Hungry in Love

Nothing else you see at the cinema this year is likely to be a soul-shreddingly harrowing as the PETA commercial currently running in front of certain screenings in UK theatres. They say that modern commercials don’t advertise products, they advertise the lifestyle which the product being flogged supposedly enables you to have – well, PETA have gone further ahead of the curve on this one and have made an advert for a lifestyle itself (it is, not entirely surprisingly, Veganism). The commercial features a cartoony lovable young turkey, a van en route to the turkey farm, a very suggestive moment when chopped tomatoes spray reddish fluid everywhere, and… well, you get the idea. Subtle stuff, guys.

Then again, I saw it before Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, for which it seemed strangely appropriate, even though the two things – on the face of it – seem to be pulling in diametrically opposed directions. On the face of it this looks rather like another slightly soft-centred, wet-between-the-ears YA novel adaptation (the book is by Camille DeAngelis, who is, and this may prove even more pertinent as we continue, a certified Vegan lifestyle coach); what Guadagnino (director of Call Me By Your Name and A Bigger Splash) actually produces is something much more… well, something much more than that, anyway.

Taylor Russell plays Maren, a young woman living in the American midwest in the late 1980s; her mother is not on the scene, she and her father (Andre Holland) seem to on the fringes of poverty and are new in town to boot. One of the girls at high school invites Maren to a sleepover, even though she has to sneak out of their trailer to do so (her father locks her in at night: our first inkling that this story may be headed to uncomfortable places). All goes well until, in the midst of the trying on of different shades of nail varnish, Maren suddenly yields to an impulse, pops her friend’s finger in her mouth, and strips all the flesh off it with her teeth. Looking duly apologetic (then again, is it possible to look apologetic enough for trying to eat your hostess’ finger?) she flees into the night – what amplifies the sudden note of disquiet the film has acquired is that her father has clearly been anticipating something like this will happen.

They relocate, as you would. However, Maren shortly turns eighteen, at which point her father reasonably takes the position that he’s had enough of a pattern of behaviour going back to when Maren ate the babysitter, and that she’s old enough to take care of herself – so he exits the scene with alacrity, thoughtfully providing her with her birth certificate and some money. From the document she gleans some information about her mother, and sets off to try and learn more about her.

On the way, she encounters Sully (a monumentally creepy performance by Mark Rylance), a man subject to the same awkward dietary impulses that she is, and she learns something about herself and those like her (she and Sully share a meal, provided by an old lady they meet – if you get my meaning). They are Eaters, afflicted by the urge to eat human flesh from time to time – an urge that increases in strength and frequency as they age. (They don’t seem to get any special benefits from this, so it’s not like they’re vampires or anything; Eaters come across as pitiful as much as revolting.) Sully clearly has it in mind to be some sort of mentor to Maren, but she has different ideas: she bails as soon as she can and continues her journey.

But on the way she meets Lee (Timothee Chalamet), another Eater who is much younger and more handsome than Sully, something which seems to incline her to overlook the fact he goes around murdering and devouring people on a semi-regular basis (there’s a slightly spurious plot point where he claims to only eat bad people, but it doesn’t seem to take much to earn a place on Lee’s menu). Soon they are travelling together, and the spark of romance flickers between the pair of them…

Yes, it’s the cannibal romance roadtrip movie that you may have heard about. I can easily imagine many people reacting with disgust and moral outrage to a film like this, and maybe they have a point – but cinema normalises, maybe even glamourises, all sorts of socially-aberrant behaviour, so the crime here is really one of degree only. Nevertheless, there’s a sense in which the whole film is a rather fragile construction, falling apart on some levels if you think about it rigorously – so it’s to Guadagnino’s credit that you generally engage with the film on its own terms. It’s not as if he’s glamourising cannibalism as a way of life, anyway – the film’s use of gore is not sensational, but makes it very clear what a messy and gruesome process it is. The whole film has a kind of measured thoughtfulness to it that makes the horror fade somewhat into the background, almost lost amongst the great midwestern skies and granular Americana of the film.

