London Film Fest 2012 Day 6 - QUARTET

Tom Courtenay and Maggie Smith as Reggie and Jean,
estranged former lovers, in QUARTET.

Dustin Hoffman's directorial début is an hilarious romantic comedy set in a nursing home for classical musicians, based on the play by Ronald Harwood (THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY).  The joyful good humour and colourful characters more than compensate for the rather predictable plot, the weak middle section, and the rather cowardly finale.

All romantic comedies need a sense of peril that must be resolved and an obstacle to true love. In this movie, the peril is the possibility that the rather luxurious nursing home will be closed if enough money cannot be raised at a benefit gala where the former stars take to the stage. This problem will be solved if new arrival Jean (Dame Maggie Smith) agrees to sing, and ignores the fears that she will damage her glittering reputation.  The obstacle to true love is that Jean's cuckolded ex husband Reggie (Tom Courtenay) is also a resident in the home - they are both hurting and must be brought together by the offices of the loveable rogue Wilf (Billy Connolly) and the lovably ditzy Cecily (Pauline Collins).

The movie drips with good will and good humour. To be sure, some of that humour is the rather simplistic kind - the joy of seeing well-bred old-people swearing like troopers.  But most of it is more subtle - poking fun at the egotism of celebrities and the stereotypes about the soloists versus the chorus and directors stealing ideas and being impossible (Michael Gambon in a brilliantly funny supporting role).  The problem is that we are never in any serious doubt that Jean will agree to sing, recreating the quartet from Verdi's Rigoletto that the four singers recorded in their heyday - and there is never any doubt that Jean and Reggie will be reunited.

Sheridan Smith, Billy Connolly, Maggie Smith, Pauline Collins, Tom Courtenay, Dustin Hoffman, and real-life opera star, Dame Gwyneth Jones

And while the movie drips with humanity - sympathising with people who are patronised and put on the shelf and forever regretting their former life - it does not have the gritty profundity of the movie to which it will inevitably be compared, THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL. That film tackled racism, homophobia and failed marriages - by contrast, this is a much sweeter, lighter confection. My final gripe is that while I quite understand why Dustin Hoffman did not want to risk showing his actors lip syncing to opera, I did feel rather cheated of not seeing some kind of performance at the end.

QUARTET  played Toronto and London 2012 and will be released in New Zealand on Dec 20; in Australia on Dec 26; in the USA on Dec 28; in the UK on Jan 4; in Germany on Jan 24 and in the Netherlands on Jan 31. The running time is 90 minutes. 

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA - killed by conventional direction

This lavish adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' classic novel is, tragically, a failure. Tragic, because it has a high quality script from Ronald Harwood; a top-class cast including Javier Bardem as Florentino and an impressive Benjamin Bratt as Urbino; and lush location work in Colombia. The production design and costumes drip with authenticity and beauty. The problem is that this movie sticks so closely to the bare bones plot of the book that it looses the magic, the whimsy, the poetry of it. In short, the movie becomes a typically plodding costume drama in which boy meets girl, love strikes, girl marries posh bloke, posh bloke dies decades later, and boy and girl finally consummate their love. Director Mike Newell lacks the daring of, say, a Julian Schnabel, and while he respects the book that isn't enough. With this film he confirms himself as a director for hire rather than an auteur, gliding between genres - (Rom-com: FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, kids-action: HARRY POTTER...)

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA was released in 2007 and 2008 and is available on DVD.

AUSTRALIA - What kind of sick country would kick someone with a giant boot?

AUSTRALIA is a magnificent disaster. A cinematic custard of of such epic proportions it rivals DUNE, WATERWORLD and BATTLEFIELD EARTH.

Australian auteur and king of kitsch, Baz Luhrmann, made two brilliantly inspired, wickedly funny movies - STRICTLY BALLROOM and ROMEO + JULIET. In each flick he took bold chances with genre and text and as luck would have it, everything somehow made sense. I was, however, unimpressed by MOULIN ROUGE! It was as if he'd taken everything that was brilliant in his previous work, injected it with speed and set a match to the celluloid. Everything was bigger, louder, brighter, faster. Watching MOULIN ROUGE! was like being assaulted with a disco-ball. I left the movie numb and disengaged - Luhrmann had crossed the line from loving whimsy and genuine pathos into smart-arse pastiche. Now I admit that I was in the minority in my disappointment with and MOULIN ROUGE! but all those worrying tendencies have expressed themselves even more fully in Luhrmann's disastrous follow-up AUSTRALIA. It's a movie that's so indulgent it comes off as a vanity project pure and simple. It's an orgy - a binge on genre cinema's most fatuous tropes. All this could've been regarded simply as a monumental misjudgment - poor taste at its most extreme. The problem is that AUSTRALIA tackles deadly serious material. Its sins, therefore, rank higher.

