Untogether (2018)

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

Tags

Ben Mendelsohn, Billy Crystal, Comedy, Drama, Emma Forrest, Jamie Dornan, Jemima Kirke, Lola Kirke, Love, Relationships, Review, Romance

D: Emma Forrest / 99m

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Lola Kirke, Jemima Kirke, Ben Mendelsohn, Billy Crystal, Alice Eve, Jennifer Grey, Scott Caan

Andrea (Jemima Kirke) is a recovering heroin addict (straight for a year now) who wrote a successful literary novel when she was twenty-one, but who hasn’t written a word since. She has a one night stand with a doctor, Nick (Dornan), who has had recent literary success himself with a memoir of his time in a war zone. For the first time since her recovery, she feels a connection to Nick and finds herself pursuing a relationship with him. Meanwhile, her younger sister, Tara (Lola Kirke), is in a relationship with Martin (Mendelsohn), a former musician who’s much older than she is. When she meets a rabbi, David (Crystal), and he offers to help her reconnect with her faith, Tara finds herself smitten by him, and unsure suddenly about her feelings for Martin. Both sisters find themselves dealing with their own insecurities as they navigate these new relationships, and having to also deal with the fallout of the decisions they’ve made. Things are made even more difficult when Tara doesn’t attend a comeback gig that Martin has arranged, and an unexpected truth about Nick’s memoir is revealed…

The feature debut of English writer/director Emma Forrest, Untogether is another of those LA fables that revel in presenting a handful of characters with a surfeit of insecurities, and traits that keep them from ever being happy, no matter how hard they try. Your patience for this sort of thing will be dependent on how many similar movies you’ve seen already, because although there’s no shortage of pointed humour and affecting drama in Forrest’s debut, ultimately the problems and the issues her characters face aren’t all that original. Andrea is another in the long line of movie novelists who struggle to find that elusive second book, and detest the negative attention that comes with it. Nick isn’t a writer, and his easy success rankles with her, and it’s this and her own doubts as to whether she’ll ever write again that causes Andrea to do what she can to sabotage her relationship with Nick, and take steps toward self-harming. However, a lot of this perceived angst is just that, perceived, as Forrest’s script never takes Andrea to a dark enough place to make her as sympathetic as she should be. You just want her to get over herself and stop brooding about what she hasn’t got, and to focus instead on what she has got.

Unfortunately, the same is true of Tara. While we can assume that she likes older men given her relationship with Martin, her sudden attraction for David is never convincingly portrayed, despite good work from the ever reliable Kirke, and Crystal in a serio-comic role that carries a lot of warmth. This leaves the relationship between Tara and Martin to founder more and more as the movie goes on, becoming less and less interesting as Forrest moves her characters from Point A to Point B by way of convenience instead of natural progression. As for Nick, Dornan is stuck with a role that has no arc, and makes little impact, leaving Andrea’s infatuation for him something that comes across as more curious than plausible. Though her script struggles to avoid the clichés inherent in such intertwined stories, Forrest has better luck in the director’s chair, and keeps the viewer involved thanks to a combination of placing the emotion in a scene front and centre, and a cast that enters into the spirit of things with a commitment and gusto that smooths over the screenplay’s rougher patches. By the end, you may be glad that it’s all over, and that the journey wasn’t worth the time and the effort, but there are enough good moments along the way to make sticking with it a reward in itself.

Rating: 6/10 – another tale of lost souls in LA (just how many can there be?), Untogether sees its characters tasked with taking risks in their lives, but having no idea what to do, or being too afraid to do so in the first place; frustrating for its lack of a coherent message, but worth it for the performances (Mendelsohn is particularly effective), perhaps it’s an indication that Forrest should focus on directing instead of writing.

The Land of Steady Habits (2018)

14 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Ben Mendelsohn, Comedy, Drama, Drugs, Edie Falco, Father/son relationship, Literary adaptation, Mid-life crisis, Nicole Holofcener, Review, Thomas Mann

D: Nicole Holofcener / 98m

Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Falco, Thomas Mann, Bill Camp, Connie Britton, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Gaston, Charlie Tahan

Anders Hill (Mendelsohn) has turned his back on his life as a husband and father, and his work in finance. Divorced and living in a condo, he’s “retired”, but finding it difficult to make his new life work. Casual (and disappointing) hook-ups with women only remind him of his ex-wife, Helene (Falco), and how much he misses her, and the fact that she’s now seeing someone he used to work with, Donny (Camp), makes it even worse. And their son, Preston (Mann), has graduated from university but seems rootless and unwilling to do anything with his life. When Anders is invited to an annual party given by his friends, the Ashfords (Marvel, Gaston), he’s not expected to actually turn up. But he does, and ends up taking drugs with the Ashfords’ son, Charlie (Tahan). When Charlie ends up in hospital that same night, it’s the beginning of an unexpected if not entirely appropriate friendship, while unresolved issues involving Helene and Preston continue to cause friction between the trio, and have a wider effect on Donny and the Ashfords, as well as a woman Anders meets called Barbara (Britton)…

