THE OUTRUN*****

THE OUTRUN is a brilliantly constructed and occasionally visually and aurally beautiful film about a young woman getting sober.  It doesn't cover up any of the pain and violence and hurt of her journey, including relapse, but culminates in a scene of such visceral euphoria that it leaves you hopeful.

The film was produced by and stars Saoirse Ronan (BLITZ) as Rona.  The film intercuts three eras in Rona's life. In her old life in London she parties hard to EDM, gets drunk and lashes out at her long-suffering boyfriend (Paapa Essiedu) to the point where she hits bottom and ends up in a strict residential programme.  In her new sober life back home in Orkney - and a series of ever smaller islands off its coast - we see her serendipitously find a new passion for life.  The third strand sees Nora remembering her childhood, with her father (Stephen Dillane) suffering bouts of severe depression.

The film is based on a memoir by Amy Lippintrot, adapted for the screen by director Nora Fingscheidt.  I love that it balances gritty reality with hope but never feels mawkish.  Even a final flourish in the end feels earned and light.  Ronan is - as we expect - stunning and raw and vulnerable in the central role.  But note also Dillane's subtly heartbreaking performance as her dad.  

As one might expect from a film based in some of the most harsh but beautiful land and seascapes, the film looks fantastic. But most importantly, it sounds fantastic. From needle drops, to the score by John Guertler and Jan Miserre, to the sound design by Jonathan Schorr and Oscar Steibitz.  Just as with SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE, THE OUTRUN is doing something special with sound that takes us into the mind of its protagonist and reflects the pressures bearing down as well as joyous release. This culminates in a wonderful scene on a beach where a now sober Rona is conducting the waves in a moment of euphoria, contrasted and intercut with her old life dancing to EDM.  This film really is something special.

THE OUTRUN is rated R and has a running time of 118 minutes. It played Sundance 2024 and was released in the UK in September and in the USA in October.

OUTLAW KING

David Mackenzie (HELL OR HIGH WATER) shifts gears to medieval Scotland for his Netflix film, OUTLAW KING. It stars Chris Pine with a dubious Scottish accent as Scottish clan leader and aspirant king, Robert Bruce.  As the movie opens his dad is bending the knee to evil imperialist King Edward I of England (Stephen Dillane, the first of many GoT alum) - this is not a film that traffics in nuance. We are asked to believe that a newly head of the family Robert can  anachronistically resist schtupping his new bride (feisty Florence Pugh) while also letting him get away with murdering his rival for the crown. This film REALLY wants us to like its protagonist! So Robert raises a rebel army and takes on the English, helped mightily by the fact that the legendary king dies leaving his moron son in charge.  The film therefore culminates in a very cool battle scene that more than compensates for its dodgy accents, two-dimensional characterisations, and stilted opening twenty minutes. In fact, it's so well done, and so similar in concept to a key moment at Waterloo, that I basically now want Mackenzie to direct a film about that. Rare praise indeed from the woman who runs the @relivewaterloo twitter account and pretty much worships the Sergei Bondarchuk version!

OUTLAW KING is rated R and has a running time of 121 minutes.  The film played both Toronto and London 2018 and was released on Netflix last week. 

MARY SHELLEY

In 1816 a young woman called Mary Shelley created the story of Frankenstein - the "monster" created by assembling corpses and revivifying them with electricity.  It's a story of an innocent, faithful creature misused by the real monster, Doctor Frankstein. The monster is violent and vengeful but also displays more humanity than his creator.  The woman who created this story was not just sensitive and romantic with a capital R, but deeply intelligent, well-read in the classics, fascinated by science - an active participant in the political and philosophical debates of the day. Her reputation as a radical philosopher may not be in the same league as that of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, but her fictional creation has achieved more fame, and argued more powerfully for the radical cause. And yet history has diminished her - describing her more often as the scandalous girl seduced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, keeper of his artistic legacy, and almost by chance creator of a gothic masterpiece. Only very recently has she been subject to serious intellectual enquiry. And in this film I had hoped to see a similarly respectful portrayal of this radical woman.

