Good, bad and Ugly
Movies from mid-2001
Originally written: October 2001
Lantana
Thirteen Days
Enemy at the Gates
The Planet of the Apes
Sexy Beast
The recently released Australian film, Lantana, has probably been the best of the recent lot. A wordy but worthy drama from Ray Lawrence, director of Bliss, Lantana deals with intertwined stories from people at three levels of society. At the upper level, we have a psychologist (Barbara Hershey) and her academic husband (Geoffrey Rush) who are recovering from the unsolved murder of their 11 year-old child. Among her clients is the wife (Kerry Armstrong) of a police detective (Anthony LaPaglia). They represent the middle class. At the working end of the spectrum is the cop's putative mistress (Rachael Blake) and her neighbours. Their stories get mixed when the psychologist is apparently murdered, the cop investigates and the mistress and her neighbour are involved. The performances are most excellent from a great ensemble cast, that also includes comedian Glenn Robbins in an uncharacteristically serious role, Leah Purcell as LaPaglia's partner and Peter Phelps as a gay patient of the psychologist. My one reservation is with Hershey's performance of the psychologist. Kerry Armstrong however is brilliant as the cop's wife who doesn't quite understand why her life is not satisfying. Aspects of it did not ring true. The script is, as I noted, wordy. It explores, and to some extent, circumambulates around a series of relationships and what happens to those relationships, and the people in them, under pressure. All the couples in the movie are placed under strain at one time or another and their reactions tested. The complexity of the relationships, which Cath assures me are metaphorically like the maze of branches formed by the lantana plant, and the resolution of them form the main narrative thread of the film. Australian film is only now beginning to explore the realities of contemporary urban life, putting behind the era of period films set in idealised bush settings. Lantana is a great contribution to this development.
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Thirteen Days explores the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It does so from the viewpoint of Kenny O'Donnell, one of JFK key advisers, a member of his Boston Irish kitchen cabinet. In this version, the military was gungho for hot war confrontation with the Soviets over the arming of Cuba and it was only the steadying influence of JFK, abetted by RFK and O'Donnell, that brought about a resolution of the crisis. An interesting theory and one that has much to recommend it but it is presented somewhat in isolation from the background: Kruschev's background and experience and his desire to test the mettle of the young, and inexperienced, President who'd already stumbled over Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and was still somewhat unsure of his grip on foreign matters. Kevin Costner stars as O'Donnell with an attempt at a Boston Irish accent that teeters occasionally on the brink of parody. The rest are played by 'character actors' who do a reasonably good job. Most are cast because they look like their real-life analog, although the actor playing JFK was not. My favourite film about the Cuban Crisis remains the little shown The Steagle but this one, as film and as docu-drama, is damned good.
Enemy at the Gates is the sort of romantic war movie that the makers of Pearl Harbour might have wanted to make had they any talent. While not completely successful, and having its own problems with historical accuracy, the story of Russian and German snipers at the Battle of Stalingrad is timely and interesting enough. Of course, the Battle of Stalingrad and the subsequent tank Battle of Kursk were the turning points of the war. They marked the stopping and then the turning back of the German war machine. Jude Law's character is based on a real Russian WWII hero-sniper and Nikita Khuschev (Bob Hoskins) was a commissar in that theatre of war. Most of the rest is woven around those facts, including Joseph Fiennes' propaganda expert, Ed Harris' German sniper and the obligatory love interest. It is best when Harris and Law are stalking each other; worst when Hoskins is eating scenery. But overall it is a bleak and harrowing look at a genuinely nasty part of the war, filmed beautifully and, for the most part, well acted.
The Bad
The remake of The Planet of the Apes makes some of the 1970s sequels to the original and the banal television series look good. It was not only silly but it made no sense. The plot devices were laughable: for example, if the original apes wiped out the people on the space station, where did the humans come from? And the anti-climax is even sillier. Avoid.
The Ugly
Sexy Beast is a reasonably rivetting movie with a mesmeric performance from Ben Kingsley as an aggressive and very nasty villain, trying to get a retired crook to come back to the Old Dart for one last job. It is beautifully filmed and well-plotted but Kingsley's performance is so good that it's frightening. Many people have had in their lives people with similarly short tempers who are wont to turn aggressively from quiet anger to uncontrolled rage. This performance was so accurate and so real that it made the movie incredibly uncomfortable at times. If you've had such people in your lives, and carry some emotional scars as a result, it might be best to avoid this film, even though bit is a very good and crisp crime caper, once the Kingsley character is discounted. But so dominant is the performance and so frightening real is his portrayal of such madness that it is better to avoid it if you're likely to have your memory buttons pushed. Still, it's the sort of performance that wins Academy Awards.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]