LONDON CITY NIGHTS: Tom Hanks

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

'Bridge of Spies' (2015) directed by Steven Spielberg

Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Putting Tom Hanks in front of the American flag and having him wax lyrical about the rights granted by the American Constitution can't help but recall Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Spielberg's Bridge of Spies lands firmly in the same liberal humanist territory; a noble Atticus Finch-a-like lawyer suffering the slings and arrows of public opinion as he defends an indefensible defendant to prove that, gosh darn it, everyone deserves due process. Even Commie spies.

Said Commie Spy is Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a taciturn painter who lives in Brooklyn and just happens to be passing military secrets to the Soviets. In the opening scenes we observe him going about his day as he's tracked by CIA agents. They arrest him and soon there's to be a hugely publicised trial. His legal counsel is the initially reluctant James Donovan (Tom Hanks), who knows full well what defending this man will entail for his reputation.

A film of two halves, the courtroom drama eventually develops into Berlin-set Cold War intrigue. While piloting a U2 spy plane over Soviet territory, pilot Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is shot down and captured. With a head full of espionage secrets, the US are determined to get him back before he cracks under interrogation, and decide to arrange a transfer of prisoners: Abel for Powers. Wary of an international incident, the US sends someone with no government ties - and so the personable Donovan is off to negotiate with the KGB.

A Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Hanks is about as safe a bet as you can get in modern cinema. Donovan is the precise kind of quiet, dignified, intelligent and subtly playful character that Tom Hanks does so well, mixing in layers of rebelliousness, quick thinking and legal creativity that sit atop an impenetrable bedrock of principles.

Spielberg similarly relishes material that, when you strip it back to its bones, is largely middle-aged men sitting in dowdy, smoke-filled rooms. There's clear shades of Lincoln in the way light hangs in the air as it pierces windows, or as low-wattage bulbs pick out the crags in these men's faces. Further directorial mileage comes in Spielberg's knack for locations; the hum and vigour of Brooklyn nicely contrasting with the monochrome iciness of Berlin - making it literally a 'cold war'.

But, for all Spielberg and Hanks' expertise, the film occasionally feels like pre-baked Oscar bait - peppered with sledgehammer 'inspirational' moments where the score rises and Hanks solemnly intones the guiding principles of the founding fathers. Too much of that gloop would be a recipe for mediocrity - yet Bridge of Spies is saved by two factors.

The first is a Coen Brothers authored script that subtly spins a thread of absurdity through the narrative. Moments like a gang of incredibly polite East German muggers, a puffed up GDR lawyer answering the wrong telephone or the appearance of a bizarre East German family feel deliciously playful. Bridge of Spies isn't straightforwardly Coenesque, but it's got enough of the same DNA inside to add a sprinkling of pizzazz.

The other major thing it's got going for it is Mark Rylance's astonishing performance. Somehow he manages to make doing literally nothing fascinating. It's surreal how magnetic Rylance can be just standing silently, observing events through impossibly perceptive eyes. I've seen him on stage a number of times, yet cinema has never exploited his talents to the fullest until now. With Abel he seems a shoe-in for awards nominations - knotting together the twin poles of cool impassivity and intense charisma.

While by no means a top flight Spielberg (or Hanks for that matter) movie, the 140 minute runtime breezily passes in a swirl of genuinely interesting historical minutia and rock-solid film-craft. There's even a couple of flashes of genuine panache - particularly a powerfully edited sequence showing schoolchildren absorbing the horrors of nuclear war via Duck and Cover.

While not a milestone in anyone's careers, Bridge of Spies achieves its goals with laudably little fuss - worthy of admiration for unpretentious craftsmanship, humanistic intentions and just enough peculiarity to tease Coen fans. Worth a watch.

★★★

Bridge of Spies is released November 27th

Monday, October 21, 2013

'Saving Mr Banks' (2013) directed by John Lee Hancock

Monday, October 21, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

As Mary Poppins famously sang: "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down". So it's appropriate that Saving Mr Banks is a sickly sweet sugary film, but it's not a spoonful that slides down, more great granulated gobs of the stuff pumped down our throats like force-fed foie-gras geese. I'm no enemy of sweetness, light and optimism but there are limits dammit. Especially when in this case, the glittering 'goodness' of the story is a whitewash for a rather depressing and sordid bit of creative prostitution.

