The farewell: "No Time To Die"

This year's contender for the title of The Film That Saved Cinema, No Time To Die, is better placed than was last year's Tenet: there are many more cinemas open, we now have vaccines in the system, and - this being a Bond film - it has more idea of what draws people to the multiplex than a self-serious sixth-former's physics homework. It also, lest we forget, has a sentimental value that its ever-canny producers realised might have been diminished had the film been shuffled onto streaming at the peak of the pandemic, being Daniel Craig's farewell as 007. In as much as anyone should care about such matters this deep into the 21st century, Craig has been a good Bond: he carried two of the better recent instalments (2006's Casino Royale and 2012's Skyfall), where he was invited to elaborate on the effects a licence to kill might have on a man's body and soul, and he even brought a measure of aloof, cuff-checking class to scenes and moments in the far flimsier Quantum of Solace and SPECTRE. Still, you get a sense from that of just how difficult this series has found it to move forward; for every entry that felt like a step in the right direction, there was another that seemed to take a step back. Naomie Harris's Moneypenny was promoted to Bond's almost-equal in Skyfall, only to be reduced to typing her way through SPECTRE (she has even less to do this time round); after being deprived of Eva Green's Vesper Lynd, the closest any Bond girl yet came to feeling like a fleshed-out character, 007 had his head turned by Léa Seydoux's pouty-girly Madeleine Swann. For his part, Craig has often appeared trapped within both the series' vast, clunking infrastructure, and the contradictory impulses of successive films; he's worked hard to find things to interest and amuse himself within the confines of a role conceived 60-odd years ago as an invulnerable fantasy figure. (You don't get BAFTA nominations for playing Leisure Suit Larry.) 

Well, time's up. Ever since Judi Dench's M labelled Pierce Brosnan's Bond a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" in 1995's GoldenEye, the Eon creatives have been wrestling with the challenge of dragging a largely unreconstructed white male into our ever-changing present. Much has already been read into the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the new film's writing staff, and the recruiting of the Black British actress Lashana Lynch to play a replacement 007. The question hanging over No Time To Die is this: does the film put the old boy out to pasture, or throw him to the wolves? And my feeling was this: that this is as good a send-off as the series could have afforded Craig, given how absurdly freighted with baggage the new film seems. Evident thought has gone into how best to end this cycle (and this particular Bond's miseries), although you'd have to be a real thicko not to spot the general direction of travel. During one early hot pursuit, a distraught Madeleine turns to Bond and says "I'd rather die than-", only for the pair's car to be T-boned by pursuers; displaying the same non-lightness of touch he forced upon HBO's god-it's-hard-to-be-a-man slogfest True Detective, director Cary Joji Fukunaga then cuts to a high-angle shot of the local church bells tolling. You ready yourself for 163 minutes of no less clangy foreshadowing when a plot of some shape kicks in. Rami Malek's Russian nogoodnik Lyutsifer Safin - crazy name, crazy guy, like a Red Army Thanos or something - absconds with a biological weapon, killing Hugh Dennis in the process, a wanton breach of international diplomacy that prises Bond out of the short-shorts of early retirement and back into the old tuxedo. His pursuit of Safin will involve several top-of-the-range action setpieces, likely overseen by Eon's in-house stunt team rather than Fukunaga himself, which provide much the same brain-in-neutral pleasure in 2021 that they would have done back in 1962. An eternal selling point of these New Bonds is that you can plainly see where the money went, much of it on the best damn storyboard artists and stunt drivers in the business.

