THE BOOK OF CLARENCE* - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 9

AD 33; Jerusalem. The apostle Thomas has a twin brother called Clarence who believes in knowledge, not faith, sells weed, and is deeply in debt to the local gangster. In yet another cockamamie scheme, Clarence thinks he will become an apostle too, to gain their protection, but they soon see through his schemes, with Thomas pouring scorn upon him. So Clarence decides to become a "new" messiah, replicating Jesus' "tricks" and raising the money from his believers to pay off his debts. Problem is, this newfound praise and money affords Clarence the opportunity to do something even more radical: to be good.  

Jeymes Samuel (THE HARDER THEY FALL) may well be the most frustrating writer-director currently working. I had hoped his sophomore film, THE BOOK OF CLARENCE, would exhibit more tonal consistency and discipline than his debut feature, but my word this film is just as indulgent.  All of which is disappointing because Samuel is clearly highly cine-literate, with a penchant for the excesses of spaghetti westerns and biblical epics.  He clearly has a good imagination and no shortage of big ideas.  But this film is neither consistently funny, nor ideologically radical.  I was hoping for something funny and zany and gonzo - something approaching the dangerous dark satire of THE LIFE OF BRIAN. Instead, I got a film that was surprisingly straightforwardly pro-religion.  What’s even worse is that in its serious moments, in the final half hour, we get some actually rather earnest and good acting from LaKeith Stanfield and Marianne Jean-Baptiste. But all of that is wasted when Jeymes Samuel can’t help inserting cheap gags. Dear lord this man needs a good producer, or editor, or mentor or something.  Something to pin him down and get the best out of him.

THE BOOK OF CLARENCE has a running time of 136 minutes. It played London 2023 and will be released in the USA on January 12th.

 

THE MIDNIGHT SKY

THE MIDNIGHT SKY is a deeply derivative, mediocre sci-fi movie that will be utterly predictable and unsatisfying to anyone even half decent with the canon. It stars and is directed by George Clooney. He plays a scientist on a future earth ravished by some kind of non-specific disaster. Naturally he's also dying because Pathos. As is the way with these sorts of film, scientific geniuses are self-involved dicks, so earlier in his life he has turned his back on the love of his life and his daughter. So when in old age this dying scientist starts seeing a young girl called Iris in his arctic base, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he's hallucinating his little abandoned girl. Together they travel to a different arctic base to send a signal to some astronauts not to come home, but to go back to a moon that is capable of sustaining life. Why does George need to travel to another base? So that he can turn in one of those Man vs Nature performances (think Leonardo di Caprio in THE REVENANT or Tom Hanks in CAST AWAY) that Oscar voters love. Except Clooney's performance is mediocre at best and the stakes really don't seem as grave as in THE REVENANT. There is no doubt he'll survive if only to connect with the astronauts. Also it really pissed me off that Clooney as director doesn't obey the rules of hallucinated little girls. If Clooney's character can't see her, we shouldn't be able to see her. Come on Clooney you should know this - you did star in that piss awful remake of SOLARIS!

By far the more interesting part of the film takes place on the spaceship that has discovered the new life-sustaining moon, per Clooney's predictions. It's staffed by David Oyelowo and Felicity Jones as a pregnant husband and wife research team as well as sidekicks like Kyle Chandler. His character exists to show the dilemma the scientists face upon hearing Clooney's news. Do you return home to try and find and admittedly die with your family? Or do you go to the new moon and try to "do better this time"? But even in this strand it all feels like stuff we've seen before, and the way in which space and moonwalks are photographed just cannot compete with superior films like GRAVITY and FIRST MAN.

The bottom line is that you would be better off watching any of the other movies that I have referenced in this review. 

THE MIDNIGHT SKY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 118 minutes.

A UNITED KINGDOM - BFI LFF 2016 - Opening Night Gala - Day One

It's London, 1947.  The black King of an impoverished African country falls in love with a white working class girl and against opposition for his Uncle, the Regent, marries her.  They think their battle will be to win acceptance from his tribe, to be ruled by a white woman.  But in fact the greater battle is against the impersonal forces of Cold War foreign policy.  For the country is a British protectorate. And Britain is bankrupt and fearful of Stalin.  She needs Apartheid South Africa's uranium and gold, and so chooses to overlook her hateful racial policies, and her objections to a mixed marriage in a country on her border.  And so this poor star-crossed couple must fight not only the more petty everyday racism, but a larger, political racism, separation and exile, in order to finally stake a claim not only for love, but for independence.

