I know that Alice Sebold’s book is revered for some reason or another, but the film sure didn’t give any of the reasons away as to why. That’s not to say that director and co-screenwriter Peter Jackson has made a bad adaptation, far from it, but it’s not remotely clear what the film is supposed to be about. Is it a ‘Ghost’-style, beyond-the-grave murder mystery? Is it a teen romance? A story of a serial killer? It never settles on anything particularly, and Jackson’s focus never stays still long enough to get an emotional grip on proceedings. Teenager Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered by serial killer neighbour Stanley Tucci in the early 70s, and narrates the film from the afterlife. We see her family life, we see her first love, ambitions and insecurities, just as she’s about to start really growing up. After her death we see her stuck in the ‘In-Between’, a half-way house between life and the afterlife, seemingly trapped by her parents’ (Mark Wahlberg & Rachel Weisz) inability to let her go. Will Tucci get away with it?
Well yes, and it’s a highly unsatisfying end to a film which claims to aspire to much more. There are other unsatisfying aspects to the film however, from Wahlberg’s whiny, insubstantial performance, to his and Rachel Weisz’s frustratingly unmoving grief, through to the non-story about the police (were they really that incompetent in the seventies?); it all may be entertainingly knitted together, but it’s emotionally unengaging. It leaves Ronan standing almost alone, excelling as Susie Salmon, as does Tucci as her killer, and the absence of a clearer focus on their relationship before and after her murder, and the lack of emotional resonance of her life being cut short are genuinely missed opportunities. But Jackson doesn’t spend long enough on any character’s plight for us to engage with it in any depth. And what was Susan Sarandon doing as the comedically drunk grandmother?
Susie doesn’t end up leading her parents to Tucci – Wahlberg figures it out on his own, and even the moment where her disembodied spirit could intervene to stop Tucci from getting away with his crime is spoiled by a ridiculously contrived (and inappropriate) sequence with Ronan and her still-living true love. What was the point of it all? What was the point of framing the real world stories with Susie’s adventures in the afterlife? It may have looked impressive, but was overlong and overindulgent, and I never figured it out.
Colin Firth may well lose out to Jeff Bridges for the Best Actor Oscar, but make no mistake he richly deserves one here, as a gay British university professor who has to cope with the sudden death of his long-term boyfriend in 1960s America. In a society still deeply homophobic, he must remain stoic and professional, and cope invisibly with the crushing pain and loneliness from losing his soulmate. And Firth’s depiction of George’s plight is nothing short of remarkable. From his cold response to the secretive phone call confirming Jim’s (Matthew Goode) death, to his very private tears and subsequent soundless breakdown with his best friend (Julianne Moore), George’s grief is never anything short of devastatingly believable. This may all sound terribly depressing, but screenwriter/director Tom Ford manages to make the film a very rich, emotional story about love, and gay love at that.
George wanders through his now emotionally cold existence with a cool detachment, which Ford details for us with a subdued colour palette, lighting up when human warmth crosses his path. The neighbour’s daughter, the Spanish hustler or just the sunset – George is given multiple reasons to go on, yet he continues his race towards death, unable to engage with the world without Jim. His emotional coldness briefly unravels with his fag hag Julianne Moore (vamping it up as a proto-Patsy – fun, but the weakest link in an otherwise powerful film), but it’s only with the arrival of student Kenny (Nicholas Hoult, sporting a remarkable American accent) that his rush towards death is truly halted. Hoult is even prettier than during his run in ‘Skins’, and is more than a match for Firth’s George. Without treading on Jim’s metaphorical toes, Kenny makes George feel again, and the sheer sensuousness of their burgeoning love affair is breathtaking, largely through never being consummated.
Ford’s attention to detail adds a level of depth which makes this film truly great – from the set design to the costumes, through to the score, every facet of George’s world is painted with love and precision. That some of Ford’s visual trickery isn’t as effective as the rest of the movie is a small criticism – pretty much all of it allows the film to pack a disproportionately powerful punch. ‘A Single Man’ may not in itself be a political film about gay rights, but it is a very effective criticism of gay invisibility. Some have said it is a film which simply addresses universal truths about love, but I agree when David Cox points out that it’s very much a gay film, but addressed at everyone. And in that it’s inordinately successful.
