Complicated thoughts on ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER*****

Paul Thomas Anderson - PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, THE MASTER, INHERENT VICE..... a master film-maker whose film I admire and adore. But ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER was a painful watch, impacted by who I am and the times we live in. As a woman of colour and second generation immigrant living in a place where lampposts are papered with St George's flags, I could not reconcile enjoying a comedy caper juxtaposed with a hyper-real depiction of undocumented migrants fearing for their lives in a sanctuary city.  In the end, I spent much of the film wondering why all of the uniformly gushing reviews had not commented on this, or found it problematic. I felt sad about racism as depicted in this film and found in my daily life. And sad that every single mainstream film reviewer in the UK is white. Maybe in a decade, if liberal democracy wins, I will be able to watch this film on its own terms. But right now, it just feels like a white guy making a funny film using immigrant pain as a backdrop. Even worse, a hispanic saviour bailing out a white fuckwit.  No. Just no.

The film is about an ex radical left terrorist (Leonardo Di Caprio) who, fifteen years later, is a stoner dad living under an alias with his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). His old white supremacist antagonist (Sean Penn) is trying to gain access to an elite group of racist vigilantes. In order to join he has to clean up his past, not least his sexual infatuation with the teenager's mother, a black terrorist called Perfidia Beverly Hills.  So the racist kidnaps the daughter. There are a bunch of car chases and shoot outs. The end.

On a technical level, this is, of course, a superb film, and maybe even the film of the year. PTA and his DP Michael Bauman shoot the film in Vistavision, so it looks fantastic and deserves to be seen on the best screen you can find. PTA crafts not one but two truly unique and tense car chases - the first in a prologue that has a getaway car scythe through traffic centrally rather than going around the side onto pavements - the second using a rolling hilly landscape to obscure and reveal the cars chasing each other.   And no-one unfurls his camera through an ever deeper set like PTA. There's a bravura set piece where we move from a storefront in a sanctuary city through a house and into an underground hideout where migrants are having to escape through a tunnel to a church. Impeccable film-making.

And then there's Jonny Greenwood's stunning score that moves from genre to genre, Greenwood often playing his own wide set of obscure musical instruments. At times I felt like the score was the only thing holding the film together. Kudos also to the production and costume designers who manage to deliberately confuse the viewer as to when the film is set.  Are we in the 70s, when US domestic terrorism from anti-capitalist militants was at its height? Or is this film contemporary? The answer is both, and that's handled very elegantly.

The performances are more complex to review. Sean Penn is mesmerising as a white supremacist police officer but it's a performance that is deliberately cartoonish. I actually found his sidekick, played straight, far more terrifying. Leonardo Di Caprio is funny, but derivative, playing his character as Lebowski. Or maybe it's just lazy writing. Benicio Del Toro plays himself - affable, cool, lowkey hilarious.  Regina Hall is stunning as an ex terrorist now trying to help out Di Caprio's teenage daughter. But it's like she's in a totally different film.

And this brings us into the inherent incoherence of the film. Half of it is played deadly straight and completely terrifies us.  That's the film containing Regina Hall and the migrants and the military sidekick interrogating high school kids. That's a great film. That's the film I wanted. And then there's a comedy caper full of cartoonish characters that I ultimately did not give a shit about. Leonardo Di Caprio's character is caught in the middle of this incoherence. Funny yes. But do I care about him as a father?  Do I invest in his relationship with daughter? No.  Because genre is working to undermine him.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER has a running time of 166 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

