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Showing posts with label Benedict Cumberbatch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Benedict Cumberbatch. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
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Johnny Depp's regression from ultra-cool indie darling to flouncing tit depressed the hell out of me. Outright classics like Edward Scissorhands, Dead Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Ed Wood cemented him as someone willing to take on risky projects and deliver complex, innovative performances. Then came Captain Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter and finally, the cruellest blow of all, the truly execrable Mortdecai.
After suffering through Mortdecai this January I wrote: "Mr
Depp, you need to stop. This is rock bottom. Put down the silly hats.
Take off the beads. Throw away the eyeliner. Mr Depp, stop. Please stop." Mercifully, at least in Black Mass, he has.
Depp plays James "Whitey" Bulger, a vicious Boston crimelord who gradually seized control of the city. A textbook psychopath, his complete lack of conscience and fierce intelligence make him a natural and successful gangster. Black Mass shows us Whiteys inexorable rise to the upper echelons of organised crime, with a focus on his relationship with FBI Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton).
Connolly and Whitey were childhood friends, growing up in the tightly-knit south side of Boston. Though they've ended up on opposite sides of the law, they're still Southie boys, and Connolly sees the connection as an opportunity. Approaching Whitey, the two form an 'alliance'; Whitey's gangland insider knowledge being used to take down the Italian Mafia and Connolly using his influence to get the FBI to tolerate Whitey's growing crime empire.
Higher-ups in the FBI grow increasingly uncomfortable with the arrangement, suspecting that the information Whitey's feeding them is useless and disturbed that anyone who informs on Whitey to them quickly ends up dead. As the years tick by the boundaries between gangster and federal agent gradually blur in a hail of bullets, blood and expensive steaks.
The obvious centrepiece of Black Mass is Depp's Whitey. Swaddled under reams of latex, with a receding hairline, sunken cheeks and ice-blue eyes, he's only just plausible as an actual flesh and blood human being. Despite looking a bit Dick Tracy, this lizardlike visage is hugely effective and actually intimidating. Depp takes this opportunity to suppress his flamboyant tics, achieving a scarily focussed intensity. Lots of this is in his beady eyes; they regard the people around him with eerie intensity - like a snake regarding a mouse.
That said, Edgerton more than holds his own. With a square-jawed, square-shouldered and square-haired figure, he looks confident, assertive and successful. He prides his masculinity, seeing both his FBI work and his Southie roots as validations of his personality. It's precisely that which makes him so vulnerable to corruption; eager to paint himself as a hero and ignore any negative repercussions of his tactics. The really depressing thing is that we quickly understand that Connolly's ego, ability to cross ethical boundaries to get what he wants and high ambitions would have made him a pretty damn good gangster - but he's a terrible FBI Agent.
It's their relationship that forms the titular Black Mass, with Whitey in the role of Satan and Connolly selling his soul. This mythic element bumps up the film from above-average gangster flick to something pretty special - and it's here that Depp's outré make-up finally reveals its true purpose. Whitey doesn't look human because he isn't human - he is Satan wearing a human skin: tempting, corrupting and sucking away every molecule of goodness from the world around him.
The core Whitey/Connolly relationship is elevated by a fine supporting cast. Dakota Johnson and Julianne Nicholson both find something new in the extremely well-trodden territory of 'miserable gangster's wife'. The thugs surrounding Whitey also come off well, particularly Jesse Plemons, whose wonderfully evocative mug kicks off the film. Special notice too for Benedict Cumberbatch - he maybe wouldn't be at the top of my list for playing a guy from the mean streets of Boston, but he does an admirable job with both accent and character.
As far as gangster films go, Black Mass isn't quite in the top tier. But when the top tier consists of the first two Godfather films, Goodfellas and Once Upon a Time in America you're going to be hard pressed to equal them. Instead it happily slots into the only-slightly-lesser 'really good gangster movie' category, alongside fare like Carlito's Way, Donnie Brasco and Miller's Crossing.
It also proves that Depp has still got the goods - let's hope that future years will provide a wealth of interesting, creative performances from him. Then again, Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is shambling its way into cinemas in 2017 so let's not count our chickens...
★★★★
Black Mass is released 27 November 2015.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Thursday, October 9, 2014
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If you're looking for an actor who can believably play a superhuman genius, Benedict Cumberbatch is your man. Since Sherlock Cumberbatch has displayed his mastery of a) talking very fast, b) being a charismatic prick and c) layering in a streak of humanising vulnerability. So who else do you call when you're casting Alan Turing, a genius prick with a vulnerable steak?
