SYLVIA - dirge

The first film I ever watched at the London Film Fest started a trend of disappointing opening and closing night galas - the programming dictated by commercial interests rather than artistic merit. The movie was Christine Jeffs' dismal biopic of Sylvia Plath: acclaimed poet; wife of the adulterous Ted Hughes; mother to two small children; and suicide. And if you think I'm being reductive, then that is exactly what this movie does: it reduces Plath and Hughes' relationship to a daytime TV melodrama. Oh how pretty tony, young Sylvia (Gwyneth Paltrow) looks! See how her hair shines! See how that devilishly handsome Ted Hughes gets tired of her and betrays her! See how she is martyred in a dismal British flat in dismal post-war London! Oh, how Paltrow emotes inner pain! The whole thing was utterly dull and unconvincing. The fault, however, does not lie with the actors, nor with the score, cinematography or any other matter of execution. It lies in the movie's conception as a touching homage to Sylvia rather than a genuinely engaged, insightful analysis of what was, by all accounts, a passionate marriage and a painful suicide that cruelly left behind small children. The resulting film simultaneously caused offence to Plath's family for daring to be made at all - but causes offence to its viewers by refusing to actually delve into the emotional torment at its heart. It is the same emotional evation that frustrated me in Christine Jeffs' new film, SUNSHINE CLEANING - another film that deals with quite dark, depressing subject matter and yet handles it with all the willingness to truly engage of a rom-com (but without the benefit of actual laughs).

SYLVIA played London 2003 and opened in 2003 and 2004. It is available on DVD.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON - technically brilliant, emotionally sterile

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is a very, very long, oppressive movie based on a very, very short, funny story about F Scott Fitzgerald. The only commonality is that both book and film are about a man called Benjamin who is born as an old man and ages backwards - through decrepitude, into middle-age, to the sexual immaturity, childhood to infancy and then death. His life experiences come in the right order, but his body rebels. As a newly born old man he has cataracts and arthritis. As a long-lived infant he suffers from dementia. In middle age, he has to grapple with how to live someone who is "going the other way".

The movie is broadly speaking, an elegy. An elegy for the young men who died needlessly in World War One and the old men slaughtered in front of Benjamin's eyes in World War Two. It's an elegy for lost opportunity and failed marriages. It's an elegy for those who we condemn to death before their time, shutting them away in nursing homes, fit only for ceremonial visits once a year. Finally, most clumsily, it's an elegy for the New Orleans that was destroyed in Katrina.

Insofar as the movie works at all, the first ninety minutes pass quickly. The viewer is mesmerized by the fairy-tale feel of the story - enlivened by the fabulist prologue concerning a blind watchmaker and tales of a man struck by lightening seven times. I could have used more of that charming whimsy. The movie simply looks fantastic, and as David Fincher and DP Claudio Miranda take us into steamy brothels, misty tug boats, and shabby Soviet hotels, the senses are overwhelmed. 

Where the movie falls down is when the traveling stops and Benjamin returns home after the war and we focus on his relationship with Daisy. She was fascinated by him as a child, throws herself at him as a twenty-something, rejects him at thirty and finally has a passionate affair with him in her forties. They "meet in the middle", but their tragedy is that they cannot grow old together. I think this part of the movie failed for me because I just didn't buy into why Daisy would find Benjamin so fascinating - a character who has become a passive observer of a world he is separated from by his freakish aging process. I find passive heroes very hard to get a hold of. I also just didn't buy into the motivation that underpins a major decision at the centre of the second half of the film. And if you don't buy into it - if you don't feel you are being swept up in an emotional tragedy - the second half of the movie is a pretty tedious affair.

All of which got me thinking what I really liked about the film. It certainly wasn't the passive performance from Brad Pitt as Benjamin or the rather typically good but not outstanding performance from Cate Blanchett as Daisy. Rather, I responded to the little vignettes, and the colourful characters that filled the margins of the story.  Taraji P Henson, Tilda Swinton and Jared Harris all give strong performances but the latter is particularly charismatic as the drunken Irish sailor who takes a semi-decrepit Benjamin from his "child-hood" home in New Orleans to Communist Russia and thence to World War Two. In addition, there's also something fascinating and funny about "fish out of water" stories. To that end, seeing an old-looking but pre-teen Benjamin visit a brothel or get drunk is wonderfully funny. But let's not get too pretentious. It's the same brand of entertainment as FREAKY FRIDAY.

So, in the final analysis, for me BENJAMIN BUTTON is a game of two halves - a beautifully made, elegaic fable enlivened by the odd flash of raucous humour, somehow hitched to a film that tries to be an epic love story but left me cold. 

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON opened in 2008 in the US and Australia. It opened earlier in 2009 in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, Sweden, Egypt, Greece, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Venezuela. It opens this weekend in Belgium, France, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Estonia, Italy, Norway, the UK and Japan. It opens next weekend in South Korea and on February 20th in Finland.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE - brilliant woman; brilliant movie

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE is the latest film from the director of cult movie, AMERICAN PYSCHO, Mary Harron. The movie is a biopic of Bettie Page - one of the most famous pin-ups of the 1950s.

The first thing to say is that THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE is a beautifully produced film. Using black and white and colour photography, Harron creates a picture postcard nostalgic vision of the US in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The sets, costumes and music are all perfect - and for those of us with a bent toward the music of Artie Shaw and Patsy Cline, this is a soundtrack to die for.

Against this background we have Bettie Page herself - brought to life by Gretchen Mol. It's a break-out performance. Mol conveys Page's complex mix of intelligence, religious fervour and sheer unabashed delight in her own naked form. The combination of Bettie's peaches and cream megawatt smile and the bondage gear is devestating.

I also love that Harron resists doing the usual melodramatic rise and fall of the tragic heroine schtick. Bettie does have a horrid upbringing in Nashville, but this is handled discreetly and with sensitivity. At the height of her notoriety she keeps a level, thoughtful head. And when she does give it all up for a life of preaching there is no shock conversion or melo-dramatic renouncement - she simply starts reading the Bible to passers-by. And no, she is not ashamed of what she did - she's just following a different path now. Best of all, Harron avoids the big-drama Congressional Hearing show-down that I feared we were building up to throughout the movie.

Overall then, THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE is a cracking movie. It's always a pleasure to see a strong, beautiful, in-control woman on screen. And it's great to see a textured view both of the religious South and the New York porn industry. Others may patronise Bettie for her apparently simple-minded belief in Jesus, but the movie never does. And while Bettie perhaps got into poses a little racier than she at first realised, there is undoubtedly more overt sexual exploitation in her wholesome childhood town than in the photographic studios of New York.

What more can I say? This is a beautifully produced, fascinating movie about an intelligent, beautiful woman who gains control over her life and happiness. And all without an ounce of Schmaltz.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE premiered at Toronto 2005 and went on limited release in the US & Canada in April 2006. It goes on release in the UK on Friday and comes out on Region 1 DVD in September.