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: Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Shaun The Sheep Movie is another Aardman production that draws as much of its inspiration from quaint old-fashioned Englishness as anything else. It is difficult to imagine another children’s animation that focuses this much on farm life and caravans. Another advantage to this film is that it is practically a silent film, which means that the jokes have to come thick and fast and the film can’t get bogged down in too much plot. The film then is madcap, flinging ideas and jokes about without much concern for pacing and structure and is all the more fun for that.

Shaun has become bored with life on the farm. The farmer has become set in his ways, sticking rigidly to an imposing schedule that leaves no room for variety. One day, Shaun sees a holiday advertisement for recommending a day off and decides to get rid of the farmer just for the day. This plan, however, goes horribly wrong and the farmer ends up lost in the big city, suffering from memory loss, and it is up to Shaun and the other sheep to find him and bring him home. Things are complicated by a enthusiastic animal catcher.

Odd as it is to review a children’s film about some cheeky but industrious sheep, the film does have some problems, most of which, admittedly, it overcomes. The design of the characters here does not allow for much expression and it is difficult to really care about them. Apart from Shaun, the other sheep are interchangeable and it is hard to distinguish any particular characteristics between them. This means that you never really feel that you are watching characters, just some dumb sheep, and it is difficult to stay emotionally involved. Though a problem, this does not matter too much – the film is more than funny enough to keep it going through its reasonable 85 minutes.

Where other Aardman films were overstuffed with plot at the expense of actually being funny, Shaun the Sheep Movie keeps things simple, preferring uncomplicated, silly situations and types. Indeed, there is no reason for the sheep to intrude on a posh French restaurant or for Bitzer, the farmer’s dog, to be dressed as a doctor, running along hospital corridors on all fours or attempting surgery. This preference for jokes and good comic timing over anything else works because the jokes are quite good (even a dated Silence of the Lambs reference with an angry cat raises a chuckle) and the film has a higher hit rate than most comedies.

So the animation is likable, the film has a nice quaint feel and, most importantly, it is actually quite funny. It doesn’t have the charm of, say, last year’s Paddington but it does join the likes of Penguins of Madagascar and the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs films, all being children’s films that are inventive and funny enough to delight anybody. Even the awful cash-in song over the end credits is quite funny.

REVIEW: A Syrian Love Story (2015)

Following on from 2012’s tough and powerful documentary about the Yemeni revolution, The Reluctant Revolutionary, Sean McAllister has moved to Syria with A Syrian Love Story, a documentary he has been making over the last six years.

In 2009, McAllister was filming in Syria when he met Amer, a Palestinian freedom fighter who had recently been released from prison. He had been left alone to bring up his two children, Kaka and Bob, since his wife, Raghda, a Syrian activist, has been imprisoned. McAllister follows their attempts to cope with life under Assad’s regime, their joy at the release of Raghda and their lives as refugees first to the Lebanon and then in France following their forced exile.

Following this family from 2009 through to 2015, McAllister captures the turmoil that this family goes through, making the documentary an engrossing personal examination of the troubles in Syria. It is a committed, campaigning film because it has chosen a side and pursues its agenda with an unarguable honesty. McAllister’s films are works of journalism since they inform the viewer about what is going on in a faraway place, but his methods are interventions. Most Westerners, if they pay any attention at all, find the whole situation too confusing or depressing, which ought to indicate the failures of most of our mainstream journalism to keep us adequately informed. The Syrian conflict is one of the most tragic and significant moments in this millennium and we should understand it. Here the audience sees the collapse of a country and the suffering of the Syrian people, and the engaged viewer should leave the film with their opinions much more fixed on the problems in Syria. McAllister’s film is, then, a very important film because it enters into the sphere of this conflict and attempts to radically alter its audience’s views on Syria.

