Dunkirk

At its best, ‘Dunkirk’ is a tense, immersive and visceral experience that practically screams to be seen on the biggest screen possible. The dogfights are staged so that the vast expanse of sea and sky are abruptly juxtaposed with the claustrophobic interior of the Spitfires. Scenes of men trying to escape torpedoed or dive-bombed ships strive for a Brueghel-like level of hellish intensity.

There is enough in ‘Dunkirk’ that works – and works well – for me to hesitate in calling it a failure or even outright say that I was disappointed. I was perplexed, though, that’s for sure – Nolan makes some aesthetic and narrative decisions that are frankly baffling – and I was more than often frustrated.

Things start interestingly enough with a group of English soldiers, who may have been separated from their unit or may be deserters – sneaking through the narrow streets of Dunkirk, seeing what they can steal from deserted households. German planes are dropping propaganda leaflets, two of which our immediate and ostensible hero Tommy* (Fionn Whitehead) grabs from the air and stuffs down the front of his trousers. Not too much later on, he’ll drop his breeches on the beach to take a shit and the inference is that he’s saved Adolf’s best efforts at demoralisation purely to wipe his arse on. But Nolan, for all that he’s half an hour off gleefully wallow in blood and bashed-in heads and third-degree burns, tiptoes away from Tommy’s required toilet break and even stages the scene such that Tommy might not have answered the call of nature anyway.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting that Nolan should have gone all real-time defecation à la ‘Kings of the Road’, but if you’re starting your movie with an I-wipe-my-arse-on-Hitler’s-propaganda note, then don’t be fucking coy about it. Anyway, Tommy’s possibly postponed poop sees him make the acquaintance of Gibson (Aneurin Barnard) whose name is subsequently revealed not to be Gibson but the script doesn’t give him any other name so I’ll continue calling him Gibson. Tommy and Gibson decide to get off Dunkirk beach by any means necessary, first by impersonating stretcher-bearers (they’re booted off the ship by the medical orderlies), and then by a feigned act of heroism in front of an officer which sees them herded onto the next troopship. Which is promptly torpedoed and they find themselves back on the beach.

Their travails are intercut with the sea crossing of Dawson (Mark Rylance), his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and their friend George (Barry Keoghan) after the navy requisition Dawson’s pleasure yacht as one of the flotilla of “little ships”; and a dogfight with the Luftwaffe by RAF flyboys Collins (Jack Lowden) and Farrier (Tom Hardy). I use “flyboys” not as a derogatory term but to indicate how the script portrays them. Remember that ‘Family Guy’ episode where Stewie, on trying to join the RAF, is asked what his qualifications are and replies, “I have a British accent, I’m possibly homosexual and my wife’s just awful”? Well, that’s the level of characterisation on display here.

Nolan straight-up tells the audience from the outset that these three points of view occupy temporally different spaces: a week for the scenes on the beach, a day for the “little ships” to make the channel crossing, collect survivors and return; and an hour for the dogfight. He proceeds to intercut between them according to dramatic beats and the rhythms of Hans Zimmer’s score**. And at the cost of any sense of continuity. Granted, when he pulls all three timelines together with the tension ratcheted to the absolute maximum, it’s a genuine coup de theatre and pretty much justifies the ticket price.

The fact that we’re two-thirds plus through the film before he effects this coup de theatre, however, is indicative of the wider problem. As with so much of his work, Nolan approaches the story of Dunkirk as an exercise in non-linear experimentalism and showy imagery. His grasp of character and how men interact in the theatre of conflict is flimsy at best. Peckinpah would have focused on group dynamics and the mindset of the soldier; hell, even David Ayer would have known where to focus the drama. Nolan, to put it bluntly, misses the real story even as he continually stumbles over bits of it.

Case in point: Tommy tries to join a line of soldiers on the beach and is basically told to fuck off (“Grenadiers, mate,” a gruff squaddie says, eyeballing him). The military as a class system in microcosm: a fascinating angle Nolan could have explored, but no – a single throwaway line of dialogue and the theme is never revisited.

Case in point: James D’Arcy’s colonel is appalled by the bland assurances of Kenneth Branagh’s commander and seems, just for a moment, as if he were about to vent anger at the callous idiocy of the top brass back home, but no – the moment passes and he remembers he’s a British officer in a war movie.

Case in point: someone notes that the tide is coming in, another character asks how they know, and the curt response is that the incoming tide washes the dead – those drowned, burned or shot during an earlier (failed) evacuation attempt – ashore. Cut to a column of men, knee deep in the sea, waiting on a ship that might not even fucking exist, pushing away from them said incoming corpses. They do so hesitantly and respectfully but not without some measure of disgust. Or maybe despair.

And I couldn’t help thinking that this is where the real drama was. Imagine being one of those men on the beach. Lined up in columns. A pretence of military discipline enforced even in the aftermath of abject defeat. No certainty of rescue. The Germans pushing ever closer. Stukas strafing the beach. The promise of being on the next ship cruelly mocked by the previous ship erupting in flames then keeling over and being taken by the cold grey waves. This is where the drama is: the hope, the despair, the terror, the horrible sense of inevitability as the whine of a Stuka’s engine cuts across the sky. This is the story Nolan should have told. And yet he takes pains – and teeth-grindingly clichéd and melodramatic pains at that – to keep Tommy and Gibson off the beach. His only real focus on the men on the beach is the opportunity they present to frame a shot. He flips from the OCD delight of constructing purely geometrical images, to the childish delight in flipping over the first domino in an elaborately constructed sequence and chuckling as he watches them fall.

Likewise, the focus on Dawson does real damage to his portrayal of the “little ships”. For eighty solid minutes, you’d swear it was only his pleasure yacht making the channel crossing. Nolan doesn’t show a single other non-naval vessel until the last 15 minutes when a metric fuckton of them suddenly appear out of nowhere and Hans Zimmer loses control of himself on the soundtrack. What should be the key moment is reduced to here-comes-the-cavalry cliché.

