ENOLA HOLMES

 

I thoroughly enjoyed ENOLA HOLMES - a wonderfully funny, earnest and kinetic young adult detective caper starring Millie Bobby Brown as the younger sister of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes.  In this version of fictional history, Enola (Brown) is raised by her eccentric but learned mother (Helena Bonham Carter) until said mother mysteriously vanishes.  Stuffy conservative Mycroft packs Enola off to a boarding school but she soon escapes to find her mother.  That first mystery isn't really solved, setting us up for a sequel, although it is hinted that mum is a radical activist feminist. So we get a second mystery: just who is trying to assassinate handsome but feckless young Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge).  As befits a progressive work, it is Enola who saves Tewkesbury rather than the other way around, and she solves the mystery of the case before her indulgent brother Sherlock (Cavill). The result is a pleasingly feminist and funny caper that shows just how good Millie Bobby Brown is at comedy. I doubt many other actresses could get away with breaking the fourth wall as often and with such wit as she does. I am very much looking forward to the inevitable sequel.

ENOLA HOLMES has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. 

JOURNEY'S END - Day 3 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Saul Dibb (SUITE FRANCAISE, THE DUCHESS) has directed what is the stand out film of this year's festival to date, an adaptation of R C Sherriff's stage play JOURNEY'S END.  This powerfully tragic tale of men on the front line in World War One has been brought from stage to screen still depicting the claustrophobia and tension of trench warfare without ever feeling "stagey" or merely a west end show with a camera put in front of it. Rather, Dibb uses his Welsh location to good effect - his film beautifully depicts the mists rising above the trench, and one can almost feel the damp, stale air.  And his use of candlelight inside the dug-out is atmospheric and sometimes even beautiful. 

The movie begins with a naive new officer requesting to join C Company in St Quentin, France, just as the troops are rotated onto the front line. Raleigh (Asa Butterfield) is full of that Dulce Et Decorum Est spirit, but is shocked to find that his schoolboy mentor Stanhope (Sam Claflin) has become a superb commander but also a cynical and volatile alcoholic - something that Stanhope is painfully aware of and scared Raleigh will tell his sister, Stanhope's beloved.  Thus it falls to Stanhope's two junior officers to take Raleigh under their wing - there's the affable, modest, epitome of the stiff-upper-lip, "Uncle" (Paul Bettany) and the working class jovial Trotter (Stephen Graham).  The officers are rounded out by Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) - a ladies man who may or may not be faking neuralgia to get away from the front - something that Stanhope is not having anything of.

Much of the action takes place in and around the officer's dugout as they unwillingly accede to an order for a near-suicide mission to fetch intelligence from enemy lines; and then as the men face a heavy bombardment for the start of the German's Spring Offensive. I found myself physically tensing throughout, I was so involved in the fate of the characters. In such an intense environment, one sees Uncle adopt an air of calm indifference and studied bonhomie to offset Stanhope's nasty aggression.  And it's the play between the two that's really at the heart of this film.  If Bettany's performance is the most instantly likeable it's Claflin who steals the movie. There's a deep and desperate vulnerability to Stanhope that reasserts itself in the film's final scenes. It's a bravura and committed performance that deserves award season recognition. 

JOURNEY'S END has a running time of 107 minutes and played Toronto and London 2017. It will be released in the UK on Feb 2nd. 

MY COUSIN RACHEL

Roger Michell has a track record in making rather ambiguous slippery stories of obsession, and after his superb ENDURING LOVE, returns to our screens with an equally ambitious if rather less successful costume thriller based on a book by Daphne Du Maurier.  The story centres on the relationship between three cousins. The elder man adopts his younger male cousin Philip after Philip's parents die. They live a pleasant bachelor live in Cornwall for many years.  We pick up the story when Philip (Sam Claflin) is a young man, and his elderly adoptive father has gone to Florence for his health. There he makes an improbably marriage to their mutual cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz). This romance is communicated by letters back to Cornwall which Philip dutifully reads out to his godfather Kendall (Iain Glen) and his daughter (Holliday Grainger), for whom Philip seems to be intended.  But romance turns to suspicions - with the elder cousin claiming that his young wife has poisoned him for his fortune.  Philip is thus set up to hate his cousin on site, but find's himself charmed by her beauty. Indeed, realising that she has been disinherited, he even takes pity on her financial situation and makes rather a fool of himself. This comes against the advice of all involved. Meanwhile the central question for the audience is whether everyone's else's suspicions of Rachel are warranted, or whether she is a maligned woman.

