TILL - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 11

TILL is a handsome and earnest film that is beautifully produced, acted and lensed, but that feels so freighted by grief that it becomes almost hermetically sealed and strains at its two hour, ten minutes running time.  This is perhaps because we never know a time before grief. Even in the early scenes where Emmett Till (Jalyn Hill) and his mother (Danielle Deadwyler) are happily living in middle-class Chicago, she is on the verge of tears and paranoia that something is going to happen to her teenage son when he goes to Mississippi to visit his cousins.  The foreboding is so heavy and persistent it never lets daylight in on the family, and makes us wonder why on earth she sent him if she was that convinced her happy-go-lucky charming child was going to be met with racial violence. I am in no way blaming the character, to be clear, I am just saying that this is a film about grief from minute one. Maybe that's an accurate depiction of the black experience in 1955, or today for that matter, but it makes for a film that doesn't seem to progress. It's trapped in amber for its entire running time, and its characters are trapped with it, never evolving or progressing. Mamie Till-Mobley is a strong, weeping mother for the entire film.  Her family are supportive.  The activists and community who rally round her are fully formed and ready to spring into action.  They are all good, decent people. This is a film where the good are good and unchanging. The bad are bad and unchanging. Racism is unchanging.

So the conclusion I have come to is that this is not a feature film in the conventional sense that is dealing in the currency of plot and character development. Rather this is an event to which we bear witness. It is the literal open-casket viewing at a funeral. It must be viewed and judged in those terms, rather than as a conventional film, because it is so freighted in history that it rejects those terms.

We bear witness to the affluence of the post-war middle class black America of the northern cities.  We bear witness to the still insidious but more muted racism that pierces the affluence. We bear witness to black Americans moving out of the first class train carriages as they cross into the South. We bear witness to southern black America still picking cotton in the fields. We bear witness to Emmett Till's disfigured, mutilated body. We bear witness to a southern courtroom packed with white men in white shirts. We bear witness to the casual way in which the prosecution team dismisses Emmett Till's mum.

Bearing witness is of value, if a depressing reminder of the ages long struggle for civil rights, and this film provides a sombre historical lesson told with care and skill. 

TILL has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG-13.  It was released in the USA this weekend and will be released in the UK on January 23rd.

IMPERIUM

IMPERIUM is a film that chronicles the true story of a young idealistic FBI agent who went undercover in a white supremacist movement to try to uncover Unabomber type plots to terrorise America.  The agent is played by Daniel Radcliffe, his handler by Toni Colette, and the movie was written and directed by first-time feature director Daniel Ragussis. Unfortunately, the movie fails on almost every count.  The script is under-written and the direction creates no tension whatsoever.  Radcliffe is made to look over-geeky to the point of parody as the desk-bound agent, and is unconvincing as an Iraqi war veteran turned racist thug.  The alacrity with which he's accepted by the terrorists is just too easy and the ease with which he bats away their suspicions sucks the tension out of the movie. As the movie drips along toward its flaccid final set piece the only emotion I felt was thanks that it was all over. Ultimately, it's laudable that Radcliffe is willing to handle such politically incendiary material, but given the times in which we live, this feels like a missed opportunity to really mine the motives of people to turn to such a cause, and to explore what is really going on in these movements.  

IMPERIUM has a running time of 109 minutes and is rated R.  The movie was released in the USA, France, the Philippines and Turkey earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK in cinemas and on streaming services.  It opens in Singapore next week.

ROSEWATER - LFF14 - Day Seven

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews on iTunes.

ROSEWATER is a compelling and important film that is funny, insightful and imaginatively directed.  That it also the debut feature of Daily Show star Jon Stewart is all the laudable because while be brings his intellect and wit to bear he doesn't let his on-camera overwhelm the story.  

The film is the true story of Iranian-British journalist Maziar Bahari who travelled to Iran to report on the elections in June 2009.  When the popular choice didn't win, Iranian people took the streets in the "colour revolution". What is fascinating is that Bahari had been reporting from Iran for many years and new just what he could get away with reporting without invoking the ire of the Iranian authorities. Yet in this particular case, he was moved to allow footage of soldiers shooting a protestor be published on TV - taking a moral stand.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was than arrested and kept in confinement as the Iranian state accused of him being a spy and a stooge of a Western media conspiracy to attack Iran.

Gael Garcia Bernal is superb as Maziar - somewhat against my expectations.  He adopts just enough of an Iranian accent on his English to be credible and nicely portrays the absurdity and incredulity of the man caught up in accusations of spying because of a spoof video he'd shot for The Daily Show.  But the actor who really steals the film for is the one who plays Maziar's "Specialist" interrogator. He paints the picture of a man who is capable of torture, yes, but also world-weary, fearing his own boss, somewhat naive and occasionally very funny.  It's an essential part of the film that we believe he is vulnerable because the point Maziar and Jon Stewart are trying to make is that the regime is ultimately scared and afraid. 

Behind the lens, the film is worth seeing for giving us a rare glimpse of life in contemporary Iran.  Jon Stewart elegantly and powerfully shows us Maziar's relationship with his father and sister, both of whom were persecuted by the state.  There's a quick introductory scene where the history of Maziar's relationship with his sister is shown on the city streets through which Maziar walks that is very special indeed.  Indeed, the only technical flourish I thought distracting and unnecessary was the superimposition of twitter feeds on an Iranian cityscape.

Overall, a worthy, funny, frightening and insightful film and an impressive debut.

ROSEWATER has a running time of 105 minutes. ROSEWATER played Telluride, Toronto and London 2014 and opens in the USA on November 7th. The movie opens in the UK and Ireland on May 8th 2015.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 5 - RAMPART

When I walked in to RAMPART I was expecting the movie equivalent of The Wire or The Shield - an examination of corruption and institutional racism in the police force, based on the real Rampart scandal in 1990s Los Angeles. To be sure, director Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER) and writer James Ellroy impressionistically hint at the wider malaise.  We have cameos from Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver as the ass-covering establishment. But there's no clear picture of the wider context - no attempt to connect the dots and take the viewer to the heart of the corruption, in the  manner of LA CONFIDENTIAL. Rather, this movie is a character study of a fictional policeman at the centre of the scandal - Woody Harrelson's Dave Brown.  

To that end, the centre of the story isn't the police department or the patrol car, but the home Dave shares with the mothers of his two children, who also happen to be sisters (Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon); the bars he frequents; the woman he picks up (Robin Wright).  Because, let us be clear - RAMPART is a scathing depiction of a delusional man, so corrupt he can't even see it, or own it - a self-destructive charmer, who thinks he should be rewarded for "doing the city's dirty work" but can't see that he's destroying his family in the process.  

If you accept the movie as a character study rather than a thriller or procedural, you have a far greater chance of enjoying it. Frustrations with the ambiguities of the graft and the uneven pacing - the lack of real "bite" - are compensated for by the powerful, charismatic and complex central performance by Woody Harrelson and the impressionistic use of intense colour and feeling of claustrophobia created by DP Bobby Bukowksi (ARLINGTON ROAD). Because, in the final analysis, RAMPART is not a great movie - it doesn't hold you in the way that it should - it is, rather, a highly successful mood piece that contains a superlative central performance. I just wish that that performance had been anchored to a stronger supporting text.

RAMPART played Toronto and London 2011.

Michael Stipe and Woody Harrelson at the UK premiere
of RAMPART at the BFI London Film Festival.