Category / review

by James Turrell

Vice

Director: Adam McKay 

Writer: Adam Mckay 

Adam McKay’s last film, 2015’s The Big Short, was a revelatory look at the reasons behind the collapse of the world economy in 2008. It was heavily stylised, but character driven, with Christian Bale and Steve Carrell putting in exquisite performances. McKay essentially took the clarity of Late Night American comedy and applied it to a feature film, The Big Short felt, at some level, like a two-hour segment of Last Week Tonight. McKay attempts to do the same thing with Vice, a film which deals with the life and politics of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. However, this time he is less successful, while The Big Short had enormous political and moral clarity, it also felt nuanced, whereas Vice feels scattershot and pourous.  

Much of the pre-release press for Vice centred around Christian Bale’s mammoth transformation, and his look in the film is all hair and make-up and the after effects of double-digit donuts. It is visually startling, an actor you accustomed to looking young and svelte is transformed into an aged and overweight man. Vice follows Dick Cheney from his bar-fighting, sleeping at the wheel 20’s up until he hoovers up untold power as the Veep to George W. Bush’s President (Sam Rockwell) from 2000-2008. The film has a broad scope and the narrative attempts to sketch out the entire life of Cheney. One of the film’s central pillars is that his quest for power and his unquenchable commitment to that quest, is drawn from is relationship with his wife, Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams). Lynne is very much the Lady Macbeth figure, a snorting fire-brand who compels the very worst aspect Cheney’s personality to action; his greed, his callousness, his corruption. Amy Adams is fantastic in the role; she plays a person driven by an uncomfortable desire for power to dominate others, and she sells it wonderfully. The film depicts their early relationship as turbulent, one in which she waits at home for Dick to arrive drunk once again. And it’s her impassioned speech for him to make her proud that seems to compel Dick to stop drinking and start politicking.  

Vice has a similar structure to The Big Short in the way in which we have a narrator who is also an aware character within the film, this time played nicely by Breaking Bad’s Jessie Plemons. His relationship to Cheney is perhaps the one true surprise fact of the film, which I will spoil for you now: they opened an abortion themed organic herb shop together called Pro-Chive. He explains in a similar way to Ryan Gosling’s character in The Big Short, the big theoretical concepts of the film, such as the Unitary Executive Theory. Steve Carrell is again on magnificent form playing Donald Rumsfeld and he portrays him in the style of a sitcom character turned pure evil. And Sam Rockwell’s W. is great as well, he captures that particular President’s capacity for endless confusion with precision.  

The central problem with Vice and what separates it from attaining the dramatic or comedic heights of The Big Short, is that McKay presents Cheney as the centre of the universe; a God-like figure whose every action affects the world in an infinite number of ways. The film portrays Cheney’s time as Vice President almost as an island, in which the outside has no effect on the actions he puts into place. Whether it be the military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the film is not shy about showing the brutal reality of, or domestic policy to the right of someone who has just had their right leg blown of, all these actions seem to happen with no relation to the outside world. McKay’s portrayal of the world seems to suggest one in which the actions of politicians are not guided by external events, that the actions of other countries have no bearing on the decision making of Cheney. This is where the film begins to struggle not to collapse because we are presented with a world that is implausible, where the characters make decisions that are devoid of the cold logic of reality.  

There is a lot to commend Vice, from the acting to the way it again explains high-concept political and economic ideas to people who might not otherwise have engaged with them. McKay is a heavily stylistic director and clearly draws influence from Adam Curtis in the way he mashes live-action with archival footage to create a grand, sweeping historical narrative. He former life as a writer of often simplistic, crude comedies still lingers and he sometimes struggles with writing straight, dramatic lines. ‘How does a man go onto to become who he is?, delivered with the utmost seriousness by Amy Adams, is particularly clunky example. But Vice is an enjoyable watch and McKay’s determination to write about big, difficult political ideas is to be admired, even if the result is not always perfect.  

7.5/10 

by James Turrell

They Shall Not Grow Old

Writer & Director: Peter Jackson 

‘It was the smell of death. If you’ve ever smelt a dead mouse, it was like that but a million times worse.’ Peter Jackson’s latest, extraordinary film contains many desperately poignant insights into the First World War. But what comes across most, even above the sheer humanity of the soldiers who tell their story, is the brutal reality is that all wars are defined by death, and most of the dead lay forgotten by history.  