There are obstacles to enjoyment, however, not least the form No Time To Die has been obliged to take. On one level, the film wants to function as elevated escapism, to generate the same two-hour runaround we expect of our Bond movies. ("Just the usual," as Ralph Fiennes' M pitches the new mission to Craig's Bond in a nice, quiet scene on the banks of the Thames: just two seasoned pros enjoying a spot of fresh air amid the hoopla going down elsewhere.) Yet it also has to tie up the loose ends set to straggling in the four previous Craig Bonds, before getting to the notional main event of the world's most expensive leaving do. It's always been at the back of my mind watching the 21st century Bonds, but I don't believe I've ever been quite so conscious of how patched together these productions are: the multiple location shoots, the half-dozen assistant directors, the ideas-atop-ideas-atop-ideas. (Waller-Bridge comes to be just another voice in the mix, sporadically audible in the film's goofier swings.) Some of those are good ideas - or good ideas for a million-dollar event movie - but it's hard to maintain a fix on a film's central character when he appears to be walking through three or four films simultaneously, set running in parallel either to attract multiple demographics (the Bond diehards and the Fast & Furious faithful, gammon and woke alike) or out of some near-Johnsonian indifference to narrative coherence. No Time To Die spends nearly three hours attempting to reconcile these broadly irreconciliable aims, and mulling over the extent to which it really has to reconcile these aims, given that it's a Bond movie and people will turn out for it anyway. The attempt is welcome, and heroic in some ways, but it's also doomed, which may be why certain stretches seem barely less cracked than Christoph Waltz's Blofeld, the film's most illustrious loose end, rejoined gibbering in a maximum-security prison facility.

Certainly, the (relative) New Bond Realism of Skyfall - which had the reliably sober Sam Mendes as its controlling intelligence - looks to have been abandoned. That film would have had no time at all for an oddball like David Dencik's rogue scientist Valdo Obruchev, a comedy sociopath who assumes a Borat-like accent and is spared from liftshaft catastrophe by, erm, magnets (?), nor for a third wheel as obvious as Billy Magnusson's fresh-faced double agent. Just one of the contradictions the new film is struggling with is that more writers means less quality control - that the cash gets spunked on any idea, however superfluous or feeble. The maximalism on show - the desire to throw everything at the screen, to make this a properly big send-off - ensures you'll more or less get your money's worth; a lot of targets are hit here. Yet it's also frequently exhausting, a Bond movie seemingly made to be fallen asleep to on an overcast Bank Holiday weekend, when you can convince yourself it's your own doziness that's the issue, and not that of the writers. It's a rare contemporary blockbuster that has to be 163 minutes, because there's almost certainly no other way of cutting all this together; and yet the sleepless nights faced by editors Tom Cross and Elliot Graham look to have factored into the film's peculiarly frazzled, fagged-out quality. We get muttered nods in the direction of the "We Have All The Time In The World" refrain of 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service (irony!), yet if No Time To Die sparks nostalgia, it's really for the clean, straight lines of those earlier Bond movies, where the hero was assigned one clear mission, got it done, and had time for a zipless fuck and a cigarette before the closing credits scrolled. (Different times.)

Battling any fatigue of his own, the generally smart Fukunaga ensures the resulting film holds onto moments of ingenuity and (again, relative) daring, particularly as we go into the fateful final reel. The script borrows one obvious move from the Nolan playbook, opening a door for future spin-offs by insisting 007 is "just a number", much as The Dark Knight Rises insisted, at comparable length, that Batman was finally just a mask. And the conclusion - obviously laboured over in the writers' room - does succeed in finding a way for our hero to appear selflessly heroic while also allowing him to continue evading exactly the kind of personal responsibility he's ducked ever since Dr. No. Here, as elsewhere in No Time To Die, you may be set to considering the thorny relationship between Bond and national self-image. It's astonishing to think that it was less than a decade ago that the resuited-and-booted Bond made such a triumphant appearance as the crowning glory of the London 2012 opening ceremony, an avatar of an at least temporary British confidence. No Time To Die, the first post-Brexit Bond, presents as greatly more ambivalent about its hero's place in the modern world, right from Daniel Kleinman's ever-imaginative opening credits, in which the last vestiges of moribund Empire are seen crumbling into a thousand pieces on their descent to the seabed. (The mumbled melancholy of Billie Eilish's theme song works better in this context than it has as a standalone.) At this week's Tory conference - the annual circus of horrors that just so happened to coincide with No Time To Die's stellar opening weekend - culture minister Nadine Dorries was predictably quick to seize on the film's success. Viewed with even a little distance, though, large parts of Bond 25 invite alternative interpretation: as a distress call from a drained, beat-up, horribly addled old island, now best nuked and left to sink to the ocean floor.

