The Homesman

As a director, Tommy Lee Jones isn’t exactly prolific: four features in just over twenty years, two of them – ‘The Good Old Boys’ and ‘The Sunset Limited’ – for television. His big screen directorial debut was ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ (2005), a contemporary western concerned with revenge and redemption that has about it more than a touch of Peckinpah. It’s a damn good movie; close as all hell to being a modern classic.

‘The Homesman’ is a western set in the 1850s concerned with failure and redemption that has about it more than a touch of Michael Cimino. In both films, Jones acknowledges his influences and draws on them subtly and respectfully in the service of the story he’s telling. ‘The Homesman’ has the stateliness and the visual grandeur of Cimino circa ‘Heaven’s Gate’ – cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto is the film’s unsung hero – the better to contrast with the dour narrative and its unsettling accretion of detail.

The film opens with three women in a hardscrabble Nebraska township emerging from a particularly vicious winter having succumbed to mental illness. “Mad women”, as the townsfolk are quick to label them. The parson, Reverend Dowd (John Lithgow), arranges for their care to be given over to a preacher’s wife in Iowa and calls upon one of his flock to make the journey: an undertaking of several weeks. When farmer Vester Belknap (William Fichtner) – husband to the afflicted Theoline (Miranda Otto) – refuses to take part in a drawing of lots to determine who gets the job, spinster of the parish Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) takes his place.

No prizes for guessing who ends up playing chauffeur to the disturbed women?

In addition to Theoline, Mary Bee’s charges number Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) and Gro Svendson (Sonja Richter). I’ll not reveal that nature of their mental illness: an unflinchingly blunt sequence early in the film – fleshed out by a couple of flashbacks around the midway point – spells out their suffering. Mary Bee – brittle, pious, frustrated in her attempts to find a husband – isn’t the ideal candidate for the company of the demented. Early in the journey, the incessant wailing of one of her charges drives her to despair. The hard realities of the journey don’t sit well with her, and the arrangement she enters into with petty criminal George Briggs (Jones) to assist on the trail as recompense for saving him from hanging is also fraught; they’re opposites in gender, age, social standing, theological views and general outlook on life.

As the journey progresses, Jones – co-scripting as well as directing (film is based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout*) – maps the gradual thawing of their relationship, only for things to take a sharp and unexpected turn. Again: I’m remaining tight-lipped. Suffice it to say that the last third of ‘The Homesman’ plays out under the shadow of the event in question, giving it the feel of an extended coda … notwithstanding one scene of stone cold ruthless violence that is cathartic only to a point.

‘The Homesman’ is a fascinating piece of work, primarily because of its focus on mental illness. It’s a theme that wrong-foots you as a viewer, subverting what you expect from a western even as the production design, cinematography and music evoke the genre as classically as in anything by Ford, Cimino or Eastwood. Inasmuch as Jones can only portray his female cast in terms of the few social roles that the rampant patriarchy of frontier life afforded women, ‘The Homesman’ can also be considered a feminist western. Jones as director has great respect for the film’s treatment of its anti-heroines and even two scenes depicting the grubby realism of personal hygiene on a long trial are shot without recourse to exploitation.

Any film so strongly grounded in character succeeds or fails by its performances. Jones gives a minimalist, elegiac variation on a type of character he’s played several times before and can play to perfection. Except where Briggs is required to be the focal point for a scene’s dynamic, Jones he is careful to keep himself to the side – if not in the background – and cede the film to his co-stars. Swank is as brilliant as you’d expect: I don’t think anyone else could have played Mary Bee.

Otto, Gummer and Richter, notwithstanding that they barely have a word of dialogue between them, turn in genuinely affecting character work. Streep, in a five minute cameo, does her best work since Eastwood’s ‘Bridges of Madison County’. Hailee Steinfeld, popping up at the end to literally be nothing more than an indicator of Briggs’s capacity for good, suggests soulful depths to a character that is pretty much one-dimensional on the page.

Everything else about ‘The Homesman’ works beautifully and in concert. It is a stunningly well-made film, glacially paced as befits its narrative; a film of telling minutiae and elegantly nuanced grace notes; it is mature, intelligent and deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. Which, sadly, it failed to find on the big screen. But that’s what DVD, streaming and on-demand are for. Seek this one out, engage with it on its own terms, go through what its characters experience. It’s transformative.


*Robert Rossen’s ‘The Came to Cordura’, Henry Levin’s ‘Where the Boys Are’, and Don Siegel’s autumnal classic ‘The Shootist’ are all based on Swarthout’s work.

