SID & JUDY - BFI London Film Festival 2019

SID & JUDY is a masterfully edited and constructed documentary about the latter half of Judy Garland's career, as seen through the autobiography of her third husband Sid Luft.  He meets and marries her shortly after her ignominious sacking from MGM, addicted to pills, with a reputation of being unreliable.  So young to be seemingly on the scrapheap, Luft masterminds her return to the big screen in the Warner Brothers funded remake of A STAR IS BORN (reviewed here).  It's so iconic now that it's easy to forget that it was a financial failure, and Garland famously didn't win the Oscar for it.  The wonder of this film is to show us how talented Judy was, despite the fact that Luft continued to enable her with drugs.  The director, Stephen Kijak, contrasts the various versions of its most famous number - recorded multiple times over many months because Warners switched to Cinemascope mid-way through the shoot. You see Judy's stamina - her ability to hit her mark - but also her subtle versatility in performance. You also get to know and admire Sid's honesty and sardonic wit. He's scathing about his own willingness to enable her drug use to get the film done, and it's so sad to realise how much he really did love her, and try to get her off drugs. At his wits end, he pretends to leave her - she calls the press, and the lawyers tell him to take the way out - but he tells us they don't realise he's in love with her.

After the STAR flop, Luft reinvents Judy as a touring extravaganza, with sell-out shows in Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium and every great venue in between, and finally gets her the CBS TV show. But by this time, she's being manipulated and defrauded by her new agents, and Sid is cut out of her life.  The story continues through the highs and lows of her TV show to her death. Even then you feel Sid still loved her. You also feel the tragedy of her life - her scathing self-mockery, her anger, her desperation to be more than just Dorothy, or the Man That Got Away, or The Trolley Song, for people. I was truly chilled by the denouement.

That I should feel so completely invested in this documentary is down to the skill of the director in recreating her story in a way that felt so vivid and immersive. He cleverly intercuts TV and film footage from the time, so we hear a lot of Judy herself in interviews. But we also get a really superb set of  voice performances from Jon Hamm and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sid and Judy respectively. Indeed, it's ironic that as Renee Zellweger is doing lots of PR for her new take on Judy, it's probably Jason Leigh who gets the closest to this brilliant, fragile, angry, funny, complicated woman.

SID & JUDY has a running time of 95 minutes. It will be shown on US TV on October 18th. It will play the BFI London Film Festival, but it does not yet have a commercial release date for the UK.

WELCOME TO ME

WELCOME TO ME is a truly unique, moving and darkly film from debut feature director Shira Piven and writer Eliot Laurence.  It stars Kristen Wiig as a bipolar woman called Alice Krieg who goes off her meds and uses her lottery winnings to fund a daytime talk show in the manner of her heroine, Oprah Winfrey. Except this show is an unfiltered expression of all of Alice's insecurities, obsessions and historic persecutions.  Despite the fact that she is clearly unhinged, a commercial production company takes her money and puts the show on air, to surprisingly decent growing ratings, until Alice suffers an emotional crisis and runs out of the necessary cash. Along the way, we come to admire her ever-loyal support network of parents, ex-husband and best friend Gina, and have some hopes that a nascent relationship with one of the show's producers might be sustainable.  We also come to have huge sympathy for Alice, despite her bouts of hurtful narcissism.  

The performances from the first-rate cast are superb.  Kristen Wiig allows herself to be utterly vulnerable and yet also manages a laconic deadpan humour that takes us through the movie's most awkward and disturbing moments. Linda Cardellini has the most to do as Alice's best friend and their final scene moved me to tears. It's also a pleasure to see Joan Cusack, James Marsden (as the show's producers), and Alan Tudyk (as the ex-husband) and Tim Robbins (as the psychiatrist) in smaller roles - all won over by Alice in the best way.  Only Jennifer Jason Leigh's producer stands in for those viewers put off by Alice's antics - or feels morally queasy by the fact that this entertainment is the result of mental illness.

