13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: Swiss Army Man

So: the farting corpse movie. Which progressively becomes the talking corpse movie; the corpse with a stiffy movie; and the gender confused corpse movie. And which finally, sad to say, identifies as the isn’t-this-movie-with-the-corpse-over-yet movie.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

Hank (Paul Dano) is stranded on a deserted island and not coping well his entry-level “monarch of all I survey” opportunities. In fact, he’s on the verging of tendering his resignation. That’s “tendering his resignation” as in hanging himself, by the way. Then Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore and Hank is initially delighted at the prospect of company. The discovery that Manny is dead throws him back into despair, until he realises that Manny’s incessant flatulence can be used as a propulsive system. Delighted, Hank escapes the island by using Manny as a jet-ski.

This is all prior to the opening credits, incidentally.

Making landfall, Hank goes in search of civilisation. En route, he utilises Manny in a variety of ways. He ignites Manny’s farts to set campfires. He uses him as a water dispenser (don’t ask). He triggers Manny’s gag reflex by means of a kind of Heimlich manoeuvre, operating him as a kind of human (or at least recently deceased human) bazooka. He follows the direction of Manny’s erection, engendered by a model in a Sports Illustrated magazine and sustained by the cellphone picture of Hank’s crush (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), like a compass.

And at a certain point during their survivalist trek through the wilderness, Manny begins to talk. Which is nice for Hank because it gives him some company. But frustrating in that Manny can’t remember a single thing about his life. Or about life, period. Obliged to explain everything from modes of transport to falling in love by way of the plot of ‘Jurassic Park’, Hank resorts to recreating entire swathes of human society and experience by means of ramshackle models built from bits of junk that he finds in the woods.

This business gives the film its best – and most feel-good – sequence. For a while, the fart jokes, dick jokes and poop jokes are kicked so far into the background as to be forgotten about, and ‘Swiss Army Man’ enthusiastically and wholeheartedly finds its tone. For twenty minutes or so, it’s quite wonderful. Then writer/directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan throw in a romantic rivalry subplot (trust me: shy guy vs dead guy for the hand of a woman who doesn’t even know that either of them exist is nowhere near as funny as it sounds, not that it sounds particularly funny in the first place), before shifting the dialectic to include a ‘Performance’-style examination of troilism and gender politics.

Which isn’t to say the material couldn’t have worked, but it drastically changes the film’s register (the filmmakers having already relied on the audience buying into the tonal shift from the scatological to the whimsical), to say nothing of leeching out the humour. And even then Scheinert and Kwan (or “Daniels” as they rather pretentiously bill themselves) aren’t finished: the final shift in both tone and narrative, as Hank and Manny are clumsily reintroduced into human society, utterly derails the film.

When it works, there is much to admire. The performances are fantastic. Radcliffe’s the best he’s ever been. The music works well, often providing an ironic commentary of its own. The montages are very well edited and, at its most imaginative, the film soars. As a half hour short, perhaps end stopped by some Tarkovskian images that shows Hank and Manny, at a large enough remove, bordered by human society but without being cognizant of it, ‘Swiss Army Man’ could have been a masterpiece in miniature. Even at feature length, but chopped down to about 75 minutes, a bloody good film could have cohered. Unfortunately, its 97 minutes outstay their welcome, the tone gets more ponderous as the directors scrabble for an ending, and it’s hard to shake the sense of being short-changed as you leave the cinema.

Youth

Paolo Sorrentino’s film is graced with many things: late period great performances by Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel (the latter of whom has been, ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ apart, ill-served by cinema this last decade or so); an eclectic soundtrack; elegant cinematography; and a cheek-by-jowl depiction of the realistic (ageing, regret, professional failure) and the surreal/metaphysical (no examples: I wouldn’t want to deprive the viewer of some delightful moments). What it doesn’t deal in is narrative.

