THE IRISHMAN - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Closing Night Gala

Who killed Jimmy Hoffa? Does anyone care? Martin Scorsese sure does. He spends three and half arse-numbing hours answering who and why. We only put up with this because it's Scorsese. And even then barely just.  If created for theatrical release, then this film is just too long.  It could easily lose twenty minutes of its opening hour and thirty minutes of its closing hour. Once Hoffa's dead, do we really care about his assassin's lonely old age?  I would argue that the indulgence Netflix afforded Scorsese is a hindrance here.  It has allowed him to be baggy where a conventional studio would have demanded a sub-180 minute cut.  Still, this is a Netflix release so I guess people will watch this at home over a few evenings. If so, that's a shame because Scorsese is at the top of his game when it comes to his visual style, choice of music, kinetic editing, and brilliant evocation of mood and era.  This film really does deserve to be seen on a big screen, for all the physical discomfort that arises.

Of course, no-one really cares who killed Jimmy Hoffa anymore.  I don't know many people of my generation who know how powerful he was in 1960s America, or the mystery surrounding his death, let alone those younger than me.  Scorsese's screenwriter Steve Zaillian seems to acknowledge the problem a couple of times in his screenplay, as aged up versions of characters try to explain to younger interlocuters that Hoffa was the second most powerful man behind the President - a powerful Union leader who could make or break a political campaign, and whose multi-billion pension fund could and did bankroll the mafia. He disappeared in 1975.  Everyone acknowledges it was a mafia hit.  You don't threaten mafia funding and survive. But the precise facts around who did the job remain unsolved. The Feds have their suspicions. But we'll never know. This film, however, posits a theory based on the late-in-life confession of long-term mafia hitman Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran.

And so this film tells us the story of The Irishman, beginning with not one but two framing devices. The outer device shows us Sheeran (an aged up Robert de Niro) narrating his sins to what we'll later find out is a Catholic priest - his sole visitor in a nursing home, given that Sheeran has alienated his family.  This reminded me a bit of AMADEUS - having the murderer confess, but not particularly seek atonement, to murdering a man who was purportedly his friend.  Because Sheeran wasn't just a mob hitman - he was also sent by the mob to be Hoffa's protection. Their relationship was one of trust and intimacy, even sleeping in twin beds like Burt and Ernie. It certainly makes the killing emotionally brutal.

The framing device within the framing device is watching Sheeran on a road-trip from Philly to Detroit with his mentor, mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), and their wives. This is meant to be a trip to a wedding, but it becomes apparent in the final third of the film that Bufalino is going to call on Sheeran's higher loyalty to him than to Hoffa, by making him kill Hoffa personally. "I have to put you in this" he says.  

And then finally, we get to the meat of the film, which is a linear re-telling of Sheeran's story from the time he met Bufalino to his life in the nursing home. He starts of as a truck driver who steals for the mafiosi, then starts driving for them, then "painting walls" aka murdering people, and providing protection for Hoffa. The fact that Sheeran even makes it to the nursing home is already a gag, as time and again, we see darkly humorous subtitles telling us how various mafiosi were brutally killed shortly after the action we're witnessing. Sheeran is literally the last man standing.

The resulting story is - as I said - baggy in its first and especially final hour - but when it's solidly in the meat of its 1960s and 1970s storyline it's as pacy and compelling and stunningly put together as anything Scorsese has ever done.  The way in which he frames a shot, or explicitly moves a lens as if its our eye panning a room, or jump cuts from a violent shot to a stylish lounge scene - the way in which he uses incidental music - it's just another league from the other films at this festival, or on release, period.  The performances are also tremendous, and I have to say the subtle use of CGI de-ageing tech is an absolute success.

For me, the star of the show is Joe Pesci. His performance is so quiet, so powerful, so menacing, and so controlled.  He can condemn a man to death with the slightest, barely noticeable, nod of his head. It's also interesting to compare him with Harvey Keitel as the even more powerful Angelo Bruno. He barely says a word in the entire movie. The two characters are quiet, understated and petrifying.  Contrast this with Al Pacino's Jimmy Hoffa - perfect casting as Hoffa needs to be (at times) bombastic, to contrast with the mafiosi's quiet menace. Hoffa's problem is a complete lack of self-awareness. Even when they're all turning on him, he just doesn't get it. He still obsesses over "my union".  He doesn't understand he sold it to the mafia years prior.  But this isn't one of those pastiche Pacino large performance. Sure, Hoffa has elements of that. But he can also be quiet and fragile. There's also a lovely contrast between Hoffa, who's downfall is that he's so emotional, seeing the benefits of that in a beautiful family life. He's even close to Sheeran's daughter Peggy (lovely facial acting in an almost wordless and thankless role).  By contrast, Peggy instinctively withdraws from her father and Bufalino.  They are left alone.  As for De Niro, his performance is strong, as we come to expect, but his character is in some ways the least interesting of the "big three". I would nominate Pesci for the awards, every time.

