Spencer (2021)

Following up the reviews of my favourite films of 2022 (full list here). This isn’t the only film on my list to have been comprehensively talked out already. You don’t need another review of it, you got everything you needed about a year ago. But it wasn’t released in NZ until into 2022, and despite all my many reservations, I really enjoyed it. Not because of any fondness for its subject, but because of the way it was done, the atmosphere it evoked. So here we go, another review.

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This film is a whole vibe, and either you get with it or you don’t, I somewhat suspect. I did, but I can understand people who go the other way. In terms of its felicity to ‘real life’, well I think that’s a fraught question at least; I’ve seen some people marvel at the accuracy of Kristen Stewart’s performance. I’m not enough of a devoted royal watcher to really know how much she captured Diana, but I don’t really see her specifically in Stewart’s portrayal. But this is as much a story about a woman in a particular situation, imagining how it might go down; it’s a fable and a fantasy, it’s shot in a hazy, gauzy, pastel-hued way yet somehow also manages to channel gothic horror. But Stewart’s Diana is trapped from the start, a doomed woman, even if around her the royal family seem nothing so much as zombies, not least Charles (Jack Farthing) and Her Majesty, who have the deadest of eyes. So she only has her head to delve further into; she gets visions of Anne Boleyn and increasingly dissociative fragments of an alternate reality, which we know is not her own because she’s giddy and happy, moving down endless corridors like Kubrick’s The Shining, cautiously at first perhaps, but with an increasing abandon as the film progresses. Against my best instincts — because I really do not like or want to hear about the British royal family — it manages to be a beautiful film, and an excellent performance as ever by Stewart who goes in fully and bodily to the whole thing. Whether it captures Diana per se, I can’t say, but it captures something fleeting, somehow both archly camp and deeply felt, about an impossible life.

CREDITS
Director Pablo Larraín; Writer Steven Knight; Cinematographer Claire Mathon; Starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins; Length 117 minutes.
Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 6 February 2022.

Criterion Sunday 558: Topsy-Turvy (1999)

I’m not sure if this is his first period drama, but it’s certainly now a strand of filmmaking that Mike Leigh fairly regularly pursues, and he has a meticulous approach. I daresay some may construe it as boring — and I certainly did with Peterloo (2018) — though here his approach draws out a drama of artistic creation, which has a self-reflective aspect, especially as W.S. Gilbert (Willie, or “Schwenk” to his family) ruminates on how he will conceive his next project, while steadfastly refusing to engage with his audience. Jim Broadbent’s Gilbert is the highlight, bringing a finely tuned comic quality to a man who didn’t seem to find anything funny and certainly seems like an unpleasant person to have been around. Allan Corduner as the rather more boisterous and pleasant Arthur Sullivan, along with the rest of the cast, does sterling work, and there’s a lot of joy to be had in each of these performances. It’s the backstage work, the rehearsals and performances, the bickering and pettiness of the actors as they apply makeup and run their lines, which provides the heart of this endeavour, and I found the time flew by for much of these scenes.

I found too that Leigh was fairly successful in avoiding the rather large elephant in the room, which is to say the latent racism of the entire premise and execution of The Mikado, by focusing on the extremely shortsighted nature of the Englishmen and women who put it all together, along with a subtle critique of colonialist exoticism on the part of a cohort of people who never had any personal engagement with any of the places brought back to them in the imperial capitals (lauding questionable military heroes like Gordon of Khartoum in one scene, as well as the patriotic puffery of a young Winston Churchill in another passing reference). It also feels important that Leigh included a scene where a group of Japanese women could barely contain their confusion when presented with the ‘three little girls’ of The Mikado in person, as Gilbert tried to mine them for some expressive tips. For all that I don’t personally find a great deal to enjoy in the work of Gilbert and Sullivan, I can still appreciate some of its appeal, but this is a story of putting on a show and it really lives in the details of that shared endeavour, a shared madness and folly at too many points.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Mike Leigh; Cinematographer Dick Pope; Starring Jim Broadbent, Allan Corduner, Lesley Manville, Ron Cook, Timothy Spall, Martin Savage; Length 160 minutes.

Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Sunday 20 August 2000 (and most recently on Blu-ray at home, Wellington, Saturday 30 July 2022).

Two Short Reviews of Recent Films Set in the 19th Century: Mr. Turner and The Homesman (both 2014)

Two more short reviews of films I just haven’t been able to summon up the enthusiasm to think about at great length. Not that either of them is bad, mind.