A noir thriller will never operate at the same pace as a standard actioner, but there’s still no excuse for the often meandering pace of director Martin Campbell’s remake of his own 1980’s BBC TV serial. I still haven’t seen the original, but despite some good performances (particularly by Gibson) this version doesn’t work anywhere near as well as the highly acclaimed original is reported to, and oddly it’s largely because of Campbell himself. Gibson returns to the big screen as policeman Tommy Craven, whose daughter (Bojana Novakovic) is shot down in front of him. The police and media believe he was the target, but Craven doesn’t, and is swiftly drawn into a conspiracy within the American defence industry. Will he meet his daughter’s fate or will hitman-cum-mysterious-ally Ray Winstone help him to reveal Craven’s boss’ (Danny Huston) activities to the world?
Campbell tries almost too hard to rise above a script (by William Monahan and Andrew Bovell) which is mystifyingly pedestrian, given the source material. Gibson does his best, but his role is under-written, and he often has to labour through overly talky sequences which have no dramatic energy whatsoever, other than through his still potent charisma. Even more mystifyingly are the direction and editing, which on more than one occasion are little more than amateurish. It feels like there are different elements constantly pushing against each other, and it makes a worthy production often uncomfortable and reduces its impact. Gibson though has no problem emoting as the policeman haunted by his dead daughter, already looking in real life far older than his years. But although you feel anything can happen around him (the manic Lethal Weapon energy is far from gone), there’s no dramatic tension to the story he’s acting in. It’s a missed opportunity by a director with such energy-bursting triumphs as ‘Goldeneye’ and ‘Casino Royale’.
The conspiracy is never adequately fleshed out, although its real-world murkiness is a nice touch. The links between Blackwater, the Bush Administration, the CIA and other organisations have long been known but have been very difficult (if not impossible) to prove, and ‘Edge of Darkness’ is fully aware of that, in ways ‘State of Play’ was not. If its noir elements had been put together a bit more competently (and the sickly ending avoided completely), and a little more political conviction been shown, this might have been a truly exciting return for the much missed Mel Gibson the actor. As it is it’s a mildly enjoyable diversion, which promises more than it delivers.
George Clooney is the everyman for the 21st century. Who needs Tom Hanks’ cheery optimism when you can have Clooney’s well-mannered disconnection? His Ryan Bingham is a man of the times- a contractor hired by firms to fire their staff in the recession so they don’t have to. Bingham is at home in the sterility of air side America, packaging his existence into his suitcase, living almost the entire year on the road, and measuring everyone else by their ability to navigate speedily through his space. He meets Alex (Vera Farmiga) – his female analogue and every bit his equal, and they begin a sterile, disconnected relationship which suits their needs, and why not? America is thoroughly rationalised, and they count themselves as amongst the tools which keep it that way. They don’t compare feelings, rather travel discount cards, admiring one another through their mutual convenience to each other. Bingham fools himself even into believing he’s doing the people he’s firing a favour, by doubling as a ‘life coach’. Enter Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who derails his feelings and responsibilities-free life by convincing his boss Jason Bateman to pull him and his colleagues off the road, and start firing people by webcam. Before that can happen she must go out on the road with Bingham to try their firm’s new system out on-site, and no longer able to insulate herself from the pain she causes, Natalie is forced to change. She isn’t the only one…
‘Up In The Air’ is a comedy of manners which belts you when you least expect it – the humour is often gently amusing, but make no mistake director and co-writer Jason Reitman has something harsh to say about recession-hit America as it limps into the century’s second decade. Class act Clooney’s charisma would make this work even if the screenplay were a dud, but together they make it sparkle. Clooney’s aloof but amusing observations on his fellow travellers are contrasted with talking heads interviews of those he’s fired, and the cost of his personal success is constantly challenged. With Bingham at the same time the fulcrum between both a bittersweet rom com and an odd-couple film, Reitman runs the risk of trying to make the film do too much, but instead it catches fire. That you can be entertained with laugh-out-loud comedy one minute and ferocious social commentary the next is a testament to all concerned, and the performances are outstanding – Clooney’s well-matched by both Kendrick and Farmiga, and even Bateman reins himself in. Reitman never loses control of the contrasting issues, values and tensions between his three leads, and successfully uses Clooney as the prism through which we view 2010 America; it may be funny and pretty but it’s heartless, unfair and sterile too. He clearly hopes the chastened Bingham we see at the film’s close will one day be matched by his country.
