Bean There, Done That

You have to wait a very long time to see anything of merit in Mr Bean’s Holiday, the final installment of the long-running Rowan Atkinson franchise. It comes when Bean, after a long, unfunny trek through France, walks from a Cannes cinema across the roofs of a carefully arranged traffic jam and onto a golden beach, where he is joined by his entire cast for a sing-along to a French version of “Beyond The Sea”.

Before that, the film was unforgivably dull stuff; shambolic, warmed-over comedy doggerel. The mentally enfeebled, grunting Bean wins a trip to the south of France in a church raffle and sets off on his journey. Soon he has lost everything; passport, tickets, wallet, and has teamed up with a Russian child (Max Baldry) who has in turn become separated from his father at a train station. The two, unable to communicate with anything other than mime, then set off for their shared destination, knocking over things and falling on their faces as they go. It’s woefully timid knockabout farce, a brightly-lit background for a parade of short scenes, each worse than the last. It is a tired knock-off of Jaques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday, except this version has seven, count ‘em, credited screenwriters and a similarly lengthy procession of producers. Tati’s was a one-man show.

So it’s not funny, big surprise, but there are a couple of worrying scenes in the film, remarkable only for being so out of place. First, Bean finds himself employed as an extra on a film set where Nazis are invading a French town. It turns out the Third Reich are there to advertise yogurt in a commercial directed by temperamental egoist Carson Clay (Willem Defoe). Atkinson goose steps and salutes his way through this crass, deeply offensive slapstick, modelled after Chaplin in The Great Dictator, you’d have to suppose. It is all wrong.

Later, I was troubled by a short scene that has a suicidal man on a bridge take a call on his mobile from Bean (as part of a limp running gag) before jumping to his death. This kind of incident and imagery has no place in the Bean universe and is indicative of a pathology troubling cinema made for children. Simply put, the Irish censor should have requested the scene’s removal before granting the film a PG certificate.

Once In A Lifetime

John Carney’s musical Once, winner of audience awards at the Sundance and Dublin film festivals, is a delight, a wonderfully sincere and affecting musical told with rare charm. The last time we saw Frames front man Glen Hansard in the movies, he was Outspan Foster in Alan Parker’s The Commitments, busking for change in the film’s ‘where-are-they-now’ finale. Fifteen years later, Once opens with the rangy, bearded singer belting out a tune on Grafton Street, his keening voice bouncing off the limestone as he grips his battered guitar. His unnamed character, dubbed The Guy in the press notes, lives at home with his supportive father (Bill Hodnett) above their Hoover repair shop, drinking tea in the twilight beside the range. He is a good son, helping out in the poky shop, picking up groceries, but behind Hansard’s cheerful, open attitude, he is hiding a broken heart, having being dumped by his girl (Marcella Plunkett) months before. He keeps her photo beside his bed and we see him going over holiday videos, recycling old memories and mementos for the last shreds of emotion.

Most days, he goes out to a spot on Grafton St, singing his quietly devastating songs about lost love and regret, while slowly formulating hopes for recording an album of his songs, moving to London and doing the rounds of the record companies. One day, a Czech immigrant girl, also unnamed but wonderfully played by Markéta Irglová, stops to listen, and the two strike up a friendship, drinking coffee and walking the streets together. He clearly likes her, but things aren’t that simple for her, supporting her mother and toddler daughter by selling flowers and working as a cleaner. Back in the Czech Republic, she was a musician, trained in the piano by her father. One afternoon, the two wander into Walton’s music store, sit at a piano that costs as much as a luxury car and play a song called Falling Slowly (from the album the two musicians recorded together called The Swell Season). It’s a terrific scene, making the case for the rest of the film in its vibrancy and simplicity and it’s poetic sense of live performance. As their relationship develops, so does the music, as he finds out more about her life in Dublin, her failing marriage and she offers the lovelorn busker something to dream about. Over the course of a week or so, the rapport they have found leads them to taking out a bank loan, conscripting a small backup band and recording an album together. And that’s about it for synopsis, except to say that throughout there are well judged, occasionally funny observations about modern urban Irish life, the immigrant experience and the struggle for artists to express themselves.

