Web of Intrigue: Clooney on Syriana

You hear him coming long before he arrives, laughing with the PR girl in the corridor, making plans for his dinner, requesting tea with sugar and braying like a donkey at whatever unheard responses she gives. She might just be the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life but he doesn’t seem to notice. She’s gazing up at him, eyes dancing, as he tilts his head down attentively, nodding and clapping his hands. Then the heavy door closes and, with a big grin, he bounds across the room. His handshake is firm and warm, political almost, but there’s a friendly pat on the shoulder to make you feel at ease. “Hi, I’m George”, he says, somewhat unnecessarily. Then, with a wrinkle of polite concern on his face, he asks me if I want anything. “Tea? Cuppa coffee? Too early for a drink, isn’t it? You Irish? I’m Irish.” This is old-school charm, you see, not to be confused with smarm, sincere and easy and altogether 100% Kentucky proof. A regular guy just making sure everything is comfortable and happy before getting down to business. He looks sharp, fit as a flea, groomed to perfection and smiling away, not to himself and not because there’s anything particularly amusing, but to make you smile too. It works, how could it not? It worked on the girl in the corridor. It works on everybody. I should be writing this down, I’m thinking, as moments later I have a big beam on my face and a lukewarm cup of Dorchester tea in my hand. I’m also wondering how, in the few minutes we have, George Clooney is going to explain both himself and his new movie Syriana to me.

They say actors have two profiles, the good ones, anyway. They can turn their heads to the left or to the right and, depending on the light and the skill of the photographer, a totally different face will appear in the lens. There are, likewise, two George Clooney’s. One is the celebrity bachelor playboy; the 40-something prince of Hollywood’s new Rat Pack, a fixture in the tabloids and co-owner of a swanky Las Vegas casino. That Clooney makes disposable fluff like Ocean’s 12 and smirks at the paparazzi as he falls out of nightclubs. The other Clooney, the new Clooney, today’s Clooney, is a political philosopher agitated about the state of America, fluent in his anger and seeking to combine, somehow, the business of entertainment with a commitment to tackling social issues. The two personas appear to be diametrically opposed. So I ask him, which one is he? My reference to Las Vegas gets a grunt and a wave of his hand. He likes the other one better. “Can I be that one? The Philosopher Prince? And hey, why can’t I be both?” I tell him that, unfortunately, he needs to be pigeonholed. “I can see that”, he says, “well, first of all, the one thing I will never ever do, and you can mark my words here, is enter into politics. That is not an interesting world to me. But I do have an interest in political issues. My dad was a newsman. My mother was mayor of our home town in Kentucky. I grew up in that world and it’s been part of my whole life. But to answer your question, you can’t just come out and say ‘hey, everybody, listen to me, I’m an intellectual. I’m really smart’. Because the more you say that, the dumber you sound. So, I can’t define how people think of me. What you try to do is function as you always have and let the chips fall as they may.”

With Syriana and his own McCarthy-era broadcast journalism film Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney has, nevertheless, positioned himself as Hollywood’s pre-eminent liberal agitator, pricking America’s conscience through his choice of films and then, wherever possible, opening up the media attention the film attracts into a discourse about the state of his country. In short, he’s worried about it. In Syriana, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, a meandering sprawl of five separate storylines come together in a dense film that highlights America’s desperate greed for oil and the political corruption that enables that economy. Having gained 30 pounds (“ridiculously easily”) a lumbering, bearded Clooney slouches his way through the movie playing Bob Barnes, a tired and unhappy CIA agent, inspired by Bob Behr and based on his memoirs as an ‘operative’ working undercover in the Middle East, See No Evil. After assassinating two gunrunners, Barnes finds himself tasked by his superiors with killing a prominent Saudi prince who has granted gas-drilling rights to a Chinese company. Having failed in the attempt, Barnes returns to Washington where he is cut loose by his agency. Once back in Beirut, because he has nowhere else to go, the now-rogue Barnes is kidnapped and tortured. Left for dead, with no hope of return, he tries to prevent the CIA from ambushing the prince with an unmanned drone bomb. Under the advertising tag line “Everything Is Connected”, Gaghan, who penned Steven Soderbergh’s similarly wide-reaching narco-epic Traffic, tries to show us the various points of connection, a tangled, global network of corruption and greed. A businessman (played by Matt Damon) has gained influence with the ruling family of an oil-rich Gulf state and, on the other side, a US Government lawyer (played by Jeffrey Wright) becomes involved in the corruption investigation against a powerful Texan oil company over a drilling contract. In Saudi Arabia, an unemployed young Pakistani immigrant and his friend join a mosque which preaches a seductive form of jihad against the West, while deep in the background on both sides, dark forces exert their influence. It’s a thinker.

Even though Syriana has snagged a couple of Oscar nominations (for Clooney’s performance and writer/director Stephen Gaghan’s script), which should help sell it abroad, Clooney is honest about the tepid audience reaction to the film in America. “They didn’t really get it”, he says, with no apparent bitterness. “They thought it was too complicated. That’s the word I heard everywhere. Complicated. But you know what, the situation is confusing and it is complicated and as filmmakers, we can’t be afraid of that”. Clooney is certainly grateful for the stronger response in Europe, saying that we at least made an effort to understand the film. “But then”, he says, “It’s always different over here. Usually your questions have a bit of substance to them. In the US they are obsessed with the celebrity aspect of storytelling as opposed to the story itself, so its more ‘who are you dating now?’ or ‘what’s Brad Pitt really like?’ Both of which I’ll answer for you later…” There’s the booming laugh again. Sadly, I suppose, we never get back to either topic because I don’t get to ask an awful lot of questions but more because this George is interested in society, not celebrity. He wants to open people’s minds, not have them open People.

Was there a concerted effort to deal with these issues in these two films now, in particular? “I wasn’t trying to put these films together as an overall political message but at the same time, I’m not trying to separate them for you now”, he says. “The time was always right to make them and the truth is it’s totally coincidental that the two have come out so close together. Although I do think that there’s a social change going on the US where people are more interested in politics and issues again. Films naturally reflect that, but there was no conscious plan to hit the public with a one-two combination or anything”. More tea arrives. Clooney sips and is quiet for a moment. He nods his head, like he’s affirming what he’s going to say to himself before he says it. “Going back to what you said there about a change in direction for me, if you think about it, we did Three Kings back in 1998. That had a lot to say about the situation, and it was honest and forthright. Then, in 2002, in the lead up to the Second Gulf War, [the director] David O. Russell and myself tried to get it re-released in cinemas and we were told most firmly by the studio there was just no possibility of it happening. Something had changed. Now, we couldn’t make that film again, with the dialogue we had and the events we showed. We wouldn’t be allowed. My point is, it’s not just me, it’s an interesting time for filmmakers now in general and opinions are starting to get accepted again, like back in the 1970s, you know, when movies had something to say and it was OK for them to say it”.

What not acceptable, it appears, is raising debate in today’s America, especially if you’re one of the most famous celebrities on the planet. Clooney got roasted by the right-wing media when, in 2002, he criticised George W Bush and the war in Iraq. “Americans have a duty to ask questions of their government”, was his widely distributed quote. It’s a mild sentiment, more a reminder that the basis for democracy is openness and discussion than a call to arms. Nevertheless, he was branded a traitor by the neo-conservative political commentators and vilified for his work for the Democratic Party in supporting John Kerry in the last US election. Now he’s back, banging the same drum again. Didn’t he learn anything from that bad experience? “Well, first of all, it couldn’t get any worse than it was at the time in the lead-up to this war, where anyone who asked questions publicly was called unpatriotic and a traitor. I don’t fear that anymore, because it got pretty much as bad as it could get for me. I didn’t think there was any great risk to me personally, in the career sense, because our country was founded on questioning authority, although we don’t do it much anymore”. His comment lingers on the air for a moment. It seems to me like a glib generalisation, and this must have been a troubling time, so I ask him if there’s anything different about the way his message will be received today. “Well, I think the climate changed after Hurricane Katrina. The press in America for the first time took this President to task for his shortcomings”. “For the first time”, he repeats, emphasising his incredulity with a raised finger. The twinkle is gone for now. “There are a lot of moments from the years of this administration that appear laughable in retrospect. Like the Mission Accomplished photo shoot in the flight-suit on the aircraft carrier. Mission Accomplished? I mean, come on. Before then, Bush had gotten a pass because it’s perceived as being unpatriotic to go after a President during a time of war. But every other President in the history of the country had been held accountable for their mistakes and he had not. Katrina changed all that”.

Does he worry that presenting this side to the public, the boring old politics and the thinly-veiled moral lectures might be a turn-off for moviegoers, a bit of a drag? Especially when his message is filtered through the same media that Clooney is calling lazy and complicit? “No”, he says, emphatically. “The elements in the media that existed in 2003 in the lead up to the war were much more toxic than they are now. I’ve been very careful not to say ‘this is what you should believe’, but ‘this is what you should be allowed to ask’. I did it from the very beginning, and then Bill O’ Reilly [a rabid right-wing US political pundit] devotes a whole show to me, where he says my career is over because of my political views. Which, by the way, he doesn’t agree with. OK, fair enough. I can’t demand carte blanche and tell the press not to say bad things about me. I’ve got to take my hits. I’m a grown-up and I know what I’m getting myself into. But, as far as the American public goes, I’m not afraid at all because ultimately we are a pretty good country at fixing our mistakes. As I see it, we make mistakes when we attack civil liberties, when we fear talking freely and we are afraid to question authority. You go back to the beginning of our history as a country and the lesson you learn is that authority, unchecked, will be corrupt. That’s why you do it, to stave off the decay”.

