Tag Archives: Bereavement

The Face of Love (2013)

25 Tuesday Jul 2017

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D: Arie Posin / 92m

Cast: Annette Bening, Ed Harris, Robin Williams, Jess Weixler, Amy Brenneman

What if you had the chance to relive the love you once had but lost? What if Fate afforded you the opportunity to continue living the romantic life you’d taken for granted? And what if that romantic life, or a newer version of it at least, wasn’t intrinsically healthy, but you had to embrace it, or lose more of yourself than you could ever realise? What would you do? Would you still try for happiness under those circumstances, or would you take a step back, avoid committing yourself, let Life take you in another direction? Or would the mere contemplation of taking a different, more appropriate path, persuade you to try for that renewed happiness? And if you did commit yourself to revisiting a once treasured relationship, how would that decision make you feel, and what would be the emotional toll of such a decision?

These are all questions asked by The Face of Love, a romantic drama that centres around the grief experienced by Nikki Lostrom (Bening) after the death of her husband, Garret (Harris), after thirty years of marriage. Five years on from his unexpected death from drowning while on holiday in Mexico, Nikki is still grieving, still devoted to his memory, still living in the house he built for her, and still wishing he was alive. She has become resigned to being on her own; the only “man” in her life is an old friend of Garret’s called Roger (Williams) who uses her pool (Garret used to swim, and Roger’s using their pool is another way of retaining a connection with her late husband). A random trip to an art gallery she and Garret used to visit leads to a fateful discovery: a man (Harris) who looks exactly like Garret, sitting on a bench. Nikki is shocked, but mostly energised by the possibility that he might serve as a replacement for Garret, a döppelganger she can pretend is her dead husband come back to life.

She discovers the man’s name is Tom Young, and that he’s an art professor at a local college. An attempt to enrol in one of his classes backfires, partly because it’s already halfway through the semester, and partly because she becomes overwhelmed. But she engineers another “chance” meeting, and she hires Tom as a private art tutor. From there they begin a relationship, one that becomes more and more serious, and one that she hides from Roger, and her daughter, Summer (Weixler). She also hides the truth about Tom’s uncanny resemblance to Garret, knowing instinctively that no one else will understand the need she has to keep him in her life. As time goes on, Tom falls in love with Nikki, while her obsession with Garret threatens to undermine the love she feels for Tom. As she strives – and fails – to keep her relationship with Tom from developing into a full-blown obsession, Summer meets Tom accidentally and doesn’t react well to his presence, while a trip to Mexico doesn’t go as Nikki planned either…

When it comes to depicting grief, the movies tend to go for big, emotionally devastating scenes that are constructed with the express desire of wringing out the audience and leaving them feeling hollow inside – in a good way, of course. Pixar took this idea to the nth degree with the opening montage in Up (2009), a sequence so perfectly judged and executed that it can instil tears no matter how many times you see it. But Arie Posin’s second feature after the quirky, indie-flavoured The Chumscrubber (2005), isn’t interested in grand emotional gestures but quietly devastating ones instead. Nikki’s grief is compounded by her inability to deal with being a widow, and the gloomy knowledge that she is on her own again after thirty years. She works, she potters around at home, she does her best to support her daughter who has her own relationship issues, but still she lacks purpose. She trades on her memories to keep her going, and every day is the same: another day where she misses Garret fiercely.

Posin and co-screenwriter Matthew McDuffie are keen to show the dilemma that Nikki faces when she sees Tom for the first time. Her initial shock soon gives way to desire, a physical craving to have Garret’s double in her life, to give her back the purpose she lacks, and to allow herself to feel whole once more. Nikki experiences a number of complex, emotional reactions to the possibility of spending more time with “Garret”, and as her desire descends slowly into obsession (at one point it becomes clear she’d rather have Tom in her life than her own daughter), the viewer is forced to watch Nikki deny her own grief and clutch at the hope of a relationship she knows in her heart can’t last. She’s both aware of, and in denial of, the feelings that are trapping her in an ever increasing spiral of deceit. With all this emotional upheaval going on it’s a good job that Bening was chosen for the role, as she is nothing short of incredible, making Nikki both horrifying and sympathetic at the same time, a monstrous figure borne of overwhelming selfishness and unseemly desire.

It’s not too far off to say that Nikki is psychologically abusive, to herself and to Tom, and the script effectively explores the nature of that abuse and its effect on everyone concerned. Harris is solid and dependable as Tom, and more ebullient as the Garret we see in flashbacks. As he becomes more and more suspicious of Nikki’s need for him, we witness Tom’s own vulnerability from being alone, and the personal importance his romance with Nikki takes on. But while the central relationship builds on an achingly effective sense of co-dependency, elsewhere the narrative isn’t as confident or compelling. Secondary characters such as Williams’ romantically hopeful friend, and Weixler’s bright but narratively redundant daughter are given short shrift by the script and pop up only when said script remembers to include them (though not always in a way that advances the story or plot). Posin the director concentrates on Nikki almost to the exclusion of everything else, and while this does allow Bening to give another of her exemplary performances, it doesn’t help that many scenes look and feel contrived, and the narrative suffers any time Nikki avoids telling Tom the truth about why she’s seeing him. Posin never really finds a solution for these problems, and they end up harming the movie, making it seem unnecessarily superficial in places, and yet far more successful as a study in the mechanics of obsessive need. A detailed, somewhat complex movie then, but undermined by its clumsy structure and random attempts to broaden the narrative.

