Race (2016)

30 Monday May 2016

Tags

1936 Olympics, Athletics, Biography, Carice van Houten, Drama, Four gold medals, Germany, Jason Sudeikis, Jeremy Irons, Jesse Owens, Larry Snyder, Leni Riefenstahl, Nazis, Racism, Review, Stephan James, Stephen Hopkins, True story

D: Stephen Hopkins / 134m

Cast: Stephan James, Jason Sudeikis, Jeremy Irons, Carice van Houten, Eli Goree, Shanice Banton, David Kross, Jonathan Higgins, Tony Curran, Barnaby Metschurat, Chantel Riley, William Hurt, Glynn Turman

Made with the support of Jesse Owens’ family, Race follows Owens as he enrols at Ohio State University in 1933, meets athletics coach Larry Snyder who teaches him how to be a better sprinter, and on through until his appearance at the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin. It’s a powerful story, and Owens’ performance at the Games is legendary… which makes Race all the more surprising for how tame it is, and how unsure it is in what it wants to say.

As biopics go, it’s all standard stuff. We see Owens (James) as a young man saying goodbye to his sweetheart (and mother of his child), Ruth (Banton) before he heads off to Ohio State University. Once there, he encounters a predictable amount of systemic and endemic racism from pupils and staff alike, but concentrates on what he can do on the running track. Attracting the attention of athletics coach Larry Snyder (Sudeikis), Owens dispels any doubts about his abilities by matching the fastest recorded time in the 100 metre dash, and doing it as casually as if it were just “one of those things”. It’s not long before Snyder is talking about the 1936 Olympics, and Owens representing his country in Nazi Germany.

Before then there’s the small matter of the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan where Owens’ set three world records and tied a fourth in under an hour, his marriage to Ruth, and the political manoeuvrings that saw the US agree to compete in the 1936 Olympics once their envoy, construction magnate Avery Brundage (Irons), had negotiated terms with Dr Goebbels (Metschurat). With these things in place, Owens and the US team arrive in Berlin and begin preparations for the Games. Once they begin, it doesn’t take Owens long to disprove the Nazis’ idea of Aryan supremacy. He wins four gold medals: in the 100 metres, the 200 metres, the broad (long) jump, and the 4×100 metre relay (which was ironic as he replaced a Jewish runner who was dropped thanks to last-minute political expediency). History is made, and in the most bittersweet of circumstances.

Race covers all this, and more, but fails to make it interesting for the viewer, instead falling back on the kind of biopic clichés that were old back in the era Owens was breaking track records like they were nothing of importance. It also tries to cram in too much in the way of subplots, particularly in the way that Leni Riefenstahl (van Houten) goes about filming the Games, and often in defiance of Goebbels and his indifference to her efforts. Riefenstahl’s presence in the movie is surprising, as the movie could have worked well enough without her. Instead we’re treated to Riefenstahl acting as an unofficial interpreter/translator for Goebbels, and van Houten struggling to look intimidated when necessary. Riefenstahl keeps cropping up, and after a while you begin to wonder if she was as involved as the movie makes her out to be.

The effect of all these subplots and extraneous storylines is to (almost) make Owens a secondary character in his own biopic. And one unfortunate romantic dalliance aside, Owens is given the kind of never-do-wrong attributes that hype the legend instead of portraying the man behind the legend. As Owens, James is confident enough, but doesn’t seem able to go beyond the script’s insistence on making Owens as unaffectedly noble as possible, and in some respects, operating in a vacuum that leaves him unaware of the political and racial maelstrom going on around him once he’s in Germany. This leads to an awkward scene where Snyder wanders around Berlin and just happens to see a group of Jews being rounded up at the end of a back street. There are other moments where the era’s ugly racism is pushed to the forefront, but strangely, there’s more of it on display in the US than there is in Berlin.

By failing to make the inherent drama of Owens’ participation, well… dramatic, the movie never fully engages the audience, or allows it to become emotionally invested in the man’s achievements (although the focus is rightly on the Olympics, his achievement at Ann Arbor carries more resonance). Left with little to identify with beyond the casual attempts at characterisation made by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse’s banal script, the viewer has no choice but to sit back and hope that the movie remembers he or she is there at some point, but without any guarantees that this will happen.

The cast do their best but the odds are stacked against them. Sudeikis dials down the comic charm he uses elsewhere but can do little with a role that requires him to take a back seat once Berlin rolls around, and which seems there to mainly provide Owens with motivational pep talks when he needs them. Irons is all capitalist swagger as the man who demanded superficial concessions from Nazi Germany in return for the US’s taking part in the Games, while as mentioned above, van Houten enjoys a bigger role as Riefenstahl than it’s likely she had historically. Of the rest of the cast, only Metschurat stands out as an icy, thuggish-looking Goebbels who wouldn’t look out of character if he was wearing braces and Doctor Martens boots.

Attempting to make a cohesive whole out of so many disparate strands, director Stephen Hopkins instead places a similar feel and importance on all of them, leading to a movie that moves seamlessly from one scene to the next without ever rising or falling in terms of the low-key drama, or tinkering with the tone of the movie. Hopkins has had a varied career, but while this isn’t his first biopic – he also made The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004) – this is his first “prestige” picture, and he falls back on the kind of easy choices that a first-timer might make, and in doing so, fails to charge the movie with the kind of energy that would draw in an audience and keep them glued to their seats.

Rating: 5/10 – not quite an also-ran, but near enough, Race plays liberally with the connotations of its title but is ultimately too lightweight in its execution to be a pointed, and poignant, reflection of the period it covers; Owens was an exceptional athlete, and while the movie does acknowledge this, what it doesn’t do is raise its own game to match that of its subject.

Unbroken (2014)

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1936 Olympics, Angelina Jolie, Athlete, Domhnall Gleeson, Jack O'Connell, Japan, Literary adaptation, Louis Zamperini, Miyavi, Mutsuhito "Bird" Watanabe, P.O.W. camp, Review, World War II

D: Angelina Jolie / 137m

Cast: Jack O’Connell, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund, Finn Wittrock, Jai Courtney, Luke Treadaway, C.J. Valleroy

As a young child, Louis “Louie” Zamperini (Valleroy) is always getting into trouble, whether it’s through stealing or drinking. He’s also bullied at school because of his Italian roots. One day he’s caught looking up women’s dresses from beneath the bleachers at a track meet. He makes a run for it which is witnessed by his older brother, Pete. Realising how fast Louie can run, Pete decides to train him to be a runner. Louie earns a name for himself and as a young man (O’Connell) is chosen to represent the US at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He does well and sets a record for running the final lap of the 5000 metre race.

In 1943, Louie is a bombardier in the United States Army Air Force, stationed in the Pacific. On a search and rescue mission, his plane crashes into the ocean, leaving himself and two of his crew, Phil (Gleeson) and Mac (Wittrock), adrift in two inflatable rafts. Fighting off starvation and the attention of marauding sharks, they survive as a trio until the thirty-third day when Mac dies. On the forty-seventh day Louie and Phil are rescued by a Japanese military ship. Now prisoners of war they’re initially interrogated for information about the Allies and then transferred to separate P.O.W. camps. Louie ends up at a camp in Tokyo that is overseen by Corporal Mutsuhito “Bird” Watanabe (Miyavi). Watanabe makes a point of mistreating Louie, partly because of his fame as an Olympian, and partly out of jealousy.

Louis is given the opportunity to make a radio broadcast that will be heard in the US. He’s able to reassure his family that he’s alive, but when he’s asked to make a second broadcast that’s critical of the US, he refuses. Sent back to the camp, Watanabe makes all the other prisoners line up and punch Louie in the face as a punishment for not making the broadcast. Two years pass. Watanabe is promoted and leaves the camp, much to Louie’s relief. But when the camp is damaged in a bombing raid by US planes, the prisoners are moved to another camp where it transpires that Watanabe is in charge. Watanabe’s mistreatment of Louie continues, until one day when Louie’s resilience and inner strength lead to Watanabe being embarrassed in front of his men and the rest of the P.O.W.s.

Adapted from the book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand, Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut is a sincere yet curiously dull affair that never quite engages the viewer, despite its obviously worthy subject matter. Zamperini’s plight was horrendous and yet this is a surprisingly sanitised version of events, with only Watanabe’s bouts of cruelty giving the movie any edge (it’s a strange movie that makes the viewer want to see more abuse in order to make it more involving).

This is partly to do with the script – a combination of drafts and rewrites carried out by William Nicholson, Richard LaGravenese and Joel and Ethan Coen – and the directorial decisions made by Jolie. The script does a good job in reflecting Louie’s life as a child, and it’s these early scenes that have the greatest impact, with their nostalgic appreciation for an earlier, more innocent time. Jolie paints these scenes in a rosy hue and quickly establishes a mood for the movie that the audience can appreciate as being straightforward and unfussy. But once Louie is adrift on the ocean it’s where things begin to unravel, and the movie loses traction. The drama begins to leak out of the movie just as it should start to be truly engrossing, and nothing Jolie does from then on ever comes close to retrieving it.

Once Louie arrives at the P.O.W. camp and encounters Watanabe, Unbroken settles into a predictable series of abusive moments that give O’Connell repeated chances to adequately display Louie’s agony and suffering, and Miyavi the chance to impart a degree of homoerotic self-loathing. There’s a surprising lack of tension to these scenes, and Jolie’s direction of them seems to be carried out at a distance, as if her respect for the material is stopping her from taking any risks. As a result, the audience becomes more of a spectator than a participant and the movie becomes unrewarding.

The movie isn’t helped either by some annoying inconsistencies. After spending forty-seven days adrift at sea, Louie and Phil’s physical deterioration is persuasively shown in a scene where they’re made to strip naked (Gleeson looks really awful). And yet it’s all undone by their carefully groomed facial hair – or lack of it – and equal lack of sunburn. It all contributes to the idea that what Jolie is going for is war-lite, a diffusion of the horrors that really happened, and while this isn’t a bad idea per se – we don’t always need to see just how bad things actually were – here it’s as if she’s taken basic notions of heroism and courage and made them more about stoicism and acceptance.

Unfortunately as well, Jolie fails to raise her cast’s performances above the level of satisfactory, with only Miyavi making any impression, his bland mask of a face hiding a dangerous sadism that seems to pain him as much as it pleases him. In contrast, O’Connell’s rise to international stardom takes a stumble. It’s not his fault, he’s just not given much to work with other than “look worried, look despairing, and grimace in pain”. With these constraints in place, he looks stranded at times, as if he knows he should be giving more but has been instructed not to.

Despite all this, there are some good things about the movie, not the least of which is Alexandre Desplat’s emotive, intimate score, and Roger Deakins’ Oscar nominated cinematography. The former is one of the composer’s best works in recent years and lifts the movie out of the doldrums with ease, and unobtrusively as well. Deakins is a master of lighting and mood, and he has an instinctive way of placing the camera, which helps Jolie’s pedestrian approach tremendously. Together, these two elements give the movie a boost it would have missed out on altogether.

Rating: 5/10 – lacking passion and drive, Unbroken is a dull, ponderous affair that is a less than rewarding experience for the viewer; as a tribute to Louis Zamperini’s fortitude and spirit, it could certainly have been more dramatic, but as a (very) low-key examination of one man’s will to survive it fares slightly better.