Luhrmann had the laudable audacity to try to create an epic history for his country in the manner of GONE WITH THE WIND. He wanted to speak to the Australian settler spirit, the travesty of the treatment of the Aborigines and of the Australian wartime experience. To that end he gives us a movie that combines elements of Westerns, melodramatic romances and war-time epics....Nonetheless, the story is as actually pretty thin given the movie's run-time. Nicole Kidman plays an English aristo who persuades an Australian drover (Hugh Jackman) to drive her cattle to Darwin and outwit an evil cattle manager called Fletcher (David Wenham). (Melodrama, fairy-tale contrast of good and evil, Western). During the long drive, the aristo learns to love the drover, the landscape and the half-Aborigine orphan who helps them with his magical powers. (Superficial attempt to tackle Australian racial politics.) The aristo, drover and boy make a home in Darwin but happiness is seemingly destroyed when the boy is interned by the Aussie authorities and the Japanese bomb Darwin. (Ham-fisted politics and clunky CGI war movie. Shameless manipulation. Ludicrous ending.)

The result is a sickly cocktail of wooden performances, absurd dialogue and furiously heightened visual back-drops topped off with a deeply patronising attitude toward the Aborigines and an insulting fairy-tale ending. AUSTRALIA is shot like a musical without the song and dance numbers; like a fable without the intuitive wisdom; like a romance without heart; like a war-movie without the high stakes and tension. It is without a doubt the worst film I have seen in 2008.

AUSTRALIA is on release in Australia, the USA, South Korea, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, Egypt, France, Indonesia, Taiwan, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, the UAE, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Turkey, the UK, Venezuela and Israel. It opens on January 8th in Argentina, on January 16th in Italy, on January 23rd in Brazil, on January 28th in China; on February 12th in Russia and on February 28th in Japan.

London Film Fest Day 10 (late review) - THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY/LE SCHAPANDRE ET LE PAPILLON

Notes on THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY from our Gmunden Correspondent, Georg:

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY has the capacity to be a major success because it combines both artistic quality and accessibility. It has artistic quality because it was made by Julian Schnabel, a director who is also an artist and photographer. He has a great sense of visual style. Schnabel and the Director of Photography, Janusz Kaminski, manage to capture what it must be like to have “locked-in” syndrome. The opening part of this biopic takes place from the point of view of Jean-Dominique Bauby. He wakes from a coma and we hear his thoughts. We look through his one functioning eye and interpret distorted sights.

The movie is accessible because Bauby has a terrific sense of humour. Even though he has been struck by illness, his voice-overs are actually very funny. In fact, THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY is one of the funnier movies I have seen in recent time. Bauby shows us what his life used to be in flash-backs. Before the accident, Bauby was editor of French Elle magazine. He had a long-term lover and children. He also had a hot current girlfriend. He was a bit of a playboy. There is a dramatic tension because the current lover finds it too painful to visit Bauby in hospital.

This is really a great film and should be a big success.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY played Cannes 2007 where it won the prize for Best Director and Technical Achievement. It also played Toronto and London 2007 and was released in Belgium, France and the Netherlands earlier this year. It is released in Greece and the US in November and in Denmark and Australia in December. It is released in Spain, Sweden and Finland in January and in the UK in February.

OLIVER TWIST - a dull, disappointing Roman Polaski film

Let me say at the top of this review that I am soft on Charles Dickens. I really do think he is the greatest writer in the English language after Shakespeare and before Anthony Trollope and George Elliot. However, I find Oliver Twist to be one of the weaker novels. (This is relative, it's still so much better than 99.9% of novels out there.) My dissatisfaction lies in the fact that this is a novel written when Dickens was young, and so the balance is not so subtle between humour and social critique. In addition, the array of characters is not so socially varied as in later novels. Finally, I find the Oliver of the novel to be a cipher. He shows up the attitudes of the people he meets, but feels rather intangible in himself.

So, when I say that Roman Polanski's new adaptation of Oliver Twist is faithful to the novel, that is not exactly a compliment. But fans will find all the classic, mythic, scenes in place and untampered with. We see Oliver, a poor orphan in a Dickensian workhouse, draw the short straw and have to ask for more food. We see Oliver meet a gang of pick-pockets let by Fagin, and assisted by the wonderful Artful Dodger. We see the violent, evil Bill Sykes murder his soft-hearted girlfriend Nancy for trying to save Oliver. And we see Sykes shopped by his own dog! Finally, we see brave young Oliver try and convert Fagin to Christianity in prison - a raher unpalatable scene to modern ears.

The good stuff: the acting performances from British actors young, old, famous, new, are uniformly well-judged. The sets and costumes are wonderful. The movie is faithful to the source. The bad stuff: For all that, the movie is rather a dull walkthrough of familiar material. There is none of the cinematic vision and authority of previous versions. Whatever Roman Polanski told the cast, this will not be spoken of as THE Oliver Twist. Strange to say, but Polanski has created a rather, well, conventional and mediocre adaptation. Perhaps this is because he deliberately made a film for his kids, rather than a film for himself. Artists may often by egoists, but they serve their art better by following their instincts. If I were feeling mean, I could say that is more of a HBO special than a cinematic release. But even here I think it fails the test, and people who want to see a more authoritative, visually and dramatically inventive and emotionally involving version should check out the BBC's recent adaptation here.

OLIVER TWIST premiered at Toronto 2005 and went on global cinematic release in autumn and winter 2005. It was released on Region 2 DVD this week.