THE APPRENTICE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 9

Roy Cohn was one of the most toxic and pervasive influences on America in the past century. The irony was that the morally corrupt lawyer was also a closeted gay man, supporting the Reagan administration in its anti-AIDS policies as he himself was dying of AIDS. He is such a notorious and influential figure that he was portrayed by Al Pacino in the HBO adaptation of Angels In America. That was a performance so strong and so well-written that I can quote lines to this day.  But in this new film, Jeremy Strong (Succession) has surpassed it.

Jeremy Strong's Roy Cohn is a despicable man. Racist, homophobic (ironically) and a capitalist red in tooth and claw.  His patriotism lies in an any means necessary preservation of right-wing governance. His legal practice relies on blackmail and intimidation. Strong plays him as a wiry deeply-tanned man of unflinching self-confidence.  But he also plays him as a man who loves and is loyal, and who throws that love and all of its protection on the awkward star-struck suburban hick Donald J Trump.

In this film we see Roy take Trump under his wing, blackmail away his Federal lawsuit on racially discriminatory leasing and achieve a massive City tax abatement for Trump's first large Manhattan development deal. Roy teaches him to always attack, to create his own truth, and to never ever concede defeat. He also teaches him to dress expensively - in those awful boxy dark navy Brioni suits - in order to wash the suburban cheapness off of him. 

Why does he do this? The film implies that maybe there was sexual attraction at first. It's hard to imagine the obese tangerine hairball as attractive but he was young once. But soon the relationship has become far more paternal. Cohn recognise that Fred Trump is a toxic bully - driving one son to alcoholism and the other to a kind of macho posturing as self-protection.  

This makes it all the more heartbreaking when a now superficially successful Trump, at the height of his 80s pomp, turns his back on a now very sick Cohn.  It's testament to Strong's performance that despite the fact that I despise the real life man, I felt desperately sorry for him in his final scene. He looks both proud of his monstrous creation and heartbroken that he has been disavowed. 

And what of Sebastian Stan's young Trump? This is an equally masterful performance. When we first meet him he is gauche and uncertain and obsequious.  By the end of the film he is inflated in ego and stomach alike, impotent thanks to amphetamines, balding and intimidated by his wife. But he has absolutely absorbed Cohn's lessons and become the author of his own mythos. He has adopted the pursed lips and scornful eyes and hand gestures synonymous with the Trump that we know today. And yet Stan never becomes a caricature.  

As Cohn is buried, the one-way love story of Roy for Donald is over, and the one-way love story of Trump for Trump has begun. He is having the fat sucked out his body - a symbol if ever there was one of excessive bile and obscene gorging on the carcass of America. 

Kudos to director Ali Abbasi (HOLY SPIDER) and writer Gabriel Sherman (INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE) for having the guts to tackle this project, even at the risk of making Trump seem sympathetic at the start and Cohn seem sympathetic at the end. I am particularly impressed that they had the guts to include a scene where Trump, his ego insulted, rapes Ivana.  This is something she alleged in her divorce proceedings and which he accused her of cooking up. The motivation for it seems utterly in keeping with what we know about his narcissism. The scene made me consider the role of the actress Maria Bakalova in the fever dream that has been MAGA America - acting the part of a rape victim in this account of Trump's life, and then being treated as a sexual favour by the real life Rudy Giuliani in BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM.  

But if the courage of all involved in this film is to be praised, then we must also condemn the gutless moral midgetry of every self-avowed liberal Hollywood distributor and streaming service that didn't have the balls to take this movie on in the face of Trump's bulshit legal threats. 

THE APPRENTICE has a running time of 120 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London 2024. It opened in the USA on October 11th and in the UK on October 18th.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Aaron Sorkin follows up his directorial debut MOLLY'S GAME with a movie whose subject is far more in his wheelhouse, and what an energetic, pointed, anger-making film he has created in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7.  Its concerns are those that Sorkin has explored throughout his career:  the liberal fight against injustice, corruption and political repression.  He cast these ideas in a warm-fuzzy light where optimism won in his hit TV show The West Wing. He was angrier and more cynical in The Newsroom.  And in the Trump era, the anger is rightly turned up, and the absurdity of a system wherein the rule of law has been bent out of all recognition fully explored.  