This isn’t a rant. Clooney is no tub-thumper; even if he speaks very quickly, his voice is never raised and he remains perfectly composed. There’s no reason to stop him in mid-flow, so I don’t. “See, in America, we don’t know anything about foreign cultures, because we don’t have to. Before 9/11, if you asked 9 out of 10 Americans to distinguish between an Israeli and a Palestinian and, you know, point out those countries on a map, they couldn’t do it. They’d say ‘that’s all those angry guys over there in the Middle East’. Things have changed now and it’s become important for Americans to fill themselves in on the news”. But movies aren’t the news, I say. They’re movies. “Yes, but the good thing we do is to open up those regions and their stories to the public debate. The bad thing is that this sometimes leads to characterisations. It’s not my duty to speak for these nations, but it is my responsibility as a storyteller to portray people in the right way. I don’t want to do movies where the bad guys are all Arabs in headscarves brandishing AK47s. It’s a tricky situation. That’s part of the process of communicating a story to an audience. But the truth of the matter is we are saying ‘this is how the world works and these are the people that work it’. For me, our objective in the film, more than telling Bob Behr’s story, more than the oil corruption story, more than the politics, is that if you are going to have a war on terrorism, which is an idea, not a country that you can bomb, then you have to come to understand why those people do what they do. In our film we have these two young men who are attracted to the radical mosque, and at the end of the day they do something horrible. I think that watching these two young men is a step towards that understanding and the real issues behind the war. That’s the story I was interested in, much more so than the other issues, in making Syriana”.

Fuck, I say. That’s a lot of information to digest. “Yeah, well, take your time”, he says with a laugh and a grin and a twinkle and a clap on the back and you get it by now. Charm offensive maybe, but his punches are landing. “It is complicated. But I’ll say this, every time you underestimate an audience, you’ll be proved wrong. When we did the pilot for ER, years ago now, the two NBC executives there stood up and said ‘What the hell did you morons do with our three million dollars? No one understands what a ventricular arrhythmia is, why would they want to watch this?’ But my argument is that you get an impression, you get a visceral thing you can take away with you and consider later. Not everyone is going to get every twist and turn on the road here, but they’ll get it eventually”. God forbid, I say, that you might watch something unfamiliar that you might have to ask a few questions about later. “That’s the point”, he says. “That’s it exactly.” I ask him if he thinks President Bush would appreciate Syriana. “Bush? Maybe we’d have to use smaller words and lose the subtitles, but yeah, sure, he’d understand it. I don’t think necessarily that Bush is evil, by the way. I think he has a very fundamental religious belief and that he thinks he has a religious imperative to do the things that he wants to do. And that to me is dangerous in America, where we like to separate Church and State”.

We’re coming to the end of our time, and to be honest, I’m not much clearer on what Syriana is about, exactly, but to quote Roger Ebert, I’m a lot clearer on how it is about it. I’ve enjoyed talking with Clooney, he is genuinely genuine and likeable with it. He believes what he’s saying and appears at least, fearless in the face of his opponents. I’m wondering if he meant what he said about never going into politics, so I ask him if he is optimistic about the future of America? “I’m always optimistic because I believe that everything is cyclical. Going back to GN&GL, if I was around in 1954, when you had to whisper your thoughts, I would have thought that situation was an unbearably dark hole that we would never climb out of. But we did and we have since and we continue to do it constantly. When we get scared as Americans, we tend to do the stupid things that people do when they’re scared. But we pull out of it. The red witch-hunts passed, Bush will pass. We fix things and we evolve. Now the fear is that if you stick your neck out, you’ll have it cut off. I’ve had that treatment, and I survived it. Look at the times right now, where the administration says ‘we can spy on people whenever we like’, you can’t stop us and we don’t even have to tell anyone what we’re doing. Well, what’s the point of America then, what’s the union that we are protecting? You’ve got to be optimistic when you’re faced with that”.

Ole Ole Ole Ole

An on-form Pierce Brosnan comprehensively sheds his suave James Bond image and restores some faith in his career after a run of post-007 duds, with his comic turn as a watery-eyed hit-man on the verge of a nervous breakdown in The Matador. Brosnan plays Julian Noble, an alcoholic, wholly unreliable international assassin who is beginning to lose the run of himself.

While completing a mission in Mexico City he meets Danny (Greg Kinnear); a straight-laced, mildly successful businessman and suburbanite with a loving wife (Hope Davis), an SUV and even a white picket fence. They share a drink and a late-night conversation at a hotel bar. The next day, while at the bull fights, the lonely but charismatic Julian tells Danny what he does, and how he does it. Rather than freak out and run, Danny listens and talks to his desperate new friend, a lonely man who confesses, “I don't live anywhere” and has lost whatever social skills he once possessed. If Julian needs a friend, Danny needs some distraction from an equally grim financial situation. He is in Mexico to sign a last-ditch deal to save his fledgling company.

Six months later, back in Denver, the doorbell goes. Danny and his wife Bean (Hope Davis) have a visitor, the hitman, still falling to bits and telling the surprised businessman, something that most likely the truth, “You are my only friend in the world”. Having moved in, charmed Bean with flashes of his deadly charm and allowed himself to be cared for, Julian and Danny together attempt to fix his overwhelming problems, not least of which is that his former employers might be trying to eliminate him.

Brosnan is terrific, and it's hard for me to say that. I've seen Evelyn, Laws of Attraction and After The Sunset. I know exactly how bad a bad actor he can be. Here, though, he's brilliant, carrying the whole movie with deliciously ambiguous turn as the dangerous, unpredictable Julian. Witty and brave, with a scraggy beard and a vulpine smile, it’s a performance as surprising as it is entertaining. Kinnear and Davis as the married couple share a fun chemistry and a wholly believable relationship, thankfully never threatened by Julian’s unexpected arrival.

A delicate character study that manages to incorporate a buddy comedy, a clichéd thriller plot, elements of black comedy, exotic location shooting and slick action sequences, The Matador is clearly trying to do everything. In attempting the impossible, debutant director Richard Sheperd unsurprisingly misses some of his targets. Nevertheless, with interesting, offbeat characters spouting lively, original dialogue and a complicated but slow-burning plot, The Matador economically creates more than a few resonant moments and some fine jokes.

Cold Front

Success really can’t bring happiness in The Weather Man, a painstakingly developed and craftily poised character study that chronicles the mid-life crisis of a man whose personal life is in a shambles just as his professional life gains a new momentum.

Nicholas Cage, doing his downbeat everyman, plays Dave Spritz, a Chicago television weather man going through a mid-life crisis. His exasperated ex-wife (Hope Davis) has moved on with her life after their divorce and is in a relationship with a man that Dave can’t stand. Their two children are troubled. His overweight daughter (Gemmenne de la Pena) urgently needs social guidance and his teenage son (Nicolas Hoult from About a Boy) is remote and troubled. He’s also getting far too close to his creepy student counsellor (Gil Bellows). Most painfully, his father (Michael Caine), Robert Spritz, an acclaimed writer, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. David does not value himself, much less his profession. Maybe people discern that from his permanently smiling face, which is why they throw fast food at him from passing cars. They can tell that he’s a self-loathing loser, a miserable failure and the object of his own contempt.

Some of Dave’s inadequacy can be traced to his father Robert (Michael Caine), a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, the toast of the Chicago literary set, who cannot hide his disappointment in his only son. It’s not that Dave is on TV discussing the weather, it’s that he’s just reading out the information. He’s not a qualified meteorologist and has no ambition to become one. For his part, Robert is coming to terms with his sad news and is desperate to teach his floundering son some life lessons. “Do you know,” he asks, “that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing?” With his life in a shambles and his spirits sinking lower than the November barometer, Dave leans something nobody on television should ever learn, that he is artificial. The knowledge almost kills him.

The film was directed by Gore Verbinski, who previously made The Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring, and like Cage, isn’t someone you’d pick for the material. He does well, setting a suitably frosty mood through some inspired photography and some delicately emotional scenes. He also makes room for a little levity, through some funny wordplay and tellingly suburban comedy of embarrassment, but only a little. The atmosphere otherwise is gloomy and contemplative. The scenes between Cage and Caine are by far the films most effective, Cage’s existential uncertainty playing beautifully against Caine’s icy, bourgeoisie self-control. As a character essay about inadequacy and the emasculation of the modern man, The Weather Man predicts a chilly forecast, with too little sunshine to fully recommend.

Slevin Blides Flor Slevin Blothers

Rivalling Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants for “Stupidest Title For A Movie”, Lucky Number Slevin isn’t the sloppily-spelled biopic of former Republic of Ireland midfielder Bernie Slavin, but a sub-Tarantino mistaken-identity crime caper from Scottish director Paul McGuigan (Wicker Park) that is ocassionally as violent and funny as you’d expect from this tired old genre, but isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is.

Opening with a series on non-linear vignettes that flit between a man losing his shirt at a racetrack in 1979, a man in a wheelchair telling a stranger a story at an airport and an unseen assassin killing a gangster outside a hotel, the film finally settles down long enough to concentrate on the arrival in New York of a young man named Slevin (Josh Hartnett). Arriving at the apartment, he gets mistaken for his absent friend Nick and dragged before a multi-millionaire gang leader called, simply, The Boss (Morgan Freeman). The Boss likes to talk about a 1950’s cartoon character called The Schmoo, who could change into anything that was required, and play chess. He is involved in an escalating war of attrition with his fellow gangster, neighbour and former friend The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley, here billed as Sir Ben Kingsley). The Boss wants Slevin to pay off a gambling debt by killing the Rabbi's son, the Fairy. Meanwhile, an almost-silent hit-man named Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis) turns up around the fringes, stepping out of shadows at opportune moments, as does a narrow-eyed cop (Stanley Tucci), who has both crime lords under constant surveillance. Lucy Liu is perky neighbour Lindsay, who plays at being an amateur detective while developing a cute crush on the battered Slevin.

