A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

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A MOST VIOLENT YEAR is a bad film that could've been iconic - a movie so steeped in cinema heritage that it slides into pastiche - a movie that reaches for greatness but trips over its own shoelaces in a final act that had the audience laughing at it rather than being awed by it. 

All of which is a great shame because the writer-director of the film, J C Chandor, is a great director.  His film MARGIN CALL remains the most powerful and understated examination of how Wall Street really works that I've ever seen.  ALL IS LOST pitted Robert Redford against the elements and in doing so created something like a profound exploration of character and worth.  These films had a style and a set of concerns that were new and unique to J C Chandor.  They felt authentic and urgent.  By contrast, A MOST VIOLENT YEAR seems like a slow and lingering meditation on an earlier time, both in New York history and in cinema history.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA - killed by conventional direction

This lavish adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' classic novel is, tragically, a failure. Tragic, because it has a high quality script from Ronald Harwood; a top-class cast including Javier Bardem as Florentino and an impressive Benjamin Bratt as Urbino; and lush location work in Colombia. The production design and costumes drip with authenticity and beauty. The problem is that this movie sticks so closely to the bare bones plot of the book that it looses the magic, the whimsy, the poetry of it. In short, the movie becomes a typically plodding costume drama in which boy meets girl, love strikes, girl marries posh bloke, posh bloke dies decades later, and boy and girl finally consummate their love. Director Mike Newell lacks the daring of, say, a Julian Schnabel, and while he respects the book that isn't enough. With this film he confirms himself as a director for hire rather than an auteur, gliding between genres - (Rom-com: FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, kids-action: HARRY POTTER...)

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA was released in 2007 and 2008 and is available on DVD.

London Film Festival Day 11 - CHE Parts 1 and 2

"I was sitting in first class with a hot towel on my face when I realised I was the right person to direct this film." Steven Soderbegh, introducing his 4 hour, 2 part biopic of revolutionary Marxist Ernesto "Che" Guevera at the London Film Festival.

"Maybe they didn't have a Q&A because they were so embarassed at how at how bad the film was?" Our Gmunden correspondent, leaving the cinema, 4 hours later.

CHE (THE ARGENTINE & GUERILLA) is an interminable, unedifying vanity project from director Steven Soderbergh, producer and lead actor Benicio del Toro and newbie writer Peter Buchman. It's a film that gives us no real insight into Che's politics or personality - indeed it perversely holds us at a distance to him. It's a film that gives us no real feel for his revolutionary career - perversely leaving Cuba before he has even entered Havana. It's a film that tells us nothing about his charisma or passion - nowhere in this film do I get a feel for why people would have put themselves in mortal danger to follow him.

Do we blame Soderbergh for having no over-arching vision for this story? Do we blame del Toro for his walking zombie performance? Do we blame the screen-writers for taking a decade of radical action and boiling it down to a series of monotonous, unexciting marches? Whatever the reason, CHE is quite frankly a disaster.

The movie is divided into two parts: THE ARGENTINE and THE GUERILLA. Producer Laura Bickman told us that they were to be released as two separate films rather than playing as a double bill, so that's how I'll review them here.

THE ARGENTINE opens with a patronising shot showing a map of Cuba, highlighting the name of each region and the position of the major cities. It's like Geography 101. It's a clumsy way to convey information and has zero artistic content. Perhaps the film-makers should realise that anyone who comits 4 hours to a Che biopic probably knows where Cuba is. We then enter into the main body of the film, which is framed by a scene in Mexico City where Fidel Castro (Demián Bichir) outlines his plan to invade Cuba, and persuades Che (del Toro) to go with him. In the final scene of the film, Che will agree, only if he can leave Cuba when the invasion is over and spread the revolutionary message to the rest of Latin America. The intervening two hours inter-cut the story of the invasion of 1956 with scenes of Che confronting the United Nations in New York in 1964.

The footage of the Cuban revolution is pretty monotonous. We see revolutionaries march through long grass a lot. Occasionally, Castro hurts Che by refusing to let him take command of troops. Che is, after all, an outsider, an intellectual, and better suited to training, inspiring, and treating illness, than strategic thinking. We also see flashes of Che's purist ethics. He wants his men to be educated, moral, above petty corruption. All these themes are fascinating, and a film pursuing them would've given real insight to Che's politics and personality. Sadly, these moments of clarity are only ever brief flashes. Other than that, we learn that war is quite boring. The footage from New York is similarly frustrating insofar as Soderbergh could've really investigated the reactions to the revolution from US politicians and other Latin American countries. After all, Che is preaching world revolution - how threatening was that to the US and Latin American establishment? But once again, we get quick-cut, impressionistic scenes that only make sense if you come into the movie with a lot of prior knowledge.

