Tag Archives: 2019 Oscar Nominations

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

Film Review: Green Book (12A)

REVIEW

THIS is traditionally a strong time of year for powerful dramatic films, no doubt calculatedly released in awards season. For the upcoming Academy Awards, there will be many hopeful film directors that the shine of a few gongs will rub off handsomely at the box-office.

Green Book is another such potential Academy winner. Set in the early Sixties, is a sweet, engagingly unsubtle picture inspired by the true story of Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a prodigiously talented African-American musician whose colour has prevented him from pursuing the career he has trained for, as a classical concert pianist.

Instead, he has formed the “easy listening” Don Shirley trio, which in the late autumn of 1962 is about to embark on a tour of the Deep South. Don, genteel and fastidious, needs a driver who might be able to protect him from the racial discrimination he is bound to encounter below the Mason-Dixon line.

By now we know just who this minder will be; the film opens at New York City’s Copacabana nightclub, where “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a no-nonsense bouncer not averse to currying favour with the mafia bosses who frequent the place. At home in the Bronx, where a volatile Italian-American life pounds around him, Tony shouts for the Yankees and eats 26 hotdogs at a sitting to win a bet.

That’s the kind of character persona he gives. He’s also a devoted family man who loves his wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini) and their two sons – and throws away a pair of drinking glasses because they have been used by black tradesmen.

He’s a racist, boorish and gluttonous, a full pendulum-swing from educated, sensitive, restrained Don, but that’s OK, because, as director, Peter Farrelly signposts in neon from the start, he is about to take a journey not just towards Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana, but also towards enlightenment.

Tony needs a temporary job because the Copa is closed for renovations. An advert leads him to Don’s bohemian apartment above Carnegie Hall.

He is duly hired, and, trying to suppress the discomfort he feels about working for a black man, prepares himself for two months on the road, with a set of responsibilities that include making sure that Don has a Steinway piano for every gig.

He is also handed the film’s titular Green Book, a guide for “Negro motorists” driving in the South, advising them where they may eat and sleep to ensure a “vacation without aggravation”.

The film, which was co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick, has resounding echoes of Pygmalion and even Cyrano de Bergerac as Don seeks to pass on some of his own refinement to the distinctly unrefined Tony.

It’s not exactly subtle. After all, Farrelly, who gave us Dumb And Dumber all those years ago, did not make his name through subtlety.

Some of this film’s minor characters, from New York mobsters to snarling Southern rednecks, are sketchily-drawn caricatures.

And several of the predicaments in which Don and Tony find themselves scream for a little more nuance, as when, having been given a lavish welcome at an ante-bellum mansion where his trio are providing the entertainment, Don asks for the bathroom and is directed outside, to a comic-book tumbledown latrine.

This might well be an accurate depiction of the bigotry and hypocrisy that scarred the segregated South before civil rights legislation, and indeed there really was a Green Book, but it feels more heavy-handed than it needs to be. So, too, does a climax of triple-ply sentimentality. But you may well brush away a tear as this film runs on.

That’s because, despite its shortcomings, this film really works, thanks in large part to the genuinely terrific and moving performances of Mortensen and Ali.

Both have been nominated for Academy Awards, and the latter is odds-on favourite to bag Best Supporting Actor, as he did three years for Moonlight.

In truth, however, it’s only in the second half of this odd-couple road trip that he is conspicuously stretched, as Don, predictably enough, begins to learn as much from Tony as he imparts. Until then, unlike his spectacular piano-playing, it’s rather a one-note performance.

Verdict: Engagingly unsubtle

★★★★

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Arts, Films, United States

Film Review: Vice (15)

REVIEW

VICE, appropriately named, tells the life story of Dick Cheney, who was Vice President of the United States throughout the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush.

The film, which is written by Adam McKay, makes no secret of his own motivational objective. It stems from a Liberal Agenda, which deserves capitalising given his bias which runs from the first minute of this film to the last.