McAllister’s ultimate subject, as with The Reluctant Revolutionary, are his human subjects and he addresses this conflict in human terms in a way that should move all of us. McAllister’s main focus is on this family and this family is not supposed to stand for all of the Syrian people, but only for themselves. It is a very personal film. Amer, Raghda, Kaka and Bob have granted McAllister a remarkable amount of access – they live in front of his camera without embarrassment and with total honesty. Raghda is ultimately a committed activist – at one point, she says that for her to leave Syria now when it needs her most is tantamount to treason – while Amer is more worried about giving his children a future. Amer and Raghda ultimately move to France as asylum seekers but their lives are riven by the traumas of their past. Amer wants Raghda to leave Syria behind and be a mother, but Raghda feels only guilt. Ultimately, this leads to the dissolution of their marriage but the film ends hopefully with Amer having secured his children’s futures in France and Raghda working as an advisor for the Syrian opposition in Turkey, twenty miles from the Syria border, feeling happy and of use to her suffering country. The film also follows Amer and Raghda’s two sons as they grow up on the move. Early on, we see Kaka amused by the picture of Assad in his schoolbook, his school trying to teach him to love the man who put both of his parents in prison. Later, we will see Kaka, more grown up but equally conflicted by his country’s troubles.

This film is quietly heart-breaking – a tragic story told in a way that will affect all of us. It should change how we look at this crisis and every other crisis in this world, not as a confusing mess of one cruel dictator, his faceless accomplices and a huge intangible crowd of victims, but in humanitarian terms. It is then a deeply important film and a rousing political documentary that keeps its focus squarely on a story of average humans.

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 World of Astley Baker Davies (2015)

The World of Astley Baker Davis is a retrospective of the work of Mark Baker and Neville Astley – most famous as the creators behind ‘Peppa Pig’. This series of six short animated films and one music video provides a fantastic showcase for these two filmmakers.

Winning a BAFTA and nominated for an Oscar, Mark Baker’s short from 1989, The Hill Farm, is a humorous but increasingly dark examination of the place of humanity in nature. The material is represented neutrally, initially seeming like a cute cartoon about life on a farm with some cute and always hungry animals until the film slowly takes a darker turn. Funny and beautiful but also somewhat nasty – but thoroughly engrossing throughout.

Mark Baker followed this with 1993’s The Village, an even more edgy cynical vision of a cloistered small town and the nosy and mean-spirited people who live within it. The Kafkaesque story of greed, murder and mistaken identity offers a melancholy view of a society so stagnant that a horde of ants are constantly on call to devour any waste, human or otherwise.

While these two are not necessarily recommended for kids, Baker and Astley’s next, Jolly Roger, is a much lighter and funnier adventure yarn about marauding pirates and a maiden out for revenge even if her protectors would rather she didn’t. Also lighter and very funny is ‘The Big Knights’, a very funny TV series co-created and directed by Baker and Astley. Presented here is the episode ‘Lost Doris’ in which the two knights lose their robotic hamster. They track it down while it eats the local population into poverty. What marks these two features out is how funny, fast-paced and inventive they are – each one throwing out enough good ideas and jokes to stay on the right side of madcap.

The last two shorts comprise an episode of ‘Peppa Pig’ called ‘Funfair’ and an episode of ‘Ben and Holly’s Magic Kingdom’ called ‘Granny and Granpapa.’ Though obviously for very young children, a good degree of the visual inventiveness and humour and a little of the edge remains.

In summary, the whole collection of shorts are highly enjoyable and the juxtaposition of darker films with lighter, funnier works surprisingly well as a showcase of both their makers’ talents and their versatility. See it in particular for the fantastic ‘The Hill Farm’ and ‘The Village.’

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.

SHORT REVIEW: Robot Overlords (2015)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here.

Jon Wright’s Robot Overlords is the latest in a string of science-fiction films that attempt to beat the Hollywood tentpoles at their own game with a lot less cash.

Robot Overlords is set in an England in which robots have taken over and confined everyone to their homes while they conduct some shady experiment. After having accidentally discovered a way to overcome the robots’ tracking devices, four kids escape and embark on a journey to find one of their fathers (Steven Mackintosh). They are pursued by human collaborator Robin Smythe (Ben Kingsley) and head robot Mediator 452 (Craig Garner).

