THE WIFE

THE WIFE is a taut, tense relationship drama that pivots on a central mystery that is revealed at its half-way point. I will therefore review the film without spoilers and strongly advise you to avoid them before watching.

THE WIFE begins as an almost placid, banal, relationship movie about an ageing rogue of a writer (Jonathan Pryce) and his quiet, reserved help-meet (Glenn Close).  She seems like a rather uninteresting character: elegant, quiet, mostly concerning herself with travel arrangements.  She says little, and when she does it's to calm the waters, especially between the author and his son (Max Irons) - another putative author desperate for his father's encouragement and approval. 

The plot sees the author awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to his evident glee and greed - and the whole family decamp to Sweden for a claustrophobic and intense set of press interviews, rehearsals, cultural events and ceremonies.  It's in this pressure cooker environment that a literary biographer and journalist, played by Christian Slater, starts trying to ingratiate himself with various members of the family, provoking a final act unleashing of pent up recrimination.  And all this is illustrated for context with flashback scenes to the author and his wife meeting at college, and trying to get published in a less inclusive time.

What I love about this film is quite simply the quality of the writing (Jane Anderson - OLIVE KITTERIDGE) and acting.  The writing is so taut and intense that the movie almost plays as a stage-play between the author and his wife, and I was surprised that the film was based on a novel rather than a play. That said, the film didn't suffer, as some stage plays do, from feeling artificial and stagey when put on screen.  The director Bjorn L Runge does a great job of using location shooting and the grandeur of some of the ceremonies to open up the visual scope of the film.

Nonetheless, this film is a chamber piece and lives or dies by the quality of its acting. And like its protagonist, THE WIFE is a movie that is quiet, elegant, unshowy, but with profoundly held emotions. Glenn Close plays Joan with a stillness that's echoed in her younger flashback self, played by her real-life daughter Annie Starke. We see both avatars observe, absorb, almost passively.  It's a set of beautifully controlled and thus powerful performances that play powerfully against Pryce/Harry Lloyd's bombast. Of the minor characters, I also really loved DOWNTON ABBEY's Elzabeth McGovern as a jaded female author.  

As the movie rolls into its final act, what I was concerned about was that it would sacrifice the slow build of creating a nuanced character for a pyrotechnic showdown, but no - that confrontation when it comes rings true to the characters it had established. All of the wife's actions and reactions felt authentic, plausible, even admirable. And I loved the rather delicate, slippery final shot. 

THE WIFE is rated R and has a running time of 99 minutes. It played Toronto 2017 and was released last year. It is now available to rent and own.  

ANTHROPOID

Writer-director-cinematographer Sean Ellis (CASHBACK) returns to our screens with a period thriller based on the true story of the assassination of the SS officer Reinhard Heydrich during World War Two.  Operation Anthropoid had Czech soldier parachuted back into the country by the British, collaborating with what was left of the Czech Resistance, scouting out Heydrich's typical route out of Prague Castle, to gun him down. History tells us that the initial attack was thought a failure, but that Heydrich did indeed die of his wounds.  The men responsible for the assassination - the only successful high-ranking assassination of a Nazi - were betrayed and after a courageous 6 hour gunfight in a church - killed. The SS razed villages and killed thousands of Czechs in reprisal. But Czecho was, as a result, seen as an ally and the Munich Agreement nullified.

It's testament to the film that despite knowing the history of Anthropoid, I was genuinely gripped by it.  The tension of planning and executing the attack was painful and the final shoot-out in the Church exquisitely choreographed and genuinely emotionally affecting. Most of all, the brutal scenes of torture were truly unforgettable and a final moral confrontation haunting.  I also love the fact that Ellis chooses to shoot the film in Prague, using many Czech actors to lend the film authenticity, and indeed show the source material respect. The problem is, however, that it forces his British lead actors into adopting what I am sure they must think are Czech accents. The film survives because of the force of Cillian Murphy's lead performance, which more than offsets Jaime Dornan's weaker contribution.

ANTHROPOID is rated R and has a running time of 120 minutes. The film is on release in the USA and UK.