No Time To Die is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Out of time: "The Green Knight"

Within the context of a cinema that has of late committed itself almost exclusively to half-assed rehashes of pre-existing pop culture, it takes a special kind of perversity to leap upon an unattributed text from the 14th century. But then perversity has proven central to the David Lowery filmography: this is the writer-director who abandoned the indie fringes to stump the Disney marketing whizzes (with the airy fantasia of 2016's Pete's Dragon), then stuck Casey Affleck under a sheet for the duration of 2017's A Ghost Story. I'd imagine that even those who haven't been wet-nursed by the MCU would find Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a weird artefact to encounter: all odd language within an odd structure, it's very clearly A Tale from A Time Before WiFi. In The Green Knight's strongest stretches, Lowery leans into that very weirdness. He's pulled chapter headings from his source, but he lays them over sequences that are all the more compelling for being broadly inexplicable, and framed in such a way as to set an audience to wonder. The plot, for starters, is a Christmas party game that spirals seriously out of control. Dev Patel's cocky young Gawain ("I've got time, I've got lots of time") is challenged by the eponymous outsider figure to land a blow with his sword; instead, the reckless youth lops off his opponent's noggin, and then faces an anxious 12-month wait to see what form the somehow still extant Knight's vengeance will take. If you're wondering what it all represents, well, better-versed scholars than you and I have puzzled over the same thing for seven centuries now. My best guess, given that this adaptation shows the Knight being magicked up by a trio of witches (including Gawain's own mother) apparently to teach our boy a lesson: Gawain is up against Nature, and as men have been realising ever since the 14th century, and ever more rapidly in the modern age, there can only ever be one winner there.

How we spend the limited time we have on this Earth was an organising theme of A Ghost Story, where the Affleck-sheet watched on for decades, maybe even centuries, after its vessel's physical demise. The protagonist there was a goner, and so had no choice but to hang around his assigned limbo hoping the universe would right itself. Gawain is very much alive, by contrast, and trying to stay that way. He starts the film fresh-faced, dewy if not outright wet behind the ears, perhaps a little too full of himself, and over the course of his Ye Olde Gappe Year is gradually stripped of his money, vestments and hubris. (One way of approaching this saga: as a rite-of-passage written by someone a good few years down the line, who knew exactly the brick walls of adult responsibility into which this carefree kid was set to run.) Growing ever more confident as a leading man, yet still betraying flickers of the naivety that made some of his early screen appearances so excruciating to behold, Patel certainly looks and fits the part, and if you come here seeking that very modern science known as world-building, have at it: the film's designers have constructed a Middle Ages that occupies the middle ground between Game of Thrones and Hard to Be a God, more mysterious than the former, less murky than the latter, allowing room for conscience, compassion and chivalry besides. The star is the Green Knight himself, notionally embodied by Ralph Ineson, yet conceived as a giant, creaking treetrunk-thing that suggests a Guillermo del Toro makeover of the Jolly Green Giant. There really are elements to marvel at here, not least when the Knight resurfaces in the final reel to claim the grave debt owed to him. "Is this really all there is?," gasps a despairing Gawain as his foe's sword hovers over his neck. Yup: sorry, fella. (Some folk learn it the hard way.)

