OUR KIND OF TRAITOR

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR is a spy thriller directed by Susanna White (PARADE'S END) and adapted by Hossein Amini (THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY) from a novel by John le Carre.  It stars Ewan McGregor as a feckless cheating academic who tries to redeem himself in his own and his wife's eyes by carrying a message from a Russian mafia money launderer to MI6.  Problem is, aforementioned gangster (Stellan Skarsgaard) doesn't trust the British government to get his family to safety and demands that the husband and wife (Naomie Harris) take part in the negotiations as a vouchsafe.  This is a wise move, as the British spy making the negotiations (Damian Lewis) is in the midst of some backroom politics orchestrated by a corrupt politician (Jeremy Northam).  The result is a thriller than attempts to work on two levels - will the couple and the spies get both the mafiosi and his family out of harm's way?  And will his information expose the corruption at the heart of the City of London?

Sadly, the film fails on all counts. Skarsgaard is horribly mis-cast as the mafioso, Dima.  He makes no attempt at a Russian accent and just acts bigger and louder.  He doesn't come across as a successful financier at all.  McGregor is good as the feckless spy but poor Naomie Harris has very little to do. And Damian Lewis is over-styled and over-broad in his performance - playing a kind of caricature of the over-confident British spy - as if auditioning for some kind of 1970s spy film, or that godawful recent movie remake of TINKER TAILOR.  Behind the camera lens, director Susanna White has no idea how to create a sense of tension in directing action. Scenes in a French sports club are almost laughably absurd as spies and mafiosi dip in and out of steamy saunas and massage rooms.  And the very conceit that somehow an ordinary couple could double up and help out MI6 in extraditing a source is just patent nonsense.  Finally, the film (and arguably the book's) heavy-handed political agenda is just too obvious and lacking in nuance to be interesting.  

OUR KIND OF TRAITOR has a running time of 108 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on release in Italy, Finland, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Serbia, Russia, Estonia, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Kuwait, Bulgaria, Sweden and Lithuania.  It opens in June in Israel, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the Philippines, Belgium and France; in July in the USA, Canada, Germany, Portugal, Singapore, Australia, Greece and Brazil; on August 4th in Thailand; on August 18th in New Zealand; on October 21st in Japan and on November 18th in Spain.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - CREATION

CREATION is a handsomely made, beautifully acted biopic of Charles Darwin, focussing on the period during which he wrote his seminal work, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. Based on the biography by Randal Keynes, the movie stars real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Charles and Emma Darwin. They are utterly convincing as a deeply loving couple grown distant because of their differing reactions to Darwin's work, more widely, and to familial grief, more closely. Emma looks to the Church for solace, as represented by the orthodox but genuinely concerned Reverend Innes. Charles turns to his science, and experiences a gradual loss of faith. He also, most touchingly, lives in his memories of his relationship with his dead little girl Annie (Martha West). One of the most brutal lines in the film is where Charles asks Emma whether his fancies are an more a prop than her idea of Annie in heaven.

What I love about this film is that, despite the costumes and the lush period settings, which can so often be distancing, there is an immediacy and credibility to the Darwin family. I completely believed in the emotional and intellectual struggle between the two parents, and I was entranced by the relationship between Charles and his daughter Annie. Martha West (daughter of the Dominic West) has genuine charisma, and it's delightful to see Charles' delight in telling his children fantastical stories of different tribes he has encountered on his travels.

The movie also cleverly sidesteps the highly politicised debate (in the US at least) between believing in evolutionary theory and in the Old Testament. Rather than reducing the movie to a bald and crude debate between the two sides, CREATION makes the struggles personal and nuanced. Reverend Innes is orthodox but no fanatic - he wants to be a genuine friend to Darwin. And Darwin is losing faith, but for a personal reason, and sees in the wondrous variety of nature something to be praised.

Given the lamentful tone of the piece, its considered pacing and focus on internal struggle, I was rather surprised to find that CREATION had been directed by Jon Amiel, the man behind action flicks, THE CORE and ENTRAPMENT. But he has completely succeeded in creating a quiet, delicate film in which deep issues are internalised.

CREATION played Toronto 2009 and was released in 2009 in the UK, Greece and New Zealand. It was released earlier this year in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and the US. It goes on release in Brazil next week and in Argentina on April 15th. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Jon Amiel, John Collee, Randal Keynes, Jim Carter, Martha West, Christopher Young, Jess Hall.

London Film Fest Day 14 - GLORIOUS 39

Stephen Poliakoff is a well-respected British play-wright and some-time film director, and the cast of Glorious 39 is filled with great British actors - from the young and talented Romola Garai and Eddie Redmayne, to stars Jeremy Northam, Julie Christie and Bill Nighy. How disappointing, then, to find his new World War Two political thriller to be poorly made, poorly acted, poorly written and patronising to boot.

