New stuff...

I've got a couple of new reviews up on Eye for Film...

Modern Times
Trailer Park of Terror

I can't link to 'em because of the frame set, but check out the site here: www.eyeforfilm.com

The Philadelphia Story on stage

What I reviewed this week...

Look Here

Hopelessly devoted

Sigh. I bloody hate it when I have to choose between my heart and my head. This was my dilemma with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. My common sense, my sensibilities, everything cerebral, was in screaming agony throughout the sometimes quite arduous 163 minutes of David Fincher’s latest movie. On the other hand, my heart was melting into the thick layers of treacle the film trowels on to the audience.

Based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the movie tells the story of the titular character (played by Brad Pitt) who ages in reverse. More specifically, he is born with the medical complaints, internal organs, looks and skin of an old man, but without the experience and physical size that his body’s age entails. As he goes through life he grows physically younger. The only time his body and his mind physically match is when he is about 40.

He falls in love with a couple of girls, and seems to live a thousand life times. He has an affair with a married English ex-pat in Russia (played by Tilda Swinton), and has a on/off relationship with his childhood sweetheart (played by Cate Blanchett). He sails the seas in a boat, and rides a motorbike like James Dean. He travels to far off lands to find himself.

It’s a strange odyssey, and one that models itself equally on Forrest Gump than on its source material. The plot interweaves itself amongst historical and cultural events like World War Two, the Beatles, the space age of the 1960s and, eventually, Hurricane Katrina. Characters come and go with careless abandon, like the historical events back flipping through the film. Like the Gump, it’s chocolate box Americana; all set to a syrupy soundtrack and looking good enough to eat.

This is part of its problem. A film trying to encapsulate its time simply cannot include everything, and omissions will be made. It’s going to be arbitrary. Also, to complicate things, it’s a film which is at once cod-philosophical, fable-esque and romantic. However, it becomes problematic when casualties of its ambition include such notable omissions as any kind of racial tension. This is despite being set throughout the twentieth century in the Deep South. Likewise, there is no mention of the Cold War, the effect of the 60s on America, any talk of the aftermath of WW2. It’s incredibly insular and self-absorbed for something consciously set to the backdrop of history.

On a less extraneous level, it also suffers from a lack of sense, of focus. Frequently the story focuses on Cate Blanchett’s character rather than Brad Pitt’s. We are never sure who the real victim of the situation is. If it’s Brad, then his ‘degeneracy’ into adolescence and childhood at the end of the film nullify, or at least bluntens, his tragedy. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t love in the same way as he did any more. Likewise, Blanchett’s narrative is confused. We are not told what happens in her life after Button and before her deathbed revelations. It’s a blank. But it matters if we are to believe its her tragedy. We need to know the effect Button has on her.

Yet, don’t Cate and Brad make a gorgeous couple? Isn’t their romance beautifully, yet inevitably, tragic? Isn’t aging a horrible thing? Look how unsightly Cate and Brad can be when they’re all wrinkly. Truly the worst tragedy of them all.

It’s easy to be seduced by the film’s wishy-washy middle-brow pseudo-philosophical charm. Its gorgeous cinematography, the, admittedly, quite incredible special effects that see Brad aging. It’s all compelling stuff, I admit. The film, however, is so half-baked in its history, and so faulty in its storytelling, I could never believe in whatever reality it is trying to construct. It’s a struggle to get through.

Before I set off for the cinema to see Sam Mendes’s latest, I made the mistake of listening to Mark Kermode’s review of it, available on his Radio 2 podcast. Firstly, I should have waited until after I came out of the movie; I try not to read too many reviews of the film I’m about to go and see… it spoils it, no? Doing this does tend to colour perspectives, however much you think it won’t. Secondly, it was a mistake as it meant I've spent half my night writing this. As much as I respect Kermode, I must protest. And, in true Kermodian style, deliver this rant...

Mark Kermode’s main gripe with 'Revolutionary Road' is that he’d seen it all before. Blue Velvet, he claims, did this stuff over twenty years ago. He's thinking suburbia as hell, the middle class dream as an unsatisfactory one etc etc. Sure, Blue Velvet has spawned a thousand parodies, controversies and then, inevitably, imitators; the opening sequence -- with the white picket fence and the camera burrowing underneath the turf, discovering all kinds of creepy crawlies devouring what looks like each other-- is particularly iconic. Underneath every surface there is always dirt. But it's not what Revolutionary Road is really about.


Kermode’s point is one I’ve heard many people who haven’t seen the film argue (including a couple of friends, who didn’t join me when I went to see it). However to argue this after seeing the film is like buying a cream egg, and only eating the chocolate shell. Essentially, the film’s subject is two fold; yes, it is about how suburbia is full of the said and the unsaid. But it’s also about a failing, fracturing, relationship. Its association with the theme of suburbia is tangled, messy and tortured. There’s no simple solution to why the central couple, the Wheelers, are unhappy.

Before moving to Revolutionary Road, the Wheelers were a happy go lucky pair; Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) wanted to make a real impact with his life, April (Kate Winslet) wanted to be an actress; they both wanted to move to Paris. The film never makes it clear when the rot sets in; it could be when Frank starts the commute to the city, it could be when they have their first kid. However, the catalyst comes at the beginning of the film, in the shape of a local am dram play; April’s acting debut goes down more like a lead balloon, more of a storm in a tea cup than revelatory tempest. The subsequent tension that oozes out of the apparent debacle of the play's, and her own, performance's failure is what sets the horror show that is Revolutionary Road into action.


As much as Kate Winslet’s other movie this Oscar season, The Reader, wasn’t about the Holocaust( but rather about how you can never get over your first love) Revolutionary Road is not so much about suburbia, it’s about what happens when infatuation, and 'romantic' love, dies. It’s painful to watch; it's a covert lecture at the audience's own naivete that idealistic romantic dreams are possible. Mendes is telling us that a relationship can't survive on emotion, on love.


The film is less American Beauty, and more Scenes from a Marriage. It’s a dialogue-heavy picture, set mostly in gloomy, colour-drained interiors. It’s also an acting showcase for the two leads... as a recent Guardian article said, it’s as close a movie can get to filmed acting. To compensate for the lack of location and motion, Mendes adapts some fairly intrusive camera work in the latter half of the film to show ratcheting tensions, reminiscent of something Woody Allen used throughout 1992's uncomfortable Husbands and Wives. With Mendes, it's a jarring technique that doesn’t quite have the effect intended.


Shortcomings and pessismism to one side; the main reason to watch this film is most definitely Kate Winslet. She seems to be channelling years of pain. Next to her, DiCaprio is weak; with a different leading lady his limitations as an actor might not have been so clearly apparent. With Winslet, he looks like a poor man’s Jack Nicholson, and his performance seems to emanate from his mouth, rather than his head or his heart. Move aside, kid.


Without getting too deep into a full scale review of the film, my main point is this: I think Kermode should re-watch this one. Sure, it’s an actor’s piece above everything else, and some of the harder edges, and the social commentary, of the novel are lost on the big screen. It's not entirely technically successful. But there’s so much pain, hurt and disappointment in this movie; it’s less Desperate Housewives, and more high tragedy.