‘Up in the Air’ is at it’s heart a dark tale of dreams lost and dreams discarded. It proves ‘Juno’ wasn’t a one-off, and that old school charm can still successfully underpin even the most biting morality plays. Studios take note.
There’s a downright great idea here, buried under a great morass of excessive overstyling and script failures. That’s not to say that ‘Daybreakers’ isn’t entertaining – it is – but its clever premise is brought down by never living up to the ideas it sets out, and because of lackadaisical direction by the Spierig brothers (who also co-wrote the film). It’s a shame because the idea of a world dominated racially by vampires is a novel one – would it too socially stratify, and what would vampiric corporate America’s priorities be? If the principal industrialised commodity were human blood, what would the social and business ramifications be of a shortage? Environmentalism in a vampire movie could have given space for a truly incisive (ahem) social commentary, but Michael and Peter Spierig eschew one in favour of simple blood and gore, overstylised visuals, and zingy one-liners.
Hunky Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a hematologist unhappy with vampirism and its farming of humans to near extinction. His attempts to formulate a blood substitute for boss Sam Neill (whose human cancer was undone by his conversion to vampirism) amount to naught, he fights with brother Michael Dorman, a success in the vampiric armed forces having been a failure in its human analogue, and faces gradual starvation as both sides face mutually assured destruction. That is until he crosses paths with Willem Dafoe’s band of humans, some survivors and some ex-vampires, who reveal the existence of a cure. The race is then on to safeguard the remaining humans, whilst saving the vampires – has vampirism stripped them of their morals or has immortality merely accentuated what was already there?
From a great start – corporate boss Neill overseeing the human blood farms, facing a dip in profits as scarcity pushes the price up, and vampires attacking ‘lower class’ vampires, it descends into a barely coherent second half, replete with moody glares at the screen but not much in the way of intelligible plotting. Hawke gets himself cured, so why is he still sleepwalking through the role? Why does Dafoe spend more time with classic one-liners than actually fulfilling an interesting function in the story? What happened to the politics? Neill rejects the cure but he’s the bad guy, but would others also say ‘what’s to cure?’ Why just ignore the social implications of vampirism when they informed so much of the first half of the movie? It all gets left behind in the Spierig brothers’ eagerness to deliver the blood, guts and gore which must have been expected of them. But whilst that element is entertaining, it isn’t something you haven’t seen countless times before. So many good ideas, such half-hearted execution.
It sure is bleak, which isn’t to say that director John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic road movie (adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s book) isn’t technically brilliant or outstandingly well acted. But ‘The Road’ is so nihilistic, so full of pessimism and dread, with no humour whatsoever, you can’t really call it entertaining or a film you can recommend for a good night out. This isn’t a problem though, because you can’t fault it on its artistic merits – from the washed out colour palette, giving further depth to the lifeless Earth, through to the Hollywood-unfriendly storyline, Joe Penhall’s script is true to itself from start to finish, and even the apparent product placements are true to the book (Coca Cola in particular had initially resisted its inclusion). Viggo Mortensen stars as an unnamed man, guiding his son Kodi Smit-McPhee through a desolate, dead America, with no plant or animal life, and with other humans reduced to violence and cannibalism in order to survive. Facing starvation or a violent death they head to the coast, hoping for something better, using one another to hold on to their sense of morality along the way.
And although the pair have no hope and little chance, they continue to fight for their survival on a planet no longer able to support life, Mortensen holding on to his responsibilities as a father, and Smit-McPhee intuitively believing in the value of being ‘a good guy’. It’s a fascinating character study of morality and fatherhood, in the face of utter hopelessness. And both actors are more than up to the task – Mortensen provides a tower of strength under unthinkable pressure, and Smit-McPhee gives a compelling depiction of hope, compassion and optimism, while the rest of his race descends into savagery. Penhall’s script has them relying on one another to hold on to what they believe in, both supporting and pushing when humanity has given up entirely, and it effectively draws you in. Could the tone have lightened up on occasion? Sure, but Hillcoat admirably never loses his focus from his pair, nor do we lose our compassion for them.
There is some genuinely shocking and mostly underplayed horror, and the stark, mostly on-location visuals add to the feeling of constant dread. The attention to detail of the dead Earth is simultaneously impressive and depressing, and although we never find out what brought about The End of the World, we don’t need to. This is all about Father and Son, showing goodness can prevail under any circumstance. More of a technical achievement than a ‘must see’, ‘The Road’ is nonetheless an impressive film and worthy of your time – just pick the right one.