Rating: 7/10 – Bening is the main attraction here, riveting and plausible in equal measure, and giving The Face of Love such a boost it’s hard to envision the movie without her; narrative problems aside, this is still a movie that packs an emotional wallop in places, and which shows that romantic dramas aren’t exclusively the domain of twentysomethings or disaffected teenagers. (23/31)

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Adult Life Skills (2016)

23 Sunday Apr 2017

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D: Rachel Tunnard / 96m

Cast: Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashbourne, Brett Goldstein, Rachael Deering, Eileen Davies, Ozzy Myers, Alice Lowe, Edward Hogg

Following the death of her twin brother, twenty-nine year old Anna (Whittaker) has moved into the shed at the bottom of her mother’s garden. It’s been eighteen months since he died, but although Anna works at a local outdoor pursuits centre, she doesn’t socialise or spend any of her free time away from the shed. Instead she stays inside it making videos that depict her two thumbs as astronauts in a space capsule. She uses this as a way of maintaining a connection with her brother, as they both made similar videos when they were younger. A lot of the stuff that’s in the shed is items and objects that she and her brother either played with or created. But while Anna is apparently content to remain living there, her mother, Marion (Ashbourne), isn’t as keen. She wants Anna to move out of the shed and start to rebuild her life. With Anna’s thirtieth birthday fast approaching, Marion gives her daughter an ultimatum: Anna has to be out of there before her birthday.

Anna has no intention of agreeing to this, and avoids or ignores all her mother’s attempts to get her to change. At the outdoor pursuits centre, Anna is given the task of monitoring the number of molehills that pop up each night, as well as ridding the site of any graffiti. It’s boring, mundane work, but she doesn’t mind, as it at least takes her mind off her brother. The reappearance of an old friend, Fiona (Deering), after she’s been away for some time, sees Anna begin to get out more (much to her mother’s delight), but she’s still adamant about remaining in the shed. Even the clumsy attentions of Brendan (Goldstein), a local estate agent who’s known Anna since childhood, aren’t enough to get her to rethink her future.

But when an eight year old boy, Clint (Myers), ends up in her family’s care temporarily following the death of his mother, his presence in Anna’s life begins to chip away at the carefully built-up walls she’s erected since her brother’s death. A night out with Fiona doesn’t go as planned, and puts a strain on their friendship, and when Clint goes missing overnight, Anna realises that she can care about someone else. But there’s still the issue of the shed, and the deadline of Anna’s birthday. Will Anna hold on to her need to be there, or will recent events show her a different way forward?

Expanded from the short, Emotional Fusebox (2014) (a lot of which is included or recycled here), Adult Life Skills is writer/director Rachel Tunnard’s feature debut. It’s a terrific little movie that’s emotionally astute and, in places, effortlessly poignant. The central conceit, that Anna feels bereft from everything following her brother’s death, is handled with sympathy and compassion for the character’s feelings, and the sadness that overwhelms her so much is often expressed in beautifully understated fashion by Whittaker. Even after eighteen months (or maybe because of that amount of time), Anna’s retreat from the world can still be regarded as understandable, but there’s still the sense that she’s using her grief as a way of avoiding any potential further heartbreak in her life.

But while Anna’s self-imposed predicament is viewed sympathetically, and the toll of her bereavement is presented with a great deal of care and sincerity, Tunnard is wise enough to know that the travails of a near-thirty something living in a shed isn’t going to be enough for a full-length movie. And so we’re introduced to the people around Anna, the people who care about her. Her mother – played with unrepressed yet entirely credible frustration by Ashbourne – is trying her best to get Anna to move on with her life, and it’s a tribute to the quality of Tunnard’s writing that Marion isn’t just the movie’s token “bad guy” but a parent trying to avoid losing both her children. No matter how acerbic or demanding she may be, she still cares. The same goes for Jean (Davies), Anna’s grandmother. Jean is supportive of Anna’s “lifestye choice”, and recognises that it’s a way for Anna to deal with her grief, that in time she’ll find her way back to everyone and everything. And though she too behaves in an acerbic manner towards Marion, there’s still the same love there as Marion feels for Anna.

The introduction of Clint, a small boy with a big attitude, acts as a catalyst for Anna’s eventual coming to terms with her pain and sadness at no longer officially being a twin. He’s challenging, acts like he doesn’t care, and sports a cowboy hat, gun and holster. He gets Anna to talk about her brother, something it’s clear she hasn’t done since his death, and as she trusts him more and more, you can see the weight lift from her shoulders. Unsurprisingly it’s Myers’ first movie, and though some of his lines don’t have the clarity needed for the viewer to understand them fully, he’s a child with wonderfully expressive features, and for his age, an equally wonderful insouciance about him.

As the emotionally tongue-tied Brendan, Goldstein provides much of the movie’s good-natured comedy (“How… is your… period?”), and Deering offers solid support as Anna’s best friend. Hogg pops up as a snorkeler Anna encounters at odd moments, while Lowe is her no-nonsense, lower-case angry work colleague, Alice. All the cast give good performances, but it’s Whittaker who holds the attention throughout, channelling Anna’s grief, confusion, and anger with an honesty and a warmth that can’t help but make the character likeable and someone to root for.

Aside from the performances, there’s much else to enjoy in Adult Life Skills, from the absurdist conversations Anna comes up with for her thumb videos (and those are Tunnard’s thumbs, not Whittaker’s), to the mangled version of Morning Has Broken courtesy of a recorder-playing barman, and its affecting sense of childhood nostalgia. Tunnard, who originally tried to pass on directing this, proves an adept, instinctive director, and her script isn’t too shoddy either. Unlike a lot of first-time moviemakers, Tunnard gets the pace just right (she is first and foremost an editor), and though she does overdo it on the quirky, shed-based activity that Anna involves herself in, she makes up for it by making Anna’s re-emergence into the outside world truthful and in keeping with the emotional journey the character is embarked upon. There’s fine cinematography courtesy of Bet Rourich, and the West Yorkshire locations provide an attractive backdrop to the action, all of which adds up to a hugely enjoyable movie about grief and loss – no, honestly.

Rating: 8/10 – sweet and sincere, and with the ability to pack an emotional wallop from time to time, Adult Life Skills is a blend of quirky characterisations, even quirkier confrontations and encounters, and sometimes, a potent examination of how grief can paralyse a person beyond their ability to deal with it; with a generosity of heart and spirit that adds further resonance to a movie with bags of sincerity already, this is a movie that doesn’t short change its characters or its cast or its viewers, and is also one of the funniest and most enjoyable British movies of the last five years.

