Going in Style

Let’s be honest: under any set of objective analytical criteria, ‘Going in Style’ is a pretty average movie. Its screenplay isn’t just predictable: you can literally cue in every narrative beat on a scene by scene basis. Matters pertaining to the gift of a watch and the capturing of a specific bit of CCTV footage are set up in such thunderously obvious style that their later relevance is something you can see coming like an ocean liner on a duck pond. The look of the film and its production design are entirely utilitarian. And with the exception of one whirlingly terrific scene where the sketching out of a bank’s floorspace segues into a “planning the job” montage, helmer Zach Braff doesn’t bring a single directorial flourish to the table. Had ‘Going in Style’ been made with a lesser cast than Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Alan Arkin, Christopher Lloyd, John Ortiz and Ann-Margret (who, at 75, still has more va-va-voom than many starlets a third her age), it wouldn’t have had much to recommend itself beyond the obvious anti-establishment satisfaction of watching a bunch of old dudes pull off a heist. (And let’s face it, Arkin’s contemporary Frank Langella set the seal on that concept in fine style with ‘Robot & Frank’ five years ago.)

That Caine and Freeman would play off each other in fine style was a done deal. That Arkin would bring his deadpan sarcasm A-game, ditto. Eccentric, scene-stealing supporting work from Lloyd? Guaranteed. Ortiz being cool just by underplaying? The man has the patent on it. Now throw in perfectly acceptable work by Matt Dillon as a determined FBI guy, Peter Serafinowicz (an actor often denied sympathetic roles) as Caine’s son-in-law, and Joey King as Caine’s granddaughter. Everyone’s engaged and, for the most part (Josh Pais as an unctuous banker is the over-egged exception), the cast pitch their performances to each other’s strengths; sure, Freeman, Caine and Arkin are the top billed talent, but ‘Going in Style’ is inarguably an ensemble piece.

The plot shouldn’t need a rehash for anyone who’s seen the trailer (hell, even a glance at the poster would probably do the job), but for the sake of completeness, here goes: three OAP buddies who worked at the same steel plant together are robbed of their pension when the firm undergoes financial restructuring; family commitments, health problems and an increasing awareness of their own mortality add to their woes. When one of their number is witness to a bank robbery, one that the media widely reports the perpetrators as getting away with, they decide to pull a similar job. That the bank is administrating the steel plant’s restructuring is the decider: they agree to take only what was depleted from their pension, superannuated by their assumed remaining lifespan (the scene where they each speculate how much longer they have is one of the best moments the film delivers).

Hands up everyone who’s pegged ‘Going in Style’ as ‘Hell and High Water’ with a free bus pass. Yeah: me too.

It’s derivative as all hell. At one point, Braff has his protagonists watch ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ on TV (“I don’t want to see the ending” one them muses) and the inclusion of footage from such an edgy and powerful classic almost sinks ‘Going in Style’. Elsewhere, the tone veers from meditations on the indignity of ageing that wouldn’t be out of place in ‘The Straight Story’ to knockabout farce that makes the average ‘Keystone Kops’ two-reeler look like Tom Stoppard.

And yet … and yet … despite everything – despite the fact the screenplay presents less a fluid narrative than a shunted-together collection of vignettes; despite the fact that the performances from the name-above-the-title triumvirate constitute screen work they could do in their sleep; despite the poundingly unsubtle sops to the audience’s emotions – it works. ‘Going in Style’ somehow finds a way to benefit from its hoariness, its obviousness, its lack of originality. It reminded me of ‘Papadopoulos & Sons’ in its conversion of comfort-food aestheticism into a fictive zone in which the characters are presented to you like old friends, their journey unfolds exactly as you expect (and moreover want) it to, and you’re simply allowed to enjoy the ride.

Now You See Me

Cineworld held a mystery film screening this evening, whipping up publicity by posting a series of downright oblique clues via Twitter. Messageboards were abuzz with speculation: many thought ‘Pacific Rim’, others plumbed for ‘The Lone Ranger’; when we booked the tickets, my wife was holding out for ‘The Wolverine’ while I had my fingers crossed for ‘The World’s End’. Ultimately, we were both disappointed. But at least it wasn’t two hours of CGI robots twatting aliens and then twatting each other. As we queued – interminably – I put a comment on FB to the effect that if it was ‘Pacific Rim’, I was going home.

