SHORT REVIEW: The November Man (2014)

This short review appears on The Upcoming here.

The November Man is a spy thriller with Pierce Brosnan, who obviously wants to try out his own darker version of Bond without getting sued. The film is based on the seventh instalment of a novel series by Bill Granger and there is apparently a sequel already on the way.

Brosnan is Peter Devereaux, an aging secret agent who is called back into action by his old boss Hanley (Bill Smitrovich) to ensure the safe extraction of Natalia Ulanova (Mediha Musliovic), a secretary of the future Russian president Federov (Lazar Ristovski), who knows something that Federov does not want revealed. Olga Kurylenko, playing committed social worker Alice, gets shoehorned into the film too.

The film disappoints almost immediately. There have been few decent action films this millennium (the first three Bourne films are all that spring to mind) and The November Man seemed to be offering a dopey but fun throwback ‘90s film. But, unfortunately, the film is humourless and painfully clichéd from the start. It is po-faced throughout, leaving the actors desperately trying to make it all seem worth caring about, and when the plot kicks in, it is either incompressible or ridiculous or both. When you finally find out the significance of the title, it is so stupid that you wonder why no one stopped it.

Roger Donaldson directs in an uninterested, slapdash fashion. The final scene is a great example of a filmmaker not in control of his medium – it just does not work. He injects a few splashes of bloody violence in an effort to liven things up, but it is clear he couldn’t care less.

There is one half-decent idea about there being so many spies running around that no one knows who is a friend and who is an enemy, but the film does absolutely nothing with it. The only other thing that is decent about the film is that it suggests that the CIA are actively involved in war crimes and is, in very general terms, evil. It is nice to see mainstream films in which the CIA are the villains but the film just does not care enough to be truly committed to this point, or any other.

Bill Granger wrote the November Man novels during the Cold War, but that is not the reason that this film feels so dated and so tired. It is simply down to sheer laziness. Dull, dull, dull.

REVIEW: To The Wonder (2013)

One of the categories that might define ‘great art’ may well be that the work cannot be adapted into another medium without losing that which makes it great. For example, A Woman Under The Influence would lose the raw immediacy and tenderness of Cassavetes’ camera, Jeux Interdits would severely miss the remarkable expressiveness of the then five-year old Brigitte Fossey (oddly, I balk at calling these two ‘art’ since they both seem much more important than that), Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” would be less intangible, less unknowably beautiful. A second category follows - that they are almost impossible to accurately review.

To The Wonder ought to be ‘great art’ then. Though every shot is an award-winning photograph, it is not photography. It certainly isn’t philosophy as it is a lot less pointed than that – in other places, Terrence Malick has been described thoroughly unhelpfully as a ‘mystic.’ A novel or a poem would collapse under the strain of revealing the beauty of the natural world as imaginatively yet truthfully as film. To The Wonder makes such excellent use of classic music that it would be less powerful without it, however music alone would not suffice. To The Wonder is essential cinema precisely because it is essential that it be cinema. Similarly, it will lose a lot of its potency off the big screen.

To The Wonder is also nearly impossible to write about, though Nick Pinkerton makes a much better effort at it. To The Wonder defies interpretation since any single meaning that might be uncovered is reductive. Any description of an image and its meaning is only a pale comparison to watching the film itself. It is a difficult watch, but then a lot of ‘great art’ is not something that can be flicked on and passively understood. To The Wonder requires patience and a certain fluidity in the viewer, a willingness to engage with the film sincerely and without embarrassment. Something that would otherwise be mawkish or annoying (like in Malick’s previous, The Tree of Life, there is a lot of dancing) is, in Malick’s cinema, celebratory and free. To The Wonder will not be for everyone, but those who are open to it might find that they come out of the cinema a little different than when they went in. The plot can only be understood by implication just as the film can only be appreciated by thought, the drawing of links with one’s own life and an acknowledgment of its lyrical and visual beauty.

Neil (Ben Affleck) is in a relationship with Marina (Olga Kurylenko). When she returns to France, her home country, Neil gets into a relationship with childhood friend Jane (Rachel McAdams), but when Marina returns, he goes back to her. Meanwhile, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) struggles with his inability to find God. To The Wonder is most obviously about searching for an understanding of something that is beyond human knowledge. Marina and Jane both try to capture an eternal happiness with a reticent Neil, who comes out of his shell only rarely. Ultimately, they are looking for love, while Father Quintana tries to find proof of God’s existence. This bare plot is then used, by Malick, to explore the world in a way rarely seen. At one point, it feels as if Malick has proved the existence of God by filming sunlight illuminating a garden fence – an entirely personal reading that, very probably, no one will agree with. The characters are ultimately either successful or not, their prize being acceptance. Father Quintana seems to find God or at least to become happy with the search. Marina’s mood varies – she might see a reason for being in an interaction with a flock of migrating birds yet she can still be in the depths of despair in a scenic field surrounded by horses. The return to Mont Saint-Michel, which Neil and Marina visit at the beginning of the film, suggests less a regression or a fondly held memory of better times, but a sign of hope and of constant renewal – Malick presents some beautiful footage of the oncoming tide that surrounds Mont Saint-Michel. The film finishes here, but it is not a conclusion.