Jason Bourne

In one respect, ‘Jason Bourne’ simply offers more of the same: foot chase, bike chase, car chase, hand-to-hand fighting, tradecraft vs technology, big crowd scenes, yet another piece of the Bourne backstory jigsaw slotted into place. And it would be easy – and lazy – to leave an appraisal of the film at that.

The first debate any reviewer of ‘Jason Bourne’ needs to engage in – of more paramount importance, even, that “by Christ, that title’s lousy, why didn’t they just stick a polysyllabic noun after the dude’s name and respect tradition?” – is whether more of the same is necessarily a bad thing.

With only millimetric tweaks to the formula decade on decade, the Bond juggernaut has made enough money at the box office across half a century to buy out Croesus, bankrupt the Sultan of Brunei and play my-bank-account’s-bigger-than-your-bank-account with J.K. Rowling; and done so on more of the same. Harry Potter? More of the same for seven consecutive terms. Horror movie franchises? ‘Halloween’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ notched up double-figures and then got rebooted. More of the same.

Yes, ‘Jason Bourne’ deals in precisely the logistically jaw-dropping set pieces, individual vs the system battle of wits, and hyper-kinetically edited action that you’d want – nay demand – from the series; and let’s face it, Paul Greengrass defined the Bourne aesthetic with his first throw of the dice on ‘The Bourne Supremacy’. Technically, ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ was an exercise in more of the same, and it remains the series’s high point.

The second debate is whether, almost a decade on from ‘Ultimatum’ and coming after Tony Gilroy’s formulaic (in a bad way) ‘The Bourne Legacy’, ‘Jason Bourne’ has any contemporary relevance. Or is this just the Matt and Paul nostalgia show? The answer to this one isn’t quite as clear cut.

‘Jason Bourne’ finds our buffed up anti-hero off the grid and dispiritingly reduced to bare-knuckle fighting in sundry European shitholes to earn a living. The decade that’s passed since ‘Ultimatum’ hasn’t been particularly kind to Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), either. She’s ex-CIA, embittered, and working for an Assange-kind reactionary hacker. Her penetration of CIA files pertaining to Treadstone, Blackbriar, Outcome and black ops imperative du jour Ironhand is the spark that ignites the film’s narrative. Not only does she pull down some serious heat on herself – in the former of CIA Director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) and ruthlessly ambitious Cyber Ops head Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) – but uncovers a crucial piece of information regarding Bourne’s recruitment to Treadstone. She makes contact with Bourne and the pair meet in Athens as an anti-government protest explodes into rioting. Into an already volatile situation comes The Asset (Vincent Cassel), under orders from Dewey and with his own agenda vis-à-vis eliminating Bourne.

This is good stuff, as labyrinthine and steeped in conspiracy as any of the previous instalments. Then Greengrass throws into the mix a sub-plot (which swiftly tries to interpose itself as the main plot) about a social media corporation called Deep Dream, run by visionary geek Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed) who owes his success to favours and fund money provided by Dewey. Which immediately ties the film to the already tired “hey let’s use IT to spy on everyone in the whole wide world and if necessary assassinate them” narrative of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and ‘Spectre’. A decade ago, Bond was playing catch-up with Bourne – it shouldn’t be the other way round.

It would be a cheap shot to describe ‘Jason Bourne’ as Bourne for the Twitter generation – it’s too smart for that; too well-crafted. The Athens sequence, as Bourne tries to extract Nicky from a city in chaos, comes a close second to the Waterloo station set-piece in ‘Ultimatum’ as Greengrass’s defining moment as Bourne director. The Las Vegas set car chase that powers Bourne towards his final confrontation is first class action cinema. Even the “CIA is run by murderous villains” formula gets a new spin with Vikander’s ambivalent character on course for the careerist coup in the final act.

How much more mileage the character has remains to be seen – ‘Jason Bourne’ sows enough seeds to structure at least one more film around – but with Damon still delivering the goods in his signature role and Greengrass’s superb craftsmanship and innate understanding of pace and tension, I’m happy to keep on taking the ride. Just sort the fucking title out next time, though, guys.

In the Electric Mist

I haven’t read many of James Lee Burke’s Louisiana-set crime novels featuring recovering alcoholic Deputy Sheriff Dave Robicheaux – something I intend to rectify – but the unifying aesthetic seems to be threefold: (i) slow-burn narratives; (ii) convoluted and multi-stranded ploting, often spanning different timeframes; and (iii) a juxtaposition of deep-rooted morality with protocol-defying acts of (necessary?) violence. Burke’s prose is precisely crafted and carries weight. He writes thinking man’s genre fiction.