We ended up not going home … well, not till the movie was over. We’d already agreed on the Half Hour Rule (if neither of us are digging a film at the half hour, we cut our losses and blow the joint). By minute thirty of ‘Now You See Me’, we were both enjoying it. By the time it was over, though, we had mixed feelings.

‘Now You See Me’ does several things right in very quick succession. It starts with a voiceover warning the audience that the closer they look, they less likely they’ll be to spot the trick. At the same time, a simple card trick plays out. The camera forces a very specific card on the viewer. It’s kind of a flipside to the opening of ‘The Prestige’. Where Christopher Nolan’s film clues you in to the three stages of an illusion, ‘Now You See Me’ deliberately sets out to obfuscate. It’s both a ballsy stroke of legerdemain and a self-defeating act: the longer ‘Now You See Me’ goes on, the more evident it is that director Louis Letterier wants his film to be a ‘Prestige’ for the Jerry Bruckheimer generation. But whereas ‘The Prestige’ has a genuine weighty human drama to anchor its more fanciful elements, ‘Now You See Me’ trades solely in the fanciful.

But let’s skip back to its opening reel. Having pulled a beautifully executed fast one on the audience, Letterier assembles his quartet of prestidigitatorial protagonists with superb economy, dealing out their vignettes like cards: street magician with a tendency to the theatrical J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist/shakedown artist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), glamorous escapologist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and new kid on the block Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). The narrative flings them together and has them pulled into the scheme of an unknown benefactor so quickly – the title card is a perfectly-timed punchline to the whole sequence – that their ineffably stupid names didn’t even begin to annoy me till a good halfway into the movie.

In equally quick succession, our foursome have been reimagined as a sell-out Vegas act who make headlines (and get themselves arrested) on account of an illusion based around a bank robbery. What pisses off the authorities, and gets Interpol newbie Alma Dray (Melanie Laurent) assigned to assisting rumpled sourpuss detective Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) – this really is That Movie Where Really Talented People Play Really One-Dimension Characters With Really Stupid Names – is the disappearance of a fuckton of Euros from a Parisian bank that tallies exactly with the magic trick.

The rest of the movie – or at least, the 75% of it that conspires to make you take your eye off the ball prior to the big reveal – is essentially Dylan and Alma vs. The Four Horsemen (thus the collective name the illusionists bill themselves as, notwithstanding that one of them is a woman), while vengeful impresario Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine) and professional debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman) hover in the wings nursing their own agendas.

‘Now You See Me’ is magnificently entertaining for a big chunk of its running time. Less than an hour in, I decided not to bother trying to second guess and just enjoy the ride. I’m glad I took that approach, because the whole improbably contrived plot pays off in a manner that, while not disappointing or in any way a cheat, is a little underwhelming. The essential problem with making a film about magic is that magic is a con. It’s smoke and mirrors; razzle dazzle; misdirection. It’s all surface and when you think about it too much, you dismiss it – rightly – as bullshit. ‘The Prestige’ is only superficially about magic – the real point of the film is the cost of the illusion; what you have to sacrifice to accomplish the seemingly impossible. To a lesser degree, Neil Burger’s ‘The Illusionist’ sets out its box of tricks as a backdrop to a tale of romance. ‘Now You See Me’ is entirely about the illusion, and as such starts to vaporise in a fog of its own insubstantiality the moment the end credits roll.

Oblivion

‘Oblivion’ is a masterpiece of production design that desperately wants to be a cerebral Tarkovskian study of ravaged landscapes, existential turmoil and questions of identity … but has to, y’know, throw in some hamfisted mainstream narrative tropes in order to justify its budget.

Opening with a slab of voiceover exposition, we learn that an alien antagonist destroyed the moon (causing all manner of natural catastrophe) prior to invading Earth. Someone on Earth authorised the use of something called “the nimbus” (I’m guessing the President of the United States in the first instance and a heavy duty piece of thermo-nuclear kit in the second), effectively “winning the war but losing the planet”. Now there’s a radiation zone, a number of power plants that process Earth’s remaining air and water power to provide energy for off-world space station The Tet, and an atmosphere-straddling platform occupied by Jack (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), technicians who maintain the power plants and the drones that safeguard them. Oh, we also learn that Jack and Victoria had “memory wipes” in order to protect “the security of their mission” prior to taking the job. I assume this was done before their induction course. As the film begins, Jack is experiencing pre-destruction-of-Earth hallucinations which he assumes are memories, while by-the-book Victoria just wants to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and jet off to Titan (Jupiter’s moon, where the last enclave of humanity are holed up) when their detail ends in a fortnight.

