X Men: First Class (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get My Sixties Groove On; or, For Your Mutants Only)

Okay, I’m pushing it a bit trying to shoehorn this one into Shots on the Blog. But what the hell, it’s got a CIA department doing covert things. And, uh, there’s more than a shade of Matt Helm to it. And, uh … all right, it’s more a spy movie than a crime movie but, as Lesley Gore almost put it, it’s my blog and I’ll review if want to. Anyway, here’s a picture of January Jones:

Now, where was I? Oh yes. ‘X Men: First Class’, Matthew Vaughan’s piss-take/prequel/showreel for the Broccolis [delete as applicable]. Things kick off with the prologue to Bryan Singer’s original ‘X Men’: the young Erik Lehnsherr being pried away from his mother by Nazi guards in 1944 and responding with a metal-bending display of power until a rifle butt to the head knocks him out. Next we’re in some Ivy League part of America where the privileged young Charles Xavier meets the young Raven. They’re all kids, and they all realize they’re not exactly normal. But whereas Xavier subjugates his power (or, as he calls it, mutation) and impresses on Raven to do the same, Lehnsherr doesn’t have the same luxury. He’s delivered into the hands of Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who quickly discovers that the key to unleashing Lehnsherr’s power is his anger. He discovers this by shooting Lehnsherr’s mother.

The juxtaposition of Xavier and Lehnsherr’s formative years continues apace as Xavier (James McAvoy), now in his twenties and a graduate of Oxford (or “Oxford University, England” as the establishing credit trumpets)*, is jarred from his enjoyment of the academic life by CIA agent Moira McTaggart** (Rose Byrne) who recruits him into an unofficial intelligence branch headed up by The Man in the Black Suit (Oliver Platt); while Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbinder) – all growed up and pretty freakin’ mean with it – is on a globe-trotting mission of revenge against Shaw.

Meanwhile, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) is all growed up and so damned cute with it there ought to be a law against it. Exhibit A, m’lud:

Um, sorry. Lost my train of thought again. Oh yes. Vaughan explicitly establishes that it’s now 1962, through more of those idiot-proof establishing credits and enough stock footage of John F Kennedy that the family’s lawyer is probably writing to Vaughan and co. right now to ask what their percentage point is of the box office gross. The Cold War is heating up (sorry: that was poor, even by my standards) and the world’s attention is focused on Cuba. Shaw is intent on playing the superpowers off against each other and here’s where the whole ‘X Men First Class’-as-Bond-movie thing really kicks in.

After all, we have an egomaniacal supervillain (Bacon’s performance suggests he’s channelled a big fat helping of Blofeld), his sexy but deadly right-hand-woman Emma Frost (January Jones), their entourage of seemingly invicible goons, a globe-trotting narrative, a loose-cannon operative (if Craig hangs up the mantle any time in the near future, Michael Fassbinder should immediately be signed up as the next 007), entire swathes of funky 60s décor, a magnificently unPC attitude to female characters (Rose Byrne’s intro has her sashaying around a go-go bar in her underwear; January Jones’s cleavage puts the fucking missiles to shame; and Jennifer Lawrence exists in an entirely different universe and time zone from the ugly stick), and more gadgets than Q Department could shake a standard issue stick with modifications at (allowing, of course, for the fact that the mutants are pretty much gadgets in their own right). Add to this Shaw’s labyrinthine inner sanctum, a pleasure cruiser whose hull turns into a submarine and various narrative beats that recall at least four different Bond titles and the evidence is nigh on incontrovertible.

There’s also a touch of the ‘Dr Strangelove’ in the politicking and the pseudo-tense council-of-war scenes. There were whole tranches of the movies where I was praying for someone to pop and say, aghast, “Gentlemen, you can’t mutate in here. This is the war room.”

Vaughan’s directorial approach vacillates quite wildly between moody, broody, angsty stuff (the young Lehnsherr suffering at Shaw’s hands), straight down the line action thriller business (Lehnsherr’s pursuit of same) and camp, OTT set-pieces (remember that advert, I think it was for vodka, when all the rammel on the seabed rises up, breaks the surface and erupts into the air? get ready for a re-edited version of same as part of the big finale). It shouldn’t work. It should be piss-awful. But somehow it’s supremely entertaining. Of course, it arrives in the wake of the wrist-cuttingly awful ‘X Men 3: the Last Snore Stand’ which gives it a certain advantage. After ‘X Men 3’, an episode of ‘Postman Pat’ where his black-and-white cat mutated into a slightly bigger cat and they went and delivered some letters would be a hundredfold improvement!

‘X Men First Class’ is a real curate’s egg of a movie. Plot holes abound, not least when Xavier does something during the aforementioned big finale that leaves you wondering why he doesn’t pull the same trick on two other specific people and – hey presto – problem solved. And yet there performances are generally effective, with only – surprisingly – McAvoy struggling to suggest Patrick Stewart’s Xavier. Fassbinder, however, captures every bit of Ian McKellan’s ruthless charm and steely intelligence as Magneto, while Lawrence nails the character arc that transforms Raven into Mystique.

Yup, it’s a weird ’un all right. But it’s the best ‘Dr Strangelove’-meets-James-Bond mash-up you’re likely to see this summer.



*Establishing credits are plentiful and bludgeoningly over-explanatory in this movie. Every couple of minutes, it’s reinforced to us poor geographically-challenged idiots in the audience that we’re in “Oxford, England”, or “CIA headquarters, USA” or “Moscow, Russia”, the latter particularly redundant given the proliferation of mushroom-domed buildings in every Moscow-set backdrop.

**Which is about as subtle as implying a character has Australian heritage by calling her Sheila.

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.