The film is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far or deep enough. It is very good at portraying Mary as a naive silly little girl who falls for a charming but vain and capricious seducer.  But it makes a fateful and disrespectful error in portraying her as being extremely passive. She watches and observes as men show her things - articles of galvanism or gothic paintings - which will work their way into her famous book.  But nowhere does it show Mary to be an active agent in her intellectual life.  There's nowhere that we SEE Mary as interested in science. We're just told by a bunch of male characters that she is.  The result is a heroine that is admirably free of cant, but one that is frustratingly passive. And it becomes very difficult to understand why she keeps returning to her emotionally abusive husband because he too is a pretty face. If there's no credible intellectual spark between the too, what's there to engage with?

That said the film is occasionally worth watching for the odd engaging performance - Tom Sturridge gets Byron exactly right.  But dialogue that is occasionally anachronistic, too conscious of the #timesup movement, and lead characters who are too thinly drawn, undermine the entire project. 

MARY SHELLEY has a running time of 120 minutes.  The film is available to rent and own.

DARKEST HOUR

DARKEST HOUR is a film about the first month of Churchill's Prime Ministership and what is often referred to as the Cabinet War Room Crisis.  It's a very compressed account of a Conservative Party at odds with its leader.  Neville Chamberlain, the previous Prime Minister, discredited by his association with the policy of appeasing Hitler, is judged unfit to continue by both his party and the opposition.  The Conservatives must therefore find a Prime Minister who will unite Parliament. Lord Halifax is popular with his own party, the King, and the House of Lords, and like many aristos of the time, scarred by World War One, is determined to make peace. Churchill seems to stand alone in believing that one cannot negotiate with a tyrant, but as the British forces are encircled at Dunkirk, seems to lose faith in his own judgment. This is his Darkest Hour. And yet, by interacting with the Honest Plucky British Public on a tube train, and with the fortification of his King who is now "bloody angry" that he'll have to go into exile in Canada, Churchill rediscovers his own confidence.  He outmanoeuvres Halifax, who is threatening to resign and bring down the government, by calling a wider meeting of his Outer Cabinet and then addressing Parliament directly. In the words of Halifax, Churchill "mobilises the English language". 

The decision to focus on this period, and the script, are the work of Anthony McCarten (THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING).  And there is much to love in this tense, compressed approach of focussing at the very real ethical dilemma of prosecuting war no matter what the cost.  We know that Churchill had history on his side, but the film does a good job of showing his faults - the drinking, past military blunders - as well as the humanity of Halifax's concern for wasted human life. After all, it's easy with the benefit of hindsight to know that the Allies would prevail, but in 1940 Britain was alone, America was out of the war, and Western Europe had capitulated. It's hard for us to sympathise with appeasers having not lived through the horror of World War One.  I also love the fact that this script focusses very much on Churchill's use of language. In his Darkest Hour, words fail him - this is a signal that he's doing the wrong thing.  That said, there's a little hokeyness mixed in with the otherwise excellent writing.  Did we really need Churchill on a tube?

In front of the lens, I loved everything about the production design - the claustrophobia of the cabinet war rooms symbolising how trapped Britain was; the oppressive grandeur of Buckingham Palace hemming in the King; contrasted with the homely security of 10 Downing Street and faithful wife Clemmie. I also loved the decision to match the ethical quandary with a visual darkness and chiaroscuro that's more extreme than anything I've seen in recent years. Kudos to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS) for pulling it off.   And the acting is of course superlative.  Kristin Scott Thomas manages to make Clemmie more than a caricature hairstyle and shows the real sacrifices she has made.  Stephen Dillane gives real humanity to Halifax and makes it clear that his decisions are not founded in self-interest.  I very much liked Ben Mendelsohn as King George V - he gets the sense of conflict and duty. But it's Gary Oldman who is rightly winning praise for his absolutely seamless transformation into Churchill. We live in an era of Churchill's - Brian Cox, John Lithgow - but none have benefited from the prosthetics, or quite nailed the vocal pattern. His Churchill is a great man - and greater still for his vulnerability and doubt.  He is funny as well as wise, and I must confess I was in tears during his final speech to the House of Commons.

