MOTHER'S INSTINCT*

Cinematographer Benoit Delhomme turns director in this woefully mediocre "thriller" apparently based on a Belgian film, and a novel before that.  It's basically a two-hander between Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, both great actresses ill-served by a script and direction that fail to ratchet up suspense, fear or paranoia.  Chastain's Alice and Hathaway's Celine start as best friends in early 60s suburbia. Celine's son Max dies in an accident and she then develops an unhealthy obsession with Alice's similarly aged son Theo.  At this point we are meant to get into a paranoid thriller where Alice questions her own sanity as Celine gaslights her. The problem is there isn't much plot, and what there is is very predictable.  Worst of all, the thematics - claustrophobic, judgmental suburbia - misogynistic husbands - are  briefly touched upon but never developed. I was expecting either Hitchcockian darkness and frights or Sirkian melodrama. I got neither. What a waste of my time and the leading ladies' talent!

MOTHER'S INSTINCT was released back in March 2024, has a running time of 94 minutes, and is rated R.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

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THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING is a well-acted but ultimately banal biopic of the famous physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) as told from the perspective of his first wife Jane (Felicity Jones).  As it opens, the young couple meet at Oxford University in the 1960s and are immediately smitten with each other.  Almost simultaneous with their courtship over the first half hour of the film is the discovery that Stephen suffers from Motor Neurone disease with perhaps only two years left to live.  It is testament to Jane's courage that she refuses to be shut out of Stephen's life and drops her own studies to marry him, raise his children and nurse him as he makes his reputation as one of the great scientists of our age.  But as we move into the second half of the film, while they both clearly still love each other, the cracks are starting to show.  Jane, who has always been religious in contrast to Stephen's atheism, falls in love with her Church choir leader, an earnest widower who becomes a kind of surrogate husband and father with Stephen's apparent blessing.  And then Stephen, forced to have a tracheotomy, and before he gets the computer voice we have come to associate with him, falls for his physical therapist.

SALOME & WILDE SALOME

The BFI played SALOME and WILDE SALOME in a double bill followed by a Q&A led by Stephen Fry with Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain. What follows is thus a combined review of all three events.

SALOME is Al Pacino's passion project of complex origin and it stubbornly defies categorisation. It began as a project to both put on a theatrical revival of Oscar Wilde's play directed by Estelle Parsons but clearly heavily influenced by Al Pacino in the lead role of King Herod, but also in the role of film-maker, for he simultaneously directed a film version of the play (SALOME) as well as a documentary of the making of the film and play (WILDE SALOME).  To say that the resulting movies are operating on many meta levels is an understatement.  This is all made more complex by the fact that the theatrical production wasn't a full staged production but rather something of table reading in costume.  Although clearly the actors were not using the "book" to guide them but acting the lines off book.  That decision, its ramifications and reasonings, was behind some of the hostile reviews the show received.  To add to the confusion, Pacino isn't filming the play at the theatre, but rather re-creating it each day on a soundstage before the play takes place back at the theatre each night. It's a gruelling schedule, and one that clearly took its toll.

LAWLESS

LAWLESS is the kind of movie you could watch in an imaginary art-house theatre where the only seat is a Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room, and you're curled up with a bottle of Bourbon and an Opus X cigar. It contains scenes of sickening violence; ethereal cinematography;an immersive, at times overwhelming sound-scape; and a disturbing, provocative moral ambiguity.

Set in Prohibition era Virginia, LAWLESS is the tale of the three Bondurant brothers - bootleggers holding out against a corrupt lawman, and dangerously believing the myth of their own invincibility.  Gruff, inarticulate older brother Forrest (Tom Hardy) is at once a faintly comic goon and a frighteningly violent dispenser of justice, as he sees it.  Middle brother Howard (Jason Clarke) is a largely silent, forgotten (and fatefully forgetful) middleman. Younger brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) is the vain, starry-eyed, romantic fool who's wooing of the preacher's daughter ultimately sets in motion the final showdown between the brothers and the "Law", Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce).

Tom Hardy is mesmerising as Forrest - walking a fine line between fearsome and funny - and killing a final scene where he has to question his own myth.  But this movie belongs to Guy Pearce in the same way that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN belongs to Javier Bardem.  He plays perhaps the most chilling, disturbing dandy killer since Brother Mouzone of The Wire, with brilliantly conceived make-up - a slightly too wide parting, slightly too thin eyebrows - unsettling us from the start.  

Ultimately, the rest of the movie is pretty thinly conceived. Poor brother Howard has nothing much to do.  The female roles are underwritten.  Gary Oldman - playing a Chicago mobster - is criminally underused, although he does have one tremendous scene with Noah Taylor.  The plot, when you really think about it, is pretty thin too.  The boys refuse to pay off the corrupt Rakes. He tries to terrify them into submission. They refuse.  It comes to a showdown.

But I guess I just think all that is beside the point.   The movie is both lyrical and hard-boiled. It's all about the battle  between Forrest and Rakes - and their personalities dominate the screen.  It's about the atmosphere of that time enveloping us - Benoit Delhomme's beautiful photography of landscapes shrouded in mist, and interiors cast in shadow. It's about being immersed with Jack in the overwhelming sound of the religious meeting to the point of being sick.  It's about the uneasy feeling that even in lighthearted moments, sickening violence is always a possibility.  It's about being complicit in the violence - cheering on the boys, as the poster suggests, as "heroes", but knowing that Forrest has done some truly repulsive things.

More than that, the film is - like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID - or THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD - about myth, and the dangers of believing in your own press. Early on Forrest tells Jack that the only thing that keeps the brothers safe is the myth of their invincibility.  But this myth is subversive.  Poor Jack and his sidekick collect shell casings to make necklaces and take photos of each other posing with guns.  Forrest's belief in his own invincibility is used against him by his lover.  And Rakes is infuriated by that myth.  Far from glorifying the violent Forrest, in the end he is a figure of hapless incompetence and comedy.  So much for the hero.

LAWLESS played Cannes 2012 and is on release in Canada and the USA. It opens this weekend in Bulgaria, Finland, Ireland, Norway and the UK. It opens next weekend in France, Hungary, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. It opens on September 20th in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Brazil and Iceland. It opens on October 4th in Russia; October 11th in Australia and Denmark; October 18th in Portugal and South Korea; October 25th in Argentina and Turkey; November 15th in the Netherlands; November 30th in Poland and on February 7th 2013 in New Zealand. 

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS - an immaculately-made, disturbing film (*spoilers*)

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS is, deep breath, a film about the Holocaust for children, based upon a book that is now being taught in British schools. The fact that it may be on your child's book list shouldn't make you complacent about taking them to see it. It's a disturbing picture and seeing things on the big screen can be more horrific than reading them on a page. It's important to teach this history but please be aware that the film-makers do not pander to their audience in the final ten minutes. If you need further information you can check out the PBBFC information here.

Ok. Public Service Announcement over, we can get back to the review. THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS is a deeply affecting, well-made drama aimed at children, but worth watching as an adult. The movie is told from the point of view of an eight-year old boy called Bruno, and the film-makers are careful to introduce the details of the Holocaust very slowly. The first time we see Bruno's father he isn't in uniform. He just looks like a normal dad. And it helps that the mostly British cast choose not to play it with caricature German accents. Still, Bruno is an observant child and he can tell that his grandma isn't happy with his father's decision to move the family to the countryside. Once in the new house, Bruno is frustrated and lonely. He manages to sneak out of the house and stumbles upon the electric fence of a "farm" where everyone wears "striped pyjamas".

The clever thing is that none of the adults lie to Bruno. The assumptions that he makes about the prisoners and the nature of the camp are all logical and plausible when viewed from the perspective of an innocent young boy who falls back on the presumption that his dad is a good man. Even when Bruno starts speaking to Schmuel, an 8-year old prisoner, he is slow to catch on. So long as you can grant the film-makers the initial conceit that these two boys could have met, the rest of the movie flows naturally. Their conversations, rationalisations, mistakes and reconciliation have an air of authenticity.

The denouement comes swiftly and, for adults, with a grim sense of what the end will be. The grim inevitability and sheer horror is enhanced by James Horner's tremendous orchestral score which builds to a literal scream. I was surprised by just how straightforward the film was and just how affecting the end was. This is surely as it should be. This is the sort of film that you don't leave the cinema talking about with your friends. You walk home in silence, considering what you've seen.

Kudos to novelist John Boyne and screen-writer, director Mark Herman for having the judgement to bring this to the screen. Herman in particular deserves praise for getting good performances from the two young boys, Asa Butterfield and Jack Scanlon. David Thewlis and Vera Farmiga are typically good as the parents, but we also get a very powerful cameo from Sheila Hancock as the grandmother. I also thought this was the first film in which Rupert Friend gave a very convincing and nuanced performance.

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS is on release in the UK. It opens on September 26th in Spain; on October 3rd in Ireland; on November 7th in the USA; on January 23rd in Norway; on February 12th in Argentina; and on April 2nd in Germany.

Overlooked DVD of the month - 1408

In age of tired torture porn and CGI ghouls it's nice to be able to kick it old school with this psychological horror from maestro Stephen King and director Mikael Hafstrom. John Cusack carries the movie as sceptical writer Mike Enslin. He checks into room 1408 at New York's fictional but suitably gothic Dolphin Hotel. Enslin hopes to experience the terror that has haunted the room since 1912. Hotel manager Samuel L Jackson tries to hold him back - and if SLJ is scared you know bad shit is just around the corner. Soon enough, King/Hafstrom start unleashing old fashioned hauntings, poltergeists and general spookiness. There are a couple of decent twists and some nice scope for the audience to interpret events as they wish. True, the movie could easily have been around 20 minutes shorter, but it was wonderful to see a horror film that had been designed with care and intelligence. The production design is exceptional - amazingly I never tired of the fact that all the action boiled down to one guy in a hotel room. I also loved Gabriel Yared's score.

1408 was released in summer 2007 and is available on DVD.