The film aims at being an adventure story for kids and adults alike with a whole load of CGI thrown in. It could have worked, but the film has too many bothersome flaws that get in the way. The film isn’t really sure what audience it is going for – a dark opening and some dirty jokes suggest that it is for teens rather than the whole family but these moments are generally few and stick out rather badly. The film also lurches from scene to scene with little motivation or forward momentum. Like Wright’s previous Grabbers, the characters and the humour are not properly thought out, leaving the film never as likable or as funny as it could be. The filmmakers seem more interested in getting to the next CGI spectacle in order to illustrate what they have done with their tiny budgets. The film ends up feeling only like an extended showreel rather than a completed film.

Robot Overlords would not have been an easy film to make and it is certainly an achievement, but it is a film that focuses on giant CGI robots and battle scenes at the expense of believable characters or a convincing story. Gillian Anderson suffers most, saddled with a character, who seems like an idiot for most of the running time before suddenly finding all sorts of strengths that the script never alluded to before. The script is very shallow with only a few moments of depth, which usually last a very short time before another robot lunges into view. The robots aren’t particularly convincing either despite the near total focus on the part of the filmmakers, but then the monsters in the recent Godzilla weren’t either. Robot Overlords may beat Hollywood at their own game but it is just as shallow.

REVIEW: The Theory of Everything (2015)

Why bother reviewing a film like The Theory of Everything? Let’s be slightly unfair for a moment. A film like this exists primarily as Oscar bait – viewed by actors, directors, writers and producers as a career stepping stone, the Oscar-winning film that nobody will particularly enjoy all that much but which will lead to greater and better opportunities, like a superhero franchise all your own. I am being cynical here – I don’t really think that this is the only reason The Theory of Everything exists. And yet the film is so drab, and dull, and paint-by-numbers conventional that it really doesn’t seem like there was any attempt whatsoever to do anything interesting here at all. There is no joy or excitement or experimentation in this film, just a dull exercise in filmmaking for the January schedules.

The Stephen Hawking Story – re-organised for an accessible film with as little science as could conceivably be put into a film about a scientist, an increasingly debilitating illness that knows to kick in at the most emotionally powerful moment, an able-bodied actor summoning all of his skill to mimic a real illness, a score that points out when something is supposed to be heart-rending or –warming, a condescending tone, a dream about walking that feels unhelpful and the story of a life re-written to the beats of the Oscar Drama Template (Disability).

Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones (the latter quite good, actually) are given only a few scenes in which they are allowed to act. The rest of the time they are repressing so that those rare moments of acting will register in the mind of the near-comatose audience. Director James Marsh keeps everything recognisable so as not to overwork a tired audience. Anthony McCarten starts with a tagline – ‘His Mind Changed Our World. Her Love Changed His’ – and yawns his way through the average-length script with numerous nods to A Beautiful Mind, an Oscar-winning genius-with-a-disability success story in somewhat recent memory. In short, nobody seems to be trying very hard and nothing that isn’t unexceptional is allowed to happen. That leaves us with only the recognisable. We have the funny scene that turns sad due to a sudden relapse, the sad scene with some ‘unexpected’ humour, the scenes where loves and lives and sicknesses are all carefully organised to push along a film with a strict three-act structure and a fear of any complication that doesn’t fit the ‘story.’ This is not about praising or documenting a real life struggle, it is about negating real life and trying to find the best framework for presenting a reality in the most lucrative and rewarding manner possible. It is a film of professional ambition and cold, cynical emotional box-ticking.

It isn’t that this film is particularly bad. But it is so happy to be bland and unrewarding and unoriginal that it actually makes you angry. Why spend so much money and take up so much of everyone’s time and effort only to achieve a film like this? It isn’t even that this film should be offering anything new – there are many great films that are also somewhat redundant – but The Theory of Everything offers nothing. There is nothing it does that hasn’t been done before – not even by accident. You watch it and you just dream of something, anything, everything that the film could be or could do to shock, surprise, entertain, inform, challenge or excite but the film remains bland. The one good thing that the film manages is that, when it’s over, you are ready for a Cassavetes, an Altman, a Godard, a Loach, a Fellini, something, anything alive.