How Guy Ritchie of all people managed to put together a perfectly good and highly enjoyable Sherlock Holmes movie, and with Robert Downey Jr in the lead, is beyond me. But the fact remains that his brazen attempt to both reboot Holmes and to set up a franchise succeeds, in an odd way a little too well. The ex-Mr Madonna and his screenwriters Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham actually cram far too much detail into an otherwise lovingly crafted and straightforward conspiracy against the British state, and leave the first half a little bloated and a bit too clever for its own good. Is Lord Blackwood (the sublime Mark Strong) really a black magician, using dark arts to take over Britain and then the world? With highly enjoyable twists and turns, the fractious Holmes and Watson investigate.
The first half of the movie is quite perplexing, despite some excellent scenes where we see the world from Holmes’ point of view. The bare knuckle fight sequence may upset film Holmes purists, but getting a snapshot of how his mind works adds a valuable dimension to Downey’s oddball performance. Whilst he clearly can’t decide still whether to play the character or just ‘do Downey’, he errs on the side of caution for the most part and is a highly watchable, charismatic lead; to manage Holmes and Stark simultaneously is no mean achievement. And Jude Law as a heavily retooled Watson is a delight too – the chemistry between them dominates the movie, as they both chew their way through every scene they share. And the back half of the movie – the payoff – is extremely strong and remarkably traditional; anyone expecting the Hollywoodised style of the trailer couldn’t be more wrong. Whilst Ritchie’s pacing is as rapid as you might imagine, it’s never at the expense of story. Well almost never – it might have helped to have known more about Holmes’ past relationship with Rachel McAdam, but this is a minor quibble.
The rebooted Sherlock Holmes for a new century is a definite success and great entertainment for audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Its highly impressive look, its eschewing any form of origin sequence (I mean who doesn’t know who Holmes is?) and the decision to take a whole new approach with Holmes and Watson casting are all triumphs for Ritchie. The lead-in to the sequel (which seems to have now been greenlit) is also pretty welcome; I can stand to revisit these characters quite happily. All in all an excellent balance between a cerebral mystery and out and out action – a very pleasant surprise.
This trailer is NOT for children and NOT for anyone who wants to avoid the best bits of Michael Vaughn’s adaptation of Mark Millar & John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass before it’s release in April. The rest of you enjoy…;)
Jim Cameron’s first film in over a decade has been described as a ‘game changer’ and after sitting through its 2 3/4 hour running time there’s no question at all that ‘Avatar’ is precisely that. The CGI and 3D rendering aren’t just good they’re astounding – Cameron creates the most fully realised virtual reality in film history, and spends much of the bloated running time showing you pretty much all of Pandora that he could afford (including the marketing budget the film’s come in at half a billion dollars). The flora, the fauna, the inhabitants, the landscapes, the vistas, everything down to the Na’vi’s (for it is they who are the 10 foot blue creatures) cultural practices, Cameron wants you to know every last little thing you might want to know about the extra-solar system planet humanity has decided to strip mine for its natural resources in the late 22nd century. And here’s where a reasonably sophisticated audience encounters its first stumbling block – the plot
Cameron recycles his plots (just count the shout-outs from Terminator, from Aliens, from Titanic, from The Abyss), couldn’t write naturalistic dialogue to save his life and bashes you around the head at every turn with the issues – oh the issues. Environmentalism is good you see? Corporate America is bad (just who financed this film though?). Modern society is bad. Aboriginal societies are good. Going to war for natural resources is bad. Insurrections against imperial powers are good. You get the idea. And I’m sorry but the human race’s prize’d asset is called ‘unobtainium’? Please.
To get away with such facile storytelling and formulaic plotting Cameron needs sterling performances from his cast, yet only Cameron stalwart Sigourney Weaver seems in on the joke, essentially reprising Ripley Mark 1, hamming up lines which could have been (and probably were) written for her more than two decades ago. Sam Worthington however fails again to make the grade, showing no emotion whatsoever as Corporal Jake Sully, the surviving twin needed to inhabit the test tube-created Na’vi ‘avatar’ humans feel necessary for their consciousness to inhabit in order to communicate with Pandora’s indigenous, humanoid population. It’s not just a drawback, it makes it downright bizarre that the actor’s CGI avatar should be more convincing than the actor himself. For a film steeped in attempts at melodrama it largely undoes the writer-director-mad genius’ conceit.
