PUZZLE

PUZZLE is worse than banal, it teeters on the offensive.  The banality begins with the slow-moving uninteresting tale of a middle-age housewife who lives as a martyr tending to her family.  In her spare time she does jigsaw puzzles and soon teams up with a glamorous exotic Indian millionaire to train for a competition.  Naturally - predictably - they end up falling for each other, and the affair gives her the confidence to demand a more equitable share of labour around the house and for her sons to take control of their lives. But in the end she drops out of the competition and her affair and returns to her now reformed family. And what of the Indian puzzler who enables this renaissance? He's cast off casually having done his part. The whole thing struck me as very dodgy and unconvincing. I get why she would be fascinated by him but not what he would see in her. Every now and then the script those in a line where he says she's beautiful, but they never have a conversation that shows a spark, and the two actors - Kelly Macdonald and Irrfhan Khan - have no chemistry. The resulting film is just too dull, and then dodgy, for words. It's the racial equivalent of films that creative manic pixie dream girls whose only purpose is to prompt a character reversal in a man, or that create wise old black women whose only purpose is to enlighten the young white protagonist. Enough already.

PUZZLE is rated R and has a 103 minute run time. It played Sundance 2018 and is now available to rent and own.  

LOVE & MERCY

LOVE & MERCY is a beautifully directed and acted biopic of the legendary musician Brian Wilson. Directed by Bill Pohlad from a script by Oren Movermen (RAMPART), the movie is sensitive, deeply felt and cleverly constructed.  It weaves together a narrative from two parts of Wilson's turbulent life. In the first period of the mid-60s we meet the Beach Boys as global superstars selling a myth of ever-happy sunshine-drenched California living.  But Brian, who writes and crucially arranges all of the music, is feeling hemmed in by the pressure to be up-beat and what's to create a perfect album with complex harmonies, dubbing and influences. It's the album that's going to become PET SOUNDS.  The music press loves to create fatuous lists of the all-time greatest albums of all time, but I've always felt that PET SOUNDS really is one of those seminal albums - arguably the best of the 60s, and just seeing it being created in the studio is one of the joys of this film.  But it's bittersweet because you're also seeing Brian's fellow band-mates/brothers push against his need to take them into darker more complex territory, as well as his first experimentation with drugs and slow slide into a kind of mental breakdown that's going to lead him to spending two years in bed in the 70s.  Paul Dano is absolutely fantastic in this role.  Both the mental slide and the precision producing feel authentic. In fact, this feels like one of the best films to document how music is actually produced. 

In the second time-period, we see Brian (John Cusack) in the mid-80s, under the malign influence of Dr Feelgood aka Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) and started to date his future wife Melinda (Elizabeth Banks).  Brian's the same sweet soul and off illegal highs but Landy's got him under complete control with over-medication and sheer emotional terrorism. What's fascinating is seeing how that terror is echoed in his stories of his childhood with an abusive father who continues to screw him over financially despite the Beach Boys sacking his as manager.  But it's Giamatti who's the real villain of the piece, fluctuating between oleaginous charm and sinister control as he tries to break Brian and Melinda up and squeeze yet another album out of his financial cash-cow.

The central performances in this film are outstanding - Dano deserves some kind of award. But the production as a whole is just perfection. I love the way both timelines are inter-cut to contrast and enhance the consistent themes in Brian's life - the mental illness, controlling men, musical genius almost painful to live with. The aural landscape is also superlative. Not just the fact that we see iconic tracks created in front of us, but the way in which the film takes us into Brian's aural world and how the over-sensitivity to voice and sounds in his head leads to his breakdown. It's as thought the famous overlapping harmonies and melodies in the Beach Boys music merges into an inescapable and sinister soundtrack to life that's unbearable. The resulting film is compassionate, intricate and ultimately uplifting.  It's the film that Brian Wilson deserves.

LOVE & MERCY played Toronto 2014 and Berlin and SXSW 2015. It is currently on release in the UK, USA, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Kuwait, France, Spain and Ireland. It opens later in July in Portugal and South Korea. It opens in August in Japan, Greece, Israel, Sweden and Turkey.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 5 - RAMPART

When I walked in to RAMPART I was expecting the movie equivalent of The Wire or The Shield - an examination of corruption and institutional racism in the police force, based on the real Rampart scandal in 1990s Los Angeles. To be sure, director Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER) and writer James Ellroy impressionistically hint at the wider malaise.  We have cameos from Steve Buscemi and Sigourney Weaver as the ass-covering establishment. But there's no clear picture of the wider context - no attempt to connect the dots and take the viewer to the heart of the corruption, in the  manner of LA CONFIDENTIAL. Rather, this movie is a character study of a fictional policeman at the centre of the scandal - Woody Harrelson's Dave Brown.  