What really kills the film, though, is two moments of bilious melodrama – one in a beached fishing boat where Tommy, Gibson and some other deserters basically re-enact that ‘Twilight Zone’ episode about the nuclear shelter but with a fishing boat instead of a nuclear shelter; and one on Dawson’s boat which makes the histrionics of ‘Dead Calm’ look like a piece by August Strindberg. Nolan’s preference for these moments over the genuine human drama of the men waiting on the beach speaks volumes about the film ‘Dunkirk’ could have been.

On a technical level, there’s little to dispute, however the performances are serviceable at best. Branagh squints and delivers his lines with all the engagement of a man who’s wondering when the pub opens. Rylance is dismal, trying for Everyman but forgetting that only the super-rich – whether it’s 1940 or 2017 – own yachts; his line readings are stilted and I’m still trying to figure out what accent he was attempting. Everyone else is basically forgettable. In fact, it says something that Harry fucking Styles is the film and his “performance” is functionally better than Mark Rylance’s!

Then we have the score. If the film itself hangs together at odds in the sum of its parts, weird tonal and aesthetic disconnects jarringly obvious from scene to scene and even within individual scenes, then the score summarises that feeling. I can only describe it as a score of two halves, not that it delineates so neatly in terms of its application throughout the film’s running time. It’s as if two entirely different scores had been commissioned, chopped up, and scattered across the film. The first uses two atonal motifs – one suggesting the inevitability of the tide, the other a thuddingly obvious “ticking clock” motif – and in the second is the kind of let’s-rip-off-Elgar-and-Vaughan-Williams orchestration that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hovis or Warburtons commercial.

But the biggest failing is Nolan’s insistence that the audience’s engagement be entirely based on a handful of cardboard cut-out characters. Dunkirk was an evacuation. The experience was collective. The odds against both soldiers and the pilots of the “little ships” were phenomenal. For all that he fills the film with carefully constructed long shots of beach and sea and columns of men, Nolan fails to communicate any sense of scale.



*Yes, Nolan wrote a script where an English soldier’s name is Tommy. Yes, my reaction was pretty much as you’d imagine.


**I will have more to say about Hans Zimmer before this review is over. It will not be pretty.

Inception

There’s a recording of ‘Mack the Knife’ where Frank Sinatra deviates from Brecht and Weill’s tale of white gloves, jack-knives and blood flowing in scarlet ribbons, and goes into a fantasia on all the other singers who have stamped their personality on the song:

Old Satchmo, Louie Armstrong, Bobby Darin

They did this song nice, Lady Ella too
They all sang it with so much feeling
That ol’ Blue Eyes, he ain’t gonna add nothing new

This is kind of how I feel about reviewing ‘Inception’. Is there anyone on the blogosphere (or at least that region of the blogosphere occupied by writers on film) who hasn’t written about ‘Inception’ yet? Is there a single review out there not weighted down by a comments section wherein rages debate on the implications of that already infamous final shot?

Is there anyone who doesn’t know that the film is about dream hacker named Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) who is hired by a businessman to implant an idea in the mind of a rival? That the first half details how Cobb puts his team together and the second details their (mis)adventures in the dream state when their carefully delineated plan goes awry after their victim’s subconscious proves a little more resistant to their machinations than expected?

Is there anyone who hasn’t sung the praises of Nolan’s audacity in the set piece involving a van plunging from a bridge in the kind of slow motion that makes Peckinpah look like a speed demon? Who hasn’t marvelled at the intercutting between this and two other extraordinarily orchestrated set pieces which play out simultaneously in different levels of the dreamscape and across different lengths of time? Who hasn’t been impressed by how efficiently Nolan sets up the rules of this world of the imagination and plays scrupulously fair by them?

Have I missed any reviews that haven’t acknowledged how heavily the dialogue errs towards the expositional and remarked upon the heavy-handedness of some of the character names? (Cases in point: Ellen Page’s dream architect Ariadne, introduced in a scene where Cobb asks her to design a maze. Or Marion Cotillard’s Mal, the fact that the actress is French ramming home what the name translates as.) Have any of these reviews not written these tendencies off in the final analysis, minor quibbles compared to how goddamned entertaining, audaciously executed and beautifully shot the whole thing is? (Wally Pfister, Nolan’s regular DoP is worthy to be spoken of alongside Roger Deakins and Christopher Doyle.)

Is there anything in ‘Inception’ that isn’t absolutely flawless, from the often breath-taking visual effects and mise-en-scene (a train barrelling out of nowhere down a city street; an unblemished city of mind filled with the oddest little details; a street bending over and folding in on itself) to the uniformly excellent performance: diCaprio is as good as he’s ever been; Joseph Gordon-Levitt revisits his cerebral/cynical persona from ‘Brick’ but underpinned here with a streak of badass; Ellen Page graduates from the quirky, borderline annoying teenie of earlier roles and her intelligence shines through fiercely; Tom Hardy, unrecognisable from ‘Bronson’, camps it up to hilarious effect; Cillian Murphy, so often cast in cold or villainous roles, imbues the film with a wounded humanity; Marion Cotillard is sultry, dangerous and seductive and I for one wouldn’t have it any other way; Ken Watanabe imbues what could have been a plot function role with real gravitas; and Michael Caine, in what is essentially a cameo, proves that he’s Christopher Nolan’s good luck charm plus VAT.

In fact, the only problem with ‘Inception’ is that it’s almost too polished and accomplished. There’s none of the unpredictably that Heath Ledger’s magnificently reinvented Joker brings to ‘The Dark Knight’, crashing through Batman’s clearly defined moral rectitude and sending the movie spinning off in unexpected directions. Nor, despite the levels of the dream state and the brilliant construction of the climactic set piece(s), is the structure quite as clever or effective as that of ‘The Prestige’. Indeed, the last shot of ‘Inception’ seems almost manufactured in its ambiguity compared to the gradual and thought-provoking way in which ‘The Prestige’ slowly and slyly reveals its secrets.