The Imitation Game opens with Turing's arrest in 1951 for indecency. This public outing was the beginning of a sad spiral of events that concluded with his suicide in 1954. Within the striplit police interrogation room Turing's skin takes on a deathly white pallor, as if his ghost talking to us from beyond the grave. "Pay attention", he sternly says, "or you're going to miss things."
Flashback ten years. Britain is at war with Germany and things are not looking good. With the aid of the famously 'unbreakable' Enigma encryption device the Nazis are able to coordinate surprise attacks across the Atlantic, sending tonnes of crucial food aid to the ocean floor. Britain is starving, bloody from being pummelled by the Luftwaffe and growing increasingly desperate - "we are losing this war". But at Bletchley Park a team of expert cryptanalysts is being formed, their ultimate goal to crack the Enigma code.
Turing, a man who "loves solving puzzles" is drawn to Bletchley like a moth to a flame, presenting himself to the commanding officer and straightforwardly telling him that his mathematical theories are the only realistic chance of beating Enigma. The rest of the film chronicles his time at Bletchley; his rocky relationship with his fellow cryptanalysts; his neuroses about his homosexuality; guilt at the growing pile of wartime dead and his fast friendship with the only person he considers smarter than himself, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley).
For the most part this is riveting stuff. The plot rumbles along at a decent pace, historical details are keenly observed and Tyldum throws in a smattering of clever visual direction (tank treads match cut to spinning computer parts, torpedoes match cut to cigarettes being stubbed out). Importantly, the film goes to great lengths to give the audience the illusion that they're as smart as these characters. Cryptography, high level statistical analysis and mechanical computing isn't the most relatable (or cinematic) subject around, but The Imitation Game is smart enough to know how to communicate what's going on.
Most of the time this works. Using the ability to solve crossword puzzles as a mark of intelligence gives us a window into logical problem solving and the script is packed to the rafters with similes that more than outline how huge an endeavour cracking Enigma is. That said there are moments when things are dumbed down a touch too much, a late 'eureka!' moment must be on the first page of Codebreaking for Dummies. It's a delicate balancing act; if we're too far behind Turing's team we can't follow the action, if we're too far ahead they lose their mystique.
Slightly more egregious flaws lie in the film nakedly shooting for awards season success. This has Oscar contender written all over it - for the most part deservedly so. But there are moments where Alexander Desplat's overbearing score swells with strings and someone says something really damn corny like "sometimes it is the people who no-one imagines anything of, who do the things no-one can imagine". In a film full of largely naturalistic dialogue, crap like this stands out a mile - dialogue that feels written to be slotted into the trailer (as indeed it is). The nadir is the utterly moronic text that closes the film; "scientists called these devices Turing Machines." (dramatic pause) "We call them 'computers'". Well duh.
The Imitation Game's desire for mass market acceptance only truly trips up the film by mandating a rather cowardly depiction of sexuality. Turing's gayness thrums along behind Cumberbatch's performance throughout, but only comes to the foreground in the final act. Unfortunately while the film pays lip service to gay rights it doesn't have the balls to actually show Turing's sexuality. The character, by and large, ends up in a conventional love story with Keira Knightley's character with every act of gay affection taking place firmly off screen.
I strongly suspect this omission is made with one eye on the box office; the producers either fearing that audiences won't relate to an actively gay hero or, more pragmatically (and depressingly), knowing showing Turing even kissing another man will earn the film an automatic R certificate from the MPAA, with the resultant reduction in its potential audience.
It's a shame that The Imitation Game often feels like it's had its rough edges sanded away, as there's a barrel load of great stuff here. Cumberbatch, though essentially playing a spin on his Sherlock character, is fantastic as Turing and Knightley is comfortably his equal as a genius mathematician. The supporting cast is similarly impressive, particularly Matthew Goode as a suave codebreaker and Mark Strong as a weirdly droll spymaster.
It's more than worth seeing, and works beautifully as uplifting, tense and exciting entertainment. But you can't ever shake the impression that these events have been strained through an extremely efficient studio machine designed to filter out every bit of grit and risk. This means that despite the obvious effort and hard work that's gone into The Imitation Game it feels a mite insubstantial.
★★★
The Imitation Game is released 14th November 2014.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
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12 Years a Slave is a precision-engineered piece of machinery designed to impress upon an audience exactly what slavery means. Through the terrifying story of Solomon Northup we get an unflinching lesson on what it means for a person to exist within in a system that subjugates human beings. McQueen's film shows slavery as a process of gradual erosion, universally grinding down everyone involved in it, from slaves to slavers and anyone peripherally caught in its upswell.
Narratively it's as straightforward as a bullet fired from a gun. It's 1841 and Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is living happily and securely as a free man in the North with his wife and two children. During a celebratory dinner with business partners he's drugged, manacled, transported to the South and sold into slavery. Then follows twelve years of humiliation and misery as his identity, dignity and personhood is systematically stripped away from him at the hands of plantation owners; chief among them the hypocritical William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the psychotic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).