The film opens with a montage that takes us back to the 1960s and the potent combination of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protests. We see RFK beg for calm after the assassination of MLK before himself being assassinated. We then zoom in to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Protestors flooded into the City hoping to protest Vietnam in front of the media outside the convention hotel soon clashed with the police brutally trying to keep them away.  Once Nixon is elected his regime decides to prosecute the so-called ringleaders of the riots for Conspiracy to Incite Riots and other charges, even throwing in iconic Black Panther Bobby Seale, who had no part of it, for good measure.  The charges were clearly trumped up, the judge (Frank Langella) was clearly biased and bogus, the jury was tampered with to ensure a friendly verdict, and the defendants were clearly there just to be made an example of.

Sacha Baron Cohen is absolutely note perfect as Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman. He gets all the funniest lines because he is most comfortable with showing the absurdity of proceedings.  But it's Eddie Redmayne that has the more interesting role as Tom Hayden - the apparently more sensible, less showy leader of a student protest movement who hates Hoffman's grandstanding. Much of the intellectual back and forth of the movie comes between them as they throw barbs about how best to serve the movement.  And they are joined in a kind of Sorkin Triumvirate of Repartee by Mark Rylance as progressive attorney William Kunstler. It's so clear that the prosecution is bent (despite an ill-conceived attempt to soften Joseph Gordon-Levitt's prosecution attorney) that all the real intellectual fun is to be had in the arguments WITHIN the defense.  

The result is a courtroom drama that is thrilling and rightly anger-making, and a movie where Sorkin's trademark razor-sharp combative dialogue is absolutely right for the job.  But he has also come on leaps and bounds as a director of action. The way in which he reconstructs the riot as he interrogates the version of events that Tom Hayden is telling himself is a visual and editorial tour-de-force.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 has been released on Netflix due to Covid. It has a running time of 127 minutes and is rated R.

MOLLY'S GAME

Molly Bloom is a real life criminal who ran an illegal high stakes poker game in Hollywood and then New York. She raked the game, laundered money for the Russian mob, and if not illegally then unethically, exploited men with a gambling addiction to enrich herself. Eventually she was caught up in a Federal investigation into the mob and without spoiling the ending, this film sees her battling those charges while recounting her history.  

Bloom is played by a characteristically high class Jessica Chastain, more or less reprising her role in the superb MISS SLOANE. Her Bloom is smart, no-nonsense, and unsympathetic - a woman whose profession is clearly both illegal and unethical - and the game is to guess whether underneath all that selfishness they're a moral compass. Bloom's lawyer, played by Idris Elba, and the director/writer Aaron Sorkin, are convinced.  They give us a film in which Bloom is portrayed as a heroine who refused to sell out her players and ruin their lives by giving the Feds her records. This might be more convincing if played with some nuance - if we didn't have bombastic TWELVE ANGRY MEN speeches from Elba - and if it didn't contradict everything we see of Molly in the film. Yes, she might offer to get a player help with his addiction, but only after she's soaked him for days on end.  Sorkin shows us someone who is a predator on the weak - but he tells us that after all, she really cares about their families. We're also asked to believe that Bloom, as smart as she is, as rapier-fast and witty as her Sorkin dialogue is, didn't realise that when Russian mafiosi turned up with cash in satchels that they weren't money laundering - that she wasn't aiding and abetting pretty nasty crimes from happening. Sorry I'm just not buying it.  The other thing that jarred was Sorkin's trademark mansplaining. We get both the lawyer character and Bloom's father (Kevin Costner) try to explain to her and us why she did what she did. There Sorkin goes again - setting up a smart female character only to cut her off at the knees.

Thus, for all the brilliant acting and snappy dialogue, I just couldn't get into a film whose central character premise I didn't buy in to. I just didn't believe in Sorkin's version of Molly.  And that made the film a long - too long - dull slog through the legal machinations, and an ending that felt unearned. If you want to see Chastain playing a strong female character who actually owns her fate, doesn't need men to explain it to her, in a tightly paced, beautifully photographed movie, check out MISS SLOANE instead. 