None of which should detract from the fact that ‘Inception’ is one hell of a good movie. Seven films into his career and Nolan has yet to disappoint. ‘Inception’ might not be the absolute touched-by-genius best thing on his CV (that honour, as far as I’m concerned, still goes to ‘The Prestige’), but evaluated for what, after all, it is­ – ie. a big-budget tentpole studio release – it sets the bar arguably higher than any mainstream director currently at work.

Inception (prelude to review)

I’ve just got back from a screening of Christopher Nolan’s mind-warping, genre-bending balls-to-the-wall sci-fi action thriller ‘Inception’ – which, on a first viewing, I have to say fully justifies every bit of hype – and I’m tempted to hammer out a quick review and post it in enough time to qualify for my fourth contribution to Bryce Wilson’s Christopher Nolan blog-a-thon which concludes today at Things That Don’t Suck.

Then I read a couple of reviews – by Jake at Not Just Movies and Tim at Antagony & Ecstasy – which really raised the bar. It seems like everyone in the blogosphere is throwing in their tuppence-ha’penny worth on ‘Inception’ – it’s generating as much fervid and fervent response as Nolan’s previous film, ‘The Dark Knight’, did – but Jake and Tim have gone above and beyond, producing the kind of intelligent and sophisticated yet unpretentious film writing that reminds me why I started my own blog.

Accordingly, and with just as must respect accorded to Christopher Nolan himself, I feel need to take a few days to think my way through ‘Inception’ as fully and deeply as possible. It’s a hell of a film and it deserves the most comprehensive review I can give it. So I’m going to post a couple of Shots on the Blog reviews over the next week, then turn my attention to ‘Inception’.

Right now, the most authoritative thing I can say about it – and even this is a clutching-at-straws approach to a summary – is that it comes across like a conflation of ‘The Matrix’ (with real cerebral concerns instead of pseudo-intellectualism), ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (with someone’s mind instead of a vault) and ‘Where Eagles Dare’ (snow, fortress, shoot-outs, explosions) filtered through William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ and rewritten by Iain M. Banks.

And even that’s simplifying it!

The reinvention of the bat

Now don’t get me wrong: I like George Clooney. A lot. But it has to be said: ‘Batman and Robin’ is a piece of shit. It was my friend Paul who delivered the most accurate and coruscating verdict on ‘Batman and Robin’: “It says something when a movie’s got Alicia Silverstone, Uma Thurman and Vivica Fox in it – and you still walk out halfway through.”

‘Batman and Robin’ is what it had come to. It made the Adam West incarnation of Batman look like an exercise in documentary realism. It made the lacklustre ‘Batman Forever’, in which the mantle so convincingly worn by Michael Keaton was transmogrified into a mooching slab of banality by Val Kilmer, look like a rediscovered masterpiece by Powell & Pressburger. It made a five year old with a snot nose and scabby knees running through a council estate screaming “nana-nana-nana-nana, nana-nana-nana-nana, BATMAAAAANNN!” at the top of his voice look like Sir Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. It made –

*steels himself*

*gnashes teeth*

*types the motherfucker anyway*

– it made ‘Twilight’ look like a proper film.

In short, ‘Batman and Robin’ presented a pretty convincing argument for the end of the franchise. Only a madman or a genius would have attempted a reboot.

Enter Christopher Nolan. (Clue: he ain’t no madman.) Even then, if I’m being perfectly honest, I had my doubts. Taking my seat at Nottingham’s Showcase Cinema back in 2005 (a scant eight years after Joel Schumacher had raped the shit out of my sense of aesthetics in exactly the same cinema with ‘Batman and Robin’), I wondered if Nolan – who had delivered a minor masterpiece with ‘Memento’ and an assured big-name studio picture with ‘Insomnia’ – wasn’t making a mis-step.

Ten minutes in, with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) roughing it up in down and dirty style in some godforsaken prison, and I gave myself a mental rebuke for doubting Mr Nolan’s talent. An hour in, with Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Tom Wilkinson and Morgan Freeman delivering the goods and Bale himself wiping the slate clean in terms of how you portray Batman onscreen, and I was in hog heaven.

This was a Batman that was dark and nasty. Wilkinson’s Falcone was a proper mob boss, the kind of guy who’d shoot you in the head halfway through a meal and still be on coffee and desserts while his henchmen were dumping you in the harbour. Cillian Murphy’s Dr Crane (a.k.a Scarecrow) was a chilling and nightmarishly-visaged fiend … even before he put the freakin’ mask on! Ra’s Al Ghul and the League of Shadows were terrifying in their implacable certainty that their genocidal plans were the only reasonable option.

And then there was Bale’s Batman. You only need to remind yourself of Bale’s filmography. The man’s intense. His performances eviscerate. You could put him in ‘Teletubbies: the Movie’ and he’d tear the screen apart in an exegesis of method actor ferocity that would have the pre-school audience in therapy for decades. Or, to put it more simply, cast the man in a comic book movie and it stops being a comic book movie pretty damn quick.

Not that Nolan’s take on Batman was ever going to be comic book. There is very little of the gothic iconography that defines the comics. Nolan’s Gotham pays lip service with some shots of a monorail and the quasi-Victorian architecture of Arkham Asylum, but otherwise the film plays out across an unapologetically gritty milieu: the docks, the slums, Falcone’s downtown bar, an authentically grubby police precinct.