With They Shall Not Grow Old, Jackson seeks to remedy that reality, and does so remarkably. Given over 100 hundred hours of footage from the First World War by the British Museum, Jackson used the latest computer techniques to change these often 10 or 18 frames per second, black and white footage, into full colour widescreen glory. The scene in which the old, rickety footage suddenly opens up, stretching into widescreen like a flower into bloom, is one of the most remarkable things you are likely to see in the cinema this year, or perhaps ever. Suddenly, the men telling their story morph from indiscreet figures from something akin to a broken British Pathé newsreel to fully formed human beings. It’s a stunning transformation; history is taken from black and white shackles and recreated to feel as real as the present. 

There is no strict narrative but the film ambles along from the men signing up for duty to returning home once the carnage had finally dissipated. We see the day to lives of the soldiers; what they eat, how they survived the horror, the kindness they exhibited to each other. I was stuck by the pre-war naivety of the soldiers, who seemed to regard signing up like joining the Boys Brigade and one of soldiers described early 20th century men as such, ‘men didn’t think for themselves at all in those days.’ There are many shots of brutalities in the film, whether dead soldiers or butchered horses, and Jackson makes excellent use of external warfare sounds to recreate some semblance of the terror the soldiers must have felt. 

They Shall not Grow Old may be the greatest cinematic achievement of Jackson’s career. He has, as close as you can, recreated a historical moment before our eyes. Watching this film, you will have no idea why the First World War began or ended but you will have an intense, often heart-breaking understanding as to what the lives of the men who lived and died in those trenches was like.

10/10 

by James Turrell

mid90s

Written and Directed by: Jonah Hill 

Jonah Hill’s first foray into writing and directing is mid90s, a period, coming-of-age piece set in the aforementioned decade and has a surprisingly sweet centre despite many of its characters superficial concerns. The story is centered around teenager Stevie (Sunny Suljic) who decides to become a skater after seeing some ‘cooler’ kids doing it, in an example of instantaneous decision-making only teenagers can manage.  These kids comprise the wise leader Ray, obnoxious Fuckshit, poor Fourth Grade and the groups previous young’un Ruben. The four spend their time skating, drinking, talking about sex and swearing profusely. The dialogue is often funny, and Hill writes the cosmological arrogance of youth well; ‘I’m so much older than you. I drink. I smoke. I fuck bitches.’ 

Mid90s narrative is fairly loose, and we follow the group over several weeks as Stevie becomes initiated in the usual rites of being a teenager, whether using drugs for the first time or his first sexual experience. Hill is a very neutral director and there isn’t, with a couple of exceptions, much stylistic flair. The use of 16:9 framing is humorous and is one of many, many cultural references that pepper the film. There is a particularly gorgeous long-shot, as the group skate down the middle of freeway, the blurred light and focus makes for a woozy, hypnotic frame.  

But the film is lacking any sort of idiosyncrasy. The film treads the familiar plot beats of the coming-of-age film and is not particularly ground-breaking, or even sand-breaking. Katherine Waterston as Stevie’s mother Daubney is criminally underused, and he endless capacity for real humanity shines through in the few scenes she is in.  

As writing and directorial debut, mid90’s offers some proof that Jonah Hill does have a future outside of the acting game. The film’s ending, which involves an interestingly constructed car crash scene, and the way in which the group react with desperate despair at how their actions have landed a 14-year-old in such awful circumstances, suggests a real and intuitive emotional touch.  

7/10  

by James Turrell

Alita: Battle Angel

Writers: Robert Rodriguez, Laeta Kalogridis & James Cameron 

Director: Robert Rodriguez 

The writer and director Richard Ayoade once said that ‘actors are the most important thing in a film and there are many examples of actors transcending poor material.’ I personally don’t agree with this and the script is ultimately the most important thing, as that’s the base from which whole film is constructed. Alita: Battle Angel does contain two performances that does offer proof that actors can engage an audience when the script fails to do so.  

Co-written by Avator’s James Cameron and directed Robert Rodriguez, Alita: Battle Angel is the story of an eponymous teenage cyborg struggling to find her identity in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Based on a manga series called Gunnm, the film is set in 2563 in Iron City, 300 years after a war with the United Republic of Mars (URM) ravaged the Earth. It’s all so very standard sci-fi, with flashes of Cameron’s own Terminator to RoboCop to the ever present Metropolis.  

