Case 39 (The Scotsman 06/03/10)

Case 39 (15) **
Directed by: Christian Alvart
Starring: Renee Zellweger, Jodelle Ferland, Ian McShane, Bradley Cooper

German director Alvart completed this unexceptional bad-seed potboiler in 2007 as a stepping stone between his full-blooded debut Antibodies and last year’s Pandorum; it now emerges, altogether tardily, in the wake of the classier Orphan and the similarly paedophobic Britpic The Children. Stressed social worker Emily Jenkins (Zellweger) accepts another case in Lilith (Ferland), a withdrawn child whose marks and friends have suddenly decreased. Intense parents with a fondness for gas ovens and digging holes in the basement seem a likely cause, but it’s only when Emily takes Lilith into her own care that she discovers how demanding the little brat is.

While we’re waiting for a reveal to snap the disparate plot elements together, the best one can say of Case 39 is that Zellweger is on bearable form, and that Ferland - the heroine of Gilliam’s Tideland - makes halfway creepy Lilith’s way with office chairs and garden peas. At one point, the latter accuses Cooper’s child psychologist of being “facile”. “What do you mean by that?,” the shrink asks. “Easily comprehended, lacking in sincerity or depth,” comes the response. If she’s good for nothing else, one concludes, Lilith might well have a future reviewing films like these.

Ondine (The Scotsman 06/03/10)

Ondine (12A) ***
Directed by: Neil Jordan
Starring: Colin Farrell, Alicja Bachleda, Alison Barry, Stephen Rea

After flailing with The Brave One, Neil Jordan returns to his native Ireland to film another contemporary fairytale. The folklore of Ondine - specifically that of the “selki”, the sea creature who ventures onto land to win a mortal’s heart - is familiar from John Sayles’ The Secret of Roan Inish, but younger viewers might just enjoy it as a live-action Ponyo. Syracuse (Farrell), a divorced, alcoholic fisherman, gets a shock when a half-drowned girl ends up in his nets. He initially suspects she’s an asylum seeker, although she magically triples his catch; no wonder he’s soon falling overboard for her.

Jordan makes one obvious concession to movielore - this selki (Bachleda) is a leggy supermodel-type clad in diaphanous dresses - and there’s an awkward tonal shift late on as Ondine’s true identity is revealed. Still, Farrell’s soulfully salty, and Stephen Rea is typically wry as a priest who senses traditional Catholicism is no match for this siren’s song. Too quiet to make a dent against Alice, perhaps, but as shot by Christopher Doyle in fisherman’s blues and greens, it never lacks for poetry - and, needless to say, Jordan’s Ireland is a good deal more convincing than Leap Year’s.

From Paris With Love (The Scotsman 27/02/10)

From Paris With Love (15) **
Director: Pierre Morel
Starring: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Kasia Smutniak

The producer-director partnership of Luc Besson and Pierre Morel enjoyed staggering success with 2008’s dumb-as-nuts revenge thriller Taken; this follow-up proves no more enlightened, but it’s shorter and - most often unintentionally - funnier, which may yet redeem it in the eyes of the less discerning. Bespectacled, square-jawed U.S. ambassador’s aide James Reece (Rhys Meyers) has been running covert national security ops in Paris without much reward. He’s aghast on learning his new partner is to be bald-pated, earringed, leather-jacketed counter-terrorism agent Charlie Wax (Travolta), who - guess what? - refuses to play by the rules.

As the above suggests, what we get is lukewarm (or Luc-warm) Tarantino with a touch of the 24s, shamelessly pandering to American audiences even as it preys on their worst fears that every burqa in sight conceals nefarious activity of a sort. Enthusiasm for Besson’s attempt to revive the buddy-movie dynamic slips away when faced with such hoary action clichés as the shootout in a room of mannequins, or the absurd development that turns Reece’s model fiancée into history’s most glamorous suicide bomber. Frequent explosions will keep militiamen everywhere yee-hawing for the duration, but it’s as authentically French as Travolta’s beloved Royales with cheese.