So overall, there is a great deal to admire in Joe Wright (ATONEMENT)'s new film.  As ever he gives us a fluid camera and camera moves that draw attention to themselves. He loves showing us complex interiors as he draws his camera forward on a single character weaving through the landscape.  At times, I felt the flourishes were just too much, or without purpose, but in general in makes what could've been a more stodgy period drama (think THE KING'S SPEECH) more dynamic, tense, and high stakes. 

DARKEST HOUR has a running time of 125 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The film played Telluride, Toronto and Turin 2017. It opened last year in the USA, China and France. It opened earlier this year in Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Kuwait, Portugal and Slovakia. It opens this weekend in Spain, the UK and Ireland; on Jan 18th in Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, South Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Finland, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania and Vietnam; on Jan 25th in Denmark and Poland; on Jan 31st in Malaysia; on Feb 2nd in Estonia and Sweden; on Feb 14th in Philippines and Argentina and on Feb 23rd in Turkey. 

ZERO DARK THIRTY

It's taken me a while to get the necessary distance to review Kathryn Bigelow's controversial but critically acclaimed CIA procedural thriller, ZERO DARK THIRTY. The movie is meant to be an account of how US intelligence tracked down Osama Bin Laden, ending with a recreation on the fatal raid on his house in Abbotabad.  But it goes further than just being a fiction inspired by facts, as Tony Kushner would claim for the scrupulously researched LINCOLN.  Rather, Bigelow's movie opens with a statement of aggressive alignment with the truth, before playing real telephone calls from the Twin Towers.  So, before we even see an actor on screen, Bigelow has asked us to take her movie as THE definitive truth, and emotionally manipulated us by playing harrowing real audio from Bin Laden's most devastating terrorist attack.

We then move into the first two hours of the film, which is basically a standard police procedural, except that it features copious quantities of torture, which are shown to provide the information that leads directly to Bin Laden. Jessica Chastain is perfectly cast as Maya. She looks vulnerable and slight and this nicely contradicts her determination to the follow a slight lead despite her superiors' scepticism, even to the point of participating in graphically and unrelentingly depicted torture.  Of course, one can see Bigelow's not too thinly veiled metaphor for a female director's struggle in Hollywood, and every scene of genuine peril or tension is offset by the scenes of clichéd struggle against The Man. Did the real Maya theatrically and childishly use a marker to chalk up how many days the CIA knew about Abbotabad and refused to act?  Would a character as senior as Mark Strong's director really unleash a standard macho shouty tirade at his team?  It all felt rather written by rote. This was most evident in the sequence where a colleague of Maya's arranges a meeting with a potential lead - a meeting that is built up to be tense but where I was always aware of its dramatic purpose and obvious consequences.

The part of the movie that worked best for me was the final half hour, where Bigelow meticulously depicts the raid on Abbotabad, showing great technical accomplishment in her use of night vision equipment in conjunction with standard camera lenses, working in zero natural light.  I also respected the discretion with which she hinted at, but did not show the death and body of Bin Laden. And perhaps the  most finely judged dramatic moment of the film is the final shot, where Maya, mission accomplished, is left with the horrible existential, deeply political question "where do you want to go?"

The problem is that ZERO DARK THIRTY only deals in such political and moral sophistication in its final scene.  Up to that point, we are in no doubt that it is torture that produces the information that leads to Bin Laden.  For Bigelow, and her screenwriter Mark Boal, to suggest that they are just neutrally depicted "what happened" is disingenuous.  This is problematic.  Not only because it severely streamlines and simplifies a very complex issue, but because movies do not exist in a social and political vacuum as pure works of art with no consequences.  I am unsurprised to see the CIA measured but clearly angry denial that this is an accurate portrait of the hunt for Bin Laden, and to say that the content of this film will be inflammatory in certain quarters is an understatement. 

