Cinema

Lady Macbeth, which has nothing to do with boring old Shakespeare beyond indicating a certain archetype (huge sighs of relief all round), is a British period drama about a young woman who, trapped in a cold, loveless marriage, finds sexual passion elsewhere, and runs with it. And runs with it. And runs with it. And if you think you’ve seen this all before — Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley, etc. — think again, my friend. In fact, if Madame Bovary were here with us right now, along with Anna and Lady Chatterley and all the other women in literature who’ve been punished for veering off message, my best guess is they’d be fist-pumping the air while crying: ‘You go, girl, you go!’ (Or similar.

Rules Don’t Apply is Warren Beatty’s first film appearance in 15 years and his first as writer, director, producer and star since Bulworth, 19 years ago. Plenty of time, then, to figure out what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it, but Rules is entirely baffling. Is it a tale of Old Hollywood? Is it a biopic of Howard Hughes? Is it a love story? Unfortunately, it can never decide, so tries to be all of the above and therefore succeeds at none. After an onscreen warning from the late Hughes himself — ‘Never check an interesting fact’ — the prologue opens in 1964, but then jumps back to 1958 as a small-town, virginal, Baptist beauty queen is flown into Hollywood as a contract actress for Hughes’s RKO studio.

The Sense of an Ending is an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker prize-winning novel starring Jim Broadbent (we love Jim Broadbent), Harriet Walter (we love Harriet Walter) and Charlotte Rampling (we love, love, love Charlotte Rampling). With such a cast, you’d be minded to think it can’t fail, and it doesn’t in this respect. The performances are transfixing throughout. But it does not satisfy emotionally, as the ending of The Sense of an Ending makes no sense. It’s a (Non)Sense of an Ending. Same with the book, which, on completing, I think I threw across the room with a: what? Is that it?

Films can be poetry — or like poetry; or poetic, at least — but can poetry ever be film? That is our question for today, and I’ll attempt to answer it, although there is absolutely no saying that I’ll be able to do so. Always touch and go, that. A Quiet Passion is Terence Davies’s biopic of the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson, author of ‘Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul’ and ‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’ (look it up; do) and, all in all, 1,800 (incredibly wonderful) poems, of which only 10 were published in her lifetime. Who was this woman? She’s fixed in our minds as a recluse who would only talk from behind her bedroom door, but was she always?

Ghost in the Shell is the Hollywood live-action remake of the 1995 Japanese anime of the same name and it’s set at a time in the future when, it would appear, the world is populated by blandly one-dimensional characters. Evil is perpetrated by our old friend, Corporate Evil Man — yes, still — and everyone communicates via dialogue so stilted and ham-fisted it makes you die inside a little. That said, at the media screening I attended we were all given a free bag of high-end crisps, so it wasn’t two hours totally wasted. (I do really like crisps, high-end or otherwise.) The film stars Scarlett Johansson, who looked liked being an interesting actress for a while but these days? Not so much.

Two films for you this week, one of which is surprisingly good and one of which does not surprise in the least. Shall we be unsurprised first? OK, Another Mother’s Son, set during the second world war on Nazi-occupied Jersey, is based on the true story of Louisa Gould, who took in an escaped Russian PoW for the course of the war. Louisa Gold, what a mensch — she would later be named a ‘Hero of the Holocaust’. But it’s the kind of story that has been told countless times (I blame Anne Frank), and here it’s told in such a perfunctory, plodding way that it brings nothing new to the party. It’s simply as if an episode of Bergerac had developed ideas above its station — or a fancy for jackboots.

To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to be watching this as a child’s plus-one, I’d say hers is the view that matters. Her favourite character was Le Fou, the baddie’s gay sidekick, though I’m not sure she realised. But then the gay scene that Disney’s been making such a fuss about, in which the adorably camp and chubby Josh Gad gives Luke Evans — the fabulous Gaston — a bit of a shoulder massage when they’re relaxing at the inn, honestly isn’t such a big deal. Sorry. This would be a digression, except that there’s been so much baggage piled on to B and the B that the ideology is what you end up looking out for.

Elle has been described as ‘a rape revenge comedy’, which seems unlikely, and also as ‘post-feminist’, which is likely as, in my experience, that simply means anything goes so long as you acknowledge that feminism has happened. The film stars Isabelle Huppert, who was Oscar-nominated for her performance, and who has repeatedly said that her character, Michèle, is not ‘a victim’ although, as you have to watch Michèle being raped or near-raped several times, I don’t know how we can be so sure about that. Perhaps I’m just not sufficiently in touch with my ‘post-feminist’ side to fully comprehend.

Gurinder Chadha’s modern comedies have fun with cultural divides. Girls kick footballs in Bend It Like Beckham. A gaggle of Punjabis hit Blackpool in Bhaji on the Beach. Jane Austen goes to Bollywood in Bride & Prejudice. In all these films (we may discount Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging), Indians and Britons grapple with the knotty ongoing project of mutual comprehension. But there are only so many perky scripts anyone can shoot about multiculturalism. In Viceroy’s House Chadha spools back 70 years to Partition, when the price of India’s independence from her colonial master was to be sundered in two, unleashing what remains the planet’s largest ever migration of refugees.

Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is one of those angst-ridden dramas focusing on what is commonly referred to as a ‘dysfunctional family’ as if there might be any other kind and it isn’t just a question of degree. This family certainly doesn’t hold back. This family has everyone shouting at everyone else for 95 minutes, blurting out brutal truths that might equally be brutal untruths (hard to tell). It has not been rapturously received. It was jeered at Cannes (even though it won the Grand Prix) and has been described by various critics as ‘insufferable’ and ‘intolerable’, which can only make you think that they haven’t seen an Avengers film for a while.

Moonlight is, in fact, a traditional story about identity, and finding out who you are, but it has rarely been better told, or more achingly, or while navigating a subject that hasn’t come up much at the cinema, if at all. (Being black and gay.) True enough, it was La La Land that swept the boards at the Baftas, and La La Land will probably sweep the boards at the Oscars, but it’s Moonlight that deserves every award going (aside from the one that’s been put aside for Annette Bening). I liked La La Land well enough at the time, but someone please make it go away now. The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, as based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s semi-autobiographical but never performed play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

Unlike with buses, you wait ages and ages for one fabulous film as framed by the older female perspective to come along and then there’s absolutely no saying when the next one will be, or if there will ever be another. (Indeed, a recent study of 2,000 films found that women in the 42–65 age bracket are given less and less to say while dialogue for men of the same age actually increases.) So don’t let this pass, and don’t do so having dismissed it as ‘a feminist film’ because it’s emotionally smart about everybody. It just takes in that portion of the human race usually left out, is all.

‘All that glisters is not gold,’ wrote Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice), and you have to hand it to the guy, as he’s nailed it on the head. This Gold certainly glisters. You look at the poster and think: ‘Oh, yes. Glistery.’ It’s directed by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote and directed the terrific Syriana. It stars Matthew McConaughey. It’s based on a true mining scandal that is as outrageous as it is fascinating. But this Gold is not gold.

Danny Boyle introduced T2 Trainspotting at the screening I attended and said that, throughout filming, he’d seen the cast looking at him and what these looks were saying was: ‘It had better not be shite, Danny.’ This may sum up all our thinking, pretty much. It had better not be shite, Danny. Danny, do what you have to do but, we beg you, don’t make it shite. Once more, with extra feeling: don’t, don’t, don’t make it shite, Danny. And? I take no pleasure in saying it (seriously, hand on heart) but this sequel is, in fact, quite shite.* I won’t bore on about the original film, even though some of us are still recovering from it — oh God, Dawn, the dead baby — and may never recover from it, and this may be part of the problem.

Let’s be clear: Jackie is a better performance than it is a film, although I suspect the performance will carry the day, even if that performance is Acting with a capital ‘A’. Was I riveted by Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy? I was. She has the look. She has the posture. She has the breathy, Marilyn Monroe-ish voice. But was I aware it was Natalie Portman, Acting? Always. And there isn’t much else here. Jackie never adds up to a whole, or anything near; we don’t penetrate ‘the myth’, and there is no real drama. So it’s disappointing albeit with a small ‘d’ because there are worse disappointments in life, and also the clothes are rather good.

You will have registered the buzz surrounding La La Land and clocked its seven Golden Globe wins and 11 Bafta nominations. However, I know you won’t believe it’s wonderful unless you hear it directly from me, so here you are: it’s wonderful. Mostly. It’s wonderful, with a few caveats. I feel bad about the caveats but if you have caveats and repress them, it can make you quite ill in later years. Best to get them out there. But just so we’re clear: La La Land with caveats is still more wonderful than almost anything else. It is written and directed by Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), who grew up loving old-style romantic musicals, even if that was only ten minutes ago (he is 31, goddammit).

A Monster Calls is a fantasy drama about a young boy whose life is crap, basically. His mother is sick. His father has scarpered. He is being bullied at school. He may also have an itch he can’t get at, for all we know. (Always hateful, that.) But he finds an ally when the ancient yew tree he can see from his window morphs into the giant tree monster who’ll take him on a journey of ‘courage, faith and truth’. This has its visually wondrous moments, and the lead (Lewis MacDougall) is a true find, but there’s too much bark, too little bite. This is no Pan’s Labyrinth, for example. Wish that it were, but it is not. Based on the bestselling book by Patrick Ness, and directed by J. A.

Comfort and joy. That’s what the song talks about, and that’s what the classic Christmas movies deliver. Whether it’s Die Hard (1988) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Home Alone (1990) or White Christmas (1954), we enjoy these films, in part, because they are so comfortable. Time and tradition have made them as familiar as carols, mince pies, woolly jumpers, and avoiding the lancinating gaze of your least favourite aunt over the sprouts. But, at the end of 2016, perhaps we can upset the usual way of things. The Christmas holiday should also be a time for Christmas Holiday, Robert Siodmak’s chilly noir from 1944.