Which is to say that there isn’t plenty go on – there is: an almost dumbfounding amount – but despite the characters’ clearly, even contrivedly, mapped interrelationships, there isn’t the inextricable interweaving of, say, ‘Short Cuts’ or even a sense of disparate material finding its rhythm and aesthetic in the editing room à la ‘Cloud Atlas’. Instead, we have a group of moderate-to-extremely eccentric people holed up at a spa in the Alps, some of whose lives have parallels, to varying degrees, with others’.

The guest list at this swish Swiss establishment includes a veritable roster of the famous and once-famous. We have Fred Ballinger (Caine), a composer remembered chiefly for his most throwaway work; Mick Boyle (Keitel), a film director trying to complete the script and drum up financing for a movie that might well be his last; prissy method actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano); corpulent former football legend Diego Maradona (Roly Serrano); and the newly crowned Miss Universe (Mădălina Diana Ghenea). Ballinger and Boyle are old friends and romantic rivals, a relationship further intertwined by the impending nuptials between Ballinger’s daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz) and Boyle’s son Julian (Ed Stoppard). Nuptials that get swiftly demoted from impending to ain’t happening when Julian throws over Lena for Paloma Faith (gamely playing a version of herself that the script is unflattering about to put it mildly).

As ‘Youth’ opens, Ballinger is visited the Queen’s emissary (Alex Macqueen), who implores him to conduct his most famous composition, ‘Simple Songs’, at a gala performance. Ballinger refuses for reasons he is reticent to cite. Of course, Ballinger recanting and the film reaching its denouement with said concert is a no-brainer. The two hours in between don’t so much sketch in the circumstances of Ballinger’s volte face as gently suggest them, mainly by playing him off against the spa’s various other residents in a series of wanly observed vignettes.

There’s the contrast between Ballinger and Boyle: the former retired and happy to have shucked off the highs and lows of creativity, the latter still desperate to complete another work. In a surreal moment late in the film, Boyle – rejected personally and professionally by his leading lady of many years, Brenda Morel (Jane Fonda) – hallucinates an alpine hillside full of the various actresses he worked with, all of them still young while he’s an old man, all of them garbed as they were in his films; just from their delivery of the hamfisted dialogue he saddled them with, it’s clear that Boyle wasn’t that great a filmmaker, that he stumbled from one low-budget no-hoper to the next purely to give a leading role to whichever B-movie beauty was his muse at any one time.

There’s the nexus of personal revelation shared by Ballinger and Tree: both are remembered for just one work – the composer for what was little more than a practice piece, the actor for playing a robot in a trashy sci-fi movie. Both have their dignity returned to them by children who are completely un-awed to meet them: a budding violinist who accepts that while Ballinger’s ‘Simple Songs’ are indeed simple, the simplicity is the key to their beauty; and a young film fan who rubbishes the robot movie and tells Tree that it was his delivery of one single line in a low-key family drama that proved his brilliance as an actor. Sorrentino is wise enough to let these rhymed scenes develop slowly and play them with absolute understatement. Much of ‘Youth’, when pinned down on the page in the context of a review, borders on the hokey. Many a director would have made a pig’s ear of it. (But again, no spoilers.)

There’s the shared moment of transcendentalism which sees an eastern mystic achieve nirvana and Maradona rediscover his old calling, no on a football field, but with a tennis ball on an immaculate court. There’s the contrast between Paloma Faith’s raucously unsubtle pop video and an amateur but heartfelt band performing Florence and the Machine’s ‘You’ve Got the Love’. There’s the experiential spectrum between Boyle’s idealistic young writing team and the world-weary pragmatism of Boyle himself. There’s the juxtaposition between Lena’s budding new relationship with a mono-emotional mountain climber and Boyle hiring the services of a young hooker only to task her to take a twilight walk with him. And there’s the stony-faced couple who take dinner every evening without saying a word to each other, who become a blank canvas upon which everyone else’s interrelationships are projected.

