FIREBRAND****

Karim Ainouz's FIREBRAND is the story of Henry VIII's sixth wife, Catherine Parr.  Fair warning, this is a highly fictionalised account of her life, as told by screenwriters Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth and based on a novel by Elizabeth Fremantle.  The real Catherine did not apparently know and admire the radical preacher Anne Askew (the marvellous Erin Doherty - the best of the Princess Annes in The Crown).  And what happens in the final act stretches credulity.  And yet I do feel that this earnest and handsomely made film gets to a deep truth about the aged Henry and Catherine.

From what we can tell, Catherine does appear to have been fiercely capable, a generous educator and mother to Henry's various children, and an intelligent religious thinker. Her influence on England through shaping the thought of the young Princess Elizabeth is profound.  As played by Alicia Vikander she manages to make herself quiet and amenable but also has the courage of her religious convictions AND the ruthlessness to humiliate a younger rival.  She is a power player within the bounds that society allows her. 

And from what we can tell, the aged Henry was a deeply unhealthy, spoiled and irascible man, capable of cruelty and tyranny. Indeed, the lens through which this film tells the marital story is one of domestic abuse. We have a wife who must watch her words in order to pacify a terrifyingly quick-tempered husband.  Her every move is designed to preserve her own life and enable religious reform.  But she is physically terrorised, doubted for her loyalty, not just to Henry as a man and but to the Crown.  He loves her - we think - as much as he has loved any of his wives - but he will viciously physically attack her if provoked. 

All of this adds up to a claustrophobic and horrific atmosphere at court.  The forces against Catherine are variously the male relations of Henry's children, jockeying for power, and Bishop Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale) who is against religious reform. And then there is Henry himself, as played by Jude Law, obese and sneering but with the odd flash of charm that makes us see why Catherine may well have convinced herself she is in love with him. This is truly a fantastic performance from Jude Law.

But the really pivotal relationship in this film turns out to be between Catherine and Anne. It is Anne who urges Catherine to action and holds her to account, and Anne who sheds a tear for Catherine's lost soul in a deeply moving final act. 

A film - and performances - not to be missed.

FIREBRAND is rated R and has a running time of 121 minutes. It played Cannes 2023 and was released in the USA in June. It opens in the UK this weekend.

OPERATION FINALE

Chris Weitz - director of THE GOLDEN COMPASS and scriptwriter on ROGUE ONE - returns to our screens with this retelling of how a small team of Israeli secret agents abducted top ranking Nazi Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and smuggled him out on an El Al flight to stand trial for his crimes in Israel.  As Israel Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (a cameo from Simon Russell Beale) explains to his agents, and so to the less historically literate audience - getting Eichmann to Israel is they key because it would be the the first time a Nazi would be put on trial by his victims, rather than by World War Two's victors. But should the mission fail, it would have been humiliating for the nascent state of Israel, and open it to justified accusations of having disrespected the sovereignty of Argentina.

And so we get a movie that is book-ended by a true-life thriller that is superbly executed.  Oscar Isaac plays the lead Mossad agent Peter Malkin and the only significant change to historical make-up of the team is including a female agent and love interest for Peter in Melanie Laurent's doctor - crucial in keeping the captor sedated.  We see the team take the intell from a Jew living in Argentina - his daughter is dating Adolf's son - and travel there to try and get a photo and a positive ID. These scenes are both the most tense and the most chilling - showing an active underground of Nazis in hiding and the rabid ideology of the next generation.  We then move to the abduction and Adolf's apparently rather quick admission of his real identity. 

MY COUSIN RACHEL

Roger Michell has a track record in making rather ambiguous slippery stories of obsession, and after his superb ENDURING LOVE, returns to our screens with an equally ambitious if rather less successful costume thriller based on a book by Daphne Du Maurier.  The story centres on the relationship between three cousins. The elder man adopts his younger male cousin Philip after Philip's parents die. They live a pleasant bachelor live in Cornwall for many years.  We pick up the story when Philip (Sam Claflin) is a young man, and his elderly adoptive father has gone to Florence for his health. There he makes an improbably marriage to their mutual cousin Rachel (Rachel Weisz). This romance is communicated by letters back to Cornwall which Philip dutifully reads out to his godfather Kendall (Iain Glen) and his daughter (Holliday Grainger), for whom Philip seems to be intended.  But romance turns to suspicions - with the elder cousin claiming that his young wife has poisoned him for his fortune.  Philip is thus set up to hate his cousin on site, but find's himself charmed by her beauty. Indeed, realising that she has been disinherited, he even takes pity on her financial situation and makes rather a fool of himself. This comes against the advice of all involved. Meanwhile the central question for the audience is whether everyone's else's suspicions of Rachel are warranted, or whether she is a maligned woman.