The first movie directed by Nicole Holofcener that doesn’t feature Catherine Keener in the lead role, The Land of Steady Habits is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ted Thompson. The title refers to the collection of hamlets and towns that dot the Connecticut commuter line, and their similarity to each other. Anders has decided that he no longer wants to be a part of the “rat race”, and that his happiness has been impeded by his job and his marriage and having to be selfless in providing for everyone around him. But Anders is finding that being “free” brings its own set of problems, some that remain from his previous life, and newer ones that add to his woes. It’s clear he’s not happy, and it’s clear that he has no idea of what he’s doing (we first meet him trying to buy ornaments to fill the shelves in his condo; the choices he makes are less than complementary to each other). He wants to retain a connection with Helene but can’t articulate why, while he’s more in tune with Charlie and his issues with his parents than he is with his own son.

All this is handled by Holofcener (who also provides the screenplay) with her customary sincerity and sympathetic approach to each of the characters, and by doing this she manages to avoid making Anders’ story yet another dull tale of an affluent, middle-class man’s mid-life crisis. She’s helped enormously by Mendelsohn’s sensitive and often poignant portrayal of Anders as a man who is at odds with himself and what he needs out of life. Falco is slightly less well served by the material – Helene isn’t given the room to develop as a character – while Mann is terrific as Preston, with rehab in his past and facing an uncertain future. However, the movie is a mixture of drama and comedy that doesn’t always gel convincingly, the relationship between Anders and Charlie is the kind that exists purely in the movies, and there are times when it seems Holofcener has trouble making certain scenes appear relevant. The result is a movie that feels as if it’s holding itself back, and which, despite the cast’s commitment, always seems to be on the verge of saying something profound – without quite knowing just what it is it wants to say.

Rating: 7/10 – a great performance from Mendelsohn ensures The Land of Steady Habits remains watchable throughout, but the patchy material doesn’t always hold up; ultimately it’s a movie that remains likeable even when it’s not living up to its full potential, and it retains a certain charm that is hard to ignore, but a lot will depend on how much emotional dysfunction you can endure – and not just from Anders.

Una (2016)

13 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Ben Mendelsohn, Benedict Andrews, Blackbird, Child abuse, David Harrower, Drama, Review, Riz Ahmed, Rooney Mara, Theatrical adaptation

D: Benedict Andrews / 90m

Cast: Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed, Ruby Stokes, Tara Fitzgerald, Natasha Little, Tobias Menzies

Very occasionally a movie comes along that makes you question why it was made, or maybe what message it was trying to get across. Such a movie makes the viewer question the validity or the purpose of its existence. Sometimes it’s because the movie is lacking in several important areas, such as acting, or being competently directed. At other times it could be down to the script, or the way the movie has been shot; it could even be all four reasons at once. If it’s an adaptation of an existing novel or play or television series, or something similar, then sometimes it’s all about whether or not the movie is faithful to the original, or whether the adaptation works on its own merits. And sometimes it’s purely because the movie itself is just plain bad, on every level.

Una isn’t bad on every level, but it is a movie that makes the viewer question why they’re watching it, while they’re watching it. Adapted from the stage play, Blackbird by David Harrower, Una is about the titular character (Mara) and her ex-neighbour, Ray (Mendelsohn), who seduced her when she was thirteen. It’s about the consequences and the ramifications of that illicit, and illegal, relationship, and the ways that it has affected both characters in the fifteen years since. Una has remained single, and still lives in her childhood home with her mother (Fitzgerald). We learn little about her except that she has sex with men she doesn’t know in night clubs, and that her relationship with her mother is fragile, partly because her mother isn’t well, and partly because of what happened fifteen years ago. One day she skips work and heads to a large warehouse where she asks to see Ray. Ray, it turns out, is now called Pete, and is a manager at the warehouse. He steers Una into a break room, and clearly unnerved by her arrival, asks her what she wants.

What Una wants, we discover, is very simple: she wants to know why he left her all those years ago, when they were on the verge of eloping to Europe. The answer proves not to be as clear-cut as we, or Una, might expect, but before we learn what that answer is, Ray’s attendance at a meeting leads to uproar amongst the workforce, and Ray having to hide from everyone. He and Una stay one step ahead of everyone else, including Scott (Ahmed), one of Ray’s co-workers, and senior management honcho, Mark (Menzies). As Ray waits for everyone to leave, he and Una talk about their relationship, what it meant for both of them at the time, and what it means for them now. Ray served four years in jail, and has since gotten married, and found a stable way of living his life. Una has no such stability, only the same house she’s lived in her whole life, and in a neighbourhood where everyone knows her and knows what happened to her.

