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Arts, Films

Film Review: Baby Driver

REVIEW

Baby Driver

Intro: Baby (Ansel Elgort) is a talented getaway driver who relies on his personal soundtrack. After meeting Lily James, the woman of his dreams, he foresees an opportunity to ditch his shady lifestyle by making a clean break. But after being coerced into working for a crime supremo (Kevin Spacey), Baby must face the music as a doomed heist threatens everything he has been hoping for – his life, love and freedom.

Edgar Wright, the writer and film director of thrilling Baby Driver, hails from the quiet county of Somerset.

For someone who grew up in the shadow of the Mendip hills, and whose last film, The World’s End (2013), which was inspired by a teenage pub-crawl he once went on in Wells, it is a marvel how he has now created a roaringly high-octane and exhilarating crime movie reminiscent of the best of Quentin Tarantino.

Baby Driver is set in Atlanta, Georgia. Its hero is a fresh-faced getaway driver nicknamed Baby (Ansel Elgort), whose job is to whisk ruthless, armed bank-robbers from the scene of their latest heist.

This he does brilliantly, but he is a reluctant participant, coerced into high-stakes crime by a gangster called Doc (Kevin Spacey), as payback for once trying to steal Doc’s car.

Yet, we encounter scenes that are, so far, unoriginal. Wright makes a virtue of filling his film with plotlines so familiar they could almost be deemed clichés. Avid film watchers would’ve seen a million heists, car chasers, menacing Mr Bigs, and protagonists falling for sweet waitresses in diners, which is what happens here to Baby, as soon as he sets eyes on Debora (winningly played by Lily James).

She is the stereotypical dreamer and romantic, whose ambitions extend no further than heading west “on 20, in a car we can’t afford, with a plan we don’t have”. And she reminds Baby of his deceased mother, who he keeps picturing in flashbacks. Another cliché.

So, what turns the clichéd and commonplace into virtues? It’s the way Wright, sometimes obviously, sometimes with deft subtlety, references other films. There are repeated nods to Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, for example, and to Walter Hills 1978 film The Driver. The Pixar animation Monsters, Inc. actually gets a namecheck.

And when Baby loses one lens from his sunglasses during a getaway, Wright plainly intends it as a homage to Warren Beatty’s character in the iconic ambush scene from Bonnie And Clyde.

But there is something else, something more that stops this film looking stylish, but essentially derivative, and makes it excitingly, enticingly original. It is, in a word, music.

Baby has been left with tinnitus from a childhood road accident that killed both his parents. He drowns it out by plugging his iPod into his ears, turning his life into one long playlist.

WHEN he waits outside banks for Doc’s ever-rotating crew, when he out-screeches the pursuing cops, even when he sits in on briefings for the next job, his constant companies are rock, R&B and disco music.

He even mixes his own tracks, secretly recording snatches of his accomplices’ conversations, then going home and turning them into his own, rather literal, version of gangsta rap.

Baby lives with his ageing, deaf foster father, Pops (CJ Jones), who knows the boy has a good heart but has fallen in with some dodgy characters.

And my, are they dodgy. Apart from Doc, they include a trigger-happy psycho called Bats (Jamie Foxx) and the scarcely less scary Griff (Jon Bernthal), neither of whom are comfortable in the company of the kid with the iPod fixation. Buddy (Jon Hamm) seems more congenial, but then he has a respectable background as a banker. Now he’s a gamekeeper turned poacher, on the run with his lap-dancer girlfriend, Darling (Eiza Gonzalez).

Wright keeps the action more real and less exuberantly comedic than in his most successful films, Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). He certainly doesn’t rein in the violence, which at times is gruesome and somewhat glorified. But his playful side is never far away, even when things start to look deeply worrying for Baby, who is forced into one final raid on a post office just when he thought he had paid his dues. Will he get to head west on 20 with lovely Debora, or will he have to face the music?

It is maybe best to say that it’s a blast and a joyride finding out. If you love car chases, you’ll love this movie; Wright choreographs them superbly. And if you love music, you’ll probably love this movie, too; the soundtrack features something for everyone, including Queen, T.Rex, The Beach Boys, The Damned, Dave Brubeck and, of course, singing the title song, Simon & Garfunkel.