Although the movie does keep you guessing, and reasonably entertained up to a point, there’s a sense that no matter how many hip pop references or slick touches are applied to it, the thing couldn't ever pay off in the way McGuigan so desperately wants it to. It’s just not there in the writing, which delights in its own complication and self-reference, but is unmistakably shallow and underdeveloped. Liu's spicy turn aside, there's nothing in the way of distraction from the not unobvious central story. McGuigan has been studying his Coppola and his Scorsese, but his results are more an homage to Guy Ritchie, himself a slavering thief, with every flavour of camera movement and jump cut employed to give much-needed pep to the criminal goings-on. What energy and fizz created in the telling doesn’t entirely make up for the film’s abrupt swerve in direction in the last act, where the smirking jokes and fluent smart-mouth are gradually revealed to disguise a sloppy lecture about complicity, revenge, wronged men and honour amongst thieves.

Sympathy For The Devil

Acclaimed Korean director Park Chan-wook completes his trilogy of operatic revenge films on a high note with the dreamlike Lady Vengeance. If your dreams feature dismemberment and coffee cake, that is. Following the themes of redemption and justice established in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and OldBoy, this time the story revolves around a young woman named Geum-ja (played by Lee Young-ae), recently released from prison having served 13 years for a notorious crime, the kidnap and murder of a young boy. The timid, religious girl that went in is a very different woman now, having spent the 13 cramped years festering in spite and plotting a complex plan. Once on the outside, she shuns her family, the rabid media attention and the creepy Christian group that helped her get parole. Using her prison contacts and keen sense of cunning, she constructs her suitably elaborate and vicious revenge, focused on one man, the evil schoolteacher Mr. Baek (Choi Min-shik from OldBoy). Reunited with her own teenage daughter, fostered in Australia, and armed with a mysterious, custom-made revolver, Geum-ja sets about her task with relish..

Stylish and eclectic, Park has an idiosyncratic, wholly successful visual sense and uses his camera flamboyantly, giving Lady Vengeance a brilliantly crunchy texture. We get swooping, impossible camera movements, vibrant special effects and the occasional moment of wild surrealism, like a man’s head on a dog’s body. It is all beautiful, even the violence, which has been toned down from the baroque excesses of OldBoy, but not by much. Displaying every trick in his virtuoso hand, Park uses dense flashbacks, and whimsical sub-plots to give his characters sometimes conflicting depth and background in his bizarre world. The ensemble cast, many making return appearances in the series, are all on top form. Funny, creepy and enjoyably dark-hearted, Lady Vengeance isn't quite the mind-blowing experience that OldBoy provided, but is a fitting end to a masterpiece trilogy.

Flux That

Hard-won reputations take a serious kicking in Aeon Flux, with Charlize Theron following fellow Best Actress Oscar winner, Catwoman Halle Berry into the career-threatening high-wire genre of the female action superhero with similarly disastrous results.

Sometime soon, all bar five million or so of the world’s population is wiped out by a deadly virus. 400 years later, those few survivors live in a seemingly utopian society called Bregna run by Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas), a scientific genius who created the vaccine that saved humanity, and his brother Oren (Johnny Lee Miller). They keep a tight grip on the population via a combination of Big Brother surveillance and heavy-handed military force. The architecture all looks very high-tech, and the fashions are suitably evolved, but there is trouble in paradise and people are starting to disappear. The deadly assassin Aeon Flux (Theron) is part of a rebel group named the Monicans, led by The Handler (Frances McDormand), who have secret meetings in a courtroom inside their brains. Aeon has a sidekick, Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo), who has hands instead of feet. Hang on, I’m nearly finished. When Aeon and Sithandra are sent on a mission to kill Trevor (Trevor?), they must dodge killer grass and beehives that shoot arrows before, not unexpectedly, uncovering a vast government conspiracy and an earth-shattering secret.

The future really is grim. Grim and stupid. Sometimes what works in animation, just like what satisfies about other two dimensional art forms like graphic novels and video games, just doesn’t translate into film. This is one of those times, and far from the only one. Theron looks great in the costume, but man alive, when she’s called upon to speak the lines. She’s not alone; it is sobering to see how such a talented cast can be so spectacularly wasted. Worse is how howlingly bad they are individually, each more uncomfortable and stilted and confused looking than the last. The unadventurous direction, from Girlfight’s Karyn Kusama is either ponderous or frantic but altogether bewilderingly shoddy and half-hearted. The original Aeon Flux was visceral and visually arresting, but as usual, all the juice has been sucked out of the property for the big-screen, big-money gamble and what remains is the bitter rind. That loss might not be all Kusama’s fault, but without soul or energy, her film collapses into a spectacularly muddled assembly of nasty special effects, witless plot twists and Power Ranger’s-outtakes standard action sequences. Chasing the all-important young teenage male demographic, Theron does cartwheels in tight black leather for ninety minutes. She even climbs a few ladders. They won’t want to miss that. For anyone else, you will.

A Warning From History

George Clooney's second picture as a director, the succinct and unpretentious Good Night, and Good Luck, is a modest movie, in scale, cost and running-time, but a huge film in terms of its message and relevance to today’s news media. It tells the story of a key chapter in American political life, the Communist witch hunt conducted by the paranoid, power-hungry Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and the efforts of television journalist Edward R. Murrow, played by David Strathrain, and his team of news producers, including Clooney as Fred Friendly, to expose him as a liar and a fraud. Murrow’s sense of decency and justice is offended by McCarthy and his cronies and in saying as much, he threatened his own position and that of his company, CBS. He is vilified by McCarthy’s supporters, his own management and by sponsors, who abandon the station as soon as the controversy breaks.

In framing the meat of his story between two snippets of a brilliant cautionary speech about the importance of an independent media that Murrow delivered at a dinner in his honour, Clooney presents his key episode as an almost surgical procedure – a group of right minded people in a position to do something who fight the tide of popular opinion and commercial pressure and fear of exposure to remove a malignant presence from the body politic.

Strathrain, a renowned theatre actor and veteran of almost 80 films but still a relatively unfamiliar face, is excellent as Murrow, suave and cool on the exterior but burning with a righteous fire of indignation underneath. Clooney plays Murrow’s dedicated producer Fred Friendly, with Frank Langella, Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson making the strongest impressions from the remainder of the large ensemble cast. The other central character is McCarthy himself, and Clooney masterstroke is having the sweaty, charmless Senator play himself, using actual archive footage to damning effect. That the movie is entirely about 50 year old politics and the early days of the American television news business might discourage Irish audiences from seeking it out. But the movie is not really about the McCarthy and his pernicious influence, rather the rightminded way in which Murrow and his team eventually engineered his downfall. Far from a bitter polemic, the film is a morality play, as relevant and important to today’s international politics and the business of reporting the truth as it is a lovingly-crafted period drama.

McCarthy's flickering presence aside, Clooney does some interesting things as a director. In shooting in glorious black & white and expending considerable energy in getting his atmosphere and production design just right, Clooney is refusing to colourise the 1950s. This isn’t ironic homage, a Technicolour trip down memory lane, its straight reportage related with a dispassionate eye and attention to detail.

The story, about tough, principled men forced by a shift in politics to make a stand, to do the hard thing in an uncertain situation, is as much a call to arms for today’s society as an opportunity to revisit the past for guidance. Clooney keeps his camera tight to create intimacy and immediacy, and his script pared down to avoid confusion. He skilfully creates an attentive calm around his key moments, provoking the audience into joining the dots between what happened 50 years ago and what is happening today in terms of press freedom and civil liberties. The film’s message is crystal clear, bullies must be stopped and liars exposed.

Heavy Jelly

A skinny black man dresses up as a fat, googley-eyed black grandmother, does a series of dirty-minded Uncle Tom skits that would have Hattie McDaniel choking on her popcorn and calls it a kid’s movie. So what? In the world of comedy, political correctness means nothing. You should be able to laugh at anybody and everybody. Anybody except Martin Lawrence.

Big Momma’s House 2 is an awful film, but it’s not because of the depressingly derivative story and bargain-basement production values. It’s not even the pitiful performances from the cast and clueless directing. And it’s not because Big Momma reinforces racial stereotypes that were embarrassing when presented in Tom & Jerry cartoons in the 1940s. None of that would matter a damn if Lawrence himself was funny. Let there be no confusion, he’s not. Not one bit. If anything, for this desperate sequel, he’s twice as unfunny.

Six years on from the character's first outing, Lawrence’s FBI agent Malcolm finds himself working undercover as a nanny for a family caught up in a murder case, an international spy-ring and a cheerleading competition. Uptight Mommy (Emily Procter) is overprotective and regimented. Absent Daddy (Mark Moses) is a boffin who’s a threat to National Security. I could try to relate the rest of the plot, but like an eye-witness to a road accident, my testimony might not make much sense after the fact. I remember there were lots of colours and loud noises. There was a dog that got drunk and one cute kid that fell down a lot and a chase scene at the beach. Big Momma shouts all the time you see, and it’s hard to stop yourself from wincing, so I might have missed a few things.

In short, entirely as you’d expect from this genre of former star relegated to ‘family’ slapsticks, the results are blatantly contrived, astonishingly vulgar and designed only to serve the Lawks-A-Mercy antics of the gurning lead. The bar doesn’t go any lower. At the risk of sounding hysterical, Big Momma’s House 2 is final proof that God is dead and that the world He leaves behind is monstrous beyond comprehension.

The Irish Blog Awards

Confessions is one of fourteen blogs up for nomination at the Irish Blog Awards on the 11th of March under the heading Best Arts & Culture. I'm as surprised as you are.

Cast a vote for me, and visit some other Irish blogs in a load of different categories at the awards website. You can go back and vote for them later...

