Luvvies all around
Movies seen summer 2012.
Originally written: April 2012
My Week with Marilyn
Margin Call
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Mirror Mirror
The American President
Harvey Weinstein knows how to manipulate the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A while ago, he promoted Shakespeare in Love by denigrating the critical applause for Elizabeth and playing up the box office success of the comedy. This year, he used the reverse trick: he played on the vanity of critics to promote The Artist as "the" movie of the year and parlayed its success in many of the critics' awards given in the months leading up to the Oscars. This, combined with the absence of a genuine box office success amongst its competitors, and the newly acquired cachet that the critics now apparently have, led to the inevitability that the pseudo-silent movie would win the Oscar. And it did. It might be that The Help, The Descendants and, certainly, Hugo are better movies but Weinstein is the better promoter and critical success seems to be preferred to box office heft. Meryl Streep has done lots of good things recently but impersonating a cleaned-up version of Margaret Thatcher isn't one of them. Viola Davis did an amazing job in The Help and should have won. If the Academy was intent on awarding someone for an in-depth portrayal of a public persona, Michelle Williams' Marilyn was there - and ignored. At least the award to Olivia Spenser was well-deserved. The show itself was uninspiring, despite the return of Billy Crystal. The Oscars have lost their edge and their cultural relevance. Their time is up.
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CC is no JFK
The Prince and the Showgirl is one of those films that has become a 'cult classic'. That is, it is a film that was not all that successfully put together but which has enough quirky features to enable it to become a firm favorite with those who see it a number of times. It's one of Marilyn Monroe's better performances and its making forms the basis for the memoir, My Week with Marilyn. Derived from the yarns of Colin Clark, the well-connected third assistant director of the original film, My Week is a charming and entertaining bon-bon with an outstanding performance. Clark was the son of Sir Kenneth, the art historian responsible for, amongst other things, Civilisation. His bother Alan was a politician whose diaries were a cause celebre. The likelihood is that Colin's memory of the making of the film in the 1950s is somewhat enhanced but, be that as it may, its central narrative is based on the known facts. Monroe, the archetype of the public personality (and not a bad actress), was at the height of her fame when she came to England to make a Ruritanian romance with Laurence Olivier and Sybil Thorndike. Michelle Williams is given the part and, even though she bares little resemblance to MM, either in facial features or, especially, the figure, she manages to play her and to be her. This is no mere impersonation: this is a gifted actress recreating someone we all know, in the same way that our Cate did with Kate Hepburn. And just as successfully. The willing suspension of disbelief, required when considering some of the activities Clark assigns to himself, is never required in appreciating Ms Williams' skills. It is a career-making role and well worthy of winning awards, as she did with a number of the critics' groups. She has captured both the raw sensuality and the massive insecurity that combine to define Monroe. Eddie Redmayne does well as the young man enamoured of her and well out of his depth but it is not a very rewarding part, largely because it seems to me that Clark has neglected the logic in his rose-colored recollection of those halcyon days. Kenneth Branagh gets to eat some scenery as Olivier. It's a pity that he was not better directed: Olivier was never at home in front of the camera but Branagh is one Shakespearian actor who has managed the transformation from stage to screen. Here he is good in parts but well over the top in his more dramatic turns. Judi Dench does what she does best: even though she bares no resemblance to Sybil Thorndike she plays the English luvvie to perfection. TV director Simon Curtis has done well enough but the success of his film is the success of Michelle Williams. This is entertaining and funny enough but her performance elevates it to a must-see, for her, and to honor the memory of a great actor whose life ended far too early.