Saving Mr Banks is ostensibly the story of how Disney's Mary Poppins made it to the screen. It takes the form of fuzzy biopic of Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers as she grapples with Disney creatives and struggles to retain control of her intellectual property. This isn't so much about the process of shooting Mary Poppins, but rather a dramatisation of script editing meetings and creative conferences. What it boils down to is the adversarial relationship between P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson), an uptight, emotionally repressed, archly stern English lady and Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), a cool, laid-back genius, friend to everyone he meets.

Disney wants the rights to Mary Poppins, we learn at the beginning of the film that Disney has been trying for 20 years to secure them, but Travers, who's fiercely protective of her creation, has repeatedly told them where to stick their cheque. This year things have changed, Travers is close to bankruptcy and faced with losing her beloved house. Feeling the pressure, she reluctantly agrees to meetings with Disney about a film adaptation. Travelling to L.A. she is horrified to discover that they plan to turn her book into an all-singing, all-dancing musical with animated penguins and Dick van Dyke as cheery cockney chimney sweep Bert. The rest of the film shows her being slowly won over by the Disney corporation until the glittering premiere where, obviously, Mary Poppins is a rousing success.

Interweaved are flashbacks to Travers' childhood in rural Australia, where we examine her relationship with her father, Travers Gof (Colin Farrell). These show us why Travers is so aloof and reserved, exploring the dark secrets that lie in her past and the real-life origins of Mary Poppins.

The critical problem with Saving Mr Banks is that its morally inverted, pushing us to identify with the powerful as they crush the weak - like rooting for Goliath over David. The film wants us to cheer on the Disney Corporation, their mission in the film an altruistic spreading of peace and love for all children by the seizure of intellectual properties from authors. Perhaps if this film wasn't made by Disney this would be a bit easier to swallow, but a film by Walt Disney productions that spends an inordinate amount of time fellating the frozen corpse of their founder leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Adding insult to injury is the constant portrayal of Travers as behaving unreasonably in seeking total control of her intellectual property (something that seems a bit hypocritical given how viciously Disney protects its IP). Saving Mr Banks acts as though a story being adapted into a Disney film should be the ultimate ambition of any children's author, so Travers' fiercely independent creative vision becomes an obstacle to be demolished rather than something to be celebrated.

A personal annoyance in film criticism is people moaning that a film based on real events bends the truth to make a better story. Usually I couldn't give a toss, but Saving Mr Banks is an especially egregious example, transforming Travers, in real life an adventurous, mystical, openly bisexual badass into a stuffy old British stick in the mud. Sure she's grumpy and miserable, but considering she's having to betray her principles and selling off her IP I think that's perfectly understandable. The film even goes so far as to portray her as anti-feminist, something that really rankles when you know that Travers was vocally furious that the Disney film showed the suffragette Mrs Banks giving up her women's rights campaigning to become a happy housewife.

The hurdle that the film has to clear is that the real-life Travers absolutely detested the Disney adaptation of her work, going so far as stipulate in her last will and testament that no Americans (and the Sherman brothers specifically) were to be involved in any future Mary Poppins productions. Saving Mr Banks gets around this not inconsiderable problem by engaging in some pretty seedy historical revisionism. For example, it's true that Travers left the premiere of Mary Poppins in tears, in the film these are tears of cathartic joy, in reality they were tears of horror and shame at seeing her beloved work whored through Disney's very safe, very cosy and very fluffy lens.

I repeat that I don't usually care about movies warping reality if it's in service of drama. But Saving Mr Banks doesn't do it in service of drama, rather to create a hagiography of the Disney corporation, and Walt Disney in particular. Tom Hanks' Walt Disney is a non-character, doling out saccharine nuggets of wisdom to his goody two-shoes, vaguely cultish work-force. This is the idealised image of "Uncle Walt" that the Disney Corporation wants to promote, a saintlike genius loved by all, existing in a beatific state of flawlessness. Within this straitjacket Hanks barely has room to breathe, settling for a vague paternalism and homely monologues delivered in an accent that makes him sound peculiarly like Agent Smith from The Matrix.

The 1960s sequences of the film are at least visually interesting: a sanitised Mad Men pastiche for kids - the early 60s devoid of booze, cigarettes and sexism with nice retro wallpaper. Thompson and Hanks are at least professionals enough to get us through this morally questionable material with little fuss, squeezing the maximum humour from the ropey script. It's the Australian sequences where the film really falls flat on its face. Colin Farrell as Travers' father never feels remotely like a real person and the film rapidly devolves into sentimental, melodramatic, syrupy bullshit.