There is also plenty here that made me go hmmm. In one crucial aspect, remaining loyal and true to the source feels like a limitation: the storytelling is olde-worlde episodic, resulting in a middle hour of questing in which characters come and go within minutes of screen time, some of whom (Barry Keoghan's trickster) leave greater traces than others (Erin Kellyman's St. Winifred). With the possible exception of the punchline, it's also unwaveringly po-faced; I came away realising I'm really more of a Chaucer kind of guy. However weird The Green Knight gets, it's still only boutique-weird, carefully curated and cultivated, lacking the rude energies of, say, Pasolini's Trilogy of Life - which may be why that middle hour feels as listless as it does. We get bogged down in the company of Good King Joel Edgerton, growling through a beard, and an unusually dull Alicia Vikander, as a princess who bears a marked resemblance to the serving wench Gawain is seen boinking as the movie opens. (This is because she, too, is played by Vikander: the dual casting might only have been profound if the actress had any spark about her.) Increasingly I wonder whether certain American filmmakers have decided the only possible alternative to the Marvel-Disney hegemony is to push even further out into the realms of fantasy, to aim specifically for wild-and-woolly territory. The Green Knight is unarguably that, but I still think most sentient cinemagoers are crying out for those entertainments in which complicated grown-ups find themselves in broadly familiar predicaments that don't involve talking foxes. (This, of course, is where TV has re-entered the picture.) We've wound up in a place where storytelling in American movies means either films that do the exact same thing over and over again to reassure an audience of millions, or films that insistently do their own thing for the delight of a niche few. Lowery is probably on the right side of this binary, but there remains a vast kingdom between the two camps, and it's a continued headscratcher that no-one's saddling up and setting out to explore that.

The Green Knight is now showing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via Prime Video.

From the archive: "SPECTRE"

After the coronation, a consolidation. First things first: Sam Smith’s SPECTRE theme isn’t greatly improved when heard in conjunction with Daniel Kleinman’s ever-imaginative opening credits, which – taking us inside Bond’s increasingly bruised and inky psyche – constitute the new film’s one shot at depth; “Writing’s On The Wall” still sounds exactly what you get when you strand a performer with minimal life experience in the middle of the Albert Hall.

The decision to employ Smith as a musical flagship could be seen as an indicator of the franchise’s renewed confidence post-Skyfall – that it believes it can now sell us on anything – or of a series that, after raising its game considerably last time out, has started to coast once more. Over 150 minutes, this is what SPECTRE seems to be doing – not unwatchably – as 007 (Daniel Craig) completes some unfinished business, first in Mexico City (home to a single-shot opener that looks too composited to impress) then everywhere else, and news lazily filters through of a threat to MI6.

After the new directions Sam Mendes pushed the last film in – finessing the performances, and thereby repositioning an indomitable hero as vulnerable flesh-and-blood – this one has the feel of the series reverting to expensive formula, and indeed rather smugly coming to reference itself. Where the last few films have done careful work in freshening up the “Bond girl” archetype, this is a boysier Bond, certainly: the conflict as stiffly institutional as Skyfall’s was familial, shifting the focus away from heart and home and back to the boardroom and briefing chamber.

You do miss what Judi Dench brought to these reboots; of the other women assembled here, Monica Bellucci has two scenes as a widow Bond literally pumps for information, Naomie Harris’s Moneypenny reverts to phone-answering duties, while the notional main attraction, Lea Seydoux’s Dr. Madeleine Swann, proves the very model of an undeveloped Bond girl: a pouting demoiselle whose daddy issues leave her easy prey for our James. (More so than 007, I spent the entire second half mourning the loss of Eva Green as Vesper Lind, who seemed so much less of a pushover.)

It’s not that there aren’t pleasures here. You can, for one, enjoy Ben Whishaw’s enhanced participation as Q: call it the Paddington effect, or part of the New Nerdiness that has seen Simon Pegg become Tom Cruise’s sidekick-in-chief in the Mission: Impossibles. And a connoisseurial enjoyment remains to be had from seeing Craig so attentively checking his cuffs.

Yet at no point in SPECTRE do you sense Bond being tested or threatened in the manner he was throughout Skyfall: it takes nearly two hours for this perilously diffuse script to put him in the same frame as his closest adversary (Christoph Waltz, himself trading on past glories), and then it’s in the kind of faintly absurd lair Connery or Moore used to escape from in the 60s and 70s – a sterile bubble of production design, sealed off from the real world the previous film dragged this character towards.

In short, we’re back in the realms of fantasy, which will be a problem for those of us who don’t find Bond an especially compelling or aspirational figure. There are stretches where Craig appears no more real than a computer game avatar – part Hitman, part Leisure Suit Larry – passing invulnerable through a world of safety nets and soft landings (a sofa here, a Seydoux there) which perhaps only come into play when your last movie has taken a cool billion at the global box office.