Case in point: it’s halfway into the film before Wayne dons the bat-suit. Most directors would mark the moment with a big, iconic close-up of Bruce Wayne as Batman, cape fluttering, zooming down through the night sky to combat villainy. Nolan does things differently. Nolan stages Batman’s first appearance during a drug deal, there various miscreants and heavies darting between containers as something – something shadowy and deadly and preternaturally fast – picks off their numbers one by one.

Context: Bruce Wayne picks his alter ego based on what scares him the most. Reasoning: if he conquers his own fear (pace the teachings of Ra’s Al Ghul), the very thing that scares him will terrify his enemies.

Nolan keeps the bat to the shadows. The effect is so much more devastating.

In a film that has only one weak spot – Katie Holmes’s indifferent performance – Nolan effortlessly portrays both sides of the persona, Bruce Wayne and Batman, as intertwined. Where most of the previous outings (only Burton’s first Batman film comes close to synthesising the two) unambiguously delineate Bruce Wayne the millionaire playboy and Batman the masked avenger, Nolan uses Wayne’s outward appearance of gentleman of leisure to strip away the concealing layers of his psyche and get to grips with the day-to-day hardships and psychological implications of leading what is essentially a double life.

‘Batman Begins’ gave the cinema-going public a credible, obsessively driven and sometimes vulnerable Batman. A gritty, ballsy Batman. A Batman largely free of glib one-liners and casual heroics. A superhero, in other words, for our troubled and ambiguous times.

Then he spent the two and a half hours of its genre-bending, expectation-shattering sequel demolishing every aspect of his anti-hero’s granite-like rectitude, irreversibly compromising Batman’s morality and turning him into a post-Guantanamo Bay one-man Patriot Act, beating the shit out of arrested suspects, clandestinely deporting foreign nationals, fucking over the basic civil liberties of every resident of Gotham (a Gotham, moreover, now free of monorails and Gothic buildings; a Gotham that could easily pass for New York) and basically proving right every naysayer who decries him as a vigilante. ‘The Dark Knight’ is the Ingmar Bergman of summer blockbusters, an unremittingly dark foray into the depths of its supposed hero’s ravaged humanity; a film whose gleefully amoral villain, Heath Ledger’s definitive Joker, remains utterly and perversely true to himself while forcing Batman at every turn to overturn every tenet of justice he stands for.

Earlier in this blogathon, Bryce linked to a thought-provoking and elegantly constructed essay at The Movie Blog which weighs the evidence of ‘Batman Begins’ as a deconstructionist or reconstructionist film and finds it reconstructionist. It’s an argument I’m entirely convinced by. But there’s no doubt that Nolan’s two Batman films are also reinventions.

Memento

Posted as part of Bryce Wilson’s Christopher Nolan blogathon at Things That Don’t Suck

‘Memento’ is a feature-length extrapolation of a 5,000 word story (‘Memento Mori’) by the director’s brother, Jonathan. The film adheres to basic premise of the short story – a man with short term memory loss tries to track down the man who raped and murdered his wife – and makes brilliant use of its key imagery: post-it notes, snapshots, tattoos, anonymous rooms. In the film, anti-hero Leonard (Guy Pearce) moves between a series of cheap motel rooms. The story mires him in the antiseptic confines of a hospital room. He’s called Earl in the story.

‘Memento Mori’ is structured so that it unfolds as a dialogue between Earl and his subconscious, his need for revenge/closure fighting its way through the vacuum that his memory has become. Every ten minutes – half an hour at the most – he’s back to a cognitive ground zero. He relies on prompts: lists, reminders, pictures. The post-it notes are handy. Over time, he’s built up a file; worked towards identifying the perpetrator. This kind of information needs more than post-it notes. He has himself tattooed. He’s called Earl in the story. There’s no Sammy Jankis.

‘Memento’ sets itself a difficult task. Cinema is above all a visual medium. The story is entirely internalised. The stages by which Earl arrives at an identification of his wife’s murderer are just so many blind spots. The settling of accounts at the conclusion is presented as the punchline to an elaborately established and cruelly ironic joke. At ten pages, it’s a small jewel of deliciously deceptive storytelling: it’s a character study whose protagonist is characterless; a revenge thriller stripped of thrilleramics or catharsis; a short story with sod all in the way of story.

‘Memento Mori’ has no Sammy Jankis. It has no Teddy Gemmell, either. There’s a tattooist in one brief scene, and a man lying dead on the pavement at the end. It’s fair to say that Earl is the only character; the story takes place in the blank spaces of his mind. Its tone and structure probe Earl, dispassionately and at one remove, like a lab specimen. He’s called Leonard in the film. Sammy Jankis (Stephen Toblowsky) is an alter ego of sorts, a man whose condition parallels his own; a man who, like Leonard, loses somebody close to him. Sammy is a constant reminder to Leonard. A reminder of who he is and why he is. A reminder, also, of guilt. Teddy Gemmell (Joe Pantoliano) is just as inextricably a part of Leonard. In the pas-de-deux of protagonist and antagonist, Leonard and Teddy share the same co-dependency (a constant theme in Nolan’s work which Bryce has highlighted during this blogathon) as cop and killer in ‘Insomnia’, Angier and Borden in ‘The Prestige’, Batman and The Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’.

‘Memento’ has Sammy and Teddy because otherwise Leonard would have no life, no persona, no point of identification or empathy audience-wise. Without Sammy and Teddy, Leonard would be a black hole into which everything would disappear, from Wally Pfister’s washed-out and atmospheric cinematography to the structural legerdemain of Christopher Nolan’s script. There would be no emotional charge to Leonard’s dalliance with a hooker (nothing sexual involved; he just wants to wake up to a few seconds’ false hope) or the scene where he burns some of his wife’s possessions (in coolly cynical voiceover he muses “I must have burned truckloads of this stuff”; a horrible admission that the act is purely symbolic and he’s no closer to acceptance, still unable to move on).