What follows should be absorbing and fascinating at the same time, as both Una and Ray reflect on events from their past, and the feelings they each had at the time. Inevitably, it takes their combined memories to provide the truth of what happened at the end for both of them; whether this will be enough for Una is a different matter. Suffice it to say, it isn’t, and the movie insists on making the same points in slightly different ways, until it heads off into the night with no clearer idea of where it’s going than Una has of what she’s going to do next. What she does do next depends entirely on the kindness of Scott, and leads to a contrived ending that takes the movie out of the realm of psychological drama and into the realm of unvarnished melodrama. But while the last third of the movie is unsatisfying and unrewarding, and relies on the good will of Harrower’s screenplay to move its characters from Point A to Point B, the cracks in said screenplay start appearing much earlier on.

Whatever the merits of the stage production (and it did win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2007), this new screen adaptation somehow manages to highlight a number of faults with the overall scenario that perhaps aren’t as noticeable under the proscenium arch. The reason for Una being at the warehouse, ostensibly to ask Ray why he left her, lacks conviction precisely because of the period of time that has elapsed. Harrower’s script never seeks to answer the question why this is still so important to her. Does she want to pick up where they left off? Does she still love Ray? Is her visit less about slaying the demons from her past, and more about breathing new life into them? These questions remain unexplored as the movie clatters along spewing out platitudes and clichés on both sides, with Ray bemoaning his time in prison, and Una blaming her father’s death on Ray’s predatory sexual behaviour. It also tries to show Una as being complicit in their affair, as if this is some kind of mitigating circumstance for what happened. The aim here may have been to make the issue more complex, but a paedophile is a paedophile, and what happened remains inexcusable.

Alas, very little of what is brought up is relatable or convincing, and with Una’s motives remaining obscure and possibly ill-considered throughout, the movie struggles to make us care what happened to her (which is concerning in itself). Mara gives a very good performance as the emotionally disturbed Una, but remains a figure we can’t relate to very well. Mendelsohn, however, is better served by the script, and makes Ray an untrustworthy character from the start. He lies to everyone, and probably about everything, and he’s good at it. Mendelsohn makes Ray self-serving and arrogant, and he rarely says anything important without thinking about it first. Ray may now be called Pete, and he may have a new life, but he’s still Ray, and with all that that entails. In bringing Una to the screen, theatre director Andrews makes his feature debut, but rarely seems comfortable in exploring the medium effectively. Within the warehouse, its crisp, clean lines and polished surfaces act as a stringent counterpoint to the raw emotions being mauled over in the break room (and a store cupboard and the ladies’ – of course), while the ending, which seems designed to leave the audience feeling appalled and shocked, plays out awkwardly and with scant regard for its backdrop.

Rating: 6/10 – a psychological drama that’s been given an arthouse makeover by its director, Una looks and feels austere, and lacks the passion to be truly effective as a movie about the lingering effects of child abuse; Mara and Mendelsohn make a good pairing but are unable to compensate for the wayward structure imposed on the material, and the script’s attempts at complexity inhibit the material even further, making it feel sterile rather than impassioned.

Rogue One (2016)

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Action, Adventure, Alan Tudyk, Ben Mendelsohn, Darth Vader, Death Star, Diego Luna, Felicity Jones, Gareth Edwards, Jyn Erso, Prequel, Rebel Alliance, Review, Sci-fi, Star Wars

aka Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

D: Gareth Edwards / 133m

Cast: Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Wen Jiang, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Riz Ahmed, Mads Mikkelsen, Jimmy Smits, Alistair Petrie, Genevieve O’Reilly, James Earl Jones

Rogue One is like the bride at a wedding: it’s got something old – an implied storyline from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope; something new – characters we haven’t seen before; something borrowed – the plot of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi; and something blue – Donnie Yen’s contact lenses. It also has a hard time deciding what kind of Star Wars movie it wants to be, whether it’s closer in spirit to Episode IV, or thanks to the technology employed, nearer to the look and feel of Episode I. With no clear decision made, the movie ends up being neither; instead it equates itself as an awkward mix of the two, where the perceived low tech of Episode IV clashes with the confused storytelling of Episode I. Make no mistake, this is a Star Wars movie, but it’s an amalgam of moods and irregular narrative necessities that stop it from becoming as impressive as it wants to be.