Collateral Beauty (2016)

30 Friday Dec 2016

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D: David Frankel / 97m

Cast: Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Michael Peña, Helen Mirren, Naomie Harris, Keira Knightley, Jacob Latimore, Ann Dowd

Sometimes, a movie arrives with very little fanfare or advance notice (in comparison to the supposed blockbusters of the day), and features a cast that makes the average viewer say to themselves, “Wow! What a cast! This movie’s got to be good!” Collateral Beauty is one of those movies, with its dream cast in service to a story that deals with unyielding grief, and which does so by employing magical realism as its main approach to telling the story. It’s meant to be an uplifting, emotionally dexterous movie – set at Xmas – that will leave viewers with a warm glow in their heart as they leave the cinema.

Alas, Collateral Beauty – and despite the best efforts of its dream cast – isn’t actually that movie. What it is, is a tragedy wrapped up in a comedy wrapped up in a magical realist fantasy wrapped up in an awkwardly staged feelbad movie. It’s a movie that revels in the pain and suffering of a group of individuals who are the very definition of stock characters. Some effort has been made with Smith’s character, a marketing executive whose six year old daughter has recently died from brain cancer. Unable to let go of his grief (and not really wanting to), Howard still shows up for work but spends his time creating elaborate domino structures and neglecting the business he built up with best friend, Whit (Norton). With the company on the brink of losing their biggest contract thanks to Howard having “zoned out”, Whit needs to prove to a prospective buyer that Howard, who has the controlling interest, is sufficiently non compos mentis for the sale to go ahead without his involvement.

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But how to prove this? How, indeed. The answer arrives, like a gift from Heaven, in the form of budding actress Amy (Knightley). Through a process too unlikely to relate here, he hires Amy and her friends, Brigitte (Mirren) and Raffi (Latimore) to act as Love, Death and Time respectively, concepts that Howard has been writing to. Yes, Howard has been railing against Love, Death and Time for stealing his daughter away from him. Whit’s idea is for the trio to pop up at random and talk to Howard in various public places. These encounters will be filmed by a private investigator (Dowd), and the actors removed digitally before the footage is shown to the buyer, thus making Howard seem, at the very least, delusional, or at worst, completely bonkers.

Now, the thing to remember here is that Whit, along with his colleagues, Claire (Winslet) and Simon (Peña), is Howard’s friend. Let’s let that sink in for a moment. His friend. Who with Claire and Simon decides to play charades with a man whose grief is all-consuming and all in order to save the company where they all work. They want to do this not, in the first place, to help Howard deal with his grief, but so that they can save their jobs. And this is meant to be a good idea, both in practice and as the basis for a movie.

But not content with having them play mind games with their boss, the script also gives them their own problems to deal with. Whit has a young daughter who hates him because he had an affair that led to her parents’ divorce (as she puts it, he broke her heart). Claire has sacrificed her longing for a child in order to be successful at work. And Simon, who has fought off a serious illness twice before, is having to face up to the possibility that the third time might not be the charm. Throw in Naomie Harris’s grief counsellor, Madeleine (the only person Howard seems able to talk to about how he feels), who has also lost a daughter, and you have a group of people you’d cross the room to avoid at a feelgood seminar. They do glum with a capital G-L-U-M, and each time the script – by Allan Loeb, who has penned such classics as Here Comes the Boom (2012) and Just Go With It (2011) – indulges in their suffering it does so in a way that’s detrimental to the central storyline: Howard and his grief.

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There’s also the problem of the movie’s tone. Collateral Beauty is about death, and the sorrow felt and experienced by the people left behind; it’s also about how grief can twist and contort feelings of pain and guilt into something much more violent and harmful. But Loeb’s script doesn’t want to address these issues head on, as quite rightly, this would make the movie a bit of a downer (and then some). So instead of making a straight-up drama about grief and loss, Frankel et al have made a middling comedy about grief and loss. While the themes in play remain serious, they’re all dusted with a light-hearted sheen that never feels right and never sounds right. The comedy elements distract from the drama of the piece, and in such an awkward, “oh no, they didn’t” way as to be confusing to the viewer. Is this a drama about grief, or a comedy about grief? But there’s no point in asking, as the movie doesn’t know any more than anyone else does.

With the whole premise undermined from the very beginning, Collateral Beauty becomes an exercise in perpetual wincing. When actors of the calibre of Norton and Winslet can’t make the material work then it’s time to head home and call it a day. Scenes come and go that make no sense dramatically, but seem intended to provide a level playing field for all the cast so they have enough moments to add to their showreels. As the actors with no background in psychotherapy but given carte blanche to say anything they can think of, Mirren, Knightley and Latimore are acceptable, but rarely do anything that takes them out of their thespian comfort zones (there’s also a suspicion that Mirren is playing a version of herself that fans have come to expect rather than an actual character).

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Smith at least tries to inject some much needed dramatic energy into his role, but until the very end, when Howard is required to undergo an about face because the script needs him to, he’s held back by the script’s decision to make him appear either vague or angry (or sometimes, vaguely angry). Norton and Winslet coast along for long stretches, and a restrained Harris is the voice of wisdom that Howard desperately needs to hear. That leaves Peña, whose performance elicits some real sympathy late on in the movie, and who proves once again that he’s a talented actor who needs to be given better opportunities and roles than this one.

Overseeing it all is Frankel, whose previous movies include Marley & Me (2008) and Hope Springs (2012). You can understand why he got the job, but with the script unable to decide what approach it wants to take, Frankel is left stranded and unable to find an effective through-line with which to link everything together. It never feels as if he’s got a firm grasp on the narrative, or any of the underlying subtleties that Loeb’s script managed to sneak in when the writer wasn’t looking. In the end, he settles for a perfunctory directing style that keeps things moving along on an even keel but which doesn’t allow for anything out of the ordinary to happen. There’s no real dramatic ebb and flow here, and sadly, like so many other directors out there today, he’s not able to overcome something that is one of the movie’s biggest flaws.

Rating: 4/10 – near enough to “meh” as to be on close, personal speaking terms, Collateral Beauty is bogged down by its schizophrenic script, and an over-developed propensity for ridiculousness; rarely has magical realism felt so false or poorly staged, and rarely has a movie about grief instilled the same feeling in its audience for having seen it in the first place.

The Meddler (2015)

17 Saturday Sep 2016

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D: Lorene Scafaria / 103m

Cast: Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne, J.K. Simmons, Jerrod Carmichael, Cecily Strong, Lucy Punch, Michael McKean, Jason Ritter, Jo Jordan

Marnie Minervini (Sarandon) is recently widowed. She has a daughter, Lori (Byrne), who lives and works in Los Angeles in the TV industry. At a loss as to what to do with her time, and despite being financially comfortable thanks to her late husband Joe’s foresight, Marnie chooses to focus her attention on Lori. But Marnie has no idea that her attentions are overbearing, and she ignores Lori’s protests that she’s trying too hard to involve herself in her daughter’s life. When Lori gets an plus-one invitation to a friend’s baby shower, Marnie invites herself along. Lori doesn’t show but Marnie is a hit with her daughter’s friends, and soon she’s spending more and more time with them, particularly Jillian (Strong), who reveals her wish to be married but who can’t afford it.

Marnie persuades Jillian to let her pay for the wedding, and soon she and Jillian’s friends (and Lori’s) are planning all the details, including the bridal outfit. Meanwhile, Lori announces that she’s going to New York for a while. The pilot she’s working on is being filmed there, and it makes sense for her to be there if any problems arise. Marnie throws herself into helping others, from the Genius at an Apple store, Freddy (Carmichael), to an elderly lady (Jordan) at the hospital where she volunteers. She even meets a retired policeman called Zipper (Simmons) when she inadvertently wanders into the background of a movie that’s being shot, and is mistaken for an extra.

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A trip to New York to visit Lori and Joe’s family goes awry, and Marnie returns to Los Angeles chastened and beginning to realise just how much her grief has been channelled into helping others at the expense of herself. She spends more time with Zipper, and comes to Lori’s aid when she has an emergency. Jillian’s wedding goes off without a hitch, and Marnie is given a special mention for her help in organising it all. But Marnie still has to make a decision about whether or not she wants to continue as she is – constantly occupied yet unhappy – or begin a new stage in her life, one that will see her still helping others but not out of personal necessity.

While it’s an apt description of Marnie’s character (for the most part), The Meddler is only so apt when it applies to Marnie’s relationship with her daughter. Away from this, it’s not quite so appropriate, as Marnie’s actions are more altruistic than interfering. This leads to a curious fracturing of the narrative, as the scenes where Marnie uses her financial good fortune, and in the case of the old lady in the hospital her compassion, carry a less distinctive dramatic weight than in those where she spars with Lori for her daughter’s attention. It’s hard to determine if writer/director Scafaria, here following up her feature debut Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012), intended it this way, or if it was something that was decided on in post-production.

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What emerges is a movie that is able to examine an aging woman’s experience of grief and the twofold way in which she assimilates and deals with it. On the one hand, her relationship with Lori suffers because Marnie isn’t able to tell her daughter just how much she’s still hurting from the loss of the man who was so important to both of them. Instead she tries to protect and control Lori’s life to the extent that she’ll be kept perfectly safe – and Marnie won’t need to worry about losing her as well. That her actions are having precisely that very effect is the irony that compounds the situation, and stops things from being resolved between them. Scafaria makes a clever decision in their early scenes by playing up the humour inherent in the idea of an overbearing mother (at one point Lori suggests her mother take up a hobby; Marnie’s reply? “Maybe you could be my hobby!”). But the humour is gradually eroded and left behind in favour of exchanges that highlight the pain both women are suffering, and the additional pain their discord is causing each other.

Scafaria has created an emotionally complex, unfailingly brave character in Marnie Minervini, and she’s been blessed with the involvement of Sarandon in the role. The actress inhabits the part so completely, and with such ease, that it becomes a quiet masterclass in screen acting. Sarandon’s performance is so subtle, and so shaded, that often it seems she isn’t doing anything at all. And yet, every expression, every gaze, and every physical movement is in service to the character’s emotions, and her struggle to make sense of her continuing grief. To some degree we’re used to Sarandon giving impressive performances, but here she excels in a role that isn’t flashy, isn’t contrived, and isn’t weighted down by unnecessary layers. Sarandon doesn’t even attempt to make Marnie sympathetic beyond the fact of her being a widow; any sympathy Marnie receives from the viewer is earned through Sarandon’s careful attention to the character and the lessons she learns along the way.

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If there’s one criticism that could be levelled at the movie, it’s that Sarandon’s performance is so good that it eclipses those of the rest of the cast. By comparison, Byrne and Simmons et al fall just that little bit short of impressing as much. It’s not their fault, nor is it Scafaria’s – Sarandon is just that good – but it does make the movie feel a little uneven, as if the secondary characters, while important to the overall story, lack the necessary colour to make them stand out. In any other movie it probably wouldn’t be a problem, but here it detracts from the effectiveness of the various relationships.

Elsewhere there’s still much to admire, from the storyline involving the old lady in the hospital who keeps using a hand to make circles in the air, and which is given a poignant resolution; to the brief scene with Joe’s relatives where a very important clue as to the depth of Marnie’s grief is revealed; and Zipper’s owning chickens, which leads to the line, “Turns out, for the optimal combination of happiness and productivity… All roads lead to Dolly [Parton].” These are all minor moments in the overall fabric of the movie, but their understated nature is perfectly in tune with the gentle, good-natured approach Scafaria brings to the material. It’s a simple story, told simply and well, and at no point is the viewer left on the outside looking in. The humour is there, the drama is there, and the pathos is there, and it’s all impeccably put together by its writer/director in conjunction with its editor, Kayla Emter.

Rating: 8/10 – movies like The Meddler come along maybe once or twice a year, and often go overlooked, which is a shame, as Scafaria’s heartfelt tale of unaddressed grief is moving, life-affirming and overwhelmingly positive in its outlook; Sarandon is magnificent, Scafaria directs her own script with skill and clarity, and the movie offers a slew of rewards for anyone lucky enough to see it.

