Basket Cases

Here’s a genuinely weird piece of promotion for a new movie: people going to see Tom Harper’s The Aeronauts at my local multiplex receive a free chocolate bar (it’s an Aero, in case you were wondering). The logic behind this seems tenuous at best, if you ask me, although it did get me thinking about what other films could potentially benefit from a similar strategy. Maybe the makers of Lion missed a trick (are Lion bars still made?). I’m not sure even a lifetime’s supply of free Twix would tempt me to see any more Twilight films, but I suppose the option is still there if they ever decide to remake Galaxy Quest, Red Planet Mars, or Marathon Man (they’d probably have to rename it Snickers Man, though). I can imagine a hook-up between a new version of Cabaret and the makers of Kit Kats, too.

The weird promotion is perhaps a sign that the makers of Aeronauts are worried about their film finding an audience, something only compounded by the fact they opted to release it into cinemas on a Monday, thus effectively giving it a seven-day opening weekend (conventional wisdom is that the more money you make on that weekend, the more people will go to see the film subsequently). Are they right to be so worried about its prospects? Well, constant reader, occasionally a film comes along which isn’t actually bad, and has points of real quality about it, but is still obviously going to struggle to find an audience. And The Aeronauts is very likely one of these.

The bulk of the film is set in and above London in 1862. Tweedy boffin James Glaisher (Eddie Redmayne, ensconced securely in his comfort zone) is widely mocked by his fellow scientists and other parties for his belief that the English weather can be predicted (hmmm), and in order to prove this he needs to go up into the sky in a big balloon. To help him with this (ad)venture, he retains the help of experienced balloonist Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones). However, she has been in a bit of a slump since her husband (Vincent Perez) passed away at the end of their last balloon trip (let us just say that the marriage experienced an abrupt vertical termination) and isn’t sure she wants to have anything more to do with that sort of thing.

Needless to say, Amelia is talked round, investors are found, and on a fairly bright day the two of them (and a dog) clamber into their basket and set off into the wide blue yonder. (Slightly worryingly, only the dog has a parachute.) Glaisher is dry as an old biscuit and seems only to be concerned about his meteorological readings; he regards Amelia as being excessively frivolous and perhaps a bit foolhardy. Is there going to be a mighty falling-out at 30,000 feet? (Hopefully not a literal one.)

Well, the film has perhaps achieved something of a coup by getting Redmayne and Jones back together again, but I’m not sure this is quite a charismatic enough pairing to get people to turn out to see the movie. It has to be said, though, that much of the movie is just the two of them in and around the basket of a balloon at various altitudes, occasionally with a spot of jeopardy in the mix, though no more than you would expect from a PG-rated movie.

The movie works hard at tricking you into thinking this is a dramatisation of true events, and indeed James Glaisher was a pioneering meteorologist who went on a very important flight in 1862. However, the Amelia Rennes character is, not to put too fine a point on it, entirely made-up: the actual pilot who accompanied Glaisher and saved his life, a chap by the name of Henry Coxwell, has been written out of the film’s version of history, presumably for being just too male and heavily bearded and not facilitating the kind of empowering feminist subtext which apparently is the most important element of the film. The Progressive Agenda Committee really are very, very busy these days; I’m guessing it was also one of their ideas to make Glaisher’s friend and fellow scientist John Trew Asian. Obviously this is well-intentioned, but I’m not sure what it achieves or how well thought-through it is; it mainly just succeeds in feeling like an exercise in box-ticking and kicking me out of the story as a result.

I’m not entirely sure how long the actual flight (sort of) depicted in the film lasted for, but I get a sense it may have been less than the 100 minutes The Aeronauts lasts for. Certainly this is a film of two halves: much of the film concerns the two of them in the balloon together, as noted, but to fill in the less-eventful stretches of the journey, the film has laid in a good supply of filler (perhaps ballast would be a more appropriate term), in the form of lengthy flashbacks to how they ended up in the basket together.

To be honest, this is quite average bonnet-opera stuff, and any interest that might be stirred by Glaisher’s struggles to be taken seriously, his relationship with his parents, and so on, is sabotaged by the suspicion that, as the entirety of Wren’s back-story is completely made up, so might Glaisher’s be as well. As a dramatisation of true events, this would just about pass muster; as pure fiction, it is just a bit underpowered.

Nevertheless, the film is visually striking, with some lovely vistas as the balloon rises higher and higher – there’s a fine score, too. There are likewise some stomach-churning moments as the characters find themselves falling in and out of the basket and having to clamber around on the balloon envelope itself – the film is an unqualified success when it come to generating these kinds of queasy thrills (my companion got a bit alarmed until I told her that Felicity Jones never, ever dies in movies). But even so, they’re only one quite small element of a strange mixture of costume drama and special-effects movie. Redmayne and Jones are perfectly acceptable, but given this is not really based on a true story, and not really an action adventure, and not really especially surprising or dramatic as a drama, all The Aeronauts really has to commend it is the fact that it and its stars are generally pleasing to look upon. And you get a free chocolate bar, of course.

