NOCTURNAL ANIMALS - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 11

It appears that Tom Ford's sophomore film is controversial - with people either in love with it or damning it as dull and potentially misogynistic.  My view is that it's neither excellent nor terrible, but something far more unforgivable - boring.

Amy Adams stars as Susan - a bored rich Los Angeles art gallery owner who is growing cynical about her perfect life and the pretentious art she surrounds herself with.  Abandoned by her philandering fraudulent husband (Armie Hammer - barely used), she starts reading a manuscript of a novel her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) has written.  She basically left him because he was a romantic loser, and the novel he writes is essentially about an emasculated man who fails to protect his wife (Isla Fisher) and child from some violent slack-jawed yokels (Aaron Taylor-Johnson included).  I suspect that the point of this B-grade revenge plot is to prove that in life as in fiction, the husband was basically weak, but kind of over-came it, depending on what you make of the ending.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 7 - HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON is a great disappointment. Despite the great cast and historically fascinating personalities, the resulting movie is flabby, unfocused, and frustrating.

The set-up is that Britain is on the verge of war with Hitler, and desperately needs a reluctant USA to commit to support her. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (of THE KING'S SPEECH FAME) are thus dispatched to the USA to woo the crowds and confer with President Roosevelt at his mother's upstate New York country house, Hyde Park on Hudson.  The President is evidently charmed by the King, and the King is happy to receive encouragement from a father figure when his own father was so cold - the basis for the oft-ridiculed "special relationship".  This important historical event is fascinating and could have been the source of a profound character study of two men, akin to FROST/NIXON. Bill Murray is mischievous and gregarious as FDR, a pleasant change from his more melancholy Wes Anderson roles, and Samuel West is a nonpareil actor who creates a warmer, less angry version of the King from Colin Firth's portrayal.

The problem is that this potentially captivating story is wrapped up in the altogether banal story of one of FDR's many mistresses - a distant cousin called Daisy who doted upon FDR and is shocked to discover that she is far from his only lover.  I'm not sure how old the real Daisy was at the time of this meeting, but Laura Linney (much as I admire her) is simply too old to play the simpering ingenue, and is also saddled with a very ill-written unsympathetic role. The movie lost pace and focus every time her dull voiceover hoved into earshot, and I was just screaming to get back the Murray-West show.  

What else is there to like and dislike? Olivia Williams is absolutely superb as Eleanor Roosevelt - I haven't seen such a mocking curtsey since Helen McCrory played Cherie Blair in THE QUEEN.  I also admire Olivia Colman tremendously but I felt she was miscast as Queen Elizabeth - somehow she just didn't have an air of majesty and the requisite superciliousness.  One can't help but feel that Helena Bonham Carter's well-meaning but hierarchy conscious Queen was closer to the truth of the matter.

Bill Murray and Samuel West at the UK première of
HYDE PARK ON HUDSON

HYDE PARK ON HUDSON played Toronto and London 2012 and will be released in the USA on Dec 7; in France on Dec 12; in Australia and New Zealand on Dec 26; in Argentina on Jan 5; in Portugal on Jan 10; in Germany and the Netherlands on Jan 24; in Sweden and the UK on Feb 1; and in Denmark on Feb 28. The running time is 95 minutes.

London Film Festival Day 3 - THE OTHER MAN

THE OTHER MAN is a profoundly disappointing, frustrating attempt at a thriller powered by sexual jealousy. But instead of the emotional tension and mind games of Richard Eyre's previous directorial effort, NOTES ON A SCANDAL, we get a meandering plot, weak motivation and a denouement that is hard to swallow.

The key flaw is the poor quality of the script - penned by Eyre, based on a story by Bernhard Schlink. For the first hour the story stumbles around, often doubling back on itself, making a meal out of plot devices that should be worked through very quickly. Liam Neeson plays a decent but dull man called Peter who discovers that his wife Lisa (Laura Linney has been schtupping a schmoozy Spaniard called Ralph (Antonio Banderas). Rather than confront Ralph, Peter plays chess with him - a clunking great metaphor that the visually unimaginative Eyre makes nothing of. The wife, Lisa, remains enigmatic, and the daughter (Romola Garai) is basically redundant. The movie fails to drum up any tension (sexual or intellectual - dear god - how long does it take to realise that the password is "Lake Como"?)

And then, as the finish line nears, the writers clearly thought it was time to spice things up a bit so they dream up, well, not so much a plot twist, as a diversion into a dead end. This diversion allows Banderas to ham it up a bit and takes us into a final scene that jars completely the character motivation we have been shown in previous scenes.

THE OTHER MAN played Toronto and London 2008. It opens in the US on December 3rd.