Battle of wills (ST 21/02/10)

The Last Station (15) 112 mins ***
Crazy Heart (15) 111 mins ***
The Lovely Bones (12A) 135 mins **

The poster threatens beardy ponderousness, but for some while, Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station plays like the least Tolstoyan film anyone’s likely to make about Tolstoy. This is Russian chamber drama rewritten by Ray Cooney: a marital ding-dong as observed by the domestics. It’s 1910, and the aged writer (Christopher Plummer) is still fighting an irresolvable battle with his countess wife Sofya (Helen Mirren) over their respective attitudes to private property, which in pre-Revolutionary Russia must have been a subject akin to the verticality of the toilet seat.

Thrust between them is a new personal secretary, Valentin Fedorovich Bulgakov (James McAvoy). A Tolstoy fanboy, he finds the position unexpectedly exhausting, obliged as he is to keep two separate diaries, dependent on what each faction wants to read. Furthermore, Bulgakov’s teetotal, celibate vegetarianism is under continual assault from the estate’s free-and-easy living and flirty serving wenches. The question The Last Station poses is simply this: can our boyish hero keep it up?

One of the few young actors with any demonstrable sense of humour, McAvoy proves commendably willing to send up his incipient heartthrob status: his Bulgakov under-performs sexually, and the Countess describes him as “handsome, in a peculiar sort of way”. Dame Helen, of course, needs no excuse for mischief, although that Oscar nod seems generous for her - at one point, literal - impersonation of a game old bird. Reclining in the boudoir, Sofya pleads with her husband: “I’m still your little chicken... you’re still my big cock.” Well, quite.

How all this - or John Sessions’s doctor, interrupting scenes with such lines as “I’m sorry, sir, it’s time for your enema” - is likely to sit with serious-minded Russian literature scholars, I don’t know, though Plummer’s Tolstoy remains a dignified and even touching figure among the hubbub. It’s true the film becomes ploddier as Leo lies dying beside the railway tracks in a stationmaster’s hut: this, finally, is the Tolstoy movie that poster promised. For a good hour or more, though, Hoffman’s film is far livelier and funnier than it looks.


With his long hair and genial, unfussed demeanour, Jeff Bridges has always been an actor prone to dishevelment: think of his pianist in The Fabulous Baker Boys - smooth as silk on stage, a wreck off it - or The Big Lebowski’s Dude, shambling through that shaggy-dog story in cardigan and flip-flops. As the grizzled, hard-drinking circuit singer “Bad” Blake in Crazy Heart, Bridges is a little bit country, a little bit rock ‘n’ roll, and more than a little bit of a mess: a figure who appears to sweat whiskey sour through his unchanged shirt, and drifts on the dry, stale breeze between motel parking lots.

A slow process of self-realisation begins when Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a young journalist, shows up one night before a gig to interview Bad for the local rag. It’s a terrific scene, capturing perfectly how interviews are often a setting down of the public record, an opportunity for the subject to address past slights, in the guise of an extended flirtation. Bad suddenly finds the steady rhythms that have sustained him out on the road are ever so slightly off; as he says to Jean, “I never noticed how much of a dump this room was before you walked in.”

Scott Cooper’s debut evokes a careworn, unglamorous America, proving sympathetic and attentive to those Bad leaves behind on the sidelines. Gyllenhaal gives an unsentimental portrayal of a working single mum who needs her man to demonstrate greater stability than Bad proves capable of; Colin Farrell has a nice hesitancy to his swagger as the singer’s one-time protégé. If it’s somewhat beholden to its protagonist’s boozy listlessness, we do gain a feel for those dependencies that shape Bad’s existence: Cooper, formerly a jobbing actor himself, is more attuned than most to the quiet complexity of life’s supporting acts.


More than one filmmaker flirted with adapting The Lovely Bones and, in the end, one has to conclude the material went to the most prominent, not necessarily the best suited. In the first misfire of his career, Peter Jackson has reshaped Alice Sebold’s troubling bestseller into a heartwarming 12A-rated not-coming-of-age drama, the novelty being that 70s teenager Susie Salmon is dead from the word go, and narrating the fallout from her murder from some place beyond the stars.

The absolute credulity that made this director’s Tolkien and Kong adaptations soar here simply leaves Jackson too close to his heroine: the film’s conception of suburban normalcy (miscast dad Mark Wahlberg) and deviancy (Stanley Tucci, twitchily obvious) are exactly those of a blandly undiscerning mallrat. Set Saoirse Ronan’s wide-eyed Susie, gambolling through her Athena-poster purgatory, against the brooding, bloodied heroines of 1994’s Heavenly Creatures, and it’s apparent repeated exposure to fantasy has softened Jackson. This Salmon’s essentially boneless; she’s been filleted for general consumption.

Masculine/feminine (ST 14/02/10)

A Single Man (12A) 100 mins ***
Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin (nc) 131 mins ****
The Wolfman (15) 125 mins **

When Colin Firth emerged dripping from that pond in the TV Pride and Prejudice, it was - in every sense - a watershed moment, ensuring that a soggy white blouson would cling to the actor’s back for years to come. With Firth confirmed as a genteel heartthrob in the eyes of millions, directors found ever less inspired ways to employ him: Bridget Jones’s Darcy Mark II for starters. What exceptions there were - the Firth of Easy Virtue, damaged in a way that that anything-goes panto-movie seemed reluctant to investigate; and Firth’s crooner in Where the Truth Lies, stricken with repression and regret - went largely unheralded.

Traces of these half-forgotten Firths resurface in A Single Man, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s story that - while not wholly seductive - finally lifts that wet shirt from this actor’s shoulders and gives him a whole new wardrobe to play with. As George Falconer, a gay college professor in early 60s America, Firth asserts himself upon scenes in ways that would have been unthinkable to the passive, rigid-lipped Firth of old. “I am exactly who I appear to be - if you look closely,” Falconer states, and Tom Ford’s film feels like encouragement to re-examine an often under-engaged performer.

Falconer is uncommonly busy over the story’s 24 hours, trying to maintain a façade of sophistry while struggling to process his lover’s sudden demise. He holds court in lecture theatres, collapses in tears; he even gets to cut a stylish rug, which is one improvement over Firth’s turn in Mamma Mia!. In a darkly funny sequence, the professor wrestles with an arrangement of throw pillows while contemplating suicide. It’s touching that Falconer should, even in despair, be thinking of the mess he’ll leave behind for his housekeeper; it’s telling he should be seeking an elegant way to frame this most inelegant of acts.

For Falconer, we gather, has a true soulmate in Ford. The designer-turned-director’s debut lacks not for visual flourishes: slow-motion lingering on naked male flesh (as Ford’s Vanity Fair cover suggested, he’s a sucker for a pert derrière), endless close-ups of eyes, and a neat lighting trick whereby characters cast in bright Technicolor hues momentarily reinvigorate the hero’s austere, black-white-and-beige world. More crucially, if predictably, Ford is also alert to textures, whether thick paper book jackets, or the crisp perfection of freshly laundered shirts.

Still, after Revolutionary Road and TV’s Mad Men, the sumptuous miseries of Eisenhower/Kennedy-era America have become awfully familiar, and Ford can seem a terrible fuss. George’s unravelling perhaps merited a little more on-screen dishevelment; instead, we get Julianne Moore’s underused confidante, permitted ten minutes of screen time just to get her eyeliner right. A quietly impressive miniature, A Single Man remains hemmed-in to the last: Firth, certainly, deserves our consideration, but the send-off Ford gives George Falconer is the cruel joke of a director who can’t resist a neat symmetry.


Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin, the latest celluloid examination of German history, derives from a diary kept by a married journalist working in Berlin as the Red Army arrived in 1945, and published, to considerable controversy, a decade later. What the diary came to document was the mass rape of German women by Soviet troops, taken by some to be symbolic payback: as one of the author’s neighbours noted, “If the Russians do to us one-quarter of what we’ve spent the last few years doing to them, no German will be left alive.” Anonyma took up with a Russian major to ensure her protection, but many others weren’t so practically inclined.

A companion piece of sorts to 2005’s Downfall - laying out the horrors unfolding on the streets above Adolf’s bunker - Max Färberböck’s film effectively rethinks the war movie from the inside out. The conflict here centres on lead actress Nina Hoss’s face, with its unusual ability to both register everything and give nothing much away; it’s these flickers of intuition with which the women sought to combat a constant masculine threat. Anonyma’s feminist credentials are impeccable, but it’s the rare psychological and emotional weight that grabs you: the palpable sense of what it is to find one’s self under siege long after the fighting has ceased.


A mega-budget reworking of George Waggner’s Universal horror classic, The Wolfman is truest to its source in its casting. Like Lon Chaney in the original, Benicio del Toro is not quite right-seeming even before he’s bitten on the moors, while the ever-ethereal Geraldine Chaplin is a smart pick to assume the duties of the unmatchable Maria Ouspenskaya as the gypsy woman who knows what transpires when the full moon rises.

Otherwise, this overlong film is an object lesson in what happens when horror material is handed to the director of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Spectacle soon swamps suggestiveness, and knowingness undermines any terror: it’s The Wolf Man seen through the prism of An American Werewolf in London, an homage to an homage, and pretty thin with it. We’ve seen remakes less reverent - less enjoyable, even - but any mythos soon vanishes, like the characters’ breath into the chill night air.

Dropping the ball (ST 07/02/10)

Invictus (12A) 133 mins **
Tony (18) 76 mins ***

Approaching the age of 80, Clint Eastwood shows no signs of slowing down, even as his films grind to a sclerotic halt. Last year’s Gran Torino overcame its limited grasp of inner-city gang culture - chiefly through the undiminished force of Eastwood’s own on-screen star persona - but other recent directorial efforts have proved stodgier. Despite its Oscar triumph, 2005’s Million Dollar Baby was crudely hewn and outrageously judgemental melodrama, while 2008’s Changeling became much less intriguing as period mystery when it began tying its loose ends into a hangman’s knot.

Increasingly, it seems, Eastwood has been drawn to projects that are logistically challenging - requiring all his considerable behind-the-camera craftsmanship - but morally and dramatically simplistic, the kind of pious fare for which filmmakers like Stanley Kramer were lauded during his apprenticeship in the industry. His latest Invictus - depicting the formation of South Africa’s “Rainbow Nation” under the newly elected President Mandela - fits the pattern to a tee: it’s easy, all right. Too easy: even the title, derived from a William Ernest Henley poem, sounds like a syrup designed to soothe the ticklish throat.

The nominal theme here is leadership. Anthony Peckham’s screenplay provides, on one hand, a talky backroom drama in which Mandela (Morgan Freeman - who else?) thrashes out the details of the new republic, healing the schisms between the country’s black and white factions while battling his own physical and mental exhaustion. On the other, we get a conventional sports drama in which the Springbok rugby captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) rallies his beleaguered troops in preparation for the 1995 World Cup, held on South African soil with the intention of showcasing Mandela’s more enlightened regime. These two arcs sporadically coincide, as when the team’s bus is observed passing through the townships. “I wouldn’t want to live here,” mutters one of Pienaar’s predominantly white squad, which is about as contentious as Invictus gets.

At every other step, the director is keen to reassure us that everything turned out for the best. Freeman’s Mandela is omniscient, twinkly and wise: rather like his portrayal of God in Bruce Almighty, only with a fluctuating Xhosan accent. There’s never any sense the actor is being challenged to fill Mandela’s imposing, weather-beaten shoes: it’s a performance fashioned from the most comforting carpet slipper, requiring only the Morgan Freeman Voiceover Device from Mike Myers’ The Love Guru to complete its lulling effect. Damon, for his part, summons a creditable sincerity, but this Pienaar - wide of jaw, broad of shoulder, not unduly interesting - is merely a tool in some schematic scripting, asked to look thoughtful while his bigoted father rants at “the blecks” on the television.

It’s not long before the inspirational speeches start coming, running out sentiments that will sound fresh to no-one save, perhaps, an actor-director once known for some fairly reactionary opinions. Still, you’d rather endure these than the atrocious score - by Clint’s son Kyle - with its plaintive, plinky-plonk piano and endless dreary songs about “rising up”. Invictus was evidently compiled with the best of intentions, but the result is one-sided and predictable within minutes of the film kicking off: a walkover for the L.A. Liberals, with not nearly enough narrative rucking to stir the soul.


Fresh blood this week comes care of Tony, a funny-creepy British B feature from writer-director Gerard Johnson, tailing the eponymous psychopath (an eerily good Peter Ferdinando) around the streets of Dalston. Johnson’s interest lies not in gory exploitation, but observing his protagonist’s hopeless attempts at social interaction: unfailingly polite, Tony greets his victims-to-be with fish fingers, glasses of squash, and Paul Young’s “No Parlez” album on cassette. Produced by Shameless’s Paul Abbott - with whom Johnson shares a sharp eye for life’s shabbier details - this small yet impressively formed debut manages at least one deadpan masterstroke: when the authorities finally show up at Tony’s grim digs, it’s in the wholly mundane form of the TV licensing officer.

