The Shadow Line

There are several spoilers here.  Don't read if you're intending to watch the series.

We've watched a British series on DVD over the last week or so.  It's called The Shadow Line, and it was exceptionally gripping.  But also very nasty, and ultimately somewhat unsatisfying, as it killed off the one character who had integrity, and left the villains in charge. There was a point to this, which I'll come to in due course, but after having watched the villains do damage to all and sundry throughout the piece it was disappointing to see them getting away with it still further.

The piece has two stories running in parallel (over seven lengthy episodes), but both intersect at a number of points, and both have come about as a result of something that happened before the story began. The first episode opens with what seems a prolonged look at a dead body in a car.  Two police officers have 'discovered' the body, and the more talkative and more-knowing of the two (David Schofield) seems to have his own peculiar agenda. He plainly knows more than he's letting on, though he gives away a number of hints to the viewer.

We're then introduced to Detective Inspector Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his working partner, Detective Sergeant Lia Honey (Kierston Wareing). The latter is a smart-mouthed, very competent cop, who's not entirely pleased to be working with Gabriel, who, as a result of being shot in the head (the bullet is still lodged in his skull) has had a loss of memory as to what he was doing the night he was shot.

Gabriel's is the main story, and he's the character with integrity, and a passion for the truth. Curiously, as so often happens with characters in modern films who have integrity, he has had a mistress with whom he's had a child - his own wife has had several miscarriages, but is hoping for one last chance at pregnancy. In the film Gabriel - to his credit - anguishes over the fact that he's never revealed the presence of this other woman, and their son, to his wife. At least in that regard he's better than the leading character in Judge John Deed, another series we've been watching, where Deed, the judge who's shown as having enormous integrity on the justice side of things, consistently plays around with various women, including his former wife, his current lady friend, and several others.

The parallel character to Gabriel is soon introduced: Joseph Bede (Christopher Eccleston). He's a wholesale flower seller - on a big scale - and is using his business as a front for drug smuggling. Also on a big scale.  Supposedly he's built up the flower business primarily as a cover for a one-off big deal that will set him up for life, and will enable him to provide constant care for his wife, who has early onset Alzheimer's. But one of the problems with the drugs game, as we see time and again in this story, is that it's a cruel master: Bede finds himself increasingly trapped inside his plan. Several others, both big and small, also come to grief before the series has finished, most of them violently.

The series may be intended to highlight the impossibility of surviving the drugs game (more than one character talks about 'just surviving', and one of the nastiest (Rafe Spall, always on the verge of insanity) says realistically, in the last episode, how he's probably only got twenty years before he'll wind up the same way as all the others), and it's plain that those who have made the big time in drugs live under the tension of being overtaken by the next villain to come along, and plainly don't enjoy the fruits of their labours.

However, this is countermanded by the fact that the corrupt police in the series, of whom there are several, seem to manage to live above the law, and thrive. Their involvement in drugs began as something that was seen as a good, but was achieved by the wrong means. Then the 'rewards' have taken over their lives and they've gone back to the trough time and again. And the chief of these, a man called Gatehouse, (Stephen Rea, in a most chilling performance), manages to manipulate and pull strings and survive assaults, like the devil himself.  He's perhaps the most improbable character, when you reflect on it all, yet Rea gives him such life and personality that you come to believe he could exist. He's utterly treacherous, blatantly murderous, and convinced of his own ability to twist everything  and everyone to his ends, even those who appear to be honest.

The story is utterly convoluted, and has several shocking moments, as well as some we can see coming. Almost no one is who they seem, apart from Gabriel, and he worries a good deal (since he has this memory issue with a very important event) that he may not be the honest man he hopes he is. The curious thing is that even the evil ones tell him he is honest, and that gets up their nose. He's the only one to make Gatehouse think he might have mis-stepped at one point, and that's some achievement.