Of course, if you just want to watch a relic of empire putting our somewhat confusing new world to rights, you’ll do fine: this is, as SPECTRE reminds you, a franchise that has always relied upon the innate conservatism of the British public. (Expect the Prime Minister to venture a groanworthy Bond pun at some stage over the coming weeks, and for George Osborne to announce what a tremendous boost the film has been for the British economy.)

Mendes has again completed a thoroughly professional job: investing the money available to him wisely, never embarrassing himself or the franchise in the way the directors of Die Another Day or Quantum of Solace did. Yet the risk and danger by which Skyfall extended the franchise and the fanbase has, for the moment, abated. That Sam Smith song has actually proven an apt advance party for the film: an expensive production, and a surefire chart-topper, but one without anything especially substantial or memorable at its centre.

(MovieMail, October 2015)

SPECTRE is available on DVD through Warner Home Video, and to rent via Prime Video; the latest film in the Bond franchise, No Time To Die, is now in cinemas nationwide, and will be reviewed here this week. 

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of September 24-26, 2021):

1 (1) Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (12A) ***

2 (new) The Many Saints of Newark (15) ***

3 (2) Free Guy (15)

4 (new) Oasis Knebworth 1996 (15)

5 (3) Respect (12A)

6 (4) Candyman (15)

7 (5) Paw Patrol: The Movie (U)

8 (new) The Green Knight (15) ***

9 (8) The Croods 2: A New Age (U)

10 (6) Malignant (18)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Maltese Falcon

2. Limbo

3. A Clockwork Orange

4. The Story of Looking

5. No Time to Die

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Black Widow (12) ***

2 (4) Monster Hunter (12)

3 (new) The Thing (18) **** [above]

4 (3) The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard (15)

5 (2) Nobody (15) ***

6 (5) The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (15)

7 (6) A Quiet Place: Part II (15)

8 (8) Peter Rabbit 2 (U)

9 (9) Zack Snyder's Justice League (15)

10 (21) Godzilla vs. Kong (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Deerskin

2. Nowhere Special

3. Supernova

4. The Reason I Jump

5. Pig

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Silence of the Lambs (Saturday, ITV, 10.35pm)

2. I Am Not Your Negro (Sunday, BBC2, 11.35pm)

3. Selma (Wednesday, BBC2, 11.15pm)

4. Mrs. Doubtfire (Sunday, C4, 4.15pm)

5. If Beale Street Could Talk (Sunday, BBC2, 9.45pm)

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of September 17-19, 2021):

1 (1) Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (12A) ***

2 (2) Free Guy (15)

3 (3) Respect (12A)

4 (4) Candyman (15)

5 (6) Paw Patrol: The Movie (U)

6 (5) Malignant (18)

7 (8) Jungle Cruise (12A)

8 (9) The Croods 2: A New Age (U)

9 (10) Space Jam: A New Legacy (U)

10 (new) Small World (18) *

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Maltese Falcon

2. Limbo

3. A Clockwork Orange

4. The Story of Looking

5. The Many Saints of Newark

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Black Widow (12) ***

2 (5) Nobody (15) ***

3 (1) The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard (15)

4 (3) Monster Hunter (12)

5 (2) The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (15)

6 (4) A Quiet Place: Part II (15)

7 (26) Dream Horse (PG)

8 (6) Peter Rabbit 2 (U)

9 (10) Zack Snyder's Justice League (15)

10 (7) Cruella (12) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Supernova

2. The Reason I Jump

3. The Fever

4. Another Round

5. Martin Eden

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Saturday, BBC2, 9.10am)

2. The Gift (Wednesday, C4, 2am)

3. Knocked Up (Saturday, ITV, 10.35pm)

4. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (Saturday, five, 9.20pm)

5. Two Mules for Sister Sara [above] (Saturday, five, 5.50pm)

The damned: "The Many Saints of Newark"