Carney and his cinematographer Tim Fleming (who also shot Niall Heery’s upcoming and not altogether dissimilar Small Engine Repair) take an unadorned, unaffected approach to the film’s photography, making good use of the digital video, natural light and practical interiors. A scene on Dalkey Hill, looking out over Dublin Bay, is a highlight, the two actors standing in eerie, three-dimensional sunlight. A later scene at a photographer's house party, where a round table of singers and musicians perform, is another standout. Once isn’t a pretty film, but it is soulful and delicate in its own way and always visually interesting.

It is impossible to be cynical about this film, or judge the performers too harshly, because this simple, unpretentious film is about a collection of songs, not scenes, a ‘video album’, according to the director. Carney, who used to play bass in The Frames, clearly trusted his cast to be able to play themselves, which is more or less what they are asked to do. They are both clearly talented musicians, happiest when performing and especially radiant when playing together, but neither of them would ask to be called actors and the straightforward story, which is mostly improvised, doesn’t make undue demands on them. When the script moves on, they visibly struggle, like in a long dialogue scene over a ride on a motorbike that falls badly flat or a clunky seduction scene.

In an age where blockbusters budget at least half their cost again for marketing, making expensive, attention-seeking noise to bully the audience, Once proves that good movies can stand quietly on their own merits. There is a danger that the Sundance win might overwhelm the film’s own simple ambitions, creating a heightened sense of expectation that it might struggle to meet, but taken for what it is, Carney’s film serves as a beacon for Irish filmmakers, proving that a small budget is no obstacle to a stout heart.

Glory Gives Herself To Those Who Dream Of Her

Zack Snyder’s extraordinary adaptation of Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel 300, based on the legendary defense of the Spartan city state at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., is a sweeping, blood-soaked epic, a suitably testosterone-drenched treatment of a heroic story and the boldest, most absorbing graphic novel-to-film transfer yet.

Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas as a half-mad, blood-thirsty force of nature, born to lead and unswerving in his devotion to the city and his men. In oppostion to the temple priests and his own senate, he assembles a guard of 300 to protect the city against the invading Persian hoard, led by the ‘god-king’ Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), determined to conquer the known world. There really isn’t much more to say about the story, as Leonidas places his forces in a narrow mountain pass, facing the Xerses’ massed ranks of real and unreal soldiers, with little by way of characterisation or sub-plotting to distract attention from the infernal momentum Snyder creates. Back in Sparta, the loyal Queen is desperate to get the Senate to send reinforcements. Standing in her way is Theron (a slimy Dominic West), who argues that his war against the Persians is wrong and that following the king will destroy Sparta. Mention of illegal wars that originate in the Middle East, where a brave few defend a way of life is certain to echo with today’s headlines, but I don’t believe the film is intended as a metaphor for the US war in Iraq.

Balancing the narrated code of military duty is the sheer physicality of the men themselves, bare-chested save for vibrant red-capes, bearded slabs of fighting beef armed to the teeth and highly drilled in defense and attack. Snyder, who filmed his actors against a green-screen and employed a team of artists to fill in the backgrounds, has crafted a jaw-dropping dream-scape filled with indelible images and audacious action. It is a brilliant achievement for the young director, on only his second film.

The scale of what the Spartans face is astonishingly realised, hundreds of thousands of invading Persians; bowmen that darken the sky with a rain of arrows, masked sword-wielding monsters with impossible agility, enormous war-elephants and rhinoceros and finally, the ‘god-king’ Xerses himself (androgenously played by Roderigo Santoro), a smooth-talking demon with unquenchable ambition. Outnumbered by a thousand to one, the Spartans dig in and hold their lines as the Persians throw everything at them. It makes for a spectacular hour of cinema.

By using Miller’s beautifully rendered comic as a storyboard, Snyder remains faithful to his source material, which will please fans, while at the same time bringing a series of static images to life. This is not cinema in the traditional sense, poised somewhere between animation and photography as a series of slow-motion tableaux, but there is no mistaking its power and immediacy. Every time Snyder focuses on an individual engagement, he slows down the action to focus on the detail and movement of the players in an arrestingly artful and fantastically choreographed series of seat-gripping fights. Amidst the mayhem, the body-count increases exponentially but the slaughter is rendered in a fantastic, as opposed to realistic, manner; computerised blood-splatter falling across the screen as limbs and heads tumble. This is a legendary tale, a half-remembered vivid dream, told in a fierce and frantic fit, not a history lesson.