And it burns, burns, burns

Based on Johnny Cash’s own autobiography and developed with considerable input from himself and his wife June up until their deaths in 2003, James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted) tells the first part of the story of a legendary life in music with astonishing power and sensitivity. Superficially, Walk the Line follows the same, tried and tested tracks of other musical biopics, but perhaps because many musicians have the same story to tell; hard times, the struggle for success and recognition, drugs, alcohol, rehab and redemption, their stories can’t help but resemble each other.

Although JR Cash’s poor childhood in rural Arkansas is quickly told, Mangold does manage to establish three key elements of his subject’s troubled personality. We discover the impact the tragic death of his beloved older brother had on his life, that his alcoholism was likely hereditary and that his father's lifelong animosity towards him scarred him deeply. “The Devil did this,” Ray Cash (played with devastating meanness by the excellent Robert Patrick) shouts. “He took the wrong son.” And you wonder why he wore black? After a tour of duty with the Army in Germany, Cash returned to the US to marry his sweetheart Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), and raise their daughter. It’s just as Cash is unhappy with the direction his life has taken, and struggling to establish himself as a musician, that the film kicks into life, in an altogether rattling scene that sustains the momentum through to the finale in Fulsom Prison.

When a combination of luck and desperate persistence gets Johnny Cash and his part-time back-up band an audition at Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts) legendary Sun Records in Memphis, things don’t go according to plan. The trio pick out an uncomfortable, altogether amateur version of an old gospel standard with Cash yodelling away like coyote. Phillips, unimpressed, asks them if they have anything original for him. With the other two following his lead, and with a nervous cough, Cash sings Folsom Prison Blues, a plaintive country song he’d written when stationed in Germany as a GI. It’s in the process of delivering this sad song about regret, with his dreams of a musical career disappearing over the horizon and an angry wife at home, that Phoenix undergoes a stunning metamorphosis. He shifts his stance a little, addresses the microphone with a jutting chin and grips his guitar with a new fervour. It’s like he hates it, and himself for playing it. The young Cash’s desire to perform and to touch people with music has embarrassed him again, but maybe for the last time. Phoenix starts the song as JR, a broke door-to-door salesman and ends it as Johnny Cash. An immortal.

After signing with Sun, Johnny and the boys set off on a seemingly endless town to town tour of the American south, along with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, driving a caravan of cars filled with amplifiers from town to town, popping amphetamine pills to keep going. Also on the tour is June Carter, one of a famous family of country singers, with she and the intense Cash quickly sparking a mutual attraction. But Johnny is married, and June is recently divorced and unwilling to get involved. Despite his frequent declarations of love, June keeps him at arms-length for years. At its heart, Walk the Line is a love story, as sizzling and passionate on screen as it was in real life. Perhaps his story ends in 1968 because the two stayed devoted to each other for the remaining 35 years of their lives, but Mangold draws out this tangled relationship beautifully, without ever becoming mawkish or sentimental.

Despite being an outstanding musician, Cash was also an adulterer and an addict. To the film’s enormous credit, Mangold doesn’t pull his punches for the sake of audience sympathy. This is entirely fitting for Cash, a man who sang about his troubles and the trouble he caused so directly and so eloquently and so simply. In his autobiography, Chronicles, Bob Dylan paid homage to Johnny Cash and his music, saying that the Man in Black’s throaty growl “was so big, it made the world grow small.” In taking on that voice, and approximating the man who held it, Joaquin Phoenix delivers a startlingly good performance that never once turns into an imitation. He is note-perfect, but the film’s energy and heart come from Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash. She positively lights up the screen with every scene, matching Phoenix’s furrowed fervour snarl for snarl. The chemistry between them is palpable, which Mangold uses to fashion an immensely believable and compelling story. Like that startling instant, when Johnny Cash finds his voice, (“steady like a train, sharp like a razor,” as June later described it), this is a film full of riveting thumbnails; a bass guitar with the chords written on the fretboard, the first time Phoenix slings his guitar back on his shoulder, Jerry Lee Lewis’ leopard-skin collars.
Two scenes are particularly memorable, sketching the time and place with a keen eye and heart. An encounter the twice-divorced June has in a rural shop with a sharp-tongued bigot is powerfully written and brilliantly performed. Later, Cash wakes up on a tour bus and in stumbling past his sleeping guitarist Luther Perkins, plucks a cigarette out of his mouth. In real life, just months later, Perkins died in a fire in his Tennessee home, having done the same thing again.

Famously, both Phoenix and Witherspoon sang all the songs and played their own instruments, with the supporting cast playing legendary rock and rollers likewise performing their own music. Mangold employed the talented music producer T-Bone Burnett (who worked on O Brother, Where Art Thou?) to record these performances, uncannily capturing the growling voice and wild mood without ever feeling like karaoke. Although the songs (including Ring of Fire) have gone on to become familiar country standards, Burnett and the cast give them a revitalising new snap and tremendous naturalism, with Witherspoon in particular coming to life when she takes the stage. Phoenix is hugely impressive as Cash, a man often called inimitable, and Mangold stages the many musical performances with energy and meaning. Although the story itself occasionally walks the line between audience-pleasing convention and damn-them-all rebellion, in the end it is the combination of great music and phenomenal performances from both leads that makes it unmissable. It is a fitting tribute to the life and music of an immensely talented, but all too human, cultural icon.

Brave New World

Idyllic images of swimmers coursing through sparking waters open American director Terence Malick’s new film, The New World, only his fourth in a career spanning thirty years, but a beautiful and wholly individual take on the familiar Thanksgiving legends that surround the establishment of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, the first stage of what became America. That the music accompanying the swimmers is Wagner's ‘Das Rheingold’, German chamber music, will indicate to attentive viewers (and you have to pay attention to Malick) that the director is laying the ground for the head-spinning clash of cultures the exploring English encountered and exploring the way those two worlds collided until, as we now know, one engulfed and destroyed the other.

Malick frames his point in a triangular love story, with the pivot being the Native American princess Pocahontas (although she's never referred to by that name), played by the astonishing teenage newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher, and the two very different settlers she loves. On one side is the bedraggled Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell), among the first arrivals and a proto-Renaissance man who quickly learns to respect and admire the “naturals”. Politics and society however, conspire to separate the two, just as their relationship offers hope of peace and mutual assistance between the starving settlers and the suspicious native people. With Smith otherwise occupied, by order of the King, Malick introduces John Rolfe, played with tremendous delicacy by Christian Bale, a wealthy tobacco plantation owner, who Rachel, as she is now known, marries and bears a son by. Various fleeting subplots surround the central story, represented by crazed priests, politicians and starving settlers. As with The Thin Red Line, the ensemble of actors pop up here and there, some barely registering in their couple of scenes while others disappear altogether into the background. Nothing is explored in too much depth, because the thing would be three days long if they were. Better to use short scenes and moments of metaphysical poetry to communicate the chaos on both sides.

Splitting the worlds, and the heart of the cast, is the ethereal Kilcher; a tremendous, wide-eyed presence, brimming with heart and youth, and soul when required. When lathered in Disney's anti-bacterial soap, Pocahontas became little more than a cute metaphor for an unspoiled land, a kind of Earth Mother totem pole; but Malick, a philosopher as much as a filmmaker, allows Kilcher to deliver a remarkably assured and natural performance as a real person, not only reclaimed but re-animated from the popular cartoon. For her more seasoned co-stars, this cannot have been an easy film to make, but Farrell and Bale both provide sterling support, with the Dubliner delivering his most natural and compelling performance since his debut turn in Tigerland. Around them nature, light and sound, is as much a character, with the physical landscape literally breathing before us through a beautifully judged ambient soundtrack.

Although some story elements are entirely fiction, Malick has gone to tremendous efforts to ensure his film is absolutely as it was 400 years ago in every other regard. He filmed along the Chickahominy River, very close to the original Jamestown settlement. His rough-hewn, hand-built sets, realistic costumes and armoury help to ground the carefully constructed atmosphere and dreamlike mood. Visually, Malick and his ace cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present a deluge of arresting and original images, brought to the screen without the aid of electric lighting. The results might not have the same heavenly glow of his other pictures, but it was a brave move, totally in keeping with his requirement for realism. Malick can make a kennel look like a cathedral, and his film is a masterclass in crafting a story from little more than light and magic.

Maybe it’s just as well its beautiful and absorbing, because there is very little spoken dialogue. I didn’t mind the silences (not least because there are very few real silences - there's a gentle ambient sound track throughout). I found it oddly dreamlike, as I expected, but entirely involving, which I didn't. As he does, Malick also fills his gaps with murmured voiceovers; snatches of thoughts or diaries that might not tell us much more about the story, but drag you into the characters head, adding a rich complexity to what we do know.

The film builds to a fascinating last act, with Rachel and Rolfe summoned back to England to meet the King. This development provides the film’s emotional heart, with Rachel wandering through a finely realised London, it’s wet, grey streets and heaving crowds with the lush forests. Those who know the story know what happened next, with Malick choosing devastatingly effective shots of a freshly made, empty bed and a still, darkened Native face to represent his conclusion, a moment that sings off the screen with heart and wisdom and genuine emotion.

As in the similarly themed WWII morality tale Thin Red Line, where humans fight a vicious war against the backdrop of a shrugging natural world, Malick is telling a traditional American cinema story in his own, decidedly non-traditional way. In allowing the camera to linger unhurriedly, occasionally for longer than the viewers gaze can hold, or in cutting to a random scene of brutality or madness, Malick is making his film exactly as he wants to. Bitching about its exorbitant running time and narrative longueurs is to miss the whole point. If it was any different, it’d be another man’s film. Something else altogether, and a lesser thing at that.