MOLLY'S GAME has a running time of 140 minutes and is rated R. In the UK it is rated 15 for strong language, drug misuse and brief violence.

The film played Toronto 2016 and was released last year in Croatia, the Netherlands and the USA. It opened earlier this year in the UK, Ireland, France, Argentina, Greece, Hungary, Kuwait, Portugal, Singapore, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and the USA. It opens on January 11th in Russia, on Jan 19th in Sweden, on Jan 25th in Australia, on Jan 26th in Finland, on Jan 27th in Mexico, on Feb 2nd in Taiwan, on Feb 22nd in Brazil, Denmark, Thailand and Norway, on March 1st in Hong Kong and on March 8th in Germany.

ZERO DARK THIRTY

It's taken me a while to get the necessary distance to review Kathryn Bigelow's controversial but critically acclaimed CIA procedural thriller, ZERO DARK THIRTY. The movie is meant to be an account of how US intelligence tracked down Osama Bin Laden, ending with a recreation on the fatal raid on his house in Abbotabad.  But it goes further than just being a fiction inspired by facts, as Tony Kushner would claim for the scrupulously researched LINCOLN.  Rather, Bigelow's movie opens with a statement of aggressive alignment with the truth, before playing real telephone calls from the Twin Towers.  So, before we even see an actor on screen, Bigelow has asked us to take her movie as THE definitive truth, and emotionally manipulated us by playing harrowing real audio from Bin Laden's most devastating terrorist attack.

We then move into the first two hours of the film, which is basically a standard police procedural, except that it features copious quantities of torture, which are shown to provide the information that leads directly to Bin Laden. Jessica Chastain is perfectly cast as Maya. She looks vulnerable and slight and this nicely contradicts her determination to the follow a slight lead despite her superiors' scepticism, even to the point of participating in graphically and unrelentingly depicted torture.  Of course, one can see Bigelow's not too thinly veiled metaphor for a female director's struggle in Hollywood, and every scene of genuine peril or tension is offset by the scenes of clichéd struggle against The Man. Did the real Maya theatrically and childishly use a marker to chalk up how many days the CIA knew about Abbotabad and refused to act?  Would a character as senior as Mark Strong's director really unleash a standard macho shouty tirade at his team?  It all felt rather written by rote. This was most evident in the sequence where a colleague of Maya's arranges a meeting with a potential lead - a meeting that is built up to be tense but where I was always aware of its dramatic purpose and obvious consequences.

The part of the movie that worked best for me was the final half hour, where Bigelow meticulously depicts the raid on Abbotabad, showing great technical accomplishment in her use of night vision equipment in conjunction with standard camera lenses, working in zero natural light.  I also respected the discretion with which she hinted at, but did not show the death and body of Bin Laden. And perhaps the  most finely judged dramatic moment of the film is the final shot, where Maya, mission accomplished, is left with the horrible existential, deeply political question "where do you want to go?"

The problem is that ZERO DARK THIRTY only deals in such political and moral sophistication in its final scene.  Up to that point, we are in no doubt that it is torture that produces the information that leads to Bin Laden.  For Bigelow, and her screenwriter Mark Boal, to suggest that they are just neutrally depicted "what happened" is disingenuous.  This is problematic.  Not only because it severely streamlines and simplifies a very complex issue, but because movies do not exist in a social and political vacuum as pure works of art with no consequences.  I am unsurprised to see the CIA measured but clearly angry denial that this is an accurate portrait of the hunt for Bin Laden, and to say that the content of this film will be inflammatory in certain quarters is an understatement. 

ZERO DARK THIRTY is on release in the USA, Spain, Canada, the Philippines, Taiwan, Portugal, Macedonia, France, Juwait, the Netherlands, Singapore, Finland, Ireland and the UK. It opens on January 31st in Belgium, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Lithuania, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on February 8th in Denmark, Italy, Estonia, Iceland, Norway and Poland. It opens on February 15th in Brazil and Japan; and on February 22nd in Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Russia and Bulgaria.

ZERO DARK THIRTY is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 157 minutes.