The bleached-out visuals, computerised gore and arch styling of the film lessens it’s nauseating impact, and allows Snyder free reign to show the battle in crimson detail without freaking out his audience. This approach, like tapestries or pottery brought to life, creates a beguiling distance; between reality and storytelling, physicality and description, that the director uses to underline the generational nature of the story, emphasizing the gap between today’s minutely recorded history and the sweeping sagas of classical mythology. 300 is very good, in spite of all the people that are saying it is very good. Although it will take a few minutes to get your breath back, be sure to stay in your seat for the beautifully animated end credits.

Love in the Time of Corsetry

In Becoming Jane, the implausibly beautiful American actress Anne Hathaway plays the famously virginal British author Jane Austen in this finely realised period biopic that tells the story of her graduation to Regency society novelist and speculates, entirely within the bounds of possibility, on a romance with a dashing young Irish lawyer, Tom LeFroy played with his usual charm and effervescence by James McAvoy.

We are introduced to the willful young Jane as she wanders her family’s garden at dawn, restlessly searching for inspiration to finish one of her stories. Her sister Cassandra (Anna Maxwell Martin) has just become engaged to marry a young vicar, a match approved by her father (James Cromwell) and mother (Julie Walters). The cash-strapped family are now looking to offload their difficult, headstrong second daughter, casting their eye over John Warren (Leo Bill) the heir to the fortune of a wealthy relative (played with unquestionable authority by Maggie Smith).

Enter the penniless London lawyer Le Froy, sent by his uncle and benefactor Langolis (the late Ian Richardson) ‘deep into the countryside’, to keep him out of trouble. Le Froy, unused to the tranquility of rural life, challenges the young Jane’s sense of propriety, and criticizes her fanciful writing, telling her that ‘experience is everything’. The relationship between Hathaway and McAvoy is the film’s central story, and just like the sparks that fly between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, the two match each other in wit and wordplay, dancing around one another in a gradually escalating dynamic that perfectly matches the film’s own sense of restraint and duty.

The early flirtations, corseted by propriety and as formal as the square dances they enjoy, give way in the second half of the film to a moment of truth on return to London, where the young couple’s hopes of marriage are broken on cruel rocks. With nowhere else to turn to, they decide to abandon their duties and elope to Gretna Green, an act of desperation that has a considerable price, especially for the young lawyer who is entirely dependent on his uncle for his income. This section of the film is beautifully played and tremendously affecting, especially when the film takes us forward in time for a final meeting, where the former lovers shared sense of loss and regret is again, carefully and compassionately presented.

Filmed last year in Ireland, which has rarely looked better on film, and with an emphasis on natural light (occasionally making for a gloomy frame), Becoming Jane creates a natural, authentic portrait of the society these characters live in, making the most of the drab interiors of the Austen household and the dense autumnal landscapes. This recreation of the past is helped enormously by the sensitive photography of Eigil Bryld and the stitch-perfect costume design of Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh.

Whatever scholars might think of the stories historical inaccuracy and the liberties taken with the writer’s cherished heritage, there is nothing overtly impudent in the film, which might struggle to contain all of the elements it presents but takes care not to create a fanciful melodrama from it’s speculative origins. It is a romance certainly, a heart-tugging story of lost love and sad souls, but it rings true for the most part. In any event, historians and literary curators are not the best people to ask about mad love, restrained passions and the defiant maps strangled hearts would draw if they were let.

Where Julian Jarrold’s otherwise engaging film falls down is in its implication that without this brush with romance, the otherwise solitary Austen would not have had the wherewithal to write her six novels, in particular Pride & Prejudice which the film explicitly name-checks. This unfortunately direct notion, that the writer must experience the emotions they choose to employ in fiction, underpins the film but is less carefully handled than the stories other elements and pushes to one side the young woman’s own literary education and the vibrancy of her imagination.

Lynch Mob

Although any summary of David Lynch's new masterwork INLAND EMPIRE would be mostly conjecture, my impression of the the story, as presented in the more coherent early scenes, seemed to add up for the most part when remembered later. Nikki (Laura Dern) is a Hollywood actress who signs on to appear in a film, On High In Blue Tomorrows, directed by Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons) that she discovers is a remake of an Eastern European romantic melodrama, itself based on a folk tale, that was cursed by gypsies. As she and her co-star Devon Burke (Justin Theroux) rehearse their scenes, Nikki, as her character Sue, gets lost in a fugue state somewhere between reality and fiction. She is trapped in her character’s imagined life and forced to endure a downward spiral of terrifying experiences – facing abuse, isolation and death. At the same time, we are told in thumbnail scenes, the story of a Polish woman contemplating suicide in a lonely hotel room, we see clips from Lynch’s series of short films about a family of half-human rabbits (first shown on the director’s website), scenes shot in Poland from what at first appears to be an entirely different time-line, and, finally, extracts from the film-within-the-film, as shot by Irons.