In smaller roles, and I really can't state this highly enough, can we get some awards love for Stephen Graham as the dangerously explosive mafiosi Tony Pro?  There are a couple of scenes where he has to go toe to toe with Pacino's Hoffa at his most powerful and domineering and my god, Graham's Tony Pro gives as good as he gets.  Graham is in no way outclassed by Pacino, and Pacino is pretty fucking classy.  Best Supporting Actor? No doubt.

THE IRISHMAN is rated R and has a running time of 209 minutes. The movie played New York and London 2019. It opens in cinemas on limited release on November 1st in the USA and November 8th in the UK, and will be released globally on Netflix on November 27th.

THE PAINTED BIRD - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Eight

Writer-director Václav Marhoul has created, in THE PAINTED BIRD, the first undeniable masterpiece of this year's BFI London Film Festival. It's a film of rare courage and stunning cinematography. I couldn't write this review last night. I had to sit to sit with the film for a while. And even now I feel somewhat incapable of describing how I feel about it other than to say that it is unique, powerful, unflinching, and devastating.  Every scene feels so deliberately and carefully shot. The black and white photography so stunning. And yet the content is so brutal. 

The movie is based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski.  You might have heard of him as the man who wrote the novel upon which Peter Sellars stunning BEING THERE was based. However, before that, he was a literary sensation in America, thanks largely to this book.  When he published it he claimed they were his memoirs of being a small abandoned Jewish boy trying to survive the Holocaust in Central Europe. However, he was exposed as a liar. His book was made up of episodes taken from other works published in Polish but unavailable in the West.  Despite this, many of his early supporters, including Elie Wiesel, continued to support him after he was exposed, because his book contained an essential and controversial truth:  that while the Holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazis, the peasants of central Europe were no less anti-semitic and violent. This is also something that comes across powerfully in Claude Lanzmann's  SHOAH.  Of course, making this point today is very contentious. Poland recently passed a law making it illegal to accuse the Polish of being complicit in the Holocaust. One wonders whether this film will be released there, or indeed in Hungary and Ukraine.

Anyway, all this so much context to what is a brutal but also beautiful film about the worst of humanity. It depicts central European peasants living in World War Two but effectively in circumstances unchanged since the Middle Ages. It's a harsh rural life without electricity or cars or running water.  Intellectually these people are riddled with superstition and prejudice. They indulge at minimum in anti-Semitic brutality. At worst in incest, bestiality and child sex abuse. The Catholic priest (Harvey Keitel) offers platitudes but throws our poor protagonist into the most severe danger (Julian Sands), knowingly, in a harsh analogy to the current child sex abuse scandals.  What kindness the boy experiences is fleeting. A Nazi soldier lets him flee in a deeply moving and enigmatic performance by Stellan Skarsgard. Later, two Soviet soldiers take him under their wing - again a deeply moving performance from Barry Pepper.  In general, it almost feels like the men with guns are at least better to him because they operate according to some kind of rules, whereas the peasants are just living in some kind of wild west brutality that's beyond reason.

THE PAINTED BIRD has had a lot of attention because of some people walking out of screenings because of the graphic scenes of violence, and indeed sexual violence. And yes that's tough, but it's endurable. The far more emotionally difficult segment is at the end, seeing this innocent boy turned murderer because he has been so brutalised by events. The final scene, of a boy etching his name into the frost, is by far the most perilous to watch. 

THE PAINTED BIRD has a running time of 169 minutes.  The film played Venice, Toronto and London 2019. It does not yet have a commercial release date.  For those who want to know more about Kosinski check out James Park Sloan's superb biography.

YOUTH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Nine

Oh man. Paolo Sorrentino’s IL DIVO is arguably the best movie I’ve ever watched at a film festival, and it’s the only one I loved so much I watched it twice. And his last movie, THE GREAT BEAUTY, was a work of magical visual beauty and deep melancholic investigation into ageing and art. So I came to his first ever English language film with great expectations. Expectations that were, with the exception of a few flashes of brilliance, disappointed. There are two over-riding reasons for this: first a chronic lack of narrative drive and energy; second, uneven tone that undermines rather than enhances the whole.

BY THE GUN

I watch straight to video movies because sometimes you find hidden gems that were just too rogue or misfit to get a full theatrical release.  Sad to say, BY THE GUN does not fall into that category of film.  It's the sort of film someone with not much talent - me, for example - would make if they had just watched the SOPRANOS boxset.  It's not a pastiche or an homage but an attempt to create a tense psychological mafia movie that fails. 