‘Memento Mori’ keeps its narrative beats offstage; likewise the genre tropes. Earl has a file on the killer; that’s all Jonathan Nolan really tells us. The film has neo noir written all over it. Drug dealers, duplicitous dames, questionable cops, guys with guns. Clues and connections. A join-the-dots hard-boiled narrative. In reverse. It’s like T.S. Eliot, having penned “in my beginning is my end”, thought fuck it and abandoned the ‘Four Quartets’ to write crime thriller. Jonathan Nolan’s story uses the cadences and careful repetitions of poetry to get into Earl’s head and describe the empty spaces and strange half-echoes of lost memories. He’s called Leonard in the film.

‘Memento’ is a feature-length extrapolation of a 5,000 word story by the director’s brother. In its end is its beginning.

David Bowie is Nikola Tesla: the unsung hero of The Prestige

Posted as part of Bryce Wilson’s Christopher Nolan blogathon at Things That Don’t Suck

The first time I saw ‘The Prestige’ – the first of three viewings on the big screen and umpteen more on DVD – I was struck by the charismatic actor playing Nikola Tesla. There was something familiar about him, but I didn’t give too much thought to the matter. I had other things to think about; ‘The Prestige’ is, after all, a thinking-caps-on kind of movie, one of those incredibly rare films that not only sucker-punches you with a hell of a twist first time round but gets even better on subsequent viewings when you know what’s coming and can marvel at the filmmakers’ skill in conjuring misdirections, concealing lacunae and – more impressive still – leaving enough ambiguity to allow for endless debates as to who was who and who knew what in any given scene.

I wholeheartedly love ‘The Prestige’. It’s easily my favourite movie of the last decade and my favourite Christopher Nolan film – with ‘The Dark Knight’ coming a close second*. It’s also a real bugger to write about (I originally reviewed it a year and half ago as part of the Personal Faves project) since you can’t get into any really interesting discussion without giving away an amazing double- (or possibly even triple-) whammy ending. And if there’s anyone reading these pages who hasn’t seen ‘The Prestige’, I want their first viewing of it to be as jaw-droppingly revelatory as mine.

The basic premise is a friendship that turns to rivalry between two magicians in the Victorian era: the working class Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and slumming-it aristocrat Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) – career bests, performance-wise, from both stars. It’s an adaptation of Christopher Priest’s epistolary novel which veers startlingly into science fiction in a denouement which explicitly homages an H.G. Wells novel.

Although Nolan, co-adapting with his brother Jonathan, wisely stops short of Priest’s OTT finale, a suspension of disbelief is still required for one of the big reveals (although it works brilliantly as a metaphorical device even if you don’t buy it as a plot point) which involves a device created by Tesla. Which is where we came in. And, like I said, I didn’t waste too much time sitting the cinema wondering who was playing Tesla. For me, he was Tesla.

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian inventor, one of the pioneers of electrical engineering. His work in the field of electricity favoured alternating current while his great rival Thomas Edison espoused direct current. History records Edison’s name as synonymous with electricity, but Tesla’s work – while tending on occasion to the more conceptual and eccentric – remains incredibly important. In a similar twist of fate, Tesla undertook some early and groundbreaking research into x-rays; however, it is Wilhelm Röntgen who is credited with discovering the technique (it also netted him the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901).

Tesla’s brilliance can be reckoned by the sheer amount of devices, principles and research he pioneered: rotating magnetic fields, the induction motor, voltage multiplication circuits, the arc light, polyphase systems, charged particle beam devices, the electronic logic gate (based on Babbage’s analytical engine), telegeodynamics, bladeless turbines, wireless electrical transfer, radio-controlled weaponry, theories on robotics and his famous (or infamous) Tesla coil.

He was eccentric. He claimed his genius was coterminous with his celibacy (though I guess that would explain Paris Hilton’s mediocrity!); he had a phobia of dirt; he ended his days in a room at the New Yorker Hotel. He kept pigeons in said hotel room. I’m still not sure how that squared with his abhorrence of dirt.

The Tesla of ‘The Prestige’, however, is the Tesla of middle age; the impeccably dressed, elegant, slightly formal, slightly aloof Tesla. The Tesla already starting to exhibit signs of paranoia, principally due to Edison who by this point has graduated from rival to nemesis. When the film ended, I sat through the end credits. “David Bowie!” I exclaimed, turning to my wife. “That was David Bowie playing Tesla!” Bowie’s given good – sometimes inspired – performances in movies before, most notably Nic Roeg’s ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. His turn in ‘The Prestige’ is something else, though. I honestly didn’t recognise him on that first viewing; he had become the character.

‘The Prestige’ is a dark story of blame, grudges, guilt, secrets and sacrifices. One of the magicians, in the final stretch, emerges as slightly more sympathetic than the other. Throughout the rest of the movie, though, it’s left to the supporting characters to supply the humanity: Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as the women in the feuding conjurors’ lives and, particularly, Michael Caine as the impresario whose association with them goes right back to the beginning of the story.

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla contributes something else entirely. He brings real gravitas to his portrayal of Tesla and, in turn, Tesla lends a crazed credulity to the single most fantastical element of the film. The only actual historical character in the film, he’s also the erratic genius who delivers into Angier’s hands a device that utterly changes what he can accomplish in his stage act. The story goes into such brilliantly bizarre realms at this point that no-one else but Tesla could have served the narrative. Put simply, you couldn’t make up a character like Tesla. When the fiction is this strange you need the kind of truth that is stranger than fiction. Watch ‘The Prestige’. Think about what Tesla’s invention does. Don’t ask yourself why anyone could actually believe that such a thing would work. Ask instead if Nikola Tesla would even believe it wouldn’t.

*For the record, I’ve not seen ‘Inception’ yet.

500th post

It’s been two and a half years and 500 posts since I started The Agitation of the Mind, my third stab at a blog after MovieBuff on 20six and MovieBuff Redux on Platform27, but the first time I got the balance right and attracted a halfway decent readership.