ZERO DARK THIRTY is on release in the USA, Spain, Canada, the Philippines, Taiwan, Portugal, Macedonia, France, Juwait, the Netherlands, Singapore, Finland, Ireland and the UK. It opens on January 31st in Belgium, Argentina, Australia, Germany, Israel, New Zealand, Lithuania, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on February 8th in Denmark, Italy, Estonia, Iceland, Norway and Poland. It opens on February 15th in Brazil and Japan; and on February 22nd in Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Russia and Bulgaria.

ZERO DARK THIRTY is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 157 minutes.

London Film Fest Day 7 - STORM

From Hans-Christian Schmidt and Bernd Lange, the director and writer of REQUIEM, comes a court-room drama with good intentions, but that plays like a TV drama. Kerry Fox stars as Hannah Maynard, an international criminal lawyer in The Hague, charged with bringing a Serbian nationalist to trial for war-crimes. When her original witness proves flaky, she digs deeper into the case and uncovers heinous crimes, as witnessed by Anamaria Marinca's Hannah Arendt. The rest of the film sees the lawyer try to persuade the Bosnian woman to put her new life in Berlin at risk and to rake over painful memories in order to see justice done. However, this is set in the context of deep political machinations involving the UN, The Hague and the EU. The Serbian general is now running for parliament and wants to cut a deal - moreover, the EU is keen to see his country have smooth accession talks. The resulting film is a well-acted solid piece of work. It has evidently been well-researched and is earnest. However, I felt that it's shooting style and production values were not really cinematic. Moreover, given its commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about realpolitik I was somewhat upset by a rather fairytale ending.

STORM played Berlin 2009 and opened in September in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.

London Film Fest Day 4 - 44 INCH CHEST

44 INCH CHEST is the debut feature from Malcolm Venville and written by the people behind the superb British gangster thriller SEXY BEAST. SEXY BEAST was not only magnificently profane and visually stunning but it took Sir Ben "Gandhi" Kingsley and presented him as possibly the most scary gangster this side of the Thames. Any script that could allow such a transformation was worthy of praise. 44 INCH CHEST is transformative, but not in such a powerful or compelling a manner. It starts off in the comfort zone of British gangster movies. We open with a plus suburban home wrecked in a vicious fight, and Ray Winstone's character, Colin Diamond, lying on the floor looking dazed. We then watch four mangy-looking East End gangsters, played by four outstanding British actors (John Hurt, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane), abduct a French waiter and gather in a vacant house. There friend Colin has been cuckolded and they, as good friends, are going to facilitate him exacting revenge on the fucker locked in the cupboard and the cheating wife. The twist in the tale is that Colin Diamond, East End gangster that he is, really loves his wife, and knows that if he kills her lover, it'll be over between them for good. What then follows is a slow burn psychological thriller, and the lads wait for Colin to beat up Loverboy, and Colin builds up the stomach to either do that or, worse still, tell his mates that he's setting him free.

The movie looks great - all grimy, discoloured yellows and browns. John Hurt puts in a bravura performance as Old Man Peanut - the meanest of the gangsters - but McShane, Dillane and Wilkinson are fine too. There's also a lovely little cameo of Steven Berkoff losing a packet at, what happens to be, the casino I frequent in Mayfair. The script is taut and full of some beautifully inventive swearing. I really admire screen-writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto for trying to explore the pyschological workings of Colin Diamond. Problem is, as the movie progresses, I found myself becoming as frustrated as the lads waiting for Colin to get on with it. Maybe I'd been mis-sold. Maybe I'd been misled by the momentum of the early scenes. But, in the end, despite the solid gold cast and script, this movie didn't really work for me.