Demolition (2015)

28 Tuesday Jun 2016

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Demolition

D: Jean-Marc Vallée / 102m

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper, Judah Lewis, C.J. Wilson, Polly Draper, Heather Lind

There’s a scene early on in Demolition, the latest feature from the director of Wild (2014) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013), where Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, an investment banker named Davis Mitchell, attempts to get some M&M’s from a hospital vending machine, but the M&M’s don’t drop down. He hits it a couple of times, then asks one of the hospital staff if they can open it; the answer is no, because it’s not owned by the hospital. This prompts Davis to write a letter of complaint to the Champion Vending Company, which begins, “Dear Champion Vending Company: I put five quarters in your machine and proceeded to push B2, which should have given me peanut M&M’s. Regrettably, it did not. I found this upsetting, as I was very hungry, and also my wife had died ten minutes earlier.”

Now, on the face of it, this is a great way in which to begin exploring the mindset of a recently bereaved husband, but Bryan Sipe’s unconvincing screenplay hasn’t told us enough about Davis so far for the audience to make a judgment as to whether or not this is funny, sad, poignant, or revealing. Instead, it invites the viewer into Davis’s world by getting him to expand on his relationship and marriage with his recently deceased wife, Julia (Lind), but through the medium of letters to the vending company. It’s an awkward plot device because we don’t know if this is a legitimate way for Davis to deal – initially – with his grief at losing his wife in a tragic car accident. It’s awkward because, outside of these letters, Davis acts like he’s okay and he’s dealing with it all pretty well.

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At first, at least. Something his father-in-law, and boss, Phil (Cooper), says to him sends Davis off on another tack, that of dismantling things to see what they’re made of, and how they work. To this end he dismantles light fixtures and bathroom stalls at his place of work, along with his computer, and at home, a coffee machine. He takes these things apart, lines the various component parts in neat groups, and then leaves them where they are. At work it all leads to Davis being told to take some time off, while at home it leaves him restless and unfocused. When he receives a late night call from a woman called Karen Moreno (Watts), the vending company’s customer service manager and someone who has read and connected with his letters, Davis is intrigued enough by her call to want to learn more about her.

Again, though, Sipe’s screenplay – and Vallée’s direction – doesn’t make it clear just why Karen connects with Davis, and vice versa. It’s true that Davis is behaving oddly, and it’s true that Karen is a needy single mother who has the ability to behave in an equally odd manner (she stalks him until he talks to her on a train), but just why these two people find support and a degree of comfort in each other is left floating in the wind. You could argue that the script requires them to, and that would be a reasonable enough answer, but the script doesn’t legitimise their relationship, even as it develops, and especially with the introduction of Karen’s fifteen year old son, Chris (Lewis). Here, Davis is pared away from Karen and inxplicably, takes on the role of father figure to Chris.

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It’s another decision made by the movie that takes Davis further and further away from the grief and (implied) despair he’s meant to be feeling following Julia’s death, and into an area where he becomes an unofficial member of Karen and Chris’s disjointed family. Meanwhile, Phil decides to use Julia’s memory to start a foundation and needs Davis to sign off on it. But Davis drags his heels, and again, the script doesn’t provide any ready answers as to why. By the two thirds mark, most viewers would be forgiven for wondering if any of Davis’s decisions have a point to them or are based on any recognisable emotions. This is because the movie is a frustrating exercise in character development and emotional withdrawal that coasts along with little regard for cause and effect, or the demands of a cohesive narrative.

It will come as no surprise that Demolition ends with everything wrapped up neatly (and with a pretty bow on top), and viewers who do manage to make it this far will be asking themselves what all the fuss was about in terms of the storyline and a handful of subplots that pop up every so often but don’t add anything to the overall narrative (a revelation regarding Julia comes out of nowhere and goes back there pretty quickly without having any real effect whatsoever). It’s hard to engage with any of the characters except on a superficial level, and the quality of the characterisations is such that even Gyllenhaal and Watts – two extremely capable actors – can only do so much with them before repetition sets in and their efforts fail to have any impact.

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Vallée’s direction is also a problem. While there’s a kernel of a great idea here – widower tries to make sense of his own grief by rebuilding his life from the ground up – Vallée doesn’t have any answers to the problems that are inherent in the script. This leaves the movie plodding along for several stretches (particularly when Davis enlists Chris in the demolition of his home), and any emotional high points lacking punch or dramatic intensity. It’s a visually well-constructed movie, however, with Vallée proving once again that he has an eye for composition and filling a frame with relevant information in support of the story, and he’s ably supported by his regular DoP Yves Bélanger. But it’s not enough to hide the ways in which Sipe and his wayward screenplay fails to explore Davis’s grief and Karen’s lack of confidence.

Rating: 5/10 – given Vallée’s previous movies (and their success), his work on Demolition and partnership with Gyllenhaal seems like a guarantee of quality, but there are too many problems with the script for even this combination to improve things; the movie aims for a kind of heightened realism at times, and while this is an admirable ambition, the fact that it doesn’t even come near is a good indication of how difficult it’s been to translate Sipe’s undercooked screenplay for the screen.

Grandma (2015)

29 Friday Jan 2016

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Grandma

D: Paul Weitz / 78m

Cast: Lily Tomlin, Julia Garner, Marcia Gay Harden, Judy Greer, Sam Elliott, Laverne Cox, Elizabeth Peña, Nat Wolff, Lauren Tom

Elle Reid (Tomlin) is a once well-known poet. She’s also a lesbian whose long-term partner has recently passed away. She has a daughter, Judy (Harden), she isn’t on very good terms with. She’s grouchy, antagonistic and caustic as the mood takes her. She’s also just shown the door – horribly – to Olivia (Greer) whom she’s been in a relationship with for four months. And now she’s visited by her granddaughter Sage (Garner) who’s pregnant and needs $630 for an abortion by five forty-five that evening. No wonder she’s so unapologetically cranky.