Anyone who hasn’t even hazarded a guess about where this is going by now will probably view ‘Oblivion’ as an entirely original and genre-defining work. The rest of us will happily tick off its many and unsubtly referenced influences while we sit back and bathe in the visuals.

Because that’s the thing. For all that ‘Oblivion’ is a derivate piece of work (particularly in the increasingly hackneyed second half where it becomes a patchwork quilt of ‘Independence Day’, ‘I, Robot’ and ‘Moon’), it’s the most genuinely gorgeous thing I’ve seen on the big screen this year. Jack and Victoria’s cloud-based operations centre is kind of like a two-up-to-down designed by Frank Lloyd Wright complete with helipad and swimming pool. A scene in said swimming pool comes close to a sort of visual poetry. Director Joseph Kosinski and DoP Claudio Miranda conjure eerily effective visions of a dune-covered New York which are a million miles away from the usual post-apocalypse imaginings. The technology is memorably rendered, too: Jack’s scout craft and the drones themselves have a propulsive sense of movement and engineering, while also looking careworn and, despite their sleek profiles, realistically utilitarian in their design. Only the late-in-the-day visualisation of a maleficent supercomputer as a slightly misshapen amplifier covered in sentient mould lets the side down.

Performances vary: Cruise delivers with a likeable everyman persona; Riseborough finds nuances in a character who could have been decidedly one-note; Olga Kurylenko is saddled with a nothing role and does even less with it; Morgan Freeman continues to be one of the coolest blokes on the planet, claiming entire scenes for himself by doing little more than lighting a cigar or wearing a knee-length leather jacket.

The script is anodyne at best, edging into total mess on more than one occasion. Example: Jack gets shot in the shoulder at one point and the wound is never reference, depicted or treated for the rest of the movie. He’s shot and then, oh fuck it, he needs to do some heroic running, jumping and falling down stuff, so let’s all pretend he never took that bullet in the first place, ’kay?

Ordinarily, I’d have marked ‘Oblivion’ down for its failings, consigned it to the file marked “ho hum” and probably not ever bothered writing about it for Agitation. But I keep coming back to how damned good it looks, and to the world-building and attention to detail of its first half as Jack goes through the motions of a routine job in an extraordinary situation; a guy who punches the clock, patches up the drones, patrols the wastelands and somehow isn’t satisfied with the way things are; a guy who’s just starting to think beyond the accepted parameters.

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.

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.

Million Dollar Baby

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 38 of 100


Following his Oscar-winning masterwork ‘Unforgiven’ in 1992, Clint Eastwood spent the next decade alternating between by-the-numbers mainstream fare (‘Absolute Power’, ‘True Crime’, the fun for forgettable ‘Space Cowboys’) and more interesting projects (‘A Perfect World’, the uncharacteristic ‘Bridge of Madison County’, the uneven ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’). None of them, however, quite hit the heights of ‘Unforgiven’, and by the time ‘Blood Work’ seeped onto cinema screens in 2002 it seemed like Eastwood was running out of steam.

Then, already in his 70s, Eastwood went hell for leather and produced, over the next eight years, an incredibly accomplished and impressive body of work: the unflinching Dennis Lehane adaption ‘Mystic River’, his first feature length documentary ‘Piano Blues’, the quadruple Oscar-winning ‘Million Dollar Baby’, the remarkably even-handed pair of war movies ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’, the somewhat over-amibitious ‘Changeling’ (perhaps the only Eastwood movie this decade that’s simply okay rather than anywhere between pretty goddamn good and freakin’ excellent), the powerhouse acting swansong ‘Gran Torino’ and the commendably old-school ‘Invictus’.

‘Million Dollar Baby’ is adapted from ‘Rope Burns’, a collection of short stories by F.X. Toole (the pen name of boxing trainer Jerry Boyd). It’s the story of people with broken lives trying to hold some semblance of dignity together while vying for a chance at the brass ring. Two of these people are old-timers: Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), a boxing manager and gym owner, and Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman), manager of said gym and a one-time prize fighter whose career went south.

