DISCLAIMER (TV) Episodes 1-3** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 Day 2

There are two different TV shows in Disclaimer with two different sets of performances and two different tones. The show's fatal flaw is that this dichotomy fatally undermines it.

In the first show we have the tragic story of a middle class mother and father learning that their twenty-something son has died in an accident on the Italian coast.  We see the Met police officers devastate their lives with the news, and the identification of the corpse.  Lesley Manville (MRS HARRIS GOES TO PARIS) is stunning in the role of the grief-struck mother, with a rather outmatched Kevin Kline giving support as the father. 

Twenty years later the mother has died but the father has stumbled upon his son's holiday photos showing a romance between him and a young mother.  It turns out that his now deceased wife wrote a novelisation of what she believes happened on that holiday, and how her son died saving this young woman's toddler son. The presumption is that the young mother was a kind of desperate housewife, seducing the young man and then cruelly abandoning the scene of his death.  

In the contemporary storyline the father (Kevin Kline) publishes the novel and sends it, as well as the explicit photos, to the now very successful middle-aged woman (Cate Blanchett) and her family.  Just as Lesley Manville played the story straight, Cate Blanchett gives a deeply convincing portrait of a woman desperately scrambling to keep her luxurious and outwardly perfect life in tact. She is distraught when her own now twenty-something son reads the book and has a rather fraught relationship with him anyway. And the publication of the novel stirs up deep-seated resentments in her husband, who thinks she has put her career before being a mother.  

So that's the serious story. It is well-acted by the two leading ladies, Manville and Blanchett, and beautifully staged.  A scene with the two parents standing in the sea where their son died is particularly haunting.  That said, the precisely curated on-trend luxury of the contemporary house that Blanchett's character lives in reminded me of the kind of miniseries that Nicole Kidman seems to relentlessly star in now. We were one bad blonde wig away from The Perfect Couple.

The problem is that there is a second TV show going on here. And it plays as bad comedy, I hope unintentionally.  Casting Kevin Kline as the vengeful older father is a risk as he brings a mischief to every role.  He needs to be an angel of torment but he comes off as Puck, complete with comedy gestures of throwing a bomb into Catherine's life. It's just tonally off. And as I said, in the flashback scenes he is utterly outmatched by Manville.

The bigger problem is casting Sacha Baron Cohen as Blanchett's jealous husband. He can't help but play the role a little bit bigger than necessary, and of course we as the audience bring our own baggage and expectations seeing him on screen. Maybe the performance won't play as bad on TV when people are watching at home. But in a packed Royal Festival Hall it took one or two people to start sniggering and pretty soon the audience was laughing out loud at his line readings.

Similarly, the audience was laughing at the scenes where the younger version of Blanchett, played by Leila George, is seducing the gap year student. It's unfortunate writing - and maybe it's this way in the book given that it's ultimately his mum's imagination? Which is also creepy AF.  But anyways, it's the most cringe-inducing scene and poor Louis Partridge (ENOLA HOLMES) has to play a feckless boy who is the object of his own humiliation and our laughter. Like I said, maybe this is the point.  Either way it was awful to watch and totally undermined the serious emotional work being done by Manville and Blanchett.

The final fatal blow to this TV series is the intrusive and ham-fisted voiceover from Kline, Blanchett and Baron Cohen's characters.  The latter in particular is just laughably bad. None of them add anything to narrative propulsion. I gather that this is a feature of the novel but it simply does not translate to screen.

As I said, it may turn out that the literal incredible and laughable tone of the seduction scenes is the point. An imagined version of a past that has been hypothesised.  But until the final episode revelations of whatever the truth is, we are stuck with some pretty unwatchable TV. I doubt many viewers will stay the course.