We’re in trouble right from the start, with a prologue that introduces us to Death Star designer and loving father Galen Erso (Mikkelsen). Having helped the Empire to begin building their big, bad planet killer, Erso has somehow managed to get away with his wife, Lyra, and young daughter Jyn, and avoid detection on a remote, largely uninhabitable planet. But big, bad Empire honcho Orson Krennic (Mendelsohn) has found him, and plans to take Galen back with him to help finish building the Death Star. Soon, Lyra is dead, Jyn is hiding in a hole in the ground, and Galen is whisked off to continue in his task of facilitating the Empire’s desire to commit repeated intergalactic genocide. Later, Jyn is discovered by half-human, half-tin man Saw Gerrera (Whitaker), and taken under his resistance fighter wing.

There are several things wrong with this sequence, and they’re indicative of the problems the rest of the movie has to try and cope with (and largely unsuccessfully). First there’s the matter of the Death Star itself, which is still being built at this point, and which needs Galen’s presence in order to be completed. This begs the question, is the Death Star being built bit by bit as Galen comes up with the design bit by bit, or has he designed it all but there’s no one else who can understand what his design entails? And then Lyra, who has initially fled with Jyn, leaves her daughter, faces down Krennic with a blaster, and is killed for her trouble by his guards, making her death entirely pointless. Jyn sees all this and runs and hides in the aforementioned hole in the ground that is camouflaged by a large, fake rock. And while Krennic’s guards look for her, and are right next to where she’s hiding, we witness Jyn peering out through a gap in the “rock” – a gap that allows us to see her eyes and nose, and which even blind Jedi disciple, Chirrut Îmwe (Yen), could have spotted. But she remains there until Gerrera arrives to save her – even though there’s no reason for him to know she’s there in the first place.

There are more illogical steps throughout, and as it progresses the movie becomes more and more confusing, and narratively complex, as the plans for the Death Star require the Rebel Alliance – in the form of Cassian Andor (Luna), his robot sidekick, K-2SO (Tudyk), Îmwe and his friend, Baze Malbus (Jiang), and later, Empire pilot turned rebel Bodhi Rook (Ahmed), and not to mention a now adult Jyn – to trek here, there and seemingly everywhere in their efforts to track down a copy of its plans, and so enable the rebels to have something to do in Episode IV (when they’re not playing second fiddle to a farm boy, a scoundrel, an old man and a Wookiee, not to mention the wheezy guy in the black helmet who pops up here a couple of times).

In the process of this search, mistrust between characters is overcome, an old villain (not Vader) makes a semi-welcome return (you might be excited until you get a closer look at him), battles are fought, lives are lost and/or sacrificed, stormtroopers are dispatched by the bucket load, good triumphs over evil, and the whole unconvincing mishmash of ideas dovetails nicely into the beginning of Episode IV. There are a couple of standout moments: Vader taking his red lightsabre to a corridor full of unlucky rebels, Îmwe’s martial arts takedown of a dozen or so stormtroopers (it’s always good to see Yen in action), and though they’re sometimes blatant (though also necessary) in their placement, there are plenty of riffs and pre-echoes of events in Episode IV to keep the fans happy.

Ultimately it’ll be the fans who will take this installment of the re-ongoing Star Wars franchise to their hearts, but for newcomers to the saga, or even those who are keen to see what all the more recent fuss is about, this will be a bit of a struggle. Part of the problem is that no matter what obstacles are put in the way of Jyn and the rebels, we all know the outcome. With a pre-ordained conclusion ahead of us, it’s also difficult to care about any of the characters, despite the best efforts of a cast who aren’t exactly lightweights. But Luna is too earnest; Jones runs him a close second; Tudyk contributes yet another robot-with-attitude performance (why do robots have to have an attitude?); Yen and Jiang make for a great, if underused, team; Mendelsohn vacillates between scowling menace and angry outbursts in a fruitless search for something to make Krennic more interesting as a villain; Whitaker and Mikkelsen both lack for screen time and never overcome their minor character status; Ahmed does wide-eyed and shell-shocked for too long; and the great James Earl Jones is brought in for a scene where, unfortunately, Vader’s dialogue only serves to muddy the waters of what’s happening even more than they’re muddied already.

With the script – by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy – moving safely from one join-the-dots scene to the next, and providing little in the way of depth, Rogue One has to fall back on its visuals, and in that respect, the movie holds a little potency. There’s still no one shot that will invoke awe or a sense of wonder (like the Star Destroyer taking up more and more room at the top of the screen at the beginning of Episode IV), and while there’s plenty of beautiful moments to take in, even the Death Star at one point emerging from hyperspace, there aren’t quite enough to make this installment stand out from the rest.