Entering their lives like a whirlwind is Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), scion of a white trash family, who waitresses in a greasy diner by day and pounds the bag by night. She wants to be a fighter; wants a title shot. And she wants Frankie to train her. Frankie’s not struck on the idea. When Maggie originally approaches him, Frankie’s first two questions are, “Do I owe you money?” and “Did I know your momma?” It’s not long before he quits asking questions and just takes to grunting that he doesn’t train girls.

Long story short, Frankie ends up training Maggie. He gets her a title shot. Paul Haggis’s script doesn’t contain any real surprises, but avoids cliché by focusing on Frankie and Eddie’s relationship (which seems to be founded on semi-good-natured bickering) as much as on the developing kinship between Frankie and Maggie. It’s established early on that Frankie’s estranged from his daughter. Maggie, scorned by her ungrateful family, is without a father figure (her dad died). It’s to Eastwood’s credit as director that none of the thuddingly obvious parallels that Haggis draws – or his thuddingly obvious lurch into tragedy for the final act – swamp the film with mawkish sentiment. It’s as if Eastwood took the script outside and set about it with a carpet beater (or maybe a baseball bat) until every bit of schmaltz had been knocked out of it.

That’s what I love about Eastwood as a filmmaker: there’s no false sentiment. Nothing phoney. His films – particularly in the latter stages of his directorial career – are shot through with wisdom and hard-won insight. They are stamped with the mark of experience.

‘Million Dollar Baby’ is a low-key and, by its final stretch, resolutely downbeat film. It is mostly a film of interiors: Frankie’s gym, Maggie’s dingy apartment, run-down diners, the backrooms of boxing halls, the boxing ring itself. Eastwood’s style is observational. The truest insights are in the smallest details. A ruefully amusing scene has Eddie, shoeless feet propped on the desk, earn Frankie’s disapprobation for having holes in his socks. Frankie offers him some cash up front to buy a new pair. Eddie pragmatically declines the offer: “I couldn’t swear it wouldn’t find its way to the track.” It’s a great moment: it tells you all you need to know about Eddie. Likewise, Frankie’s beat up old car and too-neat house tell you all you need to know about him.

Indeed, the only time the film slips into the obvious is the portrayal of Maggie’s family. Haggis’s script takes the easy option, painting them in one shade. But that’s the only quibble I have with ‘Million Dollar Baby’. For a film that won Eastwood Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, a Best Actress gong for Hilary Swank and Best Supporting Actor for Morgan Freeman, it’s perhaps the least Oscar-baity film you’ll ever see.

PERSONAL FAVES: Unforgiven

William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is living a hard-scrabble life, working a pathetic dirt farm, half of his pigs dying of fever, trying to raise his two young children and bitterly mourning the death of his wife – “she cured me of drinkin’ and wickedness,” as he tells anyone who will listen – when he’s offered one last shot at the brass ring.

And what wickedness. “You’ll be William Munny out of Missouri, killed women and children,” says Sheriff ‘Little’ Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) towards the end of the film, when killer and lawman stand off each against other. “I killed women and children,” Munny admits; “killed just about everything that walked or crawled …”

‘Little’ Bill is a regular kind of guy; he inspires loyalty in his deputies, spends his off duty hours building a house where he can enjoy the simple pleasures of sitting on his porch, smoking his pipe, drinking coffee and watching the sun go down. Nevermind his shortcomings as a carpenter, he’s a man who takes pride in a job well done. And the results of a job well done as far as being sheriff of Big Whiskey is concerned is a town free of outlaws and assassins, a town where visitors obey the clearly posted City Ordnance sign and turn in all weapons.

When Skinny (Anthony James), owner of the local billiard hall (read “brothel”), summons ‘Little’ Bill to officiate after a couple of cowpokes attack one of his girls after “she let out a giggle” at his “teensy little pecker” (these Bar T boys obviously have issues about size), he fines them and threatens them with the bullwhip if they don’t pay up.

The girls, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Farmer), are understandably aggrieved and pool their meagre savings to post a bounty. Word gets out and the first gunman who shows up is English Bob (Richard Harris), a flamboyant and self-aggrandizing showman who’s travelling with his “biographer” W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer of penny-dreadfuls who laps up all of English Bob’s heavily exaggerated tales.