CHE: THE ARGENTINE ends with Che on the road from Santa Clara to Havana. We never see him arrive. It's an odd ending - leaving the audience with little sense of closure. The movie finishes abruptly. This may work in a double-bill, but I doubt that anyone would give GUERILLA a chance after this dull, unenlightening, strangely neutered work. I learned nothing about Che that I didn't already know, and it's interesting to note that in the US, this first film is not being released at all (acc to IMDB).

CHE: GUERILLA is modestly more successful that CHE: THE ARGENTINE, but the benchmark is low. The first thing to say is that it looks like a completely different film. The shooting style and editing style are much more languid and patient - the narrative is linear - we are allowed a little closer, though still not close enough - to our hero.

The movie skips Che's entry to Havana and his period serving in the Cuban governemnt. It skips his failed attempt to start a revolution in the Congo and rolls right into his radical activities in Bolivia in 66/67. The revolution is hopeless and the film a monotonous and depressing inch by inch movement toward the inevitable execution. The Bolivian government is aided by the US, so instead of hapless Cuban troops who surrender at the first sign of violence, Che is facing crack special ops. The Cuban peasants were ready for revolution but the Bolivian peasants are unconvinced by his arguments. (Heck, so are we - we never see him as a charismatic Marxist evangelical). Worse still, the local Communists want nothing to do with him; he loses contact with Havana; and his foreign aides stupidly lead the Bolivians right to him. So what you get is a film about isolation and failure. A random bunch of men wander round the Bolivian countryside until finally they are cornered and shot. Portraits of failure and disillusionment can be captivating. Look at the brilliant, mournful THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. But GUERILLA is just dull. We are never allowed to empathise with Che in the way that we entered the emotional drama betwee James and Ford.

If CHE: GUERILLA is better than THE ARGENTINE it's because there are odd moments of visual flair. The scene where some of the guerilla are gunned down in a river is beautifully done. And there is a scene where Che is injured and on the run on the slope of a ridge. At the top, silhouetted against the horizon we see a handful of special ops soldier. And then, in a flash of pure menace, these men are joined by tens of other until the horizon is filled with men bearing down on our hero. These moments are to be expected from a man with Soderbergh's experience and technical skill. They are, however, too few.

Soderbergh began the LIFF screening with a joke - that a man who flies first class is the wrong man to make CHE. That's too reductive. But still, it contains a grain of truth. Walter Salles made a brilliant film about CHE because he was passionate about the content, could relate to it and had something to say about it. Salles was, like Che, born into privilege in Latin America but has chosen to turn his back on the establishment (in this case, being the scion of a banking family) in order to make politically and socially aware films about the poor. I would love to know why Soderbergh came to this project and whether, in all honesty, he felt any real emotional attachment to it. Because there is little evidence of any love for the project in the final films.

CHE / THE ARGENTINE & GUERILLA played Cannes where Benicio del Toro won Best Actor, Toronto and London 2008. THE ARGENTINE went on release in Spain in September, opens in Mexico on December 26th; opens in the UK on January 2nd; in France on January 7th and in Argentina on January 29th. GUERILLA opens in Argtnina on November 13th; in Greece on November 27th; in the US on December 12th; in France on January 28th; in the UK on February 20th and in Japan in March.

FAST FOOD NATION - the agit-doc is dead! Long live the non-fiction fiction film!

I am getting a little bit tired of earnest liberal agit-docs that usually have little visually to do with cinema, could equally well be shown on TV, and tend to preach to the converted. Michael Moore may have increased the sale-ability of documentary cinematic releases and part of me is happy about that but the other part bemoans the seemingly homogenous product now flooding arts cinemas across the land. I've written too many reviews starting: "this week's self-explanatory documentary..." or "the point being...?" That's not to say that I don't agree with everything these docs are trying to say. I do. I just wonder how effective they are. Clearly no nasty evil polluter is going to slap down ten squid at his local cineplex to say a movie called "Nasty evil capital bastards are raping the rainforest!"?