The way commercial movies are constructed now, the unfamiliar attention a film like The New World (and Micheal Haneke's Caché) requires can split an audience right down the middle. Impatient viewers might baulk at another shot of distant birds flying in formation across a huge, bruised sky or a series of composed visual haikus on the way water falls on rocks or how leaves fracture sunlight into rainbows. Malick’s approach might strike you as either totally immersive and rewarding or maddeningly dense and boring. Or somewhere in between. Personally, I loved it, but seeing as it might be another five years or more before we see anything like it again, I'm prepared to debate it for the sake of argument.

Seoul Assassin

Death comes dropping slow in Korean director Kim Jee Woon’s (A Tale of Two Sisters) new crime thriller A Bittersweet Life. For seven years, loyal Sun Woo (Lee Byung-hun) has acted as a mob enforcer for a mafia syndicate led by the elderly President Kang (Kim Young-chul), under the cover of managing the swanky ‘Dolce Vita’ bar. One day, Kang asks Sun Woo to do him a personal favour: He must go out of town for a few days on business, and needs someone to keep an eye on his young mistress Hee Soo (Shim Min-ah), who he suspects might be seeing another man behind his back. If she is indeed cheating on him, then Sun Woo must use his considerable killing skills to settle the matter. Sure enough, Sun Woo catches the girl in her innocent deception, but rather than murder her in cold blood as per orders, he allows her and her terrified lover to live, as long as they swear never to see each other again.

It's this simple act of mercy, wholly out of character, that will ultimately cost Sun Woo dearly.

A poignant, molasses-black and aesthetically flawless revenge story, Bittersweet is another top-notch film from the hugely impressive Kim Jee-woon whose expert touch leavens the frantic and bloodsoaked action with moments of comedy, physical bravado and touching silence. Lee Byung-hun, better known in Korea as a classic romantic male lead, is a terrifyingly internalised and psychopathically remote presence here, playing the handsome, ruthless gangster with an assured confidence and calm that gives tremendous grit to his bloodsoaked adventures. He is, oddly, very likeable. Shim Min-Ah offers the perfect mix of naivite and sexuality with Kim Young-chul’s duplicitous leer perfect for the vicious mob leader; a preening pecksniff doling out punishments or reward with a wave of his cufflinked hand. The remainder of the ensemble cast are uniformly marvellous, making scenes that might appear derivative or stale seem fresh and exciting again when redrawn through the broken prism of the new Asian cinema.

Throughout, the film contains sly, perfectly judged homages to David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and even the frantic 80s bullet ballets of Arnold Schwarzenegger; all filtered through the individual eye of the director, who has crafted another memorable, visually splendid film that holds untold riches for the growing legion of Korean cinema fans, and fans of noir cinema regardless of origin. Technically flawless, narratively fluent, boasting an impressive soundtrack, a grinding sound mix and some wonderfully staged and genuinely stomach-turning violence, Bittersweet is the work of a master filmmaker at the top of his game.

*** It occured to me as I was posting this review that I never got round to talking about how almost every major character in the movie ends up with major damage to their left hand - usually the effects of a shotgun blast. Did anyone else notice that and has anybody any idea what it might mean? I'm thinking "if your left hand offends you, cut it off", like in the Bible, except here there's a bad guy with a bowie knife to save you the trouble...***

Sayuri, We Hardly Knew Ye

Memoirs Of A Geisha, the picture-book new film from Chicago director Rob Marshall doesn't pretend to be a complicated drama, but the source novel, Arthur Golden's best-selling 1997 potboiler, never had pretentions of depth either. Instead, both book and movie provide a lush, immaculately detailed and visually absorbing portrayal of a peculiarly Japanese world, that of the special class of paid female companions, artists, musicians and, to be blunt about it, chatteled sex workers: the geisha.

The film opens with an almost silent sequence that highlights the considerable talents of young actress Suzuka Ohgo playing the frightened young Chiyo, taken from her impoverished family in 1929 and sold to a renowned geisha house in Kyoto. Here she is subjected to cruel treatment from the owner Mother (Kaori Momoi), who works the little girl to the bone, with Chiyo’s slavery made even more unbearable by the malignant attentions of Hatsumomo (Gong Li from Raise the Red Lantern). The reigning queen of the geisha house, Hatsumomo realises the threat the newcomer represents, not to her present, but to her inheritance, and cruelly engineers her isolation, especially from her only friend, Pumpkin (Youki Kudoh). She frames Chiyo for a minor crime, which leads to her being sold to Mameha (Michelle Yeoh, also from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), a beautiful geisha in her late thirties who is the companion of the Baron (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and his friend, the wealthy Chairman (Ken Watanabe from The Last Samurai). With Mameha’s careful tutelage, the shy and withdrawn Chiyo becomes the radiant geisha Sayuri, the talk of the town and a famed entertainer. The girls have been carefully drilled to realise that love has no role in their new world; that these men are clients, not potential husbands. The distinction between these women and prostitutes, and the geisha and a wife is made clear, with politically motivated flattery replacing the honesty of romance. Nevertheless, Sayuri falls in love with the Chairman, always keeping his dropped handkerchief and a newspaper photograph in the folds of her kimono.

The casting is excellent throughout, although there was some controversy about casting Chinese actresses in the lead roles of what is absolutely a Japanese story. Ken Wanatabe is the only Japanese actor in a major role. All I can add to the debate is the observation that whatever rivalries exist between nations today can’t inform how films are made, or for that matter, reviewed, and that far more troubling to me was that the film is made in in English, rather than Japanese. But subtitles would limit the box office potential of a film like this to a mass audience, so the occasionally indistinct and far less subtle lingua franca of international finance wins out in the end.

Regardless of how she delivers her dialogue, Ziyi Zhang (House Of Flying Daggers) has the face of an angel, sometimes blank and serene but always filled with subtleties and tiny human gestures that add tremendous soul to her performance. For his part, Watanabe’s Chairman, representing an idealised concept of love for the innocent Sayuri (his dropped handkerchief becomes her prized possession) plays a storybook romantic ideal, capable, brave and kind. But their gradual coming together takes a back seat to Sayuri’s own coming of age, which, once achieved, leaves the remainder of the broadly drawn, essentially formulaic Cinderella melodrama with nowhere to go. Still, it is a lovely thing to look at, and sometimes that's enough.

In one way, the painstaking approach to the first two-thirds of the film, the precise and painstaking recreation of this complicated world, is to be applauded; it’s slow unravelling setting a totally immersive, captivating tone. However, the film as a whole never recovers from the brutal intrusion of the Second World War and the subsequent occupation of Japan by the beer-swilling, skirt-chasing Americans. A subplot running through the film that highlights how these young women were cast against each other as rivals falls flat in it’s clumsy resolution, with the viewers attention taken more with where they are (and how gorgeous it all looks) rather than what they are saying to one another or what it means to Sayuri’s desperate love. Marshall has conjured up a lost world with considerable fluency, but the magic of the film is in it's recreations, almost alien in their exoticism, and not its uninvolving emotions.

One of the primary reasons to recommend Memoirs is the beautifully composed, opulent imagery of rising Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe, who takes his inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints and the Shinto belief of Suijin, or water-worship, to create deep, graduated landscapes, swooping perspectives and moments of breathtaking visual poetry; like a sequence representing the end of the war, a stream running with what appears to be blood becomes images of Sayuri hand-washing a red obi. You won’t see a better-looking film this year, it’s a triumph of photography and production design and costuming, but once these images fade, you might be left wondering what happened to the story, which never achieves the same level of careful detail and, well, cinematic craftsmanship.

Trading Places

Anand Tucker's Shopgirl is the adaptation of Steve Martin’s popular but essentially gloomy novella, his first work of fiction, which has more life on paper and in the mind of the reader than it does when played out on the big screen in three dimensions.

Country girl Mirabelle (Claire Danes) is a shy, withdrawn retail assistant, new to LA, who works at the quiet glove counter of a big department store, but spends her days mostly staring off into space, dreaming of love and escape. One evening, while washing her smalls in one of those Laundromats beloved of screenwriters, she meets Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a random, completely uninhibited and rather scruffy wannabe musician and amplifier salesman. They go on an awkward date, gingerly feeling one another out (rather than up) but there is little spark between them. However, Mirabelle is just lonely enough to call him again, and they start a clumsy, uncomfortable physical relationship. So far, so awkward.
Enter the other side to the potential love triangle, the wealthy middle-aged businessman Ray Porter (Martin himself, who looks like he's had some sandblasting done to his face, especially around the eyes). Mirabelle and Ray start to see each other, and before too long their relationship escalates into something more substantial and rewarding than Jeremy had to offer. But for all his impoverished stains and filthy hair, Jeremy was a young man with a heart, which might be worn on his sleeve, but is undeniably still beating. Ray, for all his money and the freedom it brings, is shallow, self-obsessed and faintly creepy, something Mirabelle gradually comes to realise.

Shopgirl has tremendous potential, being a fragile and undeniably heartfelt film about lonely and isolated individuals struggling to find purchase in an oblivious and uncaring LA. But realising a wholly compelling feature film from Martin’s slight, 120 page book is a task that proves beyond director Tucker (Hilary & Jackie). What starts out as a quirky, bittersweet romance becomes an almost static minimalist tapestry, with too little of the comedy that Schwartzman is keen to provide left to lighten the mood. Most disappointing is the statue-like central performance from Daines, which has plenty of heart and wrinkle-browed yearning but is overly controlled and precise. Most of the time it feels like she is just sitting there.
Tucker does employ his keen visual sense on occasion to break the mood with some assured and delicate photography, but the film’s determined anti-romantic point of view never really admits us and is altogether far too downbeat and mopey to make any real connection. It’s not much of a watch, but when compared to Martin’s other recent offering, Cheaper By The Dozen 2, it’s a fucking masterpiece. Modern love isn’t the only thing that’s not funny anymore.

