HILLBILLY ELEGY

J.D.Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was something of a publishing sensation and I very much enjoyed reading his biography.  It appealed to me as a tale of a young kid born into the opioid crisis that bred Trump's base, complete with a drug-addict mum, rescued by a a battle-axe of a grandma, who somehow gets himself into an Ivy League law school and the Marines. Along the way, Vance speaks sympathetically about the social circumstances he grew up in while also criticising some of the more feckless behaviour it breeds.  This willingness to not simply to blame structural issues but also personal choices made the book controversial. 

I was surprised that the book was inspiring a narrative fiction movie rather than a documentary.  Things that might pass as credible in real life seem broad and crass and worst of all patronising when fictionalised. And there's not a little poverty porn about Ron Howard's new film. Glenn Close stars as "mamaw" complete with frizzy afro, drooping latex boobs and stomach and hideous glasses and teeth.  It's all so patronising and broad as to be offensive. And then we have Amy Adams as the addict mum Bev - another broad performance in a thankless one-dimensional role. Speaking of which, I give you poor Freida Pinto as the protagonist's supportive college girlfriend who seems to exist merely to further his career. As for the hero? He just comes across as banal and forgettable. I didn't want him to succeed - I wanted the movie to be over. 

HILLBILLY ELEGY is rated R and has a running time of 113 minutes. It was released on Netflix on November 2th.

REBECCA

Daphne Du Maurier's nasty little thriller, Rebecca, is both iconic as a short story and as its film adaptation by Hitchcock. It's a grim tale about a banal simpering middle class spinster who falls for an unattainable rich aristocratic widower.  Which is not to say she doesn't attain him. For reasons that are still murky to me, he marries her, maybe to protect himself from the ghosts of his first and titular wife.  But the new, unnamed wife will never really possess her husband because he remains obsessed by the cynical and manipulative Rebecca - a woman beloved by all including her obsessive and diabolical housekeeper Mrs Danvers.  At the end of the novel, there is no happy ending. The couple are trapped overseas in a loveless and frigid marriage. The only triumph is that the second Mrs De Winter realises her husband never loved his first wife. At the end of the Hitchcock version we get a slightly soupier Hollywood ending. Joan Fontaine's second wife has gathered some courage and supported Laurence Olivier through his trial. He clings to her like a parasite. But it's no marriage of equals. Nonetheless, both original novel and film are of a tone - sinister, nasty, dark, cynical, blighted, thwarted and corrupt. It is Rebecca who sets the tone.

In this new adaptation by a director I very much admire, Ben Wheatley, the tone is altogether different. The south of France is lush and sunlit and Mr De Winter and his second wife (Armie Hammer and Lily James) seem young, healthy, vibrant and jarringly contemporary despite the period setting.  He takes her home to a lavish mansion but instead of the gothic gloom of the original we have Kristen Scott Thomas chomping through the scenery in a high camp version of Mrs Danvers that made me laugh at it rather than shudder from it. I had to question whether I was watching a Ryan Murphy film. And so it goes on, bad casting and bad direction. Sam Riley is utterly toothless as Rebecca's nasty cousin. The thriller/drama utterly uninteresting. It winds on to its ending which is about as cynical and Hollywood happy as anything I've ever seen. All is happy and sexy and fruitful. Rebecca has truly been vanquished. Along with any credibility Ben Wheatley ever had.

REBECCA has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released on Netflix on October 21st. 

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

In a world where large swathes of educated people wilfully believe that vaccinations cause autism; and that the Clintons and Bidens are part of an elite paedo ring; and that Covid is a hoax; I am was was really wary of watching a new BORAT film.  Isn't real life already filled with toxic racism, homophobia and misogyny?  How do you satirise bigotry when the entire political discourse of America in 2020 feels like it's gone through the Looking Glass?  But I am so happy that I watched this film, because it's really fucking funny, and really fucking horrifying, and both are important things to experience and acknowledge right now. Because whether or not the White Supremacist in the White House is evicted next January, the attitudes he exposed, the grievances and bigotry he unleashed, the lies he peddled will remain in the public discourse.  We need Borat to help us channel our anger into laughter, but we need to feel angry nonetheless.