INLAND EMPIRE is a film better suited to a geographer or a cartographer than a critic. In his 179 minute running time, Lynch creates and explores hundreds of seemingly unconnected spaces, physical and mental, on which dramatic entrances and exits are continually being made. There are elaborate mansions, poky garrets, sound stages and suburban houses, connected by doors that open in one place, and close in another. Taken together, the map drawn would reveal marked sites of annunciation and declaration, extreme violence and physical intimacy. The only key Lynch gives us to the journey is a small red lamp, which the director returns to again and again, a tantalizing symbol of, well, I’m not entirely certain, but it isn’t good.

The film, Lynch’s first in five years and one he struggled to complete outside of the studio system, is also his first to be shot on digital video and it looks terrific. After an extraordinarily beautiful opening sequence, a controlled collision of light and sound, Lynch uses the varied tone and new textures of the format with uncanny mastery, cutting from his roaming, hand-held camera to tightly focused close-ups, sometimes distorting or rearranging the images to add a sometimes frightening impact. The sound design, like in all of the director’s films, is wonderfully immersive and evocative, featuring snatches of radio, crackling musical extracts, low-frequency hums and barking, disembodied dialogue.

Lynch is playing around with his own obsessions – adultery, violence, colour, identity and narrative time, and concurrently, with the audiences perceptions of image and story, creating a deeply layered, forbiddingly dense moebius strip that doubles back upon itself, creating its own logical loops regardless of the formal expectations of a film. Whatever his objective with INLAND EMPIRE, difficult to discern with any confidence on the basis of a single viewing, Lynch has the perfect conduit for his expression in Laura Dern, who gives a phenomenal performance here, constantly on the edge of collapse, gut-wrenchingly honest and bare as her character’s identity dissolves. An angry monologue late in the story, reflecting a similar snarled rant from Naomi Watts in Mulholland Dr., is astonishing both for its emotional immediacy and its formal, theatrical, technique. Without Dern, there would be no film, just pictures and postures.

After almost three hours of the darkest storytelling, Lynch confounds expectations by staging a musical finale, having his cast (joined by, among other alumni, Laura Harring from Mulholland Dr.) dance around an ornate living room to Nina Simone’s ‘Sinnerman’. This joyous ten-minute scene, one of the most uplifting in the director’s career, plays out under the closing credits and seems more like a wrap-party than a resolution, underlining Lynch’s tangled theme of celebrating his actresses and their characters, a smiling apology for the sadistic trails he has them endure for the sake of their collaboration and his art.

Pauline Kael Collected Reviews

I've read and enjoyed a few paperback collections of Pauline Kael's [wiki] authoritative, provocative film criticism over the years, and found the few included in Philip Lopate's American Movie Critics anthology whetted my appetite for more. Lucky then that, after digesting his surgical analysis of Borat, I came across a post about an online collection of Kael's writing on Pacze Moj's Critical Culture blog.

I join Pacze in offering excelsior to the anonymous page author, who has arranged over 2,800 of the great woman's capsule reviews in a very readable, no-frills way that is well worth a couple of your boss's working hours. It's a real find, and is available here.

Vanishing Point

From the early silent films of conjurer Georges Méliès, through to enthusiastic amateur thaumaturge Orson Welles, all the way up to 2006’s dense and tricksy The Prestige, stage magic and cinema have cast a closely linked spell of illusion and amazement. The Illusionist, a bewitching film from writer director Neil Burger, adapted from a short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steven Millhauser, spins a complicated, precisely crafted tale of love and necromancy set in a brilliantly recreated early 20^th Century Vienna. Edward Norton, who doesn’t make films often enough for my liking, plays the mysterious Eisenheim, a celebrated stage magician who falls in love with Sophie Von Teschen (played surprisingly well by Jessica Biel), a woman well above him in the cities social standing. She is in fact, a duchess who is engaged to be married to the Crown Prince Leopold of Austria (Rufus Sewell), a political rather then romantic match.