Except somehow it doesn’t, not quite. For this is the triumph of spectacle, it’s the Simon Cowell school of film making, where the style is so totally overwhelming you’re forced to ignore the fact that there’s no substance, emotion or authenticity to it at all. And it’s true – Avatar has none of those qualities – none – yet it succeeds in being relentlessly entertaining. It’s beautiful, it’s awesome, it’s oddly easy even to put aside the fact that most of the sequences Cameron shows us on & of Pandora (many strung together by outrageous deus-ex-machinas) add nothing whatsoever to the story; despite the film being fundamentally flawed it’s just plain likeable. It’s fun, it’s a game changer, it will change cinema forever, but as with Cowell’s X-Factor, as everyone sets out to use it as the industry standard, to be copied and lived up to, it’ll be at the expense of good cinema and will without doubt pollute the industry for a generation. It’s a guilty pleasure but an exercise in relentless cynicism.
It’s a children’s story so it shouldn’t work for adults. It doesn’t have a plot so it shouldn’t work for anyone. Very little even appears in it, other than some imaginary monsters, one of them voiced by James Gandolfini who essentially just plays Tony Soprano again – it shouldn’t work for film buffs. But director Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s bedtime story is sublimely wonderful – it’s an ideas factory the likes of which you only see once a generation, with enormous heart and intelligence, and Jonze (with co-screenwriter Dave Eggers) delivers it with the gentlest of touches. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ manages to get away with filming the unfilmable by allowing the audience’s imaginations to run riot. It’s never clear exactly what’s going on (remember ‘Being John Malkovich’?) – are the monsters aspects of Max’s own personality? Has he travelled into another dimension? Is it all just a dream? Is Jonze trying to tell us something about growing up? The director allows us, to access the film as we please, refusing to spoon feed his audience, but still takes us on an utterly convincing emotional journey. Max plays and confronts some harsh truths about growing up – nothing else happens, and you’re free to read in any subtext that suits in this enchanting story.
The superb acting (particularly by the remarkable Max Records) and CGI so good you rarely know you’re looking at it, add a surprising, extra level of accessibility to such a rich, almost abstract fantasy. You aren’t spoon fed who the monsters are, what (presumably of Max) they represent, but you know that they and the world they inhabit are vitally important to him and this is where the attention to detail becomes so important. Max gets to play out choices which are closing down for him in the real world, living a child’s experience one last time, and Jonze puts his inner world on display, managing to add an adult subtext to a threadbare children’s bedtime story, in a triumph of his own imagination. Who wouldn’t after all at any age want to run away and lord it over monsters, getting them to shape the world for us as we see fit? It may be quite often a very sad film, but it offers hope for us all to be accepted just as we are. Truly a story for our disillusioned times.
Writer/director Richard Kelly’s second film since ‘Donnie Darko’ is seriously pretentious. Whilst the script raises intriguing questions about morality, the interconnectedness of the human race and to some extent religion, his film never quite manages to explore a single issue properly, certainly not in an engaging way. And that’s the chief flaw of ‘The Box’ – it sets up a fascinating premise and doesn’t provide a payoff – instead it rambles all over the place and leaves you completely cold. At least 2001 for all of its existential questioning had a heart, but this film has none. At no point do you ever care about stars James Marsden or Cameron Diaz, who both sleepwalk through this film, and considering their calibre it’s almost unforgivable. So for $1 million and no come-back would you choose to cause the death of a human being you don’t know? The answer is of course ‘no’, but of course if we stopped there we wouldn’t have much of a movie and the supernatural force ranged against them (the Martians? God?) wouldn’t have much to pontificate about. But I ‘m getting ahead of myself…
It’s the late 70’s and Cameron Diaz is married to NASA technician James Marsden, who is involved in the design of the cameras for the space agency’s mission to Mars. Their comfy life is thrown into disarray when spooky Frank Langella (who has half a face) delivers a box to them with a red button. Push the button and receive $1 million – it’ll mean the death of a fellow human being but you won’t know them and noone will ever find out. Diaz inexplicably allows him to enter the house twice, mystifyingly keeps the box after his initial visit, then even though they aren’t exactly living in financial hardship, pushes the button. And that’s after Marsden has discovered the box is completely empty. Then when they get their bloody money they decide they don’t want it, but it’s too late.
