Unfinished business: "The Town"

Ben Affleck must have been keyed-up by the rapturous reception afforded to his directorial debut Gone Baby Gone. So keyed-up, in fact, that he elected, with his second feature behind the camera, to take on a renewed challenge: the rehabilitation of Ben Affleck, screen actor. For though Baby provided a showcase role for Affleck's baby brother Casey, big Ben kept himself offscreen throughout that debut, marking a clean break from a past that gave us Gigli and Pearl Harbor; well, with The Town, Affleck the actor is back front and centre, a little older and wiser and more reflective, but not noticeably less square-jawed, which means he looks somewhat out of place onscreen in AA meetings populated by extras who've visibly lived a life.

As troubled Boston bank robber Doug MacRay, the director-star grants himself moments that wouldn't have been beyond the Affleck of old: an early instance of shirtlessness, as though to demonstrate to us he hasn't entirely gone to seed, and a sex scene with a trashed-up Blake Lively, underlining (in a perhaps not strictly necessary fashion, given the gun-toting we've already observed him practising in his day job) the character's potency. Yet Affleck also challenges himself in ways we've not previously seen, having to go toe-to-toe with (and not appearing ill-matched against) actors of the calibre of Chris Cooper, Jeremy Renner and Mad Men's Jon Hamm - in the latter's case, initiating a battle royale of the squarejaws, with the winner presumably going through to meet Luke Wilson in the final.

The reason for all this confrontation is that MacRay and his crew have just pulled off a score that would have been considered perfect - the robbers getting away alive with the cash, leaving the FBI precious little to go on - were it not for the one aspect that's been preying on Doug's mind: the fate of Claire (Rebecca Hall), the bank manager Doug's impetuous, trigger-happy cohort Jem (Renner) took hostage in the wake of the heist and left standing on the banks of the Charles river, awaiting the worst. Something about Claire's humanity, her grace under fire - her general all-round loveliness, in which the casting of Hall plays a not inconsiderable part - nags at Doug: when he discovers she lives in his neighborhood - that she is, in fact, a socially mobile one of them - he follows her to the launderette, asks her out, and eventually ends up in bed with the one witness who could send him away for the rest of his life.

The Town is, then, the business of countless smalltown crime dramas: the history of a conflicted man held back from a fresh start, a bright future, by the ties that bind him to a criminal past. (Needless to say, Jem is not best pleased when he hears Doug has taken a shine to the witness, and has only the best intentions toward her.) The distinguishing feature here - as Gone Baby Gone's working-class Boston milieu suggested - is that Affleck and his co-writer Aaron Stockard really know how this town works: you see it in the manner Doug's dreams of escape are made literal in the double signifier of the planes passing over a neighborhood generally impoverished enough to sit under a flight path. Affleck extends that very Wire-like policy of casting non-professionals in supporting roles for extra authenticity, and the script displays a good ear for telling detail: Hamm's G-man bemoaning there's no way his unit can get 24-hour surveillance warrants on the robbers "unless they convert to Islam", a prison being summarised as so soft, "they get Ben and Jerry's ice cream".

The filmmakers' deep-rooted feel for the various strata and sub-strata of their location - a locale especially conducive to bank robberies, as the crime statistics show - grants them licence to shoot exhilarating getaway pursuits through narrow mazes of brownstone streets, where some degree of local knowledge would indeed be preferable, if not a lifesaver; but Affleck and Stockard are also alert to subtler, class-oriented tensions in a way few contemporary American screenwriters truly are: clock the casual, derogatory use of the term "toonie" (or townie) to denote some form of social mobility denied to the city's underclasses, or the utterly dismissive manner in which Pete Postlethwaite's florist/Mob boss, strafing the pricks off his roses even as he lances an even greater thorn in Doug's side, sums up Claire as "a nice new girlfriend who lives on the Park".

In other words, it's a chance for Affleck the director to show he can handle both character and action, and in this, he mostly succeeds. True, Hamm's underdramatised detection doesn't connect all its dots on camera, and - depending upon personal taste - it'll either be a generic pleasure or an inevitability that Doug gets boxed into performing one last, fateful heist. (Though it's a nice irony it should involve him donning police uniform, with a further dab of local flavour in its Fenway Park setting, home to baseball's Red Sox - this is, we gather, a last, desperate shot at the big leagues, embarked upon by a player facing up to obligatory retirement.) We've seen worse Michael Mann impersonations, not least by Mann himself in his recent projects.

The new Ben Affleck is, however, capable of far greater self-awareness than the dumb ox of yore, referring to The Town in press interviews as "a modest work" - and whenever money becomes too tight to mention, for filmmakers and audience-goers alike, a modest work, one which doesn't overly peacock or flaunt its lavish expenses, may just fit the bill to perfection. Where Gone Baby Gone was a smash-and-grab raid on our emotions, from a personality we never thought capable of such things, The Town is certainly a stealthier, more insinuating work, with the aim of sneaking something intelligent, grown-up even, into the multiplexes - in this, it joins Inception as among the most encouraging features released by a major studio in 2010.

It is, for one, very finely acted, with not one of the leads striking a false note, right down to Titus Welliver as Hamm's weary sidekick, and ex-Gossip Girl Lively, who - after last year's The Private Lives of Pippa Lee - here confirms a growing reputation for delivering eye-catching supporting work, absolutely embodying the frustration of a young mother who's just learnt her sometime fuckbuddy has given his new girl a diamond necklace, while she's left clinging onto his baby: one way of understanding The Town is as a portrait of a city as unfinished business, a catalogue of loose ends a man might trip on while walking these streets. As for Affleck - underlining that his directorial debut was no fluke, but merely phase one of an impressive new development strategy - I think we can all take a deep breath and safety exclaim: Gigli-what now?

The Town opens nationwide from Friday.

Holding on: "Frozen"

Some horror directors get their ideas from their dreams, in the dark; others take their cue from ancient lore, or seek to reinterpret classic genre texts for all they're worth. Some, evidently, take their inspiration while getting stoned in a ski lodge on vacations paid for by the profits from the DVD release of their last film. With Frozen, the writer-director Adam Green follows up the trashily pleasurable Hatchet with a what-if proposition that adheres to the Open Water template, wondering what might happen were its characters to be stranded among the elements in the middle of nowhere; the novelty is that the water comes in solid, rather than liquid form, and actually proves the very least of their worries.

Three college students - new couple Kevin Zegers and Emma Bell, plus nice guy/spare wheel Shawn Ashmore - are left hanging on a chairlift a hundred feet or so above the ground when the ski resort they're staying at shuts down prematurely for a week in anticipation of bad weather. At first, the hold-up is no more than inconvenient: you try answering a call of nature with your friends sitting this close beside you. ("I can hold it in," Bell insists. "For a week?," comes the response, as realisation of their plight slowly filters through.) Soon it's become a matter of life and death, as the snow begins to blow in and a pack of wolves gathers beneath the chairlift, accentuating already mounting tensions between two long-time bros who went up this hill in search of extreme pursuits, and the girlfriend who's (unintentionally) come between them.

As signalled by the opening close-ups of cogs and winding wheels at work, Frozen could merely have become a mechanical exercise on Green's part, testing how long he could string us (and these characters) out, yet it's also surprisingly well fleshed out by likable performers you want to see come down off the mountain in one piece. Full marks to the stunt doubles, asked to perform (without obvious digital safety nets) the kind of high-wire acts more common to the era of Harold Lloyd; and to the make-up team for rendering literal and, indeed, visceral the business of frostbite, chapped lips and skin welded to metal safety bars. Praise should go to Green, too, who - with DOP Will Bart - composes stark, widescreen, you-are-there images, cleverly marshalling the available space in such a way as to prey upon latent viewer vertigo, while generally distancing himself from the adolescent sniggering and easy yuks of his debut. Given the present financial climate, I doubt many of us had trips planned to Val d'Isere, anyway, but there's plenty in this canny, suspenseful piece to keep those who have off-piste.

Frozen opens nationwide from Friday.

Blah, blah, blah: "Eat Pray Love"

Everything comes in threes (the magic number!) in Eat Pray Love, Glee creator Ryan Murphy's extrapolation from the Elizabeth Gilbert lifestyle bestseller. Julia Roberts' quest to find herself takes her to three locations - Italy, India and Bali - and involves crossing paths (and hearts) with three men. There is the Immature Boy-Man: Billy Crudup as the husband trying to force Roberts' Liz into a lifestyle she doesn't want to lead. There is The Rebound Kid: James Franco as a practising yogi who advises our heroine to look East, and who is paid such little attention in general by the film he comes to resemble a signpost with a winning smile.

Finally - it taking something of an eternity to get to him, in a film running two hours and twenty minutes - there is The One in Javier Bardem: knocking our heroine off her bicycle in Bali, and - shortly thereafter - coming to sweep her off her feet. Bardem is such an unlikely, scruffily vivacious screen presence - he looks like a hunky troll, keen to hide Liz under his bridge - that Eat Pray Love can't help but pick up upon his arrival, but his is a nothing part, really, and these three actors, carefully selected to represent an appeal to each of the film's three primary markets (the US, Europe and Asia), are never much more than stepping stones in the Gilbert-Murphy worldview: Liz only ever seems to be a hop, skip and jump away from happiness.

As a travelogue, the film adheres closely to Hollywood's usual selective recognition of other cultures. Italy is a Fellini movie circa 1960, all football, scooters and groups of lusty young men chasing dark-haired lovelies through the village square. It is also, lest we forget, a place of food, thus the ideal location for the film to set out its lite-feminism thesis with regard to body image: faced with a burgeoning muffin-top, Liz insists "tomorrow, we go buy bigger jeans", which might have sounded authentically liberating if it didn't seem so much like one form of consumption superceding another. This central section starts to resemble I Am Love stripped of the latter film's distinguishing style: instead of Tilda Swinton going into raptures over a hand-crafted prawn risotto, we get Julia wolfing down a very ordinary-looking spag bog, which I think even my limited culinary gifts might have stretched to.

The whole is as soapy and diaphanous as one might expect from the source material - we're left in little doubt Gilbert's thesis came first, and everything else (including a multi-million-dollar merchandising industry, its own guarantor of a kind of happiness) followed - but it has lively pockets. During the couple's alimony hearing, Crudup's explosion of rage and heartbreak is an example of premium-grade thespian empathy for a character who knows he can't, or won't allow himself to, grow up; Richard Jenkins has a film-stopping monologue as a fellow traveller recalling the day his wife and child left him - a moment that obliges Roberts to listen for a while, rather than resort to her default mode of gabble and gush.

You could argue these are no more than Oscar-night clips, but - as his present TV day-job bears out - Murphy knows how to write sincere, emotionally supple material for his actors when the situation calls for it. There's also something vaguely appealing in watching Murphy trying to coax trace elements of humility (not to mention humanity) from his star, after a decade of increasingly animatronic Roberts performances. Eat Pray Love is as much Julia seeking a rebirth as Liz, and at a time when the pulling power of our movie stars, their ability to obtain second or third chances from an audience, is approaching an all-time low (cf. the box-office of Knight and Day) to boot. In so far as anyone who draws down $15 million a picture can be considered an underdog, she is it - and in our ultra-Botoxed age, you may even come to cheer the tiny yet discernable patch of crinkles Roberts sports high on her forehead, as though someone had stapled a solitary McCoy (or, for my American readers, a single Ruffle) thereabouts.

Alas, the rest of the film is stuck with the usual arrogance of the self-help manual - it wants us to heed to it, as Liz does to her various guides, yet it seems more than anything else a defensive measure on Murphy and Gilbert's part that one of the wisdoms being passed on here insists we should attribute vast significance to the least significant of things. The emotional climax is a showdown on a beach, as Roberts declines Bardem's offer of a boat trip, citing "a loss of balance", and he challenges her to look into his eyes and tell him she's in love with him. The standard needless third-act chick-flick bust-up ensues, complete with much weeping and hyperventilating, but no-one stops for a minute to consider where exactly Liz stands on commitment, or whether she can, in fact, express herself sexually and romantically. Maybe she's just afraid of boats.

Eat Pray Love opens nationwide from Friday.

Tokyo drift: "Enter the Void"

(A necessarily shortened version of this review will run in this weekend's Sunday Telegraph.)

After the bruising, blunt-force celluloid trauma that was Irreversible, there was perhaps never likely to have been any going back for writer-director Gaspar Noe. That 2002 bummer laid firm claim to being the most anally fixated movie of all time, retracing its steps from infernal gay hangout Le Rectum to a prolonged scene of sodomy-rape performed by an arch-villain named for a tapeworm. Enter the Void, Irreversible's film-sibling, tacks a different line of penetration: this is cher Gaspar's front-bottom movie, as it were. Whether engaged in conspicuous panty-sniffing, manufacturing a link between smoking and breastfeeding, or simply cueing in utero footage more common to late-night sex-education shows, all the film's characters are longing to return to the safety of the womb; the "void" of the title may just be a commercially palatable substitute for another, six-letter v-word.

We begin, however, inside the main character's head, looking out at a day-glo, neon-lit Tokyo. Woah, we're supposed to exclaim. Trippy. Alas, young American Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) has just discovered hallucinogenic drugs and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which immediately renders this POV prologue more tedious than transporting, all mumbled dialogue and narcotics-induced fractals sprouting from the ceiling - an unholy communion of Prodigy video, Bret Easton Ellis novel and Jean-Michel Jarre son-et-lumière.

Mercifully, Oscar is shot dead by the local police during an early drugs bust; the bad news is that he returns in spirit form to honour a promise made in childhood never to leave his sister Linda, now employed - in the lissom, rarely-clothed form of Paz de la Huerta - as a stripper in the city's red-light area. Whether Linda realised at the time this bond would involve Oscar drifting into the heads of the men groping her in the club's backrooms, or eventually surfing a crest of semen heading toward her own cervix (as though her brother were Dennis Quaid in some X-rated remake of InnerSpace: InHerSpace, maybe) remains unclear - although, given little sis holds dear to a teddy bear and digs days out at funfairs, who knows?

Viewed with both feet on the ground, then, Enter the Void is an eminently preposterous proposition, its only possible saving grace Noe's proven ability to generate sensation (in all its forms), his desire to sit in opposition to the passivity and numbness most commercial cinema comes to induce. Irreversible, after all, was conceived as a challenge, pushing us to see how far we'd go both within and without the cinema: whether we'd intervene upon seeing a stranger being assaulted in a subway tunnel - or whether we'd walk out on a movie when it simply got too much to bear, as many viewers, repelled by Noe's methods, understandably did. It was a hard film, a nasty film, even, at least in part because of the tough, adult choices it demanded of both its characters and the spectator alike; the performers, meanwhile, were prepared to lie down in the gutter and give their all for their Art.

This follow-up clearly isn't meant for casual consumption so much as an experience designed (often brilliantly designed, in fact) to quicken the pulse a little. In form as in content, however, it feels like a regrettable creative regression, listlessly performed by a portfolio of models past and present (possibly one of the few species capable of convincing as vacuous itinerants, but still) and revelling in a spectacle that becomes first unmoored from reality, then increasingly gratuitous. It would be reductive to describe Enter the Void as Noe's circle-of-life movie, his Lion King - psychedelic blowjobs replacing singing warthogs - and yet it is precisely that; Oscar's death liberates Noe's camera to perform a few new, unmotivated contortions, plunging into bullet wounds and toilet wounds just because it can, not because there's anything to be said or grasped in doing so.

The way Noe films an ashtray or cooker hob from above is not the same way Lynch (himself no stranger to the Book of the Dead) films a hole in a ceiling tile, or Godard films a coffee cup, as interrogations targeted to draw out the uncanny fascination in everyday items. Rather, they're mere layovers, temporary fixed points within a framework of extreme attention deficient disorder, stylistic stepping stones paving the way to the now-expected mise en abime, in this case a stop-off at a pulsing Tokyo love hotel, where a variety of voids are observed being entered. Despite its preoccupation with birth and death, the film is scarcely human and not once moving, because the camera - forsaking stillness or reflection in search of its next available high or low - does all the moving for us; it is at the same time an exceptionally fluid piece of cinema, and a meaningless bore - and Noe knows as much, having to film head-on car crashes and gynaecological examinations (à la Breillat) in order to get any response whatsoever.

That he's still prepared to pursue such extremes only underlines Noe's status as among the most singular and uncompromising talents in world cinema - even Breillat has backed away from these shock tactics in recent years - but the director is 47 now, and you wonder for how much longer he can get away with ploughing these particular furrows. His partner and long-term collaborator, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, may have had the right idea: her 2004 oddity Innocence, set within a girls' boarding school within a remote forest, demonstrated it was possible to film a comparatively conventional, fable-like narrative without jettisoning one's darker, more adult sensibilities or any directorial edge. By contrast, the wonder and dread evoked by Enter the Void are, finally, childish: that of a Gap year student gawking at a live sex show, or an infant discovering their own genitalia for the first time. Required viewing for Freudians, it's a pretty bad trip for everybody else: a somnambulant midnight movie, a mindfuck that falls asleep on the job.

Enter the Void is on selected release from Friday.

On DVD: "Eyes Wide Open"

Haim Tabakman's moody gay romance Eyes Wide Open turns in circles familiar in one respect: it's the tale of a conflicted young man who arrives in the city to find himself, and in doing so ends up rocking the whole scene to its foundations. The novelty is that this young man should do all his brooding under black hats and ringlets, for the characters in Tabakman's film are ultra-Orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem. Visiting scholar Ezri (Ram Danker) is openly out - indeed, one of his first appointments in the city is with an ex who, under pressure from his peers, snubs him anew - but the object of his affections, the older Aaron (Zohar Strauss), is a married pillar of the community: a butcher with a tableful of kids to support. The latter takes Ezri under his wing, and into his storeroom, and thus faces exile, or - worse - a roughing-up by the Hasidic heavy mob in which he had formerly been a key participant.

Compared to Brokeback Mountain - which flaunted a scandalous 15 certificate - the watchword of this 12-rated film is restraint: for the most part, we're watching two men who feel obliged to hold themselves back. In the love scenes, the beards keep getting in the way; and when Ezri and Aaron finally look like consummating their relationship physically in a meat locker (insert your own joke here), Tabakman cuts away to the pair of them enjoying a post-coital cigarette in the street outside, as though this were a 1940s studio movie.

Eyes Wide Open is rather po-faced in this manner: for all their urgency (that which follows from the fear of being caught), the secret lovers' encounters contain little sense of joy or escape; when Aaron, mid-thrusting, wonders aloud "How did I come to this?", we perhaps note the evolution of a higher strain of Judaism, one which actually fosters guilt during sex. Still, the drama is persuasively performed - Strauss, in particular, appears to have etched into his face an acknowledgement of how much his Aaron has to lose - and shrewd, judicious mise-en-scène allows us to peer into what's effectively a whole other world: it makes an item of (untranslated) fascination out of those official screeds plastered onto this neighborhood's walls, with their stern lists of dos and don'ts. Apt that the butcher should be named Fleischmann, too: here are characters struggling to reconcile their flesh with their faith, torn between kosher society, and that decreed off-the-menu.

Eyes Wide Open is available on DVD from tomorrow.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of September 10-12, 2010:

1 (new) Resident Evil: Afterlife (15) ** [above]
2 (3) Toy Story 3 (U) ****
3 (4) Grown Ups (12A)
4 (1) The Last Exorcism (15) ***
5 (new) Tamara Drewe (15)
6 (5) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (12A) **
7 (new) Going the Distance (15)
8 (new) Cyrus (15) **
9 (2) Dinner for Schmucks (12A) **
10 (7) The Expendables (15) **

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. Metropolis [above]
2. The Illusionist
3. The Leopard
4. Avatar: Special Edition
5. The Hole