Street hits the Wall
Sometimes there is justice in the world: after their respective turns in Star Trek - the Reboot, Chris Pine was cast as a lead in This Means War and Zachary Quinto got the lead younger role in Margin Call. Quinto's karma is exponentially higher than Pine's you have to believe. Mind you, the movie itself is something of an argument against the accumulation of positive karma by good deeds. Margin Call is a JC Chandor's proposal as to how the GFC came about, based on his knowledge of speculators and traders arising from his father's many years at Merrill Lynch. The firm at the centre of the film is an old trading concern - think Lehman Brothers - which in 2008 is going through one of its regular purges of personnel. The result of the purge is that senior Risk Assessor Stanley Tucci is given the arse and his junior Peter Sullivan (Quinto) ends up with files that indicate that the portfolio of mortgages and similar securities owned by the firm is largely worthless. This information passes up the food chain from Paul Bettany's trader to Kevin Spacey's manager to our Simon Baker's power-hungry senior executive to Jeremy Irons' CEO. The question that has to be faced is how the firm will survive this. The film looks through Sullivan's eyes at how each level of the firm reacts and the extent to which they are happy to let other firms bear the costs of the firm's survival. At the highest level, there is no question to be asked but Chandor has more than a few characters who, while remaining loyal to the company, have questions about how they treat the customers who will buy the worthless products they have to unload. Here the performances of the movie come from Stacey and Bettany as the men who will have to bear the burden of the unloading. They are contrasted with Irons, who has no qualms, seeing his own and his company's survival as the only ends worth pursuing, and Baker, who is only interested in his own continued rise to power and wealth. Even those with ethics are guided by "the good of the firm", a mantra that enables all to junk any real humanity they might have in pursuit of the aims of the corporate entity. The film is Chandor's first fiction, after a career in docos, and he does a stirring job, both with the wordy and worthy script (reminiscent of a David Mamet screenplay) and with handling of the all-star cast here obviously working for scale wages. In addition to the leads, and I should note that Quinto and Tucci are as good as any in the film, Demi Moore gets a guernsey, the only female with any real screen time, as a bean-counter who didn't try hard enough the avoid the mess. She does well. Margin Call is well worth the time.
Love all the luvvies
There is the occasional movie, when you look at the cast (and the trailer), you know it's going to be great. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (for the elderly and the beautiful) is one of these. The set-up is simple enough: the younger scion of a successful Indian family, seeking to find a way to make an inherited run-down hotel in Jaipur pay, advertises it as the ideal retirement location (at a cheap price) for English types who cannot quite make it in the UK. He attracts an unhappily married couple, an impecunious widow, a retired judge seeking his youth (literally and metaphorically), two chancers who think the grass might well be greener on the other side of the world, and a woman needing a hip replacement, which she can only afford in the third world. The inaction of this lot with the young entrepreneur is the movie. Luckily each of the seven, and Dev Patel, is very good indeed. Tom Wilkinson is the judge who acts as a de facto native guide; Judi Dench the widow who discovers her sense of adventure and acts largely as the point of view; and Bill Nighy is the unhappily married to Harriet Jones (former Prime Minister). They are all excellent and each is given a chance to shine at various points in the plot. Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup are each looking for love in all the wrong places, but they get a little less of the stage so some of their plot developments are a little perfunctory. Dev gets a love interest as well as an inimical mother and shows that Slumdog Millionaire was no fluke. The stand-out for me however is Maggie Smith who is given what at first seems an unlovely role as the working-class bigot. She grows on you in the film and her involvement in the others is one of a couple of plot twists that was not to be expected. The direction, by John Madden, is great (although he falls back on the Shakespeare in Love trope of an oft-repeated line that is meant to serve as the theme, in this case, it will all turn out right in the end). The movie is funny as well as moving, and a great showcase for a number of mature luvvies showing why they are regarded as great.
No Guinness not good
The first mistake was thinking that a remake of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was necessary. The BBC had produced a definitive and masterful version as a miniseries with Alec Guinness as Smiley. The second mistake was believing that Gary Oldman's inferior imitation of Guinness would be good enough to hold a movie version up. It wasn't. Nor was the script, truncated as the labyrinthine plot needed to be to fit into the film's time constraints, sufficient to carry the load. Le Carre's archetypal Cold War tale was about the unmasking of a traitor with the upper echelons of MI6. George Smiley, a cool and intellectual functionary, not a Bondian agent, is set the task of sifting through the clues to discover the mole, with four good candidates to consider. In this task he has the assistance of a couple of younger members of the service, with Benedict Cumberbatch, sporting a super-Bieber hairstyle, and Tom Hardy amongst others. Some good character actors populate the periphery, Ciaran Hinds, Colin Firth and Toby Jones being amongst the suspects and Mark Strong doing a good turn in a cameo as the put-upon Jim Prideaux. The discovery of the mole should be secondary to the machinations of the plotters and those chasing them. To an extent it becomes the only reason to keep watching, particularly as Oldman fails to hold the centre. Which leaves me wondering: why bother?
