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Showing posts with label Joel Edgerton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joel Edgerton. 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, December 4, 2014
Thursday, December 4, 2014
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Exodus: Gods and Kings is very nearly a secular Bible adventure. Yahweh's influence is steadily pared back to a series of logically consistent natural disasters and vivid hallucinations after by Moses gets bonked on the head by a big rock. This is the core argument at the centre of Exodus: Moses fanatical religious revolution clashing with the pragmatic realpolitik of Rhamses. Ridley Scott appears to be asking "Is Moses crazy? And if he is does it matter?"
Set in 1300BCE we meet Moses (Christian Bale) as the adopted son and general in Pharoah Seti's (John Turturro) army. He's favoured by the court and gently rankles heir apparent Rhamses (Joel Edgerton). Still, the two are brothers-in-arms and it becomes quickly apparent that they'd die for one another. But once the Seti dies and Rhamses takes the throne political constraints begin to wind their way around the new Pharoah's heart.
With the revelation of Moses' birth to a slave mother he's summarily exiled from Memphis, wandering across the blasted landscape until he eventually comes across the model-sexy nomadic goat-tender Zipporah (Maria Valverde). Nine years later Moses is settled with a wife and kids, happily tending to his flock and whiling away the hours happily throwing rocks into a bucket.
But then he's whanged on the head by a big rock and has a hallucinatory freakout, concluding that God has told him to liberate the Jewish slaves of Egypt. He returns to Memphis as a crazed religious revolutionary, drawing followers to him with his magnetic presence while disturbing them with his fanaticism. After making his demands soon comes a river of blood, frogs, flies, locusts and so on.
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| John Turturro makes a neat Pharoah. But there's not much of him. |
The obvious antecedent to Exodus is Darren Aronofsky's excellent Noah. These two biblical films share a rough aesthetic, dragging divine stories through the dust and giving their (literally) iconic heroes a big dollop of psychological turmoil. The difference is that while a large portion of Noah's success is derived from willingness to portray what's in scripture - no matter how weird - Exodus often feels a bit embarrassed about the whole God thing.
It's not quite spiritually insincere; Christian Bale's performance as Moses has a hyper-focussed intensity that reminds you why he's such a great actor. Key to his Moses is that Bale takes everything utterly seriously; doubling down on the madness of Moses and playing him as a genuinely weird, mad-eyed, scraggly bearded zealot. He's odd to the point where other characters treat him with kid gloves, hiding behind rocks and worriedly watching him argue with his imaginary friends.
Next to Bale's Moses everyone else feels a bit dulled. Edgerton's Rhamses eventually builds up to a maniacal emotional peak, but for most of the film he's stuck in a mild miff. Everyone else feels a bit wasted, with great actors playing underdeveloped characters that don't have proper dramatic arcs. A prime offender is Aaron Paul's Joshua, who's relegated to staring on in disbelief, any depth to him apparently left on the cutting room floor. Sigourney Weaver as Rhamses' mother Tuya fares even worse, getting just one or two clipped lines before unceremoniously vanishing.
This reeks of a future director's cut that fleshes out these trimmed subplots. It wouldn't be the first time Ridley Scott's directorial hand has been forced; critical consensus on Kingdom of Heaven was notably revised once the diluted theatrical version was supplanted by a longer cut on DVD. I suspect the same will happen to Exodus, even at two and a half hours it feels a bit cramped.
Where it does succeed is creating a sense of massiveness Scott is shooting for an old school, DW Griffiths/DeMille style and largely succeeds. The plague sequences are imaginatively and pretty grossly shot, with nauseating shots of swarming flies and writhing, wet frogs. The film reaches a visual peak in the parting of the sea sequence, which (as you'd expect) works as a neat depiction of mankind's powerlessness in the face of humongous elemental forces.
Despite Scott's easy talent for spectacle and the impressive production values (the eyeliner budget alone must be enormous) Exodus never quite emotionally connects with the audience, settling at showing us the story of Moses without asking us to become spiritually or emotionally involved with it. To be fair, some of this is a symptom of narrative problems with The Bible. Having a protagonist that begins as a proactive revolutionary end up as a reactive observer drains his autonomy. Ideally Moses would have been the instigator of the plagues, personally bearing the burden of deciding what's to happen to the Egyptians himself. But I suppose doing this is probably not worth having a load of Bible nerds getting all shirty that you'd taken liberties with the source material.
Exodus isn't a disaster but neither is it that great. This a competent, sometimes visually interesting film that plays the story of Moses about as safe as you reasonably can in 2014. Neither willing to go full Noah crazy with the miracles, nor bold enough to present a secular vision of Moses' story, it feels like it's trying to please believers and non-believers alike. And so, in the end it truly pleases no-one.
★★
Exodus: Gods and Kings is released 26th December in the UK, 12th December in the US.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Sunday, March 24, 2013
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It's a dark and stormy night. As a young couple cuddle in bed the mud of the garden is stirring. Slowly the earth tears itself asunder and someone - someTHING claws its way out of the dirt. The man gets up for a drink of milk. As he goes to the fridge he notices the back door's open. He takes a drink of milk, pausing for a moment, some deep animal instinct telling him that not all is not well. Quick as a flash a small black flash skitters past the camera. He shrugs, figuring it must be the wind. Climbing back into bed with his wife he cuddles her as she curls up under the blanket. Then his wife walks in from the bathroom. Who... WHAT is in bed with him? A shiver runs down your spine. It's a classically constructed horror set up. But this isn't a horror film; The Odd Life of Timothy Green is a (slightly confused) small town Disney fairy tale.
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