Elle has another reason to be in a bad mood: thanks to an attack of principles she’s cut up her credit card and used it as a wind chime, so she can’t give Sage the money she needs. To make up for this selfish crime against modern day living, Elle agrees to help Sage find the money from other sources. First they visit Sage’s boyfriend, Cam (Wolff), where his aggressive and disrespectful attitude to Elle leads to some unexpected violence and the accrual of $50. From there they try to call in a loan from one of Elle’s friends, Deathy (Cox), but that only nets $65. When Elle next tries to sell some of her first edition books (even though they’re not in the best of condition), that plan backfires when Olivia appears on the scene and an argument ensues. With time running out, Elle decides she has to take a risk and visit an old flame, Karl (Elliott). At first Karl seems amenable to lending Elle the remaining $515 but their shared history ruins things and he refuses. This leaves Elle and Sage with only one remaining option: they have to see Judy and ask for her help, even though she and Elle are effectively estranged and she has no idea that Sage is pregnant (Elle also tells Sage that she’s afraid of Judy and has been since she was five).

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It should take the viewer roughly two minutes of Grandma‘s running time to see why Lily Tomlin signed up to play Elle. In keeping with her literary background, and doing her best to end her relationship with Olivia as quickly as possible, Elle refers to her as “a footnote”. It’s an unnecessarily cruel remark, and Tomlin delivers it casually, as if it were of no more significance than if Elle had called Olivia a terrible lay, or a boring conversationalist. And from that nasty remark, and Elle’s adamant refusal to apologise, the viewer can see that spending time with Elle is going to be made all the more enjoyable thanks to Tomlin’s acid dry performance. Yes, she’s unconscionably horrid at times, and yes she does her best to belittle the people she despises (which seems to be everyone outside of Sage and Deathy), but it’s Elle’s acerbic, take-no-prisoners attitude that is so ironically appealing, and Tomlin knows this. And knowing this she grabs the role in both hands and has a high old time with it.

But Tomlin’s performance isn’t the whole movie, and thanks to Weitz’s command of his own script, Elle isn’t allowed to overwhelm the other characters, and she doesn’t get all the best moments. And it’s not just about one woman’s misanthropic attitude to the world around her, but the ruptured family dynamics that keep her alone following the death of her partner, and how her being needed leads to a reconciliation that everyone is a part of. This gives the movie the heart it needs to balance Elle’s angry behaviour, and leavens the nihilism she seems to revel in. Without it, Grandma would still be funny, absorbing even, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as rewarding.

Weitz is back on form after a string of less than fully realised movies – Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009) and Little Fockers (2010) to name but two – and he creates a sympathetic storyline to hang his characters from, as well as making each encounter on the road to Judy’s office as grounded and credible as possible while also indulging Elle’s astringent nature. The outcome of the trip to see Karl is a particular highlight, adding a layer of unexpected poignancy to a situation that some viewers might not see coming until it’s there. It also gives Elliott the chance to show just how good an actor he is, and if Grandma has no other impact than to open the doors for Elliott to give further, equally moving performances then his appearance here will have been entirely worth it.

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By carefully balancing the inherent pathos and humour of Sage’s “situation”, Weitz also gets to poke fun at the American public’s antipathy to hearing the emotive word “abortion”. Elle and Sage are ejected from a coffee shop (that used to be a free clinic) thanks to Elle bemoaning out loud the clinic’s passing – “Where can you get a reasonably priced abortion in this town?” The word is used liberally throughout, and as an accurate description of the procedure Sage needs to have it’s entirely in context, but Weitz refuses to sugar coat the situation, and it’s to the movie’s credit that when Elle and Sage do encounter a pro-lifer (and her young daughter), their position isn’t criticised or lampooned, but instead is used to provide one of the movie’s best laughs.

With Weitz so assured in the handling of the material, his cast are free to provide fully rounded characters that you can empathise with and support (except for Cam, naturally). Tomlin, as mentioned before, is on superb form, and is ably supported by Garner who gives Sage a wistful nature that makes it seem as if she’s always working things out in her head, but is just a little bit too slow in doing so (“Screw you”). Harden pitches up in the final third and does sterling work as the mother who can’t quite work out why her daughter is afraid to tell her she’s pregnant when she has such a distant relationship with her own mother. Greer has a handful of scenes as the jilted Olivia and displays the character’s dismay and pain at being rejected with aplomb, her need to know the real reason for her dismissal a necessary challenge to Elle’s self-centred arrogance.

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Grandma is a movie that it would be easy to overlook, sounding as it does like an indie chick-flick for the generationally unbiased. That it’s profoundly moving in places, riotously funny in others, and completely charming all the way through is more than enough to recommend it. It’s short, sweet, avoids a lot of the clichés associated with the subject of abortion, features a cast who are behind Weitz all the way, and is just plain terrific.

Rating: 9/10 – one of the smarter, funnier, more enjoyable comedies of 2015, Grandma is a small-scale joy that deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible; and let’s say it again, and louder this time: “Where can you get a reasonably priced abortion in this town?”

Charlotte for Ever (1986)

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

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Charlotte for Ever

D: Serge Gainsbourg / 90m

Cast: Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Roland Bertin, Roland Dubillard, Anne Zamberlan, Anne Le Guernec, Sabeline Campo

Stanley (Serge Gainsbourg) is a movie maker who is down on his luck. His wife has recently died in a car accident and he has no money; all he has left is his daughter, Charlotte (Gainsbourg). He tries to get an advance for a new script from his friend, Herman (Dubillard), but it comes with a condition: he must come up with the script in a week’s time.

Charlotte blames him for the death of her mother. The car she was in, and which Stanley was driving, crashed into a petrol tanker. The subsequent explosion killed Stanley’s wife, and left him with a burned hand. He displays regret and sadness at her death but refuses to be made to feel guilty about what happened. Charlotte battles against him, being obstinate and aggressive and continually challenging his assertions about the accident and his lack of culpability. She also takes issue with his liaisons with young women who appear at their home on a regular basis.

Stanley receives a visit from his doctor, Leon (Bertin) who is gay and has recently split up from his boyfriend. Leon is depressed and unhappy, but Stanley is unsupportive toward him; only Charlotte shows him any sympathy. His visit encourages Stanley to think more on the script he needs to write. But instead of coming up with something original he decides to plagiarise the work of Benjamin Constant. When the script is finished, Stanley gives it to Herman who thinks it’s terrific. Leon is present when he reads through it, though, and he tells Herman what Stanley has done. Herman is furious, but Stanley is oblivious and hits on him again for money.