To The Wonder is achingly beautiful, embarrassingly unironic and totally sincere. Terrence Malick is a brave filmmaker, because some many people find it too easy to laugh at his films and many more will merely turn away, bored out of their mind. To The Wonder might be his most divisive film, but it is also one of his best. For others, it might take a period of weeks or months before they have totally made their mind up about the film only, I suspect, for a second viewing to open up whole new avenues of thought. For me, since one’s response to Malick’s cinema can only be personal, To The Wonder is a film to cherish and one to watch many, many more times.

REVIEW: Seven Psychopaths (2012)

With In Bruges in 2008, Martin McDonagh made a dark comedy about hit men that was both extremely funny, bittersweet and practically art all in one. Despite the Tarantino trappings, any comparison with that hopelessly waylaid once-interesting filmmaker proved utterly inappropriate and almost insulting. However, after four long years, McDonagh is back with a film that is stuck with that comparison, one that is now sadly accurate.

The plot, or at least the film’s presentation of it, is complex beyond any real justification. The website IMDB has it as: “A struggling screenwriter inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld after his oddball friends kidnap a gangster's beloved Shih Tzu.” Add to this the fact that the screenwriter, Marty – read Martin McDonagh -  (Colin Farrell) is writing a script called ‘Seven Psychopaths’, for which he has only one psychopath worked out. Of course, as the script takes shape, it starts to resemble the writer’s reality, especially when his oddball friends Billy and Hans (Sam Rockwell and a really rather good Christopher Walken) decide to help him out, inadvertently getting him involved with the genuinely psychopathic Charlie (Woody Harrelson).

It is all a bit of mess, really. Seven Psychopaths is about a writer who is trying to write a script entitled ‘Seven Psychopaths’ and yet he does not want to make a film about men with guns and disposable women and a bleakly immoral worldview. In fact, he wants his script to be life affirming, and at one point decides that his script should have no climatic shoot-out and basically finish discursively, with the main characters sitting in a desert and doing nothing but talking. And yet Seven Psychopaths is another film about men with guns and disposable women and a bleakly immoral worldview. McDonagh fills the film with guns, violence and badly characterised women. Underneath, however, is the impression that he is somehow above these tainted films, if only because he is making a meta-movie that messes with audience expectations. McDonagh is critical, yet he also glories in the very things that he is supposed to be condemning. At one point, Hans criticizes Marty because his female characters are terrible, an in-joke that reflects McDonagh’s own script and the nature of the genre itself. Yet McDonagh never really makes amends by introducing a real, three-dimensional female character. Instead Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko are embarrassingly underused. The film suggests that there should be no shoot-out, and it goes a long way towards keeping its word but, ultimately, there is one and it is a big disappointment. In the end, McDonagh isn’t a pacifist and he isn’t a ‘psychopath’ – he is just a filmmaker who has lost sight of whatever it is that he had wanted to say, hopefully only briefly.

Billy is the character that represents the audience and he is also the only true psychopath in the film. He is the one who makes sure that the shootout happens as if his own expectations are what force the film to include a shootout. Seven Psychopaths is presumably suggesting that it is the audience’s appetite for carnage that results in the proliferation of these horrible films. No blame can be levelled at the door of Martin McDonagh, who after all merely wrote and directed the film. Similarly, the film feels free to criticize its own audience, especially because they have chosen to go and see a film called “Seven Psychopaths”, the audience’s complicity only compounded further by the utterly woeful trailers. However, McDonagh overlooks his own status as a very good writer-director, exactly as Haneke did with Amour. Certain members of the audience were not there to see a film called “Seven Psychopaths”; they were there to see a film by the “writer-director of In Bruges.” The audience, hence, are not necessarily raving adolescents like Billy, but simply fans of someone who previously proved themselves to be a really good filmmaker and playwright.

Seven Psychopaths is not all bad and indeed there are a few scenes that work really well and which clearly served as the impetus for the project during its formation. It is often very funny and Billy’s imagined shoot-out, which plays out with all of the genre’s most tiresome clichés, is a hoot. The return of the Vietnamese should raise a smirk in anyone familiar with In Bruges. However, the few times that the film comes together merely point to the fact that the majority of the film does not work. There is also a feeling that McDonagh is much more out of his depth in LA, with his American characters all largely insufferable, where, with In Bruges, his characters are nearly all likable. The American landscape seems a little too unknowable in the film as if McDonagh is lost in a foreign country.

Seven Psychopaths is a compromised film and it is very difficult not to blame McDonagh entirely. His script is a mess and whatever point he wanted to make, whether he is ultimately criticizing or glorifying this dodgy genre, is lost in the fray. Colin Farrell is miscast, Woody Harrelson needs better lines and Sam Rockwell overplays it – I don’t need to mention the women. The best performances are from Tom Waits and Christopher Walken though both have too little to do. McDonagh is nothing if not ambitious and Seven Psychopaths does suggest an intention, whatever it was. It just needed a bit more thought and maybe a bit more daring. All that remains is to hope that McDonagh, his fingers severely burnt from his laziness here, will return in a few years with his best film yet, something that does remain likely.