Full Mental Jerk Off

“Are we ever going to get to kill anyone?” asks a soldier at the start of British director Sam Mendes' new film. No, they’re not, and it’s the lack of events or purpose that makes Jarhead a different kind of antiwar film - a war film without a war. In it Tony Swofford, played well enough by Jake Gyllenhaal, enlists as Marine, the title comes from the corps nickname, and after training is seconded into an elite division of snipers. Paired up with a spotter, played by Peter Sarsgaard, the 20 year old Swofford is sent to Kuwait in 1991 as part of Desert Storm. But the soldiers don't get to do much of anything when they get there, other than conduct patrols through the desert and perform drills and demonstrate their fancy equipment to uninterested journalists, with the gradual disconnect from home, from government and from the business end of the war itself driving them close to a kind of madness. Their cold-eyed tormentor in the desert is Staff Sergeant Sykes, played by a macho Jamie Foxx, who maintains a rigorous sense of discipline combined with a juicy sadistic streak. Once the actual conflict begins, the troop spends their time mopping up the burning oil fields or on patrol along the burnt-out cars on the infamous “Highway of Death”. Crucially, they never get to kill anyone; an impotence and lack of purpose that builds slowly into frustration and anger.

Mendes is certainly building towards saying something; that war isn’t just stupid, it’s dumb. That modern warriors are likewise, a dumb lot of undereducated teenagers fooling around with dangerous technology, just like their real heroes on the PlayStation. But Mendes never fully captures that cocktail of adrenaline, testosterone, cordite and disappointment in anything other than a baldly literal sense. In bleaching his story of colour, glamour, jingoism and irreverence as thoroughly as his photographer Roger Deakins washes out his widescreen desert images, Mendes throws the juice out with the bones. Unfortunately for moviegoers, random events and haphazard situations that lead nowhere doesn’t make for much of a movie, and despite a good handful of these scattered moments being both funny and horrifying and pretty faithful to Swofford’s memoir, they don’t add up to anything like a film. For all his awkward name-dropping and ironic posturing, Mendes achieves nothing like a coherent tone or a meaning - not that I’m looking for an explanation for the war or a discussion about American militarism or for the director to propose a reason why men go to war, but a meaning for the film itself. Jarhead doesn’t mean anything. Swofford is pointedly reading The Stranger, with Mendes attempting to capture the same tone as Camus’ narrator, who knows what has happened, but not why or what it means or why it has happened to him. Maybe it’s supposed to be like an absurdist Beckett play; Waiting for Saddam, perhaps. If it is, then Mendes has spent his down-time watching a whole lot of other, better war movies. In sifting through the dust of a genre that has already been well served, Mendes, unsurprisingly, finds nothing at all new or all that compelling to say. When there is a nation that has lost everything, including its freedom, at the heart of your story what sympathy can there be for a boy soldier who is bored and going through a bit of an identity crisis? Swofford and his fellow Marines complain bitterly because the methods of modern warfare means their lives are never in danger and they get to go home safely. How disgusting a notion is that? Those of us old enough to have watched the news in the early 1990s already knew about the Highway of Death and the burning oil wells and the buried troops. It doesn’t add much to see them recreated in a desert in New Mexico. What does it add to either film to have us watch Gyllenhall and his whooping buddies watching the Ride of the Valkeries scene from Apocalypse Now? I get Mendes' point that anti-war films can be misconstrued; that which is supposed to repell us can excite us instead, but other than that? Not a whole lot.

Much like Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket it's the first half of the Jarhead (the arduous training segment) that says most about the process of preparing for war, with the second half descending into a chaotic, random, anti-linear stream of events. Mendes consciously and repeatedly recalls Kubrick’s film, similarly made on painstakingly recreated locations on the other side of the world and featuring a story split between the process of turning young men (conscripts in his case) into soldiers and sending them off to do the killing. Except Kubrick was talking about a different war in different times, and had a different opinion. He saw Vietnam as being an inevitable extension of political ideologies, but also as part of the innate split in the human personality; ‘the Jungian thing’, as he describes it in the unforgettable grave-side scene between Pt Joker and his commanding officer. But to take this down from the clouds for a moment, Kubrick also had a script, dialogue, events and personalities. He had a point to make. Kubrick’s grunts too were brainwashed, over-drilled fighting teenagers, engaged in a war the filmmaker opposed, but he never forgot that they were also characters in a movie and that there would eventually be a paying audience of people requiring entertainment and food for thought. Mendes, for all his artfulness with the camera and facility with the actors, forgets.

If the director and his screenwriter Broyles (a Vietnam veteran himself) felt the need to add their tuppence to the arguments for or against the decade of war and sanctions in Iraq, why use other filmmaker’s words and images in order to make their point? Swofford’s book was praised on publication as being a unique voice that related the truth as one soldier saw it, a blistering peek behind the curtain of official military propaganda and news journalism. Why wasn’t it good enough for Mendes, or is he incapable of anything other than ironic detachment? His take on the story is just a pretext for photography. To drive home the true obscenity of war the movie needed something like the stomach-churning sequence in the book in which a fellow Marine finds an Iraqi soldier’s corpse and systematically mutilates it for several days, until Swofford finally steals the body and buries it in the desert. There is nothing as strong or as clearly morally defined in Jarhead, and it’s to the film significant disadvantage that Mendes didn’t have the courage to include it. By ramming his influences down our throats, Mendes only highlights his own film’s lack of anything interesting or novel to say about the mistakes that US administrations repeat again and again perhaps or, if that’s beyond him, offer any real insight into those young Americans buying KitKats at Shannon Airport this morning.

Jarhead’s scenarios are supposed to recreate the bemused atmosphere of what it was like to be a gun-toting soldier readied for action in a war won in the air, a war they were never likely to take an active part in, a war that was over in a couple of weeks. The overwhelming sense of frustration his plot brings about might well be Mendes’ avowed intention, but it makes for a pretty tedious movie. He is a smart, energetic director, and willing to take on something new in each of his three films to date, but in the end Jarhead is just as coldly beautiful and unfeeling and inhuman as his duff gangster movie Road to Perdition. And if that’s the whole point, well, you can go tell it to the marines.

(the image above is 'Guantanamo' by British artist Banksy and is his copyright)

Interview: Neil Jordan & Pat McCabe The Rocky Mountain News

I’m laughing at a story about an actress on a short film misreading the stage direction ‘hovering’ for ‘hoovering’ when Neil Jordan pokes his head around the door and asks where he can smoke a cigarette. “Outside? Oh, Jesus”. I go with him, half wondering if I should take my recording device (I don’t) and as we smoke we talk about how the whole country got all worked up over Willie "Oh'Dear" O'Dea being photographed pointing a handgun. “What’s that all about?” asks Jordan, by way of introduction to a minor rant about the insular nature of Irish Sunday newspapers, which, according to the director, have no idea that there’s a wider world out there. “The Rocky Mountain News has more in it”.

I don’t encourage the thread of conversation simply because I don’t read Irish Sunday newspapers (or The Rocky Mountain News for that matter) and am slightly worried that if I make agreeing noises he might ask me for an example and I’d be stuck. I mutter something to the effect that the country is reeling under the weight of endless tribunals, sleazy scandals, bad politics and paranoia, and that we’re playing catch-up with ourselves. Jordan gives me a hard look, grunts, and his attention is suddenly taken by something opposite. He steps back a bit, then leans forward and peers down the side street. “Nice alley” he says and pops his butt in the ashtray on the wall. As we saunter back up the stairs, Jordan shows me an email he received that morning, claiming to be from the CIA and warning him about some hacker having gained access to his computer. Sounds like a scam, I say, although as with the Sunday papers thing, I’m edging towards the fullness of my knowledge on the subject. He calls the number at the end of the email. It is a real phone number for the actual CIA, and a computerised voice tells him that, yes, the dire warnings in the email are part of a moneymaking scam and not to do anything else but delete it. “That’s that”, says Jordan, “excitement over”.

The al fresco cigarette, the ironic politician, the scam spam email and the pocket computer itself are so startlingly modern they throw the greasy scrabbling of early 1970s Ireland, when the kaleidoscopic Breakfast on Pluto is set, into sharp relief. Moving between a small country town and the bright lights of London, the Butcher Boy director’s second collaboration with Monaghan writer Patrick McCabe follows, Candide-like, the random exploits of Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden, played by Cillian Murphy. Kitten is the result of an affair between a young woman (Eva Birthistle) and a priest (Liam Neeson), who once he's old enough, searches London for his mother and looks to make peace with his father back home. A capricious, clever and deceptively tough young transvestite, Kitten creates elaborate fantasies to escape the drudgery and pain of his isolated existence before the real escape of emigration. As Jordan gets up to close the window, I ask McCabe, who has joined us for our conversation, if he could think of another Irish filmmaker who could have taken on his novel. “No, no, it’s all too ah…too particular. There’s definitely a mood that carries from the Butcher Boy directly into this film”. I ask how they first became interested in each other’s work. “Well, we’re two Irish writers, and we’re coming off the same page in many ways”, says McCabe. Jordan pipes in, “I read The Butcher Boy basically and that was the first time I came across Pat’s work. And Pat wrote this immediately afterwards and I read it as soon as he was happy for me to see it”. McCabe comes back, saying he knew Neil’s work “for years before he had ever heard of me, ever since The Crying Game”.

