MR BURTON****

MR BURTON is a handsomely made, restrained, and surprisingly moving film about the creation of iconic actor Richard Burton.  When we meet him he is actually called Richie Jenkins. He is a lanky school kid in a poor Welsh mining town, living with his beloved sister and her husband. He shows some talent in school, but his first love is probably rugby, and he is forced to leave at school 16 and look for work.  And there might have been the end of Richie Jenkin's story were it not for an earnest and closeted English literature teacher called Mr Burton who fought for Richie to come back to school, to enter the RAF which in turn got him to Oxford University and thence to the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Mr Burton gave Richie his love of literature but also sloughed off his rough edges - whether his manners of his accent. By the end of the film the lanky kid is now a handsome young man with that iconic deep resonant voice.  He is the finest actor of his generation and perhaps of all time. But he remains riddled with demons and is already drinking heavily.  In a late scene he turns his wrath on his mentor, Hal to Mr Burton's Falstaff, but they cannot part.  It's a slow build to the only physical contact they will share. An acknowledgment that an adoption and name-change of convenience belie true paternity and care. It's a desperately moving moment.

Director Marc Evans (HUNKY DORY) handles all of this with elegance and assurance. A final act set around the theatre is beautifully put together - lighting, editing, score. And I also loved the screenplay by Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams. They never skirt the question of what Mr Burton's motives were but leave a lot unsaid, as befitting of the sexual mores of the time.  This suppression sets up the final act explosion of intense anger from Richie. Which brings me to the superb performances that anchor this film.  Aimee-Ffion Edward and Aneurin Barnard are impressive in small but important roles as Richie's sister and brother-in-law.  Lesley Manville and Toby Jones are - as ever - impeccable as "Ma" and Mr Burton.  But it's Industry's Harry Lawtey who truly impresses, turning from unsure boy into cocky but troubled man, and all while capturing Richard Burton's shifting accent and elocution.  It is quite the performance and I hope it gets the recognition it deserves.

MR BURTON has a running time of 124 minutes, is rated 12, and was released in the UK in April.

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Opening Night

Armando Iannucci's adaptation of Dickens' beloved autobiographical bildungsroman is a complete triumph.  Thanks to a wonderful adaptation by Simon Blackwell; effervescent and imaginative visuals; and a wonderful set of performances, this really is one of my all-time favourite versions of the tale.  I think it's because of the wonderful way in which it captures the love within the novel - the wonderful spirit of acceptance, love and compassion contained in the Peggotties assembled family - or Aunt Betsy Trotwood's care of Mr Dick - or David Copperfield's eventual reconciliation with Mr Micawber.  The film also captures Dickens' wonderful humour - whether in his sharp-eyed satiric portraits of the villains, or in the linguistic wonders of Micawber and Yarmouth. The film is also a really good portrayal of the author as a cipher for Dickens, and places the act of writing and imagining and rewriting at the front of its visual style.  Those of us familiar with the fate of Dora in the novel will find a quite elegant, more concise, and yet somehow similarly moving resolution here. But the movie never shies away from the darkness in Dickens' portrayal of violent, oppressive marriages - cruel poverty - social snobbery - and fallen women.  Most of all, it's a beautifully nuanced portrait of mental illness - whether Mr Dick's fixation on Charles I, Steerforth's suicidal depression or even Micawber's self-delusions.

In front of the camera, Dev Patel really is the most beautifully cast David Copperfield - all gangly wide-eyed love and optimism even in the worst of circumstances. But his David is never a patsy, even when falling for the dippy Dora.  He shows his anger, often physically, and fights and works for his future.   Patel handles everything from slapstick to righteous anger to compassionate frustration with the best of good humour. He's one of those actors that it's simply a pleasure spending time with.

In the supporting roles, I was struck by Rosalind Eleazer as Agnes - showing real love, strength, smarts.  An actress I would hope to see so much more of.   Daisy May Cooper is just heart-meltingly lovely as Peggotty, and Tilda Swinton - who starts off as just another Tilda Swinton eccentric - shows real depth of emotion and care as Aunt Betsy.  But perhaps the most surprising turn was from Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick. Every big cast drama has its Papageno, and with Copperfield it's usually Micawber. And Peter Capaldi is just find as Micawber. But there's something so quietly funny, moving, whip-smart about Laurie's Mr Dick that steals every scene that he's in, and must surely be a contender for Best Supporting Actor awards.

I really can't fault this film. And it's worth noting that Mr007 has never read the book and loved it as much as I did.  And that's a rare feat - to condense an epic novel but lose none of its essence, and to also please the casual viewer. Kudos to all involved. 


THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD has a running time of 119 minutes. It has played Toronto and London 2019 and opens in the UK on January 10th 2020.

DUNKIRK

Christopher Nolan is a director of superlative technical skill, and his new film of the evacuation of DUNKIRK lives up to that billing.  However, in his choice to strip it of all historical context, and to keep a close-up on three sets of anonymous character tropes, he has created a film that has no epic sweep; that fails to convey the magnitude of Dunkirk; and that fails to move.  Where it works, it works because of fleeting nuanced moments of acting brilliance.  But this is no LAWRENCE and he is no Lean: he has failed to combine the epic with the personal.

