Review: The Imitation Game

The Imitation Game (dir. Morten Tyldum)

His name was Alan Turing, and his story is one of triumph and prejudice - and one that should be much more celebrated than it is. With his latest film, Norwegian director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters) is leading the charge against this suspicious absence, supported by a stellar cast comprised of Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Mark Strong, and Charles Dance.

Cutting between three parts, The Imitation Game depicts integral stages in the life of Alan Turing: his torturous boarding school days in 1928, his slightly less torturous experience as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park from 1939-1945, and his darkest moment of all, being charged for gross indecency in Manchester in 1952. In each of these parts, Turing is presented as a detached genius, a man who nobody expects anything of and yet, as the script is sure to keep reminding us, is capable of achieving things which nobody expects.

At times, as when it is driving this message home, the script does come on rather heavy-handed. However, it is testament to the acting ability on show that this does little to diminish the emotional experience of watching the film. When the drama is dealing in conflict, it is incredible to see Cumberbatch regress to the sort of fidgety-ostracised schoolboy that is played so superbly by Alex Lawther in the depiction of Turing’s early years. Instead of playing the sort of manic, fast-talking genius that one may find in Sherlock, Cumberbatch delivers a bumbling, socially awkward performance that subtly hints that Turing was perhaps somewhere on the autism spectrum.

The film succeeds in delivering the story of one of Britain’s least understood and least celebrated heroes. It is to the merit of the script that the film does not shy away from showing that Turing could be a difficult man, who was forced into making difficult decisions – whether in hiding his homosexuality from a prejudiced society, or playing the role of God when deciding which German attacks should be stopped, and which must be conceded. In the scenes concerned with Turing’s unconventional relationship with Knightley’s Joan Clarke, both are shown to be highly-intelligent outcasts. Indeed, both are snubbed by their society for not adhering to the doctrinal norm, and both positively flourish in one another’s company, highlighting the humanity and playfulness in Turing’s character despite the severity of his situation and the image of the troubled genius he wished to espouse.

Turing was a man obsessed by puzzles. Following a controversial royal pardon from Queen Elizabeth II in 2013, and the increasing awareness of Turing’s fundamental efforts towards ending the war, this film continues to undo the puzzle as to why his story has been hidden for so long.

BFI London Film Festival: Part One

At some point in the recent past that my memory has cast to the shadows, I completed an application to volunteer at the 2014 BFI London Film Festival. About a fortnight ago, I received a phone call informing me that I had passed their meticulous selection process, perhaps due to my overwhelming flexibility having just completed an MA. Though the position was unpaid - I’m yet to pass any selection process that leads to any form of monetary gain - I did receive a volunteer’s pass which granted me access to the festival’s catalogue of 248 films.  For the first week of the festival, I had an obligation to assist (and had a great time in assisting) at the delegate centre at the BFI’s Stephen Street location. Following that, the festival was my oyster, and I caught fifteen films, many of which I may never have been exposed to if it wasn’t for the far-reaching selection of films on show.

This was my first film festival, and I quickly got into the swing of seeing three films in a day. The first that I caught was the latest offering from Taxidermia director György Pálfi. Freefall, presented under the festival’s Laugh strand, showcases an old woman as she stumbles onto the roof of her apartment building determined to jack it all in. When she hurdles herself from the building only to crash unharmed onto the solid pavement below, though not without damage to her well-worn spectacles, she does what anyone with a determined death wish would do: she gets up, and tries again. The film then follows Auntie (Piroska Molnár) as she climbs once more up her staircase to heaven, diverging from her plight at each floor to offer an episodic satire of contemporary life. The film’s relationship with its soundtrack, comprised of the music of Amon Tobin (who provided an original score for Taxidermia), is astounding in the sense of discomfort and entrancement it creates, especially as the camera dissolves through each door and into the private lives of the apartment block’s residents.