Neil Jordan is just about the only pure Irish filmmaker, in that he sets out to make a different movie every time and somehow ends up saying the same things over and over again, finding new and original ways to reflect on his obsessions. Since his first film Angel in 1982 to the smash hit Crying Game in 1992 and Interview With The Vampire in 1994, he’s been inspired by childhood fairy-tales, outsiders, oblique symbolism and, ultimately, survival to redemption. Also a writer (although curiously, he has never adapted one of his own books for the screen), Jordan is enjoying a particularly juicy creative burst as he enters his mid-fifties; his new film follows 2003’s The Good Thief, producer duties on two recent Irish films, Intermission and The Actors, the publication of his fifth novel ‘Shade’ last year and the news that The Borgias, his long-delayed film about the notorious Italian family will finally go into production next year with Scarlet Johansson and Colin Farrell attached to star, although that announcement came too late for me to discuss with him. He lives in Dublin with his second wife and five children. On the day I met him he was just off the plane from the US leg of the Pluto promotional tour, had a new copy of Robert Fisk’s ‘The Great War for Civilisation’ under his arm and was wearing a speckled shirt with an interesting collar.

Patrick McCabe looks a bit like Jordan’s younger, weirder brother. Similarly stocky and direct, the Monaghan novelist and playwright is a stone-cold original with a considerable reputation. His five whirling, surreal, pop-culture books read like the 1975 Jackie annual chopped up with the Book of Revelation; featuring extraordinary, individual people in strange and uncomfortable places. They are also frequently hilarious. His 1992 book, The Butcher Boy, a black comedy narrated by a disturbed young boy in small town Ireland, was filmed by Jordan in 1996. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters. Both Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were short-listed for the Booker Prize and his latest novel, Call Me the Breeze, was published in 2003. Bearded and bluff, he had no weighty tome about international relations with him that I could see, and was wearing a blue crew-neck woolly jumper.

When it came time for these two writers to write a screenplay, how did the collaboration work? “Well from his book, Pat wrote the first draft, I wrote the second and the third” says Jordan. McCabe takes a mint from a dish on the table, pops it in his mouth and says that “the film is much more Neil than me”. Both writers are at pains to explain that Breakfast on Pluto isn’t a sequel to The Butcher Boy. McCabe sees the film as fitting with a general theme in Jordan’s work. “Maybe. It’s even a bit like Angel too, if you want to go back that far, which is about innocence and the investigation of innocence and what it means when it is destroyed. You could say that The Butcher Boy is about the destruction of a child’s innocence and Breakfast is about maintaining that state of grace, regardless of what’s going on around you. If there was anything in what you’re saying, about it being seen as a sequel, it’d be something like that”. Jordan, who has been listening intently to his co-screenwriters explanation, adds that his new film and their other collaboration “if you think about it”, have more in common. “They’re both about growing up, fundamentally – childhood or adolescence in a small Irish town, yeah? They’re both, in a strange way, about characters who refuse to grow up. Butcher Boy is about Francie, who never becomes an adult (McCabe grunts his agreement, ‘oh yeah’). And I think Breakfast is about Kitten, young Patrick, who refuses to let his own innocence be destroyed, yeah? So in a way they’re both about people who refuse to grow up, with one of them ending up bloody and monstrous and the other ends up being redeemed in a way”. “Bang on”, says McCabe, sucking on his Murray Mint. “Oh yeah”, replies Jordan, “and that’s what I liked most about making this film. Everything in The Butcher Boy was edging towards darkness and apocalypse and blood, and here, the character himself transforms everything into a day-glow fairytale, and I’m not talking about fantasy or inner dreams, he actually constructs a fairy-tale around himself, it’s his solution”.

McCabe, just as stocky and square as Jordan but with a profoundly more open disposition, has a cameo in the film as Peepers Egan, a local man. I ask him if he spent much time on the set, outside of his performance. “Oh yeah, well, it’s very interesting making a movie and I love hanging around anyway. When you’re just sitting around writing stories. It gets you out of the house”. Jordan gives a big sigh. “Every writer just wants to get out of the house, you know.” McCabe agrees. “They do really, sure it drives you mad”. Out and about or not, Jordan is a notoriously difficult subject to interview. He doesn’t pretend to enjoy the process of talking about himself or his work, and seems incapable of offering pat, polished anecdotes, the familiar, pre-assembled witticisms that slip easily into a comfortable celebrity puff-piece. He thinks before he answers questions, often falling into silence, or disagreeing, or answering a question with another question. He’s not difficult or obstreperous; he’s precise, which can be just as maddening. I ask them both about dealing with the IRA in their work, looking at Jordan’s seeming obsession with the North and citing the obvious points of connection in the director’s own back catalogue. Jordan claims he doesn’t understand what I mean, so I explain further, saying that someone from the outside looking in would find it difficult to differentiate between say, Jordan’s IRA pub-bombing and the psychological weight that carries here and a pyrotechnic sequence in a Bruce Willis action movie? It’s not meant as an explicit criticism, but it sounds like one, and a clumsy one at that. Jordan just looks at me. McCabe answers, gently, saying that the IRA is at the heart of the film. “How would you deal with a young kid living on the border in 1971 without having the IRA involved? How would you do that? Given the subject matter in the film, we couldn’t avoid it”. But, I say, Jordan has gone over this ground again and again. What elements of the North, for both writers, add up to make a drama? “Well, yeah”, Jordan replies, after a silence. “I made a movie about Michael Collins, I made The Crying Game and Angel, but one of the reasons I put off making Breakfast on Pluto for so long is that I didn’t want to deal with the issue of political violence immediately again”. “Well”, says McCabe, “I can see how this would be much more of a problem for Neil than it is for me. I haven’t dealt with the IRA before in my work. The book is set in the borderland in the 1970s, so like I said, it’s unavoidable. But the quintessential IRA movie, outside of Michael Collins, simply hasn’t been made yet. It’s like a movie you’d make about Sarajevo in the nineties, like a Battle of Algiers or something. But that’s for someone else to make and write. I don’t have that kind of mind, and maybe that’s the movie you want to see, but this film doesn’t purport to deal with those issues. The IRA in the context here represents a threatening, sinister, outside force, like a pack of wolves. A film dealing directly with the IRA and covert forces in NI would be far more politically complex than what we’ve done here”.

One thing that’s fascinating about the strange world of Breakfast on Pluto is that things are never spelled out in black or white. Everybody is ephemeral, socially, sexually, politically; a turbulent ensemble cast of characters that are all open to interpretation while resisting any neat categorisation. McCabe sucks his mint, meditatively. “It prefigures the modern world, I think. Someone was saying to me, I think it was Gavin Friday (who plays showband leader Billy Rock), that a lot of the characters are people that you just didn’t see in fiction in Ireland, even if they were right there in front of everyone. They just weren’t part of the dramatic landscape, they were swept under the carpet. Now, in the modern world, we can address them because all these things are all out in the open. They had a peculiar kind of ambience feeling about them – because of it being the early seventies, where there was a lot of depression, really, and alienation and silence. So the period that it’s set in is very significant”. He’s warming to the theme, and stretches out in his chair as he expands. “The seventies were such a weird time, really. Just looking at something like ‘Reeling in the Years’ (the archive show from RTE), it seems to me now that fashionwise, politics wise and socially wise, it was all very strange and you’d find yourself wondering what were we all thinking, watching it now”. It’s like a different planet, I say, cheerfully alluding to the Pluto of the title. A bus roars by outside. McCabe sucks his mint and Jordan sucks his lemon. I use the resulting silence to ask another question.

The film’s simple chaptered structure hides a complicated, constantly shifting mood of alternating light and dark. His voyage of self-discovery leads Kitten through an ambivalent landscape, being at times light and playful and at other times heartbreakingly violent and grim. “Well, that’s what I wanted to do, so yeah, that the way it is”, says Jordan, hardly impressed with my indelicate reading. McCabe jumps in, saying “you always get that when people are talking about the troubles in the North. It’s either laughter or disaster, like. Excessive sentiment mixed with hilarity”. Jordan interrupts. “Well, talking about the politics of this film, I never thought that I’d be in Crumlin Road Jail shooting a scene for a movie that involves a bomb-making factory and a guy in PVC leather who waltzes in and annihilates everybody with a perfume spray. I just didn’t ever think I’d be allowed to do that in Crumlin Road jail, you know what I mean? It really was interesting making this film because that issue is out of bounds, it’s…dead in Irish life now. You cannot”. He stops to correct himself. “I don’t mean dead dead but it’s gone somewhere different and now its part of the past. So that was one of the things I found refreshing about the film was the central character’s attitude was so irreverent and so…clear, in a way. Kitten expresses such irreverence for traditional Irish pieties, you know? Whether it’s Nationalism or the Catholic Church or the glamorisation of what they call ‘men of violence’ and all that sort of stuff. There’s no better de-glamoriser than Kitten, really. That’s what, well, that’s why I decided to make the movie in the end, because the central character puts all that shit in its place”. It’s the most Jordan has said since he got off the phone from the CIA half an hour ago and there’s a beat while myself and McCabe absorb it. I wish I had a mint to suck on.

I ask McCabe about the kind of women he had in mind when he sat down to write them in the first place. “It was Dusty Springfield I was most thinking of”, he says, “and at that time I was playing her music over and over again”. Not seeing the connection immediately, I ask him to explain, which he does, rather randomly. “Actually, I think that where I was coming from was perhaps Denis Nielsen, you know, the serial killer. When I went to London first in the seventies this guy was running riot and a lot of the boys he killed were Irish, who were never reported or recorded. At that time, London was a very strange place and you could easily end up on the streets. I remember a guy saying to me, ‘You know you could make a lot of money flogging your arse down Piccadilly’, you know. Jordan pipes in, “You know some guy said that to me too”. He repeats a line from his movie, in a sleazy English accent, “A young Irish lad can make a lot of money…” We’re laughing about the very different directions life could have taken for both these men when McCabe cuts through it. “But that’s what I’m saying, imagine if that had happened? It’s like Martin Amis said, ‘fiction is an opportunity to live life twice’”.