MAN OF THE YEAR - a liberal wet dream

BARRY LEVINSON has had a patchy career - from hits like RAIN MAN and GOOD MORNING VIETNAM to his more recent, rather anonymous, films of which MAN OF THE YEAR is an exemplar. It's a half-baked attempt at political satire in which a Jon Stewart-like talk show host runs for President on a tide of popular dissatisfaction with Washington cronyism. He gets elected thanks to a computer voting glitch, exposed by a life-threatened whistle-blower. Robin Williams is good value as the TV host, at least in the scenes where he's allowed to let rip at stand-up. But the intervening drama, featuring Jeff Goldblum as the corporate heavy and Laura Linney as the do-gooder whistleblower, is dull. This isn't rapier-sharp satire but obvious, earnest, liberal angst. On balance, you'd do better to just rent some Robin Williams or George Carlin stand-up.

MAN OF THE YEAR was released in 2006 and 2007 and is available on DVD.

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month - THE NANNY DIARIES

United Airlines is how airlines used to be: no flat beds in business class and no handheld video on demand IFEs. Still, needs must, and I ended up watching THE NANNY DIARIES over my inedible vegetable ravioli.

The movie plays like the anoemic younger cousin of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA. A young girl stumbles into becoming a high society nanny and is shocked to discover how ill-treated domestic servants are. Bizarrely, she sticks around to take the abuse, but doesn't stop whining about it. Finally the nanny tells the employer she's a bad mum and, this being Hollywood, it all ends happily ever after. Nanny gets a book deal and a boyfriend; mum gets a soul. Everybody Finds Themselves.

The movie doesn't seem all that concerned with satirising the upper classes in the way that DEVIL merrily took the piss out of narcissistic fashionistas. Instead, it's a pretty mean-spirited look at some rather tragic people. Scarlett Johansson plays the nanny as a bored victim and does nothing to gain my sympathy. Laura Linney tries her best with the role of the malicious employee, but it's not a big enough performance to gain the iconic status of Streep's Miranda Priestley. Elsewhere, Paul Giamatti is utterly unconvincing as the lecherous husband and Alicia Keys is wasted as the spunky best friend.

The real problem with the film is that the satire is diluted with schmaltz at every step. I'd expected better from joint directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who were responsible for the bleakly funny cult indie movie AMERICAN SPLENDOR. I also fear that Scarlett Johansson is becoming a contra-indicator. She was fine in GHOST WORLD and she had the perfect look for LOST IN TRANSLATION and GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING. But she's never particularly impressed me with her acting talent and she's made some godawful choices of late. BLACK DAHLIA anyone? She wasn't even the most memorable feature of MATCH POINT. One can only hope her latest Woody Allen movie resurrects her career.

THE NANNY DIARIES was released last year in the US, Canada, Russia, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Lithuania, South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, Estonia, the UK, Slovenia, Greece, Romania, the Philippines, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Poland, Turkey and Norway. It was released earlier in 2008 in Iceland, the Netherlands, Brazil, Finland and Kuwait. It opens in France on May 14th and in Belgium on July 2nd. It is also widely available on DVD.

I just don't get why everyone's raving about THE SAVAGES

Wendy and John Savage are self-involved middle-aged siblings, estranged from their father. When he's diagnosed with dementia, they put him in a nursing home. Wendy suffers from guilt and sentimentalises everything. John is more rational, on the surface at least.

This film was sold to me as bleakly comic, bravely unsentimental, insightful....as a showcase for two outstanding performances from Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Well, I found the script superficial, irritatingly earnest, dismally slow-paced and basically boring. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins' treatment of the impact of mental illness on close family is a very poor relation to Sarah Polley's infinitely superior AWAY FROM HER. Comedy? What comedy? Philip Seymour Hoffman in a neck brace? Please. Which brings me to Laura Linney's apparently Oscar-worthy performance. All I can say is that there was nothing exciting here. Nothing that moved me. Nothing that will stay with me. Even Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor to whom I ascribe generally god-like status, is lacklustre here. The production values are also terrible. Just look at the lighting and picture quality when they're filming scenes in ill-lit bedrooms or on motel balconies at dusk.

I just don't get what all the fuss is about.

THE SAVAGES played Sundance, Toronto and London 2007. It opened in the US in 2007 and is currently on release in Singapore and the UK. It opens in Sweden, Belgium, France and Spain in February. It opens in Norway in March and in Italy and Germany in April.

BREACH - intelligent character-driven drama

Rubbish poster, great film.

