Seven

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 99 of 100

When ‘Seven’ (and I’m not using that ‘Se7en’ spelling, by the way; it only works when you render it in capitals: ‘SE7EN’) was released in 1995, I saw it without reading a single review or having any comprehension of what it was about. It was a Sunday afternoon, I fancied going to the cinema, ‘Seven’ was on and Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were in it. Good enough for me. I bought a ticket, took my seat and twiddled my fingers through a bunch of asinine adverts and trailers. The film started. The first scene had a sombre, lonely-looking Detective Somerset (Freeman) leaving his prissily neat apartment to go to work. Cut to a murder scene, Somerset asking a humane and well-meaning question only to meet with a contemptuous response from a colleague. Then he’s back in his apartment, throwing a flick knife at a dart board.

I start getting the impression that this isn’t exactly going to be a run-of-the-mill cop thriller.

Somerset, on his last week on the job prior to retirement, meets his new partner/replacement Detective Mills (Pitt). Their relationship gets off to a fractious start. A headfuck opening credits sequence razors across the screen.

Okay, I think to myself, what the fuck’s going on here?

I spend the next hour and a half alternately revisiting that thought and marvelling at how cleverly the film is being constructed. The literary allusions, crucial to the narrative and yet unforced. The darkly satirical tailoring of the seven deadly sins to a contemporary aesthetic. The murder of the lawyer: genius. Occasional bits of cerebral humour (Somerset pointing Mills in the direction of Dante and Chaucer; Mills sending a patrolman out to by Clarkes notes not the actual texts). Occasional bits of wry humour (Somerset good-naturedly berating the security staff at a library for playing cards all night instead of availing themselves of “all these books, a world of knowledge”). A couple of beautifully judged character scenes between Somerset, Mills and Mills’s fragile wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow). The deepening of Somerset’s character from slightly snobbish grouch to mentor. The deepening of Mills’s from verbose hothead to man of compromised ideals.

I slowly come to realise how tight Fincher’s control over his material is; how acute his directorial decisions. How starved of natural light every scene is. ‘Seven’: a film of almost continual rain. A film of trash-strewn alleyways, dour tenement blocks, shadowy corridors, dark rooms, glum offices. A film where the sky is barely glimpsed.

Until that last gut-churning half hour. During which I sit in my seat, decidedly uncomfortable as Mills and Somerset ride out into the desert, their prisoner taunting them with intimations of something. Uneasy at not having any inkling, this late in the game, of exactly where the filmmakers are going with this. Squirming as that van comes careening through the desert, kicking up clouds of dust. Agitated, fingers digging into the armrests, as the package is delivered.

I sit in my seat until the end credits have finished. ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’. Then I walk unsteadily out of the Showcase, emerge blinking into the light, and wander across the car park looking for my car. Feeling like the film had come out of nowhere and struck me repeatedly around the head with a concrete block. Feeling that I’d seen something that had crept into my subconscious and wouldn’t be leaving in a hurry. Something I was convinced was a masterpiece and equally convinced I’d reapproach only at significant intervals.

Fifteen years down the line, I watched it this afternoon. Only my fourth viewing. It had pretty much the same impact, but this time left me with a consideration I’d not entertained before: for all that Mills is rash, impulsive and volatile, it’s the calm, methodical and intellectual Somerset who’s the true foil to John Doe. The other side of the coin. The tick of a metronome as opposed to the voice of a higher power.

Sylvia

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 5 of 100

If you know even the slightest thing about Sylvia Plath, you'll know how this one ends. In case you don't, a SPOILER ALERT applies for the next couple of paragraphs.

In 1963, after separating from Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Feminists and Plath supporters spent the next three and half decades laying the blame categorically at Hughes' door. Hughes kept his silence until 1998 when, just before his death, he published 'Birthday Letters', a 200-page collection of poetry examining his relationship with Plath from their initial meeting at Cambridge to the aftermath of her death. Five years after Hughes's passing, director Christine Jeffs made 'Sylvia', from a screenplay by John Brownlow. I would say that a storm of controversy greeted the film's release, except that a teacup would easily have contained said storm; or, to put it another way, the controversy was out of proportion to the amount of people who actually saw the film.

Frieda Hughes, daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, weighed in by denying the filmmakers access to her mother's poetry (there are a couple of brief snippets from 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Daddy' and that's your lot), and excoriated the project in a poem of her own entitled 'My Mother': "Now they want to make a film / For anyone lacking the ability / To imagine the body, head in oven, / Orphaning children". It is worth mentioning that, while the film shows Plath's preparations for the suicide, the act itself occurs offscreen. This negates her assertion that Plath's suicide is the filmmakers' sole motivation.