44 INCH CHEST is already on release in Australia. It opens in January 2010 in New Zealand and the UK.

Overlooked DVD of the month - KLIMT

KLIMT is a wonderfully free-form movie from veteran film-maker Raul Ruiz. Released in butchered format in the UK last year, it's now available in a full two hour director's cut on DVD. The film is less of a standard biopic than an impressionistic, sometimes surreal visit with the Austrian artist. John Malkovich gives a wonderful performance in the central role. We see Klimt's foul mouth and short temper with the pretentious fools in cafe society. We see his childlike excitement, but also gentle discretion, over his many affairs. He fathers many children, sees them rarely, but when he does he has a great affinity with them. He is broad-minded, honest, but has that thin-skinned anger that people who have no time for convetional mores often have.

If you don't know much about Klimt prior to watching the film, you might feel a little lost. Ruiz assumes knowledge about the paintings, the people in Klimt's life and the "characters" of the day. I find this refreshingly unpatronising, but frankly, if you haven't heard of Wittgenstein or Schiele you might feel a little lost. In addition, Ruiz' film resists a straightforward linear narrative structure. We first meet Klimt on his deathbed and then skip back and forth through different scenes in his life. Some of these are presumably real, some are fantastic. To give two examples, Saffron Burrows plays an artist's muse who has seemingly two disinct characters - the "on-show" personality, and the private personality - and these are represented as two separate people. And Stephen Dillane plays an enigmatic figure who pops up throughout the film, commenting acerbically on Klimt's life and acting as a sort of ghostly companion.

To be sure, the film is far from perfect - if you want a sure vision and a film that feels like a composed, coherent unit, you'll have to look elsewhere. But the fun is in the feeling that anything could happen. Moreover, I did feel that I had gained an insight into the artist's personality and work. The tech package feels a little rough - or perhaps it's the DVD transfer that makes everything look muddy and under-lit? Still, the movie is well-worth checking out.

KLIMT was released in Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, South Korea and Japan in 2006. It was released in Spain, Estonia, the US and UK in 2007. It is now available on DVD.

London Film Fest Day 12 - SAVAGE GRACE

It's a story so delicious, you couldn't make it up. The suave heir to an industrial fortune marries a beautiful social climber. They lead a life of privelege and ease in the summer resorts of Europe. She is embarassingly over-ambitious for her delicate young son. All three have casual sex with alarming alacrity. No-one is off limits. Nothing is unexpected. And then, after an hour or two of bed-hopping, the young son and mother indulge in the only coupling as yet untried. The fuck each other. He kills her. He orders chinese take-out and waits for the cops.

All this is true. But so much is left out. We never learn of Barbara Baekeland's disgust at her son's homosexuality. We never see that she seduces him in an attempt to turn him heterosexual, rather than out of careless boredom. We never see Tony exhibit signs of mental illness - the murder is not foreshadowed in anything he says or does. As a result, the movie lacks momentum or narrative drive. It just drifts across the screen - one scene of boredom and casual sex after another. You never understand why any of the characters do anything, much less care. Even during acts of incest or murder, the dull tedium of their lives has infected the movie-goer to the point where we couldn't care less. Things aren't helped by the lack of context in the production design. Apart from one scene in the Stork Club we never see the Baekelands as social animals, living fast in glamourous parties or nightclubs. Maybe this was due to a budgetary constraint? The result is that visually, this is rather a dull film. There's also a sort of prudishness when it comes to the sex scenes. They are hinted at but never shown - certainly this movie has none of the balls-out bravery of Christophe Honoré's MA MERE.

All of this is a tremendous shame. I have great respect for all three lead actors - Moore, Dillane, Redmayne - and the subject matter could have been fascinating. But the movie had a listless, bizarrely prim feel to it. I was utterly unimpressed.

SAVAGE GRACE played Cannes, Toronto and London 2007. It opens in the US, Spain and Turkey in 2008.