THE RETURN**

THE RETURN is an earnest but overly attenuated retelling of the closing act of the Greek myth Odysseus. A fully shredded Ralph Fiennes stars as the king who abandoned his people for a decade long siege of Troy and then an epic years-long sea voyage home.  When we meet him he is washed up naked on his home island, hiding his true identity through shame that he returned when so many of his soldiers died.   Meanwhile his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is being harassed to take another husband among the many foreign raiders who are pillaging her lands.

We do not see the spousal reunion until around 45 minutes into the film and it's an acting tour de force.  Odysseus refuses to reveal his identity but Penelope has figured it out and asks searching questions of him - why did he abandon his family? Why did he take so long to come home? War? What Is It Good For? etc.  We then spend an hour derping around the island as their son is on the run from the raiders, before the climactic bow and arrow scene in which Aragorn, sorry Odysseus, reclaims his bride, and goes Full Tonto on his rivals.

That one deeply moving reunion scene aside, this film is desperately slow. Thanks to some pretty pedestrian direction from Uberto Pasolini (STILL LIFE), it feels as though each scene is wading through molasses, and Odysseus stringing his bow seems to take an age.  I feel like there is a really good 60 minute cut of this film that is more engrossing and less repetitive. I mean, how many times do we really need to be told that Penelope is being forced to take a husband? I couldn't shake the feeling that this was all just an excuse for Ralph Fiennes to get buff, naked, and drenched in blood.  Maybe he longs for a role in Vikings?

THE RETURN is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes. It was released on Prime Video earlier this month.

LEE**

Lee Miller was a supermodel and a surrealist muse before becoming a photographer in her own right.  When World War Two broke out began by photographing the home front for Vogue before lobbying to be sent to the front line. She captured images of the Allies using napalm in France, and then of the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. Famously, she photographed herself in Hitler's bathtub, her muddied boots defiant in front of the tub.  She was tough, self-medicated with alcohol, "sex positive", and by all accounts a rather distant mother.  Her life is big enough for several films, or a miniseries. Sadly this film, produced by and starring Kate Winslet, can't seem to wrap its arms around its subject and wrestle it to the ground.

The first problem with LEE the film is its framing device. Winslet is aged up to be the seventy-year old Lee going through her old photos with a young interviewer (CHALLENGERS' Josh O'Connor).  The problem is that every time we get to a moment of dramatic tension and need to stay emotionally engaged we are ripped out into a different era.  The worst example of this is when we go from Dachau to Hitler's villa, now being used as a convivial officers' mess.  The contrast is sinister and surreal and Alexandre Desplat's score captures the weirdness of it. The problem is, the contrast is split by an interlude in the 1970s. I understand why Winslet the producer thought she had a duty to include this framing device - more of which in the spoiler section after the release info - but I think it was a distraction ad a mis-step.

The second problem with LEE is that the first act in St Malo is marred by the casting choice of Alexander Skarsgard as her lover Roger Penrose. Skarsgard simply can't do a convincing English accent and it's hugely distracting.  

The film is on firmer footing with the third and most impactful relationship that Miller had - her collaboration with the Life magazine photographer David Scherman. Andy Samberg is good in this role as far as it goes but the film isn't interested in exploring why this relationship worked when so many others didn't. And it criminally under explores his reaction to the camps. 

We are on firmer footing with Lee's female friendships.  Winslet is at her finest in scenes of tender intimacy, first with Noemie Merlant's surrealist artist Nusch - and most heartbreakingly with Marion Cotillard's Solange d'Ayen. This is not a convincing film but Cotillard's cameo is pure authentic tragic pain and deserves awards season recognition.  I also loved Andrea Riseborough (BRIGHTON ROCK) as the thoroughly decent and thoroughly straight-laced Vogue editor Audrey Withers.