They find themselves confronted by supernatural forces which may or may not be connected to mankind’s first visit to another planet, but considering science is ranged against the supernatural it’s baffling why not a single NASA technician (for it is they who appear to be the principal targets) questions what happens to them. Why don’t they at least try to get protection from the police, when Diaz’s father is their town’s police captain? But noone behaves in a logical fashion, and it’s tiresome. The Godly 2001 beats when they eventually come are an interesting theme – is there a God out there testing the human race, and what if we are found wanting? But they can’t mask Kelly’s unsympathetic script and self-involved direction.
Kelly seems to want to say a) we’re so disconnected from cause and effect in the world that it’s a choice we’d all make (an appalling claim) but also b) we’re so interconnected the choice was never Diaz’s (nor the final choice Marsden’s) in the first place. I was just left waiting for a beginning to lead to a middle and an end, but ultimately it’s just a muddle. The leads struggle against their fate but have no control over it – maybe that’s what Kelly wants to leave us with, but I just didn’t care. It’s entertaining enough, but I left wondering what the point was other than nihilistic pointlessness.
If you’re a Coen Brothers fan you’ll love this. ‘A Serious Man’ is a terribly (and typically) ideosynchratic work by Joel & Ethan, which equally typically fascinates and infuriates in equal measure. The plot is simple enough – Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a theoretical physics professor in a closely knit Jewish community in the American midwest in the 1960s, who suddenly finds his entire world falling apart through no fault of his own. His wife is leaving him, his kids are fighting, he’s being bribed by a Korean student and his son’s on drugs – he saw none of this coming and has no idea what to do. What follows is a gently humorous (yet drawn out) look at Jewish angst in 1960s America – very little actually happens other than a great deal of worrying, which seems largely to be the point. There are multiple subtexts about religion, community and the meaning of life, which the Coens use Stuhlbarg as their point man to run through.
The brothers clearly have something to say about the meaning of life – as soon as Stuhlbarg succeeds in reconciling with his wife (only after her lover dies in a car crash just at the same moment Stuhlbarg has a separate crash), he finds he’s terminally ill. Shortly after his son (Aaron Wolff – one to watch) completes his Bar Mitzvah and starts to mature, it’s implied that he’s killed by a tornado. So is ‘A Serious Man’ ultimately a treatise on the cyclical nature of life, or on how you should enjoy life while you have it, warts and all? The Coens don’t give you easy answers, but they do deliver some exquisite performances, excitingly from a cast of unknowns (apart from Richard Kind from ‘Spin City’). Stuhlbarg in particular gives an outstanding, empathetic performance as Gopnik, questioning why his life is going the way it is, and not even able to get a straight answer from his Rabbi (George Wyner, who nearly steals the show). No word from God and only crazy anecdotes from His representative on earth – welcome to sixties America, where even cultural norms are fraying under the surface.
It’s not the Coens’ best work – something this philosophical really does get on your nerves at times, particularly when, following the engagingly funny first act, most of the second is tied up in inaccessible psychotwaddle. But act two is followed by a highly amusing third segment, whose highlight is Wolff’s Bar Mitzvah, which we see through his drug addled haze. But outright laughs like that are few and far between – it’s a very finely tuned black comedy, which I found far more enjoyable than ‘No Country for Old Men’. I prefer film makers like David Lynch or the Coens messing with my mind rather than just being strange for its own sake, but as funny as this is, and as intellectual as it tries to be, this rare venture into non-crime territory doesn’t quite pack the weight of their greatest works.
Director Steven Soderbergh fluctuates between two extremes – the diabolically bad (Ocean’s 12/Solaris) or all-time great (Ocean’s 11/Erin Brockovich). ‘The Informant!’ doesn’t exactly sit between the two, but although it’s very good, it doesn’t reach the highest heights either. That’s not because it doesn’t know what it’s trying to be – it’s an embellished adaptation of the story of real life corporate informant Mark Whitacre, who went whistle-blower against ADM’s lysine price-fixing in the early 90s. And Soderbergh gets everything right which The Men Who Stare At Goats got wrong – he plays what could otherwise be a dull and nigh unfilmable story for gentle laughs, finding humour in the urbane, gently overexaggerating Whitacre’s character into a white collar criminal figure of fun. And Matt Damon positively radiates as Whitacre, transforming himself into a stocky caricature of a man who’s hard to pin down – is he blowing the whistle on ADM for altruistic reasons or does he have his own agenda?