Charlotte encounters Adelaide (Le Guernec), one of her father’s conquests, and angry at her (and him), she attacks her. Stanley discovers them and makes Adelaide leave before he attempts to placate Charlotte. She shows some remorse for her actions, and later, tells her father that she never really blamed him for her mother’s death.

Charlotte for Ever - scene

With a screenplay filled to the brim with literary and sexual references galore, as well as a few literally sexual references, Charlotte for Ever, the brainchild of multi-talented Serge Gainsbourg, is a movie that any viewer will hope is just that: a movie. Because if it isn’t, and it only semi-accurately describes the relationship between real-life father and daughter Serge and Charlotte, then this psycho-sexual drama is likely to leave a sour taste in the mouth.

From the opening scene where Stanley tells Herman how his attention has been transferred from his wife to Charlotte, and his speech becomes more and more erotically charged (with more than one reference to Nabokov’s Lolita to reinforce the issue), the movie becomes an uncomfortable experience to watch as he manipulates his conversations with his daughter, and the viewer is left wondering if Gainsbourg the writer/director/father isn’t averse to sharing his real feelings for Gainsbourg the actress/daughter. Charlotte Gainsbourg was fifteen when the movie was made, and there are scenes where she appears topless, including one that involves her being manhandled by her father. It may be that Charlotte was a willing, and completely aware, participant in the movie, but the fact that Gainsbourg chose his daughter for the role, and not another actress, doesn’t make it any easier to appreciate.

Added to this is Gainsbourg’s continual use of sexual rhetoric and innuendo, best displayed (if “best” is the right word) in a scene where Charlotte is doing her homework. It consists of a series of questions that she asks for his help with. One question is: “What quality do you most admire in a woman?” Stanley’s response is: “Her wetness.” There are other examples where Stanley’s blunt, unapologetic use of single entendres is used and most of them are wince-inducing. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Gainsbourg is playing with the audience, but the fact that he’s using his daughter as part of the game makes it all the more unconscionable. It’s also like seeing a naughty schoolboy trying to shock his teachers: the schoolboy knows what he’s doing will cause a stir, but he doesn’t have the context that would make it more palatable – or forgivable.

With the supporting characters in place for Stanley (and Gainsbourg) to feel superior to, the movie ends up looking and sounding more like a vanity piece than a fully realised drama. Everyone talks in an arch, mannered way of speaking that features literary quotes, apothegms, precepts and quasi-philosophical assertions that are only superficially astute. It’s the type of cod-intellectual rambling that is meant to make its author sound erudite and cultivated, but which in reality makes them sound asinine instead. Gainsbourg gives himself a lot of these meandering speeches – and not one sounds convincing.

The performances suffer as a result, with Gainsbourg appearing disinterested in his own movie and prowling around in scenes as if he can’t quite decide which mark he should be hitting. He continually grabs and paws at his daughter, and wears a black glove on his right hand to denote his injury from the car crash. Alas, this gloved hand is used more as an affectation as Gainsbourg waves it around to indicate all sorts of feelings that he can’t clarify through speech or expression. In the end, it’s a lazy, semi-committed performance that soon becomes boring to watch. As for Charlotte, she provides emotional responses to Stanley’s behaviour that match the affected way in which he behaves, but which prove too wayward and inconsistent for comfort. There are glimpses of the slightly removed acting style that has stood her in good stead in the years since, but here she’s pretty much a puppet being moved around at will by her father.

Curious viewers, or fans of Gainsbourg pére et fille, will find no one to sympathise with (or recognise), and even less to engage with beyond a handful of gratuitous scenes of female nudity. The ending is abrupt and unrewarding given all that’s gone before, but at least it brings to a close a tale that manages, with considerable ease, to be both tawdry and pretentious.

Rating: 2/10 – sometimes a movie is just a dud and that’s all there is to it, and Charlotte for Ever is the movie that proves the rule; with only Gainsbourg’s disco-themed score to recommend it, this sad, alienating movie shows him not at the peak of his powers (which were considerable) but declining badly – and seemingly unconcerned.

NOTE: The “trailer” is more of a promo video for the song that plays over the opening credits (and at various times during the movie).

The Road Within (2014)

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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Microsoft Word - RDW_1SHT_F

D: Gren Wells / 100m

Cast: Robert Sheehan, Dev Patel, Zoë Kravitz, Robert Patrick, Kyra Sedgwick, Ali Hills

Following the death of his mother, Vincent (Sheehan) is persuaded by his estranged father, Robert (Patrick), to attend an experimental treatment centre for his Tourette’s. After meeting with the head of the centre, Dr Rose (Sedgwick), Vincent is taken to the room where he’ll be staying, and meets OCD sufferer, Alex (Patel). Alex is horrified at having a roommate and does what he can to get Vincent moved to another room but his plans fail. Vincent also meets Marie (Kravitz), who is there because she suffers from anorexia (and who almost died a few months before).

Vincent and Marie strike up a friendship, but when he gets into trouble with Dr Rose, it’s she who offers an unexpected solution: take Dr Rose’s car and go wherever he wants to go. Vincent decides on the ocean so that he can scatter his mother’s ashes. He and Marie take off one night, but not without first having to abduct Alex and take him with them (he was going to inform on them to Dr Rose). When their absence is discovered, Dr Rose contacts Vincent’s father and tells him what’s happened. Despite being a politician in the middle of an election campaign, Robert agrees to come and help find his son.

He and Dr Rose struggle to get along as they pursue the runaways, while Vincent, Marie and Alex begin to forge stronger relationships. When Robert and Dr Rose catch up with them at a lake, they manage to get away. As they travel to the ocean they begin to learn to trust each other, and Vincent and Marie grow closer, while Robert, through talking about his son to Dr Rose, begins to realise that he’s not been the kind of father that Vincent needed while he was growing up. Meanwhile, Vincent and Marie’s relationship becomes intimate, but this angers Alex, who has seen her manipulate other patients at the centre in the same way. He takes off and leaves them stranded.

They catch up with him at the next town, and there is a violent confrontation, but it leads to a reconciliation, and they carry on to the ocean. But when they get there, Marie has a relapse and is taken to hospital, leaving Vincent to make the hardest decision of his life so far.