Heavyweight contender (ST 31/01/10)

Precious (15) 110 mins *****
Adoration (12A) 101 mins ***
Edge of Darkness (15) 117 mins **

Little about Precious looked promising. Director Lee Daniels’ previous credit was for a straight-to-DVD Stephen Dorff thriller. The performers? Mariah Carey, brash (read: insufferable) comedienne Mo’Nique and the unknown Gabourey Sidibe. Its full title, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, suggests both a) the drab hand of the Oprah Book Club, and b) that the legal department didn’t get their ducks in a row before finalising the credits. And yet here we are, in a position where Precious is being positioned as a key text of the Obama era, this year’s Slumdog-like little-film-that-could.

The irony is you’d be hard-pushed to find a protagonist bigger than Claireece “Precious” Jones. An overweight, undereducated black teenager in 1980s Harlem, Precious (Sidibe) shares a hovel the shade artists usually reserve for engravings of hell with a verbally and physically abusive mother (Mo’Nique). She has herself mothered one child, and is expecting another, the offspring of her own absent father. As she plods through the trash-strewn streets of the projects, her thoughts, nevertheless, tend towards optimism of sorts: “I’m always looking up… looking up for a falling piano, or a desk, or sofa”.

The Slumdog comparison isn’t entirely inapt - both films follow young people in dire circumstances as they seek self-esteem through knowledge - but Precious proves more grounded than Danny Boyle’s flash and dash. In a show of absolute formal solidarity with its heroine, the film’s movements are raggedy, its rhythms awkward and circumscribed. There’s always a Claireece slumped in the background of movies like Dangerous Minds, but here a character who’d rarely be studied on screen as an individual is repositioned at the centre of her own universe, obliging everyone in her orbit to revolve around her for a change.

Daniels’ choices, in everything from casting to camerawork, aren’t always the expected ones, or the most considered, yet they’re astonishingly effective: even on a second viewing, I couldn’t spot some of the knockout blows coming. As the film cuts, wrenchingly, from one bleak revelation to Precious imagining herself posing for a fashion shoot, you instantly intuit the richness of this girl’s inner life, and the desperation of a mind scrambling to dress up more bad news. The climax, too, arrives entirely without signal, and elicits raw, devastating acting from Mo’Nique - a phrase I never thought I’d write - as the mother reveals the extent of her own miseducation.

What powers this scrappily magnificent film is instinct - gut feeling, you might say - and an unparalleled level of empathy towards a character who simply wouldn’t be given a chance anywhere else. Walking several miles of bumpy emotional terrain in its heroine’s supersized sneakers, Precious is uniquely sensitive to pain, but it’s a hopeful work, too, and defiant: like Sidibe’s heroine, it shouldn’t triumph, but it does, and no rational explanations can substitute for the experience of seeing it in a dark room with strangers and gasping, weeping and cheering for yourself. Some movies really do leave no child, nor viewers, behind.


Adoration, another of the director Atom Egoyan’s exercises in multiple perspectives, aims principally for the intellect, centring upon a school project spiralling rapidly out of control. Egged on by batty drama teacher Arsinée Khanjian, teenager Simon (Devon Bostick) fabricates a story about his absent parents: specifically his Canadian mother, asked by her Palestinian husband to smuggle explosives onto a flight bound for Tel Aviv - or so Simon says.

The consequences of this deception play out simultaneously in both the real world and Internet chatrooms, virtual echo chambers populated by all ages, colours and creeds: soundtracked by XTC’s none-more-sceptical “Dear God”, these online sequences offer a timely and passionate discussion of where we are in the Age of Terror. Other strands begin to fray, but Egoyan keeps making intelligent and provocative connections: if it doesn’t all tie up, at least you can’t accuse it of dumbing down.


I’m too young to remember the much-admired BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness, yet it can’t, surely, have been as dour and flatfooted as Martin Campbell’s new film version. After seeing his daughter killed on his doorstep, Mel Gibson’s Bostonian detective unearths a dime-a-dozen conspiracy involving nuclear powerbrokers - though he roughs up an activist, too, just to show he’s not going entirely pinko liberal on us. A few nicely ruminative scenes pit Gibson against Ray Winstone’s wry, ideologically flexible PI: the closest the film gets to the thick-ear pulp it aspires to be. The rest, alas, treads heavy in some very familiar footsteps.