Category Archives: Films

Arts, Films

Film Review: 1917 (cert 15)

OSCARS 2020

1917

IT was twenty years ago when Sam Mendes won a coveted Golden Globes double – best drama film and best director – for his debut feature, American Beauty.

Then, Mendes was a 34-year-old movie novice when he won in 2000, precociously brilliant but already well established as a theatre director.

On the eve of this year’s Oscars Mendes looks as if he’s done it again. 1917 is a master stroke. He has fed two decades of film-making experience into this wonderfully powerful picture.

. Film Trailer –

During the centenary years of World War I, some terrific films were made about the conflict. The pick of them was a remarkable 2018 documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, a treasure trove of original but newly colourised footage which showed that no big-screen dramatisation of trench warfare would ever be quite right, for one striking, if prosaic, reason: in real life, soldiers’ teeth, almost without exception, were terribly rotten.

In every other respect, however, Mendes propels his audience back to the Western Front with the same extraordinary, visceral power.

That’s due to both his skill as a film-maker and the bold simplicity of his story. Bold, because he resists the temptation to introduce layers of plot or characterisation.

He even resists the urge to tell us anew what, thanks to all those familiar animal metaphors, we already know – that our brave soldiers were lions led by donkeys, going like lambs to the slaughter.

Instead, this is an account of a perilous but straightforward mission by a pair of lance corporals, who are handed the challenge of delivering a message intended to save the lives of 1,600 men. To do so, they must cross battle-ravaged no-man’s land and the abandoned German front line at immense personal risk.

It is a partly fictionalised tale, but is inspired by the director’s late grandfather, Alfred Mendes, to whom the film is dedicated.

There are conflicting accounts of that inspiration, with some saying that Alfred Mendes himself delivered such a message. Other accounts suggest that he told his grandchildren stories about others who did so.

 

EITHER way, this is an intensely personal project. Mendes would undoubtedly be the first to concede his debts both to his Glaswegian co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns and, above all, to veteran British cinematographer Roger Deakins, who won an Academy Award for depicting the future in Blade Runner 2049 and is surely a strong contender for another – for evoking the past.

He takes us with these men on their harrowing journey by filming what appears to be (but isn’t quite) a single continuous take. The effect is thrillingly – at time knuckle-chewingly – immersive, and actually the roots of it are in Mendes’s 2015 Bond film Spectre, which began with an eight-minute take.

The director’s theatrical background is also conspicuously influential (like many of his plays), but this unfolds in real time. Mendes has packed cinematic titans Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch to play the top brass.

Mark Strong and Andrew Scott play officers, too.

But, astutely, he has cast as his two lance corporals a pair of actors you may recognise but struggle to name: George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman (who was the sulky, mulleted best friend of the Bruce Springsteen nut in last year’s Blinded By The Light). They are the stars of this film, handily reinforcing the message that most war heroes come anonymously from the rank and file.

Chapman plays Blake, chosen because he is adept at map-reading and has a beloved older brother with the endangered division.

A General (Firth) explains tersely that the Germans have retreated, and the Field Commander (Cumberbatch) is about to order an advance, not knowing what aerial reconnaissance has shown, that the enemy has retreated only in order to lure the British into a heavily fortified trap. With phone wires cut, only messengers can stop the otherwise inevitable carnage. So Blake picks his friend Schofield (MacKay) to join him, and their grim-faced Captain (Scott) sends them off with a “cheerio” that is anything but cheerful.

After that, they are on their own; except, of course, that we are with them every step of the way – past the putrefying corpses of men and horses and even cows (shot by the Germans to remove a source of food), through booby-trapped, rat-infested trenches and on into other equally unforgettable visions of hell.

Mendes’s last two films were Skyfall and Spectre, featuring oodles of British derring-do, James Bond style. But 1917 depicts an altogether different kind of courage, forced on two ordinary young men by not only a fierce sense of duty, but an even fiercer instinct to survive.

1917 is a stunning film. Mendes deserves another top gong to be placed among his already overcrowded mantlepiece of film awards and accolades.

Verdict: A masterstroke from Mendes. An award-winning stunner

★★★★★

Standard
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

★★★

Standard
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.

★★★★★

Standard