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Mary Shelley (2017)

03 Sunday Jun 2018

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D: Haifaa al-Mansour / 120m

Cast: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Stephen Dillane, Bel Powley, Tom Sturridge, Joanne Froggatt, Ben Hardy, Maisie Williams

London, 1813. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Fanning) is the sixteen year old daughter of bookseller and political philosopher, William Godwin (Dillane). Mary is wilful, and more interested in reading and writing than contributing to the household chores, and this in turn causes bad feelings with her stepmother (Froggatt). Things come to a head and Mary is sent to stay with one of her father’s friends in Scotland. There she meets the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Booth), and an attraction develops between them. When Mary returns to London, Shelley follows her and their relationship deepens, even though Mary learns Shelley is married and has a child. Leaving her family home along with her stepsister Claire Clairmont (Powley), the pair and Shelley at first live in less than impressive surroundings until Shelley comes into some money. An invitation through Claire to stay with notorious poet and philanderer Lord Byron (Sturridge) near Geneva in the summer of 1816 comes just at the right time: Shelley’s creditors are literally knocking at the door. Once there, a challenge from Byron to write a ghost story led Mary to begin writing the novel that would seal her fame and her reputation…

A heritage picture with all the attendant tropes that go with it, Mary Shelley focuses on the early romantic life of the creator of Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus, and does its best to show the trials and tribulations that made up Mary’s life, but without connecting them convincingly with the writing of her classic novel. With any historical biography, the problem lies in recreating an acceptable and authentic sounding series of events to illustrate how a novel, a painting, or a similar work of art came into being. Emma Jensen’s original screenplay does its best – there’s the loss of Mary’s mother shortly after she was born, a theatrical display of galvanism, querulous thoughts on an afterlife – but it can’t quite make us believe that Mary was destined to write her “ghost story” in the way that the script would have us accept. There’s both encouragement and discouragement from Shelley, Mary’s own determination to prove a patriarchal society that it’s dismissal of the efforts of women is wrong, and inevitably, the support of her father at a crucial point in the novel’s publication. That these things happened is not necessarily in dispute, but the way in which they’re laid out is unfortunately quite mundane.

This proves a detriment to the movie overall, with al-Mansour’s efforts held in check by the demands of the feel and shape of the narrative, which is respectful without being passionate, and fluid though without feeling driven. There are the requisite setbacks and tragedies on display, and they come at their expected moments, and so much so that you can tick them off as you watch. This leaves Fanning somewhat adrift in a movie that her peformance dominates, and which allows her to show a greater range and skill in her portrayal of Mary than is usually the case. In support, Booth is a gifted yet emotionally petulant Shelley, Powley is terrific as the envious stepsister trying to make her own mark through an unfortunate dalliance with Byron, and Dillane does seemingly little, but to such good effect that he’s the focus of every scene he’s in. al-Mansour, following up her debut feature Wadjda (2012), is a great choice as director but again is defeated by the apparent requirements for making a period picture. It’s ironic then, that a movie about the creator of a literary figure brought to life by lightning, lacks the spark needed to bring it’s own tale fully to life.

Rating: 6/10 – it looks good (thanks to David Ungaro’s sterling cinematography), and it’s replete with good performances, but Mary Shelley is ultimately too pedestrian in nature and presentation to linger in the memory; the romance between Mary and Percy fizzles out in a perfunctory “that’s done” fashion, her stance as a proto-feminist (and the nominal ease with which she overcomes the gender prejudice of the times) is clunky, and is undermined by the movie’s end, where her fame and fortune is guaranteed by the intervention of her lover and her father – and there’s further irony for you.

The Limehouse Golem (2016)

15 Friday Sep 2017

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D: Juan Carlos Medina / 109m

Cast: Bill Nighy, Olivia Cooke, Douglas Booth, Daniel Mays, Sam Reid, María Valverde, Eddie Marsan, Henry Goodman, Morgan Watkins

A music hall comedian and musical theatre actor. A Prussian-born philosopher. An English novelist. And an aspiring playwright. All four of them men, and all four suspected of being the infamous Limehouse Golem, a murderer whose latest outrage has claimed the lives of an entire family and their maid.  Which of these four men – Dan Leno (Booth), Karl Marx (Goodman), George Gissing (Watkins), and John Cree (Reid) – is the crazed, psychopathic killer, and why?

It’s a measure of the confidence that screenwriter Jane Goldman (adapting Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem) has in the material that she keeps this central conceit ticking along for so long, because if you stopped to think about it for more than a cursory second, then said conceit would crumble to dust before your eyes. Ackroyd may have presented his story in better ways on the page, but Goldman is hampered by the requirements of a movie interpretation, and the scenes where the murders are re-enacted from the viewpoint of each suspect in turn leads to some very awkward moments indeed. The sight of Karl Marx – a bushy bearded Goodman – acting violently makes for one of the most inappropriately amusing murder scenes in recent cinema history. And the same can be said of Gissing’s turn behind the knife. Leno fares slightly better but that’s mostly thanks to Booth’s florid turn as the theatrical maestro, while Cree, this movie’s Most Likely does mentally unbalanced with too much glee to be even considered as the Golem. So with each of the suspects lacking that certain murderous je ne sais quoi, what’s a mystery thriller meant to do?

The answer is to focus instead on Cree’s wife, Lizzie (Cooke), a member of Leno’s troupe, and soon on trial for poisoning her husband. Cree’s death doesn’t immediately rule him out of being the Golem, but it does prompt Inspector John Kildare (Nighy) to attempt to kill two birds with one stone: to prove that Cree was the Golem, and in doing so, provide his wife with a motive for killing him that would make her a heroine and see her avoid the gallows. Aided by Constable George Flood (Mays), Kildare follows a clue left by the Golem at a murder scene to the British Library and a book by Thomas de Quincey that contains a diary written by the Golem within its pages. With only the four men mentioned above having had access to the book on the day of its last entry, Kildare sets about obtaining samples of the men’s handwriting in an effort to eliminate/incriminate them. Leno, Marx and Gissing are soon ruled out, but Cree’s death remains an obstacle to the truth: before he died he burnt all his personal papers.

With all this investigative work going on, and grisly accountings of the murders punctuating the narrative to boot, the movie recounts Lizzie’s life from sexually abused pre-teen to orphan to theatrical protegé to music hall star. It feels like a soap opera tale given a grim Victorian veneer, and takes up too much of the movie’s run time. For long stretches it’s Lizzie’s back story at the forefront of the material, and the search for the Golem is left feeling as if it’s been relegated to second place, a position that doesn’t feel right for the story or the overall structure. Allied with a number of scenes that see Kildare visiting Lizzie in prison and reassuring her all will be well, the mystery elements are forced to take a back seat as Kildare pursues his twin aims, all of which is likely to lead some viewers into construing that his visits are indicative of some burgeoning romance (Kildare is conscientious it’s true, but nothing fully explains his obsessive determination to save Lizzie from certain death). But wait, Kildare isn’t “interested” in women, he follows another persuasion, a detail the script brings up every now and then in a misguided attempt at adding depth to the character, and which only prompts Flood to reveal his own “interests” in a scene that is as awkwardly written as it is played out.

Lizzie’s theatrical experiences are used as a backdrop for the rise of the Golem, and there are plenty of clues dropped along the way as to the murderer’s identity (fans of this sort of thing will have no problem working out the whodunnit aspect of things). Along the way there are also several music hall interludes, and back stage confrontations, that help to throw suspicion on Leno and Cree respectively, but in an effort to stretch the material even further, there are minor sub-plots that add little to the larger storyline, and by the time the murderer’s identity is revealed, a certain amount of ennui has settled in as scenes are recycled or repeated without adding anything new or relevant to the proceedings. Even the murders themselves, touted as grisly and shocking, prove unambitious in their execution (excuse the pun), and a number of incidental deaths prove equally uninspired (and more than a little predictable).

That said, there are some good performances to be had, with Nighy putting aside all the tics and pauses that usually make up one of his portrayals (and subbing for a too ill to take part Alan Rickman), while Booth (who just keeps getting better and better) is on formidable form as Leno, imbuing the character with a melancholy nature off stage that is at odds with his more ebullient and public persona on stage. Marsan is good value as always as a senior member of Leno’s troupe, Reid plays the anger-driven Cree with a fierce passion, but Mays looks out of place, and Cooke does her best with a role that should be more sympathetic than it actually is, and which suffers from having too much attention focused on it. Medina organises everything in a frustratingly direct manner, with too many scenes and developments lacking the necessary impact, and though he has fine support from the likes of cinematographer Simon Dennis, production designer Grant Montgomery, and costume designer Claire Anderson, it’s not enough for the movie to look good when it doesn’t always feel right.