As a so-called stand alone movie, Rogue One doesn’t fit the bill, as it’s too busy reminding everyone of its connection to the series’ opener, and as an additional entry to the franchise timeline, it’s further entrenched in the overall story arc. In charge of it all, Gareth Edwards does a great job of arranging all the elements (even if he can’t overcome the clumsiness that comes with them), and he ensures that the movie hits the required number of beats on time and to its best advantage, but this is still Star Wars-by-numbers, a functional if unnecessary addition to the series, and if it doesn’t tarnish the legacy of the overall franchise, it still doesn’t quite add anything to it either.

Rating: 7/10 – superficially entertaining with its blockbuster mentality and slick, professional appearance, Rogue One lacks the heart and charm of the original trilogy, and plays out its tale efficiently and with any emotion firmly kept in check; a movie then that mimics the series’ best values without appreciating or embracing them fully, and which should leave the impartial viewer feeling more than a little let down by it all.

Slow West (2015)

17 Sunday May 2015

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Action, American Mid-West, Ben Mendelsohn, Bounty hunters, Drama, John Maclean, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Review, Reward, Western

D: John Maclean / 84m

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Ben Mendelsohn, Caren Pistorius, Rory McCann, Andrew Robertt

In the 1870’s, a young Scotsman by the name of Jay Cavendish (Smit-McPhee) is travelling alone across the American Mid-West in search of his true love, Rose Ross (Pistorius). Rose has fled to America with her father (McCann) after he accidentally killed a Scottish nobleman. As he passes through a burnt-out Indian settlement he meets Silas Selleck (Fassbinder), a loner who knows the territory and is willing to act as Jay’s escort and keep him safe until he finds Rose – for a price.

Jay has romantic notions that he and Rose will be able to resume the relationship they had back in Scotland, but what he doesn’t know is that her father’s crime has followed them across the Atlantic, and there is a bounty on their heads of $2,000, dead or alive. He’s also unaware that Silas is using Jay to find Rose and her father so he can collect the reward. And he’s further unaware that the gang Silas used to be a member of, led by Payne (Mendelsohn), are tracking them both in hopes of getting the bounty as well.

Along the way they stop at a trading post but a young couple try to rob the place. It leads to Jay shooting the woman, the first time he’s ever used a gun. When he and Silas leave, Jay discovers the couple’s two young children outside; he gives them the supplies he’s carried out by way of recompense. Jay later becomes distrustful of Silas and early one morning, leaves their camp and sets off alone again. On a barren plain he meets Werner (Robertt) who is hospitable and glad of the company, but when Jay wakes the next morning, Werner is gone and so are all of Jay’s possessions. Heading on in what he thinks is the right direction he’s eventually rejoined by Silas, who has everything that Werner stole.

As they find themselves getting nearer to where Rose and her father are living, they receive a visit from Payne who brings absinthe. The three men proceed to get drunk, yet when Jay goes off to relieve himself, Payne confronts Silas over his plans to claim the bounty. The next day, and with Payne and his gang close behind them, Jay and Silas set off on the last leg of their trek. But when they reach their destination, it’s not only Payne they have to worry about, but another bounty hunter, one who has got there before them.

A sombre, often downbeat Western, Slow West is nevertheless an engrossing, visually striking movie that tells a very simple tale with a great deal of panache. It’s a coming of age tale and a rite of passage movie as well as a journey of discovery, and is superbly acted by its talented cast.

It works best by focusing on the dreams and hopes of fish-out-of-water Jay, and how he matures over the course of his travels. In the hands of Smit-McPhee, and writer/director Maclean, Jay is one of the most fully rounded and believable characters of recent years (and any genre). His fervent belief that he and Rose are fated to be together is so compellingly drawn that what happens when they finally meet is like a punch to the heart. Jay is so focused on finding Rose that it colours his recollections of their time together in Scotland, and Maclean inserts flashbacks to those days at key moments in the narrative. As well as filling in Jay’s back story, these flashbacks serve to show how Jay’s romantic idealism has reached the point where he has travelled all the way from Scotland to find Rose – and that there’s every possibility that she won’t be as excited to see him as he hopes. It’s a feeling that develops as the movie progresses, and makes Jay’s naïve nature all the more credible, and all the more endearing.

Jay’s potentially misplaced confidence acts as a catalyst for Silas’s reassessment of his own life and needs. It’s a subtle transformation, handled expertly by Fassbender, and shows that it’s not just Jay who is on a journey of discovery, however unexpected it might be for Silas, or ultimately advantageous. His taciturn, withdrawn nature is slowly eroded by Jay’s determination, and in the end he behaves unselfishly and with a newfound purpose, and not just for Jay but for Rose as well, someone he doesn’t even know. Though this change of heart is rushed to make way for the traditional final third shootout – which is skilfully choreographed and assembled by Maclean and editors Roland Gallois and Jon Gregory – it’s still a sign of Maclean’s bold approach to his own script that it never feels like a contrivance but more of a well constructed fait accompli.

