LONDON CITY NIGHTS: willem dafoe

Sunday, September 14, 2014

'A Most Wanted Man' (2014) directed by Anton Corbijn

Sunday, September 14, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Despair looms large over A Most Wanted Man. As the last lead role of Philip Seymour Hoffman there's a pang of emotion as appears, every minute that ticks by one less until he'll never be in a new film again. But leaving such extratextual concerns aside, that this is a deeply bleak movie about broken people half-heartedly running through routines, and, given that this is an adaptation of a John le Carré novel, that routine is spycraft.

Set in modern Hamburg, the titular wanted man is Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin). He's a Chechen Muslim fleeing the wars in his home country. He's traumatised by his brutall tortured at the hands of Russian intelligence, his body a map of scars and cigarette burns. The Russians inform the Hamburg spy community that Karpov is a dangerous extremist, a one man terror threat.

The Hamburg spy community, still smarting with residual guilt that the 9/11 attacks were planned from the city, fixates upon Karpov, desperate to acquire him for their own ends. Prime among them is Günther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an veteran spy running a small-scale extrajudicial intelligence operation. Unbeholden to any state he does the tasks that the law prevents the other agencies doing.

Soon we're wrapped up in a knotty mess of various agencies jockeying for turf, planting bugs and cameras everywhere, clandestine meetings in smoky cafes and people being black-bagged off the street and bundled into vans. As in every le Carré adaptation the film all but demands close attention, lest you forget the differing motivations of the numerous shadowy groups of besuited figures.

At the core of A Most Wanted Man is an ethical battle between cinematic pleasure and real-world politics. Though reality is dialled up, Bachmann's spy team is still roughly analogous to Mission: Impossible (or any number of action movie spy crews). It's thrilling to watch them work; be they in a race against time to plant bugs and camera before their target becomes suspicious, exchanging under the table information through cigarette packets or stalking people through the busy Hamburg streets. Corbijn's spycraft is hardly sexy, but there's a Germanic care and precision to it that's easy to admire.

Taken in isolation the actions of our lead characters are pretty damn far from heroic: a litany of invasions of privacy, manipulations of trust and mental torture (backed by the subtle threat of physical torture). Yet by dint of the narrative focus these are nonetheless our heroes, audience identification with them cemented by our shared perception of the world through a camera lens, in their case security footage and bugs, in our case a cinema screen. This identification gives us a vicarious thrill. Wow, what if I was a spy? How cool would that be?

The notion of a secret world existing in parallel with our own is a seductive fictional device. Thus, A Most Wanted Man is essentially Harry Potter for grown-ups. Both exploit the same suspicion that there's something going on around us that we're not privy to, and both feature characters that become sucked into this secret world. Though cloaked in gritty reality, spycraft may as well be wizardry for all the relevance it has to the average viewer, andso despite our best efforts we end up rooting for this team.

Pushing back against that is the deepening realisation that our cool, sexy, interesting and smart protagonists are monsters. Corbijn and le Carré are at pains to emphasise that not only are our hero's methods ridiculously unethical, but ineffectual and without purpose. Spies are repeatedly quizzed as to why they're doing this, always falling back on the meaningless mantra that they're "making the world a safer place".

The intelligence community is thus exposed as simply going through the motions. They need to be seen to be doing something to justify their existence, and victimising traumatised asylum seekers and innocent members of the public is better than twiddling their thumbs. Their lack of ideological passion is contrasted with the focussed aims of their enemies, who are at least fighting for something they believe in. As Walter Sobchak said, "Dude, at least it's an ethos!".

Our hero's lack of focus suffuses the film with nihilism, expressed not only their actions but in Corbijn's desaturated visual style. Our heroes are constantly placed in boxes within boxes, whether it be in cramped basement headquarters, booths in cafes, glass meeting rooms within offices or vans in car parks. This, coupled with a repeated motif of characters being obscured: behind smoked glass, blocked by scenery or behind opaque plastic sheets works to separate these people from the 'real world', underlining their removal from reality as we know it.

When they do break into the real world it's presented as a chaotic, senseless mess. So, for example Bachmann's carefully ordered world completely breaks down when confronted by a packed, sweaty nightclub. The implication quickly becomes that these people are less fighting to make the world a safer place and more to construct a reality that justifies their continued existence.

The battleground for this debate takes place over the haggard, almost albino, features of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Chain-smoking, glugging booze by the bottleful and with lidded, rheumy red-eyes he looks desperately sick. These are the physical manifestations of his increasingly cynical view of his role in the world, something contrasted against his lint-free, perfectly coiffed CIA counterpart. It's not a career defining performance, but it's one hell of a swansong.

A Most Wanted Man isn't a perfect movie (Rachel McAdams is totally miscast), but it's got political, moral and ethical complexity baked into its DNA. Corbijn walks the tightrope between these poles with skill, aided by le Carré's rightly cynical tone. A quiet, sinister and darkly compelling piece of cinema.