So it was with real interest that I watched Richard Linklator's new movie, FAST FOOD NATION. And appropriate since I just watched INFAMOUS - a movie about how Truman Capote invented a new form of novel - non-fiction fiction. Capote's idea was to "bring alive" the facts of the case by applying fiction techniques such as emotional insight and inter-cutting narrative structures. Richard Linklater is pretty much following the same logic here. He takes a popular non-fiction book by Eric Schlosser that tackles the murky, hidden world of the industrial food industry in the USA. Linklater opts not to make another earnest documentary out of this material. Instead he gives us a feature length movie.

So, FAST FOOD NATION is not a documentary. It's also not a comedy or satire, although it contains the odd funny line. Rather it is a straight movie that contains three inter-twining stories.

The first story is about a group of Mexican illegal immigrants, including Wilmer "Fez" Valderamma and Catalina Sandino Moreno, who are helped over the border by Luis Guzman's pimped-out van driver and taken to a meat-packing plant in Colorado. There, watched over by the sleazy Bobby Cannavale, they earn a pittance which feels like a fortune to them and put their lives at risk in horrific jobs, turning live cows into frozen meat patties. This strand is brilliantly acted - showing for instance that Valderama and Canavale can play it straight. But be warned, the footage is not for the weak of stomach.

The second story is about some teenagers - played by Ashley Johnson and Paul Dano who work in a fast-food joint in the same Colorado town. The strand shows Ashley's character becoming politically aware thanks to her hip uncle, played by Ethan Hawke and, I kid you not, Avril Lavigne.

The final story is about a Vice President of Marketing at the same fast food company played by Greg Kinnear. He is sent to the same Colorado town to find out - quite simply - why there is cow shit in the meat patties. It's not hard to find out why. Everyone in town knows - from Kris Kristofferson's wise old rancher, to his maid, to the morally-challenged realist who brokered the deal - played in a chilling cameo by Bruce Willis.

The advantages of the non-fiction fiction structure is that it gives the viewer some emotional engagement with the issues. I know we should care as much about employees losing limbs at a meatpacking plant in real life, but thanks to the way our brains are wired, it's easier to care and to "get it" if we have some charismatic characters on screen. The other advantage is that we get a proper movie with proper production values, visual style (which in fairness is not that spectacular in this particular film) and sound-track. The disadvantage is that on occasion characters say stuff which is just not credible, because they are basically making a speech. It doesn't happen often but it does happen, especially when the Ethan Hawke character is on screen or when a radical student says, "The patriotic thing to do at this point is to break the Patriot Act". A gloriously seditious sentiment. Similarly, there is an extended discussion between the students as to why the cows won't leave their pens even when the fence is broken - a rather clumsy extended metaphor for humans who know fast food is made from shit-infused meat but still eat it.

Still, for all its flaws and clumsiness, I think FAST FOOD NATION is far more successful in conveying its message and simply entertaining its audience than the usual agit-docs. To that end, it's a noble experiment and hopefully one that will be influential.

FAST FOOD NATION played Cannes and London 2006. It is already on release in Australia and Germany and opens in the US and France at the end of November. It opens in Israel and Belgium in January 2007 and in the Netherlands in March.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE - a slight but interesting movie about drug mules

MARIA FULL OF GRACE is a simple film with a powerful message. Thankfully, the writer/director chooses to highlight issues through character and empathy rather than polemic. It tells the tale of a young girl in Colombia who does harsh work in a rose packing plant. Her rebellious temperament leads her to quit her work and discard the feckless boyfriend who has gotten her pregnant. She is, like so many teenagers around the world, looking for an escape from her dead-end life. The difference is that in a society as corrupt as Colombia's, her naivety, rebellion and search for something better leads her to becoming a drug mule on a flight to New York.

The brilliance of the movie is that it does not deal in heroines and evil men. Maria is not like the Blessed Virgin - free of sin - but a normal teenager. She makes good and bad decisions but they are that - free choices. She is not a victim in the conventional sense of the word. She is not forced to mule by a mean, Hollywood-movie, drug-dealer but by a more complex nexus of circumstance. Similarly, when she gets to the States, the immigration officials aren't mean - they are just tired professionals doing a job.

It is hard to find flaws with a simple movie that tells its story honestly. The material is presented credibly, without prejudice. The largely unprofessional cast of actors does a good job, notably Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria. The only real problem I have with this movie is its title which seems a needless provocation - neither reflecting the material covered nor the characterisation of Maria in the movie.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE played Sundance and London 2004. It is on release in France and the UK and opens in Germany on April 21st 2005.