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (new) The Blind Side (12) **
2 (1) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18) ***
3 (2) Shutter Island (15) ***
4 (6) The Bounty Hunter (12) *
5 (3) Cemetery Junction (15) ****
6 (new) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (12) **
7 (5) From Paris with Love (15)
8 (9) Sherlock Holmes (12) *
9 (7) Clash of the Titans (12) **
10 (10) Valentine's Day (12) *

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. City of Life and Death
2. Vincere
3. Eyes Wide Open
4. [REC]2
5. Rapt


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Groundhog Day (Sunday, five, 5.15pm)
2. The Breakfast Club (Monday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
3. The Year of Living Dangerously (Sunday, BBC1, 11.10pm)
4. Hud (Monday, C4, 12.15pm)
5. Hitch (Sunday, five, 9pm)

The long way round: "Winter's Bone"

The Sundance Grand Jury prizewinner for 2010, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, marks a return to territory the American indie sector has traditionally mined rather well, staking out its patch within a region that will be unfamiliar to most viewers; in this case, the desolate Ozark mountains of south-west Missouri, a place of crystal meth and handguns, frontyards of junk enclosed by rusting barbed-wire fences. Heroine Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, above) is busy caring for her mute, incapacitated mother and schooling her younger siblings when a patrolman shows up on the front porch with the news her estranged meth-head father has gone AWOL while out on bail, awaiting possession charges.

There is, we gather, nothing new about this, except this time, there will be consequences: if Ree cannot bring pa in to appear before the court, the family will lose the home that's been put up as part of the bond agreement. Ree's subsequent quest will become a sore spot among her neighbours, most of whom elect to turn their backs whenever she approaches in search of help or information, some of whom prove actively obstructive, plagued as they are by the native suspicion that insists "talking only causes witnesses". Ree wants answers; what she gets are evasions or, worse, threats. She's out on her own, in other words, a mere babe in some wild, wild woods.

So too is Lawrence, one of the more memorable pieces in Guillermo Arriaga's mosaic-movie The Burning Plain last year, and positioned front and centre here in a role that dovetails Ree's position within her community with the actress's standing in her career: the fierce, unblinking gaze she demonstrates is unmistakably that of a young woman obliged to take on huge responsibilities at a perilously early stage in her own development. In an early sequence in Winter's Bone, we watch Ree wandering unchecked around her siblings' school, peering in through windows and doors at the classes she couldn't afford (or never got the chance) to complete; it's this curiosity, this desire for self-improvement, that draws us towards an otherwise tough, flinty character.

As, indeed, does the self-awareness Ree displays in the face of her neighbours' increasingly unnerving indifference. Training the youngsters in firing rifles and gutting squirrels, she's asked by a passing friend what the deal is with all the guns and knives, and her response - "Just teaching them a bit of survival" - seems to stem partly from the knowledge she is herself unlikely to be around for much longer, one way or another. This hierarchy of knowledge - a girl with much to learn in search of a man who, it transpires, knows too much - gives Winter's Bone a curious air of backwoods noir, as though Granik and co-writer Anne Rosellini (adapting Daniel Woodrell's novel) were seriously proposing the film as a stew of Deliverance and Chinatown, and their heroine a composite of Heidi, JJ Gittes and Nancy Drew.

The film even has its offbeat heavy in the form of Teardrop, Ree's uncle, though you'd hardly think to describe him as avuncular: instead, he's a twitchy dopefiend played with young Sam Shepard/Harry Dean Stanton-like intensity by Deadwood's John Hawkes. It's either a pointer through the woods or something of a red herring that the only other recognisable face in the cast should be Lynch's Laura Palmer: Sheryl Lee, prematurely aged and tired-seeming as one of pop's sometime lovers. In truth, Winter's Bone is too slow-burn and foursquare to much resemble Twin Peaks; we're supposed to admire its quiet craft rather than be struck by any leftfield artistry, and in this respect, it is at least a logical successor to 2008's Frozen River, a previous Sundance winner notable for its strong female lead and rooted sense of place. Granik, for her part, demonstrates a sure feel for texture and character, less so for narrative momentum - but the sequences that stay with you pinpoint the beauty and spirit of the forest, and also its latent, timeless sense of menace.

Winter's Bone is on selected release.