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Arts, Films

Film Review: Tolkien (12A)

REVIEW

Nicholas Hoult in Tolkien, a sober affair that is driven by love and friendship.

TOLKIEN is driven by love. It is about the passion that J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult), creator of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, had for his wife, Edith (Lily Collins). In telling the story of his early years, it also chronicles his love for his friends, and for language itself. It is a likeable picture, a bit anodyne in parts, rather clunky in others, but it has a great heart.

Film Trailer (approx. 2.5 minutes)

It opens on nightmarishly familiar images of the Somme, and then whisks us back in time to show us young Ronald’s eventful early childhood. Around the turn of the 20th century, his widowed mother – the person who auspiciously first filled his head with stories of dragons and derring do – falls on what she calls “impecunious circumstances”, and uproots Ronald and his younger brother from a rural idyll to soot polluted Birmingham.

But then she dies, and his guardian, a kindly Catholic priest (Colm Meaney), moves the orphaned Ronald (played at this stage by Harry Gilby) to a kind of middle-class orphanage owned by a pompous matron (Pam Ferris). That’s where he falls for Edith, who becomes the love of his life.

Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s film explores their burgeoning relationship, and her influence on him, but also dwells on his coterie of schoolfriends, with whom Ronald forms a club, a fellowship, devoted to “changing the world through the power of art”.

His brilliant mind and academic prowess continues to broadens at Oxford, where he is mentored by a venerable professor of Middle English, sweetly played by Derek Jacobi. It is, though, his friends who influence him most, and he becomes especially attached to one of them, aspiring poet Geoffrey Bache Smith (Anthony Boyle).

Later, in one of the flits back and forth to the Somme, we see him and Geoffrey endlessly calling each other’s name on the battlefield. In scenes that are meant to be deeply poignant, cynics may wonder whether they shouldn’t perhaps be attempting to kill enemy soldiers rather than trying to locate each other like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the briny at the end of Titanic. Tolkien, for all its slight deficiencies, is a highly watchable film.

Aptly, for a biopic of perhaps the greatest of all fantasy writers, it is nicely written, by Stephen Beresford – who scripted the hugely engaging 2014 film Pride – and David Gleeson.

And while it no doubt takes plenty of dramatic licence, it is hard to see what might offend the author’s surviving relatives, who have strenuously objected to it being made at all.

Verdict: Big-hearted biopic

★★★

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Arts, Drama, Films

Film Review (Oscar nominee): Capernaum

REVIEW: 15 cert, 126 minutes

Zain

The plucky young boy Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) in Capernaum: an endless struggle to get by.

EVERY so often a film comes along which is difficult to comprehend and one in which is hard to figure out and wrap your head around. Not the ones you can’t believe were ever made (there’s no shortage of those) but the ones that simultaneously seem so real and so impossible that watching them is like witnessing a magic trick you’re unable ever to fathom. Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum – one of this year’s foreign-language Oscar nominees, and the Jury Prize winner at Cannes last year – is that kind of film. It is the story of a child surviving on the streets of Beirut, infused with the richness of great fiction and the heart-in-mouth power of front-line news footage.

The young survivor is Zain, played in an utterly disarming performance by Zain Al Rafeea, who, like his screenplay character, is about 12-years-old. He’s a newcomer to acting, but a Syrian refugee in real life. Zain flees his family’s dingy Beirut apartment in the wake of a decision by his parents that he sees, quite rightly, as an appalling betrayal, and is bounced around in the tumult of the Lebanese capital (the film’s title is a French term for chaos, and also a Biblical town cursed by Christ). Having lived with his poverty-stricken parents and numerous siblings, Zain was aghast when his father arranges for his sister, who he is especially close to, to be married off to a businessman. She is barely pubescent.

Bambi-eyed the boy may be, but he is no Disney innocent, and gets by on his considerable wits in a frenetic war-ravaged town. After fetching up at a decrepit theme park, he befriends an Ethiopian single mother called Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw). She is a cleaner who starts to rely on him to look after her own toddler while she is at work. He becomes, in effect, a surrogate big brother to her similarly undocumented toddler Yonas – who is played by a one-year-old in what must be, without a sliver of exaggeration, one of the greatest infant performances in cinema history. When Rahil goes missing, Zain becomes Yonas’s guardian too, and the two children must fend for themselves in the direst of circumstances.

The irony is clear: Zain is much better at parenting than his own parents. In fact, the film is framed by a courtroom sequence in which Zain sues his mother and father for bringing him into this wretched world. This brings shape to a story that sprawls by nature.