Disney's Mary Poppins is indisputably a classic. But here that's beside the point, Saving Mr Banks is a film that lionises a huge corporation exerting its full weight upon a financially vulnerable writer, taking a woman of intelligence, integrity and viciously exploiting her talents for financial gain and now in 2013 lying about how psychologically positive the experience was for her. If Travers was apoplectic about her creations being Disneyfied one can only imagine the reaction to her actual life receiving the same treatment. Saving Mr Banks is a perfect example of the old adage that history is written by the victors.

★

Saving Mr Banks is released on November 29th

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Captain Phillips (2013) directed by Paul Greengrass

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Captain Phillips is the tale of four brave, doomed Somali sailors. These are men that spend their days trapped in a nightmarish sand-blasted hell with an infinite desert behind them and an infinite ocean in front. This is a world where the life expectancy is a smidge over 50 years, where power comes down the barrel of an AK-47 and where life is about as cheap as it gets.

'Cloud Atlas' (2012) directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski

Wednesday, January 2, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

It's difficult to know where to start. 'Cloud Atlas' tries to do so much, some of the time it succeeds and some of the time it doesn't. The film, adapted from the book of the same name by David Mitchell, tells us a series of stories that manage to both interconnect with each other while remaining almost entirely separate. On a surface level they couldn't be more different, ranging from a 1970s detective story to a light-hearted escape from a Scottish retirement home to survival in a primitive post-apocalyptic tribal society. The film cuts between these stories freely, and by cleverly cutting between different sequences the directors subtly link actions a millennia apart.

Our cast is scattered across time, every actor playing multiple roles as they crop up in each story. For example, Halle Berry plays Luisa Rey, an investigative journalist in 1970s New York, but also Meronym, a scientist in a post-apocalyptic future. Both of these characters bond quickly with Tom Hanks' character, and seem to share a determination and curiosity even across time. But aside from these two, Berry shows up throughout the film, even if it's only for a split second, as say, a native slave in the 17th century, the wife of a Scottish composer in the 1930s or a cybernetic surgeon in futuristic Neo-Seoul.

Sonmi-351 (Doona Bae) and Ovid (Halle Berry)

This approach has mixed results. Watching the same people recurring across time and space explicitly underlines a continuity throughout humanity. It's touching (in a temporally mixed up way) to see people we know fall in love in one time meeting in another and feeling some instant, inexplicable spark between them. The actors look like they're having an enormous amount of fun getting to play some much weirder characters than they'd normally be cast as. Tom Hanks in particular seems to take great relish in playing a violent Irish gangster novelist, or a demented ship's doctor. Hanks, for better or worse, does tend to play a lot of 'Tom Hanks roles', and although he's obviously fantastic at them, it's great to see him ham it up a bit.

But this tactic of casting the same people across time becomes a little distracting, and eventually starts to distract from the film itself. Very quickly you begin to play "let's spot the actor", with the result that you spend time trying to work out who is buried under a mountain of prosthetics and makeup rather than on what's going on in the scene. It gets to a point where casting, say Hugo Weaving as a Nurse Ratchet type, feels more like stunt casting than something that compliments the themes of the film, particularly as the prosthetics he gamely performs through aren't particularly convincing.

Jim Sturgess as a Scottish rugby fan about to bonk Hugo Weaving's Nurse Noakes on the head.

'Cloud Atlas' relies on these prosthetic masks a lot, frequently to the detriment of the performance underneath. For all the film's bombast and scope, the stories nearly all focus on small, interpersonal developments between a duo. When one or more of their faces is hidden underneath a big blob of latex it's difficult to tell even what expression they're making. The principle offender in this regard is Jim Sturgess' 'Hae-Joo Chang', a revolutionary in future Neo-Seoul. He looks distractingly weird, less like a Korean and more like something out of Star Trek. This very strange prosthetic never stops looking extremely odd. The cherry on top is the constant awkward feeling that having a white actor playing a Korean man feels like a strange choice to make in 2012. 'Cloud Atlas' is genuinely thematically progressive when it comes to race: we have Halle Berry playing a white socialite in the 1930s or Doona Bae playing an English wife in the 18th century. This is a film that posits a 'post-racial' philosophy, which is admirable enough, but it's not being released in a post-racial culture, and so the way the character of 'Hae-Joo Chang' is presented is inescapably problematic.

A uh.. futuristic Korean, apparently.

