THE PERFECT COUPLE*

How many shows can we watch where Nicole Kidman plays a beautiful, uptight, brittle, rich woman trapped in a miserable marriage but struggling to hold on to her perfectly manicured life? Enough already.

In this latest iteration she plays a successful murder-mystery writer living in a gorgeous summer house in Nantucket with her handsome husband (Liev Schreiber), hosting the wedding of her second son.  The night before the wedding, the bridesmaid is found drowned and the wedding is cancelled.

Whodunnit? We discover in short order that the bridesmaid was pregnant by the paterfamilias, that the first son is a feckless trader in financial trouble, and the bride is actually in love with the groomsman.  And that's just the first couple of episodes. The set-up is that of a classic Agatha Christie mystery where lots of family members have motives that we have to untangle.  Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman is both a master of PR and selling books, but also trying to move away from her image as part of the "perfect couple".  Her best-selling novels feature a crime detecting couple similar to Christie's Tommy and Tuppence - an alliterative crime-busting perfect husband and wife, and the author's marriage is part of the marketing drive.

The six-part TV show is handsomely cast and handsomely filmed in a lavish Cape Cod mansion. Everyone looks the part.  And yet something about the script and performances feels flat. The show just never takes flight. I never cared. Also, if you know your Christie, the solution is pretty easy to figure out. (More on that in the spoiler section after the release information.)

I think the problem is that while director Susanne Bier is great at creating context and a luxury lifestyle on screen, a murder mystery has to be more than Nora Ephron lifestyle porn. It has to hook us in.  And the modern audience demands more of its murder mysteries, especially those set amongst the super-rich. In a post WHITE LOTUS world, THE PERFECT COUPLE just feels plain vanilla - too straight - too dull - too obvious.  Only the wonderful Dakota Fanning seems to be in a different show and to really be having fun with it.  

THE PERFECT COUPLE debuted on Netflix this week. 

SPOILERS - I have not read the source novel by Elin Hilderbrand but understand that the solution is far more ambiguous in the novel. It tells you everything you need to know about how plain vanilla the adaptation is that they decided to give you a proper murderer and motive and then to tie everything up by having a resolution between the author and the bride too.  The lone attempt to spice things up with the author's sketchy backstory feels very shoehorned in. It didn't cohere.

SERENA - LFF14 - Day Ten

Sweet tap-dancing Christ, SERENA is so bad people were laughing at the movie at the screening I attended.  In fairness, this final act hilarity was a massive improvement on the sheer tedium, implausibility and banality of the first hour of the film.  God knows what Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Copper were thinking of in signing up to this garbage and I'd love to hear from anyone who read the book upon which the movie is based as to whether it's better/different/other to what landed on our screen.  What's equally bizarre and shocking is that the film was directed by Susanne Bier, whose A SECOND CHANCE is also screening at this year's London Film Festival and is possibly one of the best films this year.  One cannot imagine the distance between A SECOND CHANCE's quiet intensity, closely observed emotion and tense climax and SERENA.  Both films are about the powerful emotions prompted by parenthood but they are otherwise like chalk and cheese.

So, let's take a step back. SERENA is set in depression era North Carolina. Bradley Cooper plays George Pemberton, the indebted owner of a lumber yard. Rather than marry for money he marries a hard-headed businesswoman called Serena (Jennifer Lawrence). A double threat hangs over the couple. Their business is in hock, and their land threatened by its potential forced purchase to create a national park. Second, Pemberton is hiding an attachment to his illegitimate son, something Serena finds intolerable once she loses her own child.

The characters begin as tough and cynical - unwilling to let anyone get in the way of their success. This makes it hard to sympathise for them when they meet tragedy - and all the soupy orchestral scores and dreamy photography can’t overcome this central problem in the film - it’s hard to care about the fate of people we hate. Moreover, as the movie progresses we see the cracks show in the screenwriting, direction and acting. As Serena becomes more unhinged the movie tips over the edge of heightened drama into cheap melodrama, and the attempted reformation of her husband seems automatic and unconvincing. Of course, by this point we care so little about their fate that it’s just a mad dash to the end. And wow! what an ending. I don’t think we’e seen such an absurd and literally laughable denouement to a male protagonist in quite some time. It’s the stuff of Razzies and spoof fan service.

I would simply repeat: it’s hard to see how so many actors and a director of quality went so wrong. I guess it sometimes happens with movies: good intentions just get out of control and the end result doesn’t look like the storyboards. At any rate, this is a film to avoid at all costs. The good news is that the stars are so big, their careers are unlikely to be dented by a small fall.  

SERENA has a running time of 102 minutes.  The movie played London 2014 and opens in the UK and Romania on October 24th, in Spain on October 31st, in New Zealand and Finland on November 6th, in France on November 12th, in Portugal on November 20th, in Australia on November 27th, in Italy on November 30th, in Lithuania on December 5th, in Germany, Greece and Singapore on December 18th, and in Ukraine and the Netherlands on February 5th.

A SECOND CHANCE / EN CHANCE TIL - LFF14 - Day Five

A SECOND CHANCE is an intense and haunting drama from the Danish auteur Susanne Bier. She specialises in closely observed beautifully shot film that show what happens to ordinary people in difficult circumstances. In this film she looks at motherhood - the prejudices surrounding it, stresses entailed and the strange and powerful reactions to grief.

As the film opens, there are two contrasting couples with baby boys. The first - Tristan and Sanne - are junkies, and their baby Sofus is horribly neglected. This is set against the picture perfect couple of Andreas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Anna and their son Alexander. At first, our sympathies are utterly with Andreas and his police partner Simon (Ulrich Thomsen) - a kind of casual middle-class prejudice at the parenting suitability of the junkie couple. But the genius of this film is to turn around our preconceptions about what a good mother is and just how far a parent will go to keep a child with them.

To say more would be to give away crucial plot points that motivate the narrative. Suffice to say that this is an exceptionally well-made and acted film. Nicolaj Coster-Waldau gives what is surely a career-best performance. But I also really liked May Andersen as Sanne. Ultimately this is a movie that should be remembered for how it made us feel about parenting - and the right of a parent to be respected in that role, and the need not to rush to judgment.

A SECOND CHANCE has a running time of 105 minutes.  A SECOND CHANCE played Toronto and London 2014 and opens in Sweden and Denmark on January 15th.

LFF preview - SERENA

So, I'm in cinema detox for the month before the BFI London Film Festival.  I'll be watching forty films in ten days and reviewing them all here! In the meantime, here's the JUST-released trailer for one of the two movies I'll be seeing by director Susanne Bier.

SERENA is apparently set in 1920s North Carolina with Jennifer Lawrence playing a world-savvy woman who builds a timber business married to Bradley Cooper's George - a man with a past.  The costumes look gorgeous and there seems to be shades of Scarlett O'Hara in the role.  Plus anything with Toby Jones in a supporting role is worth checking out.

  

IN A BETTER WORLD

IN A BETTER WORLD is a pretentious, po-faced drama about the impotence of liberals in the face of brutality. It works by inter-weaving four examples of bullying that affect an earnest Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor called Anton (Mikael Persbrandt). 

In a medical camp in Kenya, Anton is forced to treat the savage gangster who has been brutalising the women of the village. He shows the liberals' reluctance to judge, treating the Bad Man as his Hippocratic oath demands, despite the objections of the villagers. Back in Denmark, Anton is bullied by a mechanic. Once again, Anton refuses to defend himself - literally turning the other cheek, in order to show his children that intelligence has triumphed over ignorance by refusing to stoop to its level. His words sound unconvincing. By contrast, young Christian (William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen), recently bereaved, returned to Denmark, and friends with Anton's son, Elias, puts up a more muscular response to bullying. On his first day at school, he makes a moral judgement and intervenes to help the bullied Elias. And faced with the impotence of Elias' father - an impotence Anton claims is the high moral ground - Christian once again takes matters into his own hands. 

What can we say about this film? It is well acted (particularly by the two children), beautifully photographed (DP Morten Søborg using a Red One), and moves at a swift pace. But the characters are archetypes rather than real people - they exist to make a point rather than to involve us in their distress. As a result, the emotional scenes between Christian and his father (Ulrich Thomsen) do not have the emotional power that they should. Moreover, writer-director Susanne Bier fails to create tension, so clumsily does she foreshadow her climactic scenes. I also wonder whether Bier intended to so thoroughly discredit the possibility of Liberalism in her film. And I wonder whether the Academy realised that is what this movie did when it voted it the Best Foreign Language Film of 2010. It is, of course, no such thing.

IN A BETTER WORLD won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2011, beating Biutiful, Dogtooth, Incendies and Hors de la Loi. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. IN A BETTER WORLD played Toronto 2010 and Sundance 2011. It was released in 2010 in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Italy. It was released earlier this year in Hungary, Brazil, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Spain, the USA, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Russia, Singapore, Poland and Argentina. It is currently on release in Japan, Ireland and the UK.

London Film Fest Day 8 - THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE

THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE is directed by the Danish helmer who gave us AFTER THE WEDDING, one of the most powerful movies that I've seen this year. AFTER THE WEDDING is a film about a charity worker who returns to Denmark apparently to negotiate a grant for an Indian orphanage. But he is ambushed by a series of revelations and thrown into an affluent world that changes his life. It is a quiet movie based on powerful performances, realistic dialogue and beautiful photography that often uses extreme close-ups to create a sense of intimacy.

On the face of it, Susanne Bier’s first English-language project shares much of the same emotional and narrative territory with AFTER THE WEDDING. Both concern the mourning process and what happens when people from very different social strata form relationships. They are also both films whose plot hinges on a major and unlikely turn of events.

Just as Mads Mikkelsen's former drug-addict was at the heart of AFTER THE WEDDING, the heart of THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE is a warm-hearted recovering heroin-addict called Jerry (Benicio del Toro). His best friend is an affluent property developer called Steven (David Duchovny). Steven is married to Audrey (Halle Berry) and has two cute kids and a solid successful friend called Howard (John Carroll Lynch). Although Steven's wife and friends are suspicious of Jerry - seeing him as a parasitic bum - when Steven is tragically killed they propel him into the centre of their world. Audrey takes Jerry into her house despite the fact that he's a recovering, then relapsing addict. Howard arranges for him to qualify as a mortgage broker. Jerry's good and frank nature helps them all and they in turn get him clean. It's a story of redemption and rebuilding a life in much the same way as AFTER THE WEDDING was. It's also well acted, with Benicio del Toro and John Carroll Lynch the stand-out cast members.

The problem is that THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE is a far less original and haunting drama than AFTER THE WEDDING. The shooting style is a watered down version of what we saw in AFTER THE WEDDING. None of the performances ever touch the raw emotion of Mads Mikkelsen in AFTER THE WEDDING. And even the zig-zagging time line seems derivative of other ponderous, self-important flicks like CRASH and BABEL. Overall, I came away unimpressed. It's all well done but slightly derivative. It never grabbed me by the gut and wrenched me out of my seat in the way that AFTER THE WEDDING did. And that is a great disappointment.

THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE played London 2007 and is on release in the US. It goes on release in Mexico on December 28th 2007 and in Belgium, France, Argentina, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands in January 2008. It opens in Finland, Iceland, Australia, Sweden and Turkey in February and in Norway in March.

AFTER THE WEDDING/EFTER BRYLLUPPET - Nik's best film of 2006 AND 2007!

This review is posted by guest reviewer, Daniel Plainview.

It's important, in any movie review, to cut to the chase quickly, for those who do not plan to read past the first paragraph. So, to put it succinctly, this is the best film I've seen this year. Since it's not been up against great competition, I should add that had I seen it in 2006, it would still have been the best film I had seen that year too. Susanne Bier (BROTHERS) has outdone herself here in directing an understated yet moving, contentful, and absolutely captivating drama, that takes the viewer on a voyage with the characters that they won't soon forget.

Even had the plot not been as thick as it was with suspense and raw human emotion, this film would have been worth seeing for the acting performances alone. Mads Mikkelsen (CASINO ROYALE, PUSHER) outdoes himself as the central character Jacob; quietly spoken; intense; a man of few words. Sidse Babett Knudsen (Helene) and Stine Fischer Christensen (Anna) make for excellent co-stars, skillfully weaving the complex relationships that the movie portrays and making them more real, more tangible. But even given these superlative performances, Rolf Lassgård as Jorgen (father of Anna and husband to Helene) simply steals the show. I defy anyone not to be moved by the awesome power and sheer humanity of his acting - in fact I think his performance alone makes the film worth seeing again.

And indeed, that is perhaps the greatest triumph of the film, that it's worth seeing again. The plot unravels in such an intense and clever way that despite the relative simplicity of the central concept, and the fact that there are no clever Memento or Pulp Fiction-like plays with chronology, you are nevertheless constantly re-evaluating earlier scenes, the emotions of the players, the development of the characters, why they reacted the way they did, how they must have been feeling given what was going on inside them. Of course there is no "inside them", they're only actors, but such is the stark realism of this film encapsulated not only by the acting but by the sensitive camerawork and subtle score, that the scenes, the emotions, the stories become completely real to the audience.

I suppose I ought to be balanced in this review, and to say that this won't be everyone's cup of tea, for a very good reason. After the Wedding is an intense experience - one that is emotionally draining in a way other films are not. You come out of the cinema feeling as if you've gone through not quite an ordeal, but a journey with the characters. So much has happened, there's so much to the film; so many emotional highs and lows; so many twists and turns and surprises; so much drama, and pain. This is not by any means light viewing, and I wouldn't recommend it as a popcorn muncher.

But it does set the bar as far as future releases for this year are concerned. It is a sad comment on modern cinema that, for the first 40 minutes or so, I sat in the cinema expecting the plot to unravel in a 2-dimensional way, with goodies and baddies, a linear plot, a hero, a anti-hero, and a simple happy hollywood ending. Even though I say it again, realism is the catchword in this film - it avoids the melodrama of hollywood, the paint-by-numbers morality of Jungian archetypal characters, and the triteness of a clean, happy and sown-up ending. After the Wedding exceeded all my expectations, repeatedly confounded my cynicism, and finally conquered my heart. I laughed, I cried, I fell in love and out of it, and I am left with only one option: to heartily recommend this same experience to you.

AFTER THE WEDDING - ETER BRYLLUPPET opened in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Italy in 2006 and in Greece and Germany earlier this year. It is currently on release in Belgium, France, and the UK. It opens in Poland next week and in the US on March 30th.

P.S. BINA007 wholeheartedly concurs with this review.