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.

EARTHQUAKE BIRD - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Eight

I walked into EARTHQUAKE BIRD expecting a cool, subversive, erotic thriller. What I got was a really banal, mediocre movie that I've already half-forgotten.  The problem is that it doesn't have the courage of its convictions. It's neither a high art emotional drama/character study of a woman dealing with grief and obsessive love.  Nor is it a psychological melodrama along the lines of BLACK SWAN in which a woman is gaslit and turned mad by her creepy lover.  Nor is it a straightforward schlocky 1980s thriller of the BLACK RAIN variety.  It just....sort of....is. This is a great disappointment given how surprisingly good Wash Westmoreland's last film, COLETTE, was. This very much seems like a step backward.

Anyway, what's it all about?  Alicia Vikander plays a quite literally buttoned up Westerner called Lucy who has settled into Japan and almost perfectly assimilated into the culture.  She falls for a handsome noodle cook/moody photographer called Teiji (Naoki Kobayashi). The problem is that he seems to also be attracted to Lily (Riley Keough) - a new arrival, and apparently the stereotype of a crass ex-pat.  At first, Lucy condescends to Lily but soon becomes jealous of her.  This all ends with a mysterious disappearance and a police cell, but I promise you, you really won't care.  Not that it's bad.  My goodness, Vikander seems to be speaking very good Japanese, and Keough is compelling in yet another of "sexually available" roles.  But there's no real bite here. Nothing to really hook us in.  Hugely disappointing.

EARTHQUAKE BIRD has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R. It will be released on November 1st in the USA and November 8th in the UK in cinemas and then globally on November 15th on Netflix.

THEIR FINEST - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 10

THEIR FINEST is a handsome and genuinely funny film that also - admirably - does not shy away from the darker aspects of life in London during the Blitz.  German air-raids kill friends - people whisper about the bad news from Poland - enemy citizens have been interned - and there's a desperation to get America into the war.  The war stirs up social conflict too - women have the opportunity to do jobs left empty by conscripted men, but not without causing resentment and facing opposition.  But the over-riding picture is one of a drab and deprived city, filmed and clothed in dingy colours, trying its best to keep its spirits up and win the war.

To that end, the Ministry of Information was charged with making not just informational films but also soft propaganda feature films - authentic and optimistic. And it's on the set of one of these that the events of this romantic comedy take place.   Gemma Arterton (GEMMA BOVERY) stars as Catrin Cole, a secretary turned screenwriter hired at a reduced wage to write "slop" - dialogue for the female characters. She's married to an artist (Jack Huston - BOARDWALK EMPIRE) who resents her financial success and finds herself drawn instead to her co-writer Buckley (Sam Claflin - THE HUNGER GAMES).  Together, they write the screenplay to a movie about Dunkirk - seeking to transform a story about an ignominious British retreat into one of wartime heroism by two plucky young girls who sail their tugboat to rescue British soldiers.  The movie catches the eye of the government who think it might appeal to American cinemagoers and so persuade them to enter the war. The only problem is, American audiences need an American hero, and a less reticent romantic ending.

The first thing to say is that this film is really very funny indeed.  Properly laugh out loud funny.  Bill Nighy is a scene-stealer as the ageing actor reluctant to play anything but the male lead. His arrogance and pomposity are a joy to behold.   He also does things with the word "semolina" when he sees an attractive woman (Helen McCrory - PENNY DREADFUL) enter a restaurent that will stay with me forever!  But Rachel Stirling is also very funny as the gay Ministry producer with some of the most acerbic lines.  Rounding out the comic trio, we have Jake Lacy (GIRLS) as the American pilot who can't act for toffee with some spectacularly good bad acting.  And then - there are wonderful one-liners or cameos from Richard E Grant and Jeremy Irons. Put them together and I laughed an awful lot at this film - maybe more than watching MINDHORN - and I laughed A LOT at MINDHORN!  

The second thing to say is that I do admire the movie's willingness to show the darker aspects to life in wartime, and indeed to tackle misogyny head on.  

But that's not to say that the film is without its flaws. The romance is a bit obvious and well-worn in its development.  The final act drags - the emotional beats are obvious.  But I can forgive any film its flaws when I can remember comic lines hours after watching it.  

THEIR FINEST has a running time of 115 minutes.   The movie does not yet have a commercial release date. 

AMERICAN HUSTLE

AMERICAN HUSTLE has swagger and style and enough hairspray to raise the Titanic. It has whizz bang energy and crazy characters high on their own con. There are times when it's outlandish hype slips into self-conscious kitsch - times when the performances are so balls-deep in crazy you wonder if the movie has just become BAD, but it's so fun, so bizarre, so outlandish you can't help but stick with it. 

So what's the skinny?  AMERICAN HUSTLE is a very loose retelling of the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s - an FBI sting operation that spiralled out of control, eventually targeting US senators and congressmen with a fake Arab sheikh offering cash for a passport.  The whole thing was murky as hell.  I mean, the guys took the bribes, but this was entrapment and selection of targets as an artform.   In this version of the story, the original conmen are Irving Rosenfeld, played by Christian Bale, and his partner Sydney, played by Amy Adams. They're caught on a small time charge by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), who gets so glamoured by their lifestyle that he decides to become part of the con, using them to entrap politicians.  Key among them is a New Jersey mayor, Carmine Polito - a mobbed up man, to be sure, but one who genuinely speaks from the heart when he says he wants to use the fake Sheikh's money to reinvigorate his home town.

Director David O Russell is far less concerned with the technicalities of the plot and the con than with the characters and their conscious and subconscious motivations. This is absolutely right.  And ironic.  In a movie so concerned with surface - the hairstyles, the clothes, the moves - there is no superficiality.  When a character extravagantly combs over his hair, or creates a tight perm, or wears a dress cut to the navel - they're becoming a character and the whole point of the movie is to watch them reimagine themselves as they'd like to be. So when the movie becomes a cheap melodrama, that's maybe because that's how these characters see themselves - as the stars of their own C-list caper movie.

Another delicious irony - the most honest man in the film is the original conman, Irving Rosenfeld.  And when I say honest, what I mean in the context of a film about self-delusion is that Irving is totally self-aware.  He knows he's a schlubby conman.  He knows he's going to be ensnared by his manipulative wife forever. And he knows he can stay safe by staying small, and not letting greed get the better of him. He's even self-aware about his weakness - his need to disguise his baldness.  This gives Irving a kind of wisdom and humanity that's lacking in the other, almost universally more narcissistic characters.  He's fully aware that Carmine Polito is a good man dirtying his hands to do good works, and is the only character who shows any kind of moral courage in warning him off.  There's a kind of brilliance in Bale's understated performance - the flash of knowledge that passes across his face as he acknowledges that DiMaso is out of control and makes the call to effectively switch sides.  And, yes, I see the added irony of calling Bale's performance subtle. But it is. Under the weight gain, and the combover, and the velvet wide-lapel suits, it's a great subtle performance. 

By contrast, we have Brad Cooper in appropriately manic mode as Richie DiMaso, the henpecked mama's boy who sees the glamorous "Lady Edith" (Sydney's con character) as his ticket to reinvention as a kind of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, super-cool, super-macho, big-time PLAYA. He over-reaches in a way that Irving never would - to Lady Edith - to Senators - and his tragedy is that unlike Irving he really can't handle reality. 

Irving's wife Rosalyn is as deluded as Richie but to gloriously comic effect. She's a young single mother so fortunate as to have Irving provide and adopt her son.  But in her mind, she's always in the right, always responsible for the good things, never responsible for the bad, and a star in her own universe.  Jennifer Lawrence is so unbelievably hilarious and captivating in her few scenes that she threatens to unbalance the movie just as she unhinges the con, and if her Oscar nomination last year was generous, this year it will be thoroughly deserved. 