DISCLAIMER started airing on Apple TV today.

iPad Round-Up 2 - THE CONSIPIRATOR

Yet another thumpingly pedestrian issues-film from Robert Redford.  The movie takes the form of an historic court-room drama, with James McAvoy playing the lawyer defending Robin Wright's Mary Surrat of conspiracy to murder President Lincoln (she was Booth's landlady and her son has mysteriously fled.)  This being a Redford film, the politics are naively simple and oppositional: McAvoy's lawyer is the champion of all things good - liberty, the constitution and the right to a fair trial even in the wake of an appalling political crime.  Kevin Kline's war minister represents the forces of evil:  putting ends before means, willing to sacrifice right to expediency, with a contemporary relevance in that Surrat was denied a civilian trial before her peers, and tried under military law. 

The issues are fascinating, the casting top notch, Newton Thomas Sigel's cinematography is superb, and the dilemmas at the movie's heart are clearly highly relevant today.  The problem is that it feels like a college debate rather than a movie.  Movies must entertain. If they educate and provoke as well, then all to the good. But no-one ever learned anything while their eyes were rolling to the back of their head in boredom.  Castigat ridendo mores. Moliere knew this. Redford apparently does not  He needs to treat his subject matter with a little less respect and his audiences with a little more.  

THE CONSPIRATOR played Toronto 2010 and opened in summer 2011 in the USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, Ireland, the UK, Portugal, Australia, Turkey, Kuwait and Germany. It opened last month in Singapore. It goes on release in Belgium on November 16th and in Spain on December 2nd. It is available to rent and own.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED

Ivan Reitman, of GHOSTBUSTERS, fame returns to our screens with the kind of contemporary social comedy more typically associated with his son Jason (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, UP IN THE AIR). The result is a movie that wants us to think it's edgy and honest, but when you cut to the meat, it's still the same old rom-com happy-ending bullshit we've been subjected to for decades.

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher play two emotionally bruised people who react to their wounds in diametrically opposite ways. The girl becomes emotionally repressed, running from anything that could turn sour and hurt her. By contrast, the boy becomes immensely open and vulnerable, rushing toward people who can't return his emotions. Not automatically the set-up for a rom-com, one might think. But hey-ho, this being Hollywood, the two star-crossed lovers meet cute and decide to have NSA sex. Inevitably, they fall in love. He pushes for a relationship and she runs. One suspects that if Jason Reitman had been directing the film that's where it would've ended. But no. Because, while this film tries to prove how modern and liberated it is with its explicit sexual references and a whole scene devoted to period cramps, essentially it is a conservative project. And this contradiction infects every scene. Thus, while there are some rather funny set-pieces, typically involving the superb supporting cast (Mindy Kalinga, Kevin Kline, Lake Bell, and a brilliantly ditzy Ophelia Lovibond), the movie as a whole just doesn't hang together.

Not only does the film not hang together, it also has the faint whiff of desperation about it. It's desperate for us to love it - for us to think it's cool. In fact, it's about as desperate as the scarily need mono-dimensionally good guy that Ashton Kutcher plays in this flick, not to mention last year's VALENTINE'S DAY. I am genuinely puzzled as to why Natalie Portman, darling of indie flicks since LEON, and soon to be Oscar winner for BLACK SWAN, decided to take a role in this film. And it's even more bizarre when you realise that she actually produced it. And perhaps most puzzling of all - what a bizarre and wasteful way to use Cary Elwes!

NO STRINGS ATTACHED was released in January in the USA and Canada. It is currently on release in Bulgaria, Belgium, Indonesia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Portugal, Finland, Norway, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Singapore. It opens next week in Argentina, Greece, Brazil, Estonia and the UK. It opens on March 18th in Poland; on March 25th in Iceland and Spain; and on March 31st in Slovenia. It opens on April 1st in Sweden; on April 15th in Italy and on April 22nd in Japan.

THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX - less than the sum of its parts

THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX is a rather wilted new children's animated feature based on the popular modern fairy-tale from writer Kate DiCamillo. It has been brought to the screen by directors Robert Stevenhagen and Sam Fell, who was behind the brilliantly funny and fast-paced FLUSHED AWAY. And the screen-writers worked on the similarly engaging ANGUS THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING. The voice cast is superb. The fairy-tale is narrated by Sigourney Weaver and our hero is voiced by Matthew Broderick. The Princess is none other than Emma "Hermione" Watson and in smaller roles we have character actors of such calibre as Frank Langella, Richard Jenkins, Robbie Coltrane and William H Macy. The animation is stunning - everything looks hand-drawn, like a medieval fable come to life. And the movie is filled with the best of intentions. The message is that honesty, sympathy, courage and forgiveness are the keys to a happy life.

Why then does this film fall so flat? Why then is it such a painfully slow watch? Maybe it's because there's simply too much story to get through? Maybe it's because it is too careful to be politically correct and spends too little time on good old-fashioned action-adventure? Maybe it's because it's basically a rather trivial story - as acknowledged in the narrator's epilogue. It's the story of a rat called Roscuro who falls into a Queen's soup by mistake, causing her to die of shock. The King, grieving, bans soups and rats and his kingdom falls into darkness. The Princess, longs for sunlight and in her anger upsets Roscuro who has come to apologise. She also upsets her servant Miggery. So Miggery and Roscuro allow the rats to capture the princess, though they regret it almost immediately. Which is when a courageous little mouse called Despereaux saves the day! Kind of. What really happens is that the Princess forgives Roscuro, Roscuro forgives the Princess, Miggery forgives the Princess and the people forgive the King. Phew! Everyone gets soup, the mice learn not be cowards, and Miggery finds her dad. Aah!

I think you get the drift of how hard it must have been for the directors to balance all this material, and how Despereaux sometimes gets lost in the muddle. It's a shame, but there it is. This movie is so jumbled that it's less than the sum of its parts.

THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX is on release in the UK, US, Spain and Hong Kong. It goes on release in Hungary, Russia, Australia and Norway on Christmas Day. It opens in Chile, Croatia and Estonia on New Years Day. It opens in Brazil and Sweden on January 16th; in Turkey on January 23rd; in the Netherlands and Argentina on February 4th; in France on February 11th; in Belgium and Egypt on February 18th; in Denmark on March 6th; in Singapore and Finland on March 12th and in Germany on March 19th.

TRADE - earnest but still compelling sex trade drama

TRADE is a slightly exploitative, certainly rose-tinted drama about sex slaves smuggled into the US via Mexico and auctioned off on a website. Based on an article published in the New York Times, the movie tracks a 13-year old girl called Adriana who's kidnapped by the Russians and freighted into a suburban house in New Jersey where the exchange will take place. The movie is pretty unflinching in showing how these operations work - from casual rape, to "picking up pocket change" en route. Where the movie gets a little ridiculous is in its neat coincidences. Adriana's loyal brother Jorge manages to stalk her kidnappers all the way to the Mexican border where he conveniently hooks up with the world's kindest cop (Kevin Kline). Together, they follow Adriana's convoy to New Jersey where the cop will actually front the money to buy Adriana back. Surely the grim reality of sex slavery is incompatible with this sort of fairy-tale (or religious redemptive) ending?

I have to admit that these hokey narrative tricks help keep the movie palatable and compelling. The relationship between Ray and Jorge leavens the didactic material. Still, TRADE never really rises above a competently made TV movie and packs none of the punch of Lukas Moodyddon's brutal LILYA 4EVER.

