THE APPRENTICE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 9

Roy Cohn was one of the most toxic and pervasive influences on America in the past century. The irony was that the morally corrupt lawyer was also a closeted gay man, supporting the Reagan administration in its anti-AIDS policies as he himself was dying of AIDS. He is such a notorious and influential figure that he was portrayed by Al Pacino in the HBO adaptation of Angels In America. That was a performance so strong and so well-written that I can quote lines to this day.  But in this new film, Jeremy Strong (Succession) has surpassed it.

Jeremy Strong's Roy Cohn is a despicable man. Racist, homophobic (ironically) and a capitalist red in tooth and claw.  His patriotism lies in an any means necessary preservation of right-wing governance. His legal practice relies on blackmail and intimidation. Strong plays him as a wiry deeply-tanned man of unflinching self-confidence.  But he also plays him as a man who loves and is loyal, and who throws that love and all of its protection on the awkward star-struck suburban hick Donald J Trump.

In this film we see Roy take Trump under his wing, blackmail away his Federal lawsuit on racially discriminatory leasing and achieve a massive City tax abatement for Trump's first large Manhattan development deal. Roy teaches him to always attack, to create his own truth, and to never ever concede defeat. He also teaches him to dress expensively - in those awful boxy dark navy Brioni suits - in order to wash the suburban cheapness off of him. 

Why does he do this? The film implies that maybe there was sexual attraction at first. It's hard to imagine the obese tangerine hairball as attractive but he was young once. But soon the relationship has become far more paternal. Cohn recognise that Fred Trump is a toxic bully - driving one son to alcoholism and the other to a kind of macho posturing as self-protection.  

This makes it all the more heartbreaking when a now superficially successful Trump, at the height of his 80s pomp, turns his back on a now very sick Cohn.  It's testament to Strong's performance that despite the fact that I despise the real life man, I felt desperately sorry for him in his final scene. He looks both proud of his monstrous creation and heartbroken that he has been disavowed. 

And what of Sebastian Stan's young Trump? This is an equally masterful performance. When we first meet him he is gauche and uncertain and obsequious.  By the end of the film he is inflated in ego and stomach alike, impotent thanks to amphetamines, balding and intimidated by his wife. But he has absolutely absorbed Cohn's lessons and become the author of his own mythos. He has adopted the pursed lips and scornful eyes and hand gestures synonymous with the Trump that we know today. And yet Stan never becomes a caricature.  

As Cohn is buried, the one-way love story of Roy for Donald is over, and the one-way love story of Trump for Trump has begun. He is having the fat sucked out his body - a symbol if ever there was one of excessive bile and obscene gorging on the carcass of America. 

Kudos to director Ali Abbasi (HOLY SPIDER) and writer Gabriel Sherman (INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE) for having the guts to tackle this project, even at the risk of making Trump seem sympathetic at the start and Cohn seem sympathetic at the end. I am particularly impressed that they had the guts to include a scene where Trump, his ego insulted, rapes Ivana.  This is something she alleged in her divorce proceedings and which he accused her of cooking up. The motivation for it seems utterly in keeping with what we know about his narcissism. The scene made me consider the role of the actress Maria Bakalova in the fever dream that has been MAGA America - acting the part of a rape victim in this account of Trump's life, and then being treated as a sexual favour by the real life Rudy Giuliani in BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM.  

But if the courage of all involved in this film is to be praised, then we must also condemn the gutless moral midgetry of every self-avowed liberal Hollywood distributor and streaming service that didn't have the balls to take this movie on in the face of Trump's bulshit legal threats. 

THE APPRENTICE has a running time of 120 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London 2024. It opened in the USA on October 11th and in the UK on October 18th.

SATURDAY NIGHT - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 8

This is not a review of SATURDAY NIGHT as, for logistical reasons, I had to skip the final thirty minutes. That said, I was not that invested in it and I doubt I missed anything.

The problem may be that for British people, SNL is not part of our cultural fabric. And even from a contemporary perspective, whenever I come across skits on social media I don’t find them especially funny. So for sure I know about Ackroyd or Chevy Chase or Billy Crystal but these guys feel pretty vanilla to me. I appreciate George Carlin but he’s not really part of the SNL crew. And as for Belushi, it’s complicated and complicated in a way that the first hour or so of this film did not seem willing to engage in.

I am also not sure that the ninety minutes leading up the first ever episode of SNL fifty years ago really warrants the full Robert Altman treatment, or whether writer-director Jason Reitman (GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE) has the technical ability to make that shooting style feel organic rather than forced.  So yes we get the rapidly moving camera weaving in an out of dressing rooms and the stage and the control room and it’s all meant to feel claustrophobic and chaotic and kinetic. But it’s also felt stagey and shouting attention to its own cleverness in a way that was distracting. The overlapping Altmanian voices were probably better at conveying atmosphere but again to what end when the character arcs become harder to follow.

Worst of all, Reitman and fellow writer Gil Kenan (MONSTER HOUSE) seem desperate to inject some stakes into proceedings but I wasn’t convinced.  Producer Lorne Michaels has too much material. Okay fine just move half your skits into next week’s show. It’s not as if it’s topical satire. And as for Belushi going missing no shit he’s a raging drug addict: you have too much material just fill the gaps! 

All of which is to say that what I saw of the movie was not for me with the exception of every time writer Michael O’Donoghue (Tommy Dewey) was preaching revolution to the franchises or ripping into the censor.  That was absolutely delicious.

SATURDAY NIGHT is rated R and has a running time of 109 minutes. It was released in the USA on October 4th and opens in the UK on January 31st 2025.