SPOILERS END

'Sylvia' is a bloody difficult film to write about. On one hand - as a piece of filmmaking - it strikes a fine balance between the raw emotionalism of Gwyneth Paltrow's central performance and Christine Jeffs' controlled direction (kudos to her for resisting obvious melodrama, judgementalism or proselytizing); it succeeds in evoking a period of time and establishing a sense of place both in its English and American locations; and it truncates the seven years of Plath and Hughes' turbulent relationship into a carefully paced hour and three quarters, the timeline never becoming confused or elliptical. On the other hand, the film never fully gets to grips with Sylvia Plath the writer. And like most artists, Sylvia Plath defined herself by her art.

I've read more than one review which has seized on this shortcoming to write off the film entire. Which is unfair. It's a failing common to almost every film I've seen about writers, either factual ('Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle'), fictitious ('Barton Fink') or somewhere in between ('Shakespeare in Love'): the act of writing is solitary, time-consuming and entirely uncinematic. In fact, the only film I can think of that gets anywhere close to the reality of it is 'Naked Lunch'. There's just something about Peter Berg's typewriter morphing into an anus and talking back to him that communicates David Cronenberg's understanding of the process. But with a rectally-configured Olivetti presumably as unavailable to her as Plath's original poetry, Jeffs uses what she has and structures pivotal scenes around Plath's inability to create, empathetically tapping into her frustration as an idyllic summer at Cape Cod turns into a barren wasteland defined by writer's block.


"I'm dried up," Plath complains at one point, making it sound as much like infertility as a blip in the creative cycle. Things aren't helped by Hughes (Daniel Craig) wandering in from a ramble through the countryside and announcing "Got a poem, a good one," for all the world as if he'd just found it lying there in the woods. Fertility was as important to her worldview as literature (her 1961 poem 'Barren Woman' is a paranoid fantasia on the maternal instinct denied), yet the conflict between motherhood and the howling malevolence of her muse is made brutally plain in the climactic scenes where, estranged from Hughes, she struggles to reconcile her responsibilities to her two young children with the furious onset of ultimately self-destructive inspiration which resulted in the 'Ariel' poems.

Frieda Hughes' refusal of access to Plath's works is both a curse and a blessing. It robs the 'Ariel' sequence: instead of the viewer experiencing the onrush of Plath's most nakedly powerful and imagistic poetry (from the title poem: "Statis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances"; from 'Edge': "The moon has nothing to be sad about / Staring from her hood of bone. / She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks cackle and drag"), Jeffs is coralled into presenting a fairly bland montage of Plath scribbling away, her pen chittering across the paper as if part of an experiment into automatic writing, the poet occasionally jerking back from her desk, face contorted in a mask forged equally from the ecstasy of creation and the desperation behind it. Elsewhere, though, Jeffs rises to the challenge, raises her game and gets round the ban on Plath's poetry by transposing certain of Plath's poems (most notably 'The Moon and the Yew Tree' and 'Burning the Letters') into images.

Cinematographer John Toon does sterling work: the glorious seascapes of Cape Cod as captivating and full of light as the dingy rooms of Plath's London flat (her last address) are cramped and heavy with shadows. Gabriel Yared's score is sensitive and seldom intrudes. Jeffs directs with clear-sightedness and compassion; indeed, the film is even-handed in its portrayal of Plath and Hughes' failing marriage. Hughes' infidelity is raked over but not at the cost of demonising him. Jeffs and Brownlow don't shy away, either, from demonstrating that Plath herself wasn't the easiest person to live with.


The performances are what make the film, though. Daniel Craig makes a convincing Hughes, capturing the poet's earthiness, working class background and fierce dedication to his art. Jared Harris achieves a dignified and sympathetic characterisation of influential literary critic and early Plath champion Al Alvarez. Blythe Danner - Gwyneth Paltrow's mother - plays Aurelia Plath, Sylvia's mother, and imbues the role with a crystalline sense of the dispassionate, her few scenes suggesting the outwardly privileged but emotionally unstable childhood from which Sylvia Plath's neuroses developed.

But the defining performance is Paltrow's. I've always liked Gwyneth Paltrow, despite the proliferation of bland movies on her CV and the airy-fairy new-age guff on her Goop website, and I don't think I've ever seen her turn in such powerhouse work as she does in 'Sylvia', notably in an almost unbearable dinner party scene where Plath's slow-burn jealousies and insecurities finally come hissing to the fore. If Joe Pesci's Tommy de Vito in 'Goodfellas' had been a poet not a gangster and done his violence with words instead of guns and fists, the intensity could hardly be more shattering. Paltrow nails Plath's look, voice and mannerisms. In this and a handful of other scenes she also nails Plath's inner demons and the effect is darkly compelling.

Summer of the superhero (1): Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk

Empire magazine has this to say about 'Iron Man':

"[It] is an origin story is more ways than one ... Origin stories are tricky things - they often feel like feature length pilots. And where is it written that comic book franchises need origin stories. Looking just beyond the genre, it didn't hurt Indiana Jones, Connery's James Bond or Captain Jack Sparrow that they arrived on our screens fully formed."