Despite the plaudits and thunderous recommendation, others have pronounced the film as deeply disappointing, with ‘risible’ dialogue and ‘silly’ characterisations.

On this count, maybe Baby Driver is this season’s La La Land, for which the critical hosannas were so loud that some audiences went away unimpressed. But for this reviewer, I’ll offer and anoint the film with the full five stars.

 

Baby Driver (15)

Verdict: Exhilarating and high-octane ★★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Their Finest

REVIEW

Keeping calm and carrying on: Gemma Arterton and Bill Nighy in Their Finest.

Intro: Gemma Arterton leads a cracking cast in this witty, poignant tale of Britain’s finest hour.

Danish director Lone Scherfig has a remarkably keen eye and ear for the intricate details of British class and period.

Her 2009 feature An Education wonderfully evoked suburban London in the Sixties, The Riot Club (2014) went to town on badly-behaved Oxbridge toffs, and now here’s Their Finest, a beguiling romantic not-quite-comedy set in 1940.

Like An Education, which was based on the memoir by journalist Lynn Barber, Their Finest has also sprung from a book, in this case a novel by Lissa Evans about the making of a propaganda film thinly disguised as a drama, at the height of the Blitz.

And like An Education, except more so, the story is, above all, about a particular young woman asserting her place in a world ruled by men. This is the engaging Catrin Cole (charmingly played by Gemma Arterton), not a radiant English rose but a sunny Welsh daffodil, who has arrived in wartime London from Ebbw Vale with struggling artist husband Ellis (Jack Huston).

She is a talented copywriter, who goes for an interview with the Ministry of Information for what she thinks is a secretarial job. In fact, they want her to craft ‘women’s dialogue’ for their propaganda features.

The contemptuous film-industry word for female chatter in such films is ‘slop’, and we are left in no doubt by Gaby Chiappe’s script, which just occasionally errs on the heavy-handed side, that ministry women are third-class citizens.

The one female who has risen in the ranks is a rather butch lesbian (improbably yet nicely played by the decidedly non-butch Rachael Stirling). But Catrin finds herself firmly at the bottom of the heap.

‘Obviously, we can’t pay you as much as the chaps,’ she is told by her pompous new boss, played, or rather over-played, by Richard Grant.

Overall, Chiappe – an experienced TV writer (Lark Rise To Candleford, Shetland, The Level) here making her feature-film debut – does a lovely job of weaving Catrin’s doughty career progress in with her burgeoning feelings for screenwriting colleague Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin).

Conveniently, Ellis turns out to be rather a rotter, whereas Buckley, beneath his sneery, superior air, is a decent sort of cove, with a matinee-idol smile.

 

THEIR project, one designed not only to repair morale left in tatters by the Luftwaffe, but also to persuade the Americans to come to the aid of the plucky Brits, is a film based on a newspaper story about heroic twin sisters from Essex.

Catrin is despatched to Southend to get the sister’s story; how they borrowed their father’s rickety fishing boat and braved the Channel to rescue troops trapped at Dunkirk. Never mind that it isn’t entirely true; facts are pliable in wartime.

Besides, if all that were not rousing enough, one of the Dunkirk survivors brings home a terrier in his kitbag.

‘Authenticity, optimism, and a dog!’ cries the producer, Hungarian émigré Gabriel Baker (Henry Goodman), presumably based on the great filmmaker Emeric Pressburger. He knows just how to appeal to British sensibilities.

Their Finest is a serious tale, however. It is littered with casualties of war and lurches in some unexpected directions with several, tragic twists. Yet it is leavened with plenty of deft comic touches.

Mostly, these are supplied by Bill Nighy, as a vain, mannered old ham of an actor, called Ambrose Hilliard. There’s no point cracking any kind of gag about Nighy being perfectly cast in such a role, since he’s already dropped them all himself in the publicity interviews.