Like all poorly written films, the script is both simple and convoluted. Christoph Waltz’s Dr Ido finds a half-dead cyborg girl in junkyard and rebuilds her, and when she awakes she cannot remember anything about her past life. The film follows Alita as she attempts to find out who she was and who she is, while falling in love with Dr Ido’s assistant Hugo (Keean Johnson). Earth’s main entertainment is a sport called ‘Motorball’ a kind of mix of basketball and Nascar, where people in super-fast robotic suits battle around a track to score baskets. Alita longs to be one of the players but the game is run by Mahershala Ali’s Vector, who is an evil business overlord and set on killing her. He intends to kill Alita because, inevitably, she is last of her kind. She is a long lost URM soldier, the deadliest killing machine Mars ever produced.  

Alita is a bizarre mixture of dystopian sc-fi and teen romance. There a fighting robots and authoritarian governments mixed with scenes in which Alita and Hugo kiss for the first time in the rain. Seriously. The film is that reductive. We are treated to almost beautifully bad dialogue; ‘it’s a harsh world. The strong prey on the weak down here.’ The film hits its plot beats so predictably it could have been written by an A.I. machine that had recently had a stroke. During the films concluding fight sequence, a cyborg bounty hunter called Zaper who has been hunting Alita, has his human face sliced off. He starts jumping around and shouting ‘my face! My face! My beautiful face!’ I can feel the bile in the bottom of my throat beginning to fizz again.  

However, the film is not without merit. Rosa Salazar as Alita does provide the film’s main character with a real humanity. She manages to get the audience to see past her exaggerated, anime eyes and you believe she is a real teenager trying to find her place in the world. Christoph Waltz is excellent as Alita’s essentially adopted father and cyborg surgeon Dr Ido. He brings a world-weariness to the role and the weight of living under conditions of tyranny shines through. The film’s battle and action sequences are pleasantly lucid; Robert Rodriguez’s direction is clear and concise, it is very easy to follow the scene even when there are 10 cyborgs having a scrap at high-speed.  

This a very poor film that contains a couple of good performances and some impressive action sequences that make you forgot some of its more snort-inducing aspects. The film is very much set up to be the first in a series, with Edward Norton popping up at the end as some kind of evil overlord. Whether we will get them or not remains to be seen. However, I’m not sure whether my (less than) beautiful face could take anymore.  

4/10

by James Turrell

Beautiful Boy

Writers: Felix van Groeningen & Luke Davies

Director: Felix van Groeningen

Since the release of Foxcatcher in 2014 and The Big Short in 2015, Steve Carell has become one of cinema’s most expressive and diverse dramatic actors. The line between comedic and dramatic acting has always been vastly overstated. As Better Call Saul showrunner Peter Gould said when referencing comedy legend Michael McKean’s dramatic turn; ‘if someone can be brilliant at being funny, it’s very easy for them to be brilliant at being dramatic. It’s not always so easy to go the other way.’ While Timothée Chalamet’s drug addicted Nick is Beautiful Boy’s narrative driver, Carell as his father David is the grief-torn, desperate protagonist.

Based on memoirs by journalist David Sheff and his son Nick, Beautiful Boy is centered upon Nick’s battle with addiction and the affect that has on the rest of his family. Nick’s addiction follows a familiar path, from rolled gateway innocence to the needle of no turning back. He recovers and relapses and recovers and relapses. Film’s that centre on something like addiction or a mental illness are defined by how realistic the representation is, and Beautiful Boy does well in that regard. Nick’s addiction is nuanced and based in reality, and the film avoids superficial Hollywood conclusions. Director Felix van Groeningen is not squeamish about showing the more brutal elements of Nick’s addiction, and we are shown multiple, unforgiving shots of Heroin injection. And the worst aspects of addiction are laid bare; stealing the savings of a 6 year old sibling a particularly black-hearted example.

However, this is very much Carell’s film and his anguish at his son’s behavior permeates every frame. Carell excels as a father torn apart by a desperation to understand why Nick uses. This failure to understand is a central theme of Groeningen and Davies’s script; the unknown defines the family members materially affected by drug addiction. You can never really know what causes an addict to destroy themselves unless you’ve caused your own forehead to bleed as well. David feels that a certain set of circumstances he can force Nick to go through will stop him using. But ultimately Nick will keep using until the day he finally stops, any abstinence before that is a very brief sojourn. Carell captures this pain wonderfully; his performance gives the film a heart-breaking rudder.