‘Youth’ winds its way to its inevitable but emotionally earned conclusion with all the affable digressiveness of a shaggy dog story, albeit one told by a once-great raconteur for whom this will be his last soliloquy of any real meaning. There is a great deal of melancholy here, but it’s offset by an acidic delight in the idiosyncrasies of its characters. The performances, without exception, are buoyant. Dano is the best he’s been since ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ and ‘There Will Be Blood’, Weisz is pitch-perfect, Macqueen steals both of his scenes with the polish of a jewel thief absconding with a priceless diamond, and Caine and Keitel’s double act is a wondrous thing to behold. How to describe it? Imagine a Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau comedy reconceptualised by Lone Scherfig. Imagine, too, the best cinematic statement on ageing this side of ‘The Straight Story’. That’s ‘Youth’ for you – and don’t go thinking that the title is a bit of cheap irony. Sorrentino gives the explanation for it to one of the more subsidiary characters but the meaning is no less profound.

12 Years a Slave

Full disclosure: I avoided this one on the big screen. Everything about the trailers and posters screamed “worthy but dull Oscar bait”. Finally approaching it in the context of Steve McQueen’s previous films, I’m still slightly of that opinion but it needs to be said: overall, ‘12 Years a Slave’ is one hell of a piece of filmmaking.

Based on the memoir by Solomon Northup, a freeborn black man who was Shanghai-ed and sold into slavery in 1841 – even his name was taken away: his slave name was “Platt” – ‘12 Years a Slave’ is in some respects a handsomely mounted epic (it’s the most Hollywood looking of McQueen’s films), and in others as much of an endurance test as anything crafted by Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier. Whereas, however, Haneke and von Trier (for me anyway) never quite avoid the sense that they’re staging unpalatable scenes for the sake of it, McQueen depicts every act of inhumanity – and there are many – with a profound and highly moral sense of purpose.

There’s a scholarly piece to be written on ’12 Years a Slave’ as a response to ‘Django Unchained’ – it’s draining where Tarantino’s film is cathartic; subdued where Tarantino is explosive; graphically horrible in its violence where Tarantino’s is over-the-top and soaked in pop culture aesthetic – and this is nowhere more evident in McQueen’s commitment to anti-narrative as opposed to the adherence of ‘Django Unchained’ to a cohesive story arc. At its most reductive, a synopsis of ‘12 Years a Slave’ would run like this: Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is kidnapped and sold into slavery, first to Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) then to the sadistic Epps (Michael Fassbender) under whose ownership his sufferings worsen. Eventually, via the intervention of abolitionist Bass (Brad Pitt), he is able to prove his freeborn status and return to his old life.

There are very few scenes that function around a narrative or dramatic dynamic – for the most part the film unfolds as Solomon suffers act of brutality then Solomon witnesses act of brutality then plantation owner acts despicably then overseer acts despicably, one after another building to cumulatively shattering depiction of what it is to lose one’s liberty, one’s family and even one’s name. The auction at which Solomon is sold to Ford is a case in point: ironically-named slave dealer Freeman (Paul Giamatti) lines up his wares, male and female, stark naked like sculptures in some bizarre art gallery of dark commerce. Narratively, it fulfils the simple purpose of transiting Solomon to Ford’s plantation. The scene itself, though, has an almost surreal quality; the gleaming skin of Freeman’s slaves and the slick dialogue he employs opens a contemporary point of reference: the oleaginous salesman steering the customer towards the most expensive model in the showroom.

Likewise most of the scenes of violence – be it beating or whipping – are not prefigured or built up to by the tempo and suspense of a scene: they simply erupt and then subside again, part of the fabric of the film; part of the daily life, McQueen acknowledges sadly, of the enslaved. The contrast of Ford and Epps gives the film its only hint of a structure: Act One – Solomon retains his dignity under a conservative owner; Act Two – Solomon undergoes almost total depersonalisation under a total bastard.

Deeming Ford “conservative” is relative concept. Superficially, he’s not monstrous and he responds well to Solomon’s transportation suggestions around his logging operation. However, he still fucking owns slaves and no matter how many readings he gives from the Bible and how light he is on the whip, there’s no getting away from this one simple fact. Moreover, he has no qualms at employing the loathsome Tibeats (Paul Dano) as overseer. Tibeats delights in setting teams of slaves to work while serenading them with the tactless ditty “Run, nigger, run” as a warning against escape attempts.