GANGSTER SQUAD

GANGSTER SQUAD is a movie that's all style and no substance. The post WW2, Los Angeles crime thriller has beautiful people (Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin) in beautiful costumes, trying to say cool things while in mortal danger.  But where Curtis Hanson/James Elroy's, LA CONFIDENTIAL,  was slippery and seductive and genuinely scary at times. Ruben Fleisher's GANGSTER SQUAD is about as cartoonish and risible as Warren Beatty's DICK TRACY.  Nowhere is that more obvious that in the hero and antihero.  Josh Brolin's fearless cop O'Mara is an earnest meat-head. Every decision he takes in hunting down Sean Penn's real-life gangster Mickey Cohen is plain dumb.  O'Mara blunders through this movie, all muscle and no irony, and we're left wondering why his marvellously clever wife (The Killing's Mireille Enos - the only heart-warming performance in the film) sticks with him.  As for Sean Penn as O'Mara's nemesis, this is his worst performance in some time, not helped by the fact that he's under so much make-up he looks like a parody on Mickey Rourke.

The plot, such as it is, sees the one clean senior cop bring together an off-the-books gangster squad of policeman, led by O'Mara, to kick Cohen's ass out of town. It's a band of misfits and clichés - a sharpshooter - a token African American, a token Latin American - a brain (Giovanni Ribisi, whose characteristic over-acting does not look out of place here) - and the Face man (Ryan Gosling).  Naturally the Face man falls for the gangster's moll (Emma Stone) leading to a hackneyed side-plot, but in a movie painted with this broad a brush are we really surprised that all basically ends well in the best of all worlds?

GANGSTER SQUAD was a great disappointment. I'd imagined great things from Ruben Fleisher after his genuinely witty and original ZOMBIELAND.  I partly blame Will Beall's plodding script full of mono-dimensional characters. But at the end of the day, it's the director who directs bland performances, decided to use anachronistic, cheap, Zack Snyder-y, vis effects, and generally drags down the tone of the production.  

GANGSTER SQUAD is on release in Belgium, Australia, Chile, Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UK, Canada, Estonia, India, Lithuania, Norway, Romania, Sweden, Taiwan and the USA. It opens on January 17th in Argentina, Denmark, Hong Kong and New Zealand; on January 24th in Germany, Greece, Kuwait, Russia and Iceland; on January 31st in Hungary, Slovenia, Brazil, Bulgaria and Turkey; on February  7th in France, Portugal and Spain; on February 21st in Italy; on March 1st in Finland and on May 3rd in Japan.

GANGSTER SQUAD is rated R in the USA, and has a running time of 113 minutes.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 15 - THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

Rabartu Smitu, Rabartu Smitu, 

tashiwa ga suki Rabartu Smitu

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE is a visually inventive but often frustratingly slow-paced film that bravely tries to juxtapose whimsical comedy and serious history with problematic results. 

Sean Penn plays an ageing, bored and depressed former goth rock-star called Cheyenne. His high-pitched voice and Robert Smith clothes mark him as a man-child, trapped in his adolescence, but anchored by the love of his down-to-earth wife, Jane (Frances McDormand) and the friendship of emotionally scarred fan-girl, Mary. The death of his father forces Cheyenne back to America. Almost on a whim, he sets off on a meandering road-trip, searching for the Nazi that had tormented his father. But despite a very moving late scene of confession and humiliation, this is not really a revenge movie at all, but rather a character drama about an estranged son breaking beyond that emotional vacuum in order to become a man.

The casting is strong - with Sean Penn and Frances McDormand complemented by strong cameos from Harry Dean Stanton, Judd Hirsch (as a Simon Wiesenthal cipher) and Heinz Lieven as the Nazi. And the script, by Umberto Contarello, contains many belly-laughs, and superlative dramatic set-pieces. But as with all Paolo Sorrentino movies, the true stars are Luca Bigazzi's fluid, deliberate, elegant camera-work and the flamboyant use of the musical score, this time, by the legendary David Byrne. Technically, this film is flawless and imaginative. 

