London Film Fest 2011 Day 3 - 50/50

Anna Kendrick, Will Reiser and Seth Rogen present 50/50

50/50 is that most difficult of tricks to pull off - a movie that is both raucously funny and genuinely affecting.  For that we have to thank the loosely autiobiographical screenplay from Will Reiser and direction from Jonathan Levine (THE WACKNESS, ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE) that keeps the movie in delicate balance.  That balance is key - because this movie is about a young man struggling to beat an aggressive cancer, enduring chemo and surgery, and even then only with a 50/50 chance of survival. It's the subject matter of afternoon TV movies and melodramas.  What saves us (mostly) from emotional manipulation is the the brutal honesty and hilarity with which the topic is treated - everything from getting high on medical-strength weed, to trashing a flaky ex-girlfriends painting with eggs and knives, to exploiting having cancer to get laid by sympathetic chicks.  In other words, Reiser manages to avoid mawkishness (at least until the final fifteen minutes) by transforming his experience of cancer treatment into a "bromance" complete with adult humour.  To that end, the absolute hear of the flick is the relationship between Jospeh Gordon-Levitt as the cancer victim and all-round good egg, and Kyle - the kind of typically loud-mouthed, vulgar but heart-of-gold character that Seth Rogen always plays. The supporting cast is also first class, with Angelica Huston adding dramatic weight as Adam's mother; Anna Kendrick showing her comedic chops as Adam's therapist; and Bryce Dallas Howard deliciously shitty and cast against type as Adam's girlfriend.  If I have a criticism of this otherwise superb movie, it's that one might feel emotionally manipulated in the final reel.  I can see that intellectually, but I totally bought into the relationships in the film, was right their with Kyle in the waiting room during Adam's surgery, and enjoyed every minute of the experience.  

50/50 played Toronto and London 2011. It played Aspen where it won the Audience Award and  Hollywood where Joseph Gordon-Levitt won the Breakthrough Award for Actor of the Year. 50/50 opened in the USA in September. It opens in Portugal on November 10th; in France on November 16th; in Hong Kong and the Netherlands on November 17th; in the UK on November 25th; in Hungary and Japan on December 1st; in Sweden on December 2nd; andin Ireland on January 4th.

CHOKE - Fuckin' Knave!

What if FIGHT CLUB were a Sundance-style, whimsical, sun-lit relationship drama? What if Tyler Durden were a thirty-something college drop-out, working in a medieval theme park? What if he was emasculated by an emotionally manipulative mother? What if, instead of literally fighting back, he fucked women compulsively? What if, instead of meeting suicidal Martha Singer, he met a similarly delusional doctor? What if, instead instead of a dark, visually inspired, menacing thriller, you got a sporadically very funny but ultimately uneven film called CHOKE?

The problem with CHOKE is that actor turned director Clark Gregg skates over the truly sinister and provocative aspects of the source material - transforming a subversive text about sexual inadequacy and mental illness into an off-beat comedy. Sam Rockwell excels at these loser-outsider roles, but the character is simply two-dimensional. Angelica Huston has fun as his mentally ill mother, but the dress-up during the flashbacks is distracting and undermines any sense of profundity. Half way through this film I just wondered why I should care. Accordingly, the film is reduced to a superficial comedy, and while it has its moments, the humour isn't consistent enough for it to really sustain viewer interest.

CHOKE played Sundance 2008 where Sam Rockwell won the Best Actor prize. CHOKE opened last autumn and is currently available on DVD and on iTunes.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED should take its own advice

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's highly unattractive."

I was non-plussed by THE DARJEELING LIMITED when I watched it at the London Film Festival. Because I had previously enjoyed many of Wes Anderson's films, I thought maybe my non-reaction was due to cinematic overload in the preceeding fortnight. So I decided to give the flick another shot after a suitably relaxing Thansgiving break had put me into a more receptive mood. Sadly, even after a second viewing, I have to report that Wes Anderson is, to my mind, a director offering diminishing returns.

His new movie, THE DARJEELING LIMITED, treads familiar ground. So much so that THE ONION spoofed his style brilliantly last month. The production design consists of interiors over-stuffed with meaningful objets and the characters wear tailor-made suits and carry bespoke luggage. We are in the ranks of the over-privileged and self-indulgent. The camera draws attention to itself by switching between static symmetric framing; sudden changes of focus; and the jarring use of slo-mo (usually to a vintage Kinks sound-track.) There is an absent father figure and a beloved but somehow distant mother. There are siblings who are struggling to deal with each other and their parents. There is a troubled boy, played by a Wilson brother, who attempts suicide.

In previous, better films, Wes Anderson used this set-up to create characters that were memorable and love-able. He brilliantly articulated the dynamics of family relationships but also provided light relief throught witty banter and improbable situations. His movies have always looked deliberately designed but pre LIFE AQUATIC, they also had heart.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED is, by contrast, a deeply boring, unengaging and alienating experience. Three self-obsessed, self-pitying brothers cross Rajasthan by train, feigning interest in spiritual enlightenment but skating on the surface of things. Anderson doesn't so much satirise the dumb, luxury-lined tourist as simply present him for our consideration. As a result, where we should have laughed at, and with, our protagonists, we find ourselves bored by their emotional ugliness. Surely, it must be possible to make a movie about superficial people on a dull journey that is not of itself superficial and dull?

As dull as this movie is, it might have been forgiveable were it not for one serious mis-step. This centres on Wes Anderson's use of a tragic event as a deus ex machina. His exploitation of an Indian tragedy to facilitate a change in the American protagonists is woefully exploitative, in that he never pays any attention to the impact of this event on the Indian characters. They are merely authentic background details. And this brings me to a wider inconsistency in the piece. For much of this movie, Anderson implicitly criticises superficial tourists who do not engage with the places they travel in and, specifically in the case of India, see it as a means to their own spiritual enlightenment rather than a worthy subject of study in itself. But, on the other hand, Anderson is guilty of exactly the things he is criticises. India is no more than a facilitator that is lightly skated over.

Finally, Anderson's sheer lack of humility is infuriating. Given how generally tedious, emotionally dry and morally vacuous this movie is - how completely unengaged with India - Anderson's musical nod to Satyajit Ray appears presumptuous in the extreme.

THE DARJEELING LIMITED played Venice and London 2007. It opened in Canada and the US earlier this year and is currently on release in the UK, Brazil, Denmark, Sweden, Australia and Norway. It opens in December in Denmark, Sweden, Australia and Norway and in January in Germany, Singapore, Italy, Spain, Russia and Iceland. It opens in Estonia, Turkey and the Netherlands in February and in Japan, Argentina and France in March. It opens in Finland in April 2008.

MATERIAL GIRLS - feeble teen rom-com

MATERIAL GIRLS is a feeble teen rom-com vehicle originally intended for the Olsen twins but eventually starring Z-list stand-ins, Hilary and Haylie Duff. They play spoilt brats who lose a fortune but prove remarkably adept at winning it back. The lead actesses - apparently famous in the US - are not talented actresses, and thanks to some freakish make-up and hair-dos, they don't even appeal on a purely superficial level. It is embarassing to see Brent Spiner, Angelica Huston and Lukas Haas in supporting roles. Finally, Martha Coolidge's direction is ham-fisted and simple-minded. It is best suited to kids' TV serials and features some especially clumsy split-screen shots.

MATERIAL GIRLS was released in spring 2007 and is now available on DVD.

THE DEAD - simple, lyrical, superb

THE DEAD is a beautiful romantic period drama, based faithfully on a short story by James Joyce. It was directed by the cinematic great John Huston at the end of his life, scripted by his son Tony and starred his daughter Angelica supported by a cast of Irish thespians.

The story is set in Ireland in 1904. Two genteel ladies are giving a Christmas party at their house. They showcase their pupils' musical talents and worry about their cousin Freddy's inability to keep off the booze. An old man reads a traditional Irish poem about love betrayed. The conversation drifts from politics to religion to temperance and the first half of the short, eighty-five minute film is simply a charming depiction of intimate family life in the era. But our attention is caught by Angelica Huston playing Gretta Conroy and her husband Gabriel. Returning to their hotel after the party, Gretta is prompted to tell her husband of a young boy who loved her passionately and fatally. It is a deeply moving confession - or rather, reflection - and her husband's reaction contains all the slow-burning drama that one could hope for.

The great achievement of John Huston is in letting the novella breathe, rather than trussing it up for the modern audience. He sticks firmly to the 1904 setting and rarely ventures beyond the drawing room, the hallway and the hotel room except in a stunning scene of snow falling at the end. The camera movement is unintrusive, allowing us to appreciate the setting, the costumes and the incidental details of family life. As such, the quite breathtaking revelations in the second part of the film seem all the more profound.

At first, THE DEAD rather reminded me of the recent release, GABRIELLE. Both are essentially intimate chamber dramas featuring a wife's confession to her husband and his reaction to it. Both are set in turn of the twentieth century cities and portray the social lives of the middle classes. But here the similarities end. Where Chereau uses deliberately jarring visual techniques, Huston goes for realism. Where Chereau's couple are brutally cruel and the epiphanies are hard won, THE DEAD is full of gentle, blameless longing. GABRIELLE is a movie about thwarted passion and social compromise: THE DEAD is lyrical, tender and full of longing. It is a gentler, equally affecting, and superb film.

THE DEAD was originally released in 1987. It is now on limited re-release in the UK.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS - the perfect tragicomedy

With the recent release of the deeply disappointing Wes Anderson movie, THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, I am taking this opportunity to re-examine Anderson’s earlier movies, starting with what I consider to be the best of all, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. As with THE LIFE AQUATIC, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is a movie full of eccentric, larger-than-life characters living in a richly-imagined world one degree more whacky than our own. Whether or not you like this film will depend on how far you buy into, and are charmed by, this tragi-comic heightened reality. For my part, I found the family, and therefore the film, utterly winning.

The family is headed by a long absent father named Royal Tenenbaum. He is played by Gene Hackman, who looks like he is having a whale of a time on screen for the first time in years. Royal is a corrupt lawyer who has been ostracised by his family for the past decade, but is seeking reconciliation by any means necessary. In this, he is aided and abetted by his sidekicks, Pagoda and Dusty, the bell-hop at the seedy hotel he has made his home - a classic understated and hilarious cameo performance by Seymour Cassel. In his absence, the family has been headed by Royal’s wife, Etheline, played by Angelica Huston. Etheline is written as a wonderful mother, ever-concerned with her children’s welfare; decent but not credulous. She is seeing an accountant played by Danny Glover - another good, earnest man. The love scenes between the two combine sweetness and comedy in a manner that recent British mockumentary, CONFETTI, entirely failed to pull off. Meanwhile, the children are all having emotional breakdowns. Richie (Luke Wilson) is a failed tennis pro in love with an unattainable woman; Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) is in a loveless marriage and has failed to live up to her early promise as a writer; Chas (Ben Stiller) is in mourning for his wife and is paranoid about the safety of his twin sons, Uzi and Ari. In the mix we also have Ritchie’s oleaginous childhood friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), a wildly popular but talentless writer with a drug problem who has long wanted to be a Tenenbaum, and Bill Murray as Margot’s husband. Will it come as any surprise to regular filmgoers to discover that Bill Murray’s character is a melancholy and world-weary middle-aged man?

As can be seen from these short character descriptions, the Royal Tenenbaums is about a bunch of troubled people, who are drawn back to the family in search of solace – whether or not they were part of the family in the first place. As each character comes to terms with awkward reality, the tone of the movie alternates between tragedy and comedy with such ease as to make this a master-class for screen-writers. Both the tragic and comic scenes are elevated to perfect pitch and the film puts, to my mind, not a foot wrong. Of course, as with all Wes Anderson movies, the production design and sound-track are also out-standing. The attention to detail is staggering - from whimsically designed wallpaper, to the book covers of the novels that the characters write, to the brand of beaten-up old taxis that roam the streets of this re-imagined New York. Meanwhile, the sound-track features mournful songs from Nico, Dylan, Elliott Smith, The Stones, Nick Drake and Lou Reed. However, unlike THE LIFE AQUATIC, the rich design never seems self-indulgent. Where LIFE AQUATIC dragged, so that all the audience had to do was look at the beautiful sets, the foreground action of TENENBAUMS always has us rapt. The cute incidental background details are just that. It is this delicate balance between fascinating foreground action and the hints of a fully developed world behind it that makes TENENBAUMS one of my favourite movies.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is out on DVD.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU may be the most disappointing movie of 2005

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU may well be, for me, the most disappointing movie of 2005. This is because it is made by a director, Wes Anderson, whose previous films I have loved without reservation. Given that THE LIFE AQUATIC stars many of the same actors, covers many of the same themes, and lives in the same eccentric, richly-designed world, what went wrong? To cut a long story short, I think "sameness" is the problem. First, there is a problem when we see the same actors portray variations on the same character time and time again. In the case of THE LIFE AQUATIC the key culprit is Bill Murray. In the second half of his career he seems to be perfecting the role of world-weary, painfully self-aware, benumbed wanderer. Granted he is once again fantastic in this movie, but oh my goodness, the whole routine does seem a little tired. It was breathtaking in RUSHMORE, subtley different but still compelling in ROYAL TENENBAUMS, but by the time we have seen LOST IN TRANSLATION and the forthcoming BROKEN FLOWERS... well you get the picture. Ditto seeing Owen Wilson once again as the innocent-idiot; Angelica Huston as the wise-put-upon wife; and let us not forget the obligatory Indian guy. It just seems like Wes Anderson has his zone of comfort as far as characters are concerned.

Similarly, the thematic material is well-worn - disappointed sons and reluctant fathers; super-fan outsiders who desperately want to be part of the Cool group; relationships between the sexes that are fraught with misunderstandings - love triangles and love squares; the difficulty of dreamers to deal with the real world of hard cash; and the difficulty of dreamers to continue to believe in themselves when all around them doubt The Plan. We've been here before. Indeed, we've been here ever since BOTTLE ROCKET.

Moreover, all those incidental but important features of a movie that make up the tone of the picture - production design, sound-track - have taken over the asylum. It used to be that you were compelled to watch a Wes Anderson movie two or three times just to take in the richness of the set design and remember just what that cool track was. But now, the cute little details of set design are all there is. I so wanted to be interested in Steve Zissou 's (for which read Jacques Cousteau's) journey to hunt down the mythic jaguar shark and avenge the death of his partner Esteban. I so wanted to be fascinated by the relationship between Steve and his long-lost son, Ned. But somehow, every time the movie threatened to give us a bit of character development we got another scene with a cute red bobble hat, or crew-member Pele dos Santos (Seu Jorge) singing a David Bowie song. For, in the final analysis, this movie is a triumph of style, tone and mood over the substance that is the narrative arc and character development.

What I guess it all comes down to is that the movie just isn't as funny as TENENBAUMS. Perhaps this is because Anderson's usual writing partner, Owen Wilson, has been replaced by Noah Baumbach? Or perhaps it just signals that what was once magical and fascinating and amusing has now become stale. I tend toward the latter.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU opened in the US last fall, and opens in the UK today. It opens in France on March 9th 2005, and in Austrian and Germany on March 17th.