Film catchup

Starting with Locke, a film in which only one actor is seen the entire time, and in which the whole action takes place inside a car moving down one of England's major highways. There are several other actors involved, but we only ever hear their voices, over the car phone. The interesting thing is that these 'voice roles' are so well done that we don't need to see the actors. Our imagination does all the work for us.

Tom Hardy is the only visible actor, playing a major concrete contractor, who's about to pour the biggest pour in 'non-military and non-nuclear' history. (According to the goofs section of IMDB, that's probably an exaggeration, given the quantities quoted, but that hardly matters.) The trouble is he's driving away from the pour, which will happen in the morning, leaving in the less than capable hands of his assistant, Donal. He has a very good reason for doing so, and it will cause chaos in his personal life, and in his career. It would spoil the suspense to tell you more, but suffice to say that it's some achievement to set an entire movie inside a car, with one actor, and have you sitting watching it nervously, wondering what will happen next.

Hardy is superb: he's a man fully in control, even when things seem to be spiralling out of control. But it's the control of man with integrity, not some arrogant so-and-so who doesn't give a toss about other people. It's because he does give a toss that he's in the situation he's in.  He's a man who will do what he believes is right, no matter the cost. And we're cheering him all the way.

Second in line was Girl, Interrupted, This is a Hollywood-style mental hospital movie, so you can guess there'll be several parts for people to play to the hilt. And there are. Winona Ryder is Susanna, who somewhat unwittingly signs herself into a mental hospital, believing that there must be something wrong with her, because she's different, different especially in terms of her parents' expectations for her. Angelina Jolie, only 24 at the time the movie was made, plays Lisa, the blunt, foul-mouthed, in-your-face psycho, the sort you'd normally avoid, because she's something of a bully. She and Susanna hit it off, nevertheless. The film's main story concerns whether Susanna will allow herself to be healed and stop wasting her life looking for a healing she doesn't really need. (That's Whoopi Goldberg's take on it, anyway; she plays the sympathetic but realistic nurse.)

This is a good solid old-style movie, with some whiz bang performances (Ryder plays a relatively quiet character, yet she shines at the centre of the movie, even outdoing the full-on performance Jolie gives.) It holds your interest throughout, though whether it's true to the reality of a mental hospital isn't always easy to tell. (It's based on a book by Susanna Kaysen, who wrote of her own experience.)

The ending is tacked on, somewhat, spoiling the integrity of Jolie's character, but otherwise this was worth watching.

Not so worth watching was The Butler, an overblown piece that, like some broad spectrum medicine, covers everything possible in its two hours or so. It's a rough take on the true story of a Cecil Gaines, played by Forest Whitaker, who was a long-time butler in the White House. He works his way through the Presidents from Eisenhower (a subdued Robin Williams) to Reagan (played by Alan Rickman), forever insisting that service without bias is his keynote. Consequently, even though he's in the thick of history, he manages to stand to one side, holding his tray, or cleaning the shoes, or reading a story to Caroline Kennedy. And he also manages to avoid confronting the things his older son confronts, the things that keep black people in the USA under the thumb of white people. This is a constant source of conflict between the two men.

Unfortunately, the scriptwriters decided that every historical moment needed to be included, and the film hops from one issue to another while the characters strive to keep up. Whitaker, a fine actor, gets a one-note role that eventually becomes an irritation at the centre of the movie. Oprah Winfrey plays his long-suffering wife, and is by far the best thing in the film, along with David Banner, who plays Gaines' older son. These two actors have some scenes that they can get their teeth into. Whitaker has almost nothing. By the time he finally makes up with his son, with whom he's been at odds since the man was a teenager, it's become all a bit ho hum. We knew it would happen but it's just another event in the midst of all the stuff. (Incidentally, the make-up of the actors as they age is superbly done: whether there's been CGI added to the literal make-up, or whether make-up has improved phenomenally over the years I don't know. Only Robin Williams looks a bit odd with a partly bald head.)

Why it was thought necessary to cast various top actors in often tiny cameo roles is a mystery. It adds nothing to the film - or rather, it does add something to it: an interruption to the flow of things while you try and work out which famous actor is now playing which famous person. I missed a few, but got most of them right. Casting 'ordinary' actors in these roles would have made a lot more sense; the stars distract from what's going on.

As an example of how to put famous actors in cameo roles and make it work to your advantage, however, check out Oceans Twelve. I first saw this at the cinema, and have seen it in part at least twice more, because one or other TV channel thinks it's worth playing endlessly. It's watchable even if it's self-indulgent nonsense. The best part about it is Julia Roberts playing an imitation of Julia Roberts, which aforesaid imitation catches the attention of the real Bruce Willis playing the real Bruce Willis. These two have a wonderful time hamming it up between them, and even Matt Damon has a job keeping up.

Other than this the movie is full of lots of scenery, a plot that is so impenetrable I doubt if anyone knew what was going on (certainly the audience hasn't a hope), Brad Pitt and George Clooney enjoying themselves and being funny, and Matt Damon playing the extreme opposite of Bourne. A bunch of second-tier actors (the rest of the Twelve) spout lines that sound like they're making them up as they go. Unfortunately the lines are waffle, and the audience knows it, and worst of all they're totally lacking in wit or humour.

Sense and Sensibility

I was reading somewhere the other day that Jane Austen's book, Sense and Sensibility presents two contrasting characters, the sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who exemplify the two words in the title of the book: Elinor seems to be all 'sense' - that is, sensible - Marianne is all sensibility - that is, she lets her emotions control her life, and can't see how Elinor can be so calm in the face of heartbreak.   But the sisters also exemplify two modes of philosophical thought: whether it's better to look at life sensibly, calmly, almost dispassionately, or whether one should be utterly aware, full of response to everything that happens.

In the book the sisters each learn to appreciate the other's point of view, in due course, but not before both of them have suffered considerable heartbreak and hurt.   I watched the 1995 film version of the book again last night (somehow it's free on You Tube - I suspect it shouldn't be) and the two actors in the movie, Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, portray these two approaches to life admirably.  You feel for Marianne (Winslet) in her overwhelming pain when her lover ups and leaves, but equally you feel for Elinor who must not only harbour an unspoken love for Edward Ferrars, but find herself having to keep secret his longstanding engagement to another woman who takes her into her trust.  Marianne can't understand how Elinor can keep her pain to herself; only towards the end of the film does Elinor bitterly tell her what a quandary she's been put into, and only in the last scene is she finally able to give vent to her feelings when she discovers that her lover hasn't married the other woman after all, and that he's free to marry her.  This moment in the movie, when all the pent-up anguish bursts from Thompson in a moment she can't control, is one of the best acting scenes you'll find in the cinema - you see her wanting to weep for joy, and yet she has to deal with getting rid of all the accumulated anguish first.

I saw Ang Lee's movie of Sense and Sensibility back when it first came out in 1995, and I haven't forgotten how effective it was: the look of the movie is wonderful, with the weather playing an important part in connecting the characters' feelings, and the wonderful sense of the period.  The cast are uniformly good: Emma Thompson had written the script, so she knew the piece inside out and plays her role wonderfully; Winslet is the emotional Marianne and superbly delineates the quickly changing emotions that this character is subject to.  Alan Rickman is Colonel Brandon, a man with a gloomy past but also a man of considerable integrity who finds himself having to play second fiddle to a known libertine (played with great energy by Greg Wise).  Hugh Grant is a revelation in this movie: if you've ever thought he was a lightweight actor, check out his performance here.  It's not a large part - he appears early in the movie and then vanishes for a good deal of the time until he comes into his own at the end, but every scene and every gesture and expression count.

And there are a bunch of character roles: Tom Wilkinson for about a minute at the beginning; the twit of a son from The Vicar of Dibley in a wonderful role as his son, a henpecked husband; his fearsomely dominating wife who thinks she's doing the Family some good; Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton as a couple - he can't bear her constant prattle and makes sarcastic remarks about her at every point, and just when you think he's a hard-hearted man he turns out to be warm and sympathetic to those who are prepared to see through his hardness.  Staunton has a great moment when, after hearing there may be a threat to her baby's health, she turns in a moment from her constant prattling to a scream that pierces the heart as she races to move the baby from the house.  Imogen Stubbs plays Hugh Grant's supposed fiancée, a somewhat devious character who gets an awful comeuppance at one point from her future sister-in-law: one moment there's utter quiet on the screen in a close-up of the two women's heads, next moment the camera cuts to a wide shot and there's an explosion as the sister-in-law throws the work she's been doing in the air and simultaneously thrusts Stubbs to the floor with violent anger.  Then there are Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs as in-laws who apparently live in the same house, (they're presumably widower and widow) have the same interests, have the same all-encompassing generosity, fill the screen with boisterous energy (always accompanied by half a dozen dogs) and 'manage' other people.  Yes, they'd be annoying in real life, but they're a wonderful couple in the movie.

I had a copy of the script of this film and the diary that Thompson kept as she was writing it and then involved in the production.  It's as fascinating as the movie and Thompson plainly had a deep love for the book and wanted it translated to the screen in the best possible manner.  In this, I think, she's been completely successful.  I don't know how much the film deviates from the book - I suspect it's only in dramatic form but certainly not in spirit - and my suspicion is that Jane Austen herself would have been pleased with it.  It's a classic.

Couple of not-so-top movies

In our current catch-up of various DVDs from the public library, I picked up The Barchester Chronicles, and Last Chance Harvey.  I'm lumping these two together because they were both disappointments.

Last Chance Harvey has Dustin Hoffman (he was 71 at the time) and Emma Thompson (she was 49) in it.   The ages are important, because the film puts these two together and tries to make chemistry out of it.  Both are struggling with loss - he in the sense of losing a job, and then being treated as a second-rate citizen at his own daughter's wedding (there's a stepfather in place who's much more 'attractive' to everyone).  She's reduced to dealing with a mother who can't keep off the cellphone (Eileen Atkins, who's thoroughly wasted in the role) and being set up for blind dates.  Which is a puzzle, because Emma Thompson is just too gorgeous to be on this sort of shelf - at least as she plays this character.   There's minimal backstory in both cases - other characters hint at things, but nothing is very clear, and the two actors are left to play out their roles with little information to offer us.  Even Hoffman's last minute revelation of having heart arrhythmia comes out of the blue; there's no indication that he's likely to collapse after being made to walk up several flights of stairs.

In fact there's minimal story here altogether.  If the two characters had been allowed to develop without all the other guff (what there is of it) the film would have been worth watching.  As it is, they tend to get into an interesting conversation and then the camera pulls away and leaves them mouthing words that haven't been scripted.

And one other thing, it's not surprising that Thompson looks a surprised more often than not.  Somehow when she and Hoffman get off the train at Paddington, they arrive in Trafalgar Square. They do quite a bit of walking along the South Bank too (including trailing around the second-hand book stalls that we remember from our last visit); but this is mostly to show off the scenery and the outdoor globe string lights - it has little to do with the movie.  

The Barchester series should have been worth watching.  We survived The Warden section of it, but didn't feel inclined to pick up any more, even though Alan Rickman hadn't appeared by that time.  Donald Pleasance played the Warden who's charged with living off money that isn't rightfully his; Pleasance plays this mild-mannered man as someone deeply troubled.  In fact he plays him as Pleasance, who always looked troubled on screen, when he wasn't looking maniacal.  But the character is more than that.  There's little light and shade, and little warmth (except in one of the scenes with the woolly-thinking Bishop, who just wants peace and quiet and no conflict).  Nigel Hawthorne chews up the scenery as Pleasance's son-in-law, and if the episodes had been taken at the pace he provides, they would have been excellent.  Somehow everything else is pale and sluggish around him.   Everything looks good and authentic, but the lighting throughout is very bland and ordinary, without shadows or contrast.  It's probably somewhat typical of its vintage as a series, although I don't think that can be entirely the reason.

I'd love to have seen these two novels done better (they're amongst the top of Trollope's oeuvre, I think), but somehow this series doesn't get them there.

Two quiet movies

Last night I watched a film we'd recorded a few days earlier: Snow Cake. I actually watched it nearly twice through, as my wife had been doing something else and didn't come in until it was getting close to the end - at which point I said she needed to see it from the beginning, so I watched it again.

I can't tell you about the movie without giving some spoilers, so don't read this if you want to catch up with it.

This Canadian movie concerns a man (played by Alan Rickman) who's recently out of prison (for killing another man). He rather unwillingly picks up a lively young female hitchhiker; a few minutes of screen time later, she is killed outright when a truck crashes into the car. Rickman decides to take the rather oddball gift the daughter had bought for her mother to the mother (played by Sigourney Weaver) and discovers that the mother has some form of autism - a 'very vocal' form, as the mother's neighbour points out. And so things play out, as we gradually learn why Rickman was in prison and more.

It's a story with more than one grieving person in it, but it isn't a miserable story. There's a great deal of humour all round, and Weaver's character, while not played for laughs as such, produces a number of the funnier lines in the film. It's also about the healing needed after losing someone, and how this can take more than a matter of moments.

Rickman does his usual fairly laidback characterization even while baring his soul to different people, but when needed, can produce the goods: watch him in the aftermath of the crash.

Weaver has been criticised by some reviewers for being all performance without a real connection to the character she's playing. But this is a character at a disconnect with herself: she has no social graces: if she's fed up with you she'll tell you to stop talking until she says it's okay to start again, or, if you've come to her house for a wake, she'll ask loudly why you're still there when she wants you to go, or will dump the freshly made sandwiches in the rubbish bin to encourage you to leave. She also enjoys eating snow, jumping on a trampoline, and playing with children's baubles. She's as sharp as a tack...except she isn't quite.

Carrie Ann Moss (of the Matrix series, and the strange film, Memento) plays the neighbour, a woman who doesn't mind having 'gentlemen callers' and who is part of the healing process Rickman needs to go through.

It's a relatively quiet little film, and relies on excellent actors to put its gentle story across.

We watched Taking the Wae Wae Express the other day too. NZ reviewers have generally raved about this movie, the forerunner to the recently exhibited, Hook, Line and Sinker, but we found it lacking in energy and rather shapeless. Both movies have been made using the Mike Leigh approach of improvisation-gradually-forming-itself-into-a-script. The more recent movie worked, using this process - but also had the benefit of some very good NZ actors. Wae Wae uses a mostly inexperienced cast, and for me the lack of a script with crafted lines left them floundering. The young actors were good, but there was a kind of limitedness to their roles: a stronger script in general would have helped them to achieve something more effective. Even Rangimoana Taylor (who has the lead role in Hook, Line and Sinker) suffers from an undeveloped role. There is a curious Malaysian taxidriver in the story, a man given to uttering 'wisdom' to young people, and also a female Scandinavian tourist who turns up out of nowhere and makes herself at home with the other characters - without much evidence as to why she should do so, I thought. Incidentally, this story also evolves out of a car crash....

We were sorry not to like the movie much: it was made by Andrea Bosshard, who used to be one of my piano pupils (her family were neighbours) many years ago..! However, on the basis of Hook, Line and Sinker, I'm sure she's got better stuff still to come.