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mother! (2017)

26 Tuesday Sep 2017

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D: Darren Aronofsky / 121m

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson, Stephen McHattie, Kristen Wiig, Jovan Adepo

Tucked away near the bottom left hand corner of the poster for mother! is the tagline, seeing is believing. Like much of the movie itself, it’s a phrase that’s open to interpretation, while at the same time, it can also be dismissed quite readily. If what we’re seeing is to be believed, then principal production company Protozoa Pictures have handed writer/director Darren Aronofsky $30 million in order for him to go off and make a movie that reaches for great heights but which fails to achieve those heights because somewhere along the way – and apologies for the clumsy analogy – Aronofsky forgot to bring along the ladder that would allow him to get there. It’s a brave, fearless movie, reckless even, and one that challenges its audience on many levels, not least as to whether or not they’ll like it. But it’s not the great success that some critics are avowing, and it’s not the complete disaster that others are saying of it. Instead it’s a movie that reveals a truth about artistic vision that often gets overlooked: it’s the vision of one individual, and as such, isn’t likely to be shared or appreciated by everyone.

For the most part, mother! is a religious allegory, with the main characters – mother (Lawrence), Him (Bardem), Man (Harris), and Woman (Pfeiffer) – recycling moments from the Old Testament that trade on our familiarity with them in order to help the viewer process the world they’ve been thrust into. The house where mother and Him live is a veritable Garden of Eden; beyond it is blasted ground and decaying flora. It’s an oasis that mother wants to perpetuate, and while Him is having trouble writing (he’s known also as the Poet), mother busies herself in renovating the large, spacious house they live in. But into every paradise must come discord, and soon the arrival of man, someone who appears to know Him (though how is never decided on), leads to the beginning of a great unhappiness for mother, as Him puts their guest before both Himself and mother. mother can’t understand it, and her attempts to return things to how they were before man’s arrival, all of which are unsuccessful, are further overturned by the arrival of man’s wife, woman.

If you know your Old Testament then you’ll know that the further arrival of their two sons, known as younger brother (Brian Gleeson) and oldest son (Domhnall Gleeson), will lead predictably to the movie’s first outbreak of violence. The wake that follows sees the guests take advantage of Him’s hospitality, but while Him isn’t bothered by it all, mother becomes more and more angry and annoyed, and eventually throws them all out. mother confronts Him about his willingness to embrace the love he’s shown by others, while in turn he ignores the love she has for him. Her anger sparks passion in Him and they have sex; the next morning, mother announces she’s pregnant. At that, Him’s writing block vanishes and he sets to work again with renewed vigour and enthusiasm. Time passes (though perhaps not in the same fashion as we are aware of it). mother is heavily pregnant, and Him has finished writing his first poem. mother takes steps to celebrate their good fortune, but the arrival of fans of the Poet at the house soon makes the events of the wake seem trivial in comparison…

Written (apparently) in five days, mother! sets out its stall quite early on, and builds from an intimate character piece to a cautionary tale, and finally, to a riotous excursion into the apocalypse. For all the religious allegory that litters and upholds the screenplay, as well as its occasional forays into the consequences of much sought after celebrity, when it’s brought fully into play it lacks any subtlety, and Aronofsky seems determined to batter his audience over the head with the intensity of it all. An extended sequence that sees mother battling for her home and her life provides little respite as the director of the much more polished Black Swan (2010) gives us a potted history of the world and its fall from grace, and its adoption of original sin as a mission statement for pursuing life (or should that be death?). It’s a heavy-handed though technically stunning section of the movie, but it also proves numbing, as violence is meted out at every turn and each atrocity depicted has less and less effect on the viewer. There may be a point being made here about the way in which we’ve become inured or desensitised to violence, but if there is it’s buried beneath Aronofsky’s bludgeoning approach and the combination of Matthew Libatique’s careering cinematography and Andrew Weisblum’s frenetic editing.