With both lead actors on such impressive form, it’s possibly one of the few movies where Mendelsohn is overshadowed, but he does play a secondary role and has far less screen time. As Jay’s romantic ideal, Pistorius plays Rose as an intelligent young woman who is more than aware of her place in the world, and Jay’s as well. Her scenes with Smit-McPhee have a charming quality to them that helps the viewer understand just what drives Jay to find Rose.

The movie’s strong, deceptively detailed script is enhanced by Robbie Ryan’s often stunning photography, its New Zealand locations (while not quite standing in for the Mid-West that convincingly) so beautifully depicted it’s hard not to stare in awe at the mountains that can be seen rising majestically in various backgrounds, or the clear, achingly blue skies above them. Aa a result, Maclean’s visual compositions range from dazzling to spectacular, and the landscapes that Jay and Silas travel through can be seen as characters in their own right (the ashen atmosphere surrounding the Indian settlement is a case in point). Add an evocative, mood-sensitive score from Jed Kurzel and you have a rare Western that speaks from the heart as well as from the mind.

Rating: 9/10 – one of the (so far) must-see movies of 2015, Slow West could have been another fifteen or twenty minutes longer, but that’s a very minor quibble; hugely impressive all round, this is a bona fide modern classic.

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)

01 Thursday Jan 2015

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Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Ben Mendelsohn, Burning Bush, Christian Bale, Drama, Hebrews, Historical epic, Joel Edgerton, John Turturro, Memphis, Moses, Ramses, Red Sea, Review, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver

D: Ridley Scott / 150m

Cast: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, John Turturro, Aaron Paul, Ben Mendelsohn, María Valverde, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, Hiam Abbass, Isaac Andrews, Ewen Bremner, Indira Varma, Golshifteh Farahani, Ghassan Massoud, Tara Fitzgerald

Ancient Egypt, 1300 BC. In the holy city of Memphis, Pharaoh Seti (Turturro) has learnt that the Hittite army is nearby. He sends his two sons, Ramses (Edgerton) and Moses (Bale) to rout them, which they do, but not before Moses saves Ramses’ life on the battlefield, thus fulfilling a prophecy that says one of them will be saved by the other who will become a leader. When they return, Seti orders Ramses to travel to Pithom in order to assess the slaves working there. Moses goes instead and meets the Viceroy, Hegep (Mendelsohn).

Hegep is crooked and treats the slaves poorly. During his visit, Moses meets a man called Nun (Kingsley) who tells him that he is a Hebrew and that the circumstances of his birth are not as he believes. Moses refutes this and returns to Memphis, but the story is overheard and reported to Hegep. Soon after, Seti dies and Ramses becomes Pharaoh. When Hegep comes to Memphis he tells Ramses of Moses’ history; this leads to Moses being sent into exile. He travels to Midian where he settles down as a shepherd and marries Zipporah; they have a son, Gershom. Meanwhile, Ramses marries Nefertari and they too have a son.

Nine years pass. During a storm, Moses pursues some stray lambs onto a nearby mountain. A rock slide renders him unconscious; when he comes to he finds himself confronted by a young boy, Malak (Andrews) who is God’s messenger. He gives Moses a task to do, one that brings him back to Memphis and a meeting with Ramses where he warns the Pharaoh to set the Hebrews free or there will be consequences. Moses prepares the Hebrews for conflict, while Ramses targets them in the hope that Moses will give himself up. But Malak appears to him again and warns him that Moses’ lack of progress means “something is coming”.

“Something” proves to be a series of plagues that wreak havoc on Memphis and the Egyptian people, culminating in a cull of all the Egyptian firstborns, including Ramses’ infant son. Ramses, in despair, tells Moses to take his people and leave. But once they’ve done so he takes four thousand men and pursues them all the way to the Red Sea, with the intention of slaughtering them all.

It could be argued that the need for a re-telling of the Moses story isn’t exactly high on anyone’s agenda at the moment, but nevertheless here it is, and directed by one of the few directors able to orchestrate a movie on such an epic scale. However, while Exodus: Gods and Kings is as visually impressive as you might expect given that Darius Wolski is behind the camera and Ridley Scott is overseeing things, the movie as a whole is a leaden, passion-free exercise in big-budget movie making.

Considering both the material and the cast taking part, the movie struggles to engage the audience from the off, proving largely uninteresting and a frustratingly bland experience. As happens every so often with the projects Scott chooses – 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) and Hannibal (2001) are just two examples – Exodus: Gods and Kings is a) too long, and b) too tedious.

