REVIEW: Far From The Madding Crowd (2015)

Having seen Festen and The Hunt (I admit I haven’t yet got around to his other films), it came as a bit of a shock that Thomas Vinterberg was following up what was presumably his best film yet with a Thomas Hardy adaptation.

The film is essentially about Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) trying to make her way in a world of men, a feminist tale adapted from a book that is reportedly less than feminist (here, again, I admit that I haven’t read the book or seen the 1967 version that a lot of critics couldn’t leave at the door of the screening). Variously, if not concurrently, pursued by three men, Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), William Boldwood (Michael Sheen) and Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge), Everdene has to try to define herself as a woman and yet also choose a man.

The above synopsis – like most of the synopses in this blog – may make the film sound a little silly or overwrought, and the story is, to an extent, exactly that. But the film’s real saving grace, after a possibly dodgy opening ten minutes intended presumably to acclimatize the audience, is its old-fashioned sincerity. The performances, the script and the direction conveys a belief in the film that goes beyond the typical ‘Let’s win Oscars’ mentality behind a good few recent adaptations of classic literature. The film isn’t a dry retelling either, but a contemporary, honest version of the story. The film is good, because the people who made it clearly felt that it was a film worth making.

The performances are excellent. Mulligan brings a depth to her character, which ensures that her thoughts and motivations, if humanly inconsistent, are always clear and understandable. Everdene is never a symbol in an argument about feminism but a character trying to live well. Schoenaerts plays Oak as a decent man and succeeds in being very likable, rather than just irritatingly sanctimonious as a character less well-written or well performed might appear. Similarly, Sheen’s Boldwood is vulnerable and pitiable but believably so - his character is never played for easy pity, but as a study of depressed, hopeless obsession. Sturridge has less to act with, since it is his character’s arc that is the most melodramatic and probably was the hardest to bring up-to-date, but he does bring a nice instability to his character, who is unpredictably nice and evil, vulnerable and frightening. Coupled with tender, unironic writing and direction, the performances are allowed to stand out and the film largely succeeds on the believability of its actors.

To say anything else about the film is to verge on the redundant. Vinterberg adds enough modern touches to keep the film feeling alive and vibrant, so that it very rarely feels like an adaptation of a slightly silly 141-year-old book. He also knows to keep the actors at the centre of the film, since it is their performances that keep the film truly interesting and likable. So…nice to look at and with a pleasing preference for people over plot or style, Far From The Madding Crowd is a film for which the term ‘costume drama’ feels utterly detrimental.

REVIEW: Killer Joe (2012)

 
 
  Killer Joe is a jet black comedy and marks the apparent return from obscurity by William Friedkin, best known for The French Connection, The Exorcist and Cruising and not as well known for his less groundbreaking killer tree film. With Killer Joe, is Friedkin back at his best?

  Chris Smith (Judd Hirsch) needs money fast and he hatches a plan with his dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) and little sister Dottie (Juno Temple) to get a hold of his mother’s life insurance money. To do this, they hire Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). As is the norm for black crime comedies, hardly anything goes to plan.

  Based on a play by Tracy Letts, as was Friedkin’s recent Bug, the film is quite minimalist, with only a few locations and not very many actors. Apart from a motorcycle chase and the loud, Gothic atmospherics, the film is relatively static. The film is largely made up of scenes of people shouting at each other, the characters as suffocating as the setting. Hirsch is particularly loud, but he is far from out of place when the first scene involves thunder and lightning, torrential rain, full frontal nudity, raging arguments and two more physical fights. The film establishes itself early on as an over the top piece of pulp fiction with no likable characters and a film that delights in showing horrible people doing horrible things to each other. Humanist and subtle it is not, but enjoyable it can be.

  The film noticeably cools when Killer Joe is onscreen, though Friedkin does emphasis the crunch of his boots and the snap of his cigarette lighter, mixing them up on the soundtrack to a comical degree. McConaughey gives a great performance, his Killer Joe a relatively quiet and reserved character, though one whose underlying sadism is barely concealed. In the film’s two main unsettling scenes, McConaughey slowly eases the psychopath out of his character until he is a wholly horrifying creature, in one scene bending vampirically over Juno Temple and emitting guttural moans; the other will be discussed further below. In the scene with Temple, Friedkin, surprisingly given the rest of the film, cuts away before the worst happens, presumably aware that, in this scene in particular, the imagination works worst.