The movie is written by Emilio Mauro and directed by James Mottern with no real originality or quality.  It stars Ben Barnes as a low-level mafiosi called Nick Tortano who wants to get made by local boss Sal Vitaglia (Harvey Keitel.)  We see Nick strike up a romance with a hard-to-get girl called Ali (Leighton Meester) and get mocked by his best friend George (Slaine) for not having the balls to kill a man.   The movie attempts to show the usual mafia movie conflicts - work vs lover; work vs gonzo best friend.  Once we get hold of the initial set-up it's fairly easy to see where the film is going to end.  There's lots of plot but no real action.

Ben Barnes doesn't have the charisma or indeed the mastery of the accent to pull this roll off. Leighton Meester is utterly miscast.  I was thinking about Blake Lively who had a small role in THE TOWN and put on an accomplished accent and persona as this pretty but damaged girl.  Meester doesn't come close.  There's an epic fail scene about half way through the film where Nick is trying to get Ali to sleep with him and he's begging her to taunt him - it's meant to be subversive sexy and maybe could've been in the hands of, say, Gosling-Lively. But here it's just awkward.

Epic fail. 

BY THE GUN has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R.  The film went on limited release in the USA last December and has gone straight to DVD in the UK.

THE CONGRESS - LFF 2013 - Day Four

In the not too distant future, an oleaginous Hollywood exec decides he can dispense with the "difficult" Hollywood acting talent, by using you her looking versions of digitised actors. He'll pay them to stay in IRL retirement and sVe them from their own bad choices.  Twenty years later, he now has proof of concept, and can dispense even with the digitisers and animators.  Consumers will now hallucinate the fantasy movie character and life they want to leave. Is this the total consumer right to choose?  Or has the studio gone from manipulating actors to manipulating everyone?  

Director Ari Folman's mind-blowing movie THE CONGRESS, based on the Stanislaw Lem novel explores these issues and so many more.  It's a bitter satire on rapacious Hollywood execs and the cult of youth; an exploration of the concepts of personal identity and free choice in a digitised world; and at its most scabrous, a personal attack on Tom Cruise. At the same time, it's a love story: the story of a mother trying to hold on to reality so that she can care for her ill son.  

The star in question is a virtual reality version of Robin Wright, and in the first hour of the film we see her in live action, struggling with irrelevance in contemporary Hollywood.  She loves with her bright daughter Sarah, who embraces the concept of digitisation and her wonderfully imaginative son, who we learn has a degenerative illness.  But berated and harangued and manipulated by her agent (Harvey Keitel) and her studio boss (Jack Huston), "Robin Wright" takes the contract.  In the second hour of film we fast forward twenty and then forty years as the actress, now released from her initial contract, attends the Futurologist's Congress of the title, and sees the newly hallucinogenic, animated world where anyone can pop an ampoule and become Marilyn Monroe, or indeed, the newly successful franchise-heroine Rebel Robin Wright.

I loved the satire on Hollywood and the sheer technical feat and imagination involved in putting this film together.  But I couldn't help but think that a lot of the ideas on show were derivative of THE MATRIX and THE PLAYER and WAG THE DOG and AI and...... And as for the storytelling, it needed serious pruning. We coulda cut thirty minutes from the opening love action here and about twenty minutes from the animated interlude.   Worst of all, although Ari Folman tried to give the movie some heart by giving Robin Wright a mission to get back to her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) I just couldn't get invested in that story at all.


So, all in all, a rather derivative film lacking in heart underneath all that technical wizardry. 

THE CONGRESS has a running time of 122 minutes.

THE CONGRESS played Cannes and London 2013. It opened earlier this year in France, Belgium, Germany and Poland. It opens in the Netherlands on January 9th 2014. 

MOONRISE KINGDOM

Wes Anderson was, for me, a film-maker like Tim Burton.  A man with a distinct and beautiful visual style but whose tendency to rework the same themes, with the same actors, playing essentially the same characters, had begun to pall.  I particularly hated his last live action film, THE DARJEELING LIMITED, for its self-absorption, narcissism, rather exploitative attitude toward its Indian context, and ultimately for just being dull. With this in mind, I went into  MOONRISE KINGDOM with barely any hope that I would find the kind of film - at once whimsical and yet also profound (echoes of Tarsem Singh's THE FALL!) - that I had fallen in love with while watching THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS.

Well, my fears were groundless. MOONRISE KINGDOM is a simply wonderful film.  It is, of course, beautifully designed, rich in background detail, empathetically scored, and well-acted.  It affects a sweet yet knowing innocence - it's full of characters struggling to deal honestly with themselves and their loved ones - it deals with the darkest of emotions but it drips with hope - in friendship, in people doing the right thing - in family.  It's as if everything that began to feel so clichéd about Wes Anderson has finally been re-united with sincere emotion - and that this emotional authenticity has cut through the stagey-ness of the costumes, locations, soundtrack - and transformed a whimsical confection into something altogether more lasting, provocative and memorable.  It's as if Wes Anderson finally gave in and just told the story he always wanted to tell - about first love.

