REVIEW: Carol (2015)

Those expecting another Sirk tribute from Todd Haynes may be disappointed. Carol, like his version of Mildred Pierce before it, is a different film entirely and has more than likely been mis-sold to the public. Carol is less a film of political outrage and more a stylish and slow paced film of mood and thought.

Therese (Rooney Mara, now miles away from that disinterested turn – though who could blame her – in that awful Nightmare on Elm Street remake) is a shopgirl who does a kindness to one of her customers, mailing her back her misplaced gloves. This customer, however, is Carol, a seductive and glamourous divorcee. Carol invites her to lunch as a thank you and an attraction begins to develop between the two women before they even know it.

Early in the film, we have a character who is watching Sunset Boulevard for the sixth time and who is taking notes, his subject the disparity between what is said by the characters and what is meant or felt. A signal then to the audience that Carol will be a film of quiet, meaningful silences and yearning emotion masquerading as mundane small talk. The relationship between Therese and Carol develops slowly, the two women’s reserve as much a fact of the morals of the time as of their own fear, shyness and confusion. It is an unlikely relationship that may not initially make much sense, but it develops convincingly. Haynes keeps his camera distanced, the women frequently kept inside window frames and doorways. Kept back like this, we are always aware that the characters are a little more than we can understand – like in Sunset Boulevard, we see the front but not the mind. And, especially with the ending, we know that they will continue to exist after the film.

The characters are rarely allowed to lose their composure, but when they do, it matters. Carol’s husband, Harge, who forces Carol to stop her ‘deviance’ by taking her child away from her, loses his hard skin with an impassioned but hopeless “I love her.” The same line, slightly altered (“I love you”), similarly breaks from Carol towards the end of the film and has a truly powerful effect.

There are other times, however, where the film overplays its hand. Carol stands up to Harge and two male custody lawyers in one barnstorming scene that trespasses onto the wrong side of tacky. The Hollywood cinema of 1950s had a lot of such moments, but transplanted here it feels too jokey, too winking and knowing – as if the film has, for a moment, lost its serious veneer. The film lifts the opening and closing bookending from Brief Encounter, which works well enough while the film is playing but is quite irritating afterwards (particularly if you rewatch Brief Encounter in between – the moment in that film is perfect and heart-breaking and ought not to have been repeated). Quite why the film needed such an overt homage is anyone’s guess. Equally, the sequence in which Carol and Therese go away for a trip to Carol’s home in upstate New York literalises the idea of the ‘tunnel of love’ in a way that feels overdetermined.

Carol then is a film both quiet and intense. It is slow and mannered, as much as a means for intellectual distanciation as an expression of suppressed emotion. The final scene, while moving, is so clearly meant to make a critic write the word ‘swoon’ that it becomes as much a success of form as it does a success in character or story or emotion. Carol then is a very good, well made and moving film, but it also has a degree of practised coldness to it, a feeling of technique where honesty ought to be. It will work on the mind, and with the critics, but will it stay in the heart?

REVIEW: Her (2014)

By a bizarre coincidence, I recently saw two films that sought to replay the typical tropes of the romantic film formula (loneliness, awkward first meeting, developing relationship, break-up and reconciliation) with a somewhat subversive edge. The first was reasonably funny and the second was, initially, reasonably intriguing, but neither proved particularly interesting. The first was 2009’s I Love You, Man, a film about the developing friendship between two men (Paul Rudd and Jason Segel) and the second film was Her.

Her is set in what is clearly supposed to be the not so distant future (although the film tries its best to undercut any science fiction feel the setting might generate). Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonely guy, in the middle of a divorce, looking for love. He writes love letters for people who can no longer be bothered to write them for themselves – only one of the film many representations of a future in which the communicative potential of the internet and other technologies is used to mediate between human relationships. After his friend Amy (Amy Adams) sets him up with a blind date (Olivia Wilde), which doesn’t go well, Theodore finds what he is looking for in a new advancement in computer software, the OS or operating system. Called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), Theodore of course choosing the female voice option, it is an artificially intelligent piece of software that can learn new ideas and emotions by getting to know its human master. It also manages his affairs, sorting his emails and keeping an eye on his schedule and such. Theodore and Samantha soon fall in love.