  Killer Joe is often very funny, if even in the way it charts the inevitable downfall of the family. In fact, the twists and turns that the plot takes are often presented for comic effect, with the key revelations more likely to trigger laughter than gasps. Here, it is Thomas Haden Church who shines out, playing the utterly useless and mainly contemptible father, who initially resists his son’s plan only because it is too complicated for him. One scene with him and Gershon in the lawyer’s office is a classic in deadpan slapstick.

  However, Friedkin’s main priority with Killer Joe is to shock and there is one much written about scene towards the end of the film involves a fried chicken leg that is deeply uncomfortable, mainly because one suspects that it is being played for laughs. Presumably justified by the turn that the plot takes, the extremity and perversity of the scene coupled with the film’s awkward mother-whore dichotomy make it a difficult scene to get past. The symbolism is worn on the film’s sleeve - Sharla as the middle-aged whore who must be punished and Dottie as the virginal innocent who must be celebrated. Though presented so didactically that it can’t be taken without a little possibly-intended irony, the severity of Sharla’s punishment, which is directly associated with her being a ‘whore’, is a little too leering and misogynistic. It is true, however, that the film has little good to say about males and it may turn out that Friedkin is actually saying something interesting about how some of us can be shocked by such intellectual matters while laughing our way through the misanthropic plot about a son hiring a hit man to kill his own mother for her insurance money. That said, Friedkin deifies Dottie and demonises Sharla to such an extent that it is difficult to not leave the film feeling slightly tainted by the film’s rather dodgy sexual politics.

  Killer Joe is, on the whole, a rather grim but enjoyable film. It might say more about your own tastes and pre-occupations than you want it to, depending on how shocked or not you may be by it. Ultimately, Friedkin set out to make a grim crime comedy and, for the most part, he succeeded in making a very well executed one, surprising in view of some of his other more recent troubled films. Killer Joe is as clever and funny as it is shocking and distancing, a little unlikeable but often great fun and with a killer of an ending.

REVIEW: Kaboom (2011)

  Kaboom is the tenth feature film from fiercely unconventional filmmaker Gregg Araki. Being involved in the New Queer Cinema movement, his films defy categorization just as his characters defy rigid sexual identities. However, the film merely adds credence to the idea that American cinema cannot be arty without being mind-numbingly irritating and completely devoid of meaning.

  Smith (Thomas Dekker) is an 18-year old university student who claims that his sexuality is “undeclared”, although he has a large sexual appetite. He hangs around with his best friend, art student Stella (Haley Bennett), frequently hooks up with London (Juno Temple) and lusts after surfer roommate Thor (Chris Zylka). All apparently very boring, until he witnesses what may or may not have been the murder of an enigmatic red-haired girl, who has been haunting his dreams. Now men wearing animal masks are chasing him and strange things are happening to his friends.

  The film aims at being unconventional and surprising without being afraid to be a little incomprehensible. Though these subversions are worthy of merit in themselves, the film never feels like it has succeeded to doing anything it sets out to do. It feels like loads of pieces of different films strung together for no apparent purpose and it fails to reward its viewers’ perseverance. Its “mystery in a school setting” is not as wittily rendered as it is in Brick and its mix of teenage turmoil and gothic horror is a dull repetition of the equally uninspired Donnie Darko.

  By Araki’s own admission, the key influence behind Kaboom was David Lynch, though it feels more like the pop sensibility of Richard Kelly. The spectre of Lynch is apparent but only because Araki is so desperate to allude to that director’s fiercely overwrought and pointless films (all but The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet), with extreme close-ups on food mimicking the opening of Blue Velvet for absolutely no reason. In fact it is hard to imagine that Lynch would be happy to have such a film recalling his own films so shamelessly. Kaboom is entirely a film that aims for weird, and sacrifices meaning and interest in the process.

  In one scene, in which Smith allows a scared Stella to take his bed while he sleeps on the floor, the camera moves from left to right in a high angle from Stella to Smith. Though a reasonably nice shot to look at, it becomes clear that Stella is sleeping at the foot of the bed, a weird thing to do especially given her state of mind. No reason is given for her doing this other than to accommodate Araki’s shot. This is symptomatic of the film’s problem. Clearly, Araki was busy behind the camera, making sure his film was trendy and ‘trippy’ (to use a word that has been the bane of modern cinema). Similarly, why animal masks? As a result, the film seems to have nothing but contempt for its plot, characters, script and, because of this, its audience.

  In the end, however, the joke is that none of this matters, not the characters, not the meaning of the film and certainly not the plot, which begs the question: why make it? And, further, why watch it?