DARK PLACES

On the back of the wild success of GONE GIRL and now the new TV miniseries SHARP OBJECTS, I was compelled to read Gillian Flynn's middle book - Dark Places - and was surprised to find that it had also received a big screen adaptation. I was even more surprised when I realised it had a stellar cast of big names, because it's release had utterly passed me by. Upon further investigation I realised that it had been horribly reviewed and went straight to video. Nonetheless, it's now available on a lot of pay per view streaming services so I decided to check it out. 

The plot of the film is remarkably faithful to the book which has - admittedly - a highly cinematic structure.  As with SHARP OBJECTS we open in the present day with a survivor of childhood trauma who will be our heroine. She's also falling apart - desperate for money, deeply emotionally scarred, self-medicating.  As with SO, she's sent back into her past to investigate a crime, except this time rather than being a journalist she's paid by a weird crime club of enthusiasts who believe that the testimony she gave as a child to convict her brother of murdering her mother and sisters was co-erced and that a grave injustice has been done.  And so the movie / book proceed by alternating scenes / chapters between the present day investigation and flashbacks to the day of the crime, culminating in a big reveal.

The plot is satisfyingly tricksy and gnarly and riffs off familiar topics from the WEST MEMPHIS THREE case - accusations of satan worship and child molestation. But as with all SO, I've come to believe that the point of Gillian Flynn's fiction is not so much whodunnit - it's perfectly possible to enjoy it having guessed that - but exploring the margins of American life - the people left behind by globalisation, suffering under bad debt and addiction, living from pay cheque to pay cheque and falling apart. It's this social observation of post financial crisis America that makes for compelling reading. That, and Flynn's eye for the grotesque - the stink and sounds and horror of life that other authors choose to avoid. She is a deeply visually impressive author.

And that's really the problem with this plot-faithful but atmosphere-blind adaptation. The director and production designers and costume designers just won't let it go grungy enough. Charlize Theron is also horribly miscast - this stunningly beautiful amazonian woman just doesn't look malnourished, maladjusted and on the poverty line. Her childhood just isn't dirty and shambolic enough.  Christina Hendricks admittedly does better at looking beaten down as her mother, but she has to look truly broken - a woman who would resort to the desperate - and she doesn't. The only people who really look perfect are Chloe Grace Moretz as the vampy teen girlfriend of the convicted man, and Drea De Matteo as a washed up stripper.  Otherwise this entire film just isn't gritty, grimy and grungy enough - and contrasts poorly with the production design and slippery memories of SHARP OBJECTS. 

DARK PLACE has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It went straight to video in 2015. 

London Film Fest 2012 Day 4 - GINGER & ROSA

2009 was a great year for British literature, with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book duking it out for the Booker. The latter book was deeply concerned with how the sexual liberation of the Edwardian bohemians impacted their children. One of the key themes of the novel is to contrast the earnest liberal politics of the Bohemians with the lack of regard for their actual children. They want to make the world a better place, regardless of whether their children are fed and cared for, or hurt by their affairs. Byatt makes the point that artists and intellectuals can be both admirable for their work but a nightmare to live with. Strict principles can often be a convenient fig leaf for selfishness.

Sally Potter's new film, GINGER & ROSA makes much the same point, drawing on a much smaller canvas, but with greater intensity. It's about how a father's radical conception of personal freedom damages his doting teenage daughter. Roland sees Ginger's tears but cannot stop the actions that cause the pain, equating personal sexual freedom, and setting aside bourgeois morality, with his opposition to armed conflict. It's a pompous but not indefensible position, but the the same could be said for so much that happens around the girl. Her gay godfathers genuinely care for her, but their tales of radicalism fuel her wallowing deaths possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Similarly, their friend Bella praises Ginger's activism but denies whipping her up. It's no wonder the poor girl is sad and confused, desperately trying to please and not complain.

Alice Englert and Elle Fanning,
Rosa & Ginger respectively.

