Little Women (2019)

Given this film has only just been released, it’s a late entry into my contenders for favourite of the year. To my shame, I’ve never seen a previous adaptation, and I’ve had the book unread on my shelf for half my life. I intend to remedy both points, as I’ve now ordered a copy of the much-beloved 1994 version by Gillian Armstrong; I was a teenager when it came out which may be why I didn’t see it then. Still, this latest film convinces me that it’ll be worthwhile.

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I’ve seen some criticisms of this that mostly follow along the lines of the way it’s put together — not just the tricksy narrative conceit of bridging a seven year gap in the sisters’ storylines by constant cross-cutting, and the way that the death of [you all know which one right; we all know that surely by now, this story having been made so very many times?] becomes so emblematic of the death of their childhoods, as they move into a world of adult responsibilities… but also the way that the editing feels rather choppy, as if in a rush to move through this story. I can understand that some might suggest it would make a better miniseries, but honestly I think there’s little need to dwell too long on such a familiar story.

Despite not having read the original or seen any previous adaptation, the character arcs feel somehow very familiar, even as director Greta Gerwig brings something modern to the story. I imagine the older sister Meg has always felt a little bit underpowered (and requires someone of the iconic stature of Emma Watson to even bring a little bit of pathos to a very telegraphed storyline). Beth has humanity here, ironically a little bit more life to her than I had expected, but as presented it feels as if Little Women is canonically all about the conflict between Jo and Amy — and those more familiar with the story can put me right if this isn’t the case. Both Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh are wonderful actors, perhaps the best of anyone in the cast (and this is a cast with Laura Dern and Meryl Streep in it), but they capture the most attention, and there’s as much nuance in both performances as in any of recent memory (as much as in Streep’s, doing some of her finest work in years I think for the number of scenes she has). There are, for example, inflections to Ronan’s face in certain scenes that pull me back strongly to Cate Blanchett in Carol (if only because I’ve seen that film so often and so recently, not that I’m suggesting anything about Jo, though it certainly did cross my mind).

Aside from the acting, there’s a heavy emphasis on the monetary, proprietorial nature of marriage in this era, the sense of romantic partnership as transaction, which is what makes Amy’s storyline in particular so freighted with pathos. There’s this short scene where Streep’s elderly aunt calls Amy in from painting, something she loves and enjoys and wants to make a success out of (despite her self-awareness of her own limitations), to baldly inform her that the fate of the family basically rests on her making a good marriage and to forget about the frivolity of learning and artistic endeavour she’s currently engaged in. There are several scenes of this nature — in which women are confronted matter-of-factly with the reality of their world — that pass by almost subliminally, given the aforementioned speed of the film and its editing, but which resoundingly linger as these contrapuntal notes in what is otherwise a beautiful, warm and enriching film about life, with all the autumnal beauty and familial warmth you’d expect from a U-rated period drama. I suppose it could feel a little heavy-handed, but I think it all works enormously well within the context of a properly family film to make clear the constraints within which the characters live.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Greta Gerwig (based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott); Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux; Starring Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Eliza Scanlen, Meryl Streep; Length 135 minutes.
Seen at Odeon Holloway, London, Thursday 26 December 2019.

Two 2018 Biopics Directed by Women: On the Basis of Sex and Mary Queen of Scots

I don’t like to feature films I find a little disappointing, but both of these biopics failed to live up to the expectations created by the respective subjects and the many fine actors involved. Still, it’s worth shining some light on them as both are directed by women (albeit both written by men), and perhaps others will enjoy them more than I did. Both have a lot to commend them, after all, despite my tepid reviews.

Brooklyn (2015)

This blog has been a fan of young Irish actor Saoirse Ronan since we (ahem, I) first encountered her only a short couple of years ago in Byzantium (although of course her career stretched back some time before this, as I’ve been belatedly catching up with). It would be difficult to claim any of the films in which she takes a lead role as particularly great (I remain fond of How I Live Now, but perhaps I’m in a minority there), but these — and even the ensemble casts she’s been amongst — have all been enlivened by her facility for getting inside a character. Her latest character is Eilis, an impoverished small-town girl in early-50s Ireland who moves across the Atlantic for a chance at a better life. It’s an immigrant’s story, told with generosity and affection, as she is torn between the new life she’s making for herself and the old country. A friend of mine calls the film “low-stakes” in the sense that it becomes clear that things will work out for Eilis whatever happens — at a story level, she has a choice between two good, decent men (Emory Cohen in New York, and Domhnall Gleeson in Ireland) — but from the character’s point-of-view these choices are pretty critical, and the very fact that men and matrimony should play a central part also reflects on her society and its limitations on her own aspirations. That said, she works hard to achieve a career in book-keeping, and the film’s focus remains on Eilis and her own future, meaning it’s far from depressing. It’s also curious the extent to which it avoids any overt sentimentality (orchestral score aside, though even that is a lot more sympathetic than it could have been in the wrong hands), achieving a rich emotional register without being melodramatic. To that we can credit screenwriter Nick Hornby, a dab hand at this sort of thing, as well as director John Crowley, and the glorious images conjured up by cinematographer Yves Bélanger. But most of all, we can credit Saoirse Ronan, an actor who can improve even the patchiest of source materials, and this source is not patchy at all.

CREDITS
Director John Crowley; Writer Nick Hornby (based on the novel by Colm Tóibín); Cinematographer Yves Bélanger; Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Julie Walters, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent; Length 112 minutes.
Seen at Picturehouse Central, London, Tuesday 10 November 2015.

Atonement (2007)

Director Joe Wright is pretty decent at literary adaptations, which is a way of saying I liked his Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina more than Hanna. In between all those films was Atonement, which I think was a pretty big deal at the time; I remember reading the novel and really liking it, but it’s been too long for me to make any kinds of meaningful comparison between the two. That said, on its own merits this is a fine film and showcases that both Keira Knightley and James McAvoy are excellent actors with quite a bit of emotional depth (though we already knew that about the young Saoirse Ronan, who plays the character seeking the atonement of the title). It’s all very doomy, set against a backdrop of the build-up to and aftermath of World War II, but it’s a handsome and diverting production all the same. Also, Knightley wears a particularly excellent green dress for those who appreciate that sort of thing.

CREDITS
Director Joe Wright; Writers Christopher Hampton (based on the novel by Ian McEwan); Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey; Starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan; Length 123 minutes.
Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Sunday 21 June 2015.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world.
— Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (1923, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

Like perhaps many (too many?) in the English-speaking world, I have never encountered the writing of Stefan Zweig, from whom director and writer Wes Anderson claims inspiration for this confected mittel-European tale set over three successive post-World War II generations. However, I find myself drawn to comparisons with the work of Marcel Proust, which I am reading at the moment and have been for about the last year (making such connections rather more inevitable perhaps; I don’t know whether the quote above is really relevant, but I read it this morning, so it’s in my mind, and it does seem to speak to Anderson’s oeuvre). Mainly it’s the sense that this huge cast of characters have been distilled down into a series of fragmentary glimpses as relayed via an unreliable narrator through many layers of history and nostalgia and refracted by a world-changing war. It’s this last detail which seems most to suffuse the film, for it provides most of the pathos, that sense which is only hinted at around the edges and in small almost-throwaway lines, as it becomes clear in the telling that all of these characters — indeed this whole worldview and way of life — have since disappeared. But in many ways that’s what Anderson’s filmmaking has been building to, conjuring up a spectral reminiscence of a lost world.

Re-reading my pretentious opening paragraph, I suspect that it’s just in the nature of the film to encourage this kind of reading. The Grand Budapest Hotel is not abstruse or difficult in any way, but it is layered. The key metaphor for me is the elaborate layered cakes made by the bakers in the film, Mendl’s, which seem to reflect the way that the film is structured, not to mention its candy-coloured set design and the superficial sweetness of its surfaces. Most notably, the film is nested within four different generations of narration: the first is a young student visiting a statue of the Great Author and reading his eponymous account of his earlier life at the titular hotel; the second, the Author (Tom Wilkinson) at home in 1985; the third, ostensibly drawn from the book, is that Author as a young man (Jude Law) talking to Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) in the decaying 1968 lobby of the hotel; and finally, there’s Zero as a lobby boy (Tony Revolori) working under the concierge Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) in the hotel’s 1932 glory days. For all these levels of narrative fragmentation, most of the film is set in the 1930s strand. The four are distinguished by different aspect ratios (a Cinemascope widescreen sweep for the late-1960s, with 1.85:1 at varying zooms for the more recent scenes, and finally ‘Academy ratio’ of 1.33:1 for the oldest), which along with the usual obsessively-detailed set and costume design, means it never gets too confusing when the film jumps around in time.

The actual plot of the film is something of a caper, as dapper roué Gustave H. is bequeathed the fortune of elderly heiress Madame Celine Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Tilda Swinton), which is quickly contested by her diabolical sons and leads to plenty of deadly ado, set against the background of a coming war. The posters already make clear quite how many people are in this film, but they and their stories all support the central picaresque tale of young Zero, accompanying Gustave everywhere, and in the process finding his way in the world. In the film’s title, location and the year of its setting, I am reminded of Grand Hotel (1932), itself a multi-character story of criss-crossing lives and old world European opulence. Perhaps more atmospherically linked are the mannered and beautiful films of Max Ophüls, such as La Ronde (1950) or his luridly coloured final work Lola Montès (1953) — indeed one of the best of his films (Letter from an Unknown Woman, 1948) is also based on a work by Zweig.

My point, in any case, is that Anderson has crafted a richly-detailed work that harks back to a history of twentieth-century culture and politics. One needn’t pick up all the references, so crammed in are they, but it adds depth to what at its heart seems like a very silly story with a large cast of colourful characters. All the small details accrue in the mind and work their way into the imagination, such that a week after viewing it I still have a strong sense of it and its delirious charms, which is more than can be said for most films. I can’t comment so soon on whether it’s Anderson’s best work (The Royal Tenenbaums remains my favourite), but it’s a strong reminder that he hasn’t yet disappeared within his own pretensions as many including myself had at one point feared. If he is here conjuring something of an identical beauty to those earlier films, it’s one that continues to resonate.

Update after Second Viewing: There’s a precarious sense of mortality which subtly encroaches around the edges of many of the film’s otherwise superficially innocuous action. It took me quite a while, after all, to realise that The Royal Tenenbaums was more than just a jolly colourful farce and realise it was laden with affecting pathos (which came home to me when I watched it with my wife, and found myself in tears at the end). Still, the febrile comic persona of Ralph Fiennes’ Gustave H. comes through all the more strongly, with the running gags of his inappropriate swearing, not to mention the way his recitations of romantic poetry are consistently cut off, remaining especially funny on second viewing.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Wes Anderson; Cinematographer Robert Yeoman; Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Jude Law, F. Murray Abraham, Saoirse Ronan; Length 99 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Haymarket, London, Sunday 24 March 2014, and later at Cineworld Fulham Road, London, Tuesday 1 April 2014.

How I Live Now (2013)

I like going to see films for which I have precisely no expectations nor any idea even what they’re about except in the barest terms, so long as I can be confident they are crafted by good hands. In director Kevin Macdonald and, especially, star Saoirse Ronan, I have no qualms about the talent behind the film, and therefore the film was rather a delight, an almost bucolic story of young love set against the improbable backdrop (for its lush setting) of World War III.

In a week which sees the release in the UK of two quite different but both very Scottish films (Sunshine on Leith and Filth), How I Live Now stands out by seeming rather very English. Part of that is its setting in the English countryside, and the film has a real sense for the shambolic rural farmstead, with its cosy homeliness, which makes it all quite alien for newcomer Daisy, played by Saoirse Ronan as a brightly-clothed yet sullen Californian teenager. It takes her time to get used to this earthier, messier pastoral existence with its lack of internet connection replaced by walks in the woods and impromptu swimming trips in nearby ponds (rather than immaculately kept azure-blue pools). Director Macdonald and his cinematographer Franz Lustig linger over the autumnal colours and golden setting sun, interspersing extreme close-ups of faces and flora, glinting and shimmering attractively as a sort of natural analogue to the first blush of Daisy’s feelings towards her cousin Edmond (George MacKay). It’s clear that Daisy has never visited her English family before, and while it’s not evident why she’s come now, nevertheless she makes her displeasure known.

The backdrop to what one presumes is World War III (though perhaps it’s just a civil war) is very much that: a backdrop. The feelings between the lead characters is the thing, while the war is glimpsed only through the teenagers’ eyes, so we see hints of militaristic build-up around the airport when Daisy arrives, flashes of news reports hinting at major world events, and the only adult figure — Daisy’s aunt, a high-level civil servant — is only fleetingly seen and she disappears almost as soon as she shows up. For this is a film primarily constructed around the way its teenage protagonists relate to one another and the world. This means it never really becomes clear who the antagonists in the war are, though it would appear they are home-grown anti-government revolutionaries or anarchists. When Daisy is separated from the farm and her male cousins, this kicks off a process whereby she struggles to return to the farm and the comforts of home — and of course, the love of Edmond.

For me it’s the first half of the film, which details Daisy’s gradual adjustment to the English rural lifestyle, that is the film’s strongest. Her antagonistic relationship to her new setting is detailed rather acutely, and her cousins (particularly the middle brother Isaac) remain fairly chirpy in the face of this initial rejection of their lives. Once the war properly breaks out, we’re thrust into a world of internment camps and survivalist instict, in which Daisy gets to go all Hunger Games, by leading and protecting her youngest cousin Piper (Harley Bird) through a newly-threatening countryside. This leads to lessons and hard truths — not to mention a notable hardening of her emotions in the face of war’s brutality — but it’s never quite so boldly stated, and there remains plenty of subtlety in Ronan’s controlled performance. And although it is hinted that Edmond shares some deeper understanding with Daisy (his recognition of the noise she must tune out seems to hint at the densely overlapping sonic textures that occasionally flare up as she looks at herself in the mirror), it never overtly moves into the mystical or supernatural: this remains a world grounded in reality, unlike certain other teen-focused love stories of recent memory.

It seems that How I Live Now is destined to be underappreciated, for its charms are very much the unflashy ones of strong acting performances supporting complex characters in the absence of any big effects-driven momentum. I wonder too how it will play outside the UK, where the pastoral setting is a very specific and acutely-felt vision of England, supported by such artists as Fairport Convention and Nick Drake on the soundtrack. However, it deserves to be widely-known not just for its performances but for its narrow focus on just this core of young characters. It’s certainly one of the most appealing narratives of wartime dislocation I can remember.

CREDITS
Director Kevin Macdonald; Writers Tony Grisoni, Jeremy Brock and Penelope Skinner; Cinematographer Franz Lustig; Starring Saoirse Ronan, George MacKay, Harley Bird; Length 101 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Wood Green, London, Saturday 5 October 2013.

Byzantium (2012)

It’s become obvious to me since starting this blog quite recently, that it’s important to engage with film at a wider level than just going to check out the latest multiplex offerings (though I shall continue doing that of course). One of the most vibrant expressions of film culture is the film festival, of which London, like all large cities, boasts a great variety.

This is now the 12th year of London’s Annual International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film, though they prefer to be known as the hyphen-happy Sci-Fi-London for short, not least because the annual festival is just one aspect of their ongoing engagement with this niche of film culture. However, the festival is the highlight of their calendar, and every year brings a diverse new crop of films that bear some relationship to the stated subject, though in a range of genres and styles, with quality ranging from the amateur to auteurist. It’s all enthusiastically brought together by possibly the most idiosyncratic and charismatic of festival directors, Louis Savy.