Whatever message Aronofsky might be trying to get across, what hampers the movie most in enabling that message to be received by audiences, is the singular lack of sympathy or empathy that the viewer could have for any of the characters. mother may seem like the most obvious choice for the viewer to connect with – after all, the camera follows her around capturing close ups of her for most of the movie – but for the most part it’s a passive role that requires Lawrence to react rather than participate, and she’s forced to shuttle through a variety of expressions that range from unpleasantly surprised to easily confused and back again. It’s a good performance from Lawrence, but somehow it’s against the odds, as if Aronofsky was more concerned with the physical surroundings of his characters – the house is like a maze of unconnected rooms and dislocated floors – rather than any interior life they might have. Bardem is equally good and in the same fashion, making two good performances that help make the movie more accessible than perhaps Aronofsky was prepared to agree to.

In the end, mother! is a movie that is likely to prove divisive for some time to come. Some will like it immensely, others will be repulsed by it (and especially by a scene that has a less literal parallel in real life). It would be wrong to claim it as a masterpiece, as there are long stretches where the pace is becalmed, and mother’s persistent inability to control what’s happening around her soon becomes increasingly frustrating to watch. It would also be wrong to claim it as a catastrophe as it’s a movie that’s striving to be ambitious on its own terms, and in that sense it is successful; it’s unlikely you’ll see another movie this year that is so uncompromising and unapologetic in the way it’s being presented. On balance then, there’s more that’s good about the movie than bad, though it’s a narrow margin that separates the two. But whatever anyone may think about its successes or failings, this is bold, visionary storytelling from a director who has made a movie that is both experimental and formal in its design, and thought-provoking for much of its demanding running time.

Rating: 6/10 – a movie that may well develop a better reputation in years to come, mother! is a frustrating, relentless, impressive, and yet reproachful assault on the senses; emotionally oblique and intellectually compromised it may be, but this is still a visually and aesthetically astounding feature that flirts with the kind of regressive ideas that other movie makers wouldn’t even begin to contemplate taking on.

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)

Cymbeline (2014)

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Cymbeline

D: Michael Almereyda / 98m

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Ed Harris, Milla Jovovich, John Leguizamo, Penn Badgley, Dakota Johnson, Anton Yelchin, Peter Gerety, Kevin Corrigan, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Delroy Lindo, James Ransone, Spencer Treat Clark, Harley Ware, Bill Pullman

Imogen (Johnson) and Posthumus (Badgley) are young lovers who have married in secret and exchanged gifts of a ring (for Posthumus) and a bracelet (for Imogen). Their marriage is not to the liking of Imogen’s father, biker king Cymbeline (Harris). He banishes Posthumus, and so paves the way for his second wife, the Queen (Jovovich) to advance her own son, Cloten (Yelchin) as Imogen’s husband, in an attempt to secure control of the biker gang when Cymbeline is dead. Aided by his servant, Pisanio (Leguizamo), Posthumus goes to stay with his friend Philario (Ransone). There he meets Iachomo (Hawke) who wagers that he can seduce Imogen to prove that she isn’t as virtuous as Posthumus believes. The wager accepted, Iachomo visits Imogen and when a direct assault on her virtue backfires, he portrays it as a test of her commitment to Posthumus – which she accepts. Before he leaves he asks her to look after an item for him overnight, which she also agrees to.

The item is a chest, one that Iachomo has hidden himself inside. While Imogen sleeps he climbs out of the chest and puts together evidence that he has slept with her. He takes this evidence back to Posthumus who, enraged by Imogen’s seeming duplicity, sends two letters: one to Imogen asking her to meet him at Milford Haven, the other to Pisanio asking him to take her there and when they arrive, to kill her. Pisanio, however, is unable to carry out his order and shows Imogen his letter. He has her disguise herself as a boy and tells her to travel on to Milford Haven; he also gives her what he believes to be a remedy for travel sickness that he has taken from the Queen, but which is a potion that will mimic death.

Meanwhile, Cloten discovers Posthumus’ plan to meet Imogen and heads to Milford Haven himself with the intention of killing Posthumus and bringing Imogen back to marry him. Imogen has reached the town already and fallen in with Belarius (Lindo) and his two “sons” Guiderius (Clark) and Arviragus (Ware). She tells them her name is Fidele. While they are out hunting, they encounter Cloten who insults and then threatens Guiderius, who in turn kills him and then beheads him. Imogen, feeling unwell, takes the remedy and becomes as dead. Belarius decides to bury her with Cloten’s body; when she wakes she believes Cloten to be Posthumus as he is wearing similar clothes. With both she and Posthumus believing themselves lost to each other, an impending war between Cymbeline’s gang and the Rome police – to whom they pay a tribute – proves to be the unlikely cause of their reconciliation.