This is a quite astonishing true story, and it's testament to British director Amma Asante's film that I want to learn even more about it. How is it that modern day Botswana (then Bechuanaland) somehow managed to chart a course of relatively stable democracy and affluence, eschewing its destiny to be a political pawn between Britain, Russia and South Africa?  I also wanted to learn more about the fascinating couple at the centre of the story - particularly the wife, Ruth.  How does a working class girl from London have the courage to go to a strange country and apparently, per the end credits, become a fierce political campaigner and advocate for AIDS victims? Actress Rosamund Pike hinted in a red carpet interview that Ruth's experience in World War Two was liberating and defining and I'd love to know more about that.

SELMA

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SELMA is a handsomely made, beautifully acted and devastatingly searing movie about the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It's also a movie about the difference between having a right in theory and having a right in practice, and as such, is a profoundly important and timely film.  What it isn't, and thank goodness for that, is a conventional hagio-biography in the Great Man does Great Things genre.  This isn't, and sorry to keep going on about it, as dumb as THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

The movie opens with Martin Luther King already a major political force. He has the ear of President Johnson and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But despite the end of segregation by Federal Law, in Governor George Wallace's Alabama, African Americans are still subject to extreme racism.  In an elegant, swift and brutal opening triptych we are therefore given King's Nobel acceptance speech; the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and Annie Lee Cooper being denied her application to register to vote on the most spurious and humiliating of grounds. 

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.

THE BUTLER

THE BUTLER is a pretty hackneyed, emotionally manipulative, conservative examination of US race relations in the twentieth century.  Told through the eyes of a fictionalised version of real White House butler, the movie shows us the attempts by presidents from Eisenhower to Reagan to address the race issue, and the conflicting attitude of African Americans toward this struggle.  The butler, Cecil Gaines, after a harrowing childhood experience of extreme prejudice and lawlessness of a 1920s cotton firm in the South, decides to use a strategy of smiling compliance in the search for safety. He will numbly hear anything, and be subservient to anyone, to keep his family safe in the relative middle class affluence of Washington DC.  By contrast, his son Louis is affronted by this subservience, and first joins the peaceful protests led by Martin Luther King, before briefly flirting with the violent activism of the Black Panthers, and ending with direct political engagement.  

The problem with the film is that this political dialogue between father and son - between safe servility and dangerous activism - is so heavy handed and starkly drawn that it threatens to overpower what is actually the far more interesting aspect of the story - the character drama that sees a convincing marriage shown over fifty years. What gives this film emotional heft is not the fact that after years of prejudice, the Butler finally gets to meet President Obama, but that his wife is not there by his side, after decades of struggle, overcoming alcoholism and genuine love. That's the reason why I cried a little at the end of the movie - because that's the part of this film that has emotional honesty and authenticity.

As for the politics, it's fairly simplistic in its opposition between father and son.  The only nuance is delivered by the Martin Luther King character who makes a slight (and rather unconvincingly continued) case for the idea that the butler figure is not subservient but subversive. As for the depiction of the various presidents, this is fatally undermined by stunt casting and few of the famous actors chosen manage to transcend that "ooh look it's Robin Williams as Eisenhower" novelty to approach authenticity.  I suspect the only one who really manages is Alan Rickman as Reagan - but he also has the most nuanced character insofar as he seems to have the most genuine connection to Gaines but also the most offensive race policies.  The movie also plays a bit like history as "one damn thing after another".  We spool through presidents, each with their allotted five minutes, until it becomes more of a fashion parade than anything else.  One senses a rather cheap need to depict famous fashion moments with Nancy Reagan and the scene showing Jackie Kennedy in her famous blood-stained pink suit struck me as very exploitative indeed.  The stunt casting of Mariah Carey as Cecil Gaines mother also fatally undermines what should be a very tragic character.

So in all this - the stunt casting - the simply drawn politics - what is there to like in this film? A strong performance by David Oyewolo as Louis Gaines - the son who embodies the civil rights struggle. And most of all a magisterial performance from Oprah Winfrey as Cecil's wife who moves from blowsy drunk to noble loving wife.  It makes you wonder about the performances we have missed because of her talk show day job.  As for Forest Whitaker, a fine actor, I feel that he isn't given a wide range here - his character essentially being stalwart in his views and reactions until a small epiphany near the end of the film. He serves, if anything, as the counterpoint to Winfrey's Oscar-worthy performance, but that's merely the result of the script. 