Perhaps this is something akin to what Sergio Leone did with the western over fifty years ago: an outsider coming in, taking an arguably quintessential American genre, and recreating it as something wholly new and startling. Whether that genre is the road movie or the horror film is a good question, for Bones and All functions as both, but it’s the craft and beauty of the film’s atmosphere and imagery that lingers with you. This isn’t one of those quiet-quiet-quiet-LOUD horror films, but something more pervasive – it knows where your phobic pressure points are (to use Stephen King’s helpful phrase) and gently caresses them to create disquiet and unease, only very occasionally squeezing tight.

To be honest, there is something very much of Stephen King about this film, in its evocation of real-world horror and the careful detail of its world and characters. It reminded me rather of Doctor Sleep, but I think this is a better film, in almost every way.

Of course, if we’re going to discuss Bones and All as a horror film, then the question we should be asking is what it’s actually about, how does it function, what is it trying to say? That eating people is wrong, as the old line has it? Well, it seems to me that the device of the Eaters is a useful way of establishing the main characters as somehow apart and distanced from ‘normal’ society, an allegory for alienated youth, and the dispossessed generally (perhaps they are distant cousins to the redneck vampires of Near Dark). Feeling different and misunderstood is part of the deal when it comes to being a teenager, I suspect; being an Eater just legitimises this feeling. It’s significant that the cannibalistic urge in the film is depicted as uncontrollable, thus supposedly freeing Maren and Lee from much of the moral responsibility of their activities – the film pointedly includes a scene where they meet a ‘normal’ person who’s a cannibal simply because he enjoys it (played by David Gordon Green, director of the recent Halloween sequels), and Maren flees in horror and revulsion from him.

Is there more to it than this? Vampire films are about deviant sexual activity, werewolf films about the conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysiac aspects of human nature – so what’s going on here when Maren and Lee feel their stomachs start to rumble? It’s not entirely clear, although I think it may be something to do with the desperation arising from their social backgrounds – all the Eaters in the film seem to be part of the underclass, steeped in poverty, scrabbling to survive. Society so often treats the underclass as sub-human – perhaps that is the metaphor here, and we are nearly back to H.G. Wells’ morlocks.  Life on the fringes certainly feels like one of the themes of the film.

Guadagnino sustains the film’s atmosphere and credibility brilliantly, aided by some great, committed performances. The climax and ending are perhaps a little predictable and obscure, respectively, but – as is usually the case with road movies – it’s much more about the journey than the destination. Bones and All is a strong challenger to Raw for the title of the best horror movie about cannibalism ever made, but it’s much more than that – not just a great horror film, but a great film full stop.

Read Full Post »

Fairway to Heaven

One of the pleasing cinematic developments over the last few years has been the rise to greater prominence on movie screens of Mark Rylance. Now, to be fair, Rylance has been appearing in films since 1987, but prior to Bridge of Spies in 2015 he was much more acclaimed as a theatre actor than a film star (although his game of hide-the-sausage in 2001’s Intimacy did attract some attention). Being friends with Spielberg really can give you a career boost, obviously.

After various supporting turns in fairly big films, Rylance is now starring in a slightly smaller British film, Craig Roberts’ The Phantom of the Open (‘a stupid name’, according to the people doing the marketing at my local independent cinema). There are a few British directors specialising in this sort of thing so it didn’t really surprise me that Roberts’ name was vaguely familiar – but it turns out this is because I’ve been seeing him act in films for over ten years; this is his directorial debut (and very nicely done it is too).

The film opens in the mid-seventies. Rylance plays Maurice Flitcroft, a forty-something crane operator from Barrow-in-Furness in the north of England. After a life spent providing for his wife (Sally Hawkins) and children, the looming prospect of redundancy leads Maurice to contemplate pursuing a dream of his own – namely, entering and winning the British Golf Open. Some would consider this to be a little overambitious, given that Maurice has never completed a round of golf before in his life (he has only just taken up the sport). But his irrepressible positivity will brook no doubts.