But it didn't grab me, fascinate me, in the same way as Sorrentino's previous films - IL DIVO and THE FAMILY FRIEND. This is partly because the character of Cheyenne is, however sympathetic, also rather slow and whimsical, and after a while this started to grate. It's partly because the road-trip in the second half is so random and slow. I know that this is the point - that is should have the kind of magic and wonder of THE STRAIGHT STORY - but I did become very impatient with it. And finally, I guess I just felt too uncomfortable with the deliberate juxtaposition of the Holocaust with the character of Cheyenne - the man least likely to come to mind as a Nazi hunter. Something about the man using the hunt for the Nazi as a kind of distraction from a life of satiety, and then as a kind of agent toward self-knowledge, felt weird and exploitative. I know this was a deliberate provocation from Sorrentino - but for me it just didn't work. 

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE played Cannes 2011 where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It opened earlier this year in France and is currently on release in Italy. It opens in Germany on November 10th, in Sweden on November 18th, in the US in December, in Australia on December 26th, in Poland on February 3rd, in Spain in March and in the UK on March 9th. 

THE TREE OF LIFE

This review contains spoilers.

THE TREE OF LIFE opens with a mother in an idealised 1950s American Suburbia reacting to a telegram telling her that her that her son has died. This is inter-cut with a middle-aged man in a contemporary American city - a prisoner of the sterile modern architecture that he has helped create.  We intuit that this man is her son, the elder brother of the child who died. And he too is trying to make sense of his grief - to unravel the meaning of his life and his brother's death - and to understand - on the most profound existential level - "how did I get here?"  

This opening prologue sets up both the style and themes of the movie that is to follow.  Stunning photography of the natural world set against the world that ambitious men have created. Whispered voice-overs questioning the meaning of existence - the choice between Grace and Ambition.  The audience left to intuit what is really happening - and to glory in the sensory experience.  I suspect that most viewers will know at this point whether they are going to find the film a pretentious, wilfully obscure film over-loaded with hokey spiritual themes, or a cinematic masterpiece that pushes the boundaries of narrative cinema and has an earnest engagement with spiritual matters that leaves most contemporary cinema looking superficial and banal.  I fell into the latter camp. 

And so, after its opening prologue, the film moves into its first act - the most challenging in the film and presumably the point at which many audience members walk out. Because the questioning brother, now grown-up, tries to answer his questions by taking us right back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of his brother's life, but to the beginning of life itself.  We are immersed into a twenty minute display of creation - Kubrickian visuals that are quite simply wonderful in the literal sense of that world. Writer-director Terrence Malick wants us to wonder at the glory of nature - the power and beauty of it - but also to see that the tendency toward brutality was always there - even from the time of the pre-history.  My reaction to a scene where a dinosaur holds down the head of another injured dinosaur, and then tentatively lifts up his foot, was to see this is the same questioning of grace versus brutality.  I wouldn't blame others if they thought, WTF?  

In the second act we return to 1950s suburbia, and see the birth of three sons of the family.  Brad Pitt plays the father, truly loving but also a strict disciplinarian. It is a nuanced performance and arguably the best of his career. He has a harsh self-improvement philosophy, and is feared rather than loved by his children. The mother, played by Jessica Chastain, is cast as a kind of Virgin Mary figure - loving, forgiving, gentle, a source of succour.  She looks on mournfully as she sees the father castigate the children.  And so we have embodied the battle between the Ambition and Grace. It is a battle that the father ultimately loses - his musical career and his patents come to nothing  - and they have to leave their family home in a scene that ends the second act. He admits in a voice-over that his striving has brought him nothing but estrangement from his family and disappointment. He demands kisses from his children, he knows that they hate him.  The one son he is truly proud of - who he accompanies on the piano in a marvellous scene - is killed. And the elder son, who watches this scene of intimacy from outside the window, is left resentful.  

That isn't to say that this section of the movie is depressing - there are scenes of children goofing around that made me utterly nostalgic for my own childhood - and all portrayed with an intimacy that is captivating.  The camera is typically placed at the height of a child, looking around table-legs or looking up at adults. And the mother is portrayed in one particular scene as floating in the air - just as a little kid might ideate his mother as a kind of angelic figure. It is truly beautiful. 