So, some context, because the film gives you none. (I wonder if this will affect non-British audiences' ability to engage with the film?) We are in the early months of World War Two. Ignoring captured intelligence to German plans, French, Canadian and British and other allied troops have been lured into Belgium by a German feint and have now been encircled and driven back to the French coast. Roughly 340,000 men - the principal strength of the British army - crowded the beach at Dunkirk - a port protected by a mole, or sea wall, from which they could board the large vessels sent to ferry them back across the English channel.   In doing so, they were hugely aided by the French forces tangling up the German troops sent to cut them off at the Siege of Lille. They were also hugely aided by Hitler's inexplicable decision to order the Luftwaffe not to pursue the troops.  

The evacuation took days, and combined large ships taking people off the Mole with small requisitioned commercial vessels collecting soldiers from the shallows. All the time, the troops subject to aerial assault on the beach and in the water, and the risk of being torpedoes once aboard. The scale of the battle was thus immense - with the RAF flying 3,500 sorties and engaging the Luftwaffe in dogfights away from the beach (hence many soldiers wondering where the fuck they were) - 36 Royal Navy destroyers ferrying men home as well as the Small Ships flotilla - and c340,000 soldiers ultimately evacuated.  It was both a great military failure and a success - because as humiliating as the lost Battle of France was, it enabled Britain to survive to fight on with its men and materiel largely intact. 

Christopher Nolan makes the decision to avoid all of this explanation, and to give us a Dunkirk that focuses on the personal experiences of the war by land, sea and air.  These theatres are inter-cut but take place along different time-scales.  The land evacuation takes place over the week, although frankly days merge into each other and I couldn't keep track.  The sea rescue takes place over a day and the RAF dogfight takes place over an hour, roughly corresponding to a Spitfire's fuel limit.  I rather liked the concept of intercutting the three, and although we do get a cute crossover with the same character appearing in two of the theatres, Nolan doesn't make it too intrusive or incredible. 

Where I think his claustrophobic personal approach works best is in the air battles.  Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden play RAF Spitfire engaging in dogfights some distance from the beach. With IMAX cameras mounted on modified Yaks, Nolan takes us into the air for some quite spectacular aerial photography.  Nonetheless, the downside of this approach is that one gets the impression that the men on the ground are right to ask where the RAF are - that the scale of the aerial assault is minute when it wasn't.  I also find it absolutely incredible that a RAF pilot, knowing how desperate the British were for materiel, would risk his plane in the way that Hardy's character does.  This utterly took me out of the film. 

The sea battle is also done very well from a technical perspective.  We get a sense of the claustrophobia of being aboard ship, the shell-shock and the terror of a watery death, especially when combined with lit gasoline.  I thought the acting was by far the best in this segment.  I very much liked Mark Rylance's quiet earnestness as a civilian sailor sailing to Dunkirk with his son - the quiet communication between the two of them with glances - the profound sympathy toward Cillian Murphy's traumatised rescued RAF pilot.  And the scene of soldiers drowning under a fiery sea is one of the most memorable and rightly horrific in the film.  But I also had deep concerns with Nolan's portrayal of the naval evacuation.  He has Kenneth Branagh's Colonel declare that the Navy is only risking one Destroyer. This is just untrue. There were 36 in use! In general, his character summarises the worst of the writing on the film. He's not a character so much as a Patriotic Reaction Machine. When he gets teary at the sight of the Small Ships as Elgar floats up through the score (superbly done by Hans Zimmer), Nolan is telling us to shed a tear.  When he looks concerned at the Luftwaffe flying overhead, this is a cue for us to get concerned.  And when at the end he remains in peril to help the French, we are meant to think, ah well, this has been EXCLUSIVELY from the perspective of white male Brits, but never mind, we sorted out the French too.  Appallingly crass stuff. Still, this being Nolan, Branagh will probably get an Oscar nom for this nonsense.

Nonetheless, it is on the beach itself that this film ultimately fails.  We have small nuanced scenes of brilliance - a soldier decided to commit suicide by walking into the water - or the quietly proud smile of a Royal Engineer who has built a makeshift pier out of trucks - but there is no sense of scale or chaos. According to Nolan, the beach at Dunkirk was filled with about 3 columns of about 200 soldiers neatly waiting to be evacuated, and ducking and turning on cue to the director's megaphone. There's no fear, panic, chaos, disorder at all.  There's also no sense that we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of men.  Ultimately, then, Nolan has made a gross error.  He has given us a film that tries to convey intimacy - without ever naming a character or making a character more than a trope - and he has chosen NOT to convey the epic sweep of battle. Worst of all he has made gross historical simplifications and some outright errors that massively impact our understanding of what is happening.  And his refusal to name the enemy as the German army is simply perverse. 

DUNKIRK is rated PG-13. The film goes on global release the weekend of July 19th.

LEGEND

2015 was the year of Krays films and the one I anticipated was LEGEND, starring as it did Tom Hardy and both Ronnie and Reggie, beloved 1960s East End gangsters who infiltrated the highest levels of English society until they finally got banged up.  But I'm sad to say that the movie is boring to the point of switching off, bar a few good set pieces.  Unlike most critics I don't think it's the fault of Hardy.  Some have called his portrayal of Ronnie - a heavily doped up, heavy drinking, violent paranoid schizophrenic - too broad.  On the contrary, from the books I've read and documentaries I've watched, Hardy seems to get Ronnie just right. He loved his brother. He loved being a gangster. He loved the protection his aristo lover gave him.  But he was very very sick and almost impossible to control. I think there's no doubt that Reggie would have had a long and successful career as a criminal if it weren't for his brother running around with impossibly ambitious American schemes and generally running successful ventures into the ground.  And then, of course, there were the murders. That Hardy also manages to portray Reggie is a testament to his skill at essaying a subtler but still menacing character who was unfailingly loyal to his brother, even at the expense of his tragically doomed wife Frances.

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 2 - EMANUEL AND THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHES

Up until now, Francesca Gregorini was probably famous, if at all, for making the movie, TANNER HALL, in which Rooney Mara took her new first name from the character she was playing.  But that's about to change. Her new film, EMANUEL AND THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHES, is absolutely wonderful - a slippery, deeply affecting psychological drama that strikes a delicate balance between profound emotion and flashes of laugh-out-loud dark comedy. 

The film centres around the relationship between two women - single mother Linda (Jessica Biel) and teenager Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario).  Emanuel is still grieving for the death of her mother in childbirth, and resents her relentlessly upbeat stepmother Janice (Frances O'Connor).  She is, however, drawn to a boy she meets on a train, Claude (Aneurin Barnard), in a situation that could be a sick-making meet-cute but which actually works.  And she is, fatefully, drawn to Linda.  In a first-act twist which most will see coming, we see the two women bound together in a deep secret, and its desperately pathetic (literally) to see Emanuel strive so hard to keep it, while soaking up the crypto-maternal love from Linda.  All the more sad, we see Emanuel's stepmother shut out of just the kind of mother-daughter relationship she craves.  If all this sounds rather emo and downbeat then believe me when I say that there are moments of the darkest, most wicked humour that counter-balance the deep longing.  There's also a rich seam of visual metaphor that comes together in a wonderfully moving and affecting dénouement.

That the movie works at all is testament to Gregorini's delicately balanced script, that matches explicit verbal wit with scenes of desperate grief.  In the hands of a less accomplished director, or worse actors, the movie could easily have fallen into B-movie melodrama, or worse still, a movie we laugh at rather than with.  And here we come to the biggest surprise of all.  I'd only previously seen Kaya Scodelario in Andrea Arnold's gorgeous WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and to my mind, Scodelario was by far the weakest link. By contrast, in this movie she utterly convinces as the clever, sensitive and deeply empathetic teenager who consciously chooses to involve herself in an ambiguous and emotionally treacherous situation.  But the real star of the piece is Jessica Biel.  Of course, I think this is Biel's best performance to date, and some might say that's a backhanded complement given the questionable quality of her back catalogue.  Well, now we know that that reflects the paucity of material offered to her, rather than her talent, because in this film she takes a role that could have become a bad joke and lends it gravity and dignity. I dearly hope that this performance brings her greater opportunities because I can't wait to see what she does with them.

EMANUEL AND THE TRUTH ABOUT FISHES played Sundance and Sundance London 2013. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 14 - HUNKY DORY

Minnie Driver is the only recognised name in Marc Evans' musical drama HUNKY DORY.

Welsh director Marc Evans (SNOWCAKE, MY LITTLE EYE) bravely takes on a "concept" film with his new musical coming-of-age flick, HUNKY DORY. Minnie Driver (with impeccable Welsh accent) plays a teacher in a Welsh school, putting on a musical version of Shakespeare's The Tempest that incorporates the popular music of 1976 - David Bowie, Nick Drake, The Beach Boys - the year in which the movie is set. And while Driver is the only recognised name actor, she's actually not the person carrying the film. Rather, the young cast of talented kids steal the show, with the lead schoolboy Aneurin Barnard making an impressive debut. 

I found the movie earnest, joyful, but uneven and unsure of what it wanted to be. French writer Laurence Coriat (WONDERLAND) has penned a script that isn't an out-and-out big dance number musical in the manner of GLEE or HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. Indeed, it seems to want to be one of those authentic realist teen flicks of the US indie movement - AMERICAN GRAFFITI or DAZED AND CONFUSED. And even then it can't resist one of those plot devices that seems totally out of scale with all that preceded it - stupidly clumsy deus ex machina. Combining social realism and musical numbers is a hard trick to pull off, and HUNKY DORY is no BILLY ELLIOT.

HUNKY DORY had its world premiere at London 2011 and has no commercial release date yet.