Mr Turner, 2.11.14



Timothy Spall's Turner at the Royal Academy

Motley hasn’t always been Mike Leigh’s greatest fan, but “Mr Turner”, his biopic of England’s greatest artist, is nothing short of a masterpiece, a strong contender for film-of-the-year. 

Leigh (71) focused on Turner’s last years before his death at 76 in 1851, a time before the railways when the quickest way from London to Margate was by sea-steamer.  Seldom have I seen a historical period brought so convincingly to life:  you could almost smell the horse-shit in the streets.



Father & Son (Paul Jesson & Timothy Spall)

Leigh’s Turner (played with gusto by Timothy Spall), the original ‘grumpy old man’, is a bluff self-made rough diamond of few words but many growls, who lives in bachelor-bliss with his beloved ‘Dada’ (Paul Jesson) and their faithful housemaid Dorothy (Hannah Danby) in a suitably filthy town-house.  He’s sired two children, for whom he takes no responsibility, and their shrewish mother comes round occasionally to berate him.  His life consists of jockeying for position with fellow hacks at the Royal Academy, buttering up aristocratic patrons, and purposeful striding into the hills to scout for new subjects to paint. 

Curmudgeons never smile:  Spall's Turner

The misused servant, her face ever more crustular as the years pass, provides an outlet for short passionless couplings until, on one of his many pseudonymous scouting expeditions, Turner meets Margate landlady Mrs Booth (the twinkly-eyed Marion Bailey).  Her ex-naval husband (Karl Johnson), tormented by his own experiences as a slaver, conveniently goes the way of all flesh, leaving Turner free to woo her, with unapologetic directness.  The faithful servant meanwhile, whose love for him is never voiced, is abandoned to an ever-dustier townhouse. 

Light relief came from two memorable cameos.  “Was ist das?” whispers the young Queen Victoria in horror to Prince Albert at Turner’s proto-impressionist daubings at the Academy.  Meanwhile Joshua McGuire’s Ruskin, a Harold Acton-style aesthete avant la lettre, pontificated on art in his stately home with magnificent vacuity (in a role interpreted by some as Leigh’s revenge on critics in general). 

This appropriately visual film, rather like Jarman’s ‘Caravaggio’, conjured up a world of intense physicality, whether in the mounds of freshly ground powdered paint, the cat mess on the painter’s overcoat or the sea-swell on Turner’s bewhiskered face as he was lashed to a mast to experience the full force of a marine storm for himself.  Early Victorian England was depicted as wholly lacking in sentimentality, a place of male inarticulacy and female victimhood, where you either sank or swam. 

When Turner’s end came, ship-wrecked red-faced on Mrs Booth’s bed like the hulk of a sea-lion, we heard Spall grunt his famous last words “The sun is a God!” before the camera cut away to the two women in his life, one smiling, the other disconsolate.  Truly all human life was there.
 


Marion Bailey's Mrs Booth shares a lighter moment
with Timothy Spall's Turner

No such levity for Hannah Danby's misused servant

Altman, 16.10.14

Ron Mann’s fond and classy tribute to Hollywood’s rebel-director Robert Altman (1925-2006), showing at the BFI in the London Film Festival, exceeded all expectations.  Made with the support of Altman’s widow Kathryn (his third and longest-lasting wife), it convincingly located him in time and place. 

Originally a hack TV director from Kansas, Altman cut his teeth on advertising promos and series like “Bonanza” in the Sixties. After a long apprenticeship, he got his big break with the original movie version of “M*A*S*H” in 1970 which, though set in the Korean War, was an ironic commentary on the war in Vietnam.  (The studio tried and failed to get him to excise a particularly gorey scene in an operating theatre.) 

Tim Robbins' callow producer receives yet
another death threat in 1992's "The Player"

A virulently anti-Nixon child of the late Sixties (he tore up a signed bio the ex-President later sent him in jest), Altman managed to get himself fired by almost every major Hollywood Studio.  His commitment to film as artistry and his determination to show gritty reality and l'Amerique profonde in the flesh made him the darling of the European festival set, which rewarded him with two BAFTAs (for “The Player” and “Gosford Park”), two Palmes d’Ors (for “MASH” and “The Player) and two Golden Bears.  In contrast Hollywood managed only a belated and merely honorary Oscar. 