THE BUTLER is on release in the USA, Canada, the Philippines, Portugal, France, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Germany, Kuwait, Indonesia, Spain, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Australia, Brazil, Lebanon, the UK, Ireland and Mexico. It opens in Hungary on November 21st, in Romania on November 29th, in Belgium on December 4th, in the Netherlands on December 5th, in Norway on December 25th, in Poland on December 26th, in Chile and Greece on January 30th and in Japan on February 15th. 

THE PAPERBOY

THE PAPERBOY is a superbly trashy tawdry movie in the best tradition of the Southern Gothic. Set in a late 60s bumblefuck town in Florida, the movie opens with a racist obese cop having his guts eviscerated in a parking lot and closes with a sunkissed teen ferrying brutalised bodies over an alligator swamp. In between, we're going to see a convicted murderer command his infatuated fiancée to simulate oral sex in front of the journalists trying to prove him innocent. We're going to see that same fiancée pee on the sunkised teen lashed by a jellyfish.  We're going to see his elder brother brutalised in a sadomasochistic act in which he might have been complicit. And we're going to see a man rip the guts out of a gator as if it ain't no thang. 

In all this craziness, it's questionable where our focus is really meant to be?  Are we really meant to care about proving the innocence of creepy Hillary van Wetter (John Cusack)? To be sure, reporters Ward (Matthew McConaughey) and Yardley (David Oyewolo) do some investigating but I never really got a hold of what they were meant to be uncovering and how it got him released, or even why Ward was so convinced of his innocence after the way he talked to his fiancée Charlotte (Nicole Kidman).  (I figured Yardley never cared one way or another, just so long as he got to publish something.)

No, the focus of the movie seemed to be far more on kid brother Jack (Zac Efron), his infatuation with Charlotte (so slippery for the narrator to keep calling it love), and his unending loyalty to his brother, despite everything that he saw in that plastic sheeted motel room.  There are moments between Ward and Jack, amid the garish grotesquery, that are so intimate and authentic they make you realise how rare it is to see true sibling love on screen. I'm thinking of a snatched conversation on the banks of a swamp - and the way in which Ward cradles a drunken Jack as they sail out to see Charlotte in the movie's final act. And let's be honest, the flash of anger in which Jack uses the N-word in front of his beloved housemaid, Anita (Macy Gray) and then makes up with her says so much more about the reality of race relations in that period than THE HELP ever could. 

So, while THE PAPERBOY might fail as a conventional investigative procedural, while it's focus might be fuzzy, it succeeds like no film I know in holding us rapt - just waiting to see what on earth could happen next to these characters that, after all, we have come to care about. Because, yes, I did want the oversexed trailer trash prison groupie to be happy. And I did care about Jack and Ward, and wince every time someone mistreated Anita. 

I love the way that Lee Daniels (PRECIOUS) and DP Roberto Schaeffer's Super 16mm photography and impeccable production design make the movie jump off the screen. I love the way we can feel the sweat, and the taste the dirt and smell the filth.  And I have to say that as much as Nicole Kidman got a lot of award season glory this really is an ensemble cast that has no shame, no pride and every willingness to look trashy in service of the story.  I guess we've come to expect this from Matthew McConaughey who's reinvented himself as the king of sleaze, but I was shocked at John Cusack's transformation.  Macy Gray is also wonderful as Anita, in one of the rare examples of a narration that really works. 

THE PAPERBOY played Cannes and Toronto 2012 and was released last year in Croatia, the USA, Belgium, France, Canada, Israel, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece and Portugal. It opened earlier this year in Poland, Lebanon, Finland and Australia. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland, in Chile on April 4th, in Mexico on April 5th, in Turkey on April 12th and in Argentina on May 9th. 

THE PAPERBOY has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R in the USA. 

RED TAILS

RED TAILS is George Lucas' earnest but unwatchable vanity project about the real-life Tuskegee Airmen - the valiant African-American WW2 air-pilots who had to overcome discrimination just to get inside an airplane, let alone fight the Luftwaffe.  This could've been the set-up for an epic war movie threaded with brutal political drama, the writing team either isn't up to the task, or isn't interested. Rather, this is a film full of thinly drawn characters, heavy-handed politics and dog-fights lifted straight from Star Wars Episode IV.    You could learn more about the Tuskegee programme in a quarter of the time by looking at Wikipedia. 