As with REBECCA, the more famous of Du Maurier's novels to be adapted to the screen, the central mystery is around an enigmatic, beautiful, perhaps dastardly woman.  And while Michell cannot withhold Rachel from us forever, he does a good job of delaying her entrance to the film.  Rachel Weisz is also perfectly cast as someone who is both beautiful and communicates intelligence on screen. I also rather liked Holliday Grainger as the altogether practical spurned young woman.  But the problem with the film really lies in the source material - Philip is a far less charismatic and intriguing character than Max de Winter.  Indeed, he is rather unlikeably spoiled and petulant.  Accordingly, even as we judge Rachel, it's hard not to resent his presence both in her life and in the film.  It's a flaw that I'm not sure the film ever really recovers from.

Thus the choice of source material is a fatal flaw, and perhaps the casting of Sam Claflin.  Which is a shame because Roger Michell really does great work in liberating the piece from the banal typical camerawork of a costume drama, with absolutely superb framing and dynamic camerawork. 

MY COUSIN RACHEL has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland.

THEIR FINEST - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 10

THEIR FINEST is a handsome and genuinely funny film that also - admirably - does not shy away from the darker aspects of life in London during the Blitz.  German air-raids kill friends - people whisper about the bad news from Poland - enemy citizens have been interned - and there's a desperation to get America into the war.  The war stirs up social conflict too - women have the opportunity to do jobs left empty by conscripted men, but not without causing resentment and facing opposition.  But the over-riding picture is one of a drab and deprived city, filmed and clothed in dingy colours, trying its best to keep its spirits up and win the war.

To that end, the Ministry of Information was charged with making not just informational films but also soft propaganda feature films - authentic and optimistic. And it's on the set of one of these that the events of this romantic comedy take place.   Gemma Arterton (GEMMA BOVERY) stars as Catrin Cole, a secretary turned screenwriter hired at a reduced wage to write "slop" - dialogue for the female characters. She's married to an artist (Jack Huston - BOARDWALK EMPIRE) who resents her financial success and finds herself drawn instead to her co-writer Buckley (Sam Claflin - THE HUNGER GAMES).  Together, they write the screenplay to a movie about Dunkirk - seeking to transform a story about an ignominious British retreat into one of wartime heroism by two plucky young girls who sail their tugboat to rescue British soldiers.  The movie catches the eye of the government who think it might appeal to American cinemagoers and so persuade them to enter the war. The only problem is, American audiences need an American hero, and a less reticent romantic ending.

The first thing to say is that this film is really very funny indeed.  Properly laugh out loud funny.  Bill Nighy is a scene-stealer as the ageing actor reluctant to play anything but the male lead. His arrogance and pomposity are a joy to behold.   He also does things with the word "semolina" when he sees an attractive woman (Helen McCrory - PENNY DREADFUL) enter a restaurent that will stay with me forever!  But Rachel Stirling is also very funny as the gay Ministry producer with some of the most acerbic lines.  Rounding out the comic trio, we have Jake Lacy (GIRLS) as the American pilot who can't act for toffee with some spectacularly good bad acting.  And then - there are wonderful one-liners or cameos from Richard E Grant and Jeremy Irons. Put them together and I laughed an awful lot at this film - maybe more than watching MINDHORN - and I laughed A LOT at MINDHORN!  

The second thing to say is that I do admire the movie's willingness to show the darker aspects to life in wartime, and indeed to tackle misogyny head on.  

But that's not to say that the film is without its flaws. The romance is a bit obvious and well-worn in its development.  The final act drags - the emotional beats are obvious.  But I can forgive any film its flaws when I can remember comic lines hours after watching it.  

THEIR FINEST has a running time of 115 minutes.   The movie does not yet have a commercial release date. 