The story is set in the weeks before England went to war with Germany - the glorious summer of 1939. The adopted daughter (Romola Garai) of a wealthy aristocratic family (Nighy, Agutter, Redmayne, Temple, Christie) discovers that the British government is hiding recordings of meetings in her family's rambling country estate. They give evidence that certain elements within the British establishment are so afraid of another war, and so convinced that they can't win it, that they are preparing to negotiate a secret surrender to Hitler before the war has even begun. (All true, as it happens). The movie is a thriller, wherein the daughter uncovers the who the voices are on the record, and tries to smuggle it out to people who can use it to bring down Chamberlain's government and bring Winston Churchill to power.

All this could've been the stuff of a superb thriller, in the manner of ENIGMA. But this film lacks context. We never see the politicos, the military and the aristos arguing over the future of Britain. The stakes are all rather academic, and explained in a very patronising manner by characters played by David Tennant and Hugh Bonneville. Stephen Poliakoff seems to be assuming that his audience won't know anything about World War Two. What we are left with is a melodrama centred on this rich family who motor around the countryside and attend nice parties. The siblings are vaguely sinister, and there is a spooky looking government man, but no real sense of tension. I spent much of the movie being annoyed at the heroine for taking her time. If you found the 1939 equivalent of the Watergate tapes, wouldn't you just jump in a car and take it straight to the opposition party? Why all the listening, carrying in handbags and re-listening? Why the comedy, Agatha Christie style bumping off of minor characters?

Still, for all that, the movie is vaguely interesting for the first hour. Where it really comes off the rails is in the final hour. The heroine finds out who is plotting against her and is captured. At that point, the performances and writing veer into B-movie melodrama. It's truly risible and basically unwatchable. We then squelch into a final act, where the enemies, so ardent in hunting her down, just let her slip off, and a final scene in which we're meant to acknowledge her as a true hero of the war. But she never actually does anything!

What a waste of talent.

GLORIOUS 39 played Toronto 2009 and opens in the UK on November 20th.

London Film Festival Day 3 - DEAN SPANLEY

DEAN SPANLEY is a beautifully acted and cleverly written costume drama about coming to terms with grief and re-establishing familial relations. Peter O'Toole plays an Edwardian stick-in-the-mud who refuses to mourn his elder son's death in the Boer War. The subsequent death of his wife, which his younger son (Jeremy Northam) partly blames him for, reduces their relationship to one of cynical mocking on the part of Fisk Senior and deferential routine on the part of Fisk Junior.

This stagnant relationship is transformed when Fisk Junior cultivates a friendship with an eccentric clergyman called Dean Spanley (Sam Neil). The Dean apparently believes in reincarnation and, when plied with a rare Hungarian digestif, will unconsciously drift into his past life. The skill of DEAN SPANLEY is that its subject matter is patently absurd and yet the poker straight performance of Sam Neil in the title role and the reactions from Northam and O'Toole completely sell it to us. However the fact that the film takes so long to patiently create a credible platform for the final revelation makes the first hour of this film desperately slow moving, and does rather call into question whether the final emotional pay-off was worth the wait.

DEAN SPANLEY played Toronto and London 2008.

THE INVASION - more botch job than B-movie

THE INVASION is an embarassing remake of THE BODYSNATCHERS horror movies that so brilliantly captured the paranoia and moral decrepitude of the McCarthy witch-hunt and the Watergate disaster. This remake has the alien invasion take the form of a virus that is spread my vomit, turning its victims into pod-people. The German director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, created the outstanding Hitler bunker movie, DER UNTERGANG, so we can presume that the blame for this fiasco lies with newbie Dave Kajganich, who failed to translate this paranoia tale into a decade of rendition and starts of CCTV. (Seriously, what could have been easier?) The nearest this movie gets to a political sub-text is its weakly subversive proposition that a society of pod-people would be safer and more peaceful. It never gets sophisticated enough to examine whether it is worth sacrificing moral agency to secure safety. Blame also lies with the studio, who commissioned the guys behind the MATRIX and V for VENDETTA to re-shoot swathes of material. What we end up with is more botch-job that artistic whole. THE INVASION should have gone straight to video. Presumably it only got released because the strength of the big-name cast will partially recoup the costs of this fiasco. The public deserves better.

THE INVASION has already been released in the US, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, Greece, South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Slovakia, Italy and the UK. It opens later in October in France, Germany, Brazil, Norway, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland and Spain. It opens in Portugal, Estonia, Egypt, Russia, Slovenia, Lithuania in November 2007 and in Australia on February 28th 2008.