The movie takes place at an American airbase in World War Two, where the USAF's first all-black air group is picking off German planes in shitty hand-me-down aircraft, miles from the real action.  After some  lobbying from their Colonel (Terrence Howard) the boys finally get some new planes and a genuinely important mission - protecting the bomber groups mass-bombing Berlin.  The mission is selfless - passing up kills to protect the B-52s - much to the chagrin of some of the corps - but nonetheless covers the group in glory. End of. 

In front of the camera, we have a cast peopled with once-Oscar winners turned C-list actors (Cuba Gooding Junior), rap stars, a bunch of cast-members from THE WIRE, and David Oyelowo (RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES).  None of them do a great job - not even Andre Royo - but it just isn't their fault.  This is simply a badly put-together movie. Anthony Hemingway's direction is workmanlike -  John B Aronson's cinematography makes no attempt to show the reality of aerial combat - and John Ridley (THREE KINGS) and Boondocks creater Aaron Macgruder's script is as ham-fisted as anything every penned by George Lucas. 

I particularly hated the way in which the racial material was handled.  Time and again we see cardboard cut-out evil white people discriminate against our valiant lads before changing their minds because hey! they did a good job! rather than because hey! they deserve to be judged on their merits, and not have to work twice as hard for acceptance.  The love story between Oyelowo and his white Italian sweetheart is also absurd - as if she could've dated a black airman without her family seriously kicking off.

The only thing of merit in this entire film is Terrence Blanchard's score. The rest can safely be ignored. 

RED TAILS is on release in the US and Canada.

THE HELP - the Driving Miss Daisy de nos jours

Tate Taylor, director of the anonymous 2008 comedy PRETTY UGLY PEOPLE, somehow managed to get the studios to allow to write and direct THE HELP, a soupy drama based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett. Not having read Stockett's novel chronicling the travails in 1960s racist Mississippi, I don't know whether the emotional manipulation and superficial politics come from her of from the director.  Either way, the resulting movie looks handsome, and made me shed a tear in the final reel, but has all the genuine engagement with the issues of DRIVING MISS DAISY.  It's a bland feelgood movie about a topic that should make us angry and agitated.  It's a movie in which the main African American character's son is lynched and yet we come out feeling warm and fluffy.  Double plus not good.

The film makes the mistake of telling the stories of these African-American maids through the lens of a perky white wannabe journalist - Skeeter (Emma Stone) - a move that immediately tells us we're in a world where a harsh tale has to be made palatable for a mainstream audience.  Ironic, also, in a movie that makes such a big deal about going right to the source.  Skeeter serves as the vessel through which the maids will dish the dirt and get their story published.  The movie is scrupulous in telling us that Skeeter is sharing the royalties with her informants - but while she gets a cool job in New York out of it - they are at risk of being sacked, imprisoned or lynched. The risks and rewards are clearly completely asymmetric, but the film doesn't embrace and mine that fact - it would mess up the fluffy finale.

Worse still, there is no subtlety in the characterisation - no shades of grey. You're either a good-hearted liberal white (Skeeter, her shamed and reformed mother, Jessica Chastain's character Celia), or a nasty racist white (Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly and her acolytes).  And as for the African-American women they are largely painted in tones of full-on heroism, with even the thief seen as a martyr to a mean mistress.   As for the subject matter, awful, horrible petty racism is seen on screen, but racial violence is referred to rather than shown.  Ditto the subject matter of domestic abuse.  And I couldn't help feeling insulted that the subject of vengeance against racism was reduced to a scatological joke. 

All this isn't to say that the production isn't handsome - with lush on location lensing from DP Stephen Goldblatt (JULIE & JULIA) and wonderful period costumes.  And the female cast is good quality and does the best with the narrowly written characters they are given.  In particular, it was a joy to finally see Jessica Chastain able to round out a character - rather than just being a virtuous icon, as in THE TREE OF LIFE and CORIOLANUS.  

But this movie, so hyped, so likely to win awards, is not a good movie. It's politics are dicey - it's reluctance to truly grasp the profundity of what it's tackling frustrating - it's emotional manipulation dishonest.  I have no time for it.  