Whether you buy into McKay’s thesis that Cheney is one of the most manipulative and sinister men on the planet is another question entirely. For pure malignancy, Vice makes the present incumbent of the White House look like Forrest Gump. But it must be said he presents it very entertainingly.

Film critics would have noted that McKay deploys a similar set of idiosyncrasies to those he brought to his examination of the 2008 global financial crisis, The Big Short. He delivers jump-cuts, slow-mo, speed-ups, addresses to the camera, faux-closing credits, and whimsical narration from a character whose intimate link with Cheney is held back, only to be revealed in a late here-I-am kind of flourish.

It’s almost as if the director, and his editor, Hank Corwin, cannot shrug off a cinematic form of attention deficit disorder. It would be wholly wrong to categorise them as one-trick ponies; they have dozens of production tricks.

If the viewer can embrace all that, and its Leftie politics, then Vice is a hoot. It is also quite brilliantly acted. Christian Bale is deservedly the clear favourite to win an Academy Award for his remarkable lead performances. He renders himself almost unrecognisable and nails Cheney’s every mannerism and tic.

Gary Oldman won the Academy Award last year for his role as Winston Churchill, but he didn’t transform himself into Churchill like Bale does Cheney (both physically and temperamentally).

As Cheney’s wife, the terrifyingly ambitious Lynne, Amy Adams also richly deserves her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

In the years since her breakthrough movie in 2002, Catch Me If You Can, Adams has acquired the acting adroitness in playing Lynne Cheney who is a relentless schemer. Indeed, McKay has said that when he spoke to local folk back in Casper, Wyoming, where Lynne and Dick started out, they told him that whoever she married would have ended up as the most powerful man in the land.

How he became such a powerful man, in the process confounding the famous assertion of one of his predecessors, John Nance Garner, that “the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit”, is the film’s narrative.

 

IT BEGINS in Casper, where young Dick is a drunken driver and general wastrel until his intended, Lynne, gives him a furious pep talk.

They marry and make their way to Washington, where Cheney finds himself in thrall to another upwardly-mobile politician, Donald Rumsfeld (the suddenly ubiquitous Steve Carell). One of the fascinations of this film is the dynamic between Cheney and Rumsfeld. Gradually, the apprentice becomes the master.

After serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, both men continue to climb the slippery pole, but it is Cheney, the more shrewder and Machiavellian of the pair, who climbs the highest – with Lynne pushing hard from below. There is a rather ludicrous – if not hilarious – scene in which she almost literally slips into the guise of Lady Macbeth.

Cheney’s appetite for power is gluttonous, yet he is clever and astute enough never to look or give the image of being greedy. When a dim-witted George W. Bush (played by Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-nominated) invites him to become his running mate – “a nothing job,” snorts Lynne – he plays hard to get. He insists he’s happy running an oil company.

Eventually, he says he’ll do it on the proviso that he takes some of the more “mundane” jobs such as running the military. Oh, and foreign policy. McKay’s only concession to Cheney’s humanity is his devotion to his wife and daughters; it causes him genuine angst when his two girls fall out over the sexuality of one of them.

Otherwise, his moral scruples are conspicuous only by their absence. He even has the pretence to turn the 9/11 attacks to his own advantage, and his vested oil interests are not incidental in the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.

McKay’ political bias is adept enough to remind his audience over and over that all this comes from a Leftist standpoint, perhaps as a pre-emptive strike to say: “I know it’s biased, but it’s also true.”

I doubt it will come as no surprise to see liberal Hollywood rise to Vice when the Oscar nominees gather in Hollywood, just as it has been no surprise, since its U.S. release in December, to see the film flop pretty much everywhere but on the East and West coasts.

The question of whether a film will appeal to mainstream America has long been defined by a simple question: will it play in Peoria, Illinois? In this case, the answer is an emphatic no.

Verdict: Left-leaning political bias, but well delivered.

★★★★

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