideas come thick and fast and never seem to hang together exactly right. Seeing a new Gilliam film for the first time can be a bewildering and disappointing experience and there is always the impression that something has been missed. In a sense, Gilliam does not structure his films well, they move at a great pace but only in the sense of a runaway train. Often the later films can be scattershot and hit-and-miss, as interesting and comprehensible as they are bland and confusing – an interesting idea followed by a fairly terrible gag about a cigarette accidentally placed in a hat. The Zero Theorem feels like Gilliam’s least focussed and most badly made film, an impression not particularly helped by his trademark sets and camera movements (the camera always looks like it is about to topple over) and some bad dialogue from Rushin. And yet, a second viewing, and a third and fourth, allowed Tideland and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to reveal their truer nature, and both came to make more sense, and so, to a degree, writing about The Zero Theorem after one viewing may just be a self-defeating exercise.

What is ultimately laudable about Gilliam’s work is his commitment to challenging the audience and to never make a comforting, easy film. Appreciating these later works requires patience, commitment, effort, concentration and, maybe most importantly, time. And often even messy Gilliam can be more interesting and enjoyable than conventional Hollywood cinema. The overall effect of The Zero Theorem is the feeling that something out of the ordinary has just been seen and that it might require some work, and possibly a liberal dose of one’s own creativity, to satisfactorily decode, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

See also:

The Master

The Long Goodbye

REVIEW: The Fifth Estate (2013)

Following the final two Twilight films with a topical, controversial and political film about WikiLeaks – the first fiction feature about Assange and his whistleblower website – should seem odd. However, anyone who can make anything halfway conventional out of the downright bizarre final instalment of the “Twilight” books is a safe pair of hands, and Bill Condon’s treatment of the WikiLeaks story seems, therefore, to be more a story of resistance, grey-area ethics and mutual recrimination than anything particularly polemical or rebellious – though it may work as an introduction for anyone who prefers their head in the sand.

In Berlin in 2007, Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch), the founder of a small website that offers to publish whistleblower information with full anonymity for the whistleblower, meets Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) and is almost immediately taken by him. They dedicate themselves to making WikiLeaks the infamous and influential website that it would become. However, from the start, Domscheit-Berg is kept disconcertingly out of the loop. Meanwhile, Assange is moving further and further into uncharted territory, putting them both in danger.

The film is based partly on the book, “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website” by Domscheit-Berg himself. This, and the reticence of Assange himself, makes the film feel one-sided with a hint of character assassination. The air of mystery that the film shrouds around Assange hinders Cumberbatch’s performance – his unknowability and unclear motivations leads to a vague central performance. Assange is ultimately a figure both heroic and villainous and a film made with such a Hollywood framework is unable to find any middle ground. It ends up with two extremes – where one grateful woman tells Assange that if he had been around during the Cold War the Berlin Wall would have fallen much sooner while we also see him as working primarily for himself. The film ends sharply on the latter point, with a line intentionally comic, but also, in a way, dismissive.

There are a lot of flashbacks and backstory given concerning Assange, which, given that the film will ultimately throw up its hands in seeming exasperation at the truth of Assange’s character, are rather unnecessary. They do not reveal much in particular, leaving a conventional tale about two friends with big ideas falling out – not unlike, say, The Social Network, another film with a lot of people looking at laptop screens though a lot less awkwardly. Condon seems to have attempted to pre-empt such criticisms with a series of flashy cuts and a dreamscape of The Crowd-style computers, each an alias for Assange, all utilised in an effort to explain hacking in what feel like simple terms. Otherwise, the film feels a little too tightly structured, with the complicated real world story twisted into a three-act structure, aided and abetted with lines like, “If you are going to put yourself on a cross, you should first find out what it is made of.” All of this distracts from the real meat of the story, the central issue that anything about WikiLeaks must address.

The central issue, and one that the film takes a long time getting to, is whether or not Assange should have released Bradley Manning’s leaked files with redactions in order to protect certain people from reprisals. Fairly conventionally, the film opts for an easy answer – Yes – with little debate, offering only ethics as the determining factor. This despite clearly showing the importance of full disclosure elsewhere, when revealing the vicious murder of civilians in Baghdad and subsequent cover-up perpetrated by US forces. Although The Fifth Estate does not choose the wrong answer to the above question, it does nevertheless offer simplistic, fairly conservative ones. It seemingly suggests that WikiLeaks’ exposures are justified as long as they are not too damaging to the US, that anything diplomatically survivable is fair game but anything too horrendous is best left under wraps. In typical Hollywood fashion, a complex question is represented with a definitive answer, a happy ending of justice done and full closure – if not full disclosure.

Having said that, The Fifth Estate remains somewhat nice to see, a further American film showing real world dissent – Batmanglij’s The East  is another recent example. Though neither are fully committed to anything too radical or risky and both opts for easy cop-outs, they are nevertheless films that recognise a prevalent villainy within the American establishment. The Fifth Estate is ultimately too safe, too apologetic – the sympathetically drawn State Department official Sarah Shaw’s (Laura Linney) point that “if you don’t want dirty pictures, don’t have dirty wars” is remarkably feeble since it suggests that the USA is justified in causing as much ‘collateral’ damage as it wants and, worse still, that the dirty war was somehow ‘wanted.’ Nevertheless, a wide audience for a film like The Fifth Estate may be a good thing, especially if it enrages and leads to further reading. As likely as this may or may not be, the fact remains that, The Fifth Estate is just not angry enough.