Besides, he really is very funny, at one point investing ‘semolina pudding’ with exactly the same predatory loucheness Leslie Phillips used to get out of ‘Ding Dong!’

Eddie Marsan and Helen McCrory, as Hilliard’s agent and his sister, provide sterling comic support.

And Jeremy Irons pops up, too, enjoying himself hugely in a cameo as a starchy Ministry of War mandarin.

The excellence of the cast is but one of many reasons to see this film.

It’s witty and warm-hearted, and genuinely poignant at times, but, maybe usefully of all, it offers a fresh, enlightening perspective on a period so frequently depicted by the movies that I didn’t think there were any true, or true-ish, stories left to tell.

It turns out that there are.

 

Their Finest (12A)

Verdict: Beguiling wartime drama ★★★★

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Arts, Britain, Films

Film Review: ‘Another Mother’s Son’

SS CHANNEL ISLANDS

Mothers-Banner

– Captives: Susan Hampshire, Izzy Meikle-Small and Jenny Seagrove in Another Mother’s Son.

Intro: The gripping true story of how a mother risked her life to save a PoW as the Nazis’ jackboots trampled over Jersey in WWII.

THE BBC1 drama SS-GB which recently concluded, was an eerie vision of what a German-occupied Britain might have looked like in 1941. It was undermined slightly by the sound quality – ‘ve haf vays of making you mumble’.

Arriving on the silver screens now is an accurate and absorbing account of what it was actually like for British citizens to hear the stamp of Nazi jackboots on their own streets.

The German occupation of the Channel Islands has had surprisingly little cinematic attention down the years. Another Mother’s Son is a hugely welcome redress of that oversight. Moreover, it tells an extraordinary true story, that of Louisa Gould (Jenny Seagrove), a middle-aged shopkeeper in a rural Jersey village.

Shortly after receiving the devastating news that one of her own two boys had been killed at sea, she took an escaped Russian prisoner-of-war into her home, and, even as the Gestapo closed in, lavished on him the protective love of a mother for a son.

Apart from the tear-jerking human dimension of this story, it also offers a valuable history lesson. Who knew that there were barbaric labour camps for Russian PoWs in the Channel Islands? I certainly didn’t. Nor had I realised the moral depths to which a handful of the islanders sank, settling petty jealousies and grievances by writing anonymously to the occupiers, telling tales of hidden wireless sets, or worse, hidden prisoners.

As far as one can gather, and albeit with Somerset standing in convincingly for Jersey, the film sticks staunchly to the facts. Ably directed by Christopher Menaul, it is written by Gould’s great-niece Jenny Lecoat, who of course had a vested interest in getting the details right. Her remarkable kinswoman would be proud. Yet there was nothing conspicuously remarkable about Louisa. Seagrove plays her splendidly, as an ordinary, decent, careworn woman appalled by German brutality.

A fine supporting cast includes Sherlock’s Amanda Abbington as Louisa’s sister and the ever-watchable John Hannah as her brother-in-law, both very good at conveying the anxiety of people with much to be anxious about.

That eternal English rose Susan Hampshire, wearing her 79 years with ineffable elegance, pops up, too. In an oddly inspired casting choice, the Irish singer Ronan Keating plays Louisa’s brother Harold, and a caption at the end testifies to his own singular part in history.

 

BUT if the film belongs to anyone other than Seagrove, it is Bulgarian actor Julian Kostov. He is tremendously affecting in the part of the terrified, emaciated escapee, whose complicated Russian name is conveniently anglicised, in one of the film’s more light-hearted moments, to Bill.

Gradually, as Bill’s command of the English language improves and he acquires forged papers, Louisa becomes more brazen at hiding him in plain sight. He accompanies her to St Helier, and even helps out in her shop. This seems like folly, yet it’s another example of Louisa’s innate goodness; she instinctively trusted people.

Whether she was right to, I will let you find out for yourselves, but I do urge you to see a film which chronicles such an overlooked chapter of World War II. Hats off to another Bill, producer Bill Kenwright, for bringing this amazing story to public attention.

 

Another Mother’s Son (12A)

Verdict: Compelling war story ★★★★

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