So, sporting history is made when Maurice Flitcroft participates in the opening round of qualifying for the Open and indeed makes an unprecedented score: 121, to be exact (Seve Ballesteros, who was one of the leaders and briefly appears in the film as a character, could only manage a 69). Flitcroft is catapulted to celebrity with rather more speed and accuracy than one of his own drives usually displays, and the golfing authorities promptly have him banned from every course in the country for bringing the sport into disrepute. But it takes more than this to keep a man like Flitcroft down…

Once you start digging into the Flitcroft story, the sheer proliferation of ridiculous details do lead you to doubt whether any of these events actually took place – Flitcroft’s identical twin sons were semi-professional disco dancers, while later in his career he took to secretly entering tournaments under pseudonyms like Arnold Palmtree and Count Manfred von Hoffmanstel, occasionally making use of dark glasses and a false moustache. The film is at pains to stress that it is not inventing these things, but it certainly makes good use of them to produce a very funny comedy about snobbery, dreams, and slightly dysfunctional families.

If we’re going to be specific, it’s somewhere in the space between Eddie the Eagle (famous British sporting duffer loses everything but wins the hearts of the crowd) and The Duke (potentially irritating eccentric is vindicated, sort of, by his sheer human decency and quiet wisdom). Rylance’s performance certainly belongs in the same bracket as Jim Broadbent’s in the latter film.

On the other hand, the film walks a remarkable tightrope. Maurice Flitcroft may be the hero of the film, and you’re certainly on his side throughout proceedings, which is surely the intention of the script and director. But at the same time the film quite openly presents Flitcroft as a figure not entirely unlike Forrest Gump or Chance the gardener from Being There: he’s a droning halfwit with a fragile grasp of many key facts about the real world. Managing this trick is central to the film’s success and very smartly done. I suppose you could argue that Flitcroft, according to the film at least, is a kind of holy fool (the vision he has which inspires him to take up golf certainly feels like a moment of almost religious ecstasy) who may indeed be one of the world’s worst golfers but is filled with quiet wisdom which everyone around him eventually comes to appreciate.

As noted, most British comedies these days seem to bear a strong family resemblance to one another – they’re often based on a true story, either set in the past or in an archaic version of British society (thus facilitating a warm rush of nostalgia for the audience), usually feature one of those loveable everyman characters of the type we were discussing earlier, seldom feature much to frighten the figurative horses, content-wise, and – perhaps most notably, especially when you compare them to films of past eras – there’s invariably a strong moral premise which is carefully articulated in the course of the film. Again, this is seldom especially radical – be nice to other people, be part of a traditional community, get your work-life balance sorted out, and so on. The Phantom of the Open meets most of these criteria very comfortably.

This is not meant to sound superior and patronising. The British film industry seems to be in reasonably good health – much moreso than a few decades ago – and this is surely at least partly due to the fact it has hit upon a number of ‘banker’ genres like this one, which tend to bring in decent returns, certainly when they are well-produced. They may be a little on-the-nose and predictable, but this is equally true of many other popular genres. And The Phantom of the Open is certainly a superior example of the form, very well-played and scripted and directed with impressive skill.

So why does it feel like I am on the verge of qualifying all my praise for it? I’m honestly not entirely sure. In and of itself it is a very enjoyable film – but it feels like I have seen a huge number of very similar pieces over the last few decades. Perhaps it’s just that it does feel extremely familiar, a variation on a very common theme. I stress again that I thoroughly enjoyed it; less jaded watchers will probably enjoy it at least as much.

Read Full Post »

Beige Mirror

“In no passage of the holy canonical books there can be found either divine precept or permission to take away our own life, whether for the sake of entering on the enjoyment of immortality, or of shunning, or ridding ourselves of anything whatever. Nay, the law, rightly interpreted, even prohibits suicide, where it says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ This is proved especially by the omission of the words “thy neighbor,” which are inserted when false witness is forbidden.” – Saint Augustine

Yes, I know, nothing says ‘welcome to this semi-humorous (mostly) film review blog’ like a quote about self-slaughter from a mediaeval theologian. But bear with me, for Easter is just around the corner, and if we’re going to do religion, then what better time? We are, if nothing else, about to cast an eye over a film which is probably more concerned with Easter eggs than any other in history, and so surely there’s some kind of connection there, right?

Oh well, please yourselves. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One has managed to swing the coveted Easter weekend release for this year, although this may be less to do with the thematic connection than the fact there isn’t a Fast and Furious movie out this year. Certainly, were it not for Spielberg’s involvement, and the fact the film’s had $175 million spent on it, you might not expect it to get such an honour, for it is after all a computer game movie, not a genre with the most distinguished pedigree.