So it’s regrettable – if depressingly understandable given mainstream American cinema’s tendency to dumb-down – that Burke and Robicheaux have been poorly treated in terms of adaptation. First out of the trap, in 1996, was Phil Joanou’s ‘Heaven’s Prisoners’, a heart-in-the-right-place attempt to capture the atmosphere and complexity of Burke’s second novel. At two and a quarter hours, it took its time negotiating the source material, but the last act still seemed rushed and awkward. Nor did Alec Baldwin’s performance ever quite suggest the Robicheaux of the novels. A good supporting cast – Eric Roberts, Teri Hatcher, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Mary Stuart Masterson – kind of got lost in the background.

Total silence on the silver screen Robicheaux front for thirteen years, then Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘In the Electric Mist’ starring Tommy Lee Jones, John Goodman, Ned Beatty, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Peter Sarsgaard, Kelly Macdonald and Mary Steenburgen went, inexplicably, straight to DVD. Stop and ponder that concept a moment. Bertrand motherfucking Tavernier, one of Europe’s most respected filmmakers – a man whose CV includes the definitive jazz opus ‘Round Midnight’, Dirk Bogarde’s poignant swansong ‘These Foolish Things’, and the drumtight policier ‘L.627’ – directs Tommy Lee motherfucking Jones – two years after his encomium-laden performance in ‘No Country for Old Men’ in a James Lee motherfucking Burke adaptation and for some weird-ass reason the world didn’t sit up and take notice.

It’s fair to say, then, that something went wrong. Maybe more than one something. Let’s break it down. The biggest something was that old how-to-ineffably-ruin-a-movie standby, producer interference. This in itself is peculiar, since most of the credited producers and executive producers had previously worked either with Tavernier on his French-language films or with Jones on his fantastic directorial debut ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’. Whatever the reason, some twenty minutes got chopped out of the film, leaving various subplots unresolved, questions unanswered, characters unaccounted for and no clear correlation between the narrative’s fifty-years-apart timelines. Apparently Tavernier’s approved cut won an award in France, which tells you all you need to know.

Other possible contributory factors (mere opinionism on my part): Jones, while a better fit for Robicheaux than Baldwin, is too old for the character; Tavernier lacks the engagement with regional culture that an American director might have brought to the project; and the big quasi-surreal set-pieces are blandly conjured. Here’s a good place to consider the title. ‘In the Electric Mist’ is a neither-here-nor-there contraction of the novel’s moniker, ‘In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead’. In its full iteration, it’s a gnarly piece of dimestore poetry. Robicheaux’s pursuit of a multiple murdered who targets hookers plays out against the filming of a Civil War epic in his jurisdiction. A plot twist sees him drugged, after which he experiences hallucinations of Confederate leader General John Bell Hood (woodenly played by Levon Helm). Electric mist = the falsity of cinema. Confederate dead = Robicheaux’s ghostly confidante/advisor. To be fair, it would take someone like David Lynch, Terry Gilliam or Alejandro Jodorowsky to visualise this kind of thing and make it work and headfuck the audience so that they never forgot it.

All of which probably sounds like I’m writing ‘In the Electric Mist’ off. But that’s not what we’re about here at The Agitation of the Mind. And while ‘In the Electric Mist’ remains a flawed piece of work by any set of critical perameters, it still has several things going for it. First and foremost, Mr Tommy Lee Jones. Too old for Robicheaux: yes. Not badass enough for Robicheaux: hell, fuckin’ no. Tommy Lee Jones represents an old-school tradition of film stars who vibe tough-guy authenticity offset by an internalized suggestion of psychological unpredictability. Jones, in other words, is heir to the tradition of Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. And there are enough scenes in ‘In the Electric Mist’ where he channels their traditions and iconography while never losing sight of his (again internalized and suggestive) personification of Robicheaux.

Moreover, Jones is an incredibly generous and adaptive actor. Watch how he plays off a seasoned performer like Pruitt Taylor Vince, each of them interweaving into the other’s dialogue. Then look at his scenes with Justina Machado, easing back to allow her character the moment, then re-insinuating himself at the crucial point. Of his scenes with Goodman, I’ll say nothing more than settle back with a big and prepare to grin like a lunatic. These guys mix it up and kick it around and create cinematic alchemy.

While it might not add up, critically or narratively, to much more than a bunch of unanswered questions and redacted subplots, ‘In the Electric Mist’ galvanises most often than not when it takes up the mantle of a character-driven piece that’s interested in the dynamic between married man/adoptive father and hair-trigger-tempered authority figure one step away from vigilantism. Maybe one day it’ll be reappraised. Maybe a producer with a certain vision will greenlight another Robicheaux movie. I have no idea who would play him – could Michael Fassbender pull off a convincing Bayou accent? – but the fact remains that the definitive James Lee Burke adaptation is still out there, waiting for the right creative team.