WOLF HALL - TV PREVIEW

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex and
Lord Chancellor to King Henry VIII

You can listen to a podcast preview of Wolf Hall here:


I am a desperate fan of Hilary Mantel's superbly researched, intricately crafted, slippery novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. Though a Catholic, I have been surprised and fascinated by her sympathetic depiction of Thomas Cromwell and critical depiction of Saint Thomas More. Growing up in England where the history of the Tudors looms large in our school curriculum, our TV history and costume dramas, it was astounding to find someone who had a genuinely fresh perspective. What was even more impressive was Mantel's technical achievement to situate us so firmly in Cromwell's perspective and position, and to make this famous historic period seem contemporary and fresh. We don't meet Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn until Cromwell meets them. His own domestic vicissitudes loom large. Business, politics, religion - all seem vital, close, real and urgent rather than faded, distant and epic. And Mantel's great historic figures are real people with their weakness, moral failings, occasional nobilities, suffering and humour. The greatest example of this is her treatment of Cardinal Wolsey. He isn't just a rapacious, arrogant, power-hungry bogeyman but a fragile and fallen, perhaps delusional optimist who deserves our sympathy and Cromwell's fierce loyalty.

The challenge for any adaptation of the what will eventually become three novels is how to keep that sense of freshness, and how to keep Cromwell's perspective.  And in the case of the BBC's new six part adaptation of the two densely written published novels: how to condense the material without losing its sophistication, and how to present it for a prime time audience without dumbing it down.  I have seen the first two episodes of WOLF HALL and I can confirm that director Peter Kosminsky (THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR) and writer Peter Straughan (FRANK) have kept faith with Mantel and all her readers: this adaptation is dense, uncompromising, and centred firmly on Cromwell.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING is a well-acted but ultimately banal biopic of the famous physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) as told from the perspective of his first wife Jane (Felicity Jones).  As it opens, the young couple meet at Oxford University in the 1960s and are immediately smitten with each other.  Almost simultaneous with their courtship over the first half hour of the film is the discovery that Stephen suffers from Motor Neurone disease with perhaps only two years left to live.  It is testament to Jane's courage that she refuses to be shut out of Stephen's life and drops her own studies to marry him, raise his children and nurse him as he makes his reputation as one of the great scientists of our age.  But as we move into the second half of the film, while they both clearly still love each other, the cracks are starting to show.  Jane, who has always been religious in contrast to Stephen's atheism, falls in love with her Church choir leader, an earnest widower who becomes a kind of surrogate husband and father with Stephen's apparent blessing.  And then Stephen, forced to have a tracheotomy, and before he gets the computer voice we have come to associate with him, falls for his physical therapist.

THE IRON LADY

Cards on the table. I grew up in Thatcher's Britain and I am a Thatcherite.  To my mind, she transformed a country that was bankrupt (the IMF had been called in) and crippled by the unions, hamstrung by high inflation and generally down on its heels.  She created an environment in which the ambitious could work hard and prosper, revitalised industry, and won so many of the ideological battles that are now taken for granted in a political system where even the left acknowledges the victory of capitalism over socialism.  That is not to say that Thatcher was faultless.  She also created an atmosphere in the UK which was absolutely poisonous - the early 80s were a godawful time to live in Britain where political battles spilled out onto the streets.  Those of who grew up against a background of the Brixton Riots and the Miners Strike can only look at last summer's riots and find them quaint.  Moreover, the fighting qualities that enabled her to triumph over vested interests in her party and in the country, when fuelled by the adrenaline of her third election victory, led to a kind of hubristic, roughshod rule that allowed the massive miscalculation of the Poll Tax.  And if she was right in criticising the wets, and that treacherous little shit, Geoffrey Howe, she was wrong in underestimating their desire to unseat her.  Still, for all that, Thatcher remains a Prime Minister undefeated in a General Election; a woman who did what she thought was right, not what the focus groups said would be popular; and who left the country prosperous rather than bankrupt.   