One of the defining characteristics of HBO's landmark gangster saga The Sopranos was its stubborn refusal to give its audience what they may have thought they wanted from a TV show. The difficult men in the title of Brett Martin's 2013 study of modern televisual breakthroughs didn't solely refer to the problematic characters these series put on screen, but also those recalcitrant folk behind the camera, determined to shake the schedules of their usual pat certainties. You want clear-cut character arcs, a hint of redemption? No dice. A tidy ten-episode run year in year out? Forget about it. A neat ending tying everything in a bow? Vaffanculo. By going so decisively his own way, showrunner David Chase forged a path for the two decades of TV that followed: uncompromising success stories, shows that interrogated those audience desires (as Breaking Bad did, in frenetic passing), shows that drifted so far from what we want to watch that they barely survived a season. In the years since the show's open-ended finale, talk has persisted that there might someday be a final, conclusive Sopranos movie, perhaps along the lines of the recent, semi-miraculous Deadwood wrap-up, brought in by another Difficult David (Milch) at astronomical long odds. The death of James Gandolfini in 2013 rendered that all but an impossibility - who could ever replace him? - but there now emerges a prequel, The Many Saints of Newark, which is as close as Chase (who writes and produces, with Alan Taylor directing) has got to the newly all-pervasive idea of fan service, for better and worse.

Even here, some of the old perversity remains. For starters, Saints is only tangentially about Tony, a mere pup (played by William Ludwig) in the film's 1967 setting, fleetingly glimpsed initiating an innocent-seeming junior-high numbers racket, but more generally regarded as a future held in the balance for two hours. The focus instead switches to the titular saints, the Moltisantis, at this time a more prominent clan within the New Jersey mob than Tony's own Sopranos. As introduced to us by the series' own Christopher M. (Michael Imperioli), narrating from beyond the grave with an understandable hint of grievance, the main players here are the tyrannical patriarch Aldo (Ray Liotta, an immediate point of connection to other mobs, other movies), his newly imported, considerably younger Italian beauty-queen wife Giuseppina (Michela de Rossi), and Aldo's conflicted, slightly cowering son Dickie (Alessandro Nivola), Christopher's dad, if you've been keeping up. The Oedipal struggle that shapes up over the first hour, which comes to a grisly head in a garage, mirrors certain aspects of the show; Chase's key theme is how, in organised crime as in the entertainment business, history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. Another would be that America has always had its divisions and faultlines. Beyond the Moltisantis, typical HBO-level craft is evident in the movie's richly detailed recreation of the Newark riots, via which the movie promises to extend the show's predominantly Italian-American universe. 

Many of the old names and faces are present, renewed and rejuvenated: Paulie Walnuts (a preening Billy Magnussen), Big Pussy (Samson Moeakiola), Silvio (John Magaro and hairpiece), plus an already ailing Junior (Corey Stoll) and his prototypically monstrous wife Livia (Vera Farmiga, bringing a resemblance to Edie Falco's Carmela that's fascinating in the context of Sopranos lore). Yet they're joined - sometimes pitched against - representatives of Newark's Black community, principally Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), around whom Dickie proves far more comfortable than his irascible peers. The series took domestic stability as its backdrop: it wondered how on earth a powerful man who seemed to have it all could be so fundamentally unhappy, thus identifying an emergent theme in American life (and its TV drama). The movie's backdrop, by contrast, is a city on fire, the kind of turbulence that often covers all manner of crimes (what's another broken window or burning building?) and which can't help but shape character. If Chase is interested in revisiting the myth of Tony Soprano here, it's with an eye to the role models this kid was presented with at a formative moment: not the greatest selection, all told, and it gets more ominous still in the 1970s-set second half, when Dickie - who's been established beyond any doubt as a killer - takes the teenage Tony (now played by Michael Gandolfini, son of James) under his wing. So the film adds to our knowledge, albeit indirectly; it's a TV-derived movie that demands its viewers remain switched on, in a way multiplex movies generally don't. And yet it pains me to report that The Many Saints of Newark doesn't quite grip as drama, in part because it doesn't quite work as a movie.