McQueen's style is about as assured as can find in cinema. This is a director who has absolute confidence in the images he presents to audience, working with a disarming languidity that boils events down to a series of frozen infinities. In one stunning shot early in Northup's slavery he's lynched as punishment for attacking an overseer. The men suspend him by his neck, though are forced to let him down after being chased off by a superior. Northup is left with the tips of his toes scrabbling for purchase in the mud, in a state of constant tense movement to prevent his strangulation. McQueen holds this wide shot of Northup for what feels like an eternity, forcing the audience to imagine the rope around their necks, to experience a faint simulation of silent, slow suffocation.
This shot (and others like it) demonstrate McQueen's trust in both his own craft and the power of the images he's created. Crucially, he's not afraid to let the audience stop and think - something that's far rarer in cinema than it should be. Many contemporary directors will do everything in their power to stop the audience thinking to themselves, mistaking contemplation for disengagement, preferring to overpower us with a nonstop blizzard of imagery, frantic editing and sound. Here McQueen achieves a mild cinematic hypnosis, making endless days of drudgery in a weatherless purgatory compelling.
I can how people can criticise McQueen's directorial style as sterile, but 12 Years a Slave works because it expressly doesn't play on sentimentality or overtly trying force us through emotional catharsis. The power of this film comes from the mosaic of tightly observed moments,each small piece of the puzzle contributing to a remarkably comprehensive picture of what slavery actually entails. These moments can be as simple as the difficulty of trying to find a comfortable position to sleep in on a hard floor, cleaning the dirt from a whipped back, pricking your fingers while picking cotton, trying to write with substandard material, working in broken shoes or the correct way to cut sugar cane.
As Northup's 12 years tick agonisingly by we subtly learn the rhythms and hierarchies of slavery: how the slaves interact, how the overseers interact with the slaves, how they overseers report to their superiors and how they in turn report to the plantation owner. Within these hierarchies we see complex psychologies at play between the individual slaves and the plantation owners and their families, literally every action that every character takes informed by the system of slavery they exist within. The plantations Northup works on thus function as a microcosm of the entirety of slavery, the interactions in the film painstakingly explaining the mindsets required to sustain atrocity.
This mindset centres around the strictly defined roles of slave and master. Northup is repeatedly advised never to let his owners learn of his literacy and past freedom, learning quickly that life as a slave is only possible if you behave like a "dumb nigger" rather than a person. The slavers do their utmost to perpetuate this dehumanisation; the film showing us through the slaver Epps that the only way to sanely 'own' people is to deny them personhood. Epps fascinatingly complex: a slaveowner who's managed to combine love and hate into a weapon, becoming erotically obsessed with a particularly hard working cotton picker, a warped affection that puts him through mental contortions that drive him to perverse cruelties.
On a macro scale the film considers the economies of slavery. Repeated scenes show the slaves ranked by how many pounds of cotton they can pick in a day. There's a background hum of predatory capitalism throughout the film; the agribusiness of the plantations are precisely detailed, with the repeated references to the monetary worth of each individual slave - the reduction of person to tradeable commodity.
It would be facile and reductive to read the story of Solomon Northup as a criticism of contemporary capitalism - to view the atrocity of C18th slavery as directly comparable to the situation of a modern first-world worker would detract from the film's power. Nonetheless, as a story of a free and liberated man being thrown into a meatgrinder we cannot help but wonder how we might fare if we were standing in Northup's tattered rags. We cannot realistically imagine what it would be to have the flesh torn from our backs, but we can imagine ourselves trapped within a system of productivity targets with a concrete idea of our economic worth to our bosses.
This is the rabbit hole that we're dragged down, the crisply saturated photography, the understated score and evocative performances allowing us to experience slavery not as an alien historical phenomenon 200 years past, but as a system born of recognisable human instincts; greed, solipsism and the all-too-easy temptation to 'other' human beings. The terrible electricity of 12 Years a Slave isn't in simply watching humiliation, beating and rape, but in the horror of realising that deep within everyone lies a potential slave or worse, a slavemaster.
★★★★★
12 Years a Slave is on general release from 10 January
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
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I’ve always detected a faint whiff of fascism in Star Trek that makes me wary. To some extent it’s the militaristic uniforms, but mainly it's the weird paternal, imperialist overtones of the whole thing. Fair enough, Star Trek presents a scientific utopia that’s free of class, racial and sexual discrimination, but then so does Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. I always find a disconnection between the mission to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations" and the overtly militaristic, naval overtones of Star Trek.
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