NIGHTBITCH*** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 9

For around sixty minutes of its running time, NIGHTBITCH is a film that has the following messages: giving birth is physically savage; transitioning from being an urban career woman to a suburban stay-at-home mum is emotionally savage; and your still-at-work husband is probably going to have trouble empathising. As messages go  it’s not rocket science or particularly new but in Amy Adams hands it is compelling and wonderfully playing against type.  How marvellous to see her lean into spite and anger and animalistic power and feminist separation! And so the film should have continued.

But, the film does continue and it bottles it. The message of the back end of the film seems to be that actually being a single mum and mounting an art exhibition is, in fact, super easy, and a dickhead husband can suddenly become super-supportive, and one can be happy and have it all in suburban Williams-Sonoma bliss! 

I blame writer-director Marielle Heller (A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD) for her milquetoast approach both to the early doors body horror and the messaging of the back end.  I also felt that for a single-issue movie it’s about 20 mins too long. 

It makes for an interesting contrast with yesterday’s superb SISTER MIDNIGHT, which had similar-ish subject matter but has far more imagination and conviction.

NIGHTBITCH is rated R and has a 98 minute running time. It played Toronto and London 2024. It opens in the USA on December 6th.

SISTER MIDNIGHT**** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 8

SISTER MIDNIGHT is a strange, weird, mordantly funny, Indian arthouse film written and directed by Karan Kandhari. It stars Radhika Apte as a young bride called Uma who spends her claustrophobic days in the small shack she shares with her shy and bewildered husband.  The feckless young couple are about as successful at coupling as the King and Queen in MARIE ANTOINETTE and Uma is singularly unsuited to being a housewife.

It’s not entirely clear when the film takes a turn into surreal fantasy but let’s just say that Uma’s unhappiness expresses itself physically in the most twisted and wonderful fashion.  But what raises the movie above mere comedy is that it shows how Uma finds companionship and solidarity from her fellow women - whether best friend Shitel or the local hijras. The message of the film is that men are simple fools, society is full of bigots, but there is solace in sisterhood and self-acceptance.

I loved everything about this film - from its Western and Indian needle drops - to its precise framing and camera movements (very Wes Anderson) - its sparse script - and its hilarious and fearless lead performance from Apte. Kudos to all involved.

SISTER MIDNIGHT has a running time of 110 minutes.  It played Cannes and London 2024. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

A REAL PAIN***** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 6

Jesse Eisenberg is such an accomplished writer, director and actor that he makes creating a laugh-out loud comedy that is also heartbreaking and profound seem effortless.  His tight 90 minute dramedy A REAL PAIN is one of the stand -out films of this year's festival: full of humanity, vulnerability, and centring a beautiful performance from Succession's Kieran Culkin.

Eisenberg and Culkin play two cousins, David and Benji, who travel to Poland to honour their recently deceased grandmother. David is clearly on edge - nervous around a cousin that he clearly loves but mortified by Benji's behaviour. It's a strange mix of envy at Benji's charisma and fear of what happens when he crashes. Culkin plays Benji as a larger than life, filterless, big kid who can be thoughtless and casually cruel but is obviously very fragile and loveable too. 

The cousins join a small private tour of Poland for Jews interested in the Holocaust. Their own grandmother was a survivor, and the tour group comprises people who also lost loved ones, as well as a new Jewish convert who himself survived the Rwandan genocide. As they journey to Lublin they see remnants of an old vibrant Jewish community with the concentration camp Madjanek clearly visible from the centre of town.

It is testament to Eisenberg's writing and direction that this topic is handled with due sensitivity but that this film is also absolutely hilarious. Best of all, it resists trite neat endings or emotional resolutions. It is a film that it is utterly confident about what it wants to say and gets the tone absolutely right in saying it. 

A REAL PAIN is rated R and has a running time of 90 minutes. It played Sundance where Eisenberg won the screenwriting award. It opens in the USA on November 1st and in the UK on January 10th 2025.

ANORA** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 7

Hhhmmmmm ANORA.  I think the problem is that it’s two films - an hilarious crime caper - and then a serious drama about a damaged woman who struggles to recognise love - but the first undercuts the second. So we get what is meant to be an emotional breakdown and breakthrough at the end. But we’ve had to slog through Wacky Races to get there.

The film stars Mikey Madison as Anora, a stripper living in the heavily ethnically Russian Brighton Beach area of New York. She picks up a feckless son of an Oligarch who pays her handsomely and then drunkenly decides to marry her so that he can avoid going back to Russia. Both Anora and Vanya are delusional.  She wants to think she isn’t a hooker and that it’s a real marriage so that she can escape her working class life. He knows full well his parents won’t let the marriage stand and frankly I am amazed they didn’t just shoot Anora and take him home.

Instead, what we get is a comedy caper in which Anora and Vanya’s family’s goons try to hunt down the errant boy so that they can get an annulment before the parents arrive from Russia. It’s full of genuinely funny physical comedy but goes on way too long. And then the aforementioned handbreak turn back into serious heartbreak. 

That final scene is what I wanted from ANORA - and what I never really got.  And it made me wonder if writer-director Sean Baker actually cared about the character.  Because she really is rather thinly drawn as a superficial, foul-mouthed desperate gold-digger for ninety percent of the film.  I was watching an actress who I knew could do more being constrained by the ditzy genre format.  And let’s be frank - all the women in this film are thinly drawn cliches - the bitch gangster wife, the bitch hooker, the bitch rival stripper.  Isn’t that just a tad misogynistic?

Which brings me to this year’s Cannes jury awarding this film the Palme D’Or and EMILIA PEREZ the Jury Prize. Both are superficially female-centred films but neither gives us a three-dimensional credible portrait of a woman.  Maybe we need more female writer-directors for that. 

ANORA is rated R and has a running time of 139 minutes.  It played Toronto, Telluride and London 2024. It opens in the USA on October 18th and in the UK on November 1st.