Rating: 6/10 – a mixed bag overall, The Limehouse Golem captures the squalid nature of the Victorian era with aplomb and sets up its central storyline well, but dials down on the melodrama and the lurid nature of the Golem’s activities; perfectly acceptable then in a “what to watch on a Sunday evening” kind of way, but not quite as formidable in its approach as it needed to be.

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

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Jupiter Ascending

D: Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski / 127m

Cast: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth, Tuppence Middleton, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Christina Cole, Nicholas A. Newman, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jeremy Swift, Kick Gurry, James D’Arcy

Jupiter Jones (Kunis) works as a cleaner with her mother, Aleksa (Kennedy), and her aunt. She has no prospects, no will to succeed, and no man in her life. Shackled to her mother’s Russian family, she is unaware that she is the genetic reincarnation of the matriarch of the Abrasax family. The Abrasax family are part of an alien race whose business is that of seeding planets and harvesting the inhabitants once they reach a certain physical maturity. The Abrasax matriarch had Earth as part of her portfolio, and its importance as a source of youth-giving serum is not lost on her offspring, Balem (Redmayne), Kalique (Middleton) and Titus (Booth). Each of them is trying to acquire Earth for themselves, and when they learn of Jupiter’s existence, they initiate plans to either manipulate her or kill her (or both).

Jupiter can claim her genetic forebear’s titles and properties but if she does it will freeze out Balem and his siblings. His response is to send agents to Earth to kill her, but Titus sends a genetically engineered hunter called Caine Wise (Tatum) to protect her and bring her to him. Wise enlists aid of fellow hunter Stinger Apini (Bean) but a group of mercenaries manage to capture Jupiter and take her to a planet owned by Kalique. Kalique informs Jupiter that the conditions of her mother’s will were such that Earth would belong to her genetic reincarnation should one come forward. All Jupiter has to do is to claim her inheritance and her brothers’ plans will be thwarted.

Aided by Stinger and the Aegis, an intergalactic police force, Caine rescues Jupiter from Kalique and takes her to the planet where she can begin to claim her inheritance. Titus appears on the scene and tells Jupiter he plans to uphold his mother’s wish that Earth not be harvested, and that if she marries him it will ensure both Earth’s safety and an end to Balem and Kalique’s scheming. Titus isolates Caine from Jupiter and reveals his real plan which is to marry her and then have her killed, thus inheriting Earth by default. He has Caine expelled from an air lock, while Jupiter agrees to marry Titus…

Jupiter Ascending - scene

Originally set for release on 25 July 2014, Jupiter Ascending finally arrives on our screens and… is… well… just… terrible. It’s not quite as bad as, say, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) – that would be difficult – but it is shockingly, depressingly bad in ways that are completely surprising given the calibre of the directors, the cast and the crew. Already a box office bomb, with very little chance of its $176,000,000 budget being recouped any time soon, Jupiter Ascending is a classic example of what happens when you ask two feted filmmakers to come up with “an original intellectual property and franchise” – take a bow, Jeff Robinov (Warner Bros. president). The result? A movie that makes no sense at any point during its entire running time.

It’s a spectacular movie, true, but this is yet another sci-fi movie that is a triumph of style over substance. If there had been half as much effort put into the script as there has been into the special effects and the design of the movie then we might be talking about the movie in terms of it being a modern classic. But so successfully have the Wachowskis sabotaged their own script – sorry, “intellectual property” – that instead we have to talk about the movie in terms of it being an (almost) unmitigated disaster. Take the notion that only the human race can produce the serum that keeps the Abrasax family so youthful. So far, so good. But if this is the case, and the Abrasax family have “seeded” Earth in order to produce this serum, why haven’t they done it on other planets? Surely that would make sound business sense (not to mention keep them eternally young)? (It seems not.)