In the final act of the film, we move into a kind of dream world, where the questioning middle-aged son is reunited with his family from the 1950s - including his kid brother. The mother and father are overjoyed to see the little boy, it feels to anyone familiar with the Bible like a reunion in paradise. And then we have, after two hours of questioning, a scene that I found utterly cathartic - a scene in which the mother seems to accept that God has taken her son, "I give him back to you", surrounded by the supporting embrace of the people on the beach.  A lot of reviewers have criticised this scene in particular as being an unnecessary epilogue - detracting from the scenes in suburbia. But to me, this is the most crucial part of the film. Without it, we have no resolution, no closure, and the film really has been for nothing.

I am fully aware at how earnest and pretentious this review might seem. What can I say? Malick approaches his material with such a sense of wonder and goodness and earnest questioning - his films are quite without cynicism and it seems mean-spirited to approach them with anything but that same degree of earnestness.  I suspect that this unabashed, heart on your sleeve approach - this wide-eyed wonder at the beauty of nature and the goodness in the world - is what irks so many modern viewers, so used to post-modern irony and nihilism.  This is a film that comes from a time before ironic detachment. In fact, it wants us to jump into our sensory experiences, without barriers, and to really feel everything.  It is, in that sense, a truly radical, truly stunning, beautiful, graceful film. It is, to my mind, Malick's best work since Badlands, a worthy winner of the Palme D'Or, and a true pantheon film.

THE TREE OF LIFE played Cannes 2011 where it won the Palme D'Or. It was released earlier this year in France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark, Greece, Israel, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, Germany, Austria, Taiwan, the Philippines and Australia. It was released this weekend in Hong Kong, Thailand, Ireland, the UK and the USA. It opens on August 12th in Japan; on August 25th in New Zealand and Finland; on September 2nd in Norway; on September 16th in Spain; on December 9th in Estonia and on December 15th in Argentina.

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.

Overlooked DVD of the month - WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

Over a decade after making the political satire WAG THE DOG, veteran Hollywood director Barry Levinson made a Hollywood satire, WHAT JUST HAPPENED? It features Robert de Niro in the thinly fictionalised role of producer Art Linson, upon whose memoirs the film is based. De Niro's character is trying to get a British auteur (Michael Wincott) to recut his movie so that the studio (Catherine Keener) will give it a Cannes premier. Meanwhile, he's trying to get Bruce Willis to shave off his beard and look the part of a leading man in his forthcoming picture. And then there's the wife he wants to reconcile with (Robin Wright Penn) despite the fact that she's sleeping with the screenwriter (Stanley Tucci); the daughter (Kristen Stewart) who's going off the rails; and the Hollywood groupies who'll do anything, any time, for an interview.

I really liked this film for exactly the reason that all the other reviewers seem to have skewered it. They complain that it isn't caustic enough - that the stakes aren't high enough. All that's at stake, they say, is the continuing functioning of the well-oiled Hollywood money-making machine. By contrast, in Altman's THE PLAYER, or indeed in Levinson's previous political satire, it was a matter of life and death. But surely the point is EXACTLY that the studios, the starlets, the directors and producers are prostituting themselves for worthless commercial dross. In SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS the movies were worth something and that partially excused the shameless behaviour. But this movie is all the more tragic because it shows just how meaningless the whole sharade is.

