WILD - LFF14 - Day Six

You can listen to a short podcast review of this film here:



This movie is based upon the autobiography of Cheryl Strayed, a college student utterly undone by the death of her mother, who became a sex and drug addict, ruined her marriage and decided to hike the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail over three months to clear her head and come to some kind of self-awareness and self-acceptance. 

This could have made for a fascinating and moving story in the manner of last year’s LFF entry, TRACKS, or maybe INTO THE WILD. However, the key defining point of those two movies is that they are not afraid to show their protagonists getting kicked around by life and nature. When Mia Wasikowska tracks through the Australian desert her lips are cracked, her face raw with hot wind, her limbs burned and blistered. We’re not sure what she has come to understand about life but her struggle with it feels credible and her character realistically equivocal. By contrast, in WILD, Reese Witherspoon never allows her character to get roughed up. She hikes for months and complains about stinking but always has squeaky clean hair and a fresh face. Save for the bruises of martyrdom from her backpack and one opening shot of a bloody toenail it’s not credible that she’s undertaking this journey. Her kit always looks freshly laundered. Moreover, she doesn’t seem to encounter any real adversity. Her backpack is comically to heavy to lift up in the first scene, but after thirty seconds she’s walking with it happily. Every man who might be a threat turns out to be charming and even the forest services give her coffee and a donut. Where’s the self-realisation through suffering there? The underwhelming nature of the trip is summed up by the final shot at the Bridge of God - we have been led to believe by its name that this will provide some great epiphany but hey it’s just a steel suspension bridge and she looks at it rather wanly and doesn’t even cross it.

If all this weren’t bad enough, Cheryl’s hiking trip is intercut with flashbacks to her past. Her mother (Laura Dern) is portrayed as a kind of saint - every perfect, smiling, singing and wise. No wonder Cheryl took to heroine failing to live up to this unblemished mother figure. And let’s be honest, there is apparently a limit to how bad Reese Witherspoon will let herself look, even when playing a junkie shooting up in a squat. Contrast this with the actress playing junkie Sanne in Susanne Bier’s stunningly good drama about grief, A SECOND CHANCE. Now that’s how you do emotional trauma and redemption. The final insult is a technical one. You’d think that a movie that spends this long in nature reserves would contain some amazing landscape photography of the kind we found in Mike Leigh’s MR TURNER or Fatih Akin’s THE CUT. But no - director Jean-Marc Vallee (DALLAS BUYERS CLUB) and cinematographer Yves Belanger - give us nothing that is out of the ordinary - nothing that makes us feel Cheryl’s head clear and her heart soar. 

Overall, one can’t help but feel that this is a cynical attempt for Reese Witherspoon to break out of the rom-com’s she’s now too old for and to earn an Oscar. I know it’s a thin year in the Best Actress race but it would be shocking indeed to see this do well either in awards season or at the box office. Avoid.

WILD has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Telluride, Toronto and London 2014. It opens in the USA on December 5th, in the UK on January 16th, in Estonia on January 30th, in Germany, New Zealand, Austria and Romania on February 5th, in Denmark, Italy and Portugal on February 19th, in the Netherlands on February 26th, in Belgium, France and Norway on March 5th.

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB is a mediocre meandering film that just happens to contain two highly committed captivating performances.

The movie is inspired by the true story of Ron Woodruff, a good ole boy from Texas with all the associated bigotries, who was diagnosed as HIV positive in the mid-80s. It was an unforgiving era of paranoia about the AIDS epidemic, when doctors approached you with masks, and your community shunned you.  Add onto this the macho culture of a Texan rodeo town, and you have a desperate man, consigned to the margins, with a deep-grained prejudice toward his fellow victims.  What follows isn't a schmaltzy emotional enlightenment, a la PHILADELPHIA.  When Ron becomes close to Rayon, a pre-op transexual, it's because he needs an in to the gay subculture where he can peddle his under-the-counter anti-HIV meds, partly to finance his own use. To be sure, there are hints and flashes of a deeper understanding, and maybe affection, blighted only by Rayon's drug use, but this isn't that kind of movie.

What kind of movie is it? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure the writers are either.  At times, it feels like an odd couple dramedy with a mean old homophobe discovering his heart.  And at other times, it feels like they're trying to make an ERIN BROCKOVICH type issues move - equally concerned with Ron's fight against Big Pharma, and its rigged clinical trials pushing AZT as a treatment.  In the final act, the movie even pushes Ron into a courtroom drama, where he is demanding the right to take other medications that have not been approved by the FDA.  And the movie kind of fizzles out, and we learn that the Big Bad AZT actually wasn't so bad at all, apparently. Which is a bit of a damp squib conclusion.

By this point I'd come to the conclusion that DALLAS BUYERS CLUB was not a film with a unique and powerful directorial vision that director Jean Marc Vallée's debut feature had.  It's best viewed as a delivery vehicle for two great performances. The first of these is the least surprising: Matthew McConaughey has reinvented himself as a boundary-pushing character actor of the highest quality in BERNIE, KILLER JOE, MUD, THE PAPERBOY and  now here.  He doesn't shy away from showing the cold selfish arrogance of Woodruff, even in his supposedly reformed state, but also never lets him become a monster or a saint. It's a nuanced and fantastic performance.  The second great performance is from Jared Leto, as the pre-op transexual Rayan - vulnerable, world-wise, loving, damaged.  Both deserve the awards-season plaudits they're getting. So, is this a genuine BEST PICTURE contender? No. Is is worth seeing? Yes.  Beyond doubt.