Donald Sutherland, Sally Kellerman and Elliott Gould on manoeuvres
in Altman's 1970 breakthrough movie "MASH" 

The early-to-mid-Seventies (“Nashville”, “The Long Goodbye”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller” – alas none of which Motley has actually seen) were his signature period, but he had a late flowering with masterpieces like “The Player” (a 1992 satire on Hollywood, which he described as being “nothing like as bad as reality”, and which included the longest (8 minute +) opening tracking shot in film history), “Short Cuts” (which completely bowled Motley over in 1994), "Kansas City" (a moody 1996 film about jazz's early days), “Gosford Park” (a fresh take on the English country house murder mystery) and “The Prairie Home Companion” (his last film, a collaboration with Garrison Keillor, filled with intimations of mortality, in which Streep and Tomlin excelled). 

The doc didn’t shy away from the fact that Altman’s career included a long fallow period in the Eighties (when he was completely out-of-tune with the zeitgeist) and a fair few turkeys (such as “Popeye” – Robin Williams’ debut feature from 1980, "Pret-a-Porter", a 1994 take on the fashion industry, and “Cookie’s Fortune” – a 1999 Southern yarn with Glenn Close).
 

Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits live it large on the San Andreas Fault
waiting for 'the big one' in Altman's seminal 1994 "Short Cuts",
an adaptation of multiple Raymond Carver short stories

Mann's film pinpointed what was most distinctive about Altman's work (stylised satirical naturalism, overlapping dialogue, blurred sound, masterly choice of music, a willingness to tell the truth about the kind of issues Hollywood normally avoids, a fondness for large baggy ensemble pieces, and recurring actors like Lily Tomlin, Elliott Gould and Shelley Duvall).  It benefitted from the inclusion of family videos which really gave a sense of the man's lumbering paternal good-nature, while gently acknowledging he may have put more effort into film-making than raising his six children. 



Altman and wife Kathryn in the director's last years

A series of Hollywood “A-listers”, filmed in black-and-white close-up profile, offered multiple definitions of what “Altmanesque” meant to them:  "makin' your own rules", "kicking Hollywood's ass", "creating a family" and "expect the unexpected" were some of the snappier offerings from the likes of PT Anderson, Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin, Bruce Willis and the late Robin Williams.  Altman himself believed it was 'all about the actors'.
 
Altman lived long and drank hard, throwing party after party. After several brushes with near-penury, he ended up in an enormous beach-side condo in Malibu, and survived a heart transplant eleven years.  Mann's film succeeded in placing Altman squarely in that precious counter-cultural generation of Americans which wasn’t prepared to play the now ubiquitous corporate game.  “No hippies were harmed in the making of this film” said the closing credit!

Pride, 23.9.14

George Mackay's Bromley discovers his inner activist

A bevy of luvvies (Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy, Dominic West, Andrew Scott, Paddy Considine) starred in this warm crowd-pleaser about a small group of gay activists who fund-raised for the miners during the 1984/5 strike, despite themselves being under attack from homophobes, viruses and the tabloids. 

Heavily-inspired by “Made in Dagenham”, an earlier Brit-flick about marginalised people coming of age during a strike, Matthew Warchus’s feel-good ensemble flick transmuted challenging story-lines into something more uplifting, while occasionally teetering on the verge of corniness.  Much of the story-line was apparently based on fact:  a South Wales colliery band did indeed repay the gay activists' support by leading the 1985 London “Pride” march and NUM block-votes subsequently helped shift Labour party policy on the age of consent. 

Imelda Staunton hits the dance-floor at the Miners' Welfare Club

In the tradition of miners' strike films ("Billy Elliott", "The Full Monty"), Stephen Beresford's script focused squarely on the links between the personal and the political.  Framed as a coming-out tale for 20yo “Bromley” (a gawky catering student well under-played by George Mackay), the film was saturated in Eighties cultural signifiers (à la “Peter’s Friends”, “Starter for Ten”) and looked back nostalgically to the days when playing Bronski Beat, Frankie and Billy Bragg was the standard form of protest. 

A morality tale about the personal confidence to be gained from standing up and reaching across social borders, the film had fun with the classic British trope of introducing urbanites to a traditional provincial setting (cf “Withnail and I”).  Most of the best lines went to the miners' wives, very much the glue holding the pit-village together.  A bulked-up Staunton rather stole the show as a redoubtable Welsh battle-axe you probably wouldn't want to bump into on an unlit street at night. 
 

"LGSM:  Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners"

Ben Schnetzer was the quiffed and gobby activist who led a motley band of naifs to raise funds for a Welsh pit village 'so small there were no vowels in its name' (his character apparently based on real-life activist Mark Watson, who fell victim to AIDS only two years after the strike).  Dominic West had fun playing against standard macho type as a flamboyant Seventies ‘dancing queen’, while Andrew Scott ("Sherlock's" Moriarty) had to be more buttoned-up as West's gay-bashed Welsh lover.  The film played amusingly too with the uneasy gay/lesbian dialectic. 

For those of us who remember these events first-hand, it was striking what a different world 1984 was compared to today, similarly oppressive governments aside.  Motley found himself far more drawn to it as a wised-up forty-something than he probably would have done as a shy provincial teenager at the time.  Better late than never!

Boyhood, 20.8.14

Mason Jnr (the 6 year old Ellar Coltrane) as we first saw him

Richard Linklater’s Berlin Silver Bear winner was a Bildungsroman examining how “time’s winged-chariot” deals with both children and parents.

Media coverage rightly focused on the extraordinary feat of filming the same fictional family, in cinema verité style, over twelve years. 

We watched Patricia Arquette (Mom) and Ethan Hawke (Dad - Mason Snr), unmarried American parents of modest means, split, move, marry, divorce, remarry and divorce again, while bringing up two children through this maelstrom of changing relationships.  Arquette was particularly impressive at conveying the low-key decency of a Mom who’s serially disappointed by men (“I thought there would be more”, she concludes - about life rather than men).
 

Mason Jnr's Mom (Patricia Arquette), who matures 
as much as either of her children

The eponymous boy Mason Jnr (Ellar Coltrane) went from six to eighteen before our eyes, in tandem with his slightly older sister Sam (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei). 

Yet while we saw Mason Jnr grow up, for him, as for many teenagers, life was always elusively in the present tense (“It’s like it’s always right now”). 

Linklater’s typically Texan-set film was a languorous moody affair, more interested in the mundane realities of relationships and family life than broader social issues.  There were a few topical references to Iraq and the 2008 Obama campaign (Dad swiped some McCain billboards).  Many of the rites of passage were specifically American: baseball and bowling with Dad and a, to European eyes, creepy vignette where Mason Jnr was given a shotgun for his fifteenth birthday by doting bible-bashing hick step-grandparents.  A few more troubling episodes apart (for instance when Mom was beaten up by her alcoholic second partner), the focus of the movie was on showing children's personalities developing - not least in opposition to adults’ frequently cack-handed attempts to guide them.

Finally accepting responsibility:  Dad (Ethan Hawke)
takes his son away for one of many single-parent weekends

Linklater ‘s trademark mood of slightly bemused directionlessness, memorably essayed in “Dazed and Confused” as long ago as 1993, was repeated here at deliberate length.  The pace of the 2 ¾ hour screen time occasionally flagged but the film worked far better than Terrence Mallick’s “Tree of Life”, which tried to cover similar territory more impressionistically.

The universality of the theme, despite the particularities of the American setting, virtually guaranteed a positive audience response, helped by Linklater’s refusal to sensationalise.  Motley had two main cavils. Firstly, with the exception of one Hispanic, there was no attempt to represent America as the melting-pot that it is, with African-Americans in particular conspicuously absent.  Secondly, as many others have commented, flick was mis-titled and should have been called “Family” or “Motherhood”, since it was as much about Mom, Dad and the Sister as about the Boy. 

"The Three Ages of Boy":
Mason Jnr at 6, 14 and 18

That said, compared to the pap that Hollywood generally churns out, kudos is due to the “auteur of Austin” for a sensitive, acute and authentic portrayal, from admirably multiple perspectives, of the transfer of the baton between the generations.
   

Kill Your Darlings, 7.12.13

John Krokidas’s sexy and enjoyable movie, the third on the Beats in as many years (and the best), recreated the early student days of the Beats at Columbia in 1944.  While some young men were spilling their guts at Anzio, others were engaged in more ‘normal’ adolescent rites-of-passage: murder, buggery and the like!

The student Beats were shown posing as sexual and literary rebels while disguising their insecurities behind competitive testosterone-driven displays of intellect. 

Moody freeze-framed B&W scenes from Greenwich Village jazz clubs were intercut with lecture hall rebellions against academic orthodoxies (“there is no creativity without imitation”) and symbolic liberations of banned transgressive works (Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” etc). 

Daniel Redcliffe as Allen Ginsberg

Daniel Radcliffe was impressively convincing as the young Allen Ginsberg, whose unrequited puppy love for strutting aesthete Lucien Carr segues into offering himself fearlessly to strangers in Village bars. 

Pouting blue-eyed blond Dane DeHaan (a kind of male Scarlett Johansson) was Lucien Carr, the devil-may-care garçon fatal.  Carr, proclaimer of a so-called “New Vision” for literature (yes, another one) and the original dedicatee of ‘Howl’, provided much of the intellectual (and other) energy to the Beats. 


Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac (L);
Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr (R)

There was a fun vignette where Carr was shown giving his name as ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ on trying to enlist with the Navy, although funnier still was the scene where Radcliffe/Ginsberg is shown being blown by a horny cantilevered female librarian beneath serried shelves of dusty college tomes, only ‘to get off' himself once DeHaan/Carr eyeballs him back.

On a more elevated note, the flick’s theme was perhaps that the creative impulse (primarily here Ginsberg’s poetry) is escapist, driven by a desire to flee the complicated mess of life into a reality that the protagonist hopes to shape and control more easily.


Radcliffe's Ginsberg tries to go mano-a-mano
with DeHaan's Carr

The film turned darker with the “honor slaying” (according to NY’s antediluvian penal code) of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr (“Another lover hits the universe; the circle is broken”).  

Carr, “the Fourth Beat” (after Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac) was depicted, arguably with some licence, as profiting from a “gay panic defence” to ‘get away with’ a mere eighteen months in jail for the murder of his besotted ex-lover. (He went on to sire three children and to head up UPI’s NY news bureau for decades, only finally shuffling off his mortal coil in 2005 long after the other major Beats were dust.)

Poseurs, nous?
Radcliffe as Ginsberg, DeHaan as Carr,
Huston as Kerouac

Michael C Hall (from ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘Dexter’) 'played gay' once again as the bearded stalker-cum-murder-victim, while Jennifer Jason Leigh (“Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle”) was Ginsberg’s disturbed Mom, who was carted off to the psychiatric hospital that more than one character from this virtual roll-call of case-studies might well have benefited from! 

Although the disturbing murder scene carried echoes of Tom Kalin’s “Swoon” (1992), the prevailing tone of Krokidas’s movie was more playful and less pretentious.  That said, the parents amongst you probably still won’t want your offspring watching it before they too go up to university!     


































  



La Grande Bellezza / The Great Beauty, 13.9.13

“History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.”   (Pietros Maneos, The Italian Pleasures of Gabriele Paterkallos)   

At 2h20, Paolo Sorrentino’s lushly visual film was an extended elegy for terminal decadence and a ‘state-of-the nation’ epic. The magnificently expressive Toni Servillo played Jep Gambardello, a wealthy 65yo Roman socialite with a roof-top apartment overlooking the Colosseum (in much the same place as Nero’s ‘Domus Aurea’).  After early literary success and a stillborn youthful love affair, he’s wasted forty years partying.

Toni Servillo as Jap Gambardello, thoroughly at home with the Roman Baroque

 
“Non volevo essere semplicemente un mondano, volevo diventare il re dei mondanito” -

‘I didn’t want to be simply a playboy but to become the king of the playboys’  

Superficially, the film charted Jep's journey towards understanding his own pointlessness, but the character was really a metaphor for Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ Italy as a whole. 

Sorrentino ticked all the boxes in the course of this giro d’orizzonte of the surface glitter and cynicism of his native land:
botoxed over-sexualised middle-aged élites oblivious to their suicidal youngsters, facially-wasted cardinals interested more in their palates than their souls, impeccably-coutoured Mafiosi, aristocrats-for-hire nostalgic for past glories, blaggard self-deceiving "communists" living in luxury, unhealthy obsessions with angelic children and (probably fraudulent) religiosity, even a passing shot of the stricken ‘Costa Concordia’. 

Caravaggio's Medusa

And all of it unfolding in the carnivalesque context of Caravaggio’s Roma, with the weight of history and art bearing down upon the living in a city which has seen it all and knows there’s nothing new under the sun. 

The weight of Sorrentino’s revulsion bore comparison with Pasolini’s takes on Mussolini’s times.  But the hopelessness was partly offset by visual jokes: the dwarf editor over-shadowed by huge spectacles and a giant Teddy in the corner of her office, the CGI flamingos scattered on the breath of a dying Nun, a giraffe magically disappearing in the Baths of Caracalla:  ‘e solo un truco, amico (it’s just a trick buddy) e solo un truco!  

Fanny Ardant

While hinting that Italy's adoration of surfaces, ‘life as performance’ and the ‘great beauty’ of the title is part of its problem, Sorrentino replicated those same obsessions.  The characters were ‘types’: Carlo Verdone was Romano (Jep’s fatty actor-buddy who leaves the city that’s ‘disappointed him’), Sabrina Ferrilli was the curvaceous Ramona (an ageing tart desperate for a real connection) while Pamela Villoresi and Galatea Ranzi were stunningly cheek-boned matronly ‘mondani’.  Even that most worldly of French stars, Fanny Ardant, made a brief and exquisitely-outfitted appearance.