Chalamet’s performance is not quite as riveting. While Nick’s character has nuance, some of the expository scenes in which is addiction is formed are the film’s least engaging. We see clichéd close-frame shots of Nick’s bleary eyed high as the focus drains from the world around him while dissonant, ‘edgy’ music is overlaid. It’s a shot you’ve seen a million times from Trainspoting to 21 Grams and Beautiful Boy contains a few scenes in which narrative rigor and originality disappear. Whether it’s David finding Nick’s journal or pop songs referencing substance abuse playing over montage sequences of drug-use, there are occasions when the script and Groeningen’s direction become sloppy.

But overall Beautiful Boy is a very effective and moving piece of work. As someone with first-hand experience of living with a drug addict, the film has a commendable verisimilitude. Carell is excellent and Chalamet is very good, and the film also sports an excellent supporting turn from Maura Tierney as Nick’s step-mother Karen. There is a lovely sleight of hand in the third act, where Nick seems to have recovered fully and he gives a triumphant and moving speech to his support group. Only for him to fall far from the rails once more. The film could easily have ended there, leaving the audience draped in the glow of a happy but artificial sunlight. But it doesn’t. Nick relapses again and the film shows how with addiction there are no easy answers and Hallmark endings. Beautiful Boy is ultimately a moving film with some great performances that is overall an honest and heartfelt depiction of addiction, and the often tragic affect it has on those around them.

8/10

by James Turrell

The Hate U Give

Writer: Audrey Wells

Director: George Tillman Jr.

Possibly the most important book written in the 21st century thus far is Ibram X. Kendi’s colossal Stamped from the Beginning, a history of racist ideas in America. Over 600 brutal and unrelenting pages, Kendi carefully demonstrates how the systemic racism of modern American society was formed. Kendi goes into detail about the phenomenon of black people literally making themselves whiter, by bleaching their skin or straightening their hair. This schizophrenic and tragic behaviour permeates throughout The Hate U Give and in particular the protagonist Starr, who finds herself split between worlds inhabited by either white people or black.

The Hate U Give is adapted from a 2017 novel by Angie Thomas and is directed by George Tillman Jr., who also helmed Biggie biopic, Notorious. The film follows a few weeks in the life of Starr Carter, played by Amandla Stenberg in a career-making performance, after she witnesses her best friend Khalil murdered by a police officer. The opening scene is devastating in its intimate brutality. It sees Starr’s father, the imperious Russell Hornsby as Maverick Carter, giving his three children the ‘talk.’ This is not the ‘birds and the bees’ talk you might expect, but rather he goes into detail about how to react when interacting with a police officer, in order minimize the risk of harm. His children are ten, nine and one. It’s a damning indictment of any society that a parent should feel this necessary. And this idea is a continuous theme of the film, that a black person’s interaction with the state is different than that of other races. An unexpected knock at the door is greeted with fear rather than curiosity.  

Starr and her older brother Seven attend a private, predominately white school, away from the family’s community in Garden Heights. Here Starr is forced to avoid acting too ‘black’ in order to escape unwanted attention, as she succinctly puts it; ‘when white kids use slang, it’s cool. When black kids do it, it’s ghetto.’ Following the shooting of friend, Starr becomes the key witness in a grand jury case and is faced with fallout from the exposure of TV interview, after bravely calling out the role of drug kingpin King Lord in Khalil’s death. Tillman Jr.’s direction is very muted, he allows Audrey Wells’ script to exist without any whiff of flourish, which allows the never-ending brutality in which the state treats Starr’s family to be viewed unvarnished.

It is not possible to overstate how extraordinary Stenberg’s performance is. The emotional honesty, the anger, the desire for justice; they all exist within the confines of her craft. The year may only be five weeks old, but we quite possibly have already seen the leading performance of the year.

The Hate U Give is about how a family responds to a tragedy, and how this response becomes enmeshed with that of the wider community. After the inevitable failing of the police shooter to be held accountable, the Garden Heights community erupts into an understandably rage-fuelled protest. Wells’ script outlines how depressingly predictable the response society has to such tragedy is. How protests and riots and speeches and biased news coverage never serve to make any discernible difference. Both sides are seemingly trapped in an endless conveyor belt, in which actions have already been decided long ago.

This is a powerful piece of work, one which induces rage and sadness in equal measure. The film is an unashamed, unequivocal call to arms. The story may centre around Starr and her family but the film’s ultimate aim is to energise people into action. And Tillman Jr. and Wells make clear what real engagement is, actively helping the black community in their struggle and not the consumerist protests held at Starr’s school. The film is not without fault, there is some hideously clunky expositional dialogue and an over-use of voiceover. But as a film that documents black experience in unceasing, often traumatic but ultimately hopeful fashion, it is an astounding achievement.

9/10

by James Turrell

Mary Queen of Scots

Writer: Beau Willimon 

Director: Josie Rourke 

Despite spending 18 out of every 20 seconds at school studying the Tudors, my knowledge of Mary Stuart was limited before viewing Josie Rourke’s masterful directorial debut, Mary Queen of Scots. I knew the basics; she was Scottish, had red hair and had an altercation with a guillotine which didn’t go so well. But apart from that, the relationship between her and Elizabeth I was lacking from our never-ending Tudor study. Perhaps the reason, as this film shows, the relationship was too complex for the simple narrativized history the UK government constantly peddles.  

The film is centered upon Mary’s, the wonderful Saoirse Ronan, return to Scotland after the death of her husband in France. She returns to the throne of Scotland, which threatens the reign and ultimate succession of Margot Robbie’s Elizabeth. Mary claims the right to succeed Elizabeth on the English throne and naturally Elizabeth disagrees. The film follows the battle between the two courts as they use politics, the military and progeny to try and dominate the other.  

Mary Queen of Scots is the story of two women trapped within a sea of largely deplorable men. These are not uninteresting men, David Tennant as the puritan priest John Knox has surely put in the supporting turn of the year, unrecognizable as a hate-spewing monster.  Gender dynamics and power are at the centre of Beau Willimon’s script, and how Mary and Elizabeth define themselves in relation to their gender. Mary is far more comfortable than Elizabeth in owning her gender in relation to the rampant misogyny they both face on a second-by-second basis. Elizabeth at one-point declares; ‘I am more man than woman now. The crown has made me so.’ Mary and Elizabeth are the de facto rulers of England and Scotland, their word is law and they can declare an execution at the snap of their jewelled fingers. But the courtiers that surround them, the advisors and the Earls, they feel as if the power rests with them. And, more importantly, they detest the fact a human with a vagina is the one giving out orders. When Lord Randolph and the Earl of Moray, the two top advisors to each queen, are discussing the battle between the two Crowns, Moray comments; ‘How did it come to this? Wise men beholden to the whims of women.’ 

There are many startling aspects of this film; Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie’s performances are both wonderful in distinct ways. Ronan plays Mary with an underlying rage; the anger at having to battle with her cousin and the never-ending effort to quell the ceaseless coups against her. While Robbie’s Elizabeth is a resigned, almost heartbroken figure. She knows Mary has rights to the English throne, but the machinations of power leave her no choice but to pursue her death.  

One overlooked aspect thus far in many reviews is the fighting sequence that takes place between fighters loyal to Mary and others to Knox and Moray. Pre-artillery fighting sequences are a common part of cinema and TV but often come within a fantasy context, think Tolkien or Game of Thrones. The fighters in Mary Queen of Scots seem utterly normal, devoid of any notion of super-human fighting skills that fantasy characters often come with. To see these villagers, peasants, running at each other with no defenses and no medicine in the event of inevitable injury, is gut-wrenching. It is a relatively short sequence, less than five minutes, and yet it feels far more emotional and full of jeopardy than an hour of fighting in a fantasy realm.  

Director Josie Rourke and cinematographer John Mathieson use clever colour codes to distinguish between Mary and Elizabeth, England and Scotland. Elizabeth’s English court is all wood and gorgeous natural light, whereas Mary’s Scotland is an equally lavish but bare castle, lit by roaring fires. Mathieson uses light to create wonderfully distinct looks for each country, without sinking to clichéd dualities. Red is another colour that appears throughout the film, whether Mary’s period or the dress she is ultimately executed in. Rouke and Mathieson use it to demonstrate the dual historical perception of Mary; she is not remembered as an incredibly intelligent, bi-lingual ruler. Instead, she is remembered as a woman who gave birth and had sex with someone she shouldn’t (which she didn’t).  