Well. What can you say to that? Nothing really, except to state the obvious:

Indiana Jones is Indiana Jones. James Bond is James Bond. Jack Sparrow is Jack Sparrow. None of them have alter egos. All superheroes, however, do have alter egos. They have to, otherwise they wouldn't be superheroes. The very point of the superhero is the concept of a secret identity. Therefore Superman is Clark Kent and Superman. Batman is Bruce Wayne and Batman. And for this work, for character motivation to be established, and for the crucial dramatic dynamic between the two halves of their personalities to function, you have to explain why Clark Kent became Superman or Bruce Wayne became Batman*.

Two effortlessly entertaining blockbusters, adding up to four and a half hours of big-screen fun, exploit the dynamic between public persona and iconic alter ego to brilliant effect.


Empire's bone of contention vis-a-vis Jon Favreau's 'Iron Man' - an odd choice of director, but by God he makes the material work! - is, actually, precisely its strong point. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr, following up his storming comeback turn in 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' with another storming turn sure to put him right back in the A-list) is an arms manufacturer: clever, cocksure, terminally irresponsible, Downey plays him like a child revelling in the sheer fun of playing soldiers ... except imagine a child who's grown up to earn unprecedented wealth, drive an Audi R8 and hang out with centrefolds.

Then, in the film's most compelling section, he learns a swift lesson on the nature of responsibility when he's captured by terrorists and forced to build a weapon they can deploy against Stark's best customers (the United States military). Stark responds by creating an armoured (and armour-plated) exoskeleton which also has the capacity for flight, and blasts his way to freedom. Returning to America, he realises that (a) some dodgy corporate dealings within the company have seen arms shipments sold to the selfsame terrorists who imprisoned him; and (b) his ad hoc invention is possibly the greatest weapon he's yet created. Rather than let it become public (or even shareholder) knowledge, he keeps it under wraps ... and re-invents himself as Iron Man.

'Iron Man' isn't quite a straight-up classic of its kind (all its best scenes are in the first half; the climatic smack-down is nothing compared to Stark's escape an hour beforehand), but it works because the script pays attention to who Stark is, who he becomes and why. And because Favreau draws good performances out of quality actors: Downey Jnr owns the role the way Johnny Depp makes Jack Sparrow completely and utterly his own; Gwyneth Paltrow is radiant as Stark's Miss Moneypenny-style PA, 'Pepper' Potts - there's a palpable chemistry in their scenes together; and Jeff Bridges adds a measured amount of gravitas as the Machiavellian Obadiah Stone.

Canny casting is the key, also, to Louis Letterier's 'The Incredible Hulk'. Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner, a scientist seeking a cure to the gamma poisoning that provokes his transformation into something big, green and afflicted by serious anger management issues every time something gets his goat. Genius casting! Edward Norton has always excelled at playing schizophrenic characters. Remember 'Primal Fear', Norton's rivetting performance making an otherwise by-the-numbers courtroom yawnfest compelling whenever he was on screen? Or how about 'Fight Club'? Norton wears the hounded, world-weary character of Banner like a ragged old coat. Liv Tyler, as Dr Betty Ross, provides the human element, much as Paltrow does in Iron Man; while William Hurt and Tim Roth are value for money in fleshed-out, well-considered supporting roles.

'The Incredible Hulk' isn't an origin story per se, but delivers the Banner/Hulk backstory with admirable speed and efficiency during the opening credits sequence. This achieves two objectives: it allows us to (a) disregard the earlier movie, Ang Lee's 'Hulk' - at best, a noble failure - and (b) narratively speaking, cut to the chase. For 'The Incredible Hulk' is essentially a chase movie. Banner wants a cure so he can live a normal life; the military want Banner so they can use what's inside him to create an army of 'super-soldiers'. No quarter is asked or given. The stakes are raised when General Ross (Hurt) uses fanatical soldier Emil Blonsky (Roth) as a guinea pig in an attempt to engineer another creature with the Hulk's physical prowess. But power corrupts, Blonsky is consumed by his dark side, and the Abomination is born.

Ang Lee's take on the Hulk was misconceived: a bright green blob that bounced around like a screensaver on crack. Letterier's is the real deal: muscled, veiny, dark green to the point of shadowy, and - crucially - fucking angry. Again, it isn't without flaws. As with 'Iron Man', the denouement is overly protracted, but a cracking script and genuine chemistry between the characters lift it well above the usual standard of comic book movies. Nifty last-minute vignettes link the two movies (although you'll need to stay until after the end credits with 'Iron Man') and point towards an upcoming Avenger adaptation.

In the meantime, however, there's Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight' and Guillermo del Toro's 'Hellboy II: the Golden Army' to look forward to, hugely anticipated sequels to two of my favourite comic book adaptations, both reuniting original cast and original director.

It's gonna be a good summer!


*Subject of which: 'Batman Begins', which is arguably the best comic book adaptation yet produced, is an origin story all the way down the line - and it took a defibrilator to waning heartbeat of a near-dead franchise.