With the story of Moses, the ten plagues, and the crossing of the Red Sea being one of the most dramatic Biblical tales, the fact that this incarnation loses its way so quickly (and never recovers) is a little embarrassing. The criticism that Scott focuses too much on the design and look of a movie is upheld here by a range of performances that give new meaning to the word “undercooked”. Bale’s portrayal of Moses lacks the intensity of feeling that the part demands, and his discovery of his roots is reduced to a brief scene that gives way to an even briefer fight scene; it’s as if he’s more irritated than devastated. Edgerton plays Ramses as an indecisive, self-doubting pharaoh who looks like he needs a comforter (or his mommy). As the dramatic foil to Moses, Ramses’ character carries all the weight of a feather duster, and Bale and Edgerton’s scenes together quickly become repetitive in nature: Moses shows his annoyance/anger/disappointment in Ramses, Ramses does his best not to look as if he’s going to cry.

Thus any clash between the two is always going to be heavily weighted in Moses’ favour, but Bale never takes full advantage of the way the script orchestrates these encounters (he’s also able to get to Ramses without being detected, and to leave without being pursued). He and Egerton aren’t bad per se, but they don’t spark off each other. If it weren’t for the fact that both actors are clearly physically present in their scenes together, you could be forgiven for believing that they filmed them separately and were “united” in post-production.

As for the rest of the cast, their roles are generally too small for them to make much of an impression, with the notable exception of Mendelsohn, who takes Hegep and invests him with a surprising mixture of flippancy and menace. It’s the best performance in the whole movie, and when he’s on screen, the discrepancy between his approach and Bale’s (in particular) is all too apparent. In even minor roles, Weaver, Paul, Turturro, Kingsley and Farahani are there to make up the numbers, while Valverde is stranded by the script’s need to tick off the boxes in Moses’ life without providing any depth to it. It’s unfortunate, as well, that Valverde’s appearance is during the film’s middle section, where Moses strives to be a shepherd before his first meeting with Malak (there is a burning bush but with Malak acting as God’s mouthpiece, it just looks superfluous). This stretch of the movie has all the pace of a snail race, and thanks to the indolent editing – courtesy of Billy Rich – seems to go on for much longer than it actually does.

With so many scenes either dragging on or lacking in energy, Exodus: Gods and Kings regularly falls back on its special effects, but even here the spectacular appears commonplace, our familiarity with what CGI can achieve blunting the effect of seeing Memphis from the air, or giant crocodiles attacking ships on the Nile. It also leaves the crossing of the Red Sea, and its fast-approaching ten-storey wave, feeling less impressive and/or intimidating than it should be. Again, Scott and his cast and crew fail to heighten the drama and leave the viewer struggling to work out where everyone is in relation to a constantly changing topography (not to mention a wave that appears to be advancing from at least three directions at once).

Scott’s ardor seems to have waned recently, with his last two movies – The Counselor (2013) and Prometheus (2012) – showing clear signs of a director unable to spot, or deal with, or overcome, the faults in each movie’s screenplay, and sadly, the same is true here. The script – by Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, with assists from Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian – aims for intimacy amid the spectacle but ends up skirting it instead, and any notions of leadership, duty, fraternal betrayal, faith or destiny, rather than being placed front and centre, are given a passing nod whenever the movie appears to need them.

Rating: 5/10 – visually stunning but dramatically redundant, Exodus: Gods and Kings is a disappointing, mediocre piece that fails to inject any fervour into the story of Moses and his efforts to free the Hebrews from the pharaohs’ tyranny; stilted and dull, this becomes as much an epic of endurance (for the audience) as it does for its characters.

Starred Up (2013)

24 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Ben Mendelsohn, Criminals, David Mackenzie, Drama, Eric Love, Jack O'Connell, Prison, Review, Rupert Friend, Solitary confinement, Support group, Violence, Young offender

D: David Mackenzie / 106m

Cast: Jack O’Connell, Ben Mendelsohn, Rupert Friend, Sam Spruell, David Ajala, Peter Ferdinando, Anthony Welsh, David Avery, Mark Asante, Raphael Sowole, Ryan McKenna, Tommy McDonnell, Sian Breckin

Eric Love (O’Connell) is a young offender transferred to an adult prison. With a huge chip on his shoulder and an uncompromising attitude, it’s not long before he’s antagonised one of the other inmates, Jago (Sowole), and earned the enmity of Deputy Governor Haynes (Spruell). When a misunderstanding with a fellow inmate leads to violence, Eric is forcibly removed from D Wing and moved to solitary. On the way he tries to avoid being beaten and finds an ally in voluntary therapist Oliver (Friend), who intervenes. Against the advice of Haynes, and with the agreement that if Eric causes even one disturbance in his group he’s banned from any further attendance, the prison Governor (Breckin) agrees to let Oliver try and help Eric deal with his anger issues.