This is a striking debut by Josie Rourke, and she transitions from the stage to screen with encouraging deftness. Her decision to employ colour-blind casting to a period drama, a long-time feature of theatre, gives a modern, cosmopolitan feel to the characters. And the beautiful wide-shots of the Scottish landscape show how she can use the full scope of the medium. The scene in which Mary and Elizabeth finally meet is perhaps the single example of Rourke’s stage sensibility failing to land. They meet in a house filled with sheets hanging from the ceiling, ostensibly to stop them seeing each other but the effect is more annoyance than mystery. You end up things; ‘just tear down the sheets! And is something that would have perhaps been striking on stage but looks silly on screen. Either way, Rourke, along with fantastic central performances from Ronan and Robbie, have created a sensitive, realistic drama about a much-misunderstood figure. 

9/10 

by James Turrell

Wildlife

Written By: Paul Danno & Zoe Kazan

Directed By: Paul Danno

Paul Danno is perhaps best known for playing Brian Wilson in 2014’s Love and Mercy, or for his brilliant comic turn as a member of the Animal Liberation Front in Jon Ronson’s Okja. Wildlife is his first directorial feature and he takes to the task with a delicate touch. Wildlife, based on a novel by Richard Ford, is the story of a marriage and family in disintegration, set amongst a wonderfully realised late 50’s time period.

The story is told from the perspective of 14 year-old Joe, the subtle but interesting Ed Oxenbould, as his Mother and Father’s relationship crumples. Newly moved to Montana, Joe and his parents Jerry and Jean are presented in the film’s opening sequence as the textbook Nuclear family of mid-century America. We see shots of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jerry working hard at his grounds man job, while Jean, bought to life by the staggering Carey Mulligan, is an apron-clad hero of the family home.

This tranquillity is brought down by Jerry being fired at the Golf club he works and then, more importantly, turning down the chance to re-join the company when they offer him his job back. This sends Jerry spiralling into a depressed slump, which he uses an excuse to drink excessively; but crucially it allows Jean to re-enter the workplace, having left her previous job as a teacher to become a full-time housewife. From the outset, Danno and fellow screenwriter and actor Zoe Kazan, seek to show how Jeanette is pummelled by the gender boundaries of 50’s America. Mulligan plays the opening act with a furious resignation, she might love her son but she detests the fact her life is defined by groceries and cleaning. Mulligan is sublime in the role as Jean, bringing a ferocious intelligence mixed with an often devastating emotional veracity.

Jerry decides that he wants to leave Joe and Jean to go and help with the fight against a wildfire that is ravaging a forest in Montana. Jerry’s life seems defined by failure; he bounces from one dead-end job to another and is locked into the proscribed bread-winner role. He is much more emotional than his society allows him to be, saying to his son as he departs and kisses him, ‘men are allowed to love each other too.’

This decision leaves Joe and Jean alone in the house together and it exposes the bizarre intimacy at the heart of their relationship. Jean treats Joe as a mixture of best friend, therapist and son. She tells him about her sex life (or lack thereof), her deepening existential angst at the state of her life and the insecurities that come with that. Joe views all this with a bemused, often weirded out confusion. Danno has clearly instructed Oxenbould to play Joe to be as reserved as possible, his face is often impassive and his dialogue trimmed down to ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, Ma’am’ or ‘Is everything going to be okay?’ This allows the film to focus on Jean and how she responds to Jerry’s decision to leave the family for a low-paid, extremely dangerous job. The gap that Jerry leaves gives Jean a freedom she hasn’t really had since she gave birth to Joe. Gone are the aprons and the drab, plain dresses and she starts experimenting with colours and styles. Her anger at Jerry is clear but at some level she is glad when he leaves, as it finally allows the implicit oppression of her life to start cracking. This freedom brings with it a brutal new reality for Joe, as he witnesses first-hand the extent to which his mother will push this new life.

This is a very still film. The camera is often static, barely moving for the length of a scene. Often, a character will exit the frame and continue talking off-screen and the camera will be unrelenting in its motionless. The film is almost the anti-Birdman; it places the actors in front of the screen and lets them go. It also very small in terms of locations, existing mainly in the family home and the various work places which create a localised, intimate feel. The only time we see a true wide-shot is when Jean and Joe take a drive to see the wildfires Joe has left them to try to fight. The film itself has a wonderfully luxurious feel thanks to the work of cinematographer Diego Garcia and production designer Akin McKenzie. Danno and Kazan’s script is tight and held together by an admirable realism in terms of character and setting. Although, the presentation of time within the film is far from perfect and there are no indicators of over how many days/weeks/months the narrative lasts.