To celebrate, I’m opting for the lazy man’s guide to blogging and digging out (or at least linking back to) my ten favourite posts from the first age of Agitation. Original material will resume shortly.

1) Peckinpah as Prospero. I dedicated the whole of December ’09 to a celebration of Sam Peckinpah’s life and career, tying in with the 25th anniversary of his death. It proved the most well-received project I’ve undertaken on the blog and gave me the most satisfaction personally. I’m proud of every single article I posted during that month, but “Peckinpah as Prospero”, a distillation of the importance of Peckinpah’s cameo as Will the coffin-maker in ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’, stands out as the first (and thus far only) time I’ve abandoned the standard operating procedure of overall movie reviews and concentrated in specific detail on one crucial scene. This is the deepest I’ve ever engaged with a film.

2) THE HEY, INTERNET, STOP BEING SUCH CYNICAL EFFING DOUCHEBAGS BLOG-A-THON: Where Eagles Dare. When the inimitable Stacey Ponder at Final Girl put out the call, two years ago, for contributions to a blog-a-thon whose only remit was “write about something in the world of film that fills you with complete and total unbridled fucking retarded JOY … wear your heart on your sleeve and tells us all why you love something”, I didn’t need asking twice. ‘Where Eagles Dare’ is one of those movies that I absolutely loved as a kid – I loved the explosions and the derring do and all that business with the cable cars and I loved the music and it was the first ever movie I saw Clint Eastwood in – and is that rarest of beasts: a movie I love just as much as an adult. This article was the impetus for my Personal Faves project, an on-off series that I’m still working my way through.

3) Inglourious Basterds (a review in five chapters). The day Quentin Tarantino’s controversy-baiting war movie opened in the UK was my first wedding anniversary. We’d booked time off work; a restaurant table had been reserved. Ordinarily, I’d never have dreamed of dragging my better half to a war movie on such a day. But it was Quentin fuckin’ Tarantino! Luckily, Paula was more than receptive and loved the movie as much as I did. I knew then I’d married the right girl! I blogged a “first impressions” review that day and probably would have left it at that but for a fucktarded miss-the-point review in the New York Times that I just couldn’t leave unchallenged. The result, at 2,100 words, was the longest review I’d posted prior to the Peckinpah-fest getting underway.

4) Exorcist II: The Heretic. Last year, I dedicated a week to watching, researching and reviewing all five ‘Exorcist’ films. Since only one is a bona fide masterpiece, two are pretty decent (Blatty’s ‘Exorcist III’ and Schrader’s ‘Dominion’) and the other two are vile, heinous, filthy, poisoned, bilious, despicable and malicious acts of desecration upon cinema, this proved to be something of rollercoaster in terms of quality. It’s a tough call on which is the worst of the franchise, Boorman’s ‘Heretic’ or Harlin’s ‘Exorcist: the Beginning’. ‘Heretic’ probably wins out in terms of open-mouthed disbelief at just how bad it is – and how much pant-wettingly worse it gets. This review is far and away the most sarcastic piece of prose on the blog, challenged only by …

5) The Twlight Quartet: Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde, Edward and Bella?!? The centerpiece of four articles I posted on consecutive days, royally ripping the piss out of Catherine Hardwicke’s fuck awful adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s (allegedly; I haven’t read it) fuck-awful novel. It’s a review so snide that I interrupted myself parenthetically half way through to muse “I ought to abandon the mission statement of this blog and review more bad movies. I am just loving how much of a bitch I can be!”

6) Unforgiven. Clint Eastwood’s supreme work as actor and director. The best western since Sam Peckinpah passed on. This piece is the kind of straightforward appreciation I try to produce for Agitation as a matter of course.

7) The Prestige. I’ll be revisiting this one next month as part of the Christopher Nolan blog-a-thon being hosted by Bryce at Things That Don’t Suck between 11 and 18 July, but I’m still quite proud of my original piece on what remains one of my favourite films of the last decade. I’m most proud of the fact that I wrote a fairly in-depth review, discussing all of the reasons I love this tricksy and brilliantly constructed film, whilst delicately manoeuvring around the lacunae with nary a whisper of a plot spoiler. As I noted in the article, “to get into a really interesting discussion of the film … I'd have to give away an audacious, jaw-dropping triple-whammy ending (I've spoken to some people who think it's a double-whammy ending; it's entirely possible it's a quadruple-whammy ending - like much of the film, it's up to the viewer to figure it out) … and I want everyone who watches 'The Prestige' to be as blown away as I was by it.”

8) The Wages of Fear. Like ‘Where Eagles Dare’, ‘Unforgiven’ and ‘The Prestige’, this was written as part of the Personal Faves project. Mostly I talk about the films I’m considering in terms of the direction, the performances, the iconography, etc. – based, of course, entirely on my opinion; other times, I link my articles in to a personal recollection triggered by or involving the film. In other words, a lot of what I write is as much about me as it is about the movies. This is one of those rare pieces that is driven by the atmosphere of the film. Clouzot’s cynical thriller is as black-hearted as it is white-knuckle. I’d like to think this article captures why.

9) Grindhouse. Another article I owe to Stacie at Final Girl. For those of you not in the know, Stacie hosts a semi-regular film club. She selects a film, sets a date and the good and the great of the blogosphere contribute articles on said movie. In January ’09, she picked the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez collaboration ‘Grindhouse’. One problem: ‘Grindhouse’ had never been released in the UK. Not in its intended format, anyway. The distributors saw fit to release and extended (almost two hour) cut of ‘Death Proof’; there was rumour that ‘Planet Terror’ would go direct to DVD. It eventually got a theatrical release, several months after ‘Death Proof’ had done the rounds. However, thanks to the Region 1 DVD of ‘Planet Terror’ and a bit of surfing for the spoof trailers on the net, I managed to create my own ‘Grindhouse’ experience. I would still dearly love a release on DVD of the film QT and RR intended.