REVIEW: '71 (2014)

Since ’71 is a film set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles from the perspective of a British soldier and filmed entirely in England, one could be forgiven for feeling suspicious. Either the film is going to be grossly inaccurate or it is going to be like those American Vietnam war films that focus entirely on naïve American soldiers and ignore both the destruction and carnage they wrought and the suffering of the Vietnamese people. It is a credit to the quality of Gregory Burke and Yann Demange’s work, as well as that of the cast, that ’71 avoids these pitfalls.

Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell) is in boot camp, having only just joined the army, when he and his unit are sent off to Belfast. After a brief lesson in the history of the conflict, Hook is brought to the Falls Road to assist the RUC during a house search. Thanks to the tactics of the RUC, a riot soon breaks out. Hook is left behind during the panicked evacuation and is soon chased by two IRA gunmen (Martin McCann and Barry Keoghan). Lost and wounded, Hook tries to stay alive in a hostile environment.

The film works primarily as a thriller, giving only a short, potted introduction to the history of the Troubles. The film’s title, referring to the year 1971, seems to be a plea for a well-read audience to take the film as a thriller only and seems consciously set prior to internment and Bloody Sunday in an effort not to annoy anyone potentially offended by the sympathetic portrait of the British army in Northern Ireland. The soldiers here are seen as decent but lost, and there is a nice moment in which they are attacked by children throwing balloons of urine at them. The greener soldiers react with laughter, clearly finding the image of such furious children outlandish. The film does offer some criticisms of the British Army, though it is the commanders and the MRF, as well as the RUC, who are shown to be the most criminal. There is a rivalry between the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA and there is a band of unidentified Loyalist terrorists, too busy with their own schemes to help Hook out.

This is all that the film offers by way of historical context and, as simplistic as it may be, it is well integrated into the film, which is essentially a nighttime thriller in the vein of Walter Hill’s The Warriors or Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 or certain moments from The Wanderers. Some of the film’s best moments are the surrealist visions of Belfast at night in the middle of a riot. Hook walks along a dark and empty street only for petrol bombs to suddenly explode and a crowd of faceless people to appear, running right for him. Essentially it is a film about a young man trapped in a hostile environment trying to stay alive, and the film’s use of the Troubles as a backdrop is respectful but also mere scenery. The film is not a ‘Troubles film’ particularly because its focus is on the human drama and on the suffering of all of those involved. By the end of the film, the ludicrousness of violence and war is the most strongly felt message, not one about the innocence of the British Army. The film does not take sides on who was right and who was wrong and is more about the hysteria and the fear and the paranoia. In this sense, the film also doubles as a good ‘Troubles film’ because, like In the Name of the Father, Bloody Sunday and Omagh, it replaces context and didacticism with a focus on the humanity and pain underneath.

Suggesting that ’71 is a humanist vision of the Troubles may be overstretching the point, but the film is remarkable, first, for being very well made, very well written and very well performed and, second, for taking a divisive issue and moulding it into a thriller that doesn’t feel exploitative and insensitive. The issue of the legacy of the Troubles has not yet been resolved in Northern Ireland, and a film like ’71 is hardly going to help much, but when the film depicts the last in its series of pointless, defeatist murders, there is little politics and little justification. Instead, there is only pain and exasperation. And that sure beats the hell out of our own attempts to deal with the Troubles (see A Belfast Story).

LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Oxi: An Act of Resistance (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Oxi: An Act of Resistance is an essay film by Ken McMullen and it takes a unique and experimental view of the economic turmoil in Greece.