Road Within, The - scene

A dramatic comedy – or comic drama, whichever you prefer – The Road Within is an enjoyable, if formulaic, road movie that pitches itself somewhere to the left of inspirational, and partly to the right of sentimental. It’s a feelgood movie about people who can’t always, if ever, feel good about themselves, and as such has an air of wish fulfilment about it that it never quite shakes off. Alex’s OCD is a good case in point: he has to open and close doors four times before going through them but this comes and goes at the script’s discretion, and when he doesn’t do it it’s ignored rather than celebrated. But in the end, the movie is intelligent enough not to administer any miracle cures to Vincent, Marie or Alex, just some appropriate development in the way they deal with their conditions.

First-time director Wells, working from her own script, creates a narrative that most viewers will recognise from other road movies, and while sometimes familiarity can cause viewers to react in a blasé, seen-it-all-before way, here the journey is entirely important for the way in which it makes the characters interact. If the movie had been set entirely at the centre, then the metaphor of travelling toward an understanding of themselves would have been negated. And sometimes, comfort zones have to be left behind if we’re going to make any progress. These are obvious points to make, but the movie makes them with a sincerity and a sense of humour that allows the viewer to invest in the characters and care about what happens to them.

Thanks to the cast’s clever and often intuitive performances, the characters of Vincent, Marie and Alex never seem like the caricatures they could so easily have turned out to be. Vincent lives in the shadow of his father’s disappointment in having a son who causes him embarrassment, while Marie’s rebellious nature hides a young woman’s need for approbation despite how her illness makes her feel about herself. And Alex wants to be normal even though he knows at the same time that the likelihood of that ever happening is so minimal as to be impossible. Sheehan displays a vulnerable side to Vincent’s character that makes him instantly likeable, but there’s a deeply angry side to him that Sheehan exhibits with equal effectiveness, both aspects given due weight throughout. Kravitz gives Marie a bruised quality that highlights the suffering she’s endured and makes her the most damaged of the trio; it’s a surprisingly delicate performance, and one that keeps the viewer’s attention on her in any scene she’s in.

Patel, however, operates at the opposite end of the spectrum to Kravitz, portraying Alex as a screaming, panic-driven doomsayer – every pothole he hits while driving is someone he’s run over, like a pregnant woman – and providing someone for Vincent and Marie to play tricks on. It’s a confident performance, strident at times, but as with Sheehan and Kravitz, he portrays the character’s burden with sincerity and no small amount of sympathy. (This helps offset the several occasions when his tantrums make the viewer want to reach through the screen and give him a good slap – or wish the other characters would.)

The movie is attractive to watch, with beautiful location work at Yosemite National Park  proving a highlight, and the various themes of longing, connection and displacement given pertinent, if sometimes too gentle, attention, and Wells’ direction keeps the focus on the main characters’ often unsteady but quietly determined steps toward making their lives better, even if it’s just in small ways. This keeps the movie grounded and credible, and if the way in which Robert opens up to Dr Rose near the movie’s end seems a little too predictable or unlikely, then it’s a small misstep in an otherwise very enjoyable production.

Rating: 8/10 – not without some minor flaws – but none that keep the movie from being entertaining – The Road Within takes three people with serious illnesses and refuses to use those illnesses to define them; blackly comic in places – Vincent’s outburst at his mother’s funeral sets the tone – and with its heart in the right place, this is a movie that rewards the viewer on a small scale, but very effectively nevertheless.

Mini-Review: The Possession of Michael King (2014)

30 Saturday Aug 2014

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Possession of Michael King, The

D: David Jung / 83m

Cast: Shane Johnson, Julie McNiven, Jed Rees, Ella Anderson, Cara Pifko, Cullen Douglas, Freda Foh Shen, Patricia Healy, Dale Dickey, Tomas Arana

Following the tragic demise of his wife, Samanatha (Pifko), distraught Michael King (Johnson) decides to make a film about the search for the existence of the supernatural.  By placing himself at the centre of the search, and by allowing all sorts of demonologists and occult practitioners to involve him in their spell-castings, Michael hopes they’ll all fail, thereby reinforcing his belief that it’s all just hokum.  Aided at first by cameraman Jordan (Rees), Michael’s initial endeavours bear little or no fruit until a meeting with a mortician (Douglas) leads to a ritual that doesn’t go as expected.  Plagued by fugue moments, unexplained phenomena, and a persistent noise like interference that only he can hear, Michael begins to suspect that something has happened to him.

He retraces his steps but everyone he’s spoken to or encountered, including the mortician, wants nothing more to do with him.  Rebuffed, and with his behaviour slowly but surely estranging him from everyone else around him, including his pre-teen daughter Ellie (Anderson) and sister Beth (McNiven), Michael struggles to control the often violent transformation he begins to experience, as well as trying to ignore the voice he can hear beneath the interference – a voice that urges him to harm his daughter.

Possession of Michael King, The - scene

Let down by the stupidity of its central character, The Possession of Michael King is a hyper-stylised found footage movie that throws logic out of the window at the first opportunity and never looks back.  With a visual style that’s reminiscent of Se7en (1995) (albeit without the constant rainfall), first-time writer/director Jung assembles a woeful mess that rehashes motifs and camera angles from the Paranormal Activity series, as well as a hundred other found footage movies.  In short, there’s little that’s new or original here, although Michael’s reasons for making his film are certainly some of the dumbest heard for a long time.

The movie also suffers from a final third that seeks to inject some menace via Michael’s attempts to kill his daughter, attempts that are about as frightening as her being chased by a Care Bear.  To be fair, there are some effective moments where Jung employs some uncomfortable body horror but these are few and far between.  Johnson gamely struggles against the script’s more absurd quirks and foibles, and in doing so, saves Michael from being a complete idiot and elicits some much-needed sympathy by the movie’s end.  However, by then, like Michael, you’ll be praying for a way out from all the misery.

Rating: 3/10 – despite several attempts to be cleverer than the average found footage horror movie, The Possession of Michael King undermines itself by having its title character behave as stupidly as possible at pretty much every turn; for found footage, or possession movie completists only.