Cymbeline - scene

In adapting the play by William Shakespeare, writer/director Almereyda has done two things very well, and two things not so well. The first is to employ an incredibly talented cast, all of whom are able to take Shakespeare’s lines and make them sound as natural as modern day speech, fully understandable and with clear purpose in their meaning. The likes of Hawke – reuniting with Almereyda for the first time since Hamlet (2000) – Harris, Leguizamo and Lindo provide convincing interpretations of the prose and help the casual viewer through some of the more confusing aspects of the plot (mistaken identities are key here). The second is to condense the play’s final third into a more manageable “wrapping up” of things, even if it all feels rushed and at the expense of the movie’s previously more measured pace.

But where Almereyda gets those things absolutely right, where he gets it absolutely wrong proves too damaging for the movie to recover from. The first is to set the action in a modern day setting, mostly Brooklyn, and to flavour the movie as if it were a version of Shakespeare meets Sons of Anarchy. This backdrop, given that it should enhance the drama – the Queen persuades Cymbeline to back out of his arrangement with the Rome police in the hope that war between them will see him dead – instead seems ponderous and ill-considered, more of a budgetary consideration than a narrative one. It leads to some incongruous moments, such as Cloten pushing a motorbike along a gravel road, Imogen choosing her nom-de-plume thanks to a T-shirt worn by Guiderius, and Posthumus getting about on a skateboard. While some of these tweaks may have appeared sound in the pre-production phase, on screen they’re not as effective as was probably hoped for.

The second problem is with Almereyda’s direction itself. The movie plods along from scene to scene with little energy or flair displayed, and struggles to provide any momentum to take the audience with it. There’s a signal lack of connection between scenes that makes for a stop/start experience, the narrative appearing jumbled and ill at ease with itself, like a story that needs more cohesion. With so many subplots and supporting characters, Cymbeline looks and feels like a movie that can’t quite get a grip on what it’s trying to say, or even how to say it. Again, if it weren’t for the very talented cast, the movie would founder even more, and the audience would be left adrift, waiting – unsuccessfully – for Almereyda to place his authority on the material and make it work with more style and verve.

Generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays (written at a time when he seemed to be bored with them), Cymbeline is a strange choice for a movie adaptation, its tale of thwarted lovers and political machinations proving not quite as amenable to the translation as might be expected. It also looks very much as if it were shot too quickly – some of the set ups look rushed or improvised. Still, it’s a brave choice by Almereyda, but if he has any plans to adapt any more of Shakespeare’s works, he might be better off securing a bigger budget, and concentrating on the script rather than directing. After all, “the play’s the thing…”

Rating: 5/10 – a dour, unimpressive adaptation, Cymbeline is rescued by a set of strong performances and an astute conflation of the plot; not as engrossing as it should have been, but not as awful as the early scenes seem to indicate.

Snowpiercer (2013)

17 Saturday May 2014

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snowpiercer_3a25f386

D: Joon-ho Bong / 126m

Cast: Chris Evans, Kang-ho Song, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Ah-sung Ko, Octavia Spencer, Alison Pill, Ed Harris, Luke Pasqualino, Ewen Bremner, Vlad Ivanov, Clark Middleton, Emma Levie

In 2014 global warming has reached such a level it threatens the entire human race with extinction. To combat this, scientists release a reversing agent, CW7, into the atmosphere. To the world’s horror, CW7 destroys all life on the planet and returns it to the ice age. The only survivors are those on a train that circumnavigates the globe without ever stopping, the brain child of reclusive Mr Wilford (Harris). But even on the train there is a class system: those at the tail end exist in cramped, overcrowded conditions, while those at the front of the train live a life of conspicuous luxury. Seventeen years later, the people at the tail are guided by Gilliam (Hurt), but place their trust for a planned revolution in the hands of Curtis Everett (Evans). Aided by Edgar (Bell), Curtis is planning to reach the front of the train and take control of the “sacred engine”, thus allowing him control over the whole train (he is also receiving cryptic messages written on red paper from a mystery source).

When two of the tail people’s children are taken by the armed guards that oversee the tail section, the agony experienced by the mother of one, Tanya (Spencer), and the father of the other, Andrew (Bremner), prompts Curtis to seize his chance to move forward through the train earlier than planned. At the first section, the de facto jail, they free Namgoong Minsu (Song), a security expert whose knowledge of the train and its systems will help them get through each door they come to; they also free his daughter, Yona (Ko). As the tail people make their way from one car to the next, they discover all manner of disturbing facts about life on the train, and are hindered continually in their progress by Miss Mason (Swinton), Mr Wilford’s representative on the train.

Despite overwhelming odds, Curtis reaches the front of the train sections of the train and the gap between the people there and at the tail is thrown into sharp relief. At a classroom run by Teacher (Pill), he learns more about Mr Wilford and his plan for the train, as well as learning that the person who is sending him the messages is part of the hierarchy he seeks to overthrow. With Mr Wilford’s guards, as well as the citizens of the front sections, determined to stop him from reaching the “sacred engine”, Curtis is forced to make some difficult decisions to achieve his aim, but when he does he’s faced with an even more difficult, unexpected decision to make, one that threatens to overturn everything he’s ever believed about the train, and himself.

Snowpiercer - scene

Snowpiercer is an odd movie, a mix of high concept filmmaking supported by cod-literate meditations on the nature of existence and the need for balance in a world that’s a microcosm of the world we still live in. It’s a long, uneven movie as a result, with an expected emphasis on bone-crunching action while it attempts to say something about a range of subjects, from rampant consumerism to notions of self-sacrifice to carefully monitored euthanasia to the morality of keeping one set of passengers in what amounts to a rigorously controlled ghetto. Some of these aspects are handled adroitly (the euthanasia), others less so (the ghetto), but the movie is largely thought-provoking in its approach, and while some of the twists and turns can be seen a snow-covered mountain away, there’s still enough here to surprise the average viewer.

What stops the movie dead in its tracks sometimes (no pun intended), are the moments when something is revealed that immediately makes no logical sense. One of the biggest of these moments occurs when Curtis and his companions reach the abattoir car, and there are row upon row of chicken carcasses on display – after seventeen years, really? Another is why, considering the lethal sub-zero temperatures outside the train, none of the rails have ever split or buckled? And the biggest flaw concerns the train itself and its route: was Mr Wilford so prescient he knew CW7 wasn’t going to work even before it was conceived, because the movie makes it seem as if everything was in place from the moment the reagent was launched. (There are other moments that give pause for credulity but then the whole idea is inherently nonsensical; criticising it further would be like taking a blind man to task for failing to pin the tail on a donkey… that isn’t there.)

These lapses aside, there is still much to admire in Bong’s adaptation of the graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette (Rochette also supplies the artwork seen in the tail end of the train). As Curtis makes his way to the “sacred engine”, discovering more and more unpalatable truths about the workings of the train, there is a marked sense that he is becoming physically more restricted than he was at the tail, despite the increase in space in which to move. Bong makes being at the front just as bad as being at the end, if not worse, and Evans gives a performance that sees his character become more and more insular and compacted than he was at the beginning (he also gets to deliver an emotionally charged, yet chilling, speech towards the end that resonates even more when he reaches the “sacred engine”). Evans is one of those actors who can easily subvert his handsome looks, and here his grimy appearance is offset by a physical, tightly coiled performance that fits the mood perfectly. He’s ably supported by Swinton as the tombstone-dentured Mason (and in another, blink-and-you’ll-miss-her smaller role), Spencer as the mother obsessed with retrieving her child, and Song as the drug-addled security expert. Bell, however, has little chance to make anything of Curtis’s young follower, while Hurt lends the necessary gravitas to a role that is as close to underwritten as you’d expect.

The depiction of a new ice age is effectively maintained throughout, and the cities the train passes through are thankfully anonymous. The functions of the various train cars are imaginatively handled (the woman knitting in the garden car is a particular favourite), while the special effects are, for the most part, seamlessly integrated into the physical action. Bong directs with a visual flair that suits the movie’s mise-en-scene, and despite filming in English for the first time, doesn’t miss a nuance or moment of subtle shading. He’s ably supported by Kyung-pyo Hong’s often striking photography, and the tremendous production design by Ondrej Nekvasil, continually supporting the notion of people living in one place for so long and often surprising in its details as a result. There’s also an impressive score by Marco Beltrami that skilfully avoids the musical clichés that usually clog up dystopian flavoured movies such as this.