The inevitable conflict between Solomon and Tibeats sets the scene for one of the film’s most horrific yet mesmerising scenes. Beaten and hoisted from a tree, Solomon is compelled to stand on tip-toe, maintaining his balance, the slightest movement tightening the noose around his neck. In a long-shot that McQueen holds for a minute and a half – nothing compared to the 17-minute dialogue scene in ‘Hunger’, but excruciating and seemingly interminable while you’re watching it – as other characters weave in and out of frame behind Solomon, going about their daily business as if oblivious. It’s a scene about the banality of evil and the everyday complicities (in the interests of survival) of the oppressed.

It’s this incident that prompts Ford to sell Solomon to Epps, with the twofold result of forestalling any future problems with Tibeats and the discharging of a debt to Epps. There’s an immediate juxtaposition between the two plantation owners. Like Ford, Epps is introduced reading the Bible, but unlike Ford’s liberalism and gently improving teachings, Epps uses the good book to make a point about property and a man’s right to dispose of said in any way that pleases him. And it pleases Epps to whip, beat and rape his property. If Ford is a slave owner because he’s a businessman, Epps treats his slaves as pawns in an elaborate game of chess reimagined as hate-fucking with his wife (Sarah Poulson) as his opponent of choice. Epps has a particular fixation on Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o); Mrs Epps, predictably, hates her. The poor girl suffers at both of their hands.

This second half of the film is the most gruelling. Fassbender and Poulson conjure a vision of utter corruption on every level. Alongside Ejiofor and Nyong’o they give the best performances on offer here (though kudos to Giamatti: although his role is small, he shrugs off the mugging that has afflicted much of his recent work and re-engages with acting). McQueen defines degenerative influence of Epps so effectively that a scene where Epps manoeuvres Solomon into burning a letter that might set him from is as toe-curlingly unwatchable as an extended whipping, blood flecking from each blow.

It’s curious, then, given Epps’s sadistic streak and knowledge of Solomon’s earlier attempt to draw attention to his plight, that he sets Solomon to work with the outspoken Bass. The moment Bass delivers his big “white man’s guilt” speech – Pitt’s performance is the film’s weak spot – it’s inexplicable that Epps doesn’t drag Solomon away from him and set him back to work picking cotton. And there are a few other moments that don’t quite add up: the logistics, intricacies and expense of luring Solomon away from his family in the opening scenes seem economically at odds with what he’s sold for; Solomon pens his first, failed, letter in the grounds of Epps’s plantation, a candle guttering, a fire flickering away under a pot of home-made ink, without a single overseer getting suspicious and coming to investigate; Solomon returns after 12 years to the same well-appointed townhouse that his family have inexplicably managed to keep retain.

These are minor things, but there are enough of them to keep the film from greatness. The non-ageing of Solomon until the final scene is also curious, and doesn’t help the film’s tendency to unfurl from one incident to the next without establishing just how far into his 12-year indenture Solomon is at any given point. That Solomon is clean-shaven, neatly-coiffured and dressed in unsoiled clothes in every scene is, I assume, an aesthetic decision on McQueen’s part to accentuate the dignity and humanity that Solomon clings onto throughout his ordeal, but again a slightly false note is struck.

In comparison to ‘Hunger’ – still McQueen’s best film – and ‘Shame’, the director’s trademarks are present but muted, perhaps in accordance with the requirements of working with a larger cast and bigger budget (although, at $18million, said budget was loose change by Hollywood standards). Static takes are longer than usual for mainstream filmmaking, but there’s nothing that remotely equals the 17-minute Sands/Moran scene in ‘Hunger’ or the 10-minute restaurant scene in ‘Shame’. There’s one shot of the protagonist running, but it’s over in seconds and doesn’t carry the backstory of the young Bobby Sands in ‘Hunger’ or the immediacy of Brandon’s disruption from his carefully ordered life in ‘Shame’. There is none of the bleak palette that characterises the cinematography of either of these two films.