As with REBECCA, the more famous of Du Maurier's novels to be adapted to the screen, the central mystery is around an enigmatic, beautiful, perhaps dastardly woman.  And while Michell cannot withhold Rachel from us forever, he does a good job of delaying her entrance to the film.  Rachel Weisz is also perfectly cast as someone who is both beautiful and communicates intelligence on screen. I also rather liked Holliday Grainger as the altogether practical spurned young woman.  But the problem with the film really lies in the source material - Philip is a far less charismatic and intriguing character than Max de Winter.  Indeed, he is rather unlikeably spoiled and petulant.  Accordingly, even as we judge Rachel, it's hard not to resent his presence both in her life and in the film.  It's a flaw that I'm not sure the film ever really recovers from.

Thus the choice of source material is a fatal flaw, and perhaps the casting of Sam Claflin.  Which is a shame because Roger Michell really does great work in liberating the piece from the banal typical camerawork of a costume drama, with absolutely superb framing and dynamic camerawork. 

MY COUSIN RACHEL has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN - over-hyped

There is a great movie to be made about the conflict between Marilyn Monroe and Sir Lawrence Olivier on the set of THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL. Unfortunately, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is not it.  That is because the writer, Adrian Hodges (TOM & VIV) and director, Simon Curtis (TV's CRANFORD)  have made a decision to take the sharp edges off the drama at every turn.  Instead of the caustic wit of Colin (son of Kenneth) Clark's memoir, the movie gives us a protagonist in the classic "ingenue" line - very dull, very sweet, and hardly necessary at all as an entry point to the film's real drama.  He falls for Marilyn, she flirts with him, but it's all very tame indeed, if in fact it really happened.  

What we really want to see is Marilyn versus Larry.  The Sexy Film Star, enmeshed in the Method, desperately trying and failing to be a technically great actress, puffed up and doped up by her self-serving entourage (a particularly menacing portrayal of Paula Strasberg) versus the Great Actor, painfully aware that his time has passed, resentful he cannot set the screen alight, and in fear of hysterical women from his experiences with Vivienne Leigh.  When MY WEEK WITH MARILYN catches afire, it's because we're watching Marilyn and Larry bring out each other's insecurities - in those moments, we get a glimpse into their interior lives.  But all too often, this fascinating material is cut short for drippy dating scenes as Marilyn and young Colin skinny dip, or visit Windsor Castle.  I wanted more of the drama - more of the tension as cinema and theatre acting changed era - more of Marilyn and Arthur Miller - more of Larry and Vivienne.

The resulting film is basically shot and scripted like an afternoon movie on the Hallmark channel. And, unfortunately, it is filled with a fair few anonymous performances - from Dominic Cooper as a suffocating manager to Julia Ormond unbelievably mis-cast as Leigh.  Emma Watson is utterly wasted as Colin's parochial love interest, and Eddie Redmayne has nothing more to do than look charming and naive.  In the minor parts, it's only really Judi Dench who stands out - she oozes class as Dame Sybil Thorndike and deserves a sort of Oscar-double-whammy for her performance here and in J.EDGAR.   As for the leads, Kenneth Branagh is stunning - stunning - as Lawrence Olivier - capturing not just his particular intonation and mannerisms, but giving the towering presence in English theatre real pathos.  

All of which brings us Michelle Willams' much hyped performance as Marilyn, the subject of an Oscar campaign from the Weinsteins. Frankly, I was utterly underwhelmed. Yes she gets the breathy, tremulous voice, and yes she can sing the songs and do the moves. And yes, she appears to have put on a bit, if not enough weight.  But she problem is this - she has not got the sexy star quality that Marilyn had, and you simply can't manufacture that.  (Which is not to say she isn't a terrific actress - just look at BLUE VALENTINE).  Too often in this film we see other characters look at Marilyn and gasp in awe and envy at the way she "lights up the screen" or the "magic" she works or the way she's "full of life".  Sadly, the sign of a bad film is when people tell rather than show.  We shouldn't need this commentary.  Williams' should be doing it herself.  And I don't buy the concept that no-one can light up a screen like Marilyn today.  We have instinctive "film stars" now just as we have "technical actresses".  Sadly, I would put Michelle Williams in the latter camp.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN played New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and the AFI Fest 2011.  It opens this weekend in the US and UK. It opens on December 29th in Singapore; on December 30th in Finland; on January 5th in Portugal; on January 13th in Norway and Sweden; and on January 19th in Lebanon and the Netherlands. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 16 - THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Jolyon Coy (Philip), Kate Ogborn (producer), Tom Hiddleston (Freddie), 
Terence Davies (director and screenwriter), Sarah Kants (Liz), 
Harry Hadden-Paton (Jackie) at the premiere of THE DEEP BLUE SEA

This review is brought to you by Professor007, long missing from these pages, and a dutiful stand-in when Bina007 was struck down by cine-flu.

It is rare these days to find a movie that captivates one for its length. It is rarer still to find a movie that keeps one in its spell well beyond the hustle of the tube on the way back home.

Terrence Davies' adaptation of Terrence Rattigan's play The Deep Blue Sea is such a masterpiece. It is beautifully set in 1950s London, yet its topic is timeless. Hester (Rachel Weisz), a young and attractive woman of simple background, who is married to William (Simon Russell Beale), a distinguished man of law considerably her senior, falls in love with the young and handsome maverick Freddie (Tom Hiddleston). In Freddie, Hester seems to find the passion, lust, and physicality that she misses in her married life. Some months into the affair, however, William finds out and Hester decides to leave William and move in with her lover. Freddie, however, seems unprepared for such co-habitation: mentally stuck in his life as hero during World War II, he struggles to find a new focus in life, and is unable to emotionally care for anyone else than himself. Despite this lack of attention by Freddie and her husband's continued attempts to win her back, Hester's love for Freddie is unbroken. She does not, however, get the committed and passionate relationship she so desires, and with every increasingly desperate failed attempt to win Freddie over, she degrades herself more and more.

What is striking in its sadness and yet utter plausibility is how the behaviour of three people, of which neither is spiteful or keen to hurt the other ones, can lead to such pain and misfortune. Rachel Weisz beautifully portrays a woman who, in her attempt to find love and passion, knowingly destroys her life. William, excellently played by Simon Russell Beale, tries to win her back, but is too restrained by his upbringing to show the emotions his wife may be longing for so much. Finally, Freddie is a man who struggles with the void of purpose in his life and at the same time is overwhelmed by the passion of his lover.

To me, an oscar candidate for best movie, best actress and best supporting actor. On vera.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2011. It will be released in the UK on November 25th and the US in December.

DEEP WATER - the torment of the Wide Sargasso Sea

DEEP WATER is a fascinating doc by Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell. It tells the tragic story of a British middle-aged man called Donald Crowhurst. By the mid-1960s Crowhurst was a beloved father and husband but a professional failure. He longed for financial security, having watched his own father die in poverty, and added to that, respect, fame and glory. This longing for a better life as well as a Walter Mitty like talent for invention (both in engineering and in life) led him to enter the race to circumnavigate the globe single-handed and with no stops in port. No-one had ever completed such a journey and the idea of such a race - a Boys' Own adventure - gripped the British nation in the late 1960s.

Crowhurst was up against battle-hardened sailors, including a Frenchman named Bernard Moitessier. Many in Britain considered him something of a joke, and he was by far the last to start the race. Two prizes were available - and he was already out of the prize for finishing first. But he could win the prize for fastest trip if he survived.

The race was an endurance course that felled most of the sailors. Sailing through the south seas is gruelling stuff, without even starting to consider the pyschological impact of sailing alone for ten months against the elements. The documentary makers are blessed with acres of video and audio footage taken by the sailors themselves and Moitessier in particular is articulate in explaining both the psychological strains but also the addiction to the challenge.

The scandal of the race - and the main subject of the documentary - is Crowhurst's descent into a sort of cabin fever. It soon become clear that his tri-maran would not make it into the south seas but Donald was afraid to turn back and face personal humiliation and bankruptcy. And so, by stages, this fundamentally decent man took the decision to fake his journey. He would simply sit off the coast of Argentina for a couple of months and then rejoin his colleagues when they came back round the Cape of Good Hope.

The story is a tragedy of one man full of ideas and hope coming up against callous nature, bad luck and his own cabin fever. The documentary is a complete success in that it allows us to empathise completely with his psychological state. It is also a deeply insightful tale of how, even forty years ago, Fleet Street was spinning its nefarious tales: Alistair Campbell is no modern phenomenon.

I have no real care for sailing and certainly no prior knowledge of Don Crowhurst, but I found DEEP WATER to be a deeply emotionally involving drama that left me shaken. It is a stunning montage of archive footage and discreet interviews with people close to the various sailors as well as with the sailor who eventually won the race. Thoroughly recommended.

DEEP WATER showed at Telluride 2006 and won the prize for Best Doc and Rome. It is on release in the UK.