Men in Black 3

Does this one count as a Shots on the Blog review? Well, the franchise is about a couple of agents tasked with policing alien activity on earth; this latest (and belated) instalment starts with a prison break; and the plot centres around an attempt to prevent a murder. Yeah, that’s good enough for Shots inclusion.

Remember when the original ‘Men in Black’ was released in 1997? It was fun, frothy, irreverent and inventive; it boasted a who’d-a-thunk-it double act between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones that was quite simply a delight; and it’s hour and a half running time made for a slick blockbuster that utterly entertained and never outstayed its welcome.

The sequel appeared five years later. And it was “meh”. Five freakin’ years and they served us up an instantly forgettable piece of mediocrity. In the meantime, director Barry Sonnenfeld’s career nosedived. He’d proceeded ‘Men in Black 2’ with the misjudged ‘Wild Wild West’ and the just plain awful ‘Big Trouble’; he followed it with ‘RV: Runaway Vacation’, a film I’ve only seen ten minutes of which left me feeling profoundly despondent. Six years working in television followed.

To say I approached ‘Men in Black 3’ with trepidation is putting it mildly. To say I enjoyed it is nothing short of miraculous.

Not that the first twenty minutes or so are that promising. In short order, galactic uber-criminal Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) breaks out of a maximum security compound on the moon; then we’re reintroduced to Agents J (Smith) and K (Jones) ten years on from their last appearance, and several scenes of forced and un-engaging dialogue try to remind us how zippy the banter used to be. Following an okayish set-piece at a Chinese restaurant, some semblance of a plot kicks in. It turns out that Boris got sent down after being apprehended by K and he’s out for a little payback courtesy of a time-jump device, transporting himself back to the 1960s to assassinate K.

In the here and now, J suddenly finds himself bereft of his partner and perplexed as to why none of his colleagues can remember K. Then the full extent of Boris’s anarchic plans come to light and earth finds itself on the verge of defeat from an alien invasion. J travels back in time, intent on stopping Boris and under the dire warning to keep clear of K lest he create a paradox. The moment J steps into the late 60s, the film picks up no end. And when he encounters a forty-years-younger K (Josh Brolin), ‘Men in Black 3’ really hits his stride.

Brolin is the filmmaker’s secret weapon. He reverse engineers Tommy Lee Jones’s characterisation so perfectly that it’s not imitation or parody, but a damn good performance in its own right. Moreover, the chemistry between J and the younger K in this movie is reminiscent of that between J and the original K first time round. ‘Men in Black 3’ marks a return to the tone and style of the first film, and that can only be a good thing. There are some great visual jokes and nice concepts (Sixties counterculture provides an effective touchstone), the script plays fair with the time travel elements, and even if a late-in-the-game scene attempts to push the emotional buttons a bit too hamfistedly I’m prepared to turn a blind eye. It’s nice to see the MIBs back in a film that’s actually entertaining.

Captain America: The First Avenger

In 1991, ‘The Rocketeer’ opened to lacklustre box office. I’ve never understood the indifference; it was a fun, briskly paced WWII-set superhero movie with gorgeous art deco stylings and an even more gorgeous leading lady in the form of Jennifer Connelly.

Twenty years later and director Joe Johnston is spectacularly vindicated as he knocks it out of the park with the best Marvel Studios production yet – ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’, a fun, briskly paced WWII-set superhero movie with gorgeous art deco stylings and an even more gorgeous leading lady in the form of Hayley Atwell.

Factoring in Emily Blunt in last year’s ‘Wolf Man’ remake, there’s probably an academic paper to be written on the role of the smokin’ hot brunette in the films of Joe Johnston, and ordinarily I’d say that I was the guy to write it, but I don’t fancy sleeping on the sofa tonight so let’s move swiftly on.

Apart from a couple of dodgy bits of CGI – just a couple, mind – ‘Captain America’ is pretty much note-perfect all the way through. The key to its success is that Johnston gives the whole thing a nice old-fashioned vibe. Not just in the period recreation, but in his directorial style. Thus an action movie that’s character-driven. An action movie where the camera is held still and the editing doesn’t resemble the work of an epileptic barber – in other words, an action movie that lets you see the action. In an age of shaky-cam and bpm-editing that reduces major set-pieces in movie after movie to an impressionistic blur, this is something to be applauded.

Johnston’s cast is bob on, as well. Kudos to Chris Evans for playing Steve Rogers straight – not even the vaguest hint remains of his smug dickwad turn in the execrable ‘Fantastic Four’ movies, nor does he make the mistake of playing Steve/the Cap as too staunch and all-American. This movie could easily have drowned in jingoistic syrup. Johnston and Evans avoid the pitfalls and deliver the goods. Or should I say, Johnston and Evans and the supporting cast.