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The Over the Hill Mob

You know, until I just looked it up, I would have said that Michael Caine had basically forsworn his once-notorious ‘I’ll do anything’ work ethic and had spent the last few years only doing cameo appearances in Christopher Nolan movies. But apparently not: twenty-one films in the last decade, more or less, which is not a bad average by anyone’s standards. Still, you don’t see the great man in really juicy leading roles very much any more, and the chance to see him in action in just this style was the main reason why I trundled along to see James Marsh’s King of Thieves.

Caine plays Brian Reader, a recently-widowed professional criminal (Francesca Annis, who plays his wife, manages to scrape a prominent billing despite carking it in the opening few minutes) who is feeling his age and perhaps looking for a purpose in life. Now, most people in his situation would probably think about taking up yoga or possibly bowls, but given his past and particular skill-set, Reader decides his last hurrah will be to knock off the vault underneath the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit building, stuffed with cash, gold, jewellry and diamonds.

He duly assembles a crack team, or – to be more strictly accurate – a crock team, consisting of Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Ray Winstone and Paul Whitehouse, in addition to the young security expert who is making the whole undertaking possible (a sop to the streaming generation in the form of Charlie Cox). Potentially employed as their fence is an incontinent fishmonger nicknamed named Billy the Fish (Michael Gambon).

Well, as you might expect, things do not go entirely to plan with a team of this calibre (and vintage) on the job, and the traditional heist-movie falling-out between the principals actually occurs before the robbery is even completed. Will the gang of crinkly crims get away with it? Will their clashing egos be their undoing? Or could the police prove to be rather more competent than anyone is giving them credit for?

You know you’ve made it as a British crook when they start making films about your exploits – this has been a flourishing subgenre of the Brit crime movie for many years now. And, before we consider King of Thieves as a piece of entertainment, we should remember that this is a film based on true events (and not even the first one purporting to retell this particular story – The Hatton Garden Job came out last year, and got rather unfavourable notices). All right, so it’s not quite on the same level as some of those jolly fantasies which seem to be just a bit too fascinated by Jack the Ripper and other serial killers, but still – stuff got nicked (most of which remains unrecovered as of the film’s being released). A company went bankrupt as a result. People lost their jobs. You know, just mentioning it.

The film really attempts to skate over this, and initially at least seems to be intent on making use of its cast’s undoubted credentials when it comes to comedy. It is a particularly black, deadpan kind of comedy, mostly revolving around the gang’s advanced ages and the inevitable impact on the execution of the robbery – the look-out keeps dozing off, they have to remember to pack enough of their various medicines and ointments for the duration of the job, and so on. It’s quite broad stuff, but with a cast of this quality it’s still very watchable and entertaining stuff. Even so, to begin with I found myself a little nonplussed: the plot seemed very linear and quite shallow. Would King of Thieves just prove to be another disposable piece of knockabout frivolity, elevated only by its performers?

Well, not quite, because as the film goes on it becomes rather more interesting. What starts off looking like a typical piece of romanticised nonsense glamorising loveable London gangsters actually acquires unexpected depth and grit, and has moments of genuine grit and drama. The gang fall out, in earnest – the cosy camaraderie which initially seems to exist between them is replaced by real tension, and the old saw about honour amongst thieves is shown to be a myth as they set about double-crossing each other with an enthusiasm that belies their years. And here the cast get a chance to show what they can really do: given some of his former roles, it’s hardly a surprise that Ray Winstone can be an effective heavy, but I find I am constantly surprised by Jim Broadbent’s range and ability as an actor. You always kind of expect him to be someone slightly vague and somewhat jolly, but here he turns out to be a genuinely menacing and nasty piece of work, quite capable of holding his own in a confrontation with Michael Caine.

Michael Caine is 85 and it is inevitably a little sad to see him somewhat diminished, physically, by the passage of time: he looks frailer, and it is noticeable that he doesn’t have quite the screen time one might expect; the film seems to have been sympathetically constructed to spread the burden amongst the whole ensemble. But he is still the indisputable guv’nor of this film, still one of the biggest names in British cinema, and he has lost none of his charisma or technical ability as an actor. This is a proper actor’s performance, finding the subtleties of the character and not afraid to be unsympathetic – as the film goes on there’s a suggestion that Reader isn’t just the loveable old burglar he’s initially presented as. This isn’t one of Caine’s best films, but this is still an excellent performance.

There’s nothing very original about King of Thieves, but it’s a pacy and engaging little film and a consistently entertaining one. The gear-change between droll black comedy and semi-serious crime drama is something it never quite manages to pull off as smoothly as it probably needs to, and as I say there is the whole true-crime-as-entertainment thing to consider. But it’s still worth seeing, if only for an excellent cast doing very good work, led by one of Britain’s greatest movie stars.

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