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB played Toronto 2013 and was released last year in the USA and Canada. It was released last month in Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, France, Israel, Italy and Finland.  It was released early this month in Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, the UK, Ireland and Mexico. The movie opens this weekend in Australia and Greece; on February 20th in Hong Kong, New Zealand, Slovakia, Brazil and Japan; and on February 27th in Argentina, Paraguay, Turkey and South Africa. The movie opens on March 6th in Hungary, Serbia and Sweden; on March 14th in Spain and Poland and on March 21st in Norway.

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB has been nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Editor, Best Make-up and Best Original Screenplay.  It won the Best Actor and Supporting Actor Golden Globes for Drama. 

THE YOUNG VICTORIA - all this useless beauty

THE YOUNG VICTORIA is a luscious-looking film in which two rather beautiful, warm-hearted people - Queen Victoria and the future Prince Albert - meet and almost instantly realise that they will be in love for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, this happens in the first thirty minutes of the movie, and isn't enough to hold our attention for the next seventy minutes. So a lot of time is spent watching a cast of supporting characters harrumph about the lavish sets kicking over pot plants and shout like sulky teenagers* - everyone from the then Princess Victoria's uncle, the King (Jim Broadbent), to her mother's controlling adviser (Mark Strong) to Queen Victoria's slipper adviser, Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany). Poor screenwriter Julian Fellowes even resorts to throwing in a rather ridiculous act of heroism to add to the stakes, but this is all stuff and nonsense. He knows it and we know it. The simple facts are these: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert fell in love and were deeply devoted to each other, spawning nine children who went on to rule Europe. It's enough to warm the cockles of your heart, but not enough to fill a feature film. All the beauty, all the perfectly serviceable performances, are thus rather wasted. Although I must say that I was rather impressed by Rupert Friend for the first time.

(*Maybe not coincidentally, as this was a major component of director Jean-Luc Vallee's previous film, CRAZY.)

THE YOUNG VICTORIA is on release in the UK. It opens in Israel on April 2nd; in the Netherlands on April 23rd; in Russia on April 30th; in Belgium on May 6th; and in Norway on September 11th.

CRAZY is what would happen if That 70s Show had emotional heft, visual style and a guy singing Charles Azanvour songs

CRAZY is a wonderful, if somewhat structurally incoherent, movie. It tells the tale of a French-Canadian family of five sons growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. The first strand of the story is based on the child-hood experiences of director, Jean-Marc Vallee. Vallee grew up in the kind of intensely spiritual family that we see portrayed in CRAZY, with a mother whose fondest desire is to go to Jerusalem and who believes that her son has a gift for healing people. So as the family are eating “ironed toast”, or spaghetti with dad’s “special sauce”, you get random telephone calls with relative calling up to say, “Unky Herb just cut himself on a knife: pray for him, Zac!” I loved all this stuff. No-where have I empathised with a character more in recent cinema as when young Zac sits in church and imagines the priest telling everyone that “midnight mass is already too long. Why don’t you all just go home and open up your presents?!”

The second strand of the story is based on reminiscences of one of the director’s friends, Francois Boulay. Boulay apparently also grew up with four brothers, and had a tortured relationship with his father on account of his bisexuality. Zac is all over the place with his sexuality – in denial, experimenting, being brutally homophobic, and finally self-accepting. What I love about this film is that we see clearly that Zac’s mother and father love him deeply, and while the father cannot understand or condone his sexual leanings, he is only trying to protect Zac from what he perceives to be an unliveable life.

CRAZY works in part because of its wonderful observation of the small but funny incidental things that make up normal life. And let me be very clear, I laughed my way through this movie. Sure, a lot of the comedy here is specific to the fact that this is a Catholic French-Canadian family, but we can all recognise the trademarks in our own families. Here, the father sings the same old hackneyed Charles Aznavour songs every Christmas. We all have a dad or an uncle who does the same. CRAZY also works because it creates that intimate, authentic feel of watching old home-movies. I love the fact that whenever there is a big family argument, you always having your kid brother sucking a Popsicle nonchalantly in the corner. The director explained that he consciously strove for this effect. Despite shooting with one camera, he was aiming for a “second camera feel”. What he means by that is that he wanted the footage not to look properly staged and framed and lit, but as though someone had just left a camera running in the corner of the room – a camera that was picking up reactions and odd details rather than providing the perfect Hollywood close-up of the melo-dramatic family reconciliation. CRAZY also works because the cast are great to a man. Special shout outs have to go the actors playing the parents, and the two kids who play Zac. The younger Zac may be the director’s son, but this is not a case of simple nepotism –he’s absolutely fantastic. And finally, this movie has an AWESOME sound-track and uses it to the max. The tour de force is a long sequence set to the Stones’ “Sympathy for the devil”. Outstanding.

The only flaw with CRAZY is that once the excitement at seeing something so visually inventive and tragi-comic wears off you realise just how incoherent the structure of the movie is. After the first hour, the movie seems likes a random assortment of comic interludes from the life of Zac and I lost confidence that the film-maker knew exactly where he was going with it all. I came out of the screening thinking that the 127 minute movie could have been a good 45 minutes shorter and lost none of its emotional punch. My only other slight criticism is a scene near the end when Zac goes travelling and ends up in the middle of the desert. This was the one scene that felt contrived to me (apologies to Francois Boulay if it really happened) and just a little too “cute”.

At any rate, despite its tendency to feel like a funny yet over-indulgent scrap-book, CRAZY is a delightful, original, and desperately funny movie. If you are lucky enough to have it playing near you, you should definitely check it out.

CRAZY played at Toronto 2005 and opens in the UK tomorrow. It opens in France oon May 21st 2006 and in Germany on May 25th. Despite being sold to 50 countries, it has not found a US distributor. However, I think you can get hold of it on DVD.