Bernini's Medusa

Flick benefited from a to-die-for soundtrack which alternated drug-fuelled drumbeats and devotional simplicity (Tavener’s ‘The Lamb’ etc).  This was as far from Merkelian Protestant austerity as you can get, perhaps the closest the cinema has got to incarnating the ‘Baroque’ in all its fatal splendour. 

We’re going to hell in a handcart and we know it was the message, but we’re damned if we're not going to put on a great show as we go down ... 

 



Lincoln, 3.2.13

Daniel Day-Lewis as Spielberg's Lincoln

Arguably Spielberg’s best film yet and, if not, certainly up there with ‘The Color Purple’, this wasn’t a traditional biopic as such but a look at the last four months of Lincoln’s life, between the battle of Jenkins’ Ferry in January and his assassination on 14 April 1865. 

This (on the assumption readers are as ignorant of the finer points of US history as Motley is) was the period when “Honest Abe” was caught between the demands of a “peace now” campaign on his own party’s conservative wing and the need to ensure the Union Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment (outlawing slavery) before the Confederate states were readmitted to Congress on conclusion of a peace (which would have swung the vote the other way). 

The problem was securing a two-thirds majority with an obstructive Democrat House minority and a shortage of twenty votes.  The solution was to lie to the House about the forthcoming peace negotiations, to force the Confederate State delegates to dawdle by boat between Richmond and DC and, quite simply, to buy the flakier representatives' votes.  James Spader, unrecognisable from his Eighties' pretty-boy days ("Sex, Lies & Videotape" etc), was in fine fleshy cigar-chewing mode as the rogue distributing the Wonga on Lincoln's behalf.  'Lincoln' was that rarest of phenomena:  a war movie more interested in political mechanics and processes than in the fighting.

Scriptwriter Tony Kushner

With a strikingly literate script by Tony Kushner (who else would insert a digression on Euclidian maths in a mass-market movie?), the film captured the moment when pork-barrel Tammany Hall politics was alchemised, through the skill, daring and conviction of America’s greatest President, into moral gold.  Before his untimely demise, Lincoln had successfully secured the end of slavery in a legally unassailable way. (His earlier Emancipation Proclamation, in contrast, might have been struck down as a wartime exigency once a Peace Treaty was signed). 

In effect, the film was a resounding statement of faith in America’s "liberal mission", however much that’s been honoured 'more in the breach than th’observance' ever since.  The ironies that, 150 years ago, it was the Republicans who were on the side of the angels and the Democrats who were the obstructive element, are too obvious to belabour.  By focusing on the political procedurals more than the battles, Kushner & Spielberg seemed to suggest that, even from backroom deals and grubby compromises, worthy oaks can grow.  Given the continuing gridlock in the US political system, which at the time of writing has just come within twenty-four hours of a default, this modest message carries real contemporary force. 

'Keeper of the liberal flame',
the inimitable Mr Spielberg

Motley doesn’t mind admitting that (most uncharacteristically) he cried, briefly discovering a hitherto unsuspected Yankee corner in his, ahem, soul. Spielberg has an uncanny knack for piercing the tear ducts of even the most sceptical viewer. 

Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln was quite simply magnificent (you wouldn’t have believed he'd once been the young punk in ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’), commanding his disparate backers through force of personality and anecdotal sleight-of-hand.  Even the American accent didn't waver (so far as this Brit could tell).  The wonderfully craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones (as leading Congress radical Thaddeus Stephens) was in career-best form, and the ever-reliable Sally Field was also strong as Lincoln’s neurotic wife Mary. 

Kushner found clever ways of giving African-Americans more of a voice than they would have had at the time, while not shrinking from giving airtime to the horrendous racism of the day.  He daringly hinted at Lincoln’s platonic attraction to younger staff-members and soldiers, while wisely resisting re-enacting the assassination.  Flick was well-photographed (in chiaroscuro) and its emotional force accentuated by a powerful John Williams score, never more so than when surveying the battlefields. (The American Civil War entailed the grimmest casualty rates in history to that point, exceeded only by the trenches of the First World War.) 

[Incidentally, this was Motley's first visit to the swanky new Barbican Cinemas on Beech Street.  These were definitely an improvement, in terms of ambience, on the dingy basement that's still home to Cinemas 1 & 2. However the profusion of high-end eateries, with their high-end prices, did create rather a 'them-and-us' feel, separating clients from staff.  Is this what the arts are meant to be about?]