BROOKLYN - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Seven

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BROOKLYN is a big fat chocolate eclair of a film. It's a little obvious and predictable and it goes down a treat but it's not filling at all.  In a sense, it's just a very polished version of one of those big fat doorstop historical romance - a romantic drama from Barbara Taylor Bradford or an afternoon TV costume drama.  It's been cast and dressed above its station but really, that's all it is.

Saoirse Ronan (HANNA) plays a young Irish girl called Eilis who leaves a small  1950s Irish town with few opportunities for a new life in Brooklyn. She rooms with an hilarious lady played by Julie Walters with a host of giggling housemates, and with the help of a kind priest (Jim Broadbent) soon finds her feet.  She also finds love in the shape of a sweet Italian plumber called Tony (Emory Cohen - THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES).  The problem is that on her first trip home, Eilis is greeted by a quite different set of opportunities and yet the same small time gossip.  The question is whether she will remain or return to her new life armed with this new perspective. 

WILD - LFF14 - Day Six

You can listen to a short podcast review of this film here:



This movie is based upon the autobiography of Cheryl Strayed, a college student utterly undone by the death of her mother, who became a sex and drug addict, ruined her marriage and decided to hike the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail over three months to clear her head and come to some kind of self-awareness and self-acceptance. 

This could have made for a fascinating and moving story in the manner of last year’s LFF entry, TRACKS, or maybe INTO THE WILD. However, the key defining point of those two movies is that they are not afraid to show their protagonists getting kicked around by life and nature. When Mia Wasikowska tracks through the Australian desert her lips are cracked, her face raw with hot wind, her limbs burned and blistered. We’re not sure what she has come to understand about life but her struggle with it feels credible and her character realistically equivocal. By contrast, in WILD, Reese Witherspoon never allows her character to get roughed up. She hikes for months and complains about stinking but always has squeaky clean hair and a fresh face. Save for the bruises of martyrdom from her backpack and one opening shot of a bloody toenail it’s not credible that she’s undertaking this journey. Her kit always looks freshly laundered. Moreover, she doesn’t seem to encounter any real adversity. Her backpack is comically to heavy to lift up in the first scene, but after thirty seconds she’s walking with it happily. Every man who might be a threat turns out to be charming and even the forest services give her coffee and a donut. Where’s the self-realisation through suffering there? The underwhelming nature of the trip is summed up by the final shot at the Bridge of God - we have been led to believe by its name that this will provide some great epiphany but hey it’s just a steel suspension bridge and she looks at it rather wanly and doesn’t even cross it.

If all this weren’t bad enough, Cheryl’s hiking trip is intercut with flashbacks to her past. Her mother (Laura Dern) is portrayed as a kind of saint - every perfect, smiling, singing and wise. No wonder Cheryl took to heroine failing to live up to this unblemished mother figure. And let’s be honest, there is apparently a limit to how bad Reese Witherspoon will let herself look, even when playing a junkie shooting up in a squat. Contrast this with the actress playing junkie Sanne in Susanne Bier’s stunningly good drama about grief, A SECOND CHANCE. Now that’s how you do emotional trauma and redemption. The final insult is a technical one. You’d think that a movie that spends this long in nature reserves would contain some amazing landscape photography of the kind we found in Mike Leigh’s MR TURNER or Fatih Akin’s THE CUT. But no - director Jean-Marc Vallee (DALLAS BUYERS CLUB) and cinematographer Yves Belanger - give us nothing that is out of the ordinary - nothing that makes us feel Cheryl’s head clear and her heart soar. 

Overall, one can’t help but feel that this is a cynical attempt for Reese Witherspoon to break out of the rom-com’s she’s now too old for and to earn an Oscar. I know it’s a thin year in the Best Actress race but it would be shocking indeed to see this do well either in awards season or at the box office. Avoid.