Taylor, a series regular, ensures the action would tessellate seamlessly with any flashback within the show: Satriale's is much as we left it, and Douglas Aibel's superlative casting ensures everybody looks and sounds the part, from Young Gandolfini (who has his father's adenoidal burr) to the doddery waiter with one line at Dickie's club. Yet I spent much of Saints weighing up whether it was riffing playfully on the idea of conservatism, or simply struggling within the limitations of a studio system that's been gamed specifically to give the audience more of the same. There's no doubt that, as in the series, Chase sees and abhors his made men's conservatism, horrified as they are by their daughters' hiphuggers and the Black folks moving in next door. Organised crime here equals white power, a means of keeping an iron grip on the status quo. Yet the film keeps succumbing to a creative conservatism: it observes the old ways, senses how damaging they can be, and falls right back into them all the same. (Maybe we needed Jennifer Melfi on board as script doctor.) Retracing this lineage to the moment of the Panthers means the movie has to be more engaged with race than the series ever felt obliged to be - but despite Odom Jr.'s typically solid work, that engagement never really rises above the cursory and superficial. For one thing, it's hard to see how McBrayer rises to power on the New Jersey scene, given how comprehensively outnumbered he is. Chase shows scant interest in telling that story; the stubbornness that made the series so unique is this time round set to holding onto the old characters and traditions, rather than pursuing new paths and avenues. 

 

The thinness of the McBrayer strand is part of a wider structural awkwardness that gives the whole the look and feel of a drastically compressed miniseries: my primary takehome at the end of two hours was that this must have been a bastard of a film to edit. Too many scenes and plotlines in that second half don't get a chance to breathe as they would have done at length on TV; you see it most clearly in the death of a key character late on, gabbled through and slapped with a big soundtrack cue, where the series would almost certainly have fashioned a properly desolate tragedy from it. (Like Fredo on the lake, they had the weather for it.) Because it can't bring itself to make the same radical, decisive break from the past that, say, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me did from its predecessor, Saints is not as essential a movie as The Sopranos was a show: at best, it plays like a reasonably chewy footnote to a series that was always, even in its more wilful and wayward stretches, a main event. Perhaps it's only right that a Sopranos movie should leave us with complicated feelings to process - that's what the series did, week in week out - but these are less a result of any dramatic achievement than industrial scale, and how American TV is now routinely more accommodating than American movies. The show remains lightning: violent, electrifying and unpredictable, unlikely ever to strike twice in the same place. It's a slightly sad indictment of the failures of imagination now governing mainstream cinema that a creative as bold as Chase should have been handed the exhausting if not impossible task of recapturing it in a small, muffling, frankly too neat bottle.

The Many Saints of Newark is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

The eyes have it: "The Story of Looking"

We rejoin Mark Cousins in bed. For fully seven minutes at the start of The Story of Looking, we're propped up on a pillow in Cousins' Edinburgh flat, listening to the critic-turned-theorist-and-filmmaker outline the parameters of his latest essay film, on the act and art of looking. TSOL began life as a (smartly written, gorgeously illustrated) book, but Cousins' return to this line of thought has been precipitated by a personal crisis: a diagnosis of macular degeneration in his left eye, for which he is scheduled to undergo surgery as the film begins. The bulk of the film takes place pre-op, with Cousins reconsidering many of the topics he contemplated on the page: what he can see and what he has seen, how we see, what the look means and the problems looking brings. Yet there's also a sequence on the op itself, complete with extreme surgical close-ups of pointy objects disrupting cataracts that actively dare the viewer not to look; and a moving post-op coda that considers seeing the world through old (rather than new) eyes, and concludes with a stretch of slow cinema during which one feels one's own eyes being very deliberately recalibrated. (You've heard out the theory, Cousins seems to be saying, now here's some practice.) Repeatedly, though, and as befits an essay film made by someone in a temporary state of physical enfeeblement, The Story of Looking returns us to the sight of its prime mover lying in bed: eating toast, snapping selfies, checking Tweets, getting mildly sloshed. Like the protagonist of JK Huysmans' novel À rebours, shutting himself away in order to catalogue everything outside his door, Cousins conjures up an entire world of wonders without really getting out from under his duvet. You can do that, if you've looked well enough.