Think of the quarter-century-plus history of the computer game movie and your mind ineluctably crowds with memories of Bob Hoskins in Super Mario Brothers, Dwayne Johnson in Doom, Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil series, and much of the filmography of Uwe Boll. It can be somewhat traumatic, obviously. (Just the other day I observed that while watching the new Tomb Raider movie is more fun than is the case with either of the Angelina Jolie ones, the same can be said for sawing off your own feet.)

Ready Player One isn’t quite in the same category, being a film about playing computer games rather than an adaptation of one. There is a lot else going on here too, though, including some dystopian SF and something rather new which I haven’t really seen in a movie before (we will come to this in time).

The film tells the story of Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a teenager living in a sort of poverty-stricken demi-monde of 2045 following various ecological and financial disasters (well, as poverty-stricken as is compatible with everyone having top-end gaming and computer gear in their shacks, anyway). The real world is so thoroughly grim that everyone has retreated into a virtual-reality fantasy called the Oasis, where they can live out their dreams and be and do whatever they want.

The creator of this cyber-utopia, Halliday (Mark Rylance), has passed away, but left three keys hidden inside the game world. Whoever finds them first will gain ownership and total control over the Oasis, in addition to a stack of cash. Needless to say everyone is looking for the keys, including slimy corporate operator Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), who plans to flood it with advertising and reconfigure paradise for maximum profit. After a chance discovery puts Wade on the path to winning the prize, forces both inside the simulation and in the real world start to take a serious and possibly lethal interest in him. He and his gamer buddies team up with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), another key-hunter who sees control of the Oasis as a means of bringing about social justice, and set about solving the rest of the clues…

Well, Steven Spielberg may be 72 this year, but he has lost none of his ability to wrangle a giant popcorn blockbuster, and with Ready Player One the great man is on magisterial form: the story is told with assurance, impeccably paced, and with stormingly good set-pieces at exactly the moments when they’re needed. I found it to be an almost irresistibly entertaining film, judged simply as an adventure and a piece of pure spectacle.

That said, of course, there is a lot of other stuff going on here. The actual story is not especially innovative, being a quest for plot coupons with various twists and reversals along the way, and most of the incidental fun of the movie comes from the fact that elements from a vast number of movies, TV shows and films exist in parallel in the Oasis. There’s a car chase near the top of the film in which one character is driving the DeLorean from Back to the Future, someone else is riding the iconic bike from Akira, and a third person is behind the wheel of the 1960s Batmobile, all of which are being pursued by King Kong. In a battle scene, people variously whip out colonial marine pulse-rifles, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, or the glaive from Krull. At one point there is a brief appearance by a big name member of Toho’s monster stable. It goes on and on and on (though there are certain predictable exceptions – nothing from Marvel, obviously, and the most recognisable thing from the stellar conflict franchise in the movie is Ben Mendelsohn).

And while I found all this to be rather delightfully amusing, I imagine that if you don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure fantasy and SF pop culture it may just be baffling, or even distracting. At one point the characters visit a lovingly recreated simulation of a well-known Stanley Kubrick movie, which is fine provided you’ve seen that movie already. (One does inevitably wonder why the youth of 2045 are quite so clued-up on – even obsessed with – pop culture from sixty to seventy years earlier, and why there’s relatively little from the 2010s. But I digress.)

Now, I am aware that some people have already taken Ready Player One to task over this, claiming the movie embodies the worst kind of geeky fanboy attitudes – basically, if you don’t have a vast knowledge of popular culture, you are only worthy to be scorned and pitied. The fact that this may actually be pushback against the attitude, still quite prevalent in society in general, that geeky fanboys are the ones who deserve scorn and pity doesn’t appear to have occurred to some people.

From here they tend to roll on to what is perceived as another problem with the film – namely, that it has a white male heterosexual hero, which is apparently practically anachronistic in a post-Wonder Woman, post-Black Panther world. I think this just sounds like people being determined not to like the film: it has very contemporary ideas about the fluidity of race and gender (who you are in real life doesn’t have to have anything in common with your virtual avatar), and it’s made clear that Wade only succeeds with the help of his very diverse group of friends.