‘Captain America’ pulsates with great supporting turns. Tommy Lee Jones is back on form plus VAT as the grouchy Colonel Phillips. I can’t think of another actor who could deliver a line like “you and me are gonna have a conversation that you will not enjoy” with such relish. Hugo Weaving gets a “man of the match” award as Johann Schmidt/Red Skull (a Nazi so demonically evil even Hitler doesn’t want him on the team award). His Werner Herzog-style accent is just brilliant, and his sneering (yet beautifully subtle) ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ reference near the start is priceless.

Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones have great fun doing two contrasting versions of the Eccentric Scientist archetype. Dominic Cooper nicely reverse engineers Robert Downey Jnr’s performance as Howard (father of Tony) Stark. And Hayley Atwell … from her first scene where she proves a point by slugging a guy twice her size, to her various scenes packing heat and exchanging fire along with the guys, to the could-have-lachrymose but actually quite poignant conclusion to her character arc (gently referencing ‘A Matter of Life and Death’), she’s absolutely one of the best things about this movie and if everyone in Hollywood isn’t lining up right now to offer her leading roles then something’s amiss.

Speaking of movie references, the nods to ‘Raiders’ and ‘AMOLAD’ are augmented by homages to ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ and at least two Bond movies. Elsewhere, Johnston’s attention to detail and playful sense of humour is evident: a group of kids read issue one of the original magazine; the hood ornament on the villain’s Mercedes replaces the three-pointed star with a death’s head; a countdown to self-destruction clicks over on a flap display. Even the most outlandish technology on display keys in to a convincing 1940s aesthetic.

The subplot whereby Rogers is pressed into a war bonds fundraising campaign kits him out in a laughable first incarnation of the Captain America costume – a stroke of genius by the filmmakers as it allows us to legitimately laugh at how ridiculous he looks. When Version 2.0 of the costume is introduced, authentically weathered and buffed up and looking the business, it just comes across as all the more cool as a result.

Just as the film itself comes across as a highpoint in the Marvel canon. Joss Whedon’s ‘The Avengers’ suddenly has a hell of a lot to live up to.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 16 of 100


Picture the scene: Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam), rifle in hand, strides up to a vantage point overlooking a gorge. He whips off his ten-gallon hat, throws it upended onto the ground and tosses his glasses and watch into it. Thus unimpeded, he hunkers into a sniper’s position and draws a bead on his quarry, who is leading a kidnapped man and a couple of horses along the pass. Belmont’s finger tightens on the trigger.

So far, so ruggedly iconic. All that’s required now is a shot to ring out, Belmont’s quarry to drop from his horse and the sheriff to stand up, toss the rifle to a deputy and walk coolly away. But Tommy Lee Jones’s contemporary western – from an intricate and emotionally resonant script by Guillermo Arriaga – breaks down clichés instead of embracing them; subverts the masculine ethos of the genre instead of being defined by it.

What actually happens is that Belmont, knowing himself enough to know that he can’t shoot a man in cold blood and without warning, releases his finger from the trigger, brings the barrel of the rifle up and rolls onto his back. He squints into the sun and wipes an arm across his brow. His moment of contemplation is shattered by the jangly ringtone generic to T-mobile cellphones.

In this one moment, surprisingly comic, the juxtaposition of modern life and the old way of doing things is achieved as effectively as the juxtaposition of the various masculine codes the main characters cleave to and the challenges those codes are battered with. First time I saw ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’, I imagined the ghost of Sam Peckinpah drifting onto the set, tipping Tommy Lee Jones the nod and leaving a little something of himself in the fabric of the film.

I was still reminded of Peckinpah, watching the film recently for the third or fourth time. Explicitly, the odyssey-with-corpse narrative and Mexican setting are redolent of ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’. More subtly, the dynamics of the pursuit in ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ – Garrett (James Coburn) tracks down the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) with a sense of regret and a palpable lack of urgency – find a corollary in Belmont’s frustrated and lackadaisical manhunt for ranch boss Pete Perkins (Jones).

Said manhunt is precipitated – and I’m not throwing up any spoiler warnings, since the plot mechanics are established very soon into the two-hour running time – by the accidental shooting of Pete’s friend Melquiades (Julio Cesar Cedillo) by Border Patrol guard Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). Pete combines a promise he made to Melquiades (“If I die over here, carry me back to my family and bury me in my home town; I don't want to be buried on this side among all the fucking billboards”) with a ruthless vigilante sensibility after Belmont fails to take the investigation into Melquiades’s death seriously.