TRADE played Sundance 2007 and Berlin 2008. It was released last year in the US, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. It opened earlier this year in Singapore, Portugal, Israel and Mexico and is currently on release in the UK.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE EMPEROR'S CLUB

THE EMPEROR'S CLUB has much the same setting and set-up as DEAD POET'S SOCIETY but it is a very different film. It lacks DPS's beautiful visual style, emotional heft and moral certainty. The result is a film that is only interesting to look at insofar as it captures the New England prep school as the English like to imagine it. (A sad result given that the DP was the excellent Lajos Koltai.) In terms of pure entertainment, Kevin Kline's finely modulated performance as a deeply repressed Classics teacher is no match for Robin Williams' charismatic poetry don. Kline's Professor Hundert believes utterly in the virtues of his school: Williams' John Keating is a maverick. Hundert's students are, for the most part, a bunch of indistinct swots. Keating's students have their own stories and personalities.

For all that, THE EMPEROR'S CLUB remans a fascinating film precisely because it eschews sentiment and clear answers. Professor Hundert believes in virtue but he is no paragon. His own romantic view of the power of good teaching to reform the class clown leads him to compromise his ideals. He throws the young ruffian an opportunity to reform at the expense of a more worthy pupil. The ruffian repays him by cheating. They point is not, however, the boy's inability to change, even in adulthood, but the teacher's reaction to it. When quietly nudged by the headmaster, Professor Hundert refuses to expose the well-connected boy as a cheat.

What we have here is a quietly played moral drama that provokes serious discussion. Doctor007 and I were talking about for the equivalent of the run-time of the movie. Can character be reformed? Was Hundert right to intervene? How far does this sort of thing go on all the time, in an era when schools and universities are even more dependent on legacies? The perils of benevolent interference are clear in this film, and you look at our foreign policy and you realise how widely applicable these questions are.

So, THE EMPEROR'S CLUB may fail as a technical achievement, but as a provocative drama it certainly succeeds. Moreover, it's always a joy to see Kevin Kline given centre stage.

THE EMPEROR'S CLUB played Toronto 2002 and was released later that year. It is available on DVD.

DEFINITELY MAYBE - ho hum

DEFINITELY MAYBE is not a romantic comedy, as you might expect from the marketing campaign. Rather, it is a modestly enjoyable but perfectly forgettable drama about a rather bland but earnest young man and the three women he has loved. Ryan Reynolds tones down his trademark comic style to play political activist William Hayes, whose big plans for life scare off his high-school sweetheart (a deeply superficial performance from Elizabeth Banks). He then falls for a sophisticated writer who proceeds to skewer his career and his heart. Rachel Weisz is brilliant in this small role, and Kevin Kline is responsible for the only real humour and energy of the film as the outrageous Professor. Finally, our hero has an off-on friendship with a ditzy but well-meaning kid played by the charming Isla Fisher. They are both adorable together.

The movie rolls along at a leisurely pace and, with the exception of the college sweetheart, the characters are amiable enough to hold our interest for the run-time of the film, if not for one second more. The only real flaw in the film is the twee framing device, which has William relating his sexual adventures in flashback to an irritatingly knowing and cute daughter, played by Abigail Breslin.

DEFINITELY MAYBE is on release in the UK. It opens next week in Australia, the US, Norway and Venezuela. It opens in March in the Netherlands, Belgium, Mexico, Germany, Denmark and Turkey. It opens in April in Egypt, Singapore, Sweden and Spain. It opens in Brazil on May 9th and in Argentina and Russia on May 29th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PINK PANTHER - Probably not the worst movie of 2006

Look. This movie is not the worst movie ever made. It has the odd laugh. It's just not brilliant. And it's even more obviously not brilliant when you compare it to the original Peter Sellers' Pink Panther movies. But you know what? Let's cut it some slack. The original Panther flicks were Pure Class. Saying these remakes are not as good is like saying that Tsotsi is a worse film than Kung Fu Hustle. It's a meaningless statement beacuse every movie is worse than Kung Fu Hustle.