Another film which focuses on the physical struggle of escaping from life is Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild. Rather than ascending a staircase with intermissions from one’s neighbours, however, Reece Witherspoon is set on traversing the Pacific Crest Trail in this true story of a woman looking to escape the interrupting force of her own past. The result is a truly affecting work that stands unrivalled in Witherspoon’s filmography.  Similar to Vallée’s previous film, Dallas Buyers Club, the story is one of survival that, though packing serious emotional weight, is handled with a dexterity that allows genuine humour and hope to rise up from it. It is a sentiment completely at odds, however, with the survival story of Augusta (Brit Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeild) in the disappointingly turgid American Civil War film, The Keeping Room.  Selected in the festival’s Official Competition for Best Feature, Harry Brown director Daniel Barber takes an intriguing script by Julia Hart, only to obscure it through portentous, supposedly atmospheric filmmaking. Each dramatic moment in this Black Listed script is rendered flaccid by the director’s approach, with one scene in particular invoking the titular keeping room arriving completely out of nowhere and to diminished effect. Thankfully, this was by far the worse film I saw at the festival, and though it stuttered in its storytelling, the visual landscape provided an entertainment of its own.

Another equally beguiling landscape is the South African locations used by Dogme director Kristian Levring to establish nineteenth-century America in his Danish Western, The Salvation. The festival was ripe with films that played with genre conventions. The Keeping Room looked to reflect on the American Civil War through the scope of gender identity, the Chinese thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice experimented with narrative and camera placement, and The Salvation  contained a level of invention that elevated it beyond a pastiche of the Western. Speaking after the film, Levring’s love of the Western genre was palpable. Citing Ford, Eastwood and Leone as influences, Levring creates a setting that registers as familiar, though not worn. Populating his frontier, we have the wronged Jon (Mads Mikkelsen), the formidable outlaw (Jeffery Dean Morgan), his ex-footballer henchman (Eric Cantona), and the silenced woman (Eva Green). As intimated, however, twists in the script and remarkable cinematography by Jens Schlosser ensure that the revenge story is engaging throughout, and worth seeking whether a fan of the genre, or not.

Impressive levels of invention in the script can also be found in the solidly-acted, The Drop. Adapted from his own short story, Dennis Lehane’s first screenplay (he also wrote the source novels from which Shutter Island and Gone Baby Gone are based) is as full of grit and intrigue as one would expect from this writer’s pen. Brought to the screen by Michaël R. Roskam (Bullhead) and starring Tom Hardy and the late James Gandolfini, The Drop will provide a real pleasure for anyone with a penchant for crime cinema. Hardy once again shows that he is the master of accents (the transition from Welsh contractor in Locke to a Brooklyn bartender, executed here to perfection) and his character, Bob, is one shrouded in just enough mystery to keep the viewer’s attention transfixed. Add to this the draw of relishing in one last Gandolfini performance, and The Drop is a recipe seasoned for greatness – at least for those who are enthralled by a well-written crime story with a gratifyingly revealing final act.

With that said, if you are looking for an ending that obscures rather than reveals, then the Chinese film Black Coal, Thin Ice may prove more suitable. Having picked up the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Diao Yinan’s latest offering since the acclaimed Night Train arrived at LFF with a reputation for being of the more puzzling blend of thriller; more in the mould of Michael Haneke than M. Night Shyamalan. Concerning itself with the discovery of various body parts across the country, the film follows a detective (Liao Fan) whose alcoholism and ineptitude are more prevalent aspects of his character than his investigative skills. Containing several beautiful, and some outright shocking, shots, Diao Yinan exhibits a directorial style that is beguiling on a technical level and, as is exemplified in the mysterious last scene, on a narrative level also. It is a film that demands discussion; though don’t expect to arrive at anything close to a satisfactory conclusion. 

Review: The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq

A review for The Film Gods

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (dir. Guillaume Nicloux)                 

               

In 2011, France’s most controversial literary export since the Marquis de Sade went missing during a promotional tour of his latest book, The Map and the Territory. What ensued was a media frenzy that speculated widely on Houellebecq’s whereabouts; a baton that writer and director Guillaume Nicloux diligently picks up in his latest film.

For Nicloux’s money, Houellebecq’s disappearance three years ago was not on account of a liaison with al-Qaida, but instead the result of a brief, though enforced, stay at the country home of Luc and his sensitive skinhead brothers. The film begins with the diurnal experiences of the writer as he makes plans to redecorate his kitchen and traverses the streets of Paris - cigarettes and well-documented intolerance close at hand. In these moments of self-parody, Houellebecq comes across as remarkably engaging, with the writer proving that he is very aware, and more than willing to make light of, the unflattering picture that many people have of him.