Suzy B (Kara Hayward) falls in love with an eagle-scout called Sam (Jared Gilman) one golden summer in 1965. The carefully hatched plan to leave together triggers a sequence of scrapes, jams, shenanigans, emotional revelations and deeds good and ill.  

Anderson perfectly captures that intensity of feeling when you're a kid and you feel nobody understands you apart from this one perfect person. Suzy's trying to escape her family - her kid brothers, her distant father (Bill Murray) and the mother (Frances McDormand) she suspects of sleeping with local policeman (Bruce Willis). Sam's an orphan and a misfit with a good heart. In one of the most affecting scenes, written in exact mimicry of how we speak at that age, Sam tells Suzy he loves her but she's talking nonsense for hating her parents. Suzy and Sam run away together.  They're at the age and living in the time when you're hold world fits into a suitcase, and you take your're favourite adventure stories rather than clothes. When you can place you're entire life into the hands of another person without second-guessing yourself.  

There's a deep vein of melancholy running through the film. Most of the adults seem desperately lonely, none moreso than Ed Norton's majestically decent scout leader.  The exception is the almost mechanical Social Services, played by Tilda Swinton with steely efficiency. But the kids are in their own world, where all things are possible, and where adults barely skim the surface, except as occasional constraints and only too rarely as facilitators. There's excitement and wonder and threat and crushing disappointment. As the movie builds to a pivotal final scene (superbly scored to Britten's Noye's Fludde) I realised that I deeply cared about these kids.  I wanted desperately to know what they happened to them, and not just to download the soundtrack they were listening to. It's been a long time, but we finally have a Wes Anderson movie that makes us feel as well as admire its surfaces.  

MOONRISE KINGDOM opened Cannes 2012. It is on release in France, Germany, Ireland, Turkey, the UK and he USA. It opens next weekend in Belgium, Iceland, Hungary and the Netherlands. It opens on June 6th in Sweden, on June 8th in Norway, on June 15th in Greece and Spain, on June 21st in Russia, on June 2nd in Portugal and Lithuania, on August 16th in Slovenia and Argentina and on August 30th in New Zealand.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS - damp squib

The first NATIONAL TREASURE movie was a light-hearted unpretentious mix of Indiana Jones and The Da Vinci Code and much of the team behind the original is back for the sequel. Nic Cage reprises his role as the archeologist cum treasure hunter, Ben Gates. He's got an IT whizzkid sidekick (Justin Bartha), a hot chick girlfriend (Diane Kruger) and a pair of light relief bickering parents (Jon Voight and Helen Mirren). Instead of Auto-Bean, the bad guy is played by Ed Harris. And instead of Templar treasure, Ben Gates is searching for an ancient City of Gold hidden under Mount Rushmore. The adventure will take him to Paris, Buckingham Palace, the Oval Office and the Library of Congress too! One wonders just what is left for the heavily hinted at third installment of the franchise. Ben Gates decodes a puzzle on the moon?!

The problem is that somewhere between the insanely impressive sets and the ludicrously high-amp locations, the honest fun of the first film got lost. I didn't mind the cheesiness of the first flick because it kept me entertained. In NATIONAL TREASURE, I eventually got bored, especially during the final water sequences. And when you're bored, you start poking holes in a plot that can't stand up to such scrutiny. The motivation of the baddie, for instance, seems pretty thin. And a scene where Ben Gates is offering to sacrifice himself for his family is curiously lacking in emotional punch.

Overall then, NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS is a pretty damp squib. Still, I like the concept enough that I'll be hoping for a slightly shorter run-time and slightly less absurd locations in the inevitable next installment.

NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS was released in 2007 in the US, Kuwait, Oman, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Lebanon, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Thailand, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Spain, the USA, Venezuela, Egypt, Russia, Mexico and Panama. It was released earlier in 2008 in Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Peru, Colombia, India, Norway, Sweden, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Germany and Denmark. It is currently playing in Denmark and the UK and opens next week in France and Finland.

NATIONAL TREASURE - superior popcorn adventure movie

NATIONAL TREASURE is a whole bunch of harmless fun. Equal parts Indiana Jones movie and Da Vinci Code. The film rollocks along at a lively pace, delivering code-cracking, chase sequences, bad guys (Sean Bean), good guys (Nic Cage), and at a neat-O ending. Sure, it's not a work of art, but it handles itself with charm and aplomb - perfect for your Saturday night disposable date movie.

NATIONAL TREASURE went on global cinematic release in winter 2004 and goes on DVD release today.