THE HELP was released in the autumn in the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Sweden. It was released in October in Portugal, Finland, Norway, Lithuania, Singapore, France, Ireland, the UK and Spain. It was released in November in Spain, Hungary, Poland, Malta, Estonia, Denmark, Greece, Kuwait and India.  It opens on December 8th in Germany; on December 28th in Belgium; on Dcember 29th in the Netherlands; on January 20th in Italy; on February 3rd in Bulgaria and on February 6th in Brazil.  THE HELP is likely to be feted during awards season judging by the studio campaign and early indications from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Hollywood Film Festival.

AS YOU LIKE IT - I love you, "Bob"!

First, some context for this review. I have some limited experience of Shakespeare, having attended a school where our literary education consisted of little else from the age of eleven. I even took specialist Shakespeare examinations to enter University and before my Masters degree, even though I was applying for a different discipline in each case. I would also count myself as a great admirer of Kenneth Branagh's adaptations of Shakespeare, and I consider his Hamlet and Henry V amongst the best films of the past twenty years. So it was with increasing dismay that I realised how much I disliked his new adaptation of AS YOU LIKE IT.

AS YOU LIKE IT is, in his defence, a particularly problematic play, and not in the same way that, say, HAMLET is problematic. In the latter case, Shakespeare gives us such complex and fascinating imagery and action that we can pick out differing interpretations. AS YOU LIKE IT is problematic in the same way as COSI FAN TUTTE - it has such a frothy, convoluted plot that depends on conceits so alien to reality that it is difficult to know how to present it to a modern audience. On top of this structural complexity, I simply do not think it is one of Shakespeare's better plays. The comedy is not as broad as in his best and most vulgar comedies, the strain of melanocholy is not as integral and developed as in his darker plays, and, simply put, the language is not as beautiful.

The play opens with two sets of warring brothers and closes with four weddings. In between we have a pastoral comedy reminiscent of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and TWELFTH NIGHT. Duke Senior has been usurped by his brother Duke Frederick and banished to the Forest of Arden. Soon after, their daughters Celia and Rosalind also flee the court for the forest, accompanied by the fool, Touchstone. Meanwhile, young Oliver is feuding with his younger brother Orlando, who has also fled to the forest. Orlando loves Rosalind, and she tests his love in the guise of a young boy called Ganymede. Phoebe, a young shepherdess falls for Rosalind/Ganymede, and scorns the love of Silvius. Oliver will eventually be redeemed by his love for Celia. Phoebe will eventually content herself with Silvius when she realises that Ganymede is a girl. And Touchstone will eventually marry a doltish goat-herd called Audrey.

Such a plot is testing for a cinema audience. Watching this sort of gender-bending from a distance in the theatre we can just about suspend our disbelief. But celluloid close-ups demand that the actress roughs herself up and takes on the physicality of a boy. I think the most successful example of this that I have seen is Felicity Kendal in the 1980 TV adaptation of Twelfth Night, but Sienna Miller is also convincing in Lasse Halstrom's CASANOVA. In Branagh's film, there is no attempt to make Bryce Dallas Howard look convincing as a boy and she certainly makes no attempt to alter her voice or physicality. Indeed, I didn't much like the way she performed the Shakespeare at all. It seemed very deliberate and self-consciously theatrical and, like Kevin Kline's performances as Jacques, arguably better suited to the stage. I found Alfred Molina (Touchstone), Adrian Lester (Oliver) and David Oyelowo (Orlando) gave the most natural and therefore the most convincing performances.

So, I don't particularly like the source text and I found the performances of mixed quality. But I was most surprised by my complete dislike of Kenneth Branagh's directorial decisions. In particular, I thought the device of staging the play in 19th century Japan utterly contrived. It added nothing to my understanding of the text and seemed motivated by the desire for novelty in the costume department. (I also hated the staging of the songs and the cheap Busby Berkeley ariel shots of people dancing in formation.) The Japanese conceit led Branagh to stage an Ang-Lee-esque opening action sequence involving samurai taking over the court. This proved that Branagh cannot choreograph an action scene and that his DP does not have the requisite skill to create depth of colour and contrast in a night scene.

AS YOU LIKE IT was released in Italy and Greece in 2006 and in Hungary in 2007. It was premiered on HBO in August and is currently on theatrical release in the UK.