There are plenty of other elements within the script that don’t make sense, such as the whole idea that Jupiter is the genetic reincarnation of the Abrasax’ matriarch. How or why this should even happen in the first place is skipped over by the Wachowski’s, and it hovers over the movie like a particularly stinky McGuffin. And the speed with which Bean’s character changes sides (and is forgiven) has all the dramatic intensity of someone changing their washing powder instead of their allegiance. It’s all in service of a script that careens from one unlikely scene to another while ramping up the visual spectacle to such a pitch that the characters appear incidental to the vast spaceships and the vast sets inside them (though the Wachowskis have seen fit to ensure that no room is too small that Caine can’t pitch and hover around it with ease).

The cast look uncomfortable throughout, with Tatum doing his best not to appear confused (or wishing he was making another movie entirely), and Kunis unable to make Jupiter less irritating than she’s written. Bean appears to be apologising for each line he has to utter – his rhapsodising about bees is a highlight – while Booth mistakes petulance for silky menace, and Middleton is saddled with the weight of too much exposition (and wrinkles). And then there’s Redmayne, soft-spoken for most of the movie and evidencing Balem’s more psychotic tendencies by shouting loudly whenever he’s annoyed. By the end it’s become the movie’s most flamboyant performance, but it would have been better utilised in a pantomime than a science fiction movie trying to take itself seriously.

The action scenes are suitably large-scale and ambitious but still rely heavily on the bad guys being terrible shots, and Wise being able to get off a kill shot from any angle. The Renaissance feel to many of the sets and the overall design is, however, impressive, but the production facility on Jupiter is too overblown, and seems designed more to be destroyed (as it eventually is) than anything else. And therein lies another problem, the Zack Snyder Equation™, which posits that if there is a chance to provide mass destruction on a monumental level then it should be grasped with every gigabyte possible. It seems movie makers still haven’t caught on to the fact that while this may make for an arresting visual sequence, we’ve still seen it way too often now for it to have any meaningful effect.

Rating: 4/10 – with stumbling, forlorn attempts at comedy thrown in here and there – “I love dogs”, Jupiter’s Russian family, any time Famulus (Mbatha-Raw) makes an appearance – Jupiter Ascending succeeds in undermining its own credibility at nearly every turn; a space opera masquerading as something more (though exactly what is hard to determine), this sees the Wachowskis reprising themes from The Matrix to less than impressive effect.

The Riot Club (2014)

30 Thursday Oct 2014

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Riot Club, The

D: Lone Scherfig / 107m

Cast: Sam Claflin, Max Irons, Douglas Booth, Holliday Grainger, Sam Reid, Ben Schnetzer, Freddie Fox, Olly Alexander, Matthew Beard, Jessica Brown Findlay, Jack Farthing, Michael Jibson, Natalie Dormer, Tom Hollander

Two new students at an Oxford university, Alistair Ryle (Claflin) and Miles Richards (Irons), are from privileged backgrounds but couldn’t be more different.  Alistair is cold and aloof, and arrogant in his approach to others.  Miles is more carefree and open, and less snobbish.  Despite their very different personalities they both find themselves sought after for membership of the Riot Club, an exclusive fraternity that favours drinking and debauchery and any other hedonistic pursuits.  With their annual dinner coming up, and both young men needed to meet the required numbers for the dinner to go ahead, the Riot Club recruits them (but not before they have to undergo a variety of tests to prove they’re worthy of membership).

In the meantime, Miles has begun a relationship with Lauren (Grainger), a young woman of humbler origins.  But as the selection process for the Riot Club begins in earnest, Miles fails to see the warning signs of being part of the club while Lauren sees them all too clearly.  When she starts to question Miles’s need to be a part of the Riot Club, a rift begins to open up between them, but they remain friends nevertheless.

With the club having been banned from most of the pubs and bars and restaurants in Oxford, they are forced to hold their annual dinner at a country pub.  The landlord, Chris (Jibson), is delighted to have them as it will mean a substantial amount of revenue for the pub, but his daughter, Rachel (Findlay) isn’t so sure, or so keen to have them there.  The evening arrives and the club members quickly become drunk and rowdy, causing a disturbance and behaving with appalling manners.  When the prostitute (Dormer) that club member Harry Villiers (Booth) has arranged baulks at giving oral sex to all ten men, Alistair secretly uses Miles’s mobile phone to text Lauren and get her to come to the pub.  When she arrives, thinking that Miles is looking forward to seeing her, she is shocked to find herself verbally abused and asked to substitute for the prostitute.  Even worse, Miles fails to do anything to help her; she leaves in tears.