Chris Cooper is outstanding in capturing the enigmatic and contradictory nature of FBI lifer and Soviet-run mole, Robert Hanssen. On one level, Hanssen is an eerily straight-laced man. He attends mass daily, hates women who wear trousers and homosexuals, and loves his country. But Hanssen is running a seamier double-life, where he sells porn films starring his own wife and harbours ludicrous fantasies about Catherine Zeta Jones. He has also been giving the Soviets highly sensitive classified information for the past twenty-odd years. My theory - after a life-long fascination with the Cambridge spies - is that all moles are driven by frustrated arrogance - and Hanssen, as depicted here, conforms with that view. At bottom, their decisions seem less to do with ideology than with vanity and the belief that their own superior intelligence gives them the right to break the rules. In Hanssen's case, he feels his career has been stunted by office politics, and that he is almost doing the US a favour by exposing the weakness of their security systems. And after all, isn't it fun playing a game in which you have everyone fooled?

As foils for Chris Cooper's brilliance, we have Ryan Philippe playing Eric O'Neill, the young wannabe agent who was assigned to keep tabs on Hanssen and eventually brought him in. Philippe plays a similar sort of role to those in FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS and CRASH. He is always convincing as the quiet young man of integrity who has to face up to the fact that the institutions he grew up believing in are not as peaches and cream as he thought. Laura Linney and Dennis Haysbert are little more than age-appropriate delivery devices.

What I love about this film is its patient expositon of all the facets of Hanssen's character and its unwillingness to trim everything down to a clear answer. This adult attitude is evident even in small choices. Early on, the usually grim-faced Hanssen walks past a car in a parking garage and gives a wry smile. The name plate above the car is of Louis Freeh. There is no attempt to explain to the audience who this is. It's assumed that we've all read a newspaper and get the significance.

It's also a real triumph that although we know how the story ends, BREACH is always suspenseful and tense. Writer-director Billy Ray has done a great job.

BREACH went on release in the USA, Israel, Hungary, Singapore, Iceland, South Africa, Poland, Turkey, Australia, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Kuwait, Russia, Greece, Brazil and Mexico earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Spain on October 11th and in Germany on October 18th 2007.

JINDABYNE - confused Aussie drama

The best thing about the opening night of the London Australian Film Festival was a wickedly funny short film with a warm centre called BOOTH STORY. By contrast, the main feature, JINDABYNE, was disappointing at best. Ray Lawrence (LANTANA) fashions a confused two-hour movie from Raymond Carver's short story, 'So much water so close to home' - a story that also inspired part of Altman's SHORT CUTS.

In a nutshell, four men go on a fishing trip outside the Australian town of Jindabyne. They find the corpse of a young girl in a stream. Instead of reporting their find straight away, they continue with their holiday and go the police two days later. The film pretends to explore the ramifications of this decision.

But JINDABYNE never explains why the men didn't report the body. Fair enough. Sometimes there is no rational explanation. But it does not sufficiently unpick the dynamic between the men. There is a sinister scene where one of them - an ageing car mechanic called Stewart Kane, played by Gabriel Byrne - returns to the body, but the director brings this up only to let it hang there. This is one of many threads that are picked up but not seen through.

The pyschological drama rests with the wives that the men return to. In particular, with Stewart Kane's wife, Claire, played by Laura Linney. Her character is interesting. She is obviously intelligent and has suffered from severe post-natal depression. As a result, both her husband and mother-in-law undermine her authority. But her earnest good intentions and status as victim are finely balanced by her self-involvement, self-righteousness and disregard for other's privacy. As she goes stumbling through the town, trying to provoke an apology from her husband and forgiveness from the girl's family, I couldn't help but wonder whether the director and writer were making a ham-fisted point about American liberal angst. Or maybe, it's just that Laura Linney's performance is not sufficiently well-modulated to give a more subtle reading of the text?

The film-makers stray beyond the bounds of a relationship drama and make occasional passes at an exploration of Australian racial politics. The dead girl was an aborigine and pretty soon some of her family have daubed the words "white race crime" onto Stewart's petrol station. Sadly, the film-makers do not take this as a cue for a more interesting analysis of the issue. Rather, they implicitly adopt the attitude that, by their casual indifference, the anglers are on a par with evil white colonials. Surely there is no other interpretation of the movie given the soupy melodrama of the final scenes of the movie?

These scenes offer a resolution that seems as invasive and crass as Claire's seeing the body in the morgue. It wants to offer the characters and viewers a closure that stands at odds with the prevailing moral tone of the film. And the artistic choice to have a young girl choking back tears as she sings a love-song memorial is pure Hollywood sugar-coated emotional manipulation.

So, as far as plot, character development and artistic choices with the material go, I was deeply disappointed with JINDABYNE. In addition, the production features a couple of jarring mistakes. Not least, even after Stewart Krane has died his hair raven black, there is footage of him on a fishing trip with the old grey hair, before he returns to the car with black hair again. Amateurish.