Rating: 7/10 – not the sci-fi masterpiece some may have been expecting (the hype surrounding proposed cuts of twenty minutes for the US release hasn’t helped), Snowpiercer is an often thought-provoking movie that tries its best to add political and social content to its storyline without skimping on the action; sometimes awkward in its execution, this still has more going on than most sci-fi movies out there these days, and is well worth seeking out.

Two Tickets to Paradise (2006)

11 Monday Nov 2013

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Two Tickets to Paradise

aka Dirt Nap; Life’s a Trip

D: D.B. Sweeney / 90m

Cast: John C. McGinley, Paul Hipp, D.B. Sweeney, Ed Harris, Janet Jones, Moira Kelly, Rex Linn Tanya Mayeux, M.C. Gainey, Mark Moses, Pat Hingle

Three friends, Mark (McGinley), Jason (Hipp) and Billy (Sweeney), embark on a road trip to see a championship football match, partly because they haven’t done anything together like this for ages, and partly to escape the troubles they each have at home.  Mark is a gambler, in deep with his bookie. When a collector (Brian Doyle-Murray, the movie’s co-scripter) comes to his home, his wife Sherry (Jones) takes their son away with her until Mark can get his gambling under control. Jason is a bit of a nerd, disrespected by his work colleagues and unlucky in love; he just wants to break away from the small town ties that bind him. And Billy, a singer who never saw a musical career materialise and who now works in a warehouse, has discovered his wife Kate (Kelly) is having an affair.

On the way to the game the three friends must overcome the usual hurdles – losing their map, arguments amongst themselves, deciding whether or not to fake their deaths, to ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms or not to – and find the inner strength to make their lives a whole lot better.

Two Tickets to Paradise - scene

To date, this is actor D.B. Sweeney’s only directorial outing, and while Two Tickets to Paradise is wildly uneven and struggles to maintain its dramatic focus, there is still much that works. Working from his own (co-written) script, Sweeney’s strengths as a director come to the fore in his handling of his cast. McGinley and Hipp give life to otherwise stock characters, and the supporting cast add flavour to the proceedings.  The lead trio have a great chemistry together and if the resolutions to their individual dilemmas are entirely predictable, then it’s no fault of theirs.

Where the movie fails is in its structure and its storyline. The events that happen during the road trip don’t always ring true, especially when the guys try to impress three stoned young women and Jason ends up remarking on one woman’s “hoe tag” (tattoo); it’s a horribly misogynistic moment that sits uneasily with the movie’s mainly light-hearted approach. There’s no urgency about the trip, even when they lose their car, and it seems as if the game is weeks away. Sherry has a change of heart about Mark and decides to meet him at the game, but misses him, only to reappear later when one of them ends up in the hospital (and how did she know they were there?). Likewise the collector, who finds Mark at a motel they hadn’t booked ahead of time.

There’s also a recurring subplot involving Billy’s inability to stand up for himself. Time and again Mark tries to goad him into reacting, and while it’s fine once, by the fourth time it’s not only tired but frustrating as well (we get it!). Add to that the unlikely romance between Jason and Janice (Dilsey Davis), born out of a shared love of darts, and you have a movie that fails to work in so many ways that it almost becomes distracting.

I say “almost” because even with all this, Two Tickets to Paradise is a lot of fun to watch. It all hinges on the performances, and the humour Sweeney and Doyle-Murray have imbued the script with. The three leads are obviously having fun and this comes across as they make the best they can of often very thin material. (It would be interesting to know if there was any improvisation that made it into the final cut.) The humour, while broad at times, is still underplayed by all three, and there are plenty of one-liners that hit the mark with well-timed accuracy. Add in a touch of pathos here and there, and Two Tickets to Paradise proves vastly more effective on the comedy front than it does with the dramatic.

Rating: 6/10 – hit-and-miss throughout but on the whole an entertaining movie with enjoyable performances from its leads.

Originally posted on thedullwoodexperiment website.