Houellebecq is presented as calm if not a little complacent in his lifestyle, a picture which does not change when Luc and his brothers arrive with a perforated metal box to take him away. Rather than concerning itself with heightened emotion or melodrama, Nicloux’s film takes a decidedly down-played look at abduction, with the writer, chain-smoking and chained to a bed, remaining his idiosyncratic self throughout. Each member of the family with which Houellebecq is lodging comes to admire him for his deadpan manner and literary prowess. Some seek the author’s advice where others look to flaunt their abilities in wrestling, bodybuilding or vehicular maintenance. All the while, the atmosphere remains exceptionally cordial as wine continues to flow and the writer, after turning down the option to browse a selection of pornographic magazines, is granted a prostitute instead. In this exceptional kidnapping, each of the abducted’s whims are pandered to and, in fact, the writer’s only moment of frustration comes at Luc’s repeated refusal to return his cigarette lighter to him.

With the notion of an actor playing himself not being limited to the French author, Nicloux crafts a naturalistic, dry comedy that ultimately charms the viewer just as Houellebecq charms his captors. The cast is comprised of amateurs that play-off Houellebecq’s central performance, which is captivating from the start, to great effect. Provocative and offensive, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq is not one of the most conventionally comedic films that will be released this year, but it is all the better, and more suitable to its subject, for it.

Review: Boyhood

Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater)

Richard Linklater has described time as “the building block of cinema” – as indeed it is of all our lives. In his latest and most ambitious work Boyhood, the Austin-based auteur sets his camera to observe that idea, following his comprised cast of Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Lorelei Linklater over twelve years; and what a difference twelve years makes.

From the offset, Coltrane’s Mason Jr. establishes himself as a screen presence that claims introspection as a means of not only drawing into himself, but drawing audiences to him also. “You’re still staring out the window all day”, berates one of his teachers as, despite possessing an impressive amount of talent and intellect, Mason seems to have no desire to employ his gifts at the will of others. On the decision to cast Coltrane, Linklater explains that “Other kids were straighter…There were kids who would have grown up to be athletes, student council presidents, made their parents proud. Ellar was the kind who was going to be his own guy, he had not come out of a cookie cutter.” As the narrative of life unfolds around Mason, there are multiple attempts by overbearing (mostly drunken) stepfathers to force his voracious energy into a preordained structure, with one heart-wrenching scene involving the shaving of Mason’s long hair whilst being chastised for “looking like a girl.” When his biological father (Hawke) does turn up sporadically throughout the film, it is to fulfil the role of the ‘fun dad’, an avenue of escapism for Mason and his sister from the troubles of home life. With that said, Linklater’s characters are nuanced and intriguing enough to defy the stereotyped mothers, fathers, and stepfathers of conventional Hollywood. Hawke’s Mason Sr. provides an escape because he too is seeking a way out of dealing with his problems; namely that he is growing older whilst unable to curb his passion for the moment by forming any practical plans for the future. Whilst Mason’s pragmatic mother seeks a way out of her cruel circumstances through studying, his father looks to cling to his (short lived) carefree youth, embodied in the symbol of his classic American muscle car. When Mason reacts badly to his father’s selling of the car later in the movie, he can rest assured that he has inherited what the car comes to stand for: his father’s insatiable appetite for the present moment and for a good time.

As intimated, for a film about the force of time on our lives, the present moment is heralded as that which must be fought for (or thought of) at all cost. As Larkin realised: ‘though our element is time, / We’re not suited to the long perspectives’. Patricia Arquette’s breakdown as Mason readies himself for college upon seeing his first photograph serves as testament to this. Time is a cruel force that takes precious moments away from us until they’re ultimately forced to the role of fading memories. What Linklater’s film teaches us is that they should be captured nonetheless, pounced on despite their tendency to get away from us, just as life can. One revelation, brought on by the helpful hand of psilocybin, toward the end of the film strikes up issue with the whole carpe diem attitude: “it’s the other way around”, suggests Mason’s newly-found friend, “the moment seizes us.” Quite right, too, as in a darkened theatre this film certainly seized me, the three-hour running time expiring far too quickly. Luckily, these memories, thanks to Linklater’s perfectly placed camera, can be relived again and again (alas, they will be…again and again.)