What no-one seems to have really picked up on is what seems to me to be a genuine case of the film trying to have its cake and eat it. The central conflict is basically posed as one between free-spirited, iconoclastic, rebellious youth on the one hand, and massive, ruthless, profit-obsessed corporations on the other, with the kids obviously in the right. Well, fair enough, but the movie is being distributed by Warner Brothers, which made $31 billion last year, and is not noted for being a humanitarian charitable foundation: if they genuinely believed that high-end entertainment should be free to all, we wouldn’t have had to pay over twenty quid for our tickets (after taking concessions and my freebie card into account). And yet we did.

Well, this isn’t the first film to be hypocritical about big business, but it is emblematic of the way that Ready Player One comes on all street and revolutionary and ends up simply being rather timidly conventional in its attitudes. There is nothing genuinely surprising or unusual about its message or attitudes – in the end the characters decide that everyone should spend less time in the Oasis, because the only really real thing is reality (profound stuff, here – I’m surprised that Opus’ 1985 classic ‘Life is Life’ didn’t end up on the soundtrack, the period is certainly right).

What’s going on here is something fairly typical of films about VR and the like: the ultimate message that this can only ever be a poor substitute for the so-called ‘real world’. A really subversive and possibly much more interesting ending would be one akin to that of Brazil, with everyone retreating into their own personal solipsistic fantasies, leaving the real world deserted but for humming consoles and comatose gamers. But modern culture is ultimately as concerned with the preservation of social order as religion was centuries ago, and just as Saint Augustine was at pains to point out that suicide won’t get you into heaven (otherwise there is the risk of true believers topping themselves just to cut short their time in an imperfect world), so these days films and books about VR seem obliged to stress that they can only ever be a distraction, simply because someone’s got to do the work to keep the real world running.

In Ready Player One, this sudden emphasis on the priority of the real world comes as a crunching gear-change given we’ve just sat through over two hours of the Oasis being depicted as a miraculous utopia where dreams can literally come true, but it’s no less than what you would expect in a big mainstream movie like this one. It meets its social obligations with due diligence – but fortunately, Spielberg is also around to make sure it more than passes muster as a piece of entertainment, even if it isn’t as challenging as any of the episodes of Black Mirror it occasionally resembles. A big, shallow pool of a movie; lots of fun to splash around in, assuming you’re familiar with the water, anyway.

Read Full Post »

A Triumph of Substance over Styles

There is something odd in the English mentality that sometimes makes us more enthusiastic about celebrating our narrow squeaks and mitigated disasters than commemorating our genuine national triumphs. (I’m almost tempted to suggest this because genuine English national triumphs have been thin on the ground for some time now, but I feel besieged enough right now, thanks.) Perhaps it’s just our famous national sense of fair play that makes us want to stick up for the underdog. Especially when the underdog is us. At the moment there may be very particular reasons for this sort of thing – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The latest example of someone getting nostalgic about a pretty bad day is the new movie from Christopher Nolan. Having already treated us to Insomnia, Inception, and Interstellar, Nolan’s new movie is entitled InDunkirk (in some territories – specifically the interior of my head, but I digress). Oh, all right, it may actually be called Dunkirk, but it’s set in and around the town of that name, at the back end of May 1940.

The story of Dunkirk has genuinely become a part of the British national myth, but I’m genuinely uncertain as to how well-known it is around the world. Nolan wisely takes no chances and opens the film with a set of captions filling in the story so far – with the Nazi war machine sweeping west across Europe, the British army and its allies find themselves surrounded in the French port of Dunkirk. With the enemy closing in, the need to get the men off the beaches and over the channel to England is becoming desperate. But how is the miracle to be accomplished?

Nolan’s movie focuses on a handful of different storylines, set on land, sea, and in the air. A young soldier (Fionn Whitehead) makes his way to the allied enclave, and desperately attempts to get onto one of the ships taking soldiers off the beach, as discipline begins to falter amongst the trapped men. The owner of one of the ‘little ships’ (Mark Rylance) sets off across the channel, determined to do his bit and save as many of his countrymen as he can. And a Spitfire pilot (Tom Hardy) attempts to protect the ships taking off the army from the depredations of Luftwaffe dive-bombers.

