Captain Phillips and City of Ghosts

Two movies - Captain Phillips and City of Ghosts - take us to foreign climes where unconventional things happen. In the first movie we know exactly what's going to happen because it's hinted at so strongly from the beginning that we'd have to be stupid not to read the signals. In the second movie, which begins in New York but soon after heads to Cambodia, we have almost no idea what's happening, what's happened, and what will happen. Eventually we get the picture, but it takes quite some time, and if it wasn't so well crafted and full of such eccentric characters, we might not hang around to find out. 

Captain Phillips is earnest, and super realistic. City of Ghosts takes place in a world where apparently only peculiar people live - with the exception of the main character (played by Matt Dillon, who also directed and co-wrote the film). Even his love interest is a strange woman who seems to have no life beyond the moment. 

Captain Phillips was intensely exciting, although much too long: we know from the beginning that Phillips, the captain of a container ship heading through pirate waters will be boarded by a most ambitious but tiny group of Somali pirates; there are only four of them and they argue with and scream at each other - and everyone else - a good deal. And we know that once he's taken prisoner by them - he's allowed to escape with some money onto a lifeboat - that he'll eventually get rescued. This is a film based on a true story, and Phillips survived. 

Yet somehow in the midst of all the tension the films' often quite dull; the crew of the container ship are played in a way that allows none of them to be individuals, and Tom Hanks is left to carry most of the movie on his own. Of course he can do this, but he has no one to play against before the Somalis arrive, and once they do it's all shouting and screaming and scrambling to get out of the way of bullets. It's perhaps indicative of the script that the opening scene, in which Hanks and his wife head to the airport for the umpteenth time so he can fly to the place where he'll board his ship, consists of a dialogue that is not only intentionally banal but oddly uninteresting. Hanks and Catherine Keener (who plays his wife) seem to be wondering what the heck they've got themselves into, script-wise.

City of Ghosts holds our attention as it wends its way through a very murky and surprisingly long opening stretch by providing us with a bunch of quality actors (including those playing very small parts) who bring individuality not just by having quirky roles to play but by being individuals themselves. (Of course the actors in Captain Phillips are different people; but they're not given anything to get their teeth into.) The cast of this film are such a varied bunch that you begin to wonder if Cambodia doesn't attract strange Europeans. They're like the actors who used to play in the old noir movies: such a movie might not be up to much itself but once you add in the likes of Peter Lorre and co, even in small roles, you have interest and intensity on the screen: those actors never failed to bring life to their parts, however well or badly written they were. 

The roles here aren't badly written at all: the actors might not always say much but we know that there's plenty of subtext, and we wait expectantly to find out what the heck they're on about. Matt Dillon plays a man with some considerable angst; it's an angst he can hide from the FBI, but once he gets to Cambodia, he starts to unravel in some degree. Nevertheless, unravelling isn't where he intends going, and he spends more of the movie ravelling up again than unravelling.

Stellan Skarsgård is a world-weary character, one of the henchmen of the elusive Marvin (played by James Caan with an awful confidence and suave evil), and he remains ambiguous from whoa to go. Whose side is he really on, and is he going to get his comeuppance or not? Should he get it, even? We sympathise with him; he's trapped in his own corrupt behaviour and can't find a moral way out again.

Gérard Depardieu is a fat, barkeeper-cum-hotelier who lies through his teeth with almost every sentence he utters, who keeps control of the crazies who come into his bar, and who carries a bambino of mixed parentage around with him much of the time. Depardieu is obviously enjoying himself in the role, though he's not as consistently at home in it as the other members of the cast are in theirs. 

At first it seems as though Dillon is merely filling up his screen with oddballs to make things quirky. But the oddballs are in part caused by the strange country that Cambodia is, and Dillon is intent on making us realise that Cambodia isn't the place for unwary tourists to go. One of the apparently drug-addicted archaeologists (I think that's what the group were) soon succumbs to the evil that's just under the surface because of his naivety and because of his assumption that Europeans/Americans can behave as they like. 

When the plot finally kicks in, about halfway through the movie, things both tighten up and also become a bit more conventional. But Dillon has a way of putting scenes together that eschews the usual. There's an element of Fellini in the way he peoples the film with the curious and misshapen, and perhaps another director would have concentrated on different kinds of theatrics. Nevertheless, the risks he takes in filming the story this way pays off. 

Dillon takes another risk, that of casting a real-life taxi-driver, Sereyvuth Kem, as the man who takes him everywhere in one of those pedicart taxis. Kem provides a wonderful gentleness and wisdom, a cleanliness and honesty in the midst of the city's widespread corruption. You can believe that this man would very likely do the good things he does in the movie. He's virtually the heart of the film.

 

Catch up on some movies

We've watched three movies on DVD over the last week or so that have been worth noting.

Let me put in a plug for our local library while I'm at it: they provide DVDs at $2.00 a pop for a week, and $2.00 a pop for TV series, which you can have for a fortnight. I wanted to catch up on the first series of Broadchurch the other day, because I'd missed some episodes. In the end we got it from a video store, and it cost $10.00. I found it in the library yesterday as one of the 'top of the picks' at $4.00, and I could have had it longer...  It's a great service, and we've made some really interesting discoveries as a result, even watching two entire series of DVDs in Italian: Inspector Montalbano was one of them. And then we went on to learn Italian as well...but that's another story.

First up on the movie front was Last Passenger. It's about a small group of people who get left on a train that's refusing to stop - the driver turns out to be someone, they think, who wants to commit suicide in a spectacular way. Dougray Scott and Kara Tointon star, and do a good job. The whole film takes place on the train and for the most part maintains its sense of tension. There are a few spots where things could have moved along a bit, and the plot probably doesn't want to be investigated too strongly, but overall this was a nicely tense ride. There's an affecting performance from the seven-year-old boy, Joshua Kaynama, a little boy caught up in a situation he doesn't understand and who's asked to do the impossible at one point.

The second movie was much more sure of its pacing: the tension barely let up for a moment, even when there were conversations between various baddies. This was 7 Boxes, a film made in Paraguay, which apparently isn't well-known for top quality movies; in fact several of the cast seem to have started their film careers in this movie (!)

It's about a young man whose job is wheelbarrowing purchases for customers in a market. (The wheelbarrow isn't your garden model but a long flat thing that obviously takes muscle to handle.) These wheelbarrow boys have to compete with each other to get the work, and it's tough. When the boy, Victor (Celso Franco) gets an opportunity to take seven boxes 'around the block' for some devious characters, he jumps at it, because it's going to be very well paid. The boxes of course contain something much worse than he imagines, a nasty fellow-barrow boy has been shunted out of the job by accident and wants to get it back, and those sending the boxes on their way have got things considerably tangled, much to their horror. The piece is well plotted, and all the elements keep crossing and intercrossing until there's a violent climax in which Victor almost dies.

In spite of the tension and violence there's quite a bit of humour, lots of fun with cellphones changing hands, a nice bickering relationship between Victor and Liz (Lali Gonzalez) his know-all friend who obviously thinks girls can do anything, and all manner of other enjoyable details. This movie also takes place in a fairly confined area: small in South American terms, anyway. Everything happens in a huge (and I mean huge) market area, a market that seems to go on in a maze for miles in every direction.

The last movie was Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks star, Hanks playing a generous second fiddle to Thompson's wonderfully arrogant performance. Thompson is P L Travers, the creator of the Mary Poppins stories. Her books are sacrosanct and the idea that Walt Disney (Hanks) should make one of his awful animated movies out of them appals her. She's been holding out for twenty years, but now she's starting to need the money, and is finally persuaded to go to Los Angeles and meet Disney, and see if she can agree to anything. There's almost nothing she wants to agree to, which makes it difficult for the Hollywood people, but in the end...well, you can imagine the end because you know Mary Poppins got made and was one of Disney's most successful films ever.

Interwoven with the modern story (set in 1961) is Travers' childhood. She had an imaginative father of Irish stock, in Australia, but he was an alcoholic, and for all his intentions to keep his promises, seldom could. In spite of this Travers, as a child, adored him, and shared his wonderful fairytale view of the world. Her childhood is a tragedy, in fact, and this has affected her adulthood, so that in spite of writing a wonderful set of stories she has become a bitter old woman. Perhaps she wasn't quite as difficult as the filmmakers make her out to be, but she was certainly opinionated, and the 'family' (the Banks family in the book, and Poppins herself) were extremely precious to her.

It's a classic Hollywood movie in the old style, with a cast of great actors (Colin Farrell plays the relatively small part of the father, and Rachel Griffiths makes a brief appearance as an aunt who obviously was in part a model for Mary Poppins). Very enjoyable, and emotional.

Charlie Wilson's War

Began to watch Tropic Thunder last night but gave up fairly quickly. Apart from being schoolboy gross and full of foul language, it just wasn’t engaging – at least for us. Fortunately I’d got it out as my introductory ‘free’ New Release from Video Ezy after finding that the Civic Video had finally closed. Not surprising; it’s looked very unwell for some time.
I’d bought a couple of other DVDs, as it happened, one of which was Charlie Wilson’s War, which turned out to be a trifle odd also, but nowhere near as odd as its predecessor. For one thing, it may have been that Tom Hanks was playing a loose-living middle-aged Congressman with a penchant for whisky. I’ve often found that certain stars just don’t come across well when they play too far away from their usual screen persona. Most of them have screen personas that are broad enough to encompass a fair range, but when they step out of that and play the opposite type of character for instance, it generally doesn’t work – in my mind.
Denzil Washington is a prime example. He’s made a few films where he’s played against type, and, because in the audience’s mind he’s a man with integrity and heart and warmth and compassion, we just don’t believe him when he tries to play someone who’s really bad.
Can you imagine Danny de Vito playing any sort of hero or heroic character? Unlikely to succeed, and wisely he’s stuck to his conniving, grubby-minded characters. Gene Hackman, even when playing the hero, will be fairly flawed, but he seems to have found his niche in playing characters that are untrustworthy, venal, and ruthless. Jack Nicholson has managed to bring off a few characters that are sympathetic, but it takes some doing. He has to bring the audience around to ‘his way of thinking’ as it were. (About Schmidtt is an example.)
So to return to Tom Hanks. Tom will not easily play an out and out villain. Offhand, I can’t remember him doing so. He’s been fairly rough-edged a few times, but his trademark ‘innocence’ is what he does really well. Charlie Wilson isn’t innocent. He has integrity, but it’s very mixed, and the opening scene in the movie, with him in a spa pool with several other naked people, seems uncomfortable for Hanks.
However, once we get used to Hanks in this role, the film is well worth watching. Julia Roberts makes a brief appearance early in the piece and then vanishes for a good deal of the movie, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (who knows his place in movies as a wild man character, whether he’s playing good or bad) takes up the rest of the slack.
If the film wasn’t based on a true story we’d be unlikely to believe it, but since it apparently is, we have to assume that the scriptwriters haven’t played too fast and loose with the truth.
I said the movie was worth watching, nevertheless, it doesn’t seem well constructed for all that. There are several wonderful individual scenes (particularly Hoffman’s first appearance, and also his first encounter with Hanks), and the piece is uniformly well-acted, and directed, but there isn’t much suspense. It’s almost a forgone conclusion that Charlie Wilson will get his way and ‘save’ Afghanistan from the Russians. Along with Hoffman he’s a renegade who happens to be invisible enough in Congress not to cause huge anti-waves when he sets about supplying arms to the beleaguered country. And while the characters are well-drawn up to a point, I don’t know that I entirely believe in them. There were plenty of flamboyant characters in West Wing, for example, but they worked better than Charlie Wilson does, and both Hoffman and Roberts seem to be playing people who do their own thing and get away with it without a snub from anyone. Interestingly enough, Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay. It has plenty of his trademarks: snappy dialogue, smart one-liners that fit the scene, good scene construction. It’s just the overall effect that doesn’t quite hold. Maybe Sorkin needed a sub-plot to offset the main story, as he so often did in the TV series. Here he’s denied that.