During a particularly ruthless parental argument, Jerry asks Joe his opinion and Jean spits, ‘Don’t ask him. He’s too young to know what is and what isn’t.’ This is one of the few times in the film in which Jean is dead wrong. Danno and Kazan use the small story of a family in crisis as a way of showing the damage societies defined by gender has on individuals. In a society in which emotions are regulated and gender roles codified, it is the adults who are truly unaware of how to feel or act.

8.5/10

by James Turrell

Colette

Writtens:Wash Westmoreland & Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Screenplay) Richard Glatzer (Story)

Director: Wash Westmoreland

‘I forbid you!’

So screams Willy at his wife Colette in the climatic scene of Wash Westmoreland’s biopic of the eponymous heroine. It’s a line that defines Willy’s, played with frothing brilliance by Dominic West, relationship to both his wife and the rest of society. He sees his sex, and himself in particular, stood tall above the rest – an eagle among pigeons. Unfortunately for Willy, this worldview comes into a fatal collision with Colette’s increased sexual and social autonomy and the changing flux of the incoming modern world.

The ascent of Colette’s, the equally wonderful Keira Knightley, autonomy forms the sweep of the film’s narrative. As she begins to gain more control over her writing, her finances and her body, her marriage to Willy first crumbles and then collapses. Colette is the story of a few years in the long life of celebrated French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, writer of numerous novels and short stories who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1948. And she was a mime. An actual mime. How cool is that? The film presents her as coming from, not exactly an impoverished family but certainly one of a low class. She ends up marrying the opulent Parisian Henry Gauthier-Villars and moves with him to the city at the turn of the 20th Century. Henri, under the pen-name Willy, writes music and theatre reviews, and in the film’s opening scenes decides to branch out into writing novels.

At least, that’s what Willy pretends to the intelligentsia of Paris.  In reality, he has several ghost writers who do the work for him, as he shouts vague ideas and deadlines at them. Colette is one of those writers and is seen early on composing numerous letters for Willy. He soon discovers that Colette has more than flair for writing and he first suggests, and then ultimately forces her, to write a series of novels based on her schooling and early life. The first novel, entitled Claudine, is a commercial and critical hit. Given its success, a battle ensues in which Willy becomes increasingly desperate for Colette to write more Claudine novels, while she refuses. This ultimately ends with him locking her in a room for hours at a time until another novel his completed. Which begets even greater success.

Moreland and Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script does well not to fall into the biopic trap of showing a single scene in which something happens which causes the protagonist to suddenly morph into the historical legend the public perceive them to be. Instead, they demonstrate how Colette, through writing these novels, even under conditions of tyranny, begins to assert control over her life. As soon as the first novel becomes a success and the majority of France believe Willy to be the genius, when in reality it’s Colette, the power balance between them is irrevocably changed. Her talent, combined with her secret knowledge of her ultimately fraudulent husband, is what begins to crack the concrete casing her life has thus far been lived in.

As Colette’s confidence in her own intellect rises, Willy’s ability to manipulate and distort her thinking decreases. Knightley is wonderfully subtle, showcasing an incredibly deft touch in long-playing the way in which Colette evolves as a character. This is perhaps most evident in her ever-progressing sexual dynamic. She begins the narrative devoted to her husband and is understandably distraught upon discovering his infidelity. By the second act, she has openly declared her bi-sexuality to her husband and is engaging in a relationship with an American woman named Meg. Willy at first appears to be progressively open to his wife’s sexual awakening. However, he soon engages in a sexual relationship with her himself and his whole acceptance of the two women’s relationship is an act of objectification; he is simply titillated by it and nothing else.

This is a stylish and moving second feature from Wash Westmoreland, originally conceived in collaboration with his late husband and Still Alice director Richard Glatzer. He utilizes the gorgeous set-designs of Lisa Chugg and Nora Talmaier to showcase the claustrophobia of Colette’s existence during these years. The film is slightly let down by an over-bearing and cliched orchestral score, which attempts to telegraph ever emotional beat of the story. And there is the bizarre decision to have writing sequences in which the voice-over of the words Colette is writing is in English, but the words Knightley is writing in the scene is in French.  However, this fails to detract from the overall success of the film, in which Westmoreland delicately uses the story of France’s most famous female writer to show the changing nature of female autonomy in the 20th Century.  

8/10