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Mr. Turner (2014)

This latest by Mike Leigh seems to have divided audiences and critics, though by most metrics it has done very well at the box office, a fine feat considering its length. Presumably it appeals to the heritage crowd, what with being a period film, and at that it does very well, conjuring a good sense of 19th century London, with its galleries and its fine houses, as well as its muck and dirt, not to mention the failings of medicine (Dorothy Atkinson’s servant gets progressively more blighted by psoriasis as the film goes on). At the film’s heart is Timothy Spall’s JMW Turner, a painter of some of the finest works of English art, who here is a gruffly monosyllabic grouch who communicates more in coughs and splutters than with words (Spall’s performance is in fact second only this year to Gérard Depardieu’s in Welcome to New York for guttural grunting). Yet it’s an oddly disjointed film, which moves along in vignettes — Turner at the Royal Academy disputing with his fellow painters, Turner at home, Turner on holiday in Margate, this kind of thing. To be fair, this gives it the sense of a series of (moving) paintings, much like Turner’s work, and like his work a lot of the film is very beautifully shot. However, even the most artfully composed film could never approach the breathtaking vistas of Turner’s later paintings, so perhaps my point of comparison is just unfair in the first place.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Mike Leigh; Cinematographer Dick Pope; Starring Timothy Spall, Marion Bailey, Dorothy Atkinson; Length 149 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Haymarket, London, Tuesday 4 November 2014.

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The Homesman (2014)

Another film set in the 19th century — in fact, covering many of the same years as Mr. Turner, albeit on another side of the Atlantic — is this film by actor turned writer/director Tommy Lee Jones. His debut film as director was the wonderful and underrated The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), a film with a great feeling for border territories, and this new film is again set on a frontier of sorts. I’m tempted to call it a Western, though it’s not set in the west but rather in Nebraska, and it deals with a sturdy frontierswoman, Mary Bee Cuddy (played capably by Hilary Swank), who for various reasons has to accompany three mad women back to civilisation, where they can be (more) properly cared for. She soon picks up Tommy Lee’s disreputable George Briggs to help her, and thus begins their journey. It’s all very ably and attractively shot by veteran DoP Rodrigo Prieto, and in the two central roles Jones and Swank make for a fine odd couple. But things take a turn later on which is both unexpected and abrupt, though undoubtedly it suggests (and, more widely, the film does capture well) a sense of the difficulties attendant on life in this era and location. In which respect, of course, the roles for the mad women are rather thankless, amounting to little more than gurning and groaning at times. Yet, while it’s a film that feels as if it has two distinct parts, it certainly also has its virtues.

CREDITS
Director Tommy Lee Jones; Writers Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver (based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout); Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto; Starring Hilary Swank, Tommy Lee Jones; Length 122 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld West India Quay, London, Tuesday 25 November 2014.

Upside Down (2012)

I saw this as the closing film of London’s Sci-Fi Film Festival in May, and I was hoping to write about it earlier, but what I can say, it took me some time to come to terms with what must surely rank as the silliest film I’ve seen in the last year. There is quite a lot to enjoy in the film, especially at the level of set design, special effects and cinematography. Sadly this doesn’t extend to the script, with its ridiculously improbable physics and reliance on creaky plot devices that would have seemed cliched in a romantic movie of a hundred years ago and which lack the classic timelessness that perhaps the writer/director hoped for. It probably doesn’t help that the young leads — an English actor with whose work I was not previously familiar, and the perky Kirsten Dunst — don’t really have the charisma to make these lovers fully believable. However, the chief issue is also the central premise of the film: that there are two planets so closely interrelated that buildings can be constructed between the two, but between which characters are not allowed to travel (it’s the classic upstairs-downstairs class-based scenario). In some ways it’s a productive metaphor, this idea that different classes literally live on different planets which are nevertheless so close that they can be seen from one another. The two central characters thus only meet because they’ve managed to find a secretive mountaintop that brings them almost within touching distance — a mountaintop, it must be said, that only they appear to know about and which they seem to be able to reach at very short notice. And then there’s the way the gravitational pull of each planet exerts itself only over those who are from that place, along with an extra kicker that you gradually burn up the longer you spend away from your home, meaning our male protagonist must weight himself down in order to visit his beloved on her planet and can only be with her for a short time. Oh and the writer has added a bit of selective amnesia for the heroine. The more one thinks about these plot manipulations, the more one’s head hurts, but it’s never really possible to overlook them or excuse their stupidity, no matter how compelling the film can be in other respects. A noble failure, then, perhaps.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Juan Diego Solanas; Cinematographer Pierre Gill; Starring Jim Sturgess, Kirsten Dunst, Timothy Spall; Length 107 minutes.
Seen at Stratford Picturehouse, London, Sunday 4 May 2014.