Category Archives: Films

Arts, Films

Film Review: Widows (15 cert, 128 minutes)

REVIEW

FOLLOWING Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s reputation as a film artist is carved in stone – untouchable, monumental and hard-hitting. Without pedalling backwards in the slightest, Widows takes him in a whole new direction. It proves there’s another side to McQueen who’s always been bursting to get out – the same one whose industry secret is that he’s always itched to make a James Bond type movie, and now very possibly has.

The tense and clenched opening of Hunger has a prison officer checking under his motor vehicle for concealed bombs. In Widows, one goes off within the first 10 minutes, flinging an exploding armoured van towards the camera. Dramatic fragments, blasted towards the viewer, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a conundrum in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, the movie gets by on no more than electric confidence, technical virtuosity, and a screen cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.

With some surprise, and of all sources, McQueen and his co-writer, Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, have turned to a classic of ITV drama from 1983, the 12-part series of the same name created by Lynda La Plante, about the aftermath of a botched armed robbery. The setting has shifted to present-day Chicago, but the structure and theme broadly remains. As before, three widows are left shell-shocked in the rubble – Veronica (Viola Davis), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), none of them previously well-known to each other or at all involved in their husbands’ criminal dealings.

Financially shafted, and in Veronica’s case threatened with violence by an unscrupulous local politician (Brian Tyree Henry), they join forces to pay him and each other off, following blueprints for a planned heist that Veronica’s husband (Liam Neeson) mysteriously bequeathed to her in a safe-deposit box.

This – along with two major sub-plots – is juggled hypnotically, with pacing and precision. If it sounds as though Davis has been at all left out in these manoeuvres, she hasn’t: her character, more screwed over than anyone, is not just prime victim but prime mover, an aggrieved mastermind with a white terrier called Olivia (who tips her off to at least one severe shock) rarely far from her bosom. As she goes along, her performance stealthily dominates, without preventing anyone else in the ensemble from seizing their moments to shine.

Rodriguez, debatably, brings less novelty or shading to her role but Debicki – at one point convincingly posing as a Polish mail-order bride – is tremendous.

The real star, though, is McQueen himself. His steely grasp of stakes, pace and setting never falters: the ringleader of his own trusty crew, he has the dream team of editor Joe Walker, cinematographer Sean Bobbit and composer Hans Zimmer to do his very precise bidding. Few but McQueen would have the nerve to shoot a long dialogue scene in one take from outside the moving car where it’s happening, to remind us pointedly of the minor character who’s driving, and to take note of the few blocks separating the projects from the gentrified district up the street – all to illustrate and ironise the subject of the conversation. Not that it’s a race, but his clever showmanship leaves the likes of The Departed panting in the rear-view mirror.

Widows was previously shown at the London Film Festival earlier this month and becomes available on general release in November.

Verdict: A super-charged crime epic with Steve McQueen in full-throttle mode. An explosive remake of the 1983 TV series Widows created by Lynda La Plante.

★★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: The Wife (15 cert) 100 min

REVIEW

GLENN Close is the living actress who has most often been beaten to an Oscar: six times since 1982, the words “but no cigar” have been ringing in her ears. With The Wife, she has her best shot since Dangerous Liaisons (1989) of laying this curse to rest. The tantalising irony of the film is that it’s actually about an awards presentation – the Nobel Prize in literature, no less – and that her character is not the one receiving it. She’s the one sitting, in a manner Close presumably knows all too well, neglected and on the sidelines.

She is cast as Joan Castleman, destined forever to remain a mere adjunct to Joe (Jonathan Pryce), one of those Great American Novelists in the Roth/Updike mould. The pair have been married for most of a lifetime, ever since Joan’s college days, when Joe, her energetic professor, squirmed out of a loveless first marriage to pursue her. Their life together has involved a kind of crooked deal, where he gets all the credit for literary brilliance, and she uncomplainingly tags along. She turns a blind eye to his frequent affairs and often questions what exactly is in it for her.

Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 novel was narrated by Joan, and on its very first page, as Joe took fancy to an air stewardess on their flight, she began savagely outlining to the reader all the reasons why she planned to leave him. Adroitly adapted by Jane Anderson and directed by Swedish veteran Bjӧrn Runge, the film eases itself into her predicament more stealthily, laying down the basis for all her buried grievances. It lets Close come in wearing a kind of kabuki mask, a civilised if lightly sardonic front concealing who knows what dissatisfaction and anger lies beneath.

The glittering, frozen quality of her performance is as mesmeric as it is mysterious. The camera lingers on her often as she’s absorbing various slights: when Joe introduces her to peers at a pre-prizegiving social event, announcing “my wife doesn’t write”, her expression barely flickers, but the thermometer somehow drops a thousand degrees. When she watches him flirt with a photographer, you imagine daggers flying out of her eyes.

Veiled hints about the true nature of their marriage are gradually dropped by the script. A hack biographer played by Christian Slater, thwarted in his attempts to gain authorised access, pesters Joan into a private drink, hoping to prise those secrets out of her. But her ability to remain a smiling clam, who can toy with succulent revelations and even flirt with Slater without giving anything concrete away, should never be underestimated.