A movie tackling the subject of mental illness that also purports to be an albeit very dark and dry comedy treads on this ice.  But the results here are provocative, assured, moving and unique.  This has to be one of the best films I've watched this year.

WELCOME TO ME has a running time of 87 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto 2014 and was released in the USA and Canada last year. It is currently on release in the UK.

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. 

THE SPECTACULAR NOW - LFF 2013 - Day Three

Director James Ponsoldt's THE SPECTACULAR NOW starts with such verve and pace and authentic humour that it feels almost like a great John Hughes teen comedy.  In fact, the lead actor, Miles Teller (RABBIT HOLE), seems to be channelling a young John Cusack with his portrayal of charming, fun-loving but troubled teen Sutter  - a kid who thinks he's the life of the party but is really just a nascent alcoholic who's letting his issues with his absent father cloud his relationship with his well-meaning but distant mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and his sweet new girlfriend Aimee (Shaileene Woodley - THE DESCENDANTS). The first half of the film stays firmly in that John Hughes vein, despite the growing unease about the amount of drinking Sutter does, and how in dating Sutter, Aimee starts sipping from a hipflask too. But we're still just in the mode of looking at a meet-cute, an odd-couple dating story, with wryly observed tales of still being drawn to your ex-girlfriend, and Prom. 

But then something happens about half-way through the film that totally undoes its balance.  The lovely Aimee persuades Sutter to find his father, and casting Kyle Chandler against type, we can a lovable selfish drunk, who makes Sutter so self-loathing that he puts Aimee and himself in danger.  I won't say more for fear of spoiling the film, but it really bothered me that there were no consequences - whether emotional or external - to these events.  Worse than that, it broke that feeling of integrity and authenticity to the movie, and I was progressively less and less engaged with how it all worked out. I'm not sure whether that sharp right turn into nonsense is the fault of the original author, Tim Tharp, or the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber (500 DAYS OF SUMMER). Either way, it's a real shame because it undercuts the great work done in the movie's first half. 

THE SPECTACULAR NOW has a running time of X and is rated R

THE SPECTACULAR NOW played Sundance, where it received the Special Jury Prize for Acting, SXSW and London 2013. It opened in the USA and Canada earlier this year and will be released in Australia on December 5th.

Late Review by A.H. - SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Everyone is disappointing the more you know them.

By turns comic and poignant, the maze of love, and of the memory of love, and the idiosyncratic forms that maze takes, has been a motif of the writer Charlie Kaufman’s recent work. And yet the maze of SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK – in contrast to his previous doubling rabbit-holes – is neither internal, nor scrambled through; rather it is a large-scale theatre, a simulacrum of the city of New York, where director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) meticulously puts on, observes, and so re-experiences the daily troubles and past disappointments in his relationships with his wives and lovers. That the protagonist is an artist considering his time with the women around him may be a nod to the familiar – but it is in the effect of this life-long, theatrical, melancholic project that the film becomes a remarkable and ambitious variation in Kaufman’s characteristically unique design.

From the opening of the film, Cotard is, as his name suggests, preoccupied with the approach of death and the disintegration of his body, which only seems to widen the tense distance between himself and his wife. He directs a successful production of Death of a Salesman, and is subsequently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship that gives him the funds to create his immense life-theatre in a disused airplane hangar. This time of achievement in his professional life is weighted by his increasingly failing health (an unending anxiety seems to surface in pustules, disturbing shakes, problems in bed), and his complex personal life, marked by absence and regret and obsession, which in turn, Escher-like, becomes material for his grand play.

Kaufman has always drawn skewed perspective brilliantly, particularly in highlighting the difference in perception within relationships, and he continues this trick in SYNECDOCHE. When Cotard’s first wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter, declines an invitation to attend a performance of one of her husband’s plays because she must spend time packing up her canvases for an exhibition abroad, there is a hilarious cut to a shot of her canvases in their boxes – she paints on the most miniscule of scales and the crates she uses resemble matchboxes she could pack in a few minutes. Similarly, when Cotard discovers, to his horror, that his daughter from his first marriage has become a tattooed celebrity at the age of ten, his second wife Claire (Michelle Williams) exclaims that everyone has tattoos and turns her back to lift up her shirt revealing an enormous, monstrous tattoo of her own – which Cotard then denies having ever seen.