What there is, however, and what indelibly stamps ’12 Years a Slave’ with Steve McQueen’s authorial signature, is its intensely rigorous and purposeful examination of depersonalisation. As the prisoners in ‘Hunger’ are stripped and mistreated and broken down by a system hellbent on destroying them for political reasons, and as Brandon in ‘Shame’ ravages his body in increasingly frenzied and desperate and purposeless liaisons in order to repress any shred of emotion, so Solomon is variously forced to co-operate, endure, turn a blind eye or turn his back (his deliverance from Epps’s plantation while Patsey and the others needs must remain is terrible to watch); to do, in other words, what is necessary to survive. Even if he survives as a non-person, saddled with a name that isn’t his.

Little Miss Sunshine

Meet the Hoover family: patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who insists that everyone has a choice between being a winner and a loser, even though his personal success rate relegates him to the latter category; his wife Sheryl (Toni Colette) juggles a day job, motherhood and running a chaotic household; their children number Dwayne (Paul Dano), a goth who wears a ‘Jesus was wrong’ t-shirt and refuses to speak, and Olive (Abigail Breslin) a precocious pre-teen who dreams of being a beauty queen. Unexpected guests in the Hoover household are Richard’s father Edwin (Alan Arkin), newly expelled from his retirement home for drugs related offences, and Edwin’s brother Frank (Steve Carell), a brilliant but neurotic scholar recuperating from a suicide attempt.

Which doesn’t add up to the stuff of which feelgood comedies are made, but ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ – directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a literate and witty script by Michael Arndt – is second only to ‘Sideways’ (up soon on the Personal Faves project) in mining a seam of humour from a melancholy set-up, and emerging, in its final scenes, as life-affirming.

Like Alexander Payne’s masterpiece it unfolds as a road movie, the dysfunctional sextet crowding into a beat-up old VW Microbus as they head for California where Olive is to compete in the final of the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Everything from mechanical failure to hospitalisation conspires to prevent them, and when they finally make it to the pastel-decorated hotel hosting the event, Richard, Dwayne and Frank - at odds from the outset - find themselves united in abhorrence: the beauty contest verges on exploitation, prepubescent girls made up and paraded more in the manner women ten or fifteen years their senior. Olive, however, insists in competing.

Melancholy pervades the characters, the journey, the film itself: virtually all of the Hoovers are defeated in their ambitions. By the end, it’s all down to Olive to win one back even though everything seems stacked against her. The ending doesn’t pan out quite as you’d expect ... but it’s an absolute delight all the same, gloriously sending up the beauty pageant for what it is.

Abigail Breslin (aged ten at the time of filming) turns in an astounding performance, but so does the whole cast; in particular, Toni Colette, striking the right note between flustered and dependable as a woman trying to be all things to all family members, and Alan Arkin, an absolute hoot as the foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed Edwin “Are you getting any?” he asks Dwayne at one point. “What are you, fifteen? Just the right age. You're jailbait and they're jailbait. It doesn't matter. Leave it till you're eighteen and you're looking at three to five.” (Bear in mind that it's Edwin who coaches Olive for the dance number she performs at the contest and you might get some idea of how unorthodox her routine is.)

Greg Kinnear, insufferably smug in most of his characterisations, convinces as a man trying to cling onto the positivity he peddles in his seminars even as he suffers one setback after another; while Steve Carell, in a performance devoid of the mugging and tomfoolery that often defines his onscreen persona, achieves a career best that you wouldn’t have thought possible. Both turn moments of cringe-making embarrassment – one involving the purchase of a pornographic magazine, the other the discovery of same by an overzealous traffic cop – into absurdist highlights.

And – proudly reversing into a parking space alongside a forecourt full of automotive icons including Herbie, the General Lee, Inspector Morse’s Jaguar Mk II and a certain Aston Martin DB5 “with modifications” – the Hoovers’ unpredictable yellow VW Microbus manages contain the entire family and all their differences and run away (almost literally!) with some of the funniest scenes.