More superficially, this flick is great because of all the scabrous one-liners. It's eminently quotable in the way that GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS is eminently quotable. It also features a great performance from Michael Wincott as the auteur - a guy who last got a role as memorable when he played Guy of Gisbourne in the Kevin Costner's ROBIN HOOD. You also get to see Catherine Keener in one her most subtle performances as the quietly threatening studio boss who can turn on a dime if she gets a faint whiff of box-office success.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED played Sundance 2008 and Cannes, out of competition. It opened in the UK and US in winter 2008. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

PERSEPOLIS (US dub) - after careful parent consideration, a film teenagers should see

Some critics are getting a bit sniffy about this English language re-dub of the critically acclaimed French language animted film, PERSEPOLIS. But the great thing about this new version is that you now have more of a chance of dragging along the teenagers, to whom some of the material will speak very directly. PERSEPOLIS is basically a coming of age story and it's disarmingly frank about how girls experience musical crazes, puberty, first love and first heart-break. It's insightful, honest, funny and beautifully hand-drawn, largely in stark black and white against watercolour backdrops.

What gives the movie its depth and importance is that it's essentially a true story of a young girl who grew up in Iran during the Islamic revolution. She starts off as someone who could easily be a Westerner - wearing sneakers, idolising Bruce Lee and obsessed with pop music. But she quickly learns how members of her family have been imprisoned and then killed; she is forced to wear the veil and can't hold hands with her boyfriend in public.

Twice our heroine flees Iran. First, as a mouthy teenager her parents decide to send her to Vienna. She struggles to fit in, and after a disastrous love affair returns to Iran. Finally, when the repression increases and her marriage fails, she leaves her family for good, for Paris.

The dark material is faced head on. Early on we see a young buy shot during the revolution; later we see a Communist stand in front of a noose, and the Iran Iraq war sees batallions fall under fire. Added to this, we have to negotiate suicide, torture and homelessness. So parents should carefully consider whether their kids are ready for this stuff. The good news is that the material is usually shown in silhouette and in a highly stylised form. The best news is that, if your kids are ready for the material, it could prompt some wonderful conversations and reflections on how modern life in the West compares to Iran.

PERSEPOLIS played Cannes 2007 where it won the Jury Prize tied with STELLET LICHT. It also played London and Toronto 2007 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. PERSEPOLIS was released in France, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Tyrkey, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Hong Kong and Japan in 2007. It was released earlier this year in the USA, Poland, Singapore, Italy, Brazil, the Netherlands and Thailand. It is currently on release in Romania, Argentina and on re-release in the UK. It opens in Austrlia in August.

London Film Fest Day 10 - INTO THE WILD

I always think of Sean Penn as making angry films about disaffected, lonely men: movies that feature alienated members of society but also movies that alienate the audience with their chilly, depressing picture of humanity. I often admire Penn’s performances and directorial efforts. I rarely find myself moved by them. So it came as quite a surprise to find that INTO THE WILD was an incredibly warm and touching movie.

It tells the real-life story of an American kid called Chris McCandless. At the turn of the 1990s, Chris McCandless was a bright college graduate with a fondness for poetry. He was destined for Harvard Law and a solid middle-class life. But he abandoned his car, gave his college fund to charity and burned his petty cash and headed for the open road. He deliberately kept his parents in the dark. With their abusive marriage built upon a tissue of lies, and their typically middle-class fondness for nice “things”, they represented everything he was escaping from. More cruelly, he also kept his little sister in the dark, and we hear her understanding turn to hurt in Jena Malone’s touching voice-over throughout the film.

Before the film, I was prejudiced about McCandless. I thought his decision not to get in touch with his parents was callous. But the film shows him to be a warm-hearted, generous man, capable of empathising with people and of really listening to them. He was a good friend and often transformed the lives of people he lived with. In turn, the world seems to have shown him a smiling face. From the wonderfully caring hippies called Rainey and Jan (Brian Dierker and Catherine Keener) to a an old lonely man called Ron (Hal Holbrook) who actually offers to adopt him. Even when Chris kayaks into Mexico, loses his boat, and then turns up at the border crossing without ID, the immigration guard seems faintly amused and let him through. Throughout his two years of travels McCandless picks up survival skills and starts training for his Big Alaskan Adventure. The loneliness of the Yukon proves the ultimate test of his mission to live a pure life in all of nature’s beauty. But, despite being infinitely less irresponsible than Timothy Treadwell, he falls foul of mighty nature in the end.