My not-so-secret shame: I was bored and disappointed by INLAND EMPIRE

Credentials first: I am a fan of David Lynch. I adored Twin Peaks; I watch all his films on a regular basis; I like that there is no spoon-feeding or hand-holding; I love the persistent sense of menace; the whimsical humour; the evocative use of music; the precise framing and visual motifs. So I approached the new Lynch movie, INLAND EMPIRE, with great anticipation. 3 hours in Lynch-world: thank you very much.

People who always hated Lynch for his obscurity, self-indulgence, surrealism.... will hate INLAND EMPIRE too. Conversely, hard-core LYNCH fans will not be disappointed. We have all the classic Lynchian symptoms here: weirdness, unease, horror, confusion, beauty of a sort, evil, brutal fucking murder, two dollar whores and some pretty heavy shit.

The movie opens with extreme close-ups of a young whore crying uncontrollably. Classic Lynch. We then move to a sitcom complete with canned laughter. Naturally the actors are dressed in bunny rabbit outfits and their conversation makes only enough sense to disturb us. We then switch to the key story. Laura Dern (BLUE VELVET) stars as an ageing Hollywood actress who has just been cast in a movie alongside Justin Theroux's (MULHOLLAND DRIVE) lecherous leading man by a camp director played by Jeremy Irons. (ERAGON). This being Lynchworld, Harry Dean Stanton plays the director's bum side-kick.

Pretty heavy shit surrounds the production. On the eve of winning the part, the actress is accosted by her strange Polish neighbour who warns her (and the viewer) obliquely about the content of the script and the lack of a linear structure to what will follow. This scene is about as frightening as anything you'll see on screen and all the more impressive for being simply a series of extreme close-ups - shot on rubbish quality DV - of Grace Zabriskie (TWIN PEAKS). The sense of unease is increased by placing the actress (Laura Dern) in an oppressively decorated mansion and having her jealous husband leer over the balcony.

An hour into the film, and Laura's character is committing adultery and starting to see her identity dissolve into that of the character she is playing. Bad news, when you consider that the plot of the film does indeed involve brutal fucking murder and that a previous production of the same script was halted when a number of key people died. We follow her for the next two hours through a series of weird rooms-within-rooms behind the movie set and through the looking glass. She looks threatened and disturbed by these refractions of her psyche.

While I could see flashes of beauty and brilliance - not least in Laura Dern's career-defining and award-worthy performance - I was basically bored rigid by INLAND EMPIRE. Freed from the shackles of a pre-defined script and the kind of studio heat that comes with a production budget that allows for old fashioned photography, Lynch has indulged himself. The beauty of Lynch's photography is heavily compromised by the use of DV. While I can take my fair share of whimsy and treat much of Lynch's work as a sort of tone poem of beautiful brutality - this movie left me cold. I need not have structure and explanation - but if I am to float in a sea of random fragments, I'd like a shorter run-time. Call me superficial - but there are only so many scenes of Laura Dern looking threatened that I need to see.

INLAND EMPIRE played Venice 2006 and opened in the US and Slovakia in 2006. It opened in Italy, Belgium, France, Iran and Spain earlier this year and is now showing in the UK. It opens in the Netherlands, Portugal, Hapan, Finland, Germany and Poland in April and in Russia and the Czech Republic in July.

Overlooked DVD of the month - WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1992)

With the London Film Festival at an end, Doctor007 and I indulged in a bit of quality time with a classic romantic movie and dinner date. Watching the new Anthony Minghella flick, BREAKING AND ENTERING I was reminded of how much I admired the actress Juliette Binoche. So, I opted for an obscure remake of WUTHERING HEIGHTS from her back-catalogue. I was in the mood for a girly costume drama - a little bit of self-indulgence - but for the sake of Doctor007 opted for something with a little bit more fire and a bit less simpering. On paper, Emily Bronte's novel fulfils this criteria. It is framed with a chilling ghost story - with images of broken glass and blood - in a grim manor house on the moors. Instead of elegant courtship, we have a headstrong passionate girl called Cathy who is in love with a stubborn, violent young gypsy boy called Heathcliff. Heathcliff is abused by Cathy's elder brother to the point where she is tempted to marry a more genteel neighbour with better social standing - an act which becomes inevitable when Heathcliff leaves in a fit of pique to make his fortune. He returns to find Cathy married and pregnant and takes a slow revenge on successive generations of her family.

This movie version of the book is admirably condensed to under two hours by a screenwriter called Anne Devlin who seems to have done little else - a shame as she manages to capture the essence of the novel and leave little out. The only notable change is to make a notional character called Emily Bronte narrate rather than Ellen. This clarifies a notoriously complex structure and thankfully, Devlin does not cut down on Ellen's screen-time. The movie is less successfully directed by Peter Kosminsky who does a straightforward job capturing the suitably wild and rugged Yorkshire locations - nothing fancy but nothing terrible either.