This year is no exception, and this opening night film was given an engaging intro by Louis, followed by a Q&A with the film’s producer Stephen Woolley, as well as its charming and eloquent writer Moira Buffini, and cast member Daniel Mays. Many of the other screenings also feature special guests. The festival runs until 6 May this year, split between the (very comfortable and pleasant) Stratford Picturehouse and the BFI Southbank.

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Before I even start this review, can I just state, if it wasn’t already obvious to you, how spectacular the film poster is. It’s a gloriously eyecatching image featuring the titular hotel, which is ostensibly located on the Hastings seafront where most of the film is set. If the movie itself can’t possibly compete with this singular, gorgeously baroque vision, its images are still wonderfully striking, thanks to the work of Director of Photography Sean Bobbitt, who also recently worked on The Place Beyond the Pines (2013).

The two films share more similarity than just the cinematographer, though. They both have a certain epic grandeur to their storytelling; after all, in its title Byzantium references the ancient Greek city (now Istanbul) and its empire, just as the other film’s title references the rich traditions of Native American storytelling. Such epic qualities in this film are only enhanced by the settings, from the crumbling, decadent hotel of the poster with its striking wrought-iron lift, to the dilapidated pier grimly overpowering the concrete seafront walkway, and ultimately the wild and crashing seas of the primaeval island setting (this last filmed not in Hastings, but on the western coast of Ireland).

At its most reductive, it’s a vampire film, but like any of these, the mythology is just an opening to deal with other issues: dislocation from society and relationships, mortality and morality, and, peculiar perhaps to this interpretation, gender relations. For here the two lead characters are a 200-year-old mother and daughter (played by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan respectively), whose peripatetic lives are intertwined with a mysterious Brotherhood, an ancient (and dare I say, Byzantine) organisation dedicated at once to a mysterious ‘Code’ and, perhaps more urgently, to being a bunch of nasty misogynists desperate to cling to their patriarchal entitlement. The story follows the two leads as they flee one of the Brotherhood to the English seaside, where past and present are intermingled in the reminiscences of Ronan’s character Eleanor Webb.

For the most part, the acting is superb, particularly the uncanny gaze and tightly-coiled enigmatic silence of Saoirse Ronan. Supporting her, the rest of the cast do well within the setting, including some early-19th century period-costume turns by Jonny Lee Miller and Sam Riley, with equally period-appropriate names Ruthven and Darvell calling to mind the earliest vampiric writings. There’s also a nice uncredited appearance from Tom Hollander as a well-meaning teacher.

Along with the above-mentioned epic quality to the narrative, it also shares with Pines the sometimes aggravating habit of constructing neatly convenient situations, characters and traits in order to move forward the plot and develop salient themes. To take some examples from the start, we have the lead character’s habit of writing down her secret story and throwing it to the wind, an old man who discovers her truth and motivates the first engagement with the morality of vampirism, encounters with Caleb Landry Jones’ dying teenager, and the arrival of Daniel Mays’s john with his opulent and recently-vacated seafront property. However, when placed in the context of the whole film, these interventions seem of a piece with its grandiose mythologising; a scene like that of Arterton writhing half-naked under a waterfall of blood would certainly seem ridiculously camp on its own, but by the time it occurs in the film, it hardly seems too out of place.

Certainly, it’s a fine line the film walks, at points recalling the somber atmospherics of Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In, 2008), yet at others attaining more of a grand Guignol melodrama. If it does show anything though, it’s that vampirism is not just for the boys.

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CREDITS
Director Neil Jordan; Writer Moira Buffini (based on her play A Vampire Story); Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt; Starring Saoirse Ronan, Sam Riley, Gemma Arterton, Jonny Lee Miller; Length 118 minutes.
Seen at Stratford Picturehouse, London, Tuesday 30 April 2013.