10) The Day of the Jackal. Have you ever written a piece you’ve been inordinately pleased with? You’ve crafted some decent turns of phrase, struck a conversational tone, achieved a nice line in droll humour. You post it on your blog, feeling quite satisfied. Check back the next day for any comments. Check back again. And again. Absolutely bloody nothing. Granted, in the early days of this blog it was a big deal to get just one comment (whole swathes of posts went by without any response) and I didn’t start Agitation with the sole intention of getting lots of hits and being uber-popular. (I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw depicting a little kid sitting on the knee of a department store Santa; Santa asks what he’d like for Christmas; the kid replies, “I want an X-box and an iPod and fifty comments a day on my blog.”) But I digress. The point is: my ‘Day of the Jackal’ review, posted as part of last year’s Shots on the Blog crime festival, fits the old saw of all my articles being like my children; I love them all, even the unpopular ones that don’t fit in and get bullied by the other kids and stay in their room listening to heavy metal and reading back issues of “Guns ‘n’ Ammo”. Hell, I probably love those kind of articles even more and for precisely that reason.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Prestige

Watch Christopher Nolan's second film 'Memento' - an out-of-nowhere cult hit that set him up for what has proved, so far, a stratospheric directorial career - and marvel at its cleverness, intricacy and structural legerdemain. Watch 'Batman Begins', the most impressive franchise re-boot this side of 'Casino Royale', and marvel at his sleight of hand vis-a-vis the identity of not-quite-villain Raz Al Ghul. Watch 'The Dark Knight' - in my humble opinion the best film released this year - and be utterly gobsmacked at the narrative-fracturing possibilities of one individual's force of will (the Joker's) smashing into the ordered and rigidly defined perameters of Batman's. Consider the themes of duality, confusion of identity and obsession that permeate Nolan's filmography.

It seems somehow inevitable that he and his brother and co-writer Jonathan Nolan would adapt Christopher Priest's novel 'The Prestige'. Using the word "adapt" loosely. Priest's novel flits between time-frames (it's bookended and mesologued by contemporarily-set scenes while the bulk of the narrative plays out amidst the greasepaint and gaslight of the Victorian music halls) and features four* different first-person narrators, none of whom are reliable. The unreliable narrator is a stock-in-trade of Priest's novels. He's also interested in perspective, illusion and doubles. He's a science-fiction writer (such genre staples as time travel, cloning and alternative histories have all featured in his work) whose novels don't read like sci-fi.

As written, 'The Prestige' doesn't come across as ripe for filming. With much of the first half devoted to working class magician Alfred Borden's diary, all fractured entries and elliptical clues, and the second consisting of aristocractic Rupert Angier's journal, just as sketchy and missing crucial bits of information, the narrative essentially stops halfway, goes back to the beginning and starts again.

What Nolan does is to take elements from both sections of the novel and shuffle them like a deck of cards. This is a film about illusions, and as such takes the form of an illusion itself. The opening sees impresario Cutter (Michael Caine) explain the stages of a magic trick - the promise, the turn and the prestige - to a young girl (who is she? - very important, this - and where, chronologically, does this occur?); he also gives evidence at the trial of Borden (Christian Bale), who is accused of murdering Angier (Hugh Jackman). Oh, and there's some business about a lot of top hats in a forest that comes on like 'Miller's Crossing' in a time-warp. Forest, what forest? And why so many hats? It's important; keep it in mind.

Do not take all of this at face value. Take some of it at deeper than face value. There are clues even in misdirections.

It's a film about illusions and it takes the form of an illusion, but 'The Prestige' isn't a parlour trick - not like 'The Village'. It's one of those rare films - 'Memento', 'A Tale of Two Sisters' and 'Deep Red' being the only other examples I can site off the top of my head - that get infinitely better once you know the twist. But, like those other films, it's not so much a twist as a complete re-evaluation and re-assessment of everything that's gone before it. The first time I saw 'The Prestige', me and Paula talked about it all the way back to the car, all the way home and all the way through a bottle of wine. Now, having seen it a good half dozen times, we still debate it after each viewing.

Of course, I can't get into a really interesting discussion of the film here and lay out some of the questions me and Paula only think we've answered, because I'd have to give away an audacious, jaw-dropping triple-whammy ending (I've spoken to some people who think it's a double-whammy ending; it's entirely possible it's a quadruple-whammy ending - like much of the film, it's up to the viewer to figure it out). And I want everyone who watches 'The Prestige' to be as blown away as I was by it.

So, I can take the easy way out and break out the superlatives, praise Christopher Nolan's faultless direction to the heavens, applaud a cluster of great performances - Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine and David Bowie (a revelation as Nikola Tesla), take a bow - and rave about the period recreation, the hugely atmospheric cinematography and the attention to detail that coheres what could have been a sprawling epic full of overlapping timelines and interrelationships into intimate drama.

Or I can say that the story is driven, superficially, by rivalry (which Nolan kicks into gear differently than Priest does, and perhaps more effectively) but is, on a deeper level, about obsession, about secrecy, about dualism. About price of success and the sacrifice that is demanded. There's a third-act revelation (or maybe second act, or maybe fifth act - you work it out) that demands a suspension of disbelief that may leave you thinking the Nolan has gone a twist too far, but the key to the film is not to take it literally. True, Priest's novel takes it literally - and then takes it even further (there's a definite H.G. Wells homage going on in the latter stages of the novel) - but Nolan's genius is to render it as a metaphor. After all, this is a film about the dualism. About sacrifice.

Does it agitate the mind? Oh, you sweet fucking-A betcha!!

*Or more.