Hugo Blick wrote the script, and directed and produced the series. (Blick has also been an actor.)  This is a major achievement, because he has filled the series with vivid characters and cast some of the best in the business in the roles. Yes, there are some moments in the story when coincidences pile up a little too high, but the tension created and maintained throughout is extraordinary - I could feel my own nerves on edge during one particular episode - and he continually keeps us guessing as to who is really who.  Some apparently good characters aren't, and some of the evil ones appear to have their moments of sincerity.

Blick's direction can be mannered - but then the best film noir directors are always mannered. That's one of the things that makes these films what they are. A great deal of the time is spent in darkness, or night, or shadows, but even when we venture out into daylight, there's a sinister feel to what we're seeing. We know, for instance, that the journalist on his motorcycle won't make it home, and this is assisted a couple of scenes before by seeing him standing in front of a full-sized photo of T E Lawrence - with his motorbike. But then Blick takes advantage of what we guess by first giving us the journalist and his motorbike a near miss, and then having him vanish into a dip in the road, while a car heads towards him. Nothing happens on the screen for a moment, there's an ominous thump, then the car quietly reappears out of the dip and proceeds. The motorcycle doesn't reappear. Finally we're taken down into the dip to see the journalist incongruously sitting on the road, dying, his bike splattered across the road, and worse, that large farm vehicle he just missed a few minutes before sounds as though it's heading his way. It's a grisly scene, but all done without any bells and whistles, and in spite of our realisation that it's going to be happen, we're still shocked.

Several other scenes shock in different ways. Gatehouse makes his way into at least three houses at different times, and on each occasion we think he's going to murder someone. Nothing ever quite happens as we expect, so that when the actual murders happen, we don't have high-pitched strings playing on the soundtrack to prematurely warn us; the murders come almost out of the blue. When he comes to Peter Glickman's son's house (Glickman is his opposite number in the story, and is absent until about half way through the series) and threatens the man's wife, the whole thing takes on a craziness via a baby monitor that we misunderstand at first. The baby is unharmed, the woman is hysterical - but unharmed - and the only disaster is the dinner burning on the stove, an echo of the soup burning after the murder of the young pregnant mother earlier on.

Then there's the confrontation between Glickman and Gatehouse, in a Dublin clock shop. It has Hitchcock written all over it, right to the point of the explosion that demolishes the place, but not the two villains. (Hitchcock is everywhere through the series, in fact, and is frequently himself put in the shade by Blick's trickery.)  And the near disposal of Gatehouse in the hospital by Glickman's mistress - at least that who she appeared to be until she stabbed Glickman to death - much to our surprise.  This hospital scene is improbable; firstly because we know they say Gatehouse has the heart of a 20-year-old, but he is actually in his sixties and shouldn't have withstood being blown up and shot twice; and secondly how does he know he's about to be done in by the mistress and what method she's going to use?  Where is the policeman outside the door (yup, that's kind of explained later) and how come the nurse doesn't see or hear anything?  Once again Blick turns our expectations on their heads.  If for no other reason than his ability to undercut what we think will happen, Blick should be congratulated for a masterly series.

I didn't like some of the things that happened in it, but it was gripping viewing!