Matters are further complicated by the presence on the same wing of Eric’s father, Neville (Mendelsohn). Neville is an enforcer for the wing’s top dog, Spencer (Ferdinando), and is instructed by him to make sure Eric doesn’t cause too many problems with his attitude. Neville tells Eric to keep his nose clean and do what he’s told but he’s a poor role model, and soon becomes envious of the relationships Eric makes with Oliver and the other group members. His resentment hinders Eric’s progress in the group; meanwhile Jago gets another inmate, O’Sullivan (McKenna) to try and kill Eric, but some of the therapy group intercede and the plan fails. Later, when an altercation within the group happens, Haynes uses it as an excuse to have Eric removed under the terms of the agreement (even though Eric wasn’t directly involved). O’Sullivan makes another attempt to kill Eric but is overpowered and he gives up Jago. When Eric confronts Jago, he gives up Spencer.

This leads to Eric assaulting Spencer and Neville having mixed loyalties. As he struggles to come to terms with being a true father for the first time, Neville discovers that Spencer has arranged for Eric to “commit suicide” while in solitary, and with Haynes’ cooperation. With little time to lose, Neville must try and persuade Spencer to change his mind, but if he won’t, to stop his son from being killed.

Based on screenwriter Jonathan Asser’s own experiences as a voluntary prison therapist, Starred Up is a brutal, compelling prison drama that is uncompromising, often savage, and disturbingly realistic in its portrayal of institutional abuse carried out both by prison staff and the prisoners themselves. It’s a movie that makes no attempt to pull its punches, and it’s this determined approach that keeps the movie both gripping and horrific to watch in equal measure.

As a modern day descent into Hell, Starred Up – filmed mostly in Belfast’s notorious Crumlin Road gaol – is a harsh, merciless look at how violence begets violence and how macho posturing is as much a currency in prison as it is a state of mind. Thanks to Asser’s impressive script, the movie is chilling in its matter-of-fact depictions of anger-fuelled bloodshed, as well as the mental cruelty prevalent (and on occasion, encouraged) within the prison system. The worst part of it all is the complicity on both sides, with only Oliver and the inmates in his group willing to try and change things, if only for themselves. Without this one ray of hope, the movie would be even more challenging to watch, its in-built nihilism being even more devastating to watch.

It’s a tribute both to Asser’s script and Mackenzie’s controlled, rigorous direction that the movie doesn’t descend entirely into loosely controlled anarchy, and that the relationships that develop, particularly between Eric and Neville, are as well-defined and credible as they are. The father-son bond, so tenuous as to be almost invisible at first, slowly becomes more important to both characters, and there’s an unspoken need between them that inevitably leads to a violent confrontation. But thanks to two remarkable performances from O’Connell and Mendelsohn, this confrontation acts as a cathartic breakthrough for both men, and allows them both to move on as the family they should be.

These two lead performances are nothing short of spectacular, O’Connell like a coiled spring, Eric’s barely suppressed anger almost threatening to consume him, but thanks to the group something he learns to control rather than be controlled by it. It’s a breakthrough performance, an alarming, expressive, startling portrayal of a young man struggling to keep his anger and his reputation within the system from defining him. And then there’s Mendelsohn, making Neville a chilling, rage-fuelled monster of a man, a berserker with little regard for others, a wellspring of bile, racism and thuggish behaviour who can barely contain the fury inside him. It’s a masterful performance, and when Mendelsohn’s on screen, you can’t take your eyes off him; you just don’t know what he’s going to do next.

Ably supported by Friend as the therapist with as many issues as the men he’s trying to help, and Spruell, whose permanent sneer suggests a man who would be equally at home on either side of the fence, as well as group stand-outs Welsh and Ajala, Starred Up boasts a cast that doesn’t put a foot wrong throughout. It’s such an accomplished ensemble that Mackenzie doesn’t seem to be directing them; instead it seems as if he’s just positioning the cameras and then sitting back (though that probably wasn’t the case). And the camerawork is just as impressive, with several hand-held tracking shots as Eric roams around D Wing making the oppressive environment seem less confining, less restrictive. It’s a gloomy set of interiors but the photography by Michael McDonough is richly detailed and on several occasions, beautifully framed despite the prison settings. The editing by Nick Emerson and Jake Roberts is equally impressive: there’s not one scene that outstays its welcome, or where each element of a scene is given its due significance.

Rating: 9/10 – an effortlessly superior prison drama, Starred Up features a confident, uncompromising script, remarkable, assured direction, and a couple of lead performances that are nothing short of extraordinary; despite its grim backdrop, the movie succeeds in offering hope out of adversity and is complex, challenging viewing and all the better for it.