To that end, the centre of the story isn't the police department or the patrol car, but the home Dave shares with the mothers of his two children, who also happen to be sisters (Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon); the bars he frequents; the woman he picks up (Robin Wright).  Because, let us be clear - RAMPART is a scathing depiction of a delusional man, so corrupt he can't even see it, or own it - a self-destructive charmer, who thinks he should be rewarded for "doing the city's dirty work" but can't see that he's destroying his family in the process.  

If you accept the movie as a character study rather than a thriller or procedural, you have a far greater chance of enjoying it. Frustrations with the ambiguities of the graft and the uneven pacing - the lack of real "bite" - are compensated for by the powerful, charismatic and complex central performance by Woody Harrelson and the impressionistic use of intense colour and feeling of claustrophobia created by DP Bobby Bukowksi (ARLINGTON ROAD). Because, in the final analysis, RAMPART is not a great movie - it doesn't hold you in the way that it should - it is, rather, a highly successful mood piece that contains a superlative central performance. I just wish that that performance had been anchored to a stronger supporting text.

RAMPART played Toronto and London 2011.

Michael Stipe and Woody Harrelson at the UK premiere
of RAMPART at the BFI London Film Festival.

I'M NOT THERE - a daring conceit that mostly pays off

I'M NOT THERE is Todd Haynes audacious attempt to make a film, not so much about Bob Dylan's life, as about the way in which Dylan himself manipulated his own image and was in turn manipulated by his fans and the press. Haynes tackles head-on the difficulty of creating a linear, neat biopic about a poet, musician and political icon, who shifted shape so often. Dylan often seemed deperate to make us realise how non-chalant he was of what we thought of him. He wanted to appear aloof and enigmatic. As a result, I get the feeling that Dylan is a paradox and a mystery. But not to the extent that he'd like us to believe! Haynes response to the tangled web of image, fact and manuipulation is to create a collage of scenes, both real and imagined. He takes on a surreal journey into Dylan's alter-egos. He recreates iconic documentary-footage and press conferences. Most notoriously, Haynes casts a number of actors to depict Dylan's various self-creations. He weaves their stories together, leaving the viewer to pick through the minefield of information and misinformation.

I admire the bravery of Haynes' concept and for the most part, I think it pays off. The young actor, Marcus Carl Franklin, is brilliant as Woody-Guthrie-Wannabe-Bob. This was the point where a middle-class Jewish boy with a lovely singing voice transformed himself into an Old Time blues singer, inspired by the laments of the Great Depression and the radicalism that came out of it. He transformed his voice, his name and his stance, in a manner that is as radical as having a teenage white man played by a pre-teen African-Amercan boy. In another incarnation we see the fantastically talented young British actor, Ben Whishaw, play Dylan the Poet. He's filmed face-on to the camera in black and white, explaining his stance on language, politics and poetry. He's already complaining about how slippery language and labels can be - a true post-modernist - and will return throughout the movie. Next up, we have Christian Bale as Acoustic-Folk-Bob, who latches onto the folk movement and takes it from an underground anti-establishment scene to the very heart of the mainstream. In faux-documentary footage, we see a Joan Baez type figure played by Julianne Moore tell us how quickly Dylan put himself in opposition to the movement, becoming cynical about its chances of success. We then have the radical break that will forever define Bob - his use of the electronic guitar and move from political songs to songs of personal experience. Cate Blanchett is note perfect (and painfully thin - intentionally?) as Electro-Bob. She plays Bob at his most scabrous, cynical, manipulative and spikey. It's glorious stuff. Finally, we revert back to Christian Bale as Born-Again-Bob.

All this material is superbly acted and filmed with a technical mastery of different types of film, lens and style. If Haynes had left it at that, he would have had a tightly-knit, fascinating film of about 90 minutes in length. The problem is that he adds two other "Bobs". The first is Actor-Bob who plays Folk-Bob in a movie. He's played by Heath Ledger - the least comvincing portrayal. Actor-Bob has a long set of scenes with Charlotte Gainsbourg playing his wife. I suppose the point of these scenes is to show us how cruel Dylan was to some of the women in his life. I thought this could have been more effectively portrayed by expanding the role of the Joan Baez figure in the Folk-Bob scenes. The second redundant Bob is Richard Gere's portryal of Bob as a Billy the Kid figure. Gere is fine in this role, but the segment seemed the most pointless, the most random and the least well though out.

I'M NOT THERE played Venice 2007 where Todd Haynes won the Special Jury Prize and Cate Blanchett won the Volpi Cup. It also played Toronto, London and Vienna 2007. It opened in Italy, the US, Denmarl. Canada, France, Finland, Belgium and the UK in 2007. It is currently on release in Israel and opens in Norway on January 18th. It opens in Austria on February 1st, Sweden on February 8th, Germany on February 28th, the Czech Republic on March 6th, the Netherlands on March 13th and Japan on May 17th 2008.