All the King's Men - so many stars they can barely all fit on the screen

How can a movie with an all-star cast fail? All the King's Men is a prime example of just how easy it is.
Part of the problem seems to be that the script can't decide who the story is about: is it Willie Stark, played by Sean Penn, or the equally significantly-named Jack Burden, played by Jude Law.
The Sean Penn scenes, the ones in which he's the focus, have an energy and aggressiveness, mostly due to the full-in-your-face Penn performance. When he's off-stage, the cast, including Law, all seem to be playing a movie that's going on underwater. Everything is taken at a slow, meaningful pace, full of glances and elusive dialogue. This isn't the cast's fault: everyone of these people has played intense roles before, and held our interest fully. But the Jack Burden side of the story, with all its psychological stuff (made even more heavy-handed by a voice over from Law, full of portentous hints and warnings) isn't that interesting, and the cast do their best with what are basically underwritten roles.
Penn himself comes most alive in his speechifying, but he's adopted an accent so thick that often the speeches loose comprehensibility. The rest of the cast are easy to understand: we just don't know why they're saying what they're saying!
The film takes a curious turn about fifteen to twenty minutes in. Stark is portrayed initially as a quiet do-gooder, a man of integrity who's unlike all the corrupt politicians and businessmen around him. Burden is seemingly amoral. And then, after a scene in which Stark downs a full glass of whisky (he's always drunk soft drink up till then) and collapses on the floor, the roles all seem to reverse. Stark is shown as increasingly corrupt; Burden is a man with a conscience; Patricia Clarkson, who is woefully underused in her role, turns from being a woman on the make in the political scene to a kind of mother-figure-cum-mistress who's being used herself, and James Gandolfini ceases to be the slimy, sly political force intent on getting Stark elected, and becomes a blithering idiot without another decent scene in the film.
And besides these actors we also have Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins, two more Brits adopting various versions of Louisiana accents (they are playing upper-class Americans, of course), and Mark Ruffalo as Winslet's brother. He gets to play the most underwritten character of all. Seemingly he's a medical person of some sort, but he spends his time playing the piano - we think. And then he gets pulled into the arena to front a new hospital that Stark is building. A less-likely front man is hard to imagine, as Ruffalo is allowed no charisma, nothing to show that he might have any substance. And then finally he comes quietly out of the shadows and shoots Stark. Hmmm. And gets shot himself.
The build-up to this climax is almost entirely lacking in tension. We're really quite happy to see Stark gunned down, because he's such a snot; but because Ruffalo has been such an unassuming character we're puzzled why he also gets shot, as he seems to be performing a public service.
Winslet drifts in and out of the movie, and the scene that should be most significant, when seemingly Burden rejects making love to her, is confused (and made even more so by the voice-over), and so we have little idea what she's supposed be doing in the film. Hopkins is strong enough, but again he's more tied up with the Burden story than the Stark one, and that again confuses the role he plays.
The whole thing needs reshuffling to bring one side or the other into focus. Pity to waste such a cast on such twaddle.

In contrast to Mumma Mia

Meant to mention a movie I watched on Maori television last weekend: Schatten die Zeit, or Shadows of Time. I thought it was going to be one of those romantic movies with a hopeful ending, but it turned out to be a film in which the choices taken in a matter of seconds affect the rest of a character’s life. Consequently it was full of sadness, because people were forever just missing the moment. For all that, it was wonderfully directed and shot, had a superb Indian cast (it’s set in Calcutta, apart from the earliest scenes), and was full of poignant images.
The two main characters are played by six actors in all: two youngsters in their early to mid-teens; two adult actors who get most of the screen time, and two elderly actors who appear in the bookends of the story. Thus the cast list looks like this:
Ravi: Sikandar Agarwal/Prashant Narayanan/Soumitra Chatterjee and Masha: Tumpa Das/Tannishtha Chatterjee/Sova Sen.
The two youngsters are particularly good, and their ‘love’ story is handled with great sensitivity and care.
The world surrounding them is venal to the core – this isn’t a pretty India in any sense, and nearly everyone is out to make an extra buck or sell someone for a few more rupees. Consequently even the integrity of Ravi as a boy eventually becomes soured in adulthood, even though he holds out for virtually half the film. Masha is less able to maintain her integrity: after being sold by her father for a pittance (he proves her strength in a kind of employment screening by slapping her hard across the face) she escapes from becoming yet another in a long line of girls taken by a slimy character who appears every so often. Then she flees to Calcutta only to be turned, almost immediately, into a child prostitute. And while she survives in this life, and eventually becomes the wife of a wealthy official, she hardly has a good time of it: towards the end of the movie she’s back where she started, amongst the prostitutes (now with a small boy). We don’t know much about her subsequent fate, except that in the last scenes she’s still alive as a grandmother, looking considerably older than Ravi as an older man, even though he’s the same age.
It’s one of those gloomy European movies (it was made by Germans) that has this idea that fate will grind you down, come what may. In a scene in which the two lovers finally manage to get together, Ravi says that he wants Masha to remember that this was the time when he was happiest. He says this with the saddest possible look on his face.