The Castlemans have a daughter, who has not followed them to Stockholm, and a son (Max Irons) who has, a would-be writer bitterly struggling to escape his father’s shadow. In the book he was a disturbed, occasionally violent computer nerd – a recluse – which felt like a less clichéd conception, but it has presumably been decided that the film needs someone on screen, besides Slater, who notices what doesn’t quite add up about Joe’s literary credentials: his ability, say, to forget the name of a major character from one of his novels.

Pryce’s bluff, garrulous performance suggests a born blagger, as well as an overgrown toddler whose ego needs constant spoon-feeding, whether from Joan, Nobel Prize committees, or the young woman he has managed to ensnare with his spuriously earned fame. The role fits Pryce like an expensive silk glove.

Still, the real point of The Wife is the interior journey it offers to Close, like a red carpet smoothly unfurling towards the kind of Oscar-clip-showcase scenes that genuinely warrant the airplay. She unleashes an explosion in a limousine that feels like 40 years of neglect and disappointment fizzing free from a test tube. But still that glacial repose is hers to resume, if Joan feels like it, choosing to become the sole custodian of her own private legacy.

Close could feasibly miss the Oscar, but watching her lose again – for this, of all roles – will be a thespian psychodrama for the ages.

Verdict: Glenn Close is on stupendous form. A mesmerising performance.

★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Puzzle (15)

REVIEW

Modest champion: Actress Kelly Macdonald in Puzzle

A FILM can sometimes be so quiet and uneventful, yet at the same time so full of tenderness and charm, that at the end you would stand up and applaud if such exhibitionism weren’t so utterly at odds with what you’ve just seen.

Instead you simply sit there, smile or maybe even dab with a finger at the corner of your eye. Puzzle is such a film. It stars Kelly Macdonald, the brilliant Scottish actress whose ability to play a sweet, uncomplaining example of what the Americans call homemakers was recognised years ago by the Coen brothers.

Her performance as Carla Jean, the meek loving, anxious wife of Josh Brolin’s ill-fated Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ 2007 masterpiece No Country For Old Men was one of that great film’s many pleasures.

But in Puzzle, Macdonald’s exquisite performance as an unassuming, unassertive, devoutly Catholic homemaker is the principle pleasure; all the picture’s other virtues radiate from it. She plays Agnes, whom is both cherished by her blue-collar New England family and taken completely for granted.

At the start, someone is celebrating a birthday. Agnes carries a cake ceremoniously into the room, but in fact the birthday is hers. She has made the cake, bought the candles, lit them, and now she blows them out, a deeply reluctant object of attention.

Her principle purpose in life, other than to attend Bible classes, is to care for her husband Louie (David Denman), who runs a car-repair workshop, and their two teenage sons, Ziggy (Bubba Weiler) and Gabe (Austin Abrams). She sees it that way, and so do they.

At first, her domestic drudgery and its drab backdrop, even the clothes she wears, suggest a period piece, a story of small-town America perhaps set in the 1950s.

We only learn this is the present because one of Agnes’s gifts is a modern smartphone. She does not welcome it – “like carrying a little alien robot in your purse”, she says – but is delighted to receive a challenging 1,000-piece jigsaw, which she completes in no time, then breaks it up and does it again. It is a map of the world, an irony not lost on us, even if it is on her; Agnes is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but could hardly be less worldly.

The short journey to New York counts as a daring adventure for Agnes. But she undertakes it, because only there, in a shop called Puzzle Mania, can she find more jigsaws like the one she has just completed.

She also finds an advert, “Champion Desperately Seeking Puzzle Partner”, and digging even deeper into reserves of boldness she didn’t know she had, answers it.

 

THIS leads her to a wealthy, lonely Robert, a man as urbane as she is provincial, played with quirky, beguiling charisma by Irrfan Khan. The unlikely duo start practising for a doubles competition in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships.

If they win, they will go on to the world championships in Belgium. They appear to have a chance, because Agnes has a genius for competitive puzzling that leaves even Robert agog.

But what this also means is that she must somehow explain to her husband why she’s no longer reliably at home every afternoon, preparing his dinner and darning his socks.

Certainly, a lesser drama would make him a demanding brute. But Louie is a decent cove who adores his wife, albeit preferably on his own terms. She is his puzzle, and maybe that’s the significance of the film’s title, because actually jigsaws are an irrelevance, though a delightfully wholesome one.

Agnes could have demonstrated a rare talent for juggling or mental arithmetic and the one-line synopsis would still be the same: a middle-aged woman seeing beyond the narrow horizons’ life seemed to have mapped out for her.

Moreover, as she grows in confidence, she begins to take charge of the relationships with the men in her life – Louie, her boys, even Robert. She learns how to be assertive with more than just jigsaw pieces.

Of course, this kind of personal growth is not exactly original cinematic territory – in fact, Puzzle is directly inspired by a 2009 Argentinian movie. But nothing about it feels derivative or predictable.

Marc Turtletaub, a first-time director, has made a terrific job of shaping the screenplay (by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann) into a sensitive and very moving film. Hats off to the whole production team for a very lovely film.

Verdict: Charming and captivating

★★★★★

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