Sadly, Lawrence's incadescent Rosalyn put Amy Adams "Lady Edith" in the shade.  Adams, cast against time as the vamp, just can't carry off the super sexy outfits and in the inevitable final act confrontation between Irving's lover and his wife, it's Rosalyn/Lawrence who comes out triumphantly on top.  In fact, they seem to be in different films - and maybe that's the point.  Adams/Edith is playing in a romantic tragedy whereas Lawrence/Rosalyn is in a lurid supersexy melodrama. Adams has the  emotional crisis, but Lawrence has all the fun. 

All the way through watching AMERICAN HUSTLE I felt like I was right on the edge where so bad it's good becomes just bad.  But the more I think about it, the more I think that's the point. These characters are all, more or less, actors, hustlers, putting a con on themselves and us. Some do it better than others.  And David O Russell has made a movie that isn't so much his take on the Abscam scandal, as a patchwork of all these hustlers own perceptions of their con.   Maybe I'm being generous. And if I'm wrong, there are times when the performances and the direction in this film are so broad and pastichey and kitschy they are bad.  But if I'm right, then this is a film working on a meta levels of brilliance while all the time being entertaining in the most basic of ways. 

AMERICAN HUSTLE has a running time of 138 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 12A in the UK.

AMERICAN HUSTLE is on limited release in the USA and Australia. It opens on December 20th wide in the USA and in the UK. It opens on December 26th in Israel, Singapore and Vietnam; on December 31st in Taiwan; on January 1st in the UK and Italy; on January 2nd in Lebanon; on January 9th in Greece; on January 17th in Romania; on January 23rd in Argentina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Serbia and Turkey; on January 31st in Japan; on February 5th in France; on February 7th in Brazil and India; on February 12th in Belgium and Germany; on February 21st in Finland and Sweden and on March 20th in the Netherlands. 

KILL YOUR DARLINGS - LFF 2013 - Day Nine

KILL YOUR DARLINGS is a compelling, moving, beautifully produced movie about a dark emotionally manipulative relationship at the heart of the Beat generation.  You don't have to be fascinated by the Beat poets to be sucked into this tale of youthful exuberance, and malevolent sexual desire, so brilliantly is it crafted.

What most people know about this film, is that stars Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame as a young Allen Ginsberg, years before he wrote Howl - a naive innocent Jewish boy arriving at Columbia and dazzled by the charismatic proto-Beat writers he meets.  But really, this isn't his film, although he's a key observer and interpreter of it - our eyes and ears inside the chaos.  Really, the film is about Ginsberg's fellow Columbia student, the charismatic but deeply troubled Lucien Carr (Dale Dehaan) and his disturbed relationship with the older David Kammerer (a heart-breakingly good Michael C Hall).  When we first meet the pair, standing in Ginsberg's shoes, it seems like it's a relationship of equals.  Kammerer is obsessed with Carr, but Carr uses Kammerer to his advantage, making him write his papers.  It feels like Carr, if anything, has the upper hand.  But as the movie progresses, we learn that Kammerer isn't just a jealous boyfriend, and Carr may not be confident in his sexual orientation.  In fact, Kammerer could well be a predatory stalker.  I guess we'll never know why and how the obsessive love story ended how it did, but I love how director John Krokidas deftly navigates the spidersweb of conflicting stories and motivations. It feels fair, and fascinating, and real, even if, in reality it wasn't a possessive Ginsberg that told Kammerer where Carr was, but an unaware Kerouac. 

The cast is superb throughout. In smaller parts, I loved the sinister strangeness of Ben Foster's well-heeled heir William S Burroughs, and the carefree charm of Jack Huston's Jack Kerouac.  In the larger roles, Daniel Radcliffe is nuanced and charismatic and conflicted as Allen Ginsberg, creating an extreme version of a relatable character - the wide-eyed kid suffering his first unrequited love affair at college.  And the way in which his eyes are opened to intellectual thought - the way in which those early college friendships can change your life - made me nostalgic for my own freshman year. But as I said before, this is really a movie that belongs to Dane Dehaan and Michael C Hall - so lucid and sympathetic and fragile and tragic.  Truly heartbreaking stuff, especially from Michael C Hall, and I hope we see more of him on the big screen now that his time as Dexter is up. 