Of course, if the world has changed for us, it's also changed for Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is so recognisable he has a knock off fancy dress costume as seen in this sequel.  So Cohen couldn't actually use the Borat character to lure his bigoted marks into a false sense of security and expose their hatred.  Rather, he has to spend most of the film as Borat dressing up as someone else. And the real heavy lifting is done by the previously unknown but apparently comic genius Maria Bakalova, playing Borat's daughter Tutar. It is Bakalova that exposes the misogyny and sexual perversion at the heart of public life, not least in the coup de theatre that is the final scene where she plays a OAN-style news reporter in mini-dress and blonde wig, buttering up a lascivious Rudy Giuliani, who is all too ready to have a drink with her in a bedroom, let her take off his mike, lie back on the bed and apparently start to masturbate. What an absolute sleazebag. 

Which isn't to say that Baron Cohen/Borat doesn't have some phenomenal scenes himself.  In this sequel, we see Boart released from a long prison stint for embarrassing Kazakhstan's dictator, and sent to America to offer Trump a gift to make sure that he's seen as a friend of Trump in the same way that Bolsanaro and Putin are.  But Borat's daughter Tutar has contrived to be shipped to America instead, so that Borat has to offer HER as a gift. Cue some really queasy discourse about the pornification of young girls, and the appropriate role of women in modern life.  The most awful scenes are probably a tie between an anti-abortion pastor ignoring a case of incest and rape to focus on preventing abortion, and Borat in disguise singing a song to the delight of his bigoted audience as they chant along that their enemies should be given the Wuhan Flu while raising Nazi salutes.

Basically this is a film that makes you sick, but also makes you laugh in the way that maybe only Sacha Baron Cohen can. It's absolutely the film for this moment.

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated R. It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

ON THE ROCKS

Laura is a thirtysomething young mother whose husband is always travelling with work. Her life has been subsumed by getting the kids from A to B, and as much as she loves them, she's struggling to create the mental space to focus on writing her new book. Even worse, rather than having a rich inner intellectual life, she's stuck listening to other mums complain about their dating lives.  And even when Laura's husband Dean does coming home from yet another travel trip, he's exhausted, she's exhausted, the conversation gets mired in the bureaucratic minutiae of family life.  Things hit a tipping point when Dean drunkenly starts having sex with Laura but pulls back when he realises it's her. And then she finds his hot colleague Fiona's beauty kit in HIS suitcase. Is he having an affair?

Laura confides in her father Felix who argues that Dean probably is having an affair, because heck, that's what men do.  Felix seems to relish spending time with Laura as they tail Dean through New York and even to Mexico to uncover evidence of his misdeeds. And all of this makes for a hilarious buddy comedy that could easily serve as a prequel for a detective duo TV show. Rashida Jones (Laura) and Bill Murray (Felix) have real chemistry and it's just an absolute blast seeing them slope around Manhattan together in his absurd red sports car just being charismatic and witty and rogueish in that Bill Murray way. And we also get a side order of comedic genius from Jenny Slate (LANDLINE) as the hilariously self-involved school mum.

But there's so much more going on in this film. It's almost as if Bill Murray is back in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS but this time he's playing the Gene Hackman role.  Laura's willingness to suspect her husband of infidelity is clearly coloured by being raised in a broken home. Likewise, her father's willingness to think Dean is cheating is coloured by his own predilections.   It's clear that Laura feels lost and hurt.  But is any of that her husband's fault?  Or is this just motherhood damaging her sense of self, and thus self-esteem.  And is that lack of self-esteem in her marriage bringing up issues around her own childhood and her father's infidelity.  

So, from my perspective, this film isn't about whether the husband cheated or not at all. And that's why the Marlon Wayans character, Dean, is so vacuous.  We actually don't care about him, and maybe neither do the lead characters. In the words of Laura, "what if I'm just in a rut?" And also paraphrasing from Laura, what if her dad just wants to spend more time with her?  And from writer-director Sofia Coppola (THE BEGUILED), maybe the shadow Laura is trying to move out from under isn't that of motherhood but her larger-than-life dad?  

ON THE ROCKS is rated R and has a running time of 96 minutes. It is streaming on Apple TV+.

AMMONITE - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Closing Night Gala

AMMONITE suffers in my head from comparisons with the devastatingly brilliant PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, which played at last year's festival and has a very similar story at its heart. In both cases a young girl trapped in either the reality or prospect of a loveless and controlling marriage meets a talented older working class woman with a professional skill.  In both cases, the meeting takes place in a geographically isolated and brutally beautiful place and the relationship that builds is a slow-burn to a physically passionate end.  But in the latter, I truly believed in the connection between the two women, and in the former I'm not sure I did.

Part of the reason for this is that it was 50 mins for the protagonists in AMMONITE to have an actual (if insubstantial) conversation and 1hr10m for them to have a kiss.  And the interest in the characters is deeply asymmetrical.  Kate Winslet's Mary Anning IS fascinating. She's so repressed and locked in - maybe as much by her consciousness of her poverty and working class status as by her homosexuality - and has a fierce pride that refuses to accept help.  By contrast, Saiorse Ronan's Charlotte is the typical silly Victorian woman, fit for nothing but to be admired for her beauty. This is not to victim-shame, but she is exactly the product of societal strictures and doesn't really display an inner life in the way that PORTRAIT's young woman does. There doesn't seem to be much under the surface.  I had the feeling in AMMONITE that I always get watching Brideshead Revisited. I can understand why Charles is fascinated by Sebastian but not why Sebastian wants to hang out with Charles!

So the relationship develops and is crystallised at a beautifully staged elegant supper party where Charlotte is immediately embraced by the ladies, and Mary is left sitting excluded at the back, full of jealousy and surprise at just how much she resents them taking *her* girl away from her. We then move to a hyper explicit sex scene.  Now, it's really great to see a no-nonsense depiction of lesbian sex on screen, but it did feel strange in a movie where so much is repressed and withheld. It just felt tonally jarring rather than a cathartic release and a meeting of bodies and souls.

On the positive side, this movie looks and sounds ravishing. The costumes and way in which Lyme Regis is depicted is as austere and fierce and unique as Mary, and the sound design batters our ears with gales and tides that hint at what Mary feels under her still surface.  The acting was also top notch as one might expect,  with Winslet giving a masterclass in facial acting where there is no dialogue.  I also loved the Fiona Shaw character Elizabeth and wanted to see more of her, because I feel so much of Mary's characters reticence is due to class rather than queer concerns and that plays into their former relationship. I also love that because Charlotte is so worldly she has only experienced love as a kind of material possession and so when she falls for Mary she also expresses that with a kind of material possession. Just as she, as a wife, was expected to be subsumed without objection into her husband's world, she now expects that of Mary.

I also love how male a space the British Museum is, and the power of these two women at the centre of it at the end - as though the director Francis Lee (GOD'S OWN COUNTRY) is finally re-centring women in British history. Here is a woman who's name is not mentioned on the fossil that's on display at the Museum, but she can reclaim it visually in this film. Truly, it has been a long time coming.

AMMONITE has a running time of 120 minutes and played Toronto and London 2020.  It opens in the USA on November 13th.

LOVERS ROCK - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 12

LOVERS ROCK is another of the five-part series of films that Steve McQueen (TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE) has made to be shown on the BBC as part of its Small Axe series of films exploring British Black history.  It couldn't be more different from the courtroom drama, MANGROVE, that opened the festival.  Rather, this is a celebration of a certain time and a certain style of home-made West Indian entertainment - the house party! As the movie opens in early 80s Notting Hill, some young boys are clearing out the furniture from a house, and some women are cooking up a storm while singing together.  Hours later young West Indian men and women don their finery and pay their fifty pence to come into an absolutely banging house party, with the most amazing music. The atmosphere is hot and sultry with dancing in the queue for the loo and people eating home-made food and making out in the back garden.  As with all parties, there are unwelcome attentions from men, but also more happy couplings, and evidently a copious amount of weed being smoked.  The best way to approach this film - with little plot or dialogue - is just to be carried along on the positive vibe. To become so absorbed, as the revellers do, that when the song Silly Games stops, you feel the music continue, with perhaps the most tuneful dancers of all time singing a cappella. The sun comes up and so does reality.  This safe and warm private space that celebrates West Indian culture is exposed for what it is.  An attempted sexual assault is thwarted.  And as a new couple leaves to make out in the workplace of the boy, his boss finds them and scolds them.  The black man puts on his cockney geezer accent that makes him less Other and threatening to the White man. The compromises of living as an ethnic minority begin again. 

LOVERS ROCK has a running time of 68 minutes. It is the second episode in Steve McQueen's Small Axe TV series.  It will air on UK TV on November 22nd and be released on the internet in the USA on November 27th.