It’s an amazing story – Damon/Whitacre believing he could step up to the ADM leadership through his many years as an FBI informant against them, yet conveniently never telling the FBI of the millions of dollars he was simultaneously embezzling. It’s a difficult story to balance, but Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z Burns mostly pull it off, wisely not trying to come to any fixed conclusions about Whitacre, and it strengthens their movie. Was he playing ADM and the FBI off against each other for his own benefit or was he undone by the vastly more powerful ADM? Damon impressively keeps you guessing throughout, managing to portray Whitacre as deeply sympathetic and benign, finding a rich and engaging comic seam in his behaviour, which he balances out nicely with his ever more bizarre behaviour as the case is pursued by the Justice Department. And he’s aided by fantastic production and a killer, classic store by Marvin Hamlisch, adding just the right tone to a story full of paradoxes.
Ultimately the subject matter is a little too bland, the results of the investigation not grand enough for this to hit the heights of Brockovich. But it’s an interesting and very finely observed character piece, which should set Damon up for a much broader career than just the Bourne action stereotype.
I was looking forward to this film. After all its premise was a dramatisation of actual documentary video footage of alien abductees, with that footage cut into the film itself. But the entire film is a fraud – the ‘actual footage’ is as much a fiction as the dramatisation, making the entire experience a waste of effort. And it’s a shame, because writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi had a great opportunity to make Blair Witch meets X-Files instead – and it might have carried more weight. But having fake footage reenacted by Hollywood stars (ok Milla Jovovitch is the only real star) only comes across as pretentious; it’s also quite dull, which makes perfect sense – who are you supposed to be empathising with, and how?
It probably made sense to cast ‘Resident Evil’ veteran Jovovitch in another spooky/supernatural setting, and she does hold your attention on screen, but her section of the film is far and away the weakest. Osunsanmi never gives us enough Blair Witch, and overeggs the X-Files, but Chris Carter gave us much better alien abduction material for nearly a decade. If the ‘reenacted’ footage is supposed to be real, why is it so overly dramatic? Surely this storytelling device should simply be used to fill in the narrative gaps between ‘real’ videos? But it doesn’t even deliver there – why is the police chief (Will Patton) so suspicious and angry at Jovovitch? Why does her son hate her when he had to have seen his sister’s abduction if she did? We don’t even end up seeing any aliens, but that’s not the fundamental problem. The characters’ motivations are never really clear – did Jovovitch (and her ‘character’) imagine the whole thing? Is she mad? In which case why toy with the subplot of alien races as the basis of all religions? The one time the possible implications of that being true are explored, is when the film finally comes alive. But it’s far too little, far too late; Osunsanmi seems to want it both ways from start to finish throughout this muddle of a film, and ends up never really pleasing anyone.
Is it a murder mystery? Is it ‘Ghost Ship’ done right? Is it something else entirely? ‘Triangle’’s director Christopher Smith (of the excellent ‘Creep’) does an excellent job of keeping you on your toes for most of the running time, tantalising you with ‘Memento’-esque time jumps, always hinting something more is going on, but never quite telling you exactly what. Single mother Melissa George joins a bunch of new friends on a sailing trip, but her listless behaviour makes them wonder what’s going on. When a freak storm arrives out of nowhere and capsizes the boat, killing one of their number and leaving them adrift on the wreck, matters become serious – enter the Aeolus, also out of nowhere. Its mysterious captain picks them up, ostensibly rescuing them – so who starts shooting them dead, and why? And why does it look as though everything has happened before?
It’s a very clever mind-bender – George finds out she’s doing the killing, or at least versions of her are. Are the friends caught in a time loop? Is an evil force hunting them down? Or is this a parable about a woman’s descent into madness? The acting by newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Rachel Carpani, Emma Lung, Michael Dorman and particularly George, is top-notch – everyone comes across as so normal, how could any of them be anything other than what they seem? Their rescue is infinitely repeated, whilst George keeps on killing, eventually realising the only way out of the cycle is for everyone including her to die. And that’s where the real horror sets in – Smith doesn’t ever come out and tell you exactly what’s been going on, but hints very strongly at just what tragedy and horror might drive George to punish herself for eternity. Rather than some eerie Bermuda Triangle effect, he suggests something much more creative entirely is going on. As many reviewers have noted already, ‘Triangle’ could easily fit as an episode of the ‘Twilight Zone’, and it’s an honest, if uncomfortable piece of work, which is leaps and bounds better than most horror out there now.
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