The film strives to draw a parallel between Greece’s economic problems and the tragedies of Sophocles and Aristophanes, suggesting that Greece, and the EU in general, have departed from the values of the past and that this is what has lead in the current crisis. The Greek classics espoused democracy and a politics based on love and understanding rather than a politics of economics and party lines, as shown by the democracy of Pericles, which was, among other things, the original welfare state.

The film is interspersed with quotations from Thucydides, which remain remarkably relevant for a text that is two and a half thousand years old. The film opens with one quotation which claims that human nature, being the way that it is, is always going to repeat itself – indicating, first, the historical precedents for the inequalities of today and, second, suggesting that these classics contain important lessons for today. This point is made succinctly as the camera lingers on some ancient Greek landscapes, suggesting a permanence between the past and the present. Several interviewees argue for the return of the values of these ancient writings, often passionately and with inspiration.

The film is at its best, then, as an extended lesson in classical literature and its relevance today. But where it is less successful is in its attempts to restage scenes from these plays, updating them for a new audience. It becomes an exercise in performance, which looks a lot more artificial and cerebral than the impassioned and moving testimonies of real people. Worse still is the fictional element in which a detective, Inspector Pinon (Dominique Pinon), horrified that anyone would dare ‘steal’ the words of Sophocles and Aristophanes and make them relevant for today, castigates writers and actors. The point is that these classics are not set in stone, but live and breath today, but the way the film attempts to demonstrate this is both pretentious and somewhat contradictory.

The film works best as a dialogue between classic Greek literature and the current problems in the world. The people interviewed call for the return of the principles of the past and the film is a moving and fascinating testament to what we have lost. But it often uses too much artifice to tell a plain and simple truth.

SHORT REVIEW: Keeping Rosy (2014)

This short review appears on The Upcoming website here.

Keeping Rosy is a difficult film to write about, since it is highly recommended that you go to see it without knowing anything about it – and especially without watching the dodgy, tell-all trailer. So be warned, your enjoyment of this film may even be seriously diminished by continuing to read this review.

Charlotte (Maxine Peake) has just been laid off and she isn’t feeling all right. After an unpleasant confrontation with her cleaner Maya (Elisa Lasowski), she is trapped in a situation that will only get worse and worse and there isn’t much of a way out for her. She is forced to do things that she wouldn’t normally do and find the inner strength to escape.

Without giving too much away, Keeping Rosy is ultimately a thriller and it moves along at a great pace, conveying a lot quickly and rarely getting sidetracked. The tension doesn’t flag, and the plot unravels in twists and turns slowly and convincingly. However, aside from being an excellent genre picture, it also works very well as a character study and as social commentary.

Peake gives a fantastic performance, one that holds the film together and what turns it from being an exercise in coldness and cruelty into something really rather moving. Peake is practically never off the screen.

The film begins muted and quiet. Charlotte works in a faceless corporation and finds it difficult to socialise with her colleagues. Her apartment is all shiny surfaces and colourless decorations. The film charts her cold, mundane existence from a distanced perspective. This is a remote, strange world – some excellent early shots of London’s nighttime skyline look distinctly alien. Early on, it seems as if the film will be a brooding look at the loneliness and alienation of our contemporary corporate culture. However, as the film goes on, Charlotte’s compassion breaks through and the film ends up being a rather moving drama. One of the major successes of the film is that, despite the thriller trappings, good as they are, the film never loses sight of the fact that it is a film about Charlotte.

An entirely successful genre picture and a remarkably assured feature film debut from Steve Reeves, Keeping Rosy is taut, very well made and held together by a fantastic central performance and a plot that is never predictable – as long as you don’t watch the trailer.

IRISH REVIEW: The Company of Wolves (1984)

Neil Jordan’s second feature certainly established him as a filmmaker who wasn’t afraid to try new things and The Company of Wolves is certainly a very different film from Angel. But is it any good?

A Freudian retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, the film begins with a sleeping Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson), who has just stolen her sister’s lipstick. She dreams that she lives in an alternate, fairy tale world. She lives in a village constantly under threat from a large population of wolves who live in the woods. Rosaleen’s Granny (Angela Lansbury) tells her a series of stories designed to make Rosaleen cautious of the woods and the wolves inside, but which are also intended to make her wary for her growing sexuality and potentially predatory boys. Rosaleen takes note of these stories but she also has an independent streak and so when she meets the sinister Huntsman (Micha Bergese) in the woods, she is more intrigued than frightened.

The film is based on a screenplay by Jordan and Angela Carter and takes as its inspiration stories by Carter. Carter’s intention with these stories was to rewrite famous fairy tales from a less conservative and oppressive slant. She found that fairy tales were designed to teach women to fear their sexuality and taught them submissiveness. In her stories, which were loaded with Freudian imagery, the female characters are far from passive and the stories encourage women not to fear their sexuality but to take control of it. Essentially, her stories were modern, feminist version of the ancient fairy tales. The Company of Wolves sets out to do the same thing, and all of the typical elements of the fairy tale are present, albeit presented from a Freudian perspective and with a dream-like feel.

As interesting as this may sound, it is rather unsatisfying. The Freudian imagery is over-used and dated – films had been drawing parallels with Freud’s writings for years and Jordan doesn’t offer anything particularly new. The film’s symbolism is also heavy-handed. The phrase “Don’t stray from the path” – though taken from the original versions of the Little Red Riding Hood tale – and often repeated by Granny is so clearly meant to represent the rules and limits placed on women in male dominated society that it’s lack of subtlety only causes one to roll their eyes at its every repetition. Granny is here an ambiguous figure – being both loving and restrictive or, in other words, a parent. The stories that Granny tells explicitly link sex with danger, violence and death – and never with love – while the stories Rosaleen tells represent instead the power of women, particularly a story in which a wronged peasant woman somehow turns her rich abusers into wolves – the wolf (usually a symbol of predatory sexuality) presumably taking on a new significance here. This stuff, though interesting in a surface kind of way, is ultimately over-subscribed. In this day and age, how many are truly convinced that red represents a budding sexuality via menstrual blood or that fruit represents sexual organs?

Neil Jordan has claimed that the appeal he finds in the film is not the heavy Freudian symbolism, but instead the simple joys of storytelling. This argument is not wholly convincing but it does point towards the most interesting thing about The Company of Wolves. In the first half of the film, Rosaleen is told stories that are clearly intended as cautionary tales to guide her through puberty and into adulthood – a patriarchal society that is not too interested in raising strong, independent women is evident. But when she starts to tell her own stories, she takes control of her own destiny (such as it is) and reclaims certain desires as her own and not the dangerous evils that she has been taught to avoid. The film then shows the regenerative qualities of fiction, particularly in making up one’s own fictions. The film delights ultimately in making an oppressive story (Little Red Riding Hood) into a story of sexual awakening and power.

None of which particularly works with the jarring ending, in which Rosaleen reawakens from her dream at a point where she has finally become a woman in control (as represented by her becoming a wolf), only to see a wolf entering her room (read the maturation of dream Rosaleen impacting onto real life Rosaleen) and start screaming, horrified. Hardly a feminist ending. Taken together with the fact that while in the original fairy tale Red Riding Hood is either killed or saved by a man, in the film’s version she overcomes a man but nonetheless becomes a wolf on his terms, not particularly on her own. Surely this means that the meaning of the film’s version of the tale is not particularly better than those that came before, since Red Riding Hood is still waiting for a man to act for her in both cases – either to save her or point the way for her passage into womanhood.

Also problematic, and leaving the symbolism aside, is the film’s dream-like style, in which scenes follow on from each other in a off-kilter, irrational way intended to reflect the pacing of (or lack of) a dream. This has also been done before, though here it is very distancing device, which keeps one outside the film rather than inside, like listening to two people who know each other so well that their conversation is impenetrable to anyone else. Like a lot of Neil Jordan’s films, it is very cerebral and not particularly welcoming.