Jordan isn’t just a powerful writer and strong visualist, after more than a dozen films he is one of the finest ‘actors’ directors working. How does he draw such strong performances from his cast, and his actresses in particular? He takes the compliment with a nod and says, “I don’t know how other directors work, because I’ve never seen another director working. Its one thing you never get to do when you make films, you don’t get to see how anyone else does them. I know Mike Leigh doesn’t have a script and I know, well I dunno, you know, other people go through long periods of improvisation and workshops but I don’t do any of that really. I just cast people who will approach the part from the inside and who will explore the character with me. Some of that comes from the fact that I have generally either written or co-written the script, so I look for an actor who will basically go on a journey with me and approach what they do from terms of character and nothing else”. Murphy gives an extraordinary performance in the film; delicate and sympathetic without being overly sentimental or schmaltzy. In his best role yet, he is camp and funny and rebellious, but it’s obvious from the first time we meet him that Kitten’s fabulous extrovert exterior is masking some serious emotional pain. “Well”, Jordan explains, “shortly after we’d written the script, I did tests with about ten young Irish actors, and for Cillian, well, you were there Pat”. McCabe nods his head emphatically in agreement as Jordan continues; “At the time I didn’t know if the part was playable as we’d written it. If someone was to do it very camp, very outrageous, I wasn’t going to be interested in that, like Cage Aux Folles or that remake they did in Miami with Robin Williams, The Birdcage. If it would have been like that I wouldn’t have been interested. But the first time we met him, Cillian gave this performance that really came from the inside. It wasn’t about the fact that he was wearing a purple feather boa or had a bit of blusher on his face, it was about a boy. He made it very emotional and very real and that’s when I thought that if I was to make the movie, Cillian should do it. It goes back to what I was saying earlier. He approached it solely from the point of view of character. With Cillian playing him, Kitten became almost real; it was as if the character drove the movie forward. So unique and so special, and so recognisable in a strange way”.

It’s a performance that is just starting to get recognition from Murphy’s peers, with his indelible flounce adding to his already sturdy international reputation and, more specifically, building significant noise on this year’s awards buzz grapevine, recently garnering a Golden Globe nomination for the 29 year old Corkman, a high-profile nod that is seen as a precursor to the Oscar nominations, even if only because the movie websites keep saying it. Jordan expands on his star. “Kitten displays all his nobility through remaining an individual. It’s about the struggle is to survive, to keep his soul intact. Isn’t it? To keep his innocence, to be kind. Every circumstance Kitten confronts in the movie would convince him not to be kind, wouldn’t it? He refuses to let that happen, and that’s what the triumph of the film is, really. He even refuses to hate his father, despite what he has done to him, which makes him really interesting”.

Jordan has predicted my next question, but this is the most he’s said for quite a few minutes, and the clock is ticking, so I’m reluctant to interrupt. “Ultimately”, he continues, “everybody in the movie, no matter how awful their journey or how badly they have behaved, arrives at a kind of peace. They become good”. He looks across at McCabe. “We should have called it How To Be Good”. He turns to look directly at me. “But, isn’t that the interesting thing? One of the first things Pat did when he wrote the first draft of the script, from the book, was he brought Fr Bernard back and made him have a change of heart. I saw that and thought it was very interesting. You’ve got a priest, who hasn’t raped his housekeeper as the child imagines, but he has had a relationship with her and they had a child together and, eventually, he returns at the end and has this total change of heart. So that’s one thing, right. But the other thing is, that in order to complete that change of heart, he has to be rejected by the society that made him what he is. So in order to become what a priest should be, he has to stop being a priest. To me, that’s very true of Irish life. I know everyone’s always banging on about the church and whatever, but that situation was created by the culture here. Liam’s character, Fr. Brendan, as soon as he takes Kitten and Ruth Negga’s character Charlie into his parochial house, it’s burned to the ground by his own congregation. And that would have happened, or worse. But this is a film about the past. Definitely about the past”.

I ask both men, about the same age and from similar backgrounds if they have made peace with growing up in the slate-grey Ireland of the 1970s. “The film is about a world where the only escape was England, you know”, says Jordan. “The only escape from that severe insistence that you be Irish and Catholic and whatever, unemployed generally and grim and depressed. I remember that very well, London was the great escape for people of my generation. Everybody went”. McCabe interrupts. “It’s what I call Stonewall Ireland. You know, the Sawdoctors”. Er, what? “Hmm” says Jordan. “Yeah, but if you look at Charlie, Ruth Negga’s character. She’s pregnant and unmarried. She needs either of two things; an abortion or healthcare in a hospital, yeah? She has to go to England in order to have that choice to make that. Now in our movie, she chooses to have the child, but she could just as easily have had an abortion. But she has the child in an NHS hospital. She wouldn’t have had that opportunity in the town she comes from. If even if she was sent to Dublin, the child might have ended up in a home. So, this film is a portrait of a society that was deeply unfunctional. Is that a word? Dysfunctional? Whatever. It did not function”. I make the point that Charlie’s fictional child would be my age now and how London is no longer the only answer for Irish people in their early twenties. “Oh yes”, Jordan says, slapping the table, “the country has changed, for the better. No doubt about that”. “Oh yeah”, says McCabe, “no doubt about that”.

Music, specifically bright, sad teenage pop from the era, is central to Breakfast on Pluto. The title itself comes from a song by Don Partridge, a one-man-band folk singer who still goes by the moniker ‘King of the London Buskers’. The Glam Rock era isn’t just channelled through the bubblegum soundtrack though, Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry is cast as a sinister spiv and the hilariously glam showband that Kitten joins for a while is led by former Virgin Prune Gavin Friday. I ask both writers how the soundtrack and the film’s practical music scenes came about. “There was one song I would have loved to have in it, but we couldn’t get it or it was forgotten or something”, says McCabe. “Oh yeah”, says Jordan, “what was that?” ‘Which Way are you Going, Billy?’ by the Poppy Family. “But the book was written with loads of songs in it, wasn’t it?” says Jordan. “Oh yeah”, says McCabe, “sure you could see the whole world through songs”. “Wasn’t Honey in the book, and Sugar Baby Love and Don Partridge, obviously?” says Jordan, tapping on the table. “Yeah, yeah”, McCabe replies, more than a little wistfully. “But when we were listening to music back then and hearing about these things called niteclubs, we were just dreaming about women” says Jordan. “Yup”, says McCabe, emphatically. “It was all about women. Sex! Or the prospect of it”. Jordan jumps in, saying he remembers “sitting in a squat in North London and hearing that Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac had had a bad trip and wasn’t ever going to recover”. McCabe claps his hands with delight in the shared memory. “I remember this. He was dragged away by his nails that night shouting ‘a coalman’s life is the one for me!’ over and over again. Thrown into a van he was. He played in the Hillgrove Hotel in Monaghan two years ago there, and I went along to see him”. “You did not”, says Jordan. “I did, and he was very good”. But Kitten could have become a casualty too, I say, trying to bring the conversation back from the mists of half-remembered rockers and bad drugs. “But he did become a casualty, didn’t he, says Jordan, gently. “Becoming a rent boy and all that”. And he adds a coda in a breathlessly coquettish tone, “but he survives, you know."

Match Point

It’s not just the much-heralded exile in London and the sympathetic bosom of the BBC that marks Woody Allen’s attractive new drama out from the couple of dozen or so films he has made in his native New York. Match Point is a whiplash drama featuring a cast of mainly British and Irish actors, a couple of torrid sex scenes, gritty violence and, most surprising of all, after a run of six apathetic duds, it’s really very good.

Retired Irish tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is working as a backhand coach in a private club when he meets Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). Wealthy, well-connected Tom has a pretty, vacant sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Chris, seeing his chance, quickly marries her, much to the delight of family patriarch Alec (Brian Cox), who gives Chris a job in one of his companies. The juicy apple in this rarefied Eden is Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson), a neurotic American actress who might be out of work, but has Tom as a rich and generous boyfriend. Before long it’s game set and match for Chris and Nola, with their affair forming a devastating love triangle that has violent consequences. From there on, Allen pulls the strings on his story with the finesse and aplomb of a master puppeteer, so if you think you know where all this is heading, think again.

Johansson and Rhys-Meyers are well cast as the sexy, smooth-skinned lovers, the desperate social climber Chris, constantly checking his watch with more than a touch of Talented Mr. Ripley-style menace, and Johansson gobbling up her part as a seductive, vindictive temptress with relish. Rhys-Meyers has never been better (in that previously he’s never been any good at all) but the film lives or dies by his lethal, oily Chris; it’s his story, and he plays it brilliantly. Around this glamorous pair there’s excellent support from Brian Cox, James Nesbit and Matthew Goode in particular. A minor niggle being Emily Mortimer’s Chloe, who is a bit too eager and unquestioning to fully convince as a woman immersed in snooty, fast-moving London society.

But as Allen’s beautifully poised story hurtles towards a reckoning, the director nods towards Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment, Dreiser’s A Place in the Sun and his own Crimes and Misdemeanours in postponing or abandoning as obsolete the justice Chris so richly deserves. As a story about the randomness of life and the role of luck, both good and bad, Match Point is an enjoyably dyspeptic meditation on just how rotten it can all turn out, and how unfair and uncaring the universe is. Best of all, Match Point is a good story, well told. It’s Allen’s best in yonks and a skidding u-turn on the road to nowhere the now 70 year old director seemed himself fated to travel.

A different kind of 'Year in Film'

A Norwegian blogger called Erik took a photo out his window every other day for a year and pulled the images together into a beautiful, silent, two minute film he's posted online here.
Perfect for those deep January thoughts of another year and the passage of time and the changing of the seasons and all that.