What was her record as a wife and mother? Frankly I didn't care.  Nor did I view it as something upon which any outsider should be invited to pass judgement. I suppose that, when forced to take a stance, my view of Denis Thatcher is that, much like Prince Philip, he was probably a lot smarter than the Private Eye spoof "Dear Bill" would have him.  And I think the tragically risible public persona of Carol Thatcher, and the nefarious but incompetent activities of Mark Thatcher, say more than anything how neglected and coddled they were respectively. But in all honesty, why does any of this matter?  I was on holiday in Dubai recently and saw an advert for a news programme on BBC World. It roughly went along the lines of "Uprisings in some far away place - George Aligayah will explain what it means to YOU!"  The implication was that in this new post-modern world of "feelings" rather than "thinking" the news only had merit and relevance if it had an impact on MY life. Whatever happened to the idea that great events deserved my attention because they are important, irrespective of whether they affect ME?  When did narcissism and solipsism become the only virtues? 

Now, if you've seen the movie THE IRON LADY, and trawled through the previous two paragraphs, you'll see why I despise and discard it.  Screenwriter Abi Morgan (SHAME, BRICK LANE) and director Phyllida Lloyd (MAMMA MIA!) have utterly squandered their opportunity to use Meryl Streep's pitch-perfect impersonation of Thatcher in a movie that shows us "feelings" where it could have given us "ideas" - a movie that shows us a rather anonymous picture of an old lady struggling against senile dementia, when it could've given us a hard-nosed political biography. Whether or  not you love or hate Margaret Thatcher's politics, you cannot but admit that she radically altered the face of Britain, nor that she deserves a serious, cogent and considered evaluation.  But this is a movie about a politician that seems oddly uninterested in her politics. That, of course, is the charitable reading.  One could argue that the movie is too stupid to make an evaluation - too gutless to come down in favour or against - too commercially minded to risk alienating any part of the audience.  As a result, it condemns itself to an alternative purpose - to show the tragedy of an old woman losing her grasp on reality - an altogether more banal enterprise, and one that hardly needs the services of Meryl Streep.

Let me essay briefly how the politics is betrayed. There is no real Edward Heath.  There is no Neil Kinnock. No Gorbachev.  No Nigel Lawson!  Heseltine is a caricature pantomime villain - Richard E Grant is only allowed enough room to characterise him with a badly dyed blonde haircut.  Howe (Anthony Head) is seen as a victim of Thatcher's brutality - but one doesn't come away understanding that it was policy toward Europe that did for him and her - a policy which contemporary events show us was exactly right!  Major events - the Brixton riots, the Falklands, the poll tax - are shown as video montages - there is no colour, no insight.  And the Brighton bombing is used as a tool to show us that Thatcher loved Denis - not as a tool to show us Thatcher's particular reaction to terrorism.  What politics is shown, is the politics of feminism. Again and again, the film wants us to see Thatcher succeeding despite her sex and class. But this is a complete misreading. Thatcher was no feminist.  She did not promote women and far preferred the company of men.  She succeeded because she was talented and expected other women to do the same. 

Can one make a good film about Thatcher that has nothing to do with politics? Should one allow for a film to be entertaining even if it utterly betrays the politics of its purported subject? Perhaps. Meryl Streep certainly does a good impression of Margaret, and her ability to convey the younger and older Thatcher is impressive.  Oscar-worthy? Maybe not. I very much liked Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd (Viserys in GAME OF THRONES) as the young Margaret and Denis.  And in the later years, Olivia Colman is sympathetic as Carol Thatcher. But these good performances are under-cut by utterly ham-fisted direction. Phyllida Lloyd betrays her origin in directing musicals and opera in how she arranges her characters on screen and where she places her camera.  There are too many shots of people shuffling into parliament, or walking down stairs in parliament, or walking into ornate dining halls, with Thatcher the only woman among a sea of dark suits. Yes, we get it.  Now, move on.  Even better, jog on.  Make room for a better director, one who has the balls to grasp Thatcher's legacy by the throat, and give us the movie we, and she, deserves.

THE IRON LADY is on release in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Ireland and in New York and LA. It goes on wide release in the US on January 13th, as well as in Greece, the Netherlands, Canada and Turkey. It opens on January 27th in Finland and Italy; on February 3rd in Hungary, Sweden and Norway; on February 10th in Portugal and Poland; on February 16th in Belgium, France, Singapore and Lithuania; on March 1st in Germany and on March 8th in Denmark and Hong Kong.