THE RIOT CLUB

THE RIOT CLUB is a profoundly political film that has about as much subtlety as the title of the play upon which it was based, Laura Wade's POSH.  Both play and film seek to show us the casual cruelty, entitlement and vacuity of Britain's ruling elite and the vulnerability but ultimate incorruptibility of the working classes who happen to cross their path.  The lens through which Wade attempts to tell her rather simplistic tale is that of an Oxford dining society, here called The Riot Club, but clearly based on the Bullingdon Club - perhaps the most elite of Oxford's many dining societies, boasting the current Prime Minister (and I suspect the film's producer - heir to the de Walden estate) as one of its members.  In Wade's eyes these clubs are bastions of private-school educated male privilege, where spoiled rich kids get drunk, abuse the locals, and show their general contempt for anyone who isn't in their tribe. Most particularly, she asserts that the system is self-protecting - that their grossness will be paid off, bought off, leaving them to emerge into glittering careers unscathed by any "naughtiness".

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

There's a lot to love and a lot that doesn't work in this radical new adaptation of the Snow White fairy-tale from debut feature director Rupert Sanders.  

The stuff to love centres around the characterisation of the wicked stepmother, Ravenna.  She's written and played as a deeply insecure, emotionally scarred woman who has had to use her beauty to survive in a misogynistic patriarchy where women are sold as chattel and discarded when their looks fade.  There's a superb scene early on, when she's addressing the mirror on the wall, where we move to the perspective of her brother, and we're not sure if the Queen is just imagining it all.  Charlize Theron is absolutely stunning in the role - both in terms of the costume design and her performance. And fans of Games of Thrones will forever regret that she wasn't given the role of Cersei Lannister, more of which later. I was so involved in the story of Ravenna, that in the movie's final battle scene, I was willing her to win. She reminded me of Edmund in Lear, with his radical, demonic argument for meritocracy against the old established order.

Other things to love in this movie? As one might expect given Sanders background in commercials, the visuals are beautifully shot.  Indeed, one of the strengths and weaknesses of the film is that the narrative often feels like a weak excuse to get us from one beautifully imagined background to another.  The motivations for the moves, the narrative drive, seems secondary to the indulgently imagined costumes and scenery.

The tragedy is that all this beauty and Theron's wonderful performance is wasted upon a movie that is poorly paced, and plays like a second-class echo of better imagined fantasy worlds, created by George R R Martin, C S Lewis and Tolkien.  The character of Ravenna, complete with her incestuous relationship with her brother Finn (a marvellously creepy Sam Spruell) is straight out of House Lannister. As is the visual use of sigils and banner-men.  Snow White's long journey through different worlds before she finally faces off against Ravenna is straight out of the Lord of the Rings, with the dwarves recast as hobbits and Bob Hoskins' blind seer as Gandalf. And finally, Snow White (Kristen Stewart) has been recast as an Aslan like figure, reciting the Lord's Prayer in full (surely a first for modern teen cinema?), exhibiting healing powers over man and nature, and finally not even sealing the denouement with a kiss - rather standing alone, in power, neuter, a Virgin Queen.

This, of course, brings us to the weakest aspect of the film - its romantic core. Stewart's resentful mopey screen persona is ill-fitted to an active, action heroine who must imspire a people to revolt.  Chris Hemsworth as the Huntsman is more charismatic but suffers from an unhappy attempt at a Scottish (?) accent.  It's not as bad as Russell Crowe's attempt at regional English in ROBIN HOOD, but it's still unfortunately reminiscent of Mike Myers in SHREK. Still, the two young actors have a convincing rapport, which is more than can be said for Snow White and her aristocratic childhood sweetheart William (Sam Claflin).Claflin's character is so thinly written - his performance so uninspired - the potential love triangle so quickly dismissed - that what should be a powerful love story is reduced to a whimper.

One can only conclude that the movie is irredeemably let down by a poor script from Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock - THE BLIND SIDE, and Hossein Amini - DRIVE. It's just too derivative, too thinly developed, too lacking in narrative drive.  And worst of all, they try to include an emotionally manipulative death scene that's utterly unearned. 

P.S. Why does no-one wear helmets in battle?  Stannis Baratheon I'm looking at you.

SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN is on release everywhere except: Cambodia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Finland, India, Norway and Sweden, where it opens on June 8th; Belgium, France, Switzerland, Russia and Japan where it opens on June 13th; in Australia, New Caledonia and New Zealand where it opens on June 21st and in Italy where it opens on July 11th.