The comparison above is mainly unhelpful (and probably used primarily as a snappy opening, especially considering the first four words), but it may represent in some small way the problem with Her. I Love You, Man was a comedy that attempted to mock the typical formula of the romance film (a formula that most other contemporary comedies stick to much too closely) by a slight shift in the gender roles – Rudd taking the man’s role and Segel the woman’s. Though not a great film, it passed the time. Her, on the other hand, has a science-fiction premise, which can be clearly read as a comment on the way we use technology today. As such, it can at times be rather depressing and creepy, in its scenes of people passing each other by while wrapped up in conversations with their OSs and in how lucid and penetrating these OSs can be. But where it blunders is by representing the relationship between man and machine in so typical a romance storyline. Initially, the film is not without interest, but its refusal to judge or moralise, though valuable in itself, makes it a rather vague and meaningless one.

In a bizarre spin on Woody Allen’s ‘whatever works’ mantra, Her seems to be suggesting that humans and machines can have fulfilling, if temporary, relationships. It seems to be saying that our fascination and increasing reliance on technology and the steps forward being made in artificial intelligence may lead to some pretty freaky human-machine relationships…but that’s OK. And despite its science fiction premise and its muted futuristic setting, Her is, at heart, a fairly typical romance film, tightly aligned to the above formula – although, being a high-minded film, the relationship does not quite work out at the end. In the end, Theodore rebounds predictably into a relationship with Amy. So, in other words, human-machine romances may be the future…but probably not.

Her, in the end, doesn’t have much to say about anything. It gestures at ideas – when all of the OSs band together at the end of the film, the film seems to be suggesting a coming apocalypse, though this turns out to be merely unintentional. The film comfortably muses at length on such overdone topics as what it is to be alive and the difficult of maintaining romantic relationships and how people grow without saying anything new. Instead of real philosophical depth or insight, we have a relationship in which two people talk about philosophical depth and insight without ever imparting any of it. The film suggests that the OSs will continue to grow after we are gone…fair enough but who cares? By way of a conclusion, it has Theodore and Amy go to the top of their building and tearfully contemplate the sky while the awful indie movie soundtrack swells.

Her is ultimately an overlong romance film with a gimmick and a badge of indie credibility where it should have innovations or ideas. Unsurprising, really, since most of Spike Jonze’s cinema is more about gimmicks than ideas – for instance, Adaptation is about the difficulty and torture of the creative process, especially in an art form as commodified as that of the Hollywood film, but it is mainly about making meta jokes. Her is not unlike a Hollywood film itself - vacuous, hokey, uninteresting, emotionally false and, dare I say it, boring as hell.

REVIEW: The Social Network (2010)

  David Fincher is due a good film. There are two reasons for this. One is that he is a director who makes one good film for every bad one. Starting from “Seven”, he has consistently alternated between the good and the bad. Since his last film was “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, his new film “The Social Network” should be one of his best. The other reason is that “The Social Network” might be a last hurrah for a director on the verge of slipping into the pedantry of a franchise, in Fincher’s case a series of unnecessary English-language remakes of the successful Swedish Millennium trilogy. “The Social Network” is good, very good but, of course, it had to be.

  Snappily written by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing”, the film follows anti-social computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) who, desperate to enter into elite Harvard society, designs the website Facebook. Subsidized by his only friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the website becomes a phenomenal success. Zuckerberg falls under the influence of industry bad boy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), broke after creating Napster and facing multiple lawsuits. Zuckerberg is eventually sued twice, one lawsuit from the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer) and another from his best friend Saverin.

  As the film is largely set indoors, it is very much an actor’s film. All of the cast shine. Jesse Eisenberg, previously known as the poor man’s Michael Cera, has proven himself to be much better than the typecast Cera, managing to convey the sinister side of the socially awkward nerd effortlessly. There is a lot of pathos in his lovesick character who just wants to fit in. Garfield and Timberlake are great support, perfectly at odds with each other for the entire film. Hammer plays his dual role with great comic timing and a lot of integrity. Sorkin’s script rarely allows for a straggling scene and ensures that every character becomes a person. On top of being a very witty script, packed with good laughs, it refuses to take sides. Fincher, too, is on top form, allowing us time to get to know the characters while neither losing forward momentum nor excellent visuals. Somehow, he manages to make scenes of computer hacking and programming exciting.  

  The fact that the film is about the creation of Facebook should not put people off. Fans and haters of the website will be equally pleased. Essentially, it’s a poignant film of young men trying to fit in and getting in over their heads, while at the same time exposing a deeply misogynist and materialist society. Mark Zuckerberg, genius or thief, is largely a tragic figure in the film.

  This is intriguing and moving cinema from a director working at the height of his powers, with a great script and a talented cast. If he takes a long time to fully deliver again, this should tide us over. Oh, and the ending is great.