SAVAGE HOUSE***

BARRY LYNDON meets BIG NIGHT in screenwriter Peter Glanz's directorial debut. It starts off as a dark, nasty, witty social satire on social climbers, takes a turn into a genuinely moving love story, but just loses steam in its second half. After such a sharp take-off in its first thirty minutes, I then wanted something, anything to happen, and it never did.  That's the point, but it made for a rather dull watch. This is all rather a shame as the two lead performances are absolutely superb.

The Crown's Claire Foy gives a wonderfully layered performance as Lady Savage - a properly aristocratic woman who defied convention to marry the dastardly rake and parvenu, Chauncey.  She gives a powerful defence of female agency and genuinely moved me.  But despite this, she pawns the last of her family jewels to scrape her way back into high society, when the chance to host the Marlboroughs comes her way.  And what of her husband?  Grant plays Chauncey as a kind of ageing Withnail, fuelled by port and gambling, all charm, wit, petulance and aching vulnerability. He wants to be accepted and also to avoid the bailiffs.  

The movie hits cruising speed fast.  And then stalls.  We get a nice side plot involving Jack Farthing and Bel Powley's valet and woman of all work respectively.  But ultimately this is a morality play about two people hellbent on social climbing and the agents of their own ruin.  It would have worked better as a sixty minute short.

SAVAGE HOUSE is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It is on limited release in the USA and UK.

JOY**

Director Ben Taylor (Sex Education) and writer Jack Thorne (ENOLA HOLMES) deliver a rather earnest but tepid biopic about the scientists who developed IVF.  Maybe earnestness is what this topic requires, but it does rather strain the two-hour running time.

The cast is, however, mostly great.  James Norton plays biologist Robert Edwards, fizzing with excitement and energy and impatient with barriers.  He teams up with near-retirement obstetrician Dr Patrick Steptoe (an understated and moving Bill Nighy) whose ability to delicately extract the candidates' eggs allows Edwards to attempt to fertilise them in vitro. Tanya Moodie is wonderfully stern and pragmatic as the fictional NHS Nurse who has to manage the patients and the ward.  The only weak link is Thomasin McKenzie as the real-life research nurse who project managed the entire affair, Jean Purdy.  There is something in her line delivery that I found unconvincing. 

My suspicion is that there is a far more interesting film to be made about the opposition to the research - whether religious (represented here by Purdy's mother - an always excellent Joanna Scanlan) - scientific - or simply bureaucratic. We get some of that here but it is rather lightly skated over. I also feel that the film would have been more interesting if it had focussed on why Jean Purdy was not given due recognition for decades and despite Edwards' campaigning.  Basically I wanted something grittier and more nuanced than the rather Keep Calm and Carry On plain vanilla approach taken here.

JOY has a running time of 115 minutes, is rated PG-13, and was released on Netflix last month.

THE AFTERMATH

James Kent (TESTAMENT OF YOUTH) returns to our screens with another earnest, deeply felt, beautifully staged, but ultimately un-engaging wartime drama. This time, we're in Hamburg in 1946 during the British occupation of the city they bombed. Jason Clarke - by far the best thing in this film - plays the only really fascinating character - a tight-lipped British officer, turned humane by his brutal experiences of war, struggling to communicate with his wife since the death of their son.  The wife is played by Keira Knightley taking a million steps back from her more challenging and interesting performance as COLETTE to play the kind of role she did before - very posh, very repressed, very superficial British woman. She acts out at her husband's coldness and grief by at first being hateful to the Germans she blames for her son's death, and then having an affair with one of them - the moody, soulful, pretty architect, now houseboy played by Alexander Skarsgard. I've commented before at how uncomfortable I feel when an affair with a third person merely exists to cause self-reflection and evolution for the protagonist. Skarsgard's character is used here in more way than one, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth at the film's resolution. I came to the conclusion that I couldn't believe it because the husband seemed to be operating on such a deeper plane of intelligence and profundity than his wife.  The result is a rather obvious, predictable film, with a hammy lead actress performance and a so-called passionate love affair at its centre than fails to catch fire. 

THE AFTERMATH is rated R and has a running time of 108 minutes. The film was released earlier this year and is now available to rent and own. 

GEMMA BOVERY

Posy Simmonds is well known British cartoonist known for re-intrepreting classic literature in a modern setting in serial comic strips.  Her TAMARA DREWE, a version of Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd,  was adapted as a film in 2010 by Stephen Frears with mixed results. On the whole, I much preferred this Franco-English adaptation of Simmonds GEMMA BOVERY.  In this version of Flaubert's iconic tale of middle class married boredom, tragic love and debt, the heroine is played by Gemma Arterton (who also played Tamara Drewe).  Mrs Bovery has moved to a small town in northern France to live with her husband (Jason Flemyng), a humble decorator.  However, it soon becomes apparent that she has tastes of something grander and more sensuous.  She buys things that she can't afford on a whim, and there are hints of previous, richer lovers.  For no other reason than just to see what it's like, she cheats on her husband with the local nobleman, a rather pale imitation of the novel's Rodolphe.  