And finally, kudos to first time feature director John Krokidas who has fashioned a movie so elegant, and intricate and confident that it's amazing to think it's really his first film. I loved the way in which he folded and moulded time, using flashbacks in a totally unconventional way. I loved the way in which he could direct both the comedic caper movie material as well as the emotionally intense material - and his feeling for editing together the great pivotal scenes.  His direction is so brave and assured that I am truly excited to see what he does next. 

KILL YOUR DARLINGS has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R in the USA. 

KILL YOUR DARLINGS played Sundance, Venice, Toronto, and London 2013.  It goes on release in the USA and Italy this weekend, in Greece on November 7th, in Canada on November 8th, in Australia on December 5th, in the UK on December 6th, in Germany on January 30th and in Brazil on February 14th. 

Late Review - MR NICE

Director Bernard Rose takes a break from contemporising Russian literature, with his straight-ahead adaptation of Howard Marks' autobiography, MR NICE. The charm of Marks' story is that he stands against the cliché of the drug dealer typically seen in films. He doesn't grow up in a mean urban setting - he doesn't push drugs to survive - he isn't particularly flash - he doesn't do whores - he's faithful to his wife and kids - and he studiously avoids Class A drugs - both dealing them and taking them. In fact, he is rather more like a hero of an Ealing Comedy - stumbling into drug dealing quite by accident and permanently amused that he is getting away with it.

Marks was basically just another middle-class kid studying at Oxford and smoking hash when a mate asked him to do a favour and drive a car stuffed with drugs back from Germany. Marks was quite happy to quit teaching for easy money-making and soon hooked up with the Provos to bring his hash into UK airports without the inconvenience of customs checks. Before long he's got the biggest outfit in the UK and tries to crack America. Moreover, he's been recruited by his old college chum to be a spy in Kabul - after all, he moves in circles they can't penetrate! The first time he's busted for dealing he gets off on grounds so spurious he seems to be amazed, but he does eventually serve time - and not because of hubris, or narcissism, or betrayal - but basically because he was too bored to quit.

The film is charming and fun, and uses a deliberately lo-fi amateurish style, with live action footage digitally inserted into grainy old vintage footage of the 60s and 70s. Rhys Ifans is suitably bumbling and charming as Marks and he and Chloe Sevigny as his wife seem genuinely in love. I also love David Thewlis - who has just that edge of danger required to play the Provo, Jim McCann. The charm and the fun is entirely in keeping with Marks' carefully cultivated persona as Mr. Nice. Yes, that was his real alias, but he also wants to be seen as basically a good guy. To that end, this movie drips with family values, and to watch it, one would think that his wife and daughters never blamed him for one second for being absent from their lives. The film also refuses to question how far his involvement with the Provos was morally pretty nasty - after all, the dodgy money they were earning wasn't going into real estate, was it? And there is a deliberately cultivated equivocation about how far he ever really did any spying for the British.

So, MR NICE is basically a rather fawning film - frothy, light, charming, disposable. It doesn't get to grips with Howard Marks - but provides him with a yet another self-justificatory platform. Is that bad? Who knows. But there is something rather, well, distasteful in an international drug dealer who consorted with the IRA palming himself of as a charming rogue.

MR NICE is currently on release in the UK.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - SHROOMS

Low-budget Irish horror flick in which hapless Yanqui teens go camping in Ireland with a canny local who fills their heads with ghost stories and their tummies with magic mushrooms. The kids trip. They don't know if what they're seeing are hallucinations or real. And who's really after them? In-bred yokels or angry abused orphans? Either way it's all pretty forgettable and derivative other than a nice scene between Robert Hoffman of STEP UP 2 fame and a talking cow.

SHROOMS was released in 2007 in Russia, Spain and the UK. It opened earlier in 2008 in the USA. It is available on DVD.