All the Queens' Men
The good thing about Mirror Mirror is that it is generally funny and entertaining. The trouble with the movie is that it can't quite make up its mind whether it is a subversive retelling of the Snow White story for adults, or a slightly funny version aimed at kids. In its failure to resolve that conflict it never quite works as either. In this version Julia Roberts is the scenery-eating evil queen who has taken control of the kingdom after the unfortunate disappearance of her late husband, the king. The kingdom's income is directed at her conspicuous consumption, and that of her court, who are all, it has to be admitted, costumed in the most flamboyant and colorful way (by acclaimed Japanese designer, and sometime film costume designer, Eiko Ishioka, who died shortly after completing the film(. This leaves the peasants suffering for want of food, comfort and joy. The happy kingdom, where everyone sang and danced, is now joyless. And poor Snow (Lily Collins, looking like a reincarnation of an elfin Audrey Hepburn around the time of Sabrina) is kept locked away in the palace, ignorant of the condition of her people and under the queen's thumb. During one rare escape from captivity she runs across a Prince, not longer Charming but now Alcott, who has been bested by a band of thieves - the seven dwarves. The queen decides that Alcott, and his wealth, are for her and so she sends Snow to the woods and to death. As usual her putative assassin cannot do the deed and she ends up with the dwarves. All this plays out reasonably well: the lavishness of the palace, contrasted with the icy and frozen climate of the kingdom; the antics of the dwarves, who supply the comic relief, with some notable lapses in timing, but lots of enthusiasm; the maturing of Snow and the role-reversal bestowal of love's first kiss; the queen's evil plotting (the ideas behind the magic mirror are beautifully realised and add some extra delight); the deus ex machina that was quite predictable; the Bollywood dance sequence in the anti-climax, which was not. Roberts is excellent and Collins good. Arnie Hammer, perhaps having difficulty coming to grips with playing only one part, is a wooden Prince; Mare Winingham and Nathan Lane are reliable in support roles. It's hard to distinguish amongst the dwarves (with this and another Snow White film to be released this year it must be about the best year for little people since they made The Wizard of Oz), although as a troupe they perform well and, for the kids, will be a main focus - they certainly get more screen time than is usual in versions of the tale. I enjoyed Mirror Mirror well enough but it could have been so much better had they taken the subversive elements further and played around a little more with the audience's expectations.
Choosing a president on film
The American President (1995) was Aaron Sorkin's first foray into presidential politics. The film attained some degree of notoriety hereabouts when federal Minister Anthony Albanese quoted, without attribution, from the climactic speech from Sorkin's fictional president. (Mind you, we were told that Albo was quoting Michael Douglas, rather than Sorkin, and the journos never admitted to their own "research", such as the oft-repeated misquoting of another Douglas character when they assert that greed is (or is not) good.) The American President is not strictly about the race for the office although it does deal with the fourth year of a first-term leader who is looking at his re-election chances. Like The West Wing we have a liberal president who seems unwilling to use up his credit to do anything real about two issues: the environment (global warming was the issue even in the mid-1990s) and gun crime. Michael Douglas is the leader and Jed Bartlett is his chief of staff. Around him are a plethora of political operatives, Michael J Fox (looking not unlike George Stephanopoulos), Anne Devere Smith (Nancy McNally for the initiated) and David Paymer, amongst others. This president is a widower with a twelve-year-old daughter who meets and falls in love with a lobbyist for the greenies (Annette Bening). This affair, together with his political reticence, sees his numbers tank, as the putative Republican nominee, Richard Dreyfuss, talks up scandal. Director Rob Reiner manages to mix the politics and the humor in excellent proportions. The casting of Douglas in the central role is the only questionable choice here, although it can be argued that the script indicates a certain lack of sophistication in dealing with the issues, something that was fixed up on The West Wing by the hiring of people like Dee Dee Myers to advise on the politics. As a result, the ending is a little too pat: but it is the ending for a romantic comedy, which is what this movie more resembles than the straight presidential dramas that play the politics seriously rather than for laughs. Still a fun movie where, like Sports Night, you can see Sorkin's ideas starting to gel as he moves towards his masterpiece - seasons 1-4 of The West Wing
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]