Emile Hirsch gives a wonderful portrayal of McCandless. He fills the screen with warmth and a sense of adventure and has genuine chemistry with all the people he meets along his journey. We can see that McCandless is foolhardy in his determination to follow an extreme course, but we are never allowed to judge him for it. But most of all, I think that Sean Penn deserves special praise here. As screen-writer and director, he discreetly shows the audience the home-life that Chris was escaping from and the wonderful beauty of the American landscape that lured Chris on. The visuals are absolutely stunning and are perfectly complemented by Eddie Vedder’s songs. I left the movie theatre grateful to have spent time with McCandless and all the people he had met on his travels. I was deeply moved by his epiphany and the journey’s end.

INTO THE WILD played Toronto 2007 and has already been on release in the USA, Canada and the Czech Republic. It goes on release in the UK today. It opens in Russia, Iceland, Australia and Denmark later in November and in Turkey and Brazil in December 2007. It opens in Romania, Japan and Spain in January 2008 and in Germany and Norway in February. It opens in Sweden in March.

ALL THE KING'S MEN - really not so bad as all that....

....but not so fantastic either. ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN attracted a lot of critical brick-bats when it was released last autumn and made no money at the box office either. So I was expecting a tedious over-blown movie. But, you know, it's not as bad as all that.

The movie is an adaptation of the famous political novel by Robert Penn Warren, which was in turn loosely based on the life of the Louisana Governor, US Senator and one-time potential presidential candidate, Huey Long. Long was a populist demagogue, who got elected on the 'hick vote' and proceeded to threaten the vested interests with a programme of wealth redistribution and massive infrastructure investment.

In the movie, the Governor is called Willie Stark, and is played by Sean Penn as a fire-brand orator of superb skill. He begins as a man of fierce integrity, who won't touch alcohol and stands on street corners warning the electorate of the corruption of their local officials. When he discovers that he's been put up as a Gubernatorial candidate to split the Hick vote - that he's a patsy - he starts campaigning for real and wins a landslide election to become Governor. Many critics have taken Penn to task for his exaggerated Southern accent and wild polemical style. But if you look at the most successful orators in history some have had exactly this kind of over-the-top style. This is precisely what translates to the gathered hordes at the back of the stadia. Frankly, I found his performance mesmerising.

Sadly, he is let down by poor casting of the other roles and a poor script. Penn's Governor Stark is propelled to power thanks partly to the help of a journalist played by Jude Law. This character should be one of the most intriguing in the movie. He is the son of a wealthy establishment family - precisely the kind that Stark's policies are aimed against. Indeed, when Stark needs to side-step an impeachment trial, he asks the journalist to investigate his own godfather - a man with whom he is incredibly close. The moral decision that the journalist makes: whether or not to dig dirt on his own surrogate father to further the career of a politician that he knows has become corrupt - should form the emotional and moral heart of the film. Instead, the viewer is constantly distracted by Jude Law's inability to consistently hold down any variant of a Southern accent. The same is also true (but with less serious damage inflicted because they have smaller parts) of Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins as the girlfriend and the godfather respectively.

The other big flaw is in the development of Sean Penn's character. Instead of sliding into the mire of corruption and compromise, he seems to go to sleep one night as candidate with integrity and wake up as a corrupt Governor. There is no middle ground. This makes the movie infinitely less interesting and once again focuses attention onto Jude Law's character as the centre of the moral drama - leading to the aforementioned frustrations.

Still, for all it's faults, I was never bored watching this lengthy political thriller and despite its manifest flaws, I enjoyed Sean Penn's performance and the handsome production (Pawel Edelman (DP) and Patrizia von Brandenstein). I even enjoyed James Horner's orchestral score, although I have heard it described as clumsy and over-worked.

ALL THE KING'S MEN was released last autumn and is now available on DVD.