Keener and Williams are faultless in these roles, as the rest of the cast generally tend to be whenever they are on screen. That cast includes Samantha Morton; Jennifer Jason Leigh; Hope Davis; Emily Watson; Dianne Weist; and it feels important to name the soaring ensemble here as they are each gone too swiftly. But that, achingly, is the nature of the piece. As the play comes to its end, so Kaufman’s questions become plain: where does love go? Where does life go? Their ethereal conclusion is one of the many ways this film rewards watching and, of course, re-watching.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK played Cannes (where it was beaten to the Palme D'Or by GOMORRAH), Toronto, Chicago and London 2008. It won the award for Best First Feature and the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2009. It went on limited release in 2008 and 2009, and is now available to rent and own.

Overlooked DVD of the month - GREENBERG

Writer-director Noah Baumbach makes excruciatingly well-observed films about financially privileged, neurotic, unsympathetic middle-aged Americans. When his films work, they are masterpieces of razor-sharp dialogue and uncomfortable silences and fleeting moments of sympathy for the fundamentally unsympathetic. His latest film, GREENBERG, features a classic Baumbach character, brilliantly played by Ben Stiller. Roger Greenberg is the definition of the bi-coastal American mid-life crisis. He's a forty-something, neurotic failed pop star turned carpenter who spends his life feeling sorry for himself, using recreational drugs, hitting on younger women and basically being self-indulgent and whiny. He is a walking embarrassment - the Uncle who won't grow up - the brother who won't get himself together - the friend who won't admit to his failures. 

Greenberg comes to LA to house-sit his brother's house and, taking the family's cue, casually abuses the services of their au pair/social secretary/general all round skivvy Florence (Greta Gerwig). The interaction between the passive-aggressive Greenberg and the vulnerable, low-self-esteem Florence is fascinating. She is sympathetic but hopeless. Greenberg is simultaneously repelled by her openness, and inflated by the fact that he has finally found someone in such dire circumstances that even a loser like him can help her. (I've been rewatching the classic 1981 BRIDESHEAD REVISITED recently, and as far apart as these things are, I thought I recognised something of the relationship of Sebastian Flyte and Kurt in Greenberg's attraction to finally being of use.)

I liked GREENBERG. Or maybe it's a film that you don't so much like, or enjoy, but see as a reflection of people you know, and admire for its honesty in depicting a certain slice of life. Greenberg is a profoundly unsympathetic character, but I did care about his journey and find some satisfaction, if not redemption, in the final scenes of the movie. GREENBERG isn't as bitterly funny as THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, nor does it have as interesting a cast of characters. GREENBERG feels more like a character study - a closely drawn, almost claustrophobic, portrait of a man in a crisis. It felt real, and painful and sometimes infuriating. But I was happy to have spent time with its characters and bought into the relationships and narrative arc.

Baumbach is, like Nicole Holofcener, the great chronicler of our decadent, pampered lives. Of rich people who feel guilty for being rich, but want all that being rich gives them. Of emotionally unstable people self-sabotaging. Of people in their thirties and forties who refuse to grow up and take responsibility. Of emotional narcissism and the difficulty of connection. I am grateful that there is room for his kind of cinema, even if it is, by definition, a painful watch.

GREENBERG played Berlin 2010 and opened earlier this year. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Overlooked movie of the month - THE MACHINIST

Before TRANSSIBERIAN, Brad Anderson made a freakishly weird film called THE MACHINIST, little seen, and remembered chiefly for Christian Bale's alarming weight loss to play insomniac lathe-worker Trevor Reznik. Barcelona is transformed into the nightmarish Los Angles of David Lynch, with walking ghost Reznik aware that he is losing his mind, despite the best attempts of sympathetic hooker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and waitress (Aitana Sanchez Gijon). This marginalised man becomes ever more isolated, professionally and emotionally, menaced by a disfigured co-worker and eery post-it notes playing hangman. THE MACHINIST works brilliantly as a brooding, austere, psychological thriller cum mood piece. It's masterful, freakish, cinema on the edge for all those who crave movies about characters on the margins of society and on the brink of madness.

THE MACHINIST played Berlin and Toronto 2004. It was released in 2004 and 2005 and is available on DVD.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING - a step back from SQUID

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is a film about a selfish, hateful novelist who arrives at her sister's house and proceeds to hurt everyone in her path, not least her own son. She is a rather savage figure, and despite the fact that writer/director Noah Baumbach creates a realistic, fully-fleshed portrait, I found it hard to have any empathy for her or to be interested in what she did. Some way through the film, another callous author (Ciaran Hinds) brutally exposes Margot (Nicole Kidman) at a public reading. I thought this might have been cathartic. Up until that point, I would have happily slapped Margot myself, so presumably I would have enjoyed seeing her skewered? But I felt neither happiness at, nor sympathy for, her downfall. Just mild irritation that I had to witness yet another selfish, hateful novelist inflicting pain on others.

So what is there to hold our interest in this film? Jennifer Jason-Leigh gives a wonderful performance as Margot's kind-hearted but weak-willed younger sister, Pauline. Despite all the punishment Margot deals her, Pauline still loves her and listens to her. Jack Black is also marvellous in a small role, playing it relatively straight. He seems all the more funny the more he is hemmed in by a stern script and director, and he plays one of the few love-able characters in the movie.

Other than that, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is a pretty dismal affair. And that extends to the production design and the camera-work. DP Harry Savides has treated the negative to give the scenes a dull, mono-chrome look, and interior scenes in particular look murky and uninteresting.

The movie seems like a step backward from THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. That movie was far from perfect, but it did capture my interest and the cutting observations of human frailty were tempered by something like human warmth. By contrast, MARGOT feels misanthropic. And the little flaws that marred SQUID are magnified in MARGOT. The final scene is a case in point. Baumbach doesn't seem to be able to restrain himself from big dramatic flourishes at the end of his films. They feel stagey and heavy-handed.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING played Telluride and Toronto 2007. It opened in the US last year and is currently on release in Australia. It opens in the UK on February 29th and in Belgium and the Netherlands in March. It opens in Denmark on April 11th and in Norway on May 9th. It opens in Spain on June 6th. MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is also available on Region 1 DVD.

RAG TALE - Fleet Street brutally satirised

The hosts of one of my favourite movie podcasts recently discussed their top movie satires, and included great films such as BOB ROBERTS and NASHVILLE. I want to give a small shout out to a small British movie called RAG TALE - released in festivals in 2005 and on Region 2 DVD in 2006. RAG TALE brutally satirises British tabloid journalism in the manner of The Eye on acid. It features the outstanding actor Rupert Graves as the editor of a tabloid paper called The Rag. The paper is owned by a rich and ruthless businessman played by Malcom MacDowell, who is obsessed with climbing the British social ladder by publishing sycophantic articles about the Royal Family in contravention of the editorial line of the paper. Aiding him in his quest is his young American wife, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. The movie is filled with the kind of scathing wit and putrid bilge that I had feared dead when The New Statesman and Spitting Image got the chop. I luxuriated in the back-biting, conspiring and foul-mouthed plotting that filled the ninety-odd minutes of the movie. HOWEVER, despite writing a satire to die for, writer-director Mary McGuckian has also committed visual suicide. Under her direction, the film is shot as if by a paralytic hunchback - all swerving hand-hold shots from odd angles. Worse still, it is edited to within an inch of its life - so much so that I felt nauseous watching it. FEAR NOT, dear reader, for there is a solution, much as it pains me to say it. We have to treat this movie as a radio play. You pop the DVD in the player, turn on the TV and then go into the next room and do some ironing. Hey presto! 90 minutes caustic wit and no need for a sick bag!

RAG TALE was shown at Edinburgh and the oh-so-wittily titled Raindance Film Fest 2005. It is available on Region 2 DVD.