‘Little’ Bill greets English Bob by giving him a pistol-whipping and kicking him down main street, sending out a message to any other assassins who might come calling that Big Whiskey is a zero tolerance kind of place when it comes to gentlemen of that profession. When English Bob is run out of town in chains, Beauchamp stays on, just as entranced by ‘Little’ Bill’s tales of the reality of the west.

Meanwhile, Munny has been coerced into picking up his guns and saddling his horse once more – he’s lost his technique with the former and can barely stay in the saddle of the latter – by a wind-and-piss braggart who styles himself as ‘The Schofield Kid’ (Jaimz Woolvett) “on account of Schofield model Smith & Wesson”. Munny in turn ropes in his old partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), and the three of them head for Big Whiskey and a double killing. After all, as Ned puts it, “we done stuff for money before”.

Under Eastwood’s direction, the terse frontier poetry of David Webb Peoples’ script (which Eastwood bought the rights to ten years before he filmed it, waiting until he was the right age to play the character) becomes an elegy for the western in a way that no other film since Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ has achieved. It also demythologizes the western while at the same time, through the ingenious use of the Beauchamp character, reminding us where the myths came from in the first place.

Munny is Eastwood’s finest acting performance (Walt Kowalski in the recently released ‘Gran Torino’ runs a close second), a man who spends all but the last fifteen minutes of the film in denial. Along with the oft-repeated “she cured me of drinkin’ and wickedness”, his mantra is “I ain’t like that no more”, and every time he says it, it sounds a little more hollow, a little more like something he’s trying to convince himself of.

‘Unforgiven’ deconstructs the genre by painting everything in shades of grey. Munny by his own admission has killed women and children, done things for money and professes to being unable to remember most of his misdeeds (“I was drunk most of the time”) and yet for all of his assertions that he’s changed he’s simply being untrue to himself and it’s only when the need for revenge and half a bottle of whisky are lodged inside of him that the real Munny re-emerges … and an apocalypse in microcosm comes to Big Whiskey.

‘Little’ Bill just wants to keep his town free of assassins and “men of low character” and yet he has no qualms about resorting to brutally sadistic methods to accomplish it. The Schofield Kid is desperate to make a name for himself and blatantly fabricates the extent of his career as a hired gun, and yet the messy reality of killing a man proves too much for him in the final analysis. English Bob already has a reputation but is hellbent on perpetuating his own legend; he is ultimately proved a liar. Beauchamp, the ending implies, is the man who will chronicle Munny’s showdown with ‘Little’ Bill (I’ll omit the motivations and mechanics of this scene for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen the film) and yet his literary talents seem less in harness to the truth than to the claiming of a story dramatic enough to boost the sales of his purple prose.

The title crawl that closes ‘Unforgiven’ is purposefully ambiguous, as is the very title. An anti-violence aesthetic hangs over the whole film (particularly in the painfully extended death of one of the cowpokes), yet the final shoot-out is as cathartic and iconic as any western in Eastwood’s filmography.

‘Unforgiven’ is a richly rewarding film that demands repeated viewings. It works on many levels. Acting, script, direction, cinematography and music are spot-on perfect. There isn’t a misstep or a wrong note in the whole thing. It’s a film whose characters are flawed and world weary; who are defined by experience and regret. Some of them change their minds in a welter of remorse. Some can no more escape who they are than fly to the moon. And, in the main, it’s all on account of pullin’ a trigger.

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.

Morgan Freeman

I can't think of many actors who bring such a well-balanced sense of gravitas, dignity and wry humanity to their performances as Morgan Freeman. In honour of his 71st birthday, here are five of my favourite Morgan Freeman moments:

1) "Rehabilitated? ... To me it's just a made up word. A politician's word, so young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie, and have a job. What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? ... There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone and this old man is all that's left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It's just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don't give a shit." - 'The Shawshank Redemption'

2) "I sure do miss my bed." "You said that last night." "No, last night I said I missed my wife, tonight I just miss my goddamn bed." - 'Unforgiven'

3) "Only took me six days. Same time it took the Lord to make the world." - 'Driving Miss Daisy'

4) "One hundred and ten. Get a job, punk." - 'Million Dollar Baby'

5) "Gentlemen, gentlemen. All these books, a world of knowledge at your fingertips - and you play poker all night." - 'Seven'