These problems are distracting but fortunately they don't overwhelm the film. At its finest moments it's unexpectedly and disarmingly touching. One of the main reasons I was anticipating this film was because of how much I adored the highly under-rated 'Speed Racer' (2008). That film is a kaleidoscope of intensely kinetic action sequences and cutting edge editing. 'Cloud Atlas' takes an entirely different tack altogether, the few big action set pieces are competently put together, but nothing to write home about. Where the film shifts into high-gear is when the emotional stakes are raised. My favourite performance in the film was Ben Whishaw's 'Robert Frobisher', a young bisexual composer in the 1930s struggling to complete his masterpiece symphony, the 'Cloud Atlas Sextet'. He's racked with depression as he's exploited and blackmailed, but even as the character reaches the end of his rope we still sense the bright young thing we met at the beginning of the film. He's brilliant here, talented but flawed and desperate. 'Cloud Atlas' is a long film, but it's worth it to let performances like this breathe.

This is not a film for everyone, on its release last September in the US it was greeted with what can charitably be described as mixed reviews. But it's difficult not to be admire the sheer gumption of some of the decisions and ambitions that went into this. For example, the far future society speaks a garbled, slangy version of English:

"Prescients come barterin' twice a year. Their ships creep-crawlin' on the waves, just floatin' on the smart of the old ones."

The film opens with dialogue like this, a lot of which is mumbled by Tom Hanks in a low voice. There are no concessions to the audience in trying to work out what's going on, and on first viewing you'll maybe understand half of it, if that. Forcing an audience to concentrate on what the characters are saying isn't necessarily a downside, it emphasises both the alien nature of the primitive world of the characters and their connection to our world.

Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) and Rufus Sixmith (James D'Arcy)

The contrasts in tone between these stories are hugely impressive, particularly the way in which 'Cloud Atlas' cuts between the micro and macro scale. So we get an action-packed adventure through a futuristic city, complete with hoverbike chases, huge explosions and martial arts gunplay, and then without skipping a beat we'll be in a contemporary retirement home in Scotland plotting a 'jailbreak'. It's like going from 'Minority Report' to 'Last of the Summer Wine' in the blink of an eye. This isn't some refuge in audacity to distract from any failings, it actually works! Emotional high points in each story coincide with each other and there are myriad ways each the time periods subtly link together (this is definitely a film that benefits from multiple viewings). One stylistic choice the directors make is to shoot everything in the same way, with no concessions made to making the past seem distant, or the future especially visually confusing. The upshot is that there's a continuity to the visual style, which goes a long way towards making the film one larger story rather than six short films.

This all feeds into the messages of the film, namely that there are certain universal human qualities that transcend time and space. Everything about the way the film is constructed underlines this message: race, age, period and gender are irrelevancies as far as 'Cloud Atlas' is concerned. What's important are acts of kindness big and small, and co-operation and trust between people. Each of the stories examined features a series of collaborations between people, and over and over again we see great acts and works produced when people work together and tragedy striking when people act in their own self-interest at the expense of others.

Hugh Grant!

The structure of 'Cloud Atlas' diminishes the role of the individual in the grand scale of things explaining that no-one can achieve greatness on their own, everyone stands on the shoulders of others. This sounds pretty straightforward and sensible, but puts the film in philosophical opposition to vast tracts of Western cinema, which tends to prioritise the Campbellian journey of the individual. 'Cloud Atlas' defiantly refuses to have a protagonist, and goes to great lengths to blur the line between heroism and villainy through the multiple roles each actor plays. In one story Jim Broadbent might play a bumbling loveable grump who learns the importance of co-operation, and in another a hateful, blackmailing old miser living leechlike off someone else's talent. Both characters share aspects of their personalities and so we have to evaluate why one is sympathetic and one isn't, and what choices led them to that point. Inevitably if you're thinking like this you begin to analyse yourself; what impact have the choices you've made had on your personality?

There is also an absolute smorgasbord of visual loveliness in this film.

'Cloud Atlas' is far from a perfect film, or even a great one. But with its wild ambitions and earnest optimism it's difficult to dislike. I'd much rather see a film that's a bit hit and miss than something glossily successful that achieves its limited goals. They don't make many films like 'Cloud Atlas'; too unselfconsciously weird to be taken entirely seriously; too serious and moral to be made fun of. Sure it's butt-numbingly long, and at times it consciously sets out to alienate and confuse the audience, but for all its flaws the film is stuffed with moments of genuine lyricism that make it a must-see, if only to appreciate the scale of the cinematic ambition present in every frame.

****/*****

'Cloud Atlas' is on general release from 22nd February.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS