JOY**

Director Ben Taylor (Sex Education) and writer Jack Thorne (ENOLA HOLMES) deliver a rather earnest but tepid biopic about the scientists who developed IVF.  Maybe earnestness is what this topic requires, but it does rather strain the two-hour running time.

The cast is, however, mostly great.  James Norton plays biologist Robert Edwards, fizzing with excitement and energy and impatient with barriers.  He teams up with near-retirement obstetrician Dr Patrick Steptoe (an understated and moving Bill Nighy) whose ability to delicately extract the candidates' eggs allows Edwards to attempt to fertilise them in vitro. Tanya Moodie is wonderfully stern and pragmatic as the fictional NHS Nurse who has to manage the patients and the ward.  The only weak link is Thomasin McKenzie as the real-life research nurse who project managed the entire affair, Jean Purdy.  There is something in her line delivery that I found unconvincing. 

My suspicion is that there is a far more interesting film to be made about the opposition to the research - whether religious (represented here by Purdy's mother - an always excellent Joanna Scanlan) - scientific - or simply bureaucratic. We get some of that here but it is rather lightly skated over. I also feel that the film would have been more interesting if it had focussed on why Jean Purdy was not given due recognition for decades and despite Edwards' campaigning.  Basically I wanted something grittier and more nuanced than the rather Keep Calm and Carry On plain vanilla approach taken here.

JOY has a running time of 115 minutes, is rated PG-13, and was released on Netflix last month.

Guy Ritchie retrospective - LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS

Do you remember when Britannia was cool? Do you remember when we were Common People? Do you remember when Jason Statham was just some skinny bald git? Do you remember when Guy Ritchie was the saviour of British cinema? Before the marriage to the cinematic kryptonite that is Madonna - before the kabbalistic drivel of REVOLVER - before the straight-to-video disaster of SWEPT AWAY....

LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS remains the best of Guy Ritchie's movies - full of energy, cartoonish-fun, a genuinely new visual style, and a script so tight and complex you could put a cherry on top and call it a weasel. It was a shock to the system when it first came out. It celebrated all that was great about the old Ealing comedies and caper films, but amped it up for the video-gaming age with sharp editing, pop-culture references and a Tarantino-like fondess for the absurdity of violence.

The plot is too byzantine to discuss in any detail. Suffice it to that, as with all Ritchie films, it takes a slice of London life in all its grimy glory but puts it through the filter of a cartoon-sensibility. So we have posh kids producing drugs; working class kids losing heavy money gambling; heists and counter-heists; cockney gangsters and immigrant scams. The whole things ties together with a neatness that is awe-inspiring. Instead of dumbing everything down to a sort of universally understandable but banal language and set of character types, Ritchie glories in the quirkiness of Londoners. He goes out of his way to create outlandish characters and loves their particular idioms and squalid hang-outs. He doesn't want Hollywood-handsome. He wants "Barry the Baptist" and "Nick the Greek".

Ten years later you can still stick this on the old DVD player and have a laugh and that's more than you can say about most movies. Critics and audiences weren't wrong to get excited about what this mockney was going to do next. LOCK STOCK didn't just have promise, it delivered.

LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS hit the screens in 1998 and is available on DVD.

Another pantheon movie - ANOTHER COUNTRY

In the 1930s, five young men of rank and privilege decided to systematically betray their country and their class by spying for the Soviet Union. What drives men to such actions? Partly it was an entirely admirable reaction against the seemingly inexorable rise of Fascism. Partly it was an insider's view of how brutal life in the class system was - even when you were destined to be top of the pile. But some have made another, psychological, explanation: that for Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, their experience of having to hide their homosexuality in a bigoted society alienated them from the very establishment they were supposed to be members of. Certainly Miranda Carter, in her excellent recent biography of Anthony Blunt, claims that his miserable time at public school, miserable partly because of his homosexuality, helped foster a subversive but also superior attitude toward British society. This potent combination - insecurity and moral superiority - fed into a belief that this chosen elite had the right to be exempt from mere conventional morality for the good of the masses. Well, were they so very different from the colonial dictators they so despised?

Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess were exposed in the 50s and defected to Russia, but Anthony Blunt escaped public exposure until 1979. The fact that a traitor could have ascended so high in British society (Blunt was Director of the prestigious Courtauld Institute as well as being Surveyor of the King's Pictures) was profoundly shocking. The shock prompted a re-consideration of the motives of the Cambridge Spies. Julian Mitchell's play ANOTHER COUNTRY, and the following cinema adaptation, was part of that process.

The movie opens with a seedy old man in a dingy Russian apartment. His true origin is betrayed by the sepia photographs of schoolfriends in Eton dress. An interviewer asks how he could have betrayed his class. He preceeds to relate a story that will show it to have been as despicable as it was delightful. We flash back to Eton in the 1930s. A young schoolboy is caught by a master having homosexual sex: the shame of exposure will lead him to commit suicide. Fearful of the school's reputation, the self-elected elite pupils ("Gods", closely modelled on "Pop") decide to crack down on homosexual activity. Note that it is not the practice they object to so much as exposure. And wrapped around the events are the frantic manoeuvrings surrounding election to the Gods next term.

ANOTHER COUNTRY is essentially about a young homosexual student called Guy becomes disillusioned with these ridiculous and yet deadly serious manoeuvrings. Guy is desperate to become a God, but is also desperate to love another young boy called Harcourt. Love leads him to indiscretion, exposure and exclusion from the fulfilment of his ambition. At such a point, he becomes radicalised and a fellow traveller of his best friend Judd - an intellectually committed Communist.

The radical idea behind ANOTHER COUNTRY is portray the road to betrayal as starting in a very personal, emotional crisis, rather than in a purely intellectual attraction. The other radical idea is to portray the traitor as the victim. In this, director Marek Kanievska is spot on in photographing the classic English boarding school in soft dappled light and to make it look as superficially delightful as we could imagine it to be. He's also fortunate to have the quite shockingly beautiful and youthful Rupert Everett as his leading man. Everett is perfectly cast as Guy - he is mischevious, intelligent, clearly in love, nervous around his lover, and altogether sympathetic. What could be more tragic than seeing him crushed by the juggernaut of the English class system? Guy was being bred to rule the colonies through force - as foreshadowed by the military drills for corps. He was being bred to inflict rule in the real world by playing at Gods at school. And against this inhumanity he rebelled. ANOTHER COUNTRY challenges you to judge him for it.

ANOTHER COUNTRY played Cannes, where DP Peter Biziou won Best Artistic Contribtuion, and Toronto 1984. It was released in the UK that year. It is available on DVD.