ROBOT & FRANK

ROBOT & FRANK is a delicate film that breaks your heart, makes you think, and all with the lightest of touch.  It's also an astonishingly assured debut feature from Jake Schreier (director) and Christopher D Ford (screenplay).  Set in the near future, Frank Langella plays a retired cat burgler called Frank, afflicted by Alzheimer's but charmingly no-nonsense and wily.  His concerned son Harrison (James Marsden) buys Frank a Robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard) to get him onto a routine and make sure he eats right.  Frank is wary at first, but eventually warms to the Robot who provides him with companionship, and indeed, facilitates a return to crime - ripping off their smarmy yuppie neighbours.  

The movie works on many levels.  At its most obvious, it's a loose sci-fi film, although those viewers looking for detailed applications of the laws of robotics per Asimov will be disappointed. Instead, the film is more concerned with the emotional implications of forming an attachment to a robot, and plays more like the most intelligent buddy-movie you've ever seen.  All this despite the fact that Robot is always reminding Frank that the friendship can't be real because Robot is, well, just a robot.  The sad fact remains that for Frank, Robot is a much more real emotional presence than his distant son or irritatingly right-on daughter (Liv Tyler). There's also a light critique of urban yuppies moving to the country, an a melancholy lament for the printed word that touched a chord with me.

Frank Langella gives a charismatic central performance as Frank. He's charming and grouchy all at once, but never in that mean grinchy Clint Eastwood way.  He always keeps us guessing as to how much Frank really knows what's happening, and how much his Alzheimer's is taking over.  I really loved Peter Sarsgaard as Robot too.  He has a melancholy tone to his voice that's just perfect - there's empathy if you want to read it that way, but neutrality if you don't.  I cared about the two of them, even though Robot was telling me not too. Special mention too for Susan Sarandon who gives perhaps the most challenging performance in a small role as a librarian that Frank befriends. 

Overall, ROBOT & FRANK is one of those surprising rare birds - a fragile movie that wears its deep thinking lightly and creates memorable characters and stirs deep emotions. I'm not ashamed to say that in two deeply poignant scenes near the end of the film, it got a little dusty in the theatre.

ROBOT & FRANK played Sundance 2012 where Jake Schreier won the Alfred P Sloan Feature Film Prize, and Sitges 2012 where he won the Audience Award for Best Feature Film.  It was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, France, Kosovo, Kuwait, Taiwan, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand. It opens in Hong Kong on January 31st; in Portugal on March 7th; in the UK on March 8th; and in Spain on May 24th. 

ROBOT & FRANK has a 89 minute running time and was rated PG-13 in the USA. 

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - THE ROMANTICS

THE ROMANTICS is a movie about a bunch of late-twenties college friends reunited at the Long Island wedding of two of the group. The marriage forces the group to re-assess their friendships, loyalties and sexual attraction - and all this should create tension around whether the wedding between Tom and Lila (Josh Duhamel and Anna Paquin) will actually go ahead given that Laura (Katie Holmes) is still carrying a torch for the groom. The audience is meant to be drawn into the emotional lives of characters who feel mixed-up and sympathetic - just like us! And debut feature director, Galt Niederhoffer (adapting her own novel, employs lots of obvious tricks to try and manufacture that empathy and a sense that we are watching an hip counter-culture indie flick rather than an inauthentic Hollywood rom-com: gloomy lighting; painfully indie sound-track; deliberately obscure ending. Sadly though, the film fails on every level. Casting 40 year olds like Josh Duhamel breaks the credibility of the film, especially when we're meant to believe he was a peer of THE OC's Adam Brody. The acting is universally bad and yet for diametrically opposite reasons: chip-board performances from Duhamel and Katie Holmes but hammy, over-the-top acting from Elijah Woods, Malin Akerman and Anna Paquin. The whole thing struck me as self-indulgent; pretentious; inauthentic and dull, dull, dull. Distributors were right to scorn it: there is a reason why it appeared in the UK as a straight to video/TV release. 

THE ROMANTICS played Sundance 2010 and was released in 2010 in the US and Slovenia. It was released in Iceland in March 2011.