Norton’s killing of Melquiades might be accidental, but elsewhere his guilt and shortcomings are writ large. He is violent in his treatment of Mexicans trying to sneak across the border; unfeeling in his treatment of his trophy wife Lou Ann (January Jones, crafting an all-too-human performance out of what could have been a nothing role); and lacklustre in his approach to his job, whiling away the hours on duty reading porn.

Failure of masculinity extends to Belmont, whose impotence as an authority figure is mirrored by his literal impotence during his trysts with married coffee shop waitress Rachel (Melissa Leo), who doesn’t help by remarking that her much older husband swears by Viagra. “I'll turn truck-stop queer and blowjob-giver before I use that shit,” Belmont replies disdainfully.

Even Pete, essentially the one good man in all of this, is no stranger to moral compromise. He’s also carrying on with Rachel (a quietly devastating scene, late in the film, has him pin his hopes on her joining him in Mexico; you can guess the outcome). He works for a man he has no respect for, a man who’s only a rancher because the ranch was bought for him by rich parents. During his odyssey to inter Melquiades and to coerce Norton into atoning for his action, he vacillates between using force towards Norton and being rendered as impotent as Belmont when they encounter an old man, blind and infirm, living out in the wilds who begs them to perform a mercy killing. “I don’t want to offend God by killing myself,” he says. “We don’t want to offend Him either,” Pete replies as he slowly and solemnly rides away.

‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ is a thoughtful and thought-provoking film. Tommy Lee Jones goes for slow-burn in both the pacing and his performance. As director, he engages with the material on a level that would suggest the work of a seasoned filmmaker, and elicits flawless performances from his entire cast. As an actor, this is up there with his work on the Coen brothers’ ‘No Country for Old Men’.

There is profundity, intensity and raw moments of emotional import on display here. You’d expect nothing else from Arriaga, the man who wrote ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘21 Grams’ for Alejandro González Iñárritu. Yet Jones steers away from the austerity and sense of moral outrage that typify Iñárritu’s films, finding instead a sad but wry humour and an equally saddle-worn humanity. In its final scenes, ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ stops being about revenge and becomes a film about redemption, delivering a quietly haunting finale and confirming itself as a modern classic.

A Prairie Home Companion

I’ve long been a fan of Garrison Keillor: the original radio broadcasts of ‘Lake Wobegon Days’ were homespun nostalgia in excelsis. The book was even better, a lovely, lyrical slice of Americana. With Robert Altman at the helm, Keillor’s timeless, poignant prose found its way into another medium and the result – ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ – is a perfectly cast, witty, subtle, cleverly observed ensemble piece.

It’s also a swansong. A summation.

As much as I wish Altman could have made more films (after the release of ‘Short Cuts’, his multi-narrative Raymond Carver adaptation, he hinted he was planning two more Carver films), it’s fitting that ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ was his last. It’s so perfect and quintessentially Altman in so many ways.

‘M*A*S*H’, the film that made the director’s name and allowed him to plough an eccentric and unique furrow through American cinema, established him as a master of overlapping scenes; with ‘Nashville’, ‘Short Cuts’ and ‘Gosford Park’ he put together ensemble casts par excellence; ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘The Player’ acerbically satirised the institutions of the military and Hollywood respectively.

All of these qualities (which are the keynotes to his best films) are present in ‘A Prairie Home Companion’. Parochial radio stations, corporate and personal self-importance, the lachrymose excesses of Country & Western music - all are gently, but effectively, sent up. Scenes overlap, character interrelationships merge and diverge and interlink. The cast is as eclectic as any Altman ever assembled: Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, Lindsay Lohan, L.Q. Jones (a stalwart of Sam Peckinpah's films), Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly (the last two hilarious as a musical comedy duo).

Most poignantly of all, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ is a film about endings. The death of its director, shortly after its completion, bestows upon the film an extra quality. And I’m still unsure as to how deeply this influences my appreciation of the film; seeing for the first time at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema, it sent me out of the auditorium with a tear in my eye, but how much of that was wrapped up in Altman’s passing? Catching the film on TV recently, a late night screening and a couple of glasses of wine already consumed, my reaction was similar.

If ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ had been made by any other (and crucially, still-living) director, would my perspective be different? How far does the heart rule the head?

The Big Town

To the best of my knowledge ‘The Big Town’ is the only feature film helmed by prolific TV director Ben Bolt. Which is a shame since it’s one of the better American movies of the ’80s, free of the artificial visual stylisations which render much of that decade’s filmic fare hideously outdated. To indulge in a sweeping generalisation, it was a decade marked by high-profile directors seeming hell-bent on generating indulgent and excessive throwbacks to the Hollywood of old – ‘The Cotton Club’, ‘One From the Heart’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’ spring to mind – and ending up with costly flops that marred reputations and even bankrupted studios.