★★★★

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

The Fault in Our Stars (2014) directed by Josh Boone

Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The Fault in Our Stars opens with a big promise: this isn't going to be one of those syrupy, schmaltzy Hollywood films about cancer. No, this film is, according to our protagonist and narrator, “truth”: a story to be told without resort to cliche and sentiment.

What a load of a bullshit!

The Fault in Our Stars is, in reality, 'yer standard terminal illness tearjerker, with diseases that leave our principals looking California-photogenic 'til the end, tons of soft focus smooching in Autumnal parks and great big dollops of heartfelt, acoustic guitar indie music. It's a straight-up weepie, but it's a decently put together weepie, and successful to the extent that it actually wrung a tear or two from my cynical bones.

Our cancer-crossed lovers are Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Gus (Ansel Elgort). Hazel is smart, literate and funny, Gus is adventurous, brave and imaginative. They even have a lot in common other than the fact that they're dying. After a meet-cute at a support group they quickly become entangled in each other's lives and we watch as their feelings and attachments to each other develop into real love. It's pretty standard teenage romance stuff, though with the morbid twist that the primary bond is their impending deaths. As the months tick away their respective conditions worsen, the film exploring the limits of romance when your body is consuming itself.

Like a hunkier Michael Cera

Unsurprisingly, a story of two cancer suffering teenagers finding love just as they're about to die is pretty damn depressing. The script leavens this with black (well, beige anyway) humour, but there's never any ignoring the essential tragedy of the situation. Woodley and Elgort are both decent enough in the lead roles; and successfully navigating the tightrope between cute and annoying (though they sure do wobble). They're ably supported by two heavyweights in the supporting cast; a bearded and grumpy Willem Dafoe and a sensitive Laura Dern as Hazel's mother. This isn't a film defined by great performances (particularly a miscast Sam Trammel as Hazel's father), but Dern in particular brings her A-game, giving a masterclass in how to imbue a stock role with development and character.

The cancer movie has practically become its own subgenre of late. My favourite is 2011's excellent 50/50, which possesses a sharp as hell script and a willingness to get its hands dirty with the nitty gritty of what chemotherapy and terminal illness do to a person. The nadir is the execrable Now Is Good with Dakota Fanning, a piece of irredeemable crap so gloopily saccharine that I rooted for the leukaemia. The Fault in Our Stars falls somewhere in the middle, textually up front about the realities of cancer, yet afraid to cinematically go the distance.

My suspicions are that this stems from adaptation difficulties. In John Green's novel of the saem name, it's easy to identify with these character's personalities without having to grapple with the visual toll of disease. It'ss up to the reader to visualise the characters a process allowing them a certain degree of self-censorship. The problem Boone faces is that it's difficult from both a production and aesthetic viewpoint to get genuinely ill-looking actors; firstly because his hot, in-demand teen stars don't want to slim themselves down to a skeleton or shave their heads, and secondly because genuinely dealing with the disease runs the risk of overpowering a sweet love story with body horror.

There is also a pretty disturbing subplot about this guy in the shades getting his eyeballs surgically removed.

The solution is simply to handwave it, the result being that throughout the two lovers are photogenic, healthy looking, beautiful people. In The Fault in Our Stars, the real way we know a character is going downhill is when they begin wearing what I dub 'The Woollen Hat of Death' – cinematic shorthand that an ill character is about to be brown bread. Tactics like these (which I think stem from 1970s Love Story) come close to undermining the entire production; especially as they went to such lengths to explain that this isn't going to be like those other wimpy cancer films.

What saves the film is Josh Boone's exemplary grasp of how to manipulate the audience. The book it's based on is young adult lit, and I suspect the target audience of teenage girls is going to absolutely adore this. Boone goes for their tear ducts like a man possessed, deploying every cinematic trick in his arsenal to squeeze every last drop of emotion out of the material. His prime weapons are an uncanny instinct for when best to deploy a pop song (specifically the recurring use of M83's Wait), an occasionally moving and poetic snatches of dialogue and some nice (if somewhat blunt) visual metaphors. By the final scenes I could hear hankies being blubbed into and sniffles all around the theatre. Even I, a seasoned film critic, ended up with a little something in the corner of my eye.

Regardless of its many flaws, The Fault in Our Stars has to be judged a rough success simply on that front. It's an unashamedly sentimental, manipulatively cheesy bit of cinema, but like a crap comedy that nonetheless makes you laugh, it must be doing something right. It's certainly a vast improvement on Josh Boone's last film Stuck in Love, on the whole I'm glad that my wish that he'd be run over by a bus never came to pass.

★★★

The Fault in Our Stars is on general release from 19 June

Saturday, March 8, 2014

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' (2014) directed by Wes Anderson

Saturday, March 8, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

If Wes Anderson was God the world would be a much nicer place. Over the course of his cinematic career he's woven unique cinematic style; creating a fractally detailed, synchronised universe. This is a world where every tiny thing on screen is a jigsaw piece in a bigger picture; the fabrics used in the productions, the style of beards; the fonts on the cover of books; the dents on cars and tiny sound effects and a thousand other minute, carefully considered elements adding up to a sumptuous feast - a beautiful world, an aesthetic world - a better world.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is pinnacle of Wes Anderson's style; a geometric, symmetric and rectilinear caper through beautiful spaces populated with the cream of modern acting talent. After watching this it's difficult to imagine how a film could be any more Wes Anderson than this; every frame packed to the rafters with his idiosyncratic style.

