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.

SHORT REVIEW: Glassland (2015)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here.

Glassland is the new film from Gerard Barrett, whose first feature Pilgrim Hill won all sorts of praise. I have to admit that I haven’t yet seen it as cinemas in Northern Ireland are not very good at giving screens over to films from across the border. Glassland should, however, get a bigger release and is certainly worth seeing.

Jack Reynor (better remembered for the great What Richard Did than Transformers 4) plays John, a taxi driver struggling to care for his alcoholic mother Jean (Toni Collette). Exhausted by long hours at work and at home, he convinces her to get help, though help will cost money and will force John to accept shady, criminal work that he may not be able to do.

Glassland is a powerful drama about love and vulnerability and the extremes, or depths, that a person may have to go to help someone they love. John is a nice guy, but he works in human trafficking. We cannot condemn him as the film shows us his reasons, making it a powerful indictment of an indifferent state as well as a deeply moving drama of desperate people. Reynor is fantastic, rarely off screen and almost always in oppressively tight, darkly lit frames, but always deeply expressive.

The plotting is muted so that we never really think of the film as a story with a structured beginning, middle and end, more a series of causes and effects, realistic and human. Some moments are surprisingly moving, often unexpectedly, making it a deceptively simple film that may linger in your mind. The film is a little quick with its denouement but its ending is compassionate and daring, rounding of a film that is not about gangsters, sex and violence but about the people that are so often forgotten about in these kinds of stories. The film is set in a seemingly remote, barren wasteland with little warmth and few people, where alcoholism, desertion and trafficking seem both pervasive and commonplace. But this is not to say that this is a depressing film, because there are little joys in this world – it is just that they are often hard won. At first glance a minor film, Glassland nonetheless holds a powerful emotional, and political, wallop. It promises great things, important things from Reynor and Barrett and, if you’re able, you should watch.

REVIEW: Dollhouse (2013)

                  

Dollhouse marks the return of Kirsten Sheridan, who is still best known for 2000’s unlikeable Disco Pigs and for being the daughter of Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, The Field, In The Name of the Father, The Boxer). Dollhouse marks a bit of a departure as the script is almost totally improvised with a cast of unknowns, although one is now recognisable – Jack Reynor from Lenny Abrahamson’s fantastic What Richard Did. Dollhouse is the first feature film from the filmmaker’s collective The Factory, formed in 2010 by John Carney (November Afternoon, Park, On The Edge, Once, Zonad, The Rafters), Lance Daly (Last Days in Dublin, The Halo Effect, Kisses and the forthcoming Life's A Breeze) and Sheridan herself.

Five teenagers break into an empty house on a well-to-do neighbourhood on the coast of Dublin. They look around the house, clearly impressed by all the expensive stuff, some of them stunned almost into silence by the lifestyles of the ‘haves.’ They drink heavily and have a raucous party, laying waste to the house. But when one of them turns out to have a secret, and when a young neighbour Robbie (Jack Reynor) calls around to complain about the noise, things take a dark turn, with violence a constant threat.

Someone used to say that Reservoir Dogs feels like a violent film, despite its relative lack of violence, because there is, throughout the film, the threat of violence. Dollhouse is the same, but much more so. The apparently self-appointed head of the group Eanna (Johnny Ward of Savage, Five Day Shelter and This Must Be The Place) is thoroughly dangerous, his jokes and pranks constantly on the cusp of breaking into violence. Ward is absolutely terrifying, making a complex and unpredictable character out of what would ordinarily be a one-note thug. Jeannie (Seána Kerslake, her debut), the one with the secret, shows the effects of her life collapsing around her, at her own instigation, with very few words. Jack Reynor is fantastic again, showing that his role in the next Transformers film really will be a waste of his talents.

Sheridan’s film has a real feeling of the work of John Cassavetes about it. Not so much the violence, but the deep emotions that only rarely come to the surface and the complex, almost contradictory characters. These six people are entirely out of touch with their emotions, as seen in a scene in which one of the characters goes to have a shower. Threatening before, he now appears entirely vulnerable and alone, peeling off his clothes and revealing the marks of presumed domestic abuse. It is impossible to tell since he is in the shower but it seems as if he is in tears. Similarly, Jeannie, finding herself confronted by the rest of the group, can’t decide whether to laugh or cry, so she does both. Though it does not reach the sheer artistry and emotional power of Cassavetes at his best, at certain moments it comes close.

That said, the young cast do struggle visibly with the improvisations, and the film is full of little pauses in which the cast look like they have no idea where to go next. Sometimes, these moments work, showing the reality underneath the performance and clearly there is a point being made about a person’s behaviour in front of their friends being a performance constantly improvised and frequently trapped and confused. This works well, but not consistently. The film stumbles at moments or, worse, becomes confused itself, wandering through a longueur looking for a point before giving up and going back on track. Similarly, the plot is a little too loose, falling back on the same situations again and again. However, the power of the performances and the film’s sheer unpredictability and thoroughly unsettling tension more than makes up for the less successful aspects of the improvisations.

What ultimately damages the film is Sheridan’s fondness for an almost didactic symbolism. The improvised scenes sometimes give way to more lyrical, more formalist sequences, which were clearly planned and directed (with a capital ‘D’) by Sheridan. They are not all bad, but the obvious symbolism of many of them feels like an active negation of the more powerful, unplanned moments in the film. The film ends with a twist but also with a lot of overtly significant dialogue and with each character looking around with silent, understanding expressions, as if they have all learned something profound. When they tidy their clothes up and walk back out into the world, the allusions to putting their masks back on and to a coming of age are tacky and annoying. It is a shame, in a film so unpredictable and unsettling, so wonderfully indeterminate, that it should all the resolved with such unrealistic arthouse posturing – it pretends to say a lot about young people but it really doesn’t. That the ending is so frustrating, however, shows how much the rest of the film was working.

Dollhouse is a powerful and uncomfortable film, one that seems alive and unapologetic – like a debut of a young filmmaker with greatness ahead of them, which may or may not say much about Sheridan. Indeed, it seems hard to imagine that many people will like it if they weren’t already interested in improvisation in film. The arch symbolism of Disco Pigs does make an unwelcome appearance, but it is more than made up for by the challenging and exciting aesthetic. To end on a superlative, Dollhouse is one of the most disturbing and powerful dramas that Ireland has produced.

Dollhouse is available on DVD.

See also: Husbands

REVIEW: What Richard Did (2012)

What Richard Did is the third feature film by director Lenny Abrahamson and his first since the phenomenal Garage made Abrahamson an international name in 2007. He has taken his time choosing his next film and with What Richard Did we get another insight into modern Ireland that is both universal and recognisably local.

Richard (Jack Reynor) is a successful rugby player who would seem to have the world in the palm of his hand. He is planning to go into rugby professionally, but also continue his studies at the same time. He is very popular and is surrounded by mates and people who look up to him, particularly Stephen and Cian (Gavin Drea and Fionn Walton). He starts a romance with Lara (Roisin Murphy) and looks set to enjoy a long, uncomplicated summer. However, his drunken actions during a brawl outside a house party one night might just ruin his life.

Abrahamson imbues the film with a very real sense of sympathy for Richard, just as he did with the social outcasts in Adam and Paul and Garage. Though the middle class milieu is totally different from those of his previous two films, Abrahamson nevertheless displays the same ability to lift the lid on a particular group of people and reveal the psychology beneath. Richard is a popular guy, but Abrahamson and Reynor present him as an ambiguous character from the very beginning. We often see Richard staring enigmatically at a sunset or at some scenery, the observational style and the ambiguity of the film’s title suggesting that there is a lot going on underneath the surface that Richard presents. When he is alone, Richard is subdued, almost immobile, as if constrained by some deep dissatisfaction or fear.

This may seem premature as all of this occurs before the event, midway through the film, which will alter Richard’s life forever. However, Abrahamson is more interested in his character than he is in conventional plotting and, as a result, it is clear that there is something mildly wrong with Richard before the unfortunate incident. This feature of What Richard Did is worth emphasising as it is emblematic of the film’s ability to suggest almost as much as it reveals, making it a film full of allusive possibilities. Indeed, the previous relationship between Richard and his eventual victim remains unclear throughout the film. It seems that there is some kind of a past between them but the film never bogs itself down in redundant specifics, preferring a richness of possibilities. As a result, What Richard Did is the kind of film that ought to be endlessly talked about.

However, Abrahamson, for all his allusive illusiveness, has not made a film full of ciphers. Most of the actors in the film are very good and the film has a very Cassavetes-feel to it, seeming semi-improvised and workshopped. Jack Reynor is fantastic, easily carrying the film with a performance that is keenly aware of both Richard’s sheer confidence and extroversion and his less definable, darker qualities. Of the adults, Richard’s father Peter (Lars Mikkelsen) is the most interesting, producing a fine study of ineffectual horror. The majority of the young actors are very good at presumably just being themselves with Sam Keeley and Patrick Gibson. Richard will eventually have a long awaited breakdown and Reynor’s performance and Abrahamson’s eye for harrowing realism make the scene a key moment.

Of course, the film will end somewhat inconclusively, but the drama that Abrahamson wrings from the film’s situation is utterly fascinating. The film’s final ten minutes are remarkable for the sheer volume of ideas and nuances that are presented. Defiant, having finally made a decision that he feels is the right one, Richard and Lara spend one last bittersweet night together. However, in the cold light of the morning, Richard has a change of heart and the romance of the night before is tarnished. All of this is conveyed practically without words and is a powerfully evocative depiction of indecision, quilt and fear. Similarly, the film’s final shot is a deeply effective conclusion albeit one without many answers.

Beneath the surface of What Richard Did, an ostensibly straightforward drama about guilt and the loss of innocence, is a complexity that defies easy answers and categories. Similarly, the story is told with a subtly that is only matched by some of the performances making the film as thematically rich as it is enthralling. To say too much about the film is to give too much away so suffice it to say that What Richard Did is the second great film from Ireland’s most important living filmmaker.

What Richard Did will be playing at the QFT from Friday 14th Dec to Thursday 20th Dec.

Also on: http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/article/5404/film-review-what-richard-did