And what of Ginger's best friend Rosa? Although the focus of the film is not on her, she's an equally tragic figure. Where Ginger suffers from a surfeit of concerned but misguided adults, Rosa has a distracted mother and an absentee father. No wonder she latches onto Roland as an impressive father figure - a composite man to take care of her and shepherd her into adulthood.

GINGER & ROSA seems to me to be a perfect film - tightly scripted, beautifully acted and photographed, evoking in minute detail the spirit and design of early 60s London, but also hinting at wider themes of revolt and parenting. I love that in place of the Swinging Sixties cliché we get a drab, grimy post-war world and an uneasy conflict between radicalism and 50s suburbia. Particular praise has to go to Elle Fanning (Ginger) who carries so much of the emotional burden of the film, but also Christine Hendricks in a smaller but equally intense role as her mother. Alessandro Nivola as Roland, her father, brings just the right balance of sleaze and headstrong idealism. But ultimately, the triumph of this picture is Sally Potter's, in bringing a new perspective to 60s London, and doing so with such formal control and intensity. If there is any justice, this film, and particularly Fanning and Hendricks' performances, will be recognised come awards season.

GINGER & ROSA played Toronto and London 2012. It opens in the UK on October 19th. The running time is 89 minutes.

DRIVE - A Real Hero

I know a lot of guys who mess around with married women, but you're the only one I know who robs a place to pay back the husband. 

From the Hot Pink titles; to the electro-kitsch soundtrack; to Ryan Gosling's silver satin jacket; to the neon lights of Los Angeles, DRIVE is a movie that oozes cool.  It's hero, simply titled "Driver" is so cool, he barely needs to speak, has no discernible back-story, merely exists. As both a stunt- and get-away-driver, he barely breaks a sweat, and even when for a sweet girl (Carey Mulligan) and her son, he barely cracks a smile.  The courtship is so low-key, chaste, Driver's attitude so stoic, at times I even doubted he had been moved at all. And then, when his girl needs a hero, that's exactly what he becomes.  The change comes by stealth, jarring, shocking, and the movie, like its hero (now capitalised) shifts from quirky romance into hard-core ultra-violence.  Driver becomes the man his angelic, virginal girlfriend needs - maybe the man he always wanted to be, and just needed the excuse to become - the violence evidently so close to the surface.  Within what feels like seconds, we have descended into overwhelming violence, no-way-out kind of snowballing craziness.  Driver seems to welcome it.  It seems to be his fate.

DRIVE is another example of director Nicolas Windig Refn's obsession with, and objectification of, men who define themselves through violence.  Again and again - whether Tom Hardy in BRONSON or Mads Mikkelsen in VALHALLA RISING, Refn glories in the image of "hard" men covered in blood and gore.  The objectification is sometimes pretty disturbing, it feels voyeuristic, slippery, fascistic - we are being made complicit in, and enjoying to the point of nervous laughter, heinous violence. This sense of deeply, deeply black humour is heightened by some genius casting in the supporting roles - Albert Brooks playing against type as a sleazy B-movie producer cum mobster - Ron Perlman as a West Coast mafiosi - and Bryan Cranston as the semi-father figure who pimps Driver out for heist jobs.  (Sadly, Mad Men's Christina Hendricks' is underused in a cameo.) The humour also comes from Hossein Amini's tightly written adaptation of James Sallis' novel. But ultimately, given the glossy, seedy, look and feel of the movie, the ultimate praise has to go to Refn, for creating both his most mainstream movie to date, but betraying none of that particular brand of "violence and romantic sexiness" - and Gosling, who with but a flicker of eyes can betray a complexity of emotion beyond most of his generation of actors.  

DRIVE played Cannes, where Nicolas Windig Refn won Best Director, and Toronto 2011. It opened on September 16th in the US, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Canada and Poland. It opens today in Greece, Ireland, and the UK. It opens on September 30th in Malaysia and Italy. It opens on October 5th in France; on October 7th in Finland, on October 13th in Hong Kong, on October 21st in Estonia and Norway and on October 27th in Australia. It opens on November 3rd in Russia and Singapore, on November 18th in Sweden, on December 8th in Portugal and on January 26th 2012 in Germany.