What we have here is Steve Martin as bumbling French idiot, Inspector Clousseau, playing the Sellars part with an Allo Allo accent and happily tripping over furniture and into women with gay abandon. He is commissioned by the Chief of Police, Kevin Kline in the Herbert Lom part, to catch an infamous thief. As his right-hand man, he has "Ponton" - a new character played by Jean Reno. The eye-candy is Beyonce and no, dear reader, there is no Burt Kwouk replacement. NO KATO. I was sad to realise that Jackie Chan had not finally taken up the role. I love KATO. I used to go to restaurents in Chinatown just because Burt Kwouk had recommended them in TIME OUT. Burt Kwouk was the only reason I used to tune in to Harry Hill. But you know, upon reconsideration, I am pleased that the memory of Kato is unsullied.

You get a lot of slapstick comedy, some of which works, most of which doesn't. You get some jingoistic comedy at the expense of the French. We Brits have been doing this for centuries, and believe me, we can come up with better stuff. Clearly all these actors are far better than the material they have been given, although I have to say that after the crimes against cinema that were Cheaper by the Dozen and Shopgirl, I am starting to have my doubts about Steve Martin. Alls I hope is that they were paid a whole lot and can now "afford" to do some nice low-budget indie films as atonement. As I said, this is a harmless movie. But if you have one ounce of respect for Peter Sellars you'll put your money back in your pocket and rent A SHOT IN THE DARK instead.

THE PINK PANTHER opens in the UK on Friday 17th March 2006 and is already release in much of continental Europe and in the US.

A PRAIRE HOME COMPANION - Li-lo in decent performance shock

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION is the story of one of America's most famous and best-loved public radio programmes. Broadcast out of Minnesota, then New York and then Minnesota, the programme was conceived by Garrison Keillor and combines country music acts performing in concert and adverts for fictional products. The show has all the ingredients for a classic Robert Altman movie, and the director essentially apes all his previous greats, such as GOSFORD PARK.

First, Altman finds a milieu in which a bunch of eccentric, fascinating characters can interact. So, where Gosford Park had an English country house, we now have the theatre where the final radio show is about to be recorded.

Second, Altman assembles a fantastic ensemble cast, largely on the strength of his reputation as a world-class film-maker. We have Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin - perhaps the finest actess and comedienne of their generation - as two country singers, plus Streep's on-screen daughter Lola, played by Lindsay Lohan, in what may be her break-out performance. I have always thought that Lohan had a great on-screen presence. She has the ability to make you want to spend time with her and, HERBIE: FULLY LOADED aside, has made some fantastic good quality comedies. (And yes, I AM being serious here.) We also have Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and the fantastic John C Reilly) as two cowboys who sing crude songs and tell fantastic off-colour jokes. My personal favourite, "Why do they call it PMS? Because Mad Cow was already taken." A special shout-out has to go Kevin Kline - the shambolic PD who provides the solid centre around which the ensemble cast turns. (How odd and sad to see him in this marvellous flick, and then the execrable new PINK PANTHER movie in the same week.) True to cliche, Kline gets hooked by an enigmatic blonde, in the form of Virginia Madsen.

Finally, Altman just follows these guys around. It's as simple as that. There are no big melodramatic moments, no epiphanies, but an authentic rendering of the little amusements, tensions and wonders of every-day life. With a cast this good, and a script this charming, you really don't need much else. The audience feels like it is part of the action thanks to the mobile camera-work of Edward Lachman, apparently using hand-held Hi Def cameras.

Is this a great film? Maybe. It is surely a sweet and funny film with some great performances and great lines. Some film-makers are shooting for worthier things, and a very small portion are succeeding. But you know what? I'll take a film-maker who can make me laugh over one that can educate me any day of the week.
A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION premiered at Berlin last month, where it did not win the Golden Bear. It lost out to a great and worthy film about the aftermath of the Balkan War. Now, I am not saying that worthy films shouldn't win anything but sometimes you have to wonder why the "academy" does not praise comedies enough. Making someone laugh is, to be facetious, a serious business, and there is no lesser talent involved in playing it for laighs as in playing it straight. Anyways, PHC goes on release in the US in June. I'll add European release dates when I have them.