The problem is that these moments of genuine heartbreak are scattered in a film that can't quite convince as a whole. I blame this mostly on the screenplay by Liz Hannah (THE POST), Marion Hume and John Collee (MASTER & COMMANDER).  I think the time spent in St Malo is good as a contrast to the wartime suffering, but I felt every moment spent with Roger or the interviewer was wasted. Most of all I just didn't feel that I ended the film understanding Lee more than at the start. The script felt reductive. Its Lee is a victim of abuse who protects the abused but cannot protect herself or her family from her alcoholism.  But is that the only explanation I am to have of why this beautiful privileged woman decided to go to Dachau? And was she an alcoholic before the war? Or just after Dachau?  And why don't we ever really see her suffer for that?  She is the most high-functioning alcoholic I have seen.

I also feel that the film is both dumbed down with exposition AND weirdly does not explain stuff I needed to know! There's lots of exposition - especially early on - but then no signposting that we are at Dachau, or really that we are in Hitler's actual house, or that the little girl in the camp was in a brothel. I only knew that because Kate Winslet referred to that scene in a Q&A. 

Is the film worth watching? Yes for the scenes with Riseborough and Cotillard and for Winslet's performance. But it remains a frustrating viewing experience.

LEE is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023. It opens in the UK on September 16th and in the USA on September 27th.

Spoilers follow:  Kate Winslet said in her Q&A that she felt a duty toward Lee's son to give him the conversation with his mother about her life that he never had in real life. This film was made in collaboration with the son and the Lee Miller estate. I feel that that sense of obligation was a burden for this film.  The lack of relationship between mother and son is only interesting if we really explore her post-war PTSD and as a reflection on what she saw. By wrapping the film up in it, and making it have a conversation with Lee's wartime experiences, it diminishes the power of the Holocaust scenes and adds little depth to our understanding of Lee.

HOTEL MUMBAI

Anthony Maras' directorial debut, HOTEL MUMBAI, is a beautifully handled thriller focusing on the Taj Hotel during the 2008 Islamist terrorist attacks on Mumbai. As so many others, I watched the events unfurl in real time on the TV, and in general I think it's better to approach such topics in documentaries. Fictionalised attempts can feel cheap or exploitative. Which is not to say that this movie entirely avoids kitschy moments. There's a very heavy handed point made about how a Sikh can be mistaken for a muslim by a racist white posh woman.  There's an even worse O Captain My Captain moment when the staff of the ultra-luxe hotel volunteer to stay back and help the guests through the ordeal.  But other than those two very quick moments of cheap emotion, the movie actually handles itself with dignity, intelligence and empathy.

We begin as the terrorists come into Mumbai by boat, the soothing, seductive voice of their handler in their ears, telling them of the glory that awaits them, and how the infidels in Mumbai deserved no mercy.  His voice will be a persistent and sinister presence in the film, goaded the boys into atrocities, gloating at the overheard horror he has unleashed. It's chilling at the end of the film to learn that he's still at large.

We then see the train terminal attack reported on the news, and a particularly well constructed scene in the tourist cafe, so well choreographed as to be shocking, even when we know exactly what will happen.  But the majority of the action happens in the hotel. Ironically, it begins because the staff let in ordinary Mumbaikars fleeing the terror elsewhere in the city. The attackers come in with them.  

This is where the film really needs to weave together multiple strands, and it does so with aplomb. We have the front desk staff forced to call guests and make them let the terrorists into their rooms. We have the head chef and waiter (Anupam Kher and Dev Patel) guiding the guests into an exclusive and therefore well hidden VIP lounge.  We have Armie Hammer as an American tourist who has to get back to his suite to his baby and nanny.   And we have Jason Isaacs as a russian oligarch. Both of these men will become hostage targets. 

I thought this was an excellent film insofar as it was tense, well orchestrated but also even handed. We care about and spend as much time with the staff as with the western guests. We understand the pressures the cops are under.  And we even spend time with the terrorists while never crossing the line of making them sympathetic.  There's something so authentic and piercing about these guys who've never seen a flush toilet before, or tasted pizza, wreaking havoc in a luxury hotel - a world they are jealous of and feel excluded from - its sumptuous luxuries symbolic of the indulgences they claim to be against. And all the time, the evil voice, guiding them to murder. 

HOTEL MUMBAI is rated R and has a running time of 123 minutes. It played Toronto 2018 and opened in the USA in March 2019. It opens in the UK on September 27th.