MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

Writer-director Jeff Nichols (TAKE SHELTER, MUD) is the purveyor of deeply felt, beautifully acted low budget independent films. He returns to our screens with MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, a similarly lo-fi sci-fi flick.  The movie starts off strong - perhaps the strongest opening of a movie I've seen this year. It's dark, a weird kid wearing swimming goggles in abducted by two men and hidden in the back of an old battered car. The TV news flashes images of the kidnapper.  We realise its a father (Michael Shannon) and his son (Jaeden Lieberher), who's reading superhero comics by torchlight.  But the other guy (Joel Edgerton) is freaking us out. He asks the dad to reach into the glove compartment. Is it for a gun? No, night vision goggles. He's going to drive at high speed through the night to get this kid to wherever he needs to be.   Meanwhile, a local bunch of religious nutters led by Sam Shepard are being interrogated by the Feds and NSA analyst Kylo Ren.  The cult think he's going to lead them to paradise when the apocalypse comes in three days time.  The army thinks he can be weaponised. But we still don't know what he is.

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY is a histrionic family melodrama of little merit in which the performances are so extreme they verge on parody. Oh look, there's Meryl Streep which all her trademark physical ticks being a drunken, mean old cancer-ridden harridan, haranguing her family so cruelly that her alcoholic husband (Sam Shepard) tops himself.  It's hard to know whether it's the character who's so repulsive or Streep's "turn it up to eleven" performance, but for whatever reason seeing the old witch harassing her children made me want to leave the cinema.  And what of her children? Julia Roberts is doing some proper acting. We know this because she has generously allowed us to see her grey roots as she portrays a tired middle-aged mother struggling with her unhappy marriage in a haze of self-righteous anger.  Juliette Lewis is cast against type as the fragile, man-dependent, delusional ditz, and it's utterly unconvincing. Finally, we get some actress called Julianne Nicholson playing a shy wallflower quite implausibly attracted to her cousin Little Charles - played by the typically marvellous Benedict Cumberbatch only two notches shy of Simple Jack.   

This sack of unsympathetic, uninspired characters gather at the old witch's house for the funeral of her husband, as we would expect, all the seething resentments and nasty secrets come out.  I found the whole thing shouty and dull. The only real emotional truth came from a confrontation between Margo Martindale and Chris Cooper as the witch's sister and brother in law, arguing over their treatment of Simple Jack, sorry Little Charles.   The acting is otherwise over-done. The direction, from John Wells, plodding. The cinematography, by Adriano Goldman, often just technically bad. 

What's the problem here? We've had two marvellous movies recently based on plays by Tracy Letts - BUG and KILLER JOE. In both cases, the characters were outlandish and the plotting crazy but it somehow worked and seemed real in the context of the gonzo worlds the director, Billy Friedkin, had created.  Here, the director seems to rooted to a naturalistic setting, in which his characters seem like circus freaks.  There's a disconnect - are we meant to be taking this seriously? Are we meant to be laughing? It's disconcerting, but not in the way the play is meant to be disconcerting. What a waste of the on-screen talent!

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY played Toronto, Austin and AFI 2013 and was released last year in the USA, Israel and Brazil. It was released this month in Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Canada, Spain, Hungary and Kuwait. The movie was released this weekend in Singapore, the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. It opens on January 30th in Italy and Macedonia; on February 5th in the Faroe Islands, Argentina and Denmark; on February 13th in Belgium; on February 26th in France, Hong Kong, Portugal, Finland and Sweden; on March 6th in Germany; on March 20th in the Netherlands and on April 18th in Japan.

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY has a running time of 121 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language. 

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - MUD

Despite the critical hype surrounding Jeff Nichols' TAKE SHELTER, I just couldn't get into it. It was just so dour, and obscure and wilfully pessimistic that it alienated me.  Nichols' sequel MUD is an entirely different beast, and worth every ounce of praise it's receiving.  The movie drips with humanity and compassion.  It speaks, as did BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, to a vanishing of a lifestyle rooted in its environment and local community on the banks of the Mississippi.  The stakes couldn't be higher.  But to the movie's great credit, it's shot through with a disarming blunt humour delivered by one of its two superb child stars, Jacob Lofland.  That helps to make us really care about the characters, and so to become susceptible to the thriller-like tension of the movie's final act.  

The plot is deceptively simple.  Two charming kids, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacon Lofland) stumble upon an escaped convict called Mud (a grungy, grifty looking Matthew McConaughey).  Ellis - from a mixture of plain decency and romance - decides to help Mud gather the materials to repair a boat and escape purely because he wants Mud to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).  The tension comes from the fact that Mud killed Juniper's abusive ex-boyfriend and his family is out looking for vengeance.  Moreover, at an emotional level, we are deeply concerned as to whether the vulnerable skittish Juniper will have the courage to follow through with Mud.  Indeed, a theme that flows through this movie could be summed up as "la donna e mobile".  The movie is full of  women who are flighty and let down their romantic with a capital R menfolk.

The resulting film has a wistful, darkly comic tone.  We feel the grittiness and the griminess of the locale as well as the stunning beauty of the river. The plot point that motivates the final act is heavily foreshadows and yet the betrayal that triggers it is so powerful that one can't help but get carried along with it.  McConaughey continues his run of superb character roles, really getting shabby and battered for this one. And while Mud is charismatic enough to get these boys to help him, this is no Magic Mike style pure show-man. Mud is a far more layered, vulnerable and sometimes even pathetic character.  Reese Witherspoon is good in a cameo role, but it's really the kids who carry the film and win our hearts. 

MUD has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA.

MUD played Cannes 2012 and Sundance 2013. It opens on France on May 1st and in the UK on May 10th.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY

KILLING THEM SOFTLY is an unrelentingly bleak and cynical examination of mid-level criminals in a bad economy.  It chronicles an America bloated and decayed, with a soft belly and a smack addiction, where "hope you can believe in" is just a pathetic fairytale.  America is a business not a democracy, and this movie is about getting paid.  To that end, it is fitting that nothing that happens in this film is a surprise.  The wheels of capitalism, whether on Wall Street or trashy motels, grind on regardless.

The first act sees ex-con idiots Frankie (Scoot McNairy - IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn - ANIMAL KINGDOM) hired by The Squirrel (Vincent Curatola - THE SOPRANOS) to knock off a card game.  The twist is that because the host of the game, Markie Trattman, (Ray Liotta) is known to have held up his own card game once before, the suspicion will fall on him and they'll get away scott free.  The second act sees a dull bureaucrat (Richard Jenkins) hiring muscle to kill not just the guilty trio but also Trattman.  For confidence to be restored to the "market", justice must be seen to be done, even if the underworld have gotten the wrong end of the stick. The bureaucrat hires Brad Pitt's hitman, Jackie Cogan, who in turn brings in James Gandolfini's Mickey, only to realise that Mickey is not fit for purpose. The final act sees Cogan resigned to the task at hand.

There is a grim inevitability to the crime and punishment narrative. But that doesn't mean that the film has no dramatic tension.  The initial heist is painfully, terrifyingly drawn out.  And the final execution is expected but unbearably tense.  I've never seen a punishment beating look so visceral as when Trattman is beaten by two goons.  I've never seen an execution look simultaneously so beautiful and so desperately anonymous as when Trattman is off'ed. I've never seen a smack addict getting high so imaginatively depicted than when DP Greig Fraser (SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) photographs the perceptions of Russell.

But we all know that director Andrew Dominik is the master of the technically brilliant set-up - the unbearable tense pregnant pause.  That's partly what made THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD an instant pantheon movie - and probably the best film I've ever seen at the London Film Festival.   That film coupled stunning visuals and a foreboding mood with a sickening, fascinating obsessive love story.  It had heart  - a twisted heart, admittedly - but an emotional centre for us to hold on to.  Similarly, Dominik's first film CHOPPER had audacious visuals and superlative editing, but it's success hinged on the charisma and horror of the central character.

The problem with KILLING THEM SOFTLY is that it works at an intellectual but not an emotional level. This is quite deliberate.  Dominik is making an intellectual point - about the decadence and squalor of the USA  - the bad economy - falling wages, rising bureaucracy - that it's just about getting paid, and getting paid is getting harder.  I didn't find the political analogy over-bearing as I know some critics have. I found it not just valid, but urgent.  The problem is that the cynicism of the film is alienating - almost unbearably so.  Dominik just doesn't give us anything to hold on to. And as a result, his latest film is less than the sum of  its parts.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY played Cannes 2012 and opened this weekend in Ireland, Spain and the UK. It opens next weekend in Slovenia. It opens on October 11th in Australia, Hong Kong, Italy and Argentina; on October 18th in Argentina, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Estonia and Lithuania; on October 25th in Greece; on November 1st in Portugal and Norway; on November 9th in Mexico; on November 16th in Poland; on November 23rd in Bulgaria; on November 29th in Germany and the USA; and on December 5th in Belgium, France and Denmark. 

FAIR GAME

True story. Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, building networks to fight terror in the Middle East. Her husband, Joe Wilson, was a pugnacious ex-diplomat, and mediocre businessman.  When the Bush administration misquoted his research, and used it as casus belli for a "pre-emptive" war in Iraq, Wilson went public, explosively. In an act of miscalculated vengeance, Dick Cheney's aide, Scooter Libby, outed Wilson's wife as a CIA agent, exposing her network in the process.  Plame and Wilson had their reputations slandered in the press, suffered the stress of intrusive paparazzi, but ultimately history will see them as on the side of truth. Scooter Libby went to prison for obstructing justice but Bush soon commuted his sentence. And, of course, on the larger issue, the war in Iraq, it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

FAIR GAME is a new feature film based on this political and family drama, directed and shot by Doug Liman (MR AND MRS SMITH, THE BOURNE IDENTITY) and written by John-Henry and Jez Butterworth (THE LAST LEGION).  The movie drips in earnest good intentions. It wants us to be utterly repulsed by the dinner-party ignorance in Washington; by the brazen exploitation of Plame by the Bush administration; and the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraqi war. It wants us to share in Joe Wilson's outrage and see his journey as one of vindication - from puffed-up has-been to inspirational public speaker. It wants us to admire Valerie Plame's loyalty, and sympathise with her disillusionment.

I think the problem with the film is that for those of use who share its political stance, none of this is new, and for those who don't - well, they are hardly going to pay to watch it. I was shocked at the time, but too much time has passed - too much nefarious wrangling has been exposed - for the shock factor to still exist. And as for the mechanics of cooking up a war, there is no better exposition than Armando Iannucci's IN THE LOOP.  And, suffice it to say, IN THE LOOP managed to be unbelievably entertaining, while at the same time expository. In contrast, FAIR GAME where it's mission very heavily indeed.  All that is not to say that the film isn't handsomely acted and technically well-made. It just fails to spark up.

FAIR GAME played Cannes 2010 where it lost to OF GODS AND MEN for the Palme D'Or.  FAIR GAME was released in 2010 in Italy, Norway, Belgium, France, Canada, Finland, Spain, Sweden, the USA, Bulgaria, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Thailand, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Austria, Taiwan, Portugal, Denmark, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia and the UAE. It was released earlier in 2011 in Iceland, India, Egypt, Croatia, Singapore, New Zealand, Estonia, Indonesia, Ireland and Latvia. It is currently on release in Serbia, the UK and Brazil. It opens later in March in Brazil and Mexico. It opens in May in Argentina and Poland; in June in Chile, Kazakhstan, Russia and Uruguay; and it opens on July 14th in Ukraine.

THE ACCIDENTAL HUSBAND - meh

Patrick is dumped by Sophia on the advice of super-rational talk-radio love doctor Emily. So Patrick hacks the marriage license database so it looks like Emily's already married to him, throwing a spanner in the works of her marriage to perfect gentleman Richard. Emily spends time with Patrick in the process of obtaining an annulment. Guess what happens next!

This romantic-comedy slips by merrily enough for the first half hour because Uma Thurman (Emily) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Patrick) are charming. Patrick's Indian neighbours also have some fine comedy moments. But as the novelty of the odd-couple pairing wears off the mechanics of the plot become tedious in the extreme. All this will-she won't-she crap is a waste of time.

I also found myself mildly irritated that a lot of rom-coms start off with a high-functioning rational woman and then take a malicious pleasure in watching her life get messed up by a child-like bloke who she should ultimately take pity on. Dumbing down to his level will make her life complete! It's the same old story in KNOCKED UP and, to a lesser extent, in JUNO. Enough already. I can also detect a worrying and cynical trend in post 9-11 Hollywood to make characters they want us to think are decent, warm-hearted guys New York fire-fighters.

THE ACCIDENTAL HUSBAND is on release in the UK. It opens in France on April 2nd; in Brazil on April 11th; in the USA on August 15th and in the Netherlands on August 28th.