‘The Big Heat’ pays homage to old school Hollywood – the films noir of the ’40s – but manages to be small scale, reined-in and focussed on telling a pacy story. Bolt’s direction is clear-sighted and unpretentious. He loses no time in establishing character and location. The opening credits, playing out to Johnny Cash’s mournful rendition of ‘Home of the Blues’, sets up not-quite-hero-not-quite-anti-hero J.C. “Cully” Cullen (Matt Dillon) as a small-town boy from a farming community, holding down a grease-monkey job in an auto shop by day and proving himself a craps shooter extraordinaire by night.

Equally swiftly, Bolt and scripter Robert Roy Pool (adapting Clark Howard’s novel ‘The Arm’ have him blow Nowheresville for the big town (Chicago). Sponsored by hard-nosed businesswoman Ferguson Edwards (Lee Grant) – whose embittered husband, referred to only as Mr Edwards (Bruce Dern), was a renowned dice shooter until he was blinded in an acid attack by a vengeful opponent – Culley breaks every game in town, strikes up a non-committal romance with hometown girl Aggie (Suzy Amis), and enjoys the easy money, flashy clothes and the cachet that comes with the Edwards’s protection.

But it isn’t enough. Cleaning up with their money is one thing, but Culley wants to make a big score with his own stake. He hears tell of a game run by club-owner and mobster George Cole (Tommy Lee Jones). He attends, flashes his money around and wins big. In doing so, he rubs Cole up the wrong way. In a further complication to his continued personal safety, he falls hard for Cole’s exotic dancer mistress Lorry Dane (Diane Lane). They are soon conducting a full-blown affair.

With Cole out to bring Culley down a peg or two, and Lorry leading him a merry dance, into the picture comes Phil Carpenter (Tom Skerritt) who swiftly replaces the Edwards as a mentor of sorts. But is Carpenter the man Mr Edwards has been dreaming of revenge against all these years? And to what lengths will he go to get that revenge?

With its naïve but corruptible protagonist, duplicitous femme fatale, sardonic gangster, tangle of divided loyalties and milieu of back rooms, bars, shadowy streets and gaudy neon, ‘The Big Town’ is straight-up film noir. Perhaps only the ending, where Culley at least gets one of the girls (as well as the chance to resume his old life), hits a wrong note – the happy ending. The rest of it, though, is compellingly cynical, particularly when Culley realises just how thoroughly he’s been used.

Dillon captures both sides of Culley: the wide-eyed country boy suddenly exposed to a flashy, addictive lifestyle; and the inveterate money-grubber for whom materialism is everything. Jones, Skerritt and Dern are on top form. Suzy Amis, in only her second film appearance following a bit part in ‘Fandango’, is luminous as the romantic heroine with a chequered past.

And then there’s Ms Lane: seductive, smouldering, fantastically foxy in her show-stopping fan dance. In the pantheon of great burlesque routines in the movies – after singling out Rita Hayworth’s immortal “Put the Blame on Mame” turn in ‘Gilda’ for the number one spot – Lane’s fan dance is definitely Top Three material alongside Lolita Davidovich’s voluptuous bit of bump ‘n’ grind in ‘Blaze’*. She’s everything a femme fatale should be, viz. enough to make a priest kick a hole in a stained-glass window.



*Davidovich (billed as Lolita David) has a small role in ‘The Big Town’ as, presciently enough, a stripper.


Tomorrow on the Diane-fest: ‘Hollywoodland’.

Myth, majesty and malevolence: three modern American classics

What do 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford', 'No Country for Old Men' and 'There Will Be Blood' have in common, apart from being three of the finest films I've seen in the last three months?

Firstly, they're all adaptations - 'Assassination' and 'No Country' from novels of the same title by Ron Hansen and Cormac McCarthy, 'Blood' from 'Oil!' by Upton Sinclair. In a current cinematic climate of shoddy remakes and sequels shot through with the law of diminishing returns, they represent high-quality film-making drawn from bona fide literary sources.

The titles say a lot. I love the 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' for its unapologetic length (seventeen syllables; the same as in a haiku) and for the fact that it encapsulates the film's entire dynamic: that James and Ford will play equally significant parts in the story, that things will move inexorably towards an act of violence, and that history will record Ford as a chicken-shit. You can't say it fast, either. Listen to people asking for tickets at the box office ("Two-for-'Over-Her-Dead-Body'-please", "One-for-'Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks'-please"); by and large they blurt out the title as if embarrassed to be heard buying a ticket for such formulaic pap or desperate to get to the popcorn stand. Try it with 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford'. It almost demands you to pause in at least three places - 'The Assassination ... of Jesse James ... by the Coward ... Robert Ford'. It's a weighty and serious title, one that tells you you're in for something epic, something that's going to demand your attention.

'No Country for Old Men' functions on a different level. There's an enigmatic quality to it. It sounds poetical. It is. The phrase comes from W.B. Yeats' poem 'Sailing to Byzantium'. Again, it carries weight and significance when spoken aloud.

So, too, 'There Will Be Blood'. Four granite-like monosyllables. There's no modulation to them, no rhythm. Each word falls from the tongue as bluntly and solidly as the one that proceeds it. 'There Will Be Blood'. It's a statement. There's no way around it. Likewise, the film will have no last-reel reprieve. There's only one way the story's going: straight into the heart of darkness.

They're all epic: 'Assassination' and 'Blood' in their two-hour-forty-minute running times, the scope and sweep of their stories; 'No Country' in its striking vistas and elegiac tone. All boast the kind of cinematography that remind me why I fell in love with cinema as an art form in the first place. Cinema is, first and foremost, a visual medium; one wherein movement is crucial. That's where the word "movie" comes from after all: moving picture. All three films have magnificent - but not prettified - cinematography. It comes as no surprise that genius lensman Roger Deakins shot two of them, with Robert Elswit more than worthy of comparison to Deakins for his work on 'There Will Be Blood'.

It's tempting to describe all three as the work of directors at the top of their game - for the Coens, 'No Country' is their best in a decade and the equal of the half dozen or so works in their filmography that can genuinely be called classics; for Paul Thomas Anderson, 'Blood' is a quantum leap from the confident and technically brilliant but ultimately somewhat soulless stylisations of his previous features - but how can I apply this description to Andrew Dominik? 'Assassination' is only his second film (after 'Chopper', which I must confess I've never seen). Is he at the top of his game so soon into his career? Or will he scale even greater heights, make even more impressive films? Oh God, I hope so!

They are all films about greed. 'No Country' and 'Blood' in particular take scenarios that are almost cliches - respectively: otherwise honest man finds bag full of drug money and goes on the run; prospector is driven to dangerous measures in his pursuit of oil - while 'Assassination' touches on greed in the fiscal sense in that Jesse James (Brad Pitt) has created his own myth carving out a career as a ruthless and violent thief, but also examines psychological greed - that of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), half in love with and half pathologically jealous of James, wanting to be him but always falling short, a laughing stock among his peers.

'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' has two main characters, but no protagonist - no-one you could remotely consider a hero. James is vicious, paranoid, as quick to kill those who ride with him as those who oppose him. Ford is a spiteful child awkwardly inhabiting a man's body. Two antagonists tear the screen apart in 'There Will Be Blood': oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and fire-and-brimstone preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano).

'No Country for Old Men' divides its screen time between three main characters: Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong and takes the money instead of turning round and getting the hell out of there; Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a methodically efficient killing machine dispatched by various underworld types to retrieve said currency; and Sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a small-town lawman steeped in the past, unable to come to terms with changing times (Jones is perfectly cast here, having already explored these kind of Peckinpah-esque themes in his excellent directorial debut 'The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada').

All three films have their share of violence: Chigurh's chillingly dispassionate executions; James' casual brutality and almost knowing acceptance of Ford's act of cowardly treachery; Plainview's increasingly vehement battle of wills with Sunday, including a jaw-dropping scene where Plainview whores his atheism and allows, in return for permission to build a pipeline across a parishoner's land, Sunday to baptise him into his self-styled Church of the Third Revelation, physically beating the "demons" out of Plainview while forcing the prospector to decry that he's a sinner who has abandoned his child. The reversal of this scene, at the end, veers from nervous hilarity to catharsis to shocking finality.

They all have endings that will challenge the complacent film-goer, reared on traditional three-act structure and neatly tied-up endings. 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' has its conventional climax - Ford's murder of James - two hours in, then goes on to explore Ford's brief fame and lasting infamy, the shadow it throws across his life, the inevitable circularity of his own death. 'There Will Be Blood' climaxes after fifteen wordless minutes as Plainview's initial efforts to find oil are gloriously rewarded. What follows is a study in commerce vs. religion (although, for Plainview, oil clearly is his religion; the triumphant way he mouthes the word "pipeline" after what should have been the humiliation of his baptism says it all); a weighing up of the price of oil.

It can be argued that the climax of 'No Country for Old Men' happens before the film opens: the double-cross and ensuing shoot-out that leaves men dead and pick-up trucks riddled with bullets in the middle of nowhere. What follows, follows as a result. Fortune - good or ill - plays a greater part here than narrative. Film and book are titled from a poem; a phrase by another poet, William Ernest Henley, applies: "the vagaries of chance".

These films are studies in aftermath. They are straight up masterpieces.