As you can perhaps discern, this is not quite a traditionally epic war movie, built around a specific narrative. Instead it seems to be trying to offer up an almost impressionistic experience of what it felt like to go through the ordeal of the Dunkirk evacuation. The storyline of the movie is quite straightforward, and there is correspondingly little exposition, just a succession of set-pieces. Nolan is, characteristically, attempting to do something clever and tricksy with the film’s handling of space and time, but it takes quite a while for this to become completely clear.

It comes as no great surprise to find regular Nolan collaborators like Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy in the movie (apparently Michael Caine also contributes a vocal cameo), nor, really, distinguished thespians like Ken Branagh or Mark Rylance. It has to be said that these gentlemen are occupying the somewhat-coveted ‘With’ and ‘And’ section of the cast list, with many of the main roles played by younger, less famous actors such as Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney, and Barry Keoghan. Also making a fairly substantial appearance is the quadro-mammaried popstrel Harry Styles, who apparently used to be in some boy band or other. Styles is actually perfectly acceptable in this movie, which I fear is only going to encourage him to keep acting. You can’t have everything, I suppose. It is notable, I think, that Christopher Nolan has managed to make a major film with a cast almost exclusively composed of white men, without anyone kicking off about it – maybe he really does have magic powers. (It’s enough to gladden the heart of a thundering misogynist.)

While doing my research for this piece (quiet at the back – of course I do research), I discovered that Dunkirk is based on a script which Nolan wrote donkey’s years ago, long before his rise to prominence as a director. Apparently he put it on ice while he gathered enough experience making large-scale Hollywood blockbusters (can’t argue with a confident man, I guess), and in some ways it feels like something written in a different mode – it has some of the audacity of Nolan’s most celebrated work, but not really the narrative density or thematic strength which you associate with those films. He appears to be trying to make the film work more on a visceral level, but it is a qualified success at best in this regard.

And I have to say that, while it still feels unlikely that Nolan will ever make a film which is less than accomplished and engaging, I left this one without the same joyous sense of having had the possibilities of cinema confirmed for me that I felt after all the other Nolan films I’ve seen. Naturally, I seem to be in a tiny minority on this one (just for a change), as many professional film-watchers are announcing this is Christopher Nolan’s best film yet, and a sign of him finally realising his promise as a film-maker. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I do think it’s a bit suspicious that it’s Nolan’s first film in fifteen years that isn’t on some level a fantasy or an SF movie that has been hailed as marking his admission to the grown-up’s club. It seems you just can’t get respect making certain kinds of genre movie, even if they’re as exceptional as Inception or The Dark Knight.

Then again it may just be that this is one of those films which it is just unacceptable to give a negative review to, not just because of the director and cast, but because of the subject matter itself – slightly absurd though it sounds, giving the thumbs down to Dunkirk could be interpreted as disparaging one of the defining moments in the modern British narrative, along with everyone involved in those events. We are in the middle of a bunch of movies about the Second World War at the moment – recently we’ve had Churchill and Their Finest Hour, with yet another Churchill bio-pic (Darkest Hour) being trailed before Dunkirk itself. Is it just a coincidence that all these films about Britain heroically going it alone should be making an appearance at the moment? I’m sure Nolan is not setting out to make particular political points with Dunkirk, but I note that the film’s parting shot – a reminder that this muddled withdrawal of Britain from Europe was not a triumph, and should not be treated as one – is not one of the elements being lionised by its supporters in the media.

As I say, Christopher Nolan seems incapable of making a bad film, and watching Dunkirk should prove a memorable experience for virtually anyone: it is full of striking images, heart-felt performances, moments that stay with you. By almost anyone’s standards it is a good, if somewhat unconventional war movie and historical drama. But I have to say that of all the Nolan movies that I’ve seen, it’s the one I can least imagine myself sitting down to watch again and again, even if that says more about his exceptional track-record than anything else.

 

Read Full Post »

Suspension Thriller

Some people mark the turn of the year by observing the flight of birds, the passage of the seasons, and the signs to be drawn from the sky. I, on the other hand, prefer to keep track of what’s on at the local cinema and take it from there. Currently we are receiving a range of seasonal movies, plus what I can only describe as quality blockbusters. Christmas may be here soon, but – I am certain – film industry types are more concerned by the fact that awards season isn’t that far behind it.