Review: Calvary

Calvary (dir. John Michael McDonagh)

Anyone familiar with John McDonagh’s initial outing, The Guard, will be aware of the acerbic wit and caustic dialogue that so gloriously flourishes under the pen of both he and his brother, Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths). Whilst that bitter tone isn’t missing from Calvary, a certain amount of the comic undercutting is, a deliberate composition that is encapsulated in the film’s opening line: “I first tasted semen when I was seven years old…”

The film opens with Brendan Gleeson’s priest sat in a confession box, the silence drags out, the camera unrelenting in its study of Gleeson’s face before this line shatters the silence. What follows is a sentence. Not a command of one ‘Our Father’ and several ‘Hail Mary’s’ from the priest but, rather, the ominous threat of death from a pained, and abused member of the rural Irish community. The stage is then set for County Sligo’s cast of jaded parishioners: Dylan Moran plays the town squire undergoing an existential crisis as a result of his illicit practices as a banker, Chris O’Dowd enters as the cuckolded butcher whose wife, it is revealed by her Ghana-born lover, has many boyfriends in a town that, apparently, is able to collect in one small building.

If one wishes, the opening gambit of the film allows for a whodunit of sorts to play out amidst this curtain call of melancholia. For Freud, the distinction between mourning and melancholia is such that ‘[i]n mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself'. McDonagh’s lens brilliantly captures the landscape of the Irish coast, asserting that the troubles here are within rather than without. Trauma is aplenty amidst this community, not least in the central figure of Gleeson’s priest as the arrival of his daughter (Kelly Reilly) proves. What is absurd about the trauma is the way in which it is dealt with. Whereas Father Lavelle’s daughter follows the Freudian tradition by turning guilt-ridden anger onto the self, making the vital error of cutting across and not down, the rest of this motley-crew seem determined to make the good priest suffer for their various pains. Whether it is through humiliation as Dylan Moran’s drunken banker pisses over a Holbein masterpiece, violence as he meets the force of a baseball bat, or the goading of the rest of the community, Gleeson acts as a Christ-like figure that bears witness to the sins of a humanity that may be beyond salvation.

Ultimately, the priest himself is unable to resist inflicting his own pains onto others, snapping at a fellow clergyman that he should be working in an insurance firm rather than the Church; an indictment that leads this “man-of-faith” to turn to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. McDonagh makes it clear, Gleeson’s character is from the same world as the community he is part of, his reference points (from Robert Herrick to “felching”) are the same, he is as worldly a man as any we have seen in McDonagh’s films. What is different is his relentless desire to rid his parish of cynicism, marking, perhaps, a change in scope for this director. Calvary is altogether a more serious work, but one in which the McDonagh’s talent for cultivated wit can still be enjoyed. Making his entrance into acting late, just as his priest enters into the Church in his middle-years, Gleeson turns out his best performance yet, an assured effort that carries McDonagh’s vision meticulously.  

Book Review: The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don't run

The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don’t run. By Rob Stone. West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2013. pp. 224 + vii.

Existing as part of the Wallflower Press’s Directors’ Cuts series, one that boasts titles on auteurs ranging from Takeshi Kitano to Terry Gilliam, Rob Stone’s nuanced study of Richard Linklater takes one remarkable step in making amends for the relatively little amount of work to be found on one of the most innovative of contemporary filmmakers. One of the objectives of this series of monographs is to illuminate the creative dynamics of World Cinema, a commitment to art that is embodied by Linklater himself, who made the decision to place himself in a world ‘that was just about your artistic desires’.[1]

This world, as addressed in Stone’s opening chapter ‘Locating Linklater’, is that of the Texas University campus and its surrounding areas. Somewhat convincingly, Stone outlines the importance of such a liberal, creative and bohemian landscape to the development of ‘a prime contradiction: the committed slacker, which remains the dominant theme in Linklater’s cinema.’[2] For Linklater and his band of slackers, then, Austin is transformed into a utopia of creative activity politicised in its opposition to the cut-throat world of Reaganomics being espoused by America at large. As the title-card in Slacker reads: ‘withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy’[3], a sentiment that Stone dexterously links to Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, a group ‘who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces’ and are ‘at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.’[4]