Is there anything, then, to recommend this film? I found Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney's lead performances rather thin, although it's not clear whether this is their fault or that of the writers and directors. However, the film does feature some splendid performances from the supporting cast - not least Sean-Rees Wemyss and Eva Lazarro as the two children, Tom and Caylin-Calandria. DP David Williamson also takes some spectacular shots of the surrounding country-side.

JINDABYNE played Cannes and Toronto 2006 and opened in Australia in 2006. It played Dublin 2007 and opened the London Australian Film Festival tonight. It opened in Norway and Sweden earlier this yera and opens in the US on April 27th and in the UK on May 25th.

DVD round-up 2: DRIVING LESSONS

Where Daniel Radcliffe has stripped off emotionally and literally in a West End play to shake his Harry Potter image, side-kick Rupert Grint merely plays a slightly older put-upon teenager in this woeful coming of age comedy. Writer-director Jeremy Brock gives us a lazy film that has neither charm nor originality and is saved only by a typically witty performance from Julie Walters as an ageing luvvie. She hires Grint's hapless teenager as a home-help and shoe-horns him into driving her to the Edinburgh festival. Predictably, he learns a lot about life and love (i.e. clumsy sex) en route and they form an odd-couple friendship. The comedy derives entirely from Walter's fruity accent and the mild shock value, apparently, of hearing an old woman talk about "roaring lesbians."

DRIVING LESSONS was originally released in the UK in September 2006 and in the US in October. It is now available on DVD.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE - if Wes Anderson and Woody Allen made a movie...

I really like THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. Despite the somewhat hammy ending, to my mind, writer/director Noah Baumbach has delivered a charming, often hillarious, often painful movie. Despite the similarity in feel to a Wes Anderson or even certain types of Woody Allen movie, the subject matter of the film feels really fresh and interesting. There have been films about flawed people with fractious relationships before, but rarely one that explores with such honesty, authenticty and good humour the impact of divorce on young kids, and how learning that our parents can be wrong is the first step in growing up. Every member of the cast turns in a great performance, from Jeff Daniels as the narcissistic, judgmental academic father to Owen Kline as the absurdly cool, cute but messed up kid brother. Anna Paquin is always fantastic, but I also liked Hailey Feiffer as the elder son's girlfriend. When he says something cruel to her, you can feel her teenage heart breaking. All in all, this film wears its indie heart on its sleeve, but, with the exception of the final few minutes, is never pretentious or manipulative. And as an added bonus, the movie is set in the mid-80s so there is plenty of opportunity to get nostalgic about Jimmy Connors, skinny black jeans and Short Circuit. I still have a smile on my face thinking about it and I can't ask for more than that.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE premiered at Sundance 2005 where Noah Baumbach won the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards. It opens in the UK on April 7th 2006, in Germany on May 11th and in France on May 31st.

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE - Fails both as a horror flick and as a legal thriller

Let me set out my stall. I am a big girl when it comes to horror movies. Harry Potter 4 scared me silly. So when I say that THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE failed as a horror movie, you can take it from me that this is not because I am some hard-core fan of blood, gore and severed limbs. The set pieces in this flick had the audience in the screening laughing. I wasn't scared one bit. And that is a bit of a structural flaw for a movie with the word "exorcism" in its title.

So, horror aside, what can we salvage from this movie? Well, aside from all the spooooooooky stuff, we have the remains of a half-decent legal thriller. Emily Rose is a devout Catholic teenager who believes herself possessed by demons. Her university medical practitioners believe her to be suffering from epileptic fits and psychosis and put her on medication. However her family and her parish priest believe her to be possessed and attempt an exorcism. The rite fails and Emily dies. At this point, the priest, played without any sense of emotion or conviction by the usually superb Tom Wilkinson, is taken to court on charges of criminal negligence. According to the prosecution, he should have called in the doctors rather than resort to superstitious mumbo-jumbo. There follows a typically melo-dramatic American court-room drama, with Laura Linney on auto-pilot as the defence attorney. The moment when the prosecutor calls an "objection on the grounds of silliness" is truly the low point of the movie.

I was rather disappointed by THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. The movie appears to have been filmed without any sense of passion or intellectual engagement with what could have been a very interesting topic: how far can modern people, even religious people, really take the existence of demons and the like seriously? Apparently a German production based on the same true story is due for release next year, and it will be interesting to see if they can bring a greater degree of authenticity and credibility to the project. Until then, if you think you're hard enough, you'd be better off renting THE EXORCIST instead.

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE went on release in the US in September and in the UK and Germany last weekend. It goes on release in France on the 7th December 2005.