The casting is interesting. In the secondary roles we see a young Jeremy Northam as Hindley Earnshaw and an outstanding performance by Janet McTeer as Ellen Dean. In the major roles, Ralph Fiennes is a very fine Heathcliff - combining ruthless sadism and vulnerability. The problem lies with Binoche as Cathy. Her looks are perfect and she and Fiennes have real chemisty. Her acting - when we consider her physicality and her face - is pitch perfect. The transition from playing Cathy to playing her daughter is beautifully done. Binoche even does a rather good job of supressing her French accent. But she does not finally succeed - and therein lies the rub. I recommend this movie as a sort of experiment - how far will fans of the novel forgive the hint of the French accent given the brilliance of Binoche's physical performance...?

My only other quibble is that this movie plays very much as a tragic passionate love story. But the chilling ghost story element is rather lost in translation to the screen. We are simply not haunted enough by it. Still, this is an interesting cinema adaptation and for all its flaws, tremendously enjoyable and tremendously romantic.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS was released in UK cinemas in 1992 but did not get a US release. It is now available on Region 1 and 2 DVD.

GUY X - what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

There are lots of great films about the absurdity of war that combine black comedy with insightful social comment. GUY X is not one of them. GUY X is what happens when you take all that is wickedly funny, noble and true in M*A*S*H and CATCH-22 and then invert it. The film tells the story of a young soldier in 1979 who is posted to Greenland by mistake. Unable to resolve this clerical error he sets about writing the Base newspaper for the autocractic Colonel Woolrap while romancing Woolrap's chick. The movie fails to create the claustrophic, Kafka-esque atmosphere necessary and has NOT ONE SINGLE funny line or moment. The romance between Jason Biggs and Natasha McElhone is insipid. Worse still, McElhone and Jeremy Northam - two fine British actors - cannot do American accents. The final nail in the coffin is when the director lazily sticks "War (What is it good for?)" by Edwin Starr on the soundtrack. This is a brave move because as every funk fan knows, the response to the question is "absolutely nothing". Cue the inevitable title for my review....

GUY X played a bunch of minor Film Festivals including the oh-so-wittily named RAINDANCE festival in London in autumn 2005. It is currently on limited release in Canada and is available on Region 2 DVD.

A COCK AND BULL STORY - Nobody likes a smarty-pants

A COCK AND BULL STORY is an odd sort of film. Far cleverer than the average cinematic fare, and in parts, hysterically funny. And yet you leave the cinema not entirely sure what you have been witness to....

The movie is an attempt to bring the supposedly unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" to life. The novel was written by a village priest, Lawrence Sterne, in the eighteenth century and - remarkably for the time - played fast and loose with narrative structure, as well as dealing with bawdy subject matter. To quote the film, Tristram Shandy was a post-modern book written years before there was anything modern to be "post" about. The novel tells the story of Tristram's parents and uncle, various escapades encountered by each. So much happens, so baggy and chaotic is life, that it is only in the final volume that Tristram finally gets round to being born! In bringing the novel to the screen, the director, Michael Winterbottom, has opted against a straightforward adaptation. Rather he has made a film about making a film about Tristram Shandy. Winterbottom argues that this is truer to the spirit of the novel, while getting over the tricky fact that in a novel of 500 pages, so little happens that you can barely get a half-hour script out of it.

The film-within-a-film structure is a nice idea, and we get some very funny scenes parodying actors' over-weening egos and libidos, but this stuff was done with more wit in David Mamet's superb flick STATE AND MAIN. Moreover, much of the humour depends on the audience knowing who the lead actor, Steve Coogan, is. I imagine the jokes at Coogan's expense will be utterly lost on an international audience. And once again, hasn't this stuff been done better in Ricky Gervais' EXTRAS?

But all this would be excused if the film were genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny. After all, when you've hired the likes of Stephen Fry, Shirley Henderson, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran and Steve Coogan, expectations are high. The film is very, very patchy. There are sequences that sort of meander and exist and seem to serve no purpose at all. And just when you just about give up on the thing, there is flash of side-splitting, pant-wetting funniness. Seriously, I left the cinema knowing I had a cult classic on my hands. It's all there - basically boring long-winded Britflick interspersed with one-liners so funny, so instantly memorable that the audience was already quoting it on the way out of the cinema. This film is a WITHNAIL AND I for the new millenium, and will no doubt be quoted ad nauseam in student unions for the next fifty years.

A COCK AND BULL STORY was shown at the London Film Festival in November 2005, but goes on release in the UK on the 20th January 2006. The film goes on limited release in the US on the 27th January. There are no scheduled European release dates.