At it's core, the film is the story of a hotel. Set in the cartoonish fake Eastern European country of Zubrowka, the film quickly reveals a pleasingly onion-like structure. We open with a modern woman visiting a monument to a famous Zubrowkian writer known only as "The Author". As she opens a book we flash-back to 1985 where the middle-aged author is explains his methods and how he gets his ideas. From here we flash-back once more to the mid 1960s, where the author (now played by Jude Law) stays at the hotel; now bedraggled, largely unoccupied and suffering under a shabby Kubrickean refit. Here he meets the unassuming owner of the hotel. The two men have dinner and the elderly owner recounts the tale of how he came to run this building.

It's always nice to see Jeff Goldblum in a film.

Now we're in the meat of the story: it's 1932 and Zubrowka is on the verge of war. The hotel is its prime, every aspect overseen by the exacting eye of concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) with the assistance of his lobby boy protégé Zero (Tony Revolori). With the death of elderly patron Madame D (Tilda Swinton) and her subsequent bequeathment of a painting to the concierge, the stage is set for adventure. For the rest of the film we plunge into an energetic, fast-paced farce as Gustave and Zero battle assassins, the military police, prison guards and sinister in-laws of Madame D. The plot twists and turns across Zubrowka, taking in cities, countryside and mountain-tops, showing us every inch of a country which usually only exists on the front of a chocolate box.

As with most Wes Anderson films, you'd be hard pressed to put together a better cast he can. Every few minutes a hugely talented actor pops up, does themselves proud then vanishes back into the crowd. But though we see some memorable turns from luminaries like Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton and Adrien Brody, none of these can really touch Ralph Fiennes. Quite simply he's marvellous, combining a brittle pansexual grace with a military man's attention to detail. Often, (sometimes within the space of a single line of dialogue!), he's paternal, horny, cruel and touching. It's a masterclass of a performance; turning what could have been a prissy Basil Fawlty type into a weirdly noble action hero.

One aspect of Wes Anderson's writing I deeply appreciate is the sincerity of his characters. They wear their passions on their sleeve, announcing their loves and fears at the drop of a hat. There's no ironic winking in a Wes Anderson film, when someone declares their love - whether it be for a hotel, an elderly lady or a resourceful baker, the film takes them at their word. It's important not to take this transparency as shallowness; just because these characters don't have secrets doesn't make them any less dramatically fascinating. My own theory as to why Anderson's characters behave so oddly is that they're children's ideas of what adult behaviour is like.

This is a very pretty film.

This is at the forefront of most of his films; the childish revenge of Herman Blume in Rushmore, the arrested development of the children in The Royal Tenenbaums; the swashbuckling (apparently) 'ideal' Dad Steve Zissou of The Life Aquatic. Most of all it's at the forefront of his last film, the excellent Moonrise Kingdom, with two young runaways besotted with each other to the confusion of the neurotic adults. In Grand Budapest we see Anderson's child-like world butting up against realpolitik, from the opening sequence we realise that this idealised 1930s world will be crushed under the boot of concrete realism - innocent childhood gradually and acceptingly replaced by the cool utilitarianism of adulthood.

This is furthered in the visual style of the film, the watercoloured matte-paintings and landscape wide-shots of Grand Budapest recalling children's pop-up books, the objects whizzing and wobbling through the scenery in a pleasingly analogue manner - looking like hand-made papercraft. In fact, of all Wes Anderson's films, the closest aesthetic relation is the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox - a film that's literally children's literature in motion.

With the clear divisions between goodies and baddies and fast-paced rhythmic action The Grand Budapest Hotel succeeds largely because it follows this basic template of children's adventure story, with laser-perfect moments of swearing and the odd bit of gruesome violence. This is pure escapism - a retreat into a reassuring world of order and beauty. The camera movements, locked into horizontal or vertical geometric motions underline this vision of an ordered universe, which ultimately becomes represented by the clockwork running of the titular hotel.

This is an absolute pleasure to watch from start to finish, tapping into the same base level of wonderment as you get when you peer into a miniature village, or pull open the doors of an extravagantly detailed doll's house and marvel at the detailing on every tiny piece of furniture. Under Anderson's steady hand everything in the film pulls in the same direction, the best moment being a pursuit up a mountain where every single sound effect squeaks and beats in time to Alexandre DeSplat's masterful score.

The Grand Budapest Hotel makes no grand claims to sociological importance. It has no pretensions to tell us anything about the modern world. The message, such as it is, is essentially about the importance of good people sticking together - hardly news to a seasoned audience. Yet there's something to be said for simple beauty, humour and craftsmanship in cinema. For a film to quite simply make you happy is reason enough for it to exist: with The Grand Budapest Hotel now out there in the world, things are minutely happier.

★★★★★

The Grand Budapest Hotel is out now.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS