MARY SHELLEY

In 1816 a young woman called Mary Shelley created the story of Frankenstein - the "monster" created by assembling corpses and revivifying them with electricity.  It's a story of an innocent, faithful creature misused by the real monster, Doctor Frankstein. The monster is violent and vengeful but also displays more humanity than his creator.  The woman who created this story was not just sensitive and romantic with a capital R, but deeply intelligent, well-read in the classics, fascinated by science - an active participant in the political and philosophical debates of the day. Her reputation as a radical philosopher may not be in the same league as that of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, but her fictional creation has achieved more fame, and argued more powerfully for the radical cause. And yet history has diminished her - describing her more often as the scandalous girl seduced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, keeper of his artistic legacy, and almost by chance creator of a gothic masterpiece. Only very recently has she been subject to serious intellectual enquiry. And in this film I had hoped to see a similarly respectful portrayal of this radical woman.

The film is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far or deep enough. It is very good at portraying Mary as a naive silly little girl who falls for a charming but vain and capricious seducer.  But it makes a fateful and disrespectful error in portraying her as being extremely passive. She watches and observes as men show her things - articles of galvanism or gothic paintings - which will work their way into her famous book.  But nowhere does it show Mary to be an active agent in her intellectual life.  There's nowhere that we SEE Mary as interested in science. We're just told by a bunch of male characters that she is.  The result is a heroine that is admirably free of cant, but one that is frustratingly passive. And it becomes very difficult to understand why she keeps returning to her emotionally abusive husband because he too is a pretty face. If there's no credible intellectual spark between the too, what's there to engage with?

That said the film is occasionally worth watching for the odd engaging performance - Tom Sturridge gets Byron exactly right.  But dialogue that is occasionally anachronistic, too conscious of the #timesup movement, and lead characters who are too thinly drawn, undermine the entire project. 

MARY SHELLEY has a running time of 120 minutes.  The film is available to rent and own.

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. 

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here.

In late nineteenth century rural England a coquettish, strong-willed but ultimately kind young girl called Bathsheba Everdene rejects the earnest proposal of a good but apparently rather dull sheep-farmer called Gabriel Oak.  She goes on to inherit a large farm and surprises the county by running it herself, although relying very heavily on Oak's advice in his reduced position of shepherd.  Oak must watch guiltily fend off the proposals of the rich austere Mr Boldwood, to whom she has sent a valentine in a fit of pique little suspecting the deeply passionate and obsessive response it would provoke.  Worse still, both Oak and Boldwood have to watch her marry the feckless and cruel Sergeant Troy, a man who has already ruined the poor maid Fanny Robbin.

This is, of course, the story of Thomas Hardy's most famous novel, Far From The Madding Crowd, and the iconic 1967 film adaptation directed by John Schlesinger, starring Julie Christie as Bathsheba and Alan Bates, Peter Finch and Terence Stamp as her three lovers.  That film is so beloved and so well-acted and photographed that a remake felt almost superfluous, but I am pleased to report that it has its own charms.

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED - a lot of fuss about nothing

In general, I hate movies by Richard Curtis. He has created a mythical London in which smug middle-class bastards live in pretend-bohemia and have the emotional maturity of pre-teens. In Richard Curtis movies, the sun is always shining, unless someone has just broken up with you, in which case it rains. Everything happens for the best in the best of all worlds. It's a world I neither recognise nor find entertaining. Now, all this being said, the one thing you couldn't accuse Richard Curtis movies of was being poorly structured and lacking in narrative drive. Indeed, what irritates me so much about them is that they work so much like a Rubik's Cube of dappy fops. Everyone knows everyone else - everything is connected. Imagine then, my complete surprise in finding that THE BOAT THAT ROCKED has no point and no story. (I was less surprised to find that it had no jokes.)

What Curtis is trying to do is to make a movie about an epic clash between freedom-loving pot-tastic DJs and the reactionary, heartless British establishment. He wants the stakes to be high - freedom of expression and the very future of popular music. But he also wants to make jokes about poo and have a character called "Twatt". In reality, there wasn't an epic clash over pop music. Pirate radio stations weren't doing anything illegal. When the government realised this, instead of being all skull and dagger and Bond-villain about finding clever loopholes to shut them down, they just outlawed them. Pop didn't die. The establishment didn't win. Rather, a very typically British revolution happened. Pop was co-opted by the BBC, with many of the best DJs turning up on legitimate airwaves.

Curtis mistakenly tries to turn a rather banal set of events into A Matter of Life and Death. Kenneth Branagh and Jack Davenport play the establishment stiffs trying to shut down Radio Rock. The performances are excruciating to watch - hammy, unfunny, poorly directed and under-written. Meanwhile, a motley band of British comedians plus the brilliant Rhys Darby and Philip Seymour Hoffman play the DJs aboard Radio Rock. They make misogynistic jokes, shag a lot, play some decent records and that's about it. For nearly two hours we just get montages set to 60s hits; a piss-poor attempt at emotional drama via a paternity story; and no real laughs.

All this would be bad enough but in the final twenty minutes, Curtis decides to go in a direction that is just ludicrous. I can only hope he is satirising a very famous and very rubbish movie but I suspect that he was deliberately going for an ending that is as schmaltzy as the original.

The only possible reason to see this film is for Rhys Darby. And that's not enough. Even Bill Nighy's mannered delivery is starting to get on my nerves. As for Philip Seymour Hoffman, in general, he is a genius at picking great roles in superb dramas, but this is his worst choice since the abysmal ALONG CAME POLLY.

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED is on release in the UK and opens next week in Australia and New Zealand. It opens on April 16th in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It opens on April 30th in Russia; on May 1st in Estonia; in May 6th in Belgium, France and Iceland. It opens in Spain on May 29th; on June 5th in Bulgaria; on June 11th in Italy and Hungary; on June 19th in Turkey; on July 30th in the Czech Republic; in Argentina, Brazil and the USA on August 28th.

LIKE MINDS - silly plot, outstanding central performance

LIKE MINDS is a curious new thriller set in a British public school. Weird new kid Nigel has a fondness for dissecting dead animals in his dorm room. He also believes that he and his room-mate, Alex, are descendants of the Knights Templar and have an obligation to well - the film isn't entirely clear on this but I think it boils down to screwing corpses. That the film manages to hold our attention for quite as long as it does is down to the moody cinematography and direction by debut helmer, Gregory J Read and powerful central performances by Eddie Redmayne as Alex and Patrick Malahide as his father, the Headmaster. That the film ultimately fails boils down to, I think, three things. First, Tom Sturridge is weak as Nigel. He spends the first half of the film looking indifferent and stoned rather than murderous and mad. Second, Richard Roxburgh and Toni Colette, who play a copper and a forensic psychologist respectively, do not hold onto their English accents, which brings us out of the moody boarding school atmosphere. Third, the final twist seems to come out of nowhere and does not ring true. Still, as thrillers go, you could do worse, and the movie is worth seeing for Redmayne's performance alone.

LIKE MINDS was released in Australia in 2006 and is currently on release in the UK.