WILD has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Telluride, Toronto and London 2014. It opens in the USA on December 5th, in the UK on January 16th, in Estonia on January 30th, in Germany, New Zealand, Austria and Romania on February 5th, in Denmark, Italy and Portugal on February 19th, in the Netherlands on February 26th, in Belgium, France and Norway on March 5th.

London Film Fest Day 7 - AN EDUCATION

AN EDUCATION is a British coming-of-age drama set in the swinging sixties, based on the memoirs of the British journalist Lynn Barber. It's essentially the story of an intelligent young girl swapping a place at Oxford (and a conventional life) with her dream of being an urban sophisticate, in the arms of charming man (Peter Sarsgaard). As I was attending another screening, Our Gmunden Correspondent took my ticket. Here are his thoughts:

"Just a few thoughts on An Education.

Yes it was nice. The film is a fine period drama on the clash of bourgeois and bohemian life in the early sixties, expressed in the ambivalent experiences of young Jenny, coming of age. There is everything a good film needs to have, a perfect script, great set design, catchy music, and, above all, impeccable performances of a dream cast (even if it sometimes felt a bit overacted, meaning that the actors seemed more to enjoy themselves in showing off their great talent and skill than actually embodying a persona; but good, no doubt). It is entertaining and a pleasure to watch and to listen to. If that's what we are looking for in a film, mission accomplished, all good. If we are setting higher standards, want to see revelations and revolutions in filmmaking, it seems like a little etude, do everything you are expected to do and you will get a good movie, which is not more than the sum of its parts, rather less even. It would be worth looking the flick just to hear the actors talk, devour the great sets and sounds, and accomplish the perfect editing, yet there is something missing. It lacks the subtlety of showing the inbetweens of lifestyles, that there is grey zone between good and bad, between the deeds society demands and the pleasures the individual needs. To cut it short: Watch it, enjoy it, don't think about it too much. Full stop."

AN EDUCATION played Sundance 2009 where John de Boorman won the Cinematography Award and Lone Scherfih won the Audience Award. It also played Berlin, Sydney, Brisbane, Toronto and Helsinki 2009. It is currently on release in New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Israel. It opens next week in the UK. It opens in February 2010 in the Netherlands and Germany and opens in April in Norway.

PERFECT CATCH - perfect date movie

The first time I saw FEVER PITCH, marketed in the UK as PERFECT CATCH, I hated it. I thought it was a glossy, vapid, Hollywood chick-flick, lacking intelligence and wit. However, I was WRONG. It wasn't my fault: I had been a complete sucker. The marketing posters had sold me a remake of the British film of the same name, based on the novel by Nick Hornby. So, I had gone into the cinema expecting a movie about a middle-aged teacher struggling to come to terms with life as an adult: balancing his complicated relationship with his father and his first serious relationship with his fanatical devotional to Arsenal football club. Both the novel and the original film were trememdous: they were genuinely funny, and genuinely insightful about modern life and relationships. The movie even looked grey and gritty, and in case we were ever in any doubt, we even had the Hillsborough disaster to ground us. By contrast, the Hollywood remake recasts the story in America and instead of a Gooners fan, we have Jimmy Fallon as a Boston Redsocks fan, falling in love with career woman played by Drew Barrymore.

The key to enjoying the remake is to completely empty your brain of any fragment of the source material: to take it as a stand-alone, original movie. Even better, ignore the marketing campaign that tells you it is a romantic COMEDY. Yes, yes, Drew Barrymore is a decent comedic actress and Jimmy Fallon (TAXI aside) is a decent stand-up comedian, but that is not what this film is about. If you look for belly-laughs you'll be disappointed. But if you adjust your expectations as instructed, what you'll get is a really sweet date movie, perfectly cast, that IS schmaltzy and glossy, but that gives you a nice warm feeling inside. Aaah! I love Asian ultra-violence as much as the next girl but, every now and then, it's lovely to inhabit a world where chicks don't mind when their boyfriends watch Match of the Day, and guys don't care when their girlfriends work late, and your team wins the The Ashes, I mean World Series.

PERFECT CATCH/FEVER PITCH is now available on DVD.