As the evening progresses, the Riot Club members become increasingly unruly, and when they discover that the food they ordered isn’t exactly what they asked for, they grow aggressive and begin to trash the dining room, egged on by Alistair, who spouts class-based bile.  When Chris sees the damage they’ve done and tries to remonstrate with them, things take a darker, more violent turn…

Riot Club, The - scene

Featuring the cream of young British male acting talent, The Riot Club is a demanding, disturbing look at the ways in which privilege and contempt can go hand in hand and lead to the most horrifying of situations and circumstances.  Adapted by Laura Wade from her play, Posh – itself based on the exploits of the Bullingdon Club – The Riot Club depicts the kind of arrogant, dismissive behaviour most viewers will take for granted, and therein lies one of the movie’s main problems: even at its most melodramatic, the club’s actions aren’t quite as appalling as the movie would like them to be.  True, they’re abusive, disdainful, egotistical, misogynistic, conceited and full of their own self-importance, but we’ve seen this kind of misconduct before, and while it’s competently presented, viewers won’t be surprised by the direction in which the storyline travels.

What we have here is a spurious social commentary made up to appear relevant in relation to the latest ideas about the class divide (and acerbically delivered in a caustic speech by Claflin near the dinner’s end).  In truth it boils down to the standard, predictable belief that the haves are dismissive of, and abhor, the have-nots, and look down on them as inferior and unimportant when weighed against the needs of the so-called elite.  It’s hardly news, and Wade’s depiction of these privileged young men is often as cynical as the characters’ attitudes, leaving the viewer unsure if she, in her own way, is as contemptuous of them as they are of Lauren et al.  There’s an attempt as well to provide a political as well as social context to the club members’ behaviour, but it comes across as too prosaic to have much of an impact.  Alistair’s desperate assertions notwithstanding, it’s clear there’s no excuse for what they do, and the script rarely tries to provide any credible explanation.  This leaves the club’s self-aggrandising dissipation with no other justification than that they behave the way they do purely because they can, a message that is clear from the beginning.

In transferring Wade’s play to the screen, Scherfig wisely stages things with a nod to the material’s theatrical origins, and the dinner party itself achieves a certain claustrophobic ambience after a time, and while Scherfig keeps the camera moving – often dizzyingly so – the movie traps the viewer in that room with the Riot Club and keeps a seat there for them throughout, in an attempt to make them in some way complicit in the debauchery.  It’s a neat idea, but doesn’t quite work, the camera forced to move outside the room too often to maintain the effect.  Otherwise, the dinner party and all its tawdry developments – the movie’s own main course, if you will – have a cumulative effect that is surprisingly effective from a visual perspective.  In fact, the movie looks good throughout, a tribute to both DoP Sebastian Blenkov and production designer Alice Normington.

Of the cast, Claflin stands out the most by virtue of being the movie’s most clearly defined villain, an acid-tongued, rancour-spouting advocate of class hatred.  It’s a fierce, uncompromising performance and confirms Claflin isn’t afraid to “mix it up” outside of the heroics of The Hunger Games.  As his foil and target, Irons makes Miles a little too insipid to be entirely credible or likeable, while Grainger quietly steals the movie with a well-rounded portrayal of a young woman for whom the best privilege is being where she is, and having a sense of achievement her more aristocratic co-students can’t (or don’t have to) fathom.  In amongst all the sturm und drang, its cast members such as Jibson as the conflicted Chris that make the most impact, while Booth, Reid and Alexander et al. struggle to do much with their less detailed roles.

A clutch of good performances however, fail to make up for the unevenness of the material and its often simplistic notions of class warfare.  That the members of the Riot Club are snobbish and uncaring of others is a given; that they don’t show any signs of self-awareness means their unrestrained amorality becomes both unpleasant and increasingly dull to watch.  To see so much bad behaviour taking place, and with continued impunity, makes The Riot Club a frustrating experience to watch and one that arrives at its final “point” with a dispiriting vindication that robs the viewer of any catharsis from what they’ve seen up til then.  And that’s a mean trick to play on anyone.

Rating: 5/10 – visually arresting at times, and with strong performances that offset the often muddled dramatics, The Riot Club has energy to spare but doesn’t quite know what to do with it all; suffocating at times, and not as “relevant” as it might have been thirty years ago.