As interesting as the film may or may not be, it feels badly thought out. The ending would seem to be directly contradictory to all that came before and the symbolism is so obvious and so dated that it just isn’t convincing. Nonetheless, it is a fairly original film from a filmmaker who is clearly trying something new, which is something that remains worth celebrating since it is now so rare.

See also:

Angel

Michael Collins

IRISH REVIEW: Intermission (2003)

Though it would obviously be foolish to claim that Intermission owes more of a debt to something like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia than to films like Pulp Fiction and Snatch, Intermission is nonetheless much more a film about people than it is a self-consciously stylish showcase for violence and other things that its director finds cool. Director John Crowley and writer Mark O’Rawe (the not as successful Perrier’s Bounty) feature a variety of interlinking characters and plotlines but they never forget that the film is ultimately just about people trying to get by in life and love.

Small-time thief John (Cillian Murphy) decides to test the sincerity of his girlfriend Deirdre’s (Kelly MacDonald) feelings for him by breaking up with her. This all backfires when she is left broken-hearted and shortly afterwards takes up with a married man Sam (Michael McElhatton), who leaves his wife Noeleen (Deirdre O’Kane) devastated. Noeleen is encouraged to go out and try to find another man. Meanwhile, John’s love-starved best friend Oscar (David Wilmot) becomes increasingly depressed and his other friend Mick (Brían F. O’Byrne) is left unemployed when a small boy (Taylor Molloy) throws a rock through the front windshield of his bus, resulting in a remarkable crash involving Deirdre’s mother Maura (Ger Ryan) and sister Sally (Shirley Henderson), which sparks the interest of a documentary crew led begrudgingly by Anthony (Rory Keenan) who would much rather be filming the tough life on the streets of policeman Gerry Lynch (Colm Meaney) Gerry has it in for local hood Lehiff (Colin Farrell), who may have a proposition for John and Mick.

Intermission is a reasonably convoluted film but it doesn’t let itself get too bogged down in exposition. It is primarily the story of John and Deirdre with additions from a supporting cast, who have their own problems, some not as interesting as others but there is a general feeling of a close-knit community in an optimistic post-Tiger Dublin. If it isn’t the most taut plotting, it is forgivable since life is never simple and because the film romps along at a nice pace and a likable and easy-going tone. Cillian Murphy and Kelly MacDonald do well, but their parts are somewhat underwritten to make room for all the other characters, many of whom are very good. David Wilmot has a larger role here than many of his more recent roles and proves to be a very likable presence, as does Brían F. O’Byrne, Michael McElhatton and Deirdre O’Kane. Colm Meaney plays his typical role, the hard man who doesn’t realize how funny he is to other people, but he does it well here thanks mainly to a good script – something clearly missing when he took on similar roles in Whole Lotta Sole and A Belfast Story. Colin Farrell gets a great opening (with excellent use of ‘Out of Control’ by U2 – so exciting for an Irish film at the time and now, in retrospect, so optimistic) but he is surprisingly kept largely to the background until towards the end of the film.

What is so likable about Intermission though is the fact that it avoids the cool style and ‘funny’ violence that was so in vogue at the time that the film was made, preferring a light tone and a hand-held feel, making it a film about people, not trendy pop culture references, crime and violence. It is, more than anything else, a comedy and a rather funny one at that, though it is one that doesn’t avoid the more harrowing and gritty side of life on the streets of Dublin – the mean streets, as Meaney’s Lynch prefers to call them, though only to heighten his own hard-as-nails image.

As the film plays out, it becomes unclear what exactly the unifying theme behind the whole thing is, but by then, it also ceases to matter. It ends up being a small and really rather charming film – not wholly successful but certainly good enough – a pleasant surprise given the poster that was very suggestive of Trainspotting and Snatch. In the end, its primary value is that it is entertaining, full of good performances from a whole pile of recognisable faces (I didn’t even mention Tom Murphy, Conleth Hill, Laurence Kinlan and Ruth McCabe). It is mostly light, fairly unexpected and quite a bit of fun. And with a major stunt that was said to be the most expensive thing in Irish cinema at the time.