This is a film about looking, then, but it's also a work of careful, sustained, considered looking in itself. The cutaways are to clips from those movies that number among the most amazing to look at (Persona, Vertigo, Zhang Yimou's Hero); in this respect, this Story tessellates with The Story of Film, but we also see artworks and architectural marvels that broaden the frame of reference, and highlights from Cousins' own magpie-like image gathering, many of them equally spectacular. A power station's cooling tower is blown to smithereens, leaving a silhouette of coal dust in its place. A black-clad fellow perches precariously alongside the chimneypots of a property adjacent to Cousins' flat, recalling the angels who watch over Berlin in Wings of Desire. Cousins' landscapes speak to many hours studying Kiarostami: motorcyclists carving lines into hillsides, sheep moving over the face of a mountain. Yet equally he's compelled by the microscopic (a feather borne along on the breeze), knowing full well that the human eye has been equipped to locate astonishment in both. The soundtrack is rife with stimulation - prompts set out in that uniquely jabbing, probing syntax, where even the definitive statements sound like the kind of question a critic is prone to asking themselves while at work. Even those bedroom scenes serve a purpose, clearing some space for the viewer to envision and work through their thoughts: Cousins knows a film can suggest something without having to show it. (Which is why he shows us the build-up to an alleged beheading in Saudi Arabia, but not the fateful blow.)

This kind of work has precedents. I was set to thinking not just of the book - which may be more comprehensive in setting out Cousins' thoughts on this subject, but less personal, somehow - but also Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, with its encyclopaedic squirrelling of cherished images. Yet where Godard hides behind those images - obfuscating, like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain - Cousins inserts himself front and centre, as somebody to be looked at. He digs out his childhood photographs, compares his chest to that of Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver, and stages his own homage to Jenny Agutter's naked swim in Walkabout. "Am I an exhibitionist?," he asks, as his penis bobs before us. The answer to that will lie solely in the eye of the beholder, but there's certainly a different philosophy in play here: Cousins is a far more enthusiastic, all-in exponent of the pleasures and joys tied up with looking than the guarded Godard has been. (I can't see the latter reaching for the "You're the One That I Want" number from Grease, somehow.) One of this story's subtexts concerns how looking has changed in recent years - how critical study is now less detached and more democratic. Cousins doesn't strike us as one proclaiming from on high - we're right next to him on that pillow - rather someone seeking further engagement; he doesn't want the last word, but to open up a space for further reflection and conversation. If Agnès Varda had popped round to see this theorist-and-filmmaker at the end of Faces Places, she would have received the warmest of welcomes.

The emotion inherent in that is another part of this story, and another point at which Godard and Cousins part ways: the latter allows his voice to crack, and his eyes to water. And a big part of this Story's poignancy derives from the fact there's nobody around to open the door to; the usual sources of conversation aren't there. The chronology's a little fuzzy - the hospital scenes, when we get to them, are noticeably mask-free - but some parts of the film were apparently completed during the first lockdown, and a kind of solitude is written into those bedroom scenes: it's as though the filmmaker is going through the film alone, with only the camera as a confidante, and only wifi to connect him to the outside world. What Cousins succeeds in evoking here is a period when we were all falling back on what we'd already seen and done, taking stock of our own visual imagebanks, and wondering what we might ever see and do again. This will go double in Cousins' case, given the physical concerns of the past few years, but one of the most moving aspects of the past few months has been seeing old faces, and reminding ourselves just how those faces move - how they sometimes light up like screens, and in ways the scratchily makeshift pixels of a FaceTime or Zoom call couldn't ever fully replicate. (If, as the saying goes, we're all light, then some of it was visibly dimmed by our laptops.) As the world has reopened, and our horizons have once more expanded - at least a little, for now at least - we've all had to learn to look anew and see again; Cousins' film, being a refresher course for the eyes, connects very closely and affectingly with that ongoing process of regeneration.

The Story of Looking is now playing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via Curzon Home Video, the BFI Player and the Modern Films website.