Summer of the superhero (2): Hellboy II and The Dark Knight

So, my two most anticipated films of the year have come and gone, both sequels, both saddled with the challenge of facing up to an awesome first instalment, both reuniting director and key players, both with the potential for greatness.

One was masterful, one disappointing. Let’s get the disappointment out of the way first.

A few weeks before it opened, I mentioned to a friend that I was eagerly anticipating ‘Hellboy II: the Golden Army’. His response was a cautious, “Might just be more of the same, though.”

Oh, that it had have been! The original ‘Hellboy’ was a delight: it came out of nowhere, unheralded, the brainchild of Guillermo del Toro, a man who had made a career out of alternating highly personal Spanish-language films (‘Cronos’ – what a debut!) with generic Hollywood productions … a ‘one for you, one for me’ arrangement that seemed to serve him well. Only with ‘Hellboy’, it was more a case of ‘one for me while I pretend it’s one for you’. Studio film-making shot through with a style all of his own. And I dug it big time.

I dug ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ a whole lot more – it’s on the personal faves list and I’m itching for it to get pulled out of the hat (a certain revisionist Boulting Brothers classic is next on the list) – and was in a state of almost pant-wetting excitement at the prospect of a ‘Hellboy’ sequel.

Ordinarily, this would be the point where I’d come out with an eminently sarcastic paragraph consisting of a single sentence where every component word is full stopped, just to ram the message home as bluntly as possible. Something like:

But. It. All. Went. Wrong.

I can’t quite bring myself to grind the axe so viciously with ‘Hellboy II’, though. Whatever its deficiencies (see next few paragraphs), it is nothing less than visually magnificent. The troll market sequence is a standout, likewise an extended sequence involving a forest elemental; although seemingly vindictive to begin with, once defeated by Hellboy, it dies the most poetic of all movie deaths, turning a grimy city sidewalk into a pastoral glade. Likewise, del Toro’s take on the angel of death: a deliciously ambivalent creation on every level.

Del Toro’s imagination gets free rein when it comes to the creatures and visuals, and he exploits it in to the full. Oh, that the same degree of imagination, of artistic flair had been lavished on the script. For the script is the albatross around the film’s neck, the millstone forcing it to shuffle when it should sprint, leap, fly …

The original succeeded because of its script, its direction and its cast. All elements lined up and clicked into place. The sequel fails because it takes the intelligent characterisations of its predecessor and dumbs them down. Remember the lovelorn Hellboy (Ron Perlman), worshipping Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) from afar, taking advance on matters of the heart from a nine-year-old kid? A wonderful, perfectly played scene. In the sequel, Hellboy and Liz are a couple and their constant bickering is on par with the last, desperately unfunny, series of ‘Men Behaving Badly’.

Or how about Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), Hellboy’s nominal departmental nemesis: originally a stuffed shirt who later proves his mettle and earns Hellboy’s grudging respect. Here, he’s reduced to a stuttering imbecile paraded in front of the audience for cheap laughs. Liz Sherman’s erstwhile edgy, unpredictable heroine is recast as a doe-eyed sap. Doug Jones as Abe Sapien – a cool, intelligent foil to Hellboy first time round, is forced into a lapdog-like romantic subplot and saddled with dimestore motivation purely to drive the plot forward in the final act.

Yeah, ‘Hellboy II’ is a glory to behold imagery-wise, but its nothing short of a betrayal of everything that made the first film so priceless.

Fortunately, Christopher Nolan doesn’t make the same mistakes in ‘The Dark Knight’. In fact, he doesn’t make any mistakes at all. ‘The Dark Knight’ is not only an improvement on the frankly fucking bloody brilliant ‘Batman Begins’, and not only the best film of the summer, but it’s one of the best films of the year, period.*

I’m aware that I’ve just spent about 600 words bemoaning ‘Hellboy II’ and I could easily knock out twice that many praising ‘The Dark Knight’ to the heavens, but before this posting gets too long, and too reliant upon strings of fanboy-grasped adjectives, I’ll just pick out just four aspects of the film at random and hopefully, if there’s anyone within a hundred miles of a cinema who hasn’t seen it yet, said individual will log off this blog and head for the multiplex in question PDQ:

1) Heath Ledger as The Joker. Christ, I feel his loss so badly watching this film. The Joker is quite simply his greatest performance. It telegraphs the career he would – should – have gone on to. Like Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Ledger tears down the screen, eradicates the boundary between actor and audience, and makes every fucking one of us complicit in his gouts of inspired mayhem.

2) Christian Bale as Batman. Going deeper and darker into Bruce Wayne’s psyche, his balls-to-the-wall acting style creating an even more emphatic schism between the two personalities, Bale takes a comic book (anti) hero and turns him into a mainstream Hamlet. I can’t think of any other blockbusting, studio produced summer event movie that delves with such Shakespeare fearlessness into the compromised morality of its ostensible hero.

3) The supporting cast: Michael Caine, making it a quadruple-whammy after ‘Batman Begins’, ‘Children of Men’ and ‘The Prestige’, doing some of the best work of his career; Morgan Freeman, the Mister Cool of cinema, who – as Antagony & Ecstacy has pointed out – claims the single best line of the film; Gary Oldman, building on the rugged humanity of Lieutenant Gordon in the first film, here developing the character to heights of almost tragic intensity; and Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent/Two Face, the only complaint about whom is that, with The Joker taking centre stage, he doesn’t survive to become the antagonist of a third instalment – Eckhart’s performance would easily have driven another movie.

4) The co-writer and director, Christopher Nolan, who, six films into his career has yet to deliver a film that is less than fascinating, and half of whose filmography – in my opinion – constitutes bona fide masterpieces. For what he’s done so far: slainte, Mr Nolan. For what he has the potential to go on to do: I can’t fucking wait!



*To qualify this remark, two of the US critics’ best films of ’07 – ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’ – didn’t open in the UK till January and February of this year respectively.