For some, Zain’s legal challenge adds a discordant note of fantasy to a film that otherwise pulsates with realism. Others are likely to love every minute of this movie, which seems largely improvised, but which is brilliantly crafted and directed.

Capernaum is Labaki’s third and most ambitious film to date. It is close in both texture and spirit to the Brazilian crime epic City of God: it teems with the same excitement and danger as Fernando Meirelles’s film. To call it Dickensian would probably be too great a compliment. Whether Capernaum has the staying power of the great social-realist films remains to be seen. But, in its unbroken gaze and visionary sweep, it does feel like a landmark.

The list of films in this year’s Foreign Language category at the Academy Awards, which also includes Roma, the Netflix film that won a Bafta and is tipped for an Oscar, is considerably classier than the list of nominees for Best Picture.

Nadine Labaki probably won’t walk away from the Oscars with a gold statuette and the movie industry’s greatest bauble, but in most other years, she surely would have done.

Verdict: Social realism with a blockbuster spirit. A classy drama.

★★★★★

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Arts, Films, Literature

Film Review: All Is True (12A)

REVIEW

AT the Global Theatre in London on June 29, 1613, a stage cannon was fired during a performance of William Shakespeare’s play All Is True, which today we know as Henry VIII.

. See also Short Essay: Shakespeare’s Plays

Such a small and theatrical flourish would come to have devastating consequences, because the cannon set fire to the Globe’s thatched roof and within an hour one of the most famous playhouses, where most of Shakespeare’s plays had been unveiled, had burned to the ground.

The career of the country’s greatest playwright ended on the same night. He never wrote another significant play and died a couple of years later.

Those last two years are the focus of Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True. Heartbroken and bereft, Shakespeare returns to his home town of Stratford, and to the uneasy embrace of his wife Anne Hathaway and their two daughters, whom he has rarely visited over the previous two decades.

All Is True is heavyweight production, particularly in terms of those doing the acting. Branagh, who has done as much as anyone alive to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the silver screen, plays the great man himself.

Under a gleaming dome of a forehead, he is, though, barely recognisable. A knobbly prosthetic nose and a jutting bearded chin which, when added to a surprising lack of assertiveness, give him the air of a man who can’t decide whether he has entered a lookalike contest as Jimmy Hill.

Less compromised by the make-up department, Judi Dench plays Anne, and Ian McKellen has a highly enjoyable cameo as Shakespeare’s erstwhile patron, the Earl of Southampton. It is strongly hinted that the Earl was also the object of Shakespeare’s ardour. Or “Bardour”, if you prefer.

The script is by Ben Elton, who has tempered the jauntiness of his Shakespearean sitcom Upstart Crow to give us a barrage of sexual scandal and a whirl of emotions – grief, resentment, envy, lust – more suited to a modern soap opera like EastEnders. Or, maybe something else entirely different.

All Is True largely unfolds as an everyday tale of country folk, for which Dench unpacks her best rural vowels. Some might rather suggest it’s a ruff version of The Archers.

 

THE scandals concern both Shakespeare’s daughters. Susanna (Lydia Wilson) is unhappily married to a holier-than-thou Puritan doctor, to whom she is appearing unfaithful.

Judith (Kathryn Wilder) marries the more rakish Tom Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst), who has already impregnated another local woman, Margaret Wheeler (Eleanor de Rohan).

The grief is mostly Shakespeare’s, whose return to Stratford, without the distraction of writing and staging all those plays, re-ignites the pain of losing his only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, many years earlier.

“I’ve lived so long in imaginary worlds, I’ve lost sight of what is real,” he laments. At first, he gets precious little sympathy either from the stolidly undemonstrative Anne, or from miserable Judith, who was Hamnet’s twin, and feels certain that her father would prefer her to have perished instead.

Occasionally, Shakespeare loses his temper with these unappreciative womenfolk. “Through my genius I’ve brought fame and fortune to this house,” he bellows, and 400 years or so later there’s no real arguing with that, though Anne doesn’t look too convinced. But, gradually, the family learn to live with and even love each other again, despite Elton pulling out a rather startling late twist.

Branagh’s decision to cast Dench has raised eyebrows.

Anne was eight years older, whereas the actual gap between them is 26. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to see our greatest Shakespearean actress playing the Bard’s wife, and, All Is True contains many pleasures, not least the cinematography by Zac Nicholson.

Nicholson pounces like another 17th-century genius, Rembrandt, on the lighting opportunities afforded by all those candles, and all those sunbeams streaming through mullioned windows.

Outside, the panorama shots are ravishing. Warwickshire is a beautiful part of the country.

Verdict: An Intriguing tale.

★★★★

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