From locating Linklater geographically, Stone goes on to display the problems in placing the director amongst the taxonomies of film. Neither belonging to the studio-systems, nor being wholly independent, Linklater is shown to occupy an area of grey that has seen him produce blockbuster films such as School of Rock, adapt plays (SubUrbia, Tape), shoot digitally (Tape) and explore post-production rotoscoping as a means of enhancing the oneiric qualities of his contemplative cinema (A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life). The implications that Stone draws from this cast Linklater as a composite Modernist figure who employs ‘the techniques of associative thought favoured by the Surrealists, the dérive of the Situationist International and the experiments with film language of Godard.’[5]

The inclusions here of Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive, Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the ‘time-image’ and Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on the carnival are masterfully appropriated with the cinema of Linklater, the rewards being of valuable insight to the diligent reader. Rather neatly, Stone moves from an investigation of the spatial aspects of this cinema to the temporal, building an argument all the while that confirms Linklater, and his work, to embody the ethos of revolutionary withdrawal; of committed slacking.

 Ultimately, this book is invaluable to anyone with an interest in understanding the works of one of cinema’s most intelligent directors. It comes with just the one caveat: a work as well-researched and packed with ideas as this requires a pace not dissimilar to Linklater’s films; so, like the subtitle of this book, when approaching Stone’s writing: walk, don’t run.

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[1] Rob Stone, The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don’t run (Columbia University Press, 2013) p. 16.

[2] Ibid., p. 1.

[3] Slacker, dir. by Richard Linklater (Detour Film Production, 1991)

[4] Robert Louis Stevenson cited in The Cinema of Richard Linklater: walk, don’t run (Columbia University Press, 2013) p. 108.

[5] Ibid., p. 99.

Book Review: Slacker (the Screenplay)

Slacker (Screenplay). By Richard Linklater. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. pp. 154 + vi.

The published screenplay of Richard Linklater’s seminal Slacker, a film that gave a sense of identity to a generation of anti-establishment, anti-mainstream twenty-somethings growing up in the 1990s, is not your average screenplay. In the opening pages Linklater is sure to acknowledge how ‘[l]ike Slacker the film, this book would not exist without the help of enthusiastic and talented collaborators.’[1] Indeed, that is what makes this book so unique: Linklater taking his synergetic filmmaking style and adopting it to a project that combines memoirs, Q & As, articles, profiles and photographs to form a collage of the creative process involved in the making of Slacker.

Douglas Coupland providing the foreword for this composite collection of materials is as suitable as it is entertaining. Credited with paving his own form of marginal identity apart from the late capitalist model of an ‘Eisenhower-based reality’[2], Coupland’s Generation X, released the same year as Linklater’s Slacker, shared a similar vision of a creative life free from the burden of work; a world of ‘dreamers out on the edge…characters out of key, in and out of love, drifting, slightly twisted, still willing to listen…’[3]

What is most remarkable about this book is just how personal it feels. Slacker itself being a labour of love for Linklater and his Austin-based collaborators, the inclusion of diary entries from the director’s notebook scattered sequentially throughout the screenplay allow one to ascertain a fuller, more intimate understanding of the process involved in getting a film that, one excerpt reveals, has ‘been in [his] head for over five years’[4] from the page to the screen. Moreover, nothing is left unturned in this scrupulous study of this creative process. Whether it be directorial notes to actors, a description of the casting method, notes from the crew or reports of early responses to the film – one highlight being the observation that “[t]hey don’t DO anything!”[5] as overheard by Linklater – no stone is left unturned; a thoroughness that avoids being onerous and is instead pleasantly revealing.

In the centre of this plethora of sources is the screenplay itself, one that paved the way for a new type of contemplative filmmaking that captures the philosophical musings and frustrations of the disenfranchised youth of America. Profiles of the cast – with information including preferred Italian city, last book read and formative experience – highlight what it was they brought to a stage that Linklater created for their voices to be heard on. What becomes apparent is that these individuals are expressing the same sentiment that Linklater describes in his introduction to the book: a transformation ‘from thinking (as I had been told over and over again) that my generation had nothing to say to thinking that it not only had everything to say but was saying it in a completely new way.’[6] It is thanks to this film, and the works of writers such as Douglas Coupland, that such a large, creative and marginal group of individuals were given a platform at all above the ubiquitous currents of the mainstream.

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[1] Richard Linklater, Slacker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. iv.

[2] Douglas Coupland cited in Slacker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Richard Linklater, Slacker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) p. 3.

[5] Ibid., p. 12.

[6] Ibid., p. 4.