THE INTERPRETER - over-reaching ambition sinks this thriller

THE INTERPRETER is the worst of all things - an over-long, flabby, dull thriller that fails to excite, enthrall or build up any tension. The idea is that Nicole Kidman is a translator at the United Nations building in New York. One night she overhears a plot on the life of an African president. She goes to the police with this, but comes under suspicion herself. So the movie becomes a bog-standard whodunnit, albeit with pretensions at more overt political subject matter, which it largely manages to dance around. For me, this movie was a noble failure. Despite the great photography of the United Nations building, I kept being brought out of the movie by three things. First, Sean Penn's hammy acting (he seems to be turning into a parody of himself, much like Al Pacino). Second, Nicole Kidman's fluctuating South African accent. One cannot help but wonder how far the film's credibility would have been improved if they had cast Charlize Theron - a brilliant actress who is actually South African. Third, there are a number of plot points, which if not exactly plot holes, certainly stretch credulity. These include who has access cards to different parts of the UN, why a President at risk of an assassination attempt would be left alone, how come Sean Penn can get in the safe room with just a key....And don't even get me started on the ridiculousness of the ending. Nicole Kidman used to be a flag for a good film - I almost always trusted that if she had opted to be in a film then it had a good script and production team. But it seems that of late her radar has been off and THE INTERPRETER only confirms my view. So, as much as it pains me to say this of a Sydney Pollock movie starring Penn, Kidman and Catherine Keener, this is probably one to avoid.

THE INTERPRETER is on global release.

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON – earnest yet dull

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON is a movie about the psychological breakdown of a man named Samuel Bicke. He is decent working class man pushed to the limit by a series of misfortunes. His wife leaves him when he cannot provide for her and their daughters. The bank turns him down for a business loan largely because his partner is black. He is the butt of jokes and criticism at work. He feels denigrated and de-humanised at every turn, and comes to think of himself as a modern-day wage-slave. For some bizarre reason, which is never convincingly explained, he sees Richard Nixon as the ultimate cause of his downfall – the man who sold him a vision of the American Dream that turned out to be a lie. In a bizarre turn, Bicke decides to take a hold of his life, and become more than just another face-less nobody. He will hijack a plane and crash land it into the White House, thus killing the President.

Where the film succeeds in casting three great actors, Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle, in the leads. Each gives a technically pitch-perfect performance, although because of flaws in the concept of the story, I found their performances ultimately uninvolving. I also think that the film beautifully captures the absurdity of the man on the edge of society: Sam Bicke is a tragi-comic character. Nowhere is this shown more clearly than we he tries to join the Black Panthers, who are understandably mystified and insulted that he should want to join. Bicke argues his case for allowing white membership as follows: “Zebras. You see, they're black, and they're white. The Black Panthers become The Zebras, and membership will double.”

However, for me this movie ultimately fails. The title, the fact that it stars Sean Penn and the plot summary that references a suicidal terrorist mission, sell the movie as a tense political thriller with contemporary relevance. However, viewers may find themselves feeling short-changed. Terrorism and the corruption of Richard Nixon are never really discussed here. Instead, it is the process by which a man becomes dehumanised to the point of considering extreme action of any kind that is the real subject matter. The Samuel Bicke character could have expressed his frustration at society in any number of ways. For instance, he could have become a lone gunman like Michael Douglas’ character in the movie FALLING DOWN, hitting out at anyone who came across his path. To my mind, there is something crass in the current climate in using the hijacking a plane that is intended to crash into the White House as a sort of background, substitutable plot device.

Overall, I found that despite some technically brilliant performances by the leads and the rare flash of black humour, this movie had nothing new or interesting to say about the disenfranchisement of working men in corporate America. It certainly had very little to say about terrorism. And worst of all, because it re-treads old ground, it was a very dull movie to watch.

THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON showed at Toronto 2004 and is released in the UK today.