A brief prologue to these events fill in the background to the story. Eisenheim (the son of a carpenter) and Sophie were in fact teenage lovers before her high-born obligations forced an unkind separation. Years later, after Eisenheim has traveled the world educating himself in the dark arts and growing a natty goatee, he returns to the Austrian city and causes a sensation with his dazzling act. His seemingly supernatural performances, especially his manifestations of spirits, bring him to the attention of the Chief of Police Uhl (Paul Giamatti), who is sympathetic to the magician’s plight, but loyal to his commander, the conniving Crown Prince, who wants his show shut down and the magician ‘disappeared’.

From that finely judged opening, the film’s second half creates a dense, enjoyably deceptive scenario, where both sides and their individual motivations collide. Eisenheim, despite frequent and increasingly sinister warnings, refuses to close his show or drop his pursuit of the beautiful Sophie. Uhl and the Prince, likewise, are engaged in a dangerous game of international politics, attempting to merge the Austrian empire with Sophie’s native Hungarian kingdom. Initially intrigued by the dark-eyed magician, even inviting him to the palace for a command performance, the Prince is embarrassed in front of his peers when he cannot figure out the deceptions behind his tricks and charged his Inspector Uhl with bringing him down a peg. This denouement arrives when Eisenheim appears to mock God and bring the dead back to life for the entertainment of the crowd. Uhl is forced to act, arresting the magician in a show of force and forcing the magician to act in order to save his love and his life.

Norton plays the remote, almost silent illusionist with typical power and prowess. Although he appears aloof and almost superhumanly different, glowering from behind heavy brows and muttering incantations, he is motivated by simple love. Opposite him, the stunning Biel plays the Duchess with a previously unsuspected facility, tortured by her position and graceful in her dealings with the arrogant, vulgar Prince. Best of the ensemble, again, is Giamatti, who brings a sly dignity to his detective work, even if he is required to fall into the background by the slight-of-hand story, which occasionally makes more than it should out of it’s narrative misdirections. Director Burger shows a keen eye for simple delight in presenting the film's many illusions, complicated computer-generated scenes, like sprouting lemon trees or magic mirrors. There is more all-encompassing joy to be found in the painstaking recreation of turn of the century Vienna (actually Prague) and in the artful costuming and polished cinematography, all of which add considerably to the picture’s evocative charm.

Cinema itself is a kind of magic, and storytelling a technique similarly dependent on timing and precision, making The Illusionist, right up until its convoluted final revelations, an elegant, heady mix of disbelief and entertainment.

Lipstick Lackwits

I have seen all of Hilary Duff’s movies, a fact I keep in reserve for those occasions when people at parties tell me they’d love to do my job. Taken together, the squeaky blonde teen idol’s biannual offerings constitute one of the more baffling and repugnant bodies of work in modern movies; she is an actress of extraordinary limitations, unable to deliver a line or communicate the simplest of emotions, a talent created by photography and marketing. In Material Girls she is joined by her older sister and fellow dullard Haylie, forming a demonic cabal of itchy-looking hair and tombstone dentistry to which the only correct response is to run, screaming.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the riches-to-rags story of two snooty heiresses, Tanzie and Amy, who lose their $100 million inheritance thanks to some shady dealings inside the cosmetics company founded by their saintly, now dead father. Their mother is now living in Egypt, under an assumed name, and who could blame her? Together, Dumb and Dumber must restore their good names and their company’s fortunes while smoking out the rat and finding romance.

Although the film, credited to three screenwriters, goes through the motions of narrative cinema, it is in actuality just another opportunity for the Duff sisters to play dress-up and act like spoiled bitches. This part of the movie the two play suspiciously well but later, when called upon to descend into the gutter, they go through the same clumsy, condescending trials endured by fellow abomination Lindsay Lohan in the identical Just My Luck; learning how the other half live by riding the bus and washing the dishes.

Unforgivably, this part of the asinine story has the two protagonists offer casual insults to everyone who comes into their orbit. They flee in terror from black men, they sneer at their Columbian nanny’s tiny apartment (filled with their hand-me-downs) and blithely treat innocent passers-by as servants. Vanity, racism and eletism aside, the most frightening aspect of Material Girls is the appearance of Angelica Houston as rival cosmetics tycoon, Fabiella. Her absurdly painted face just about hides a blush of crimson shame.