It occurs to me that the kind of film which aspires to win Oscars isn’t anything like as certain a commercial bet as the typical big dumb derivative summer blockbuster. It’s a measure of how important critical respect is to the major studios that every year they sink millions of dollars into films like Foxcatcher – a true-life crime story about Olympic wrestling, not traditionally a commercially popular subgenre – and various other worthy and high-minded projects, when they could be doing more superhero movies and remakes with a more guaranteed profit margin. These films do constitute a gamble – the ones that win major awards will receive a push at the box office as a result, but the ones that don’t may struggle.

Then again, sensible studios invest wisely: which brings us to one of the first quality blockbusters off the blocks this year, Bridge of Spies. You can’t always judge a film based on the names of the key personnel, but any film starring Tom Hanks, directed by Steven Spielberg, and co-written by the Coen brothers must have something going for it, surely?

The story opens in late 50s America, with the Cold War at its height and espionage enthusiastically pursued by both parties. One such Soviet agent, Rudolf Abel (played by Mark Rylance), is captured by the FBI in New York, and put on trial for his activities. It is politically important that Abel is seen to be given a fair trial, and given the awkward and unpopular job of defending him is Jim Donovan (Hanks), an insurance lawyer.

Donovan does his best but it quickly becomes clear that he has been retained simply for the purpose of keeping up appearances – and no matter how token a figure he is, it doesn’t stop his family from being on the receiving end of hostility from other American citizens who see him as a Communist sympathiser.

Going on in parallel with this is the story of the training of Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), a US air force pilot being prepared to take a U2 spy plane on a reconnaissance mission over the USSR. When the mission takes place and Powers is shot down, an awkward international situation threatens – but with the US and the USSR each holding one of the other’s agents prisoner, there is the chance of engineering an unofficial exchange. An unofficial exchange requires an unofficial negotiator to broker it, of course, and Donovan finds himself flying off to a newly-partitioned Berlin, responsible for bringing about Powers’ safe retrieval…

There’s a magical experience which happens too rarely at the cinema – that moment when you suddenly become totally assured that you are watching a film made by people who completely understand what they’re doing, and that as a result you can just relax and sit back, safe in the knowledge that you’re in for a piece of superb entertainment. I am happy to say that I had one of those moments very early on in Bridge of Spies.

This is possibly even more noteworthy given that this is – in theory at least – a thriller, but one where many of the scenes concern middle-aged men having complicated discussions with each other in various offices. There are virtually no action sequences worthy of the name, and to anyone with a reasonable grasp of modern history the conclusion of the movie should hold few surprises. And yet Spielberg has managed to make a film which is both gripping and genuinely entertaining.

Early on in his career, Tom Hanks was whisked off to have his photo taken with an elderly James Stewart, which if nothing else displayed remarkable prescience on the part of the publicist involved: Hanks is the closest thing modern American cinema has to Stewart, no-one else can project that kind of everyman quality while still remaining a star, no-one else can do quiet decency in quite the same understated way. Hanks is on top form here – he is basically playing the conscience of America for most of the film, but he does it without once seeming hokey.

What’s also very special is the relationship between Donovan and Abel and the bond that develops between them. Rylance takes an incredibly introverted and phlegmatic man and turns him into a memorable character, and the scenes between him and Hanks are captivating: it’s deeply thrilling to see the great American movie star and the brilliant British stage actor bringing their different styles to the film, and watching them combine so flawlessly.

Then again, there’s barely a single dud performance in the entire film – the minor characters Hanks encounters on his mission are all wonderful little miniatures of writing and performance, each one memorable in their own way. Turn of the 60s America and Germany are both painstakingly recreated, and Spielberg eschews flashy look-at-me directing in favour of simply telling the story.

There is, I suppose, a sort of God-bless-America-aren’t-we-wonderfulness to some of the scenes in this film, which some viewers may find a bit difficult to stomach – in a less-accomplished film, it might not sit easily in a story which to some extent is concerned with the way in which American realities do not live up to American idealism. And, given the nature of the story, this is primarily a fairly talky film about middle-aged men discussing the politics of five and a half decades ago. Nevertheless, as far as this sort of film goes, Bridge of Spies does it superbly – it’s hard to imagine how it could be any better, to be honest. It’s a film that deserves to do very well at the box office, regardless of how many rewards it picks up, and I hope it gets the success it deserves.

 

Read Full Post »