All this is observed by the town's baker, Martin Joubert (Fabrice Lucine - POTICHE).  He's a man obsessed with Flaubert's novel, attracted to Gemma, and almost willing her to re-enact the story, although not of course its ending.  The result is a wonderful performance of wry tragicomedy that sets the tone for this charming and sometimes deeply moving film.  I also love the wry social commentary that Simmonds is famous for. In this case, it's embodied in the Franco-English couple Rankin (Pip Torrens) and Wizzy (Elsa Zylberstein) - Notting Hill yuppies with a lavish second home in France. The movie perfectly satirises their social climbing and insecurity. The problem is the inevitable clash of tone, which director Anne Fontaine doesn't handle well, especially in the final act of the film. Maybe no-one could and the ultimate fault lies with Simmonds for shoe-horning in that ending....Either way this remains a charming and occasionally very clever movie, if flawed.

GEMMA BOVERY has a running time of 99 minutes and is rated R.  The movie played Toronto 2014 and was released last year in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Greece and Portugal. It was released earlier this year in Italy, Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Turkey and Brazil. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN - over-hyped

There is a great movie to be made about the conflict between Marilyn Monroe and Sir Lawrence Olivier on the set of THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL. Unfortunately, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is not it.  That is because the writer, Adrian Hodges (TOM & VIV) and director, Simon Curtis (TV's CRANFORD)  have made a decision to take the sharp edges off the drama at every turn.  Instead of the caustic wit of Colin (son of Kenneth) Clark's memoir, the movie gives us a protagonist in the classic "ingenue" line - very dull, very sweet, and hardly necessary at all as an entry point to the film's real drama.  He falls for Marilyn, she flirts with him, but it's all very tame indeed, if in fact it really happened.  

What we really want to see is Marilyn versus Larry.  The Sexy Film Star, enmeshed in the Method, desperately trying and failing to be a technically great actress, puffed up and doped up by her self-serving entourage (a particularly menacing portrayal of Paula Strasberg) versus the Great Actor, painfully aware that his time has passed, resentful he cannot set the screen alight, and in fear of hysterical women from his experiences with Vivienne Leigh.  When MY WEEK WITH MARILYN catches afire, it's because we're watching Marilyn and Larry bring out each other's insecurities - in those moments, we get a glimpse into their interior lives.  But all too often, this fascinating material is cut short for drippy dating scenes as Marilyn and young Colin skinny dip, or visit Windsor Castle.  I wanted more of the drama - more of the tension as cinema and theatre acting changed era - more of Marilyn and Arthur Miller - more of Larry and Vivienne.

The resulting film is basically shot and scripted like an afternoon movie on the Hallmark channel. And, unfortunately, it is filled with a fair few anonymous performances - from Dominic Cooper as a suffocating manager to Julia Ormond unbelievably mis-cast as Leigh.  Emma Watson is utterly wasted as Colin's parochial love interest, and Eddie Redmayne has nothing more to do than look charming and naive.  In the minor parts, it's only really Judi Dench who stands out - she oozes class as Dame Sybil Thorndike and deserves a sort of Oscar-double-whammy for her performance here and in J.EDGAR.   As for the leads, Kenneth Branagh is stunning - stunning - as Lawrence Olivier - capturing not just his particular intonation and mannerisms, but giving the towering presence in English theatre real pathos.  

All of which brings us Michelle Willams' much hyped performance as Marilyn, the subject of an Oscar campaign from the Weinsteins. Frankly, I was utterly underwhelmed. Yes she gets the breathy, tremulous voice, and yes she can sing the songs and do the moves. And yes, she appears to have put on a bit, if not enough weight.  But she problem is this - she has not got the sexy star quality that Marilyn had, and you simply can't manufacture that.  (Which is not to say she isn't a terrific actress - just look at BLUE VALENTINE).  Too often in this film we see other characters look at Marilyn and gasp in awe and envy at the way she "lights up the screen" or the "magic" she works or the way she's "full of life".  Sadly, the sign of a bad film is when people tell rather than show.  We shouldn't need this commentary.  Williams' should be doing it herself.  And I don't buy the concept that no-one can light up a screen like Marilyn today.  We have instinctive "film stars" now just as we have "technical actresses".  Sadly, I would put Michelle Williams in the latter camp.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN played New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and the AFI Fest 2011.  It opens this weekend in the US and UK. It opens on December 29th in Singapore; on December 30th in Finland; on January 5th in Portugal; on January 13th in Norway and Sweden; and on January 19th in Lebanon and the Netherlands.