On To The Wonder

Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder comes just one year after his award winning The Tree of Life (2011). Rumoured to be even less narrative bound than The Tree of Life, To The Wonder arrives as a 100-minute romance with idiosyncratic Malickian touches.

Of the director’s work it thematically and stylistically combines The Tree of Life with his second feature, the incredible Days of Heaven (1978). To The Wonder tells the story of Neil, a reticent mid Western American and Marina, a vivacious Parisian. Their romance is passionate and sudden, but doomed by differences and unwillingness on Neil’s part to commit. After a visa expiry, Marina returns to Paris where she becomes increasingly depressed losing her 10-year-old daughter’s affections to the estranged father. In America, Neil becomes romantically involved with a childhood sweetheart. Marina returns to America forcing Neil to break off his childhood romance and attempt to rekindle his love with Marina.

The narrative is straightforward (a love triangle, not unlike Days of Heaven) yet it is delivered with the looseness that Malick has become known for. However it is accessible (more so for fans of his work) and when Marina is on screen To The Wonder is majestic. Marina, played by Olga Kurylenko, is the heart and soul of the film and when midway she temporarily departs, the film loses its grip and Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams (playing Neil and his childhood sweetheart) are unable to capture in their performances the freedom that Malickian characters require.

Malick films Kurylenko always moving, spinning, jumping or rolling, connoting the evanescence and vitality of her character. Like the natural environment that Malick so beautifully frames and shoots, Marina is a part of the natural, spinning like a leaf or swaying like the long grass surrounding her American home. Neil on the other hand is static, only coming to life in anger and it is no surprise that his job requires him to take from and destroy the natural world.

The film does suffer from a midway lull, but there is beauty in the images and To The Wonder further highlights that there are few directors as in tune with the beauty of the natural world that surrounds us every day and our interaction with it as Terrence Malick. 

On Great Characters with Flight

There are many great films with great characters. There are few mediocre films with great characters. Flight is one of them. John Gatins has created in Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington, a character who is both good and bad simultaneously and he brings life to the film when it is at its best and worst.

Whip is a pilot who enjoys all the trimmings that come with the status of airline pilot: women, alcohol and drugs. Whip doesn’t just enjoy them; he enjoys all three the morning he is due to fly cross-country. Juxtaposed with this unforgiveable and entirely depraved behaviour is Whip’s status as one of the best pilots in the air. So, when his plane falls apart mid air it is only the skill of Whip that keeps 90% of the passengers from what would have been a certain death.

What follows is an entirely believable lawsuit that in turns investigates the crash while prosecuting Whip for flying high, drunk and tired. The catch is, of course, that Whip is entirely in the wrong and should be punished to the full extent of the law, yet without him the failure of the plane (that has nothing to do with Whip) would have resulted in total deaths.

Washington plays this dichotomy of traits with sublime excellence communicating at times the enjoyable highs of drug use seen in the earlier scenes of Goodfellas (1990) with the terrible lows of grittier drug representations. The film does lag in the final third and it is too long. The ending is problematic also and director Robert Zemeckis opts for mawkish sentimentality, which feels incongruous. Despite this Flight is, when Washington is on screen, captivating.   

On Politics and Lincoln

You wait years for a film about slavery to come along, and then two comes at once. Earlier this month Tarantino’s Django Unchained and now Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. However, only one of these films is about slavery and that is the latter.

Despite criticisms of ignoring the black point of view, Spielberg’s film rolls on and rightly so; it is a beautifully crafted piece of work and is a film about Abraham Lincoln, a white president with a white cabinet. Despite some early civil war scenes Lincoln is a film that plays out in the small back rooms and basements of unassuming Washington buildings. A hunt for votes to pass an anti slavery amendment is the main narrative thread and from this Spielberg pulls a gripping story and creates a masterful film.

Lincoln is a film very much about politics and at times feels like a nineteenth century The West Wing (1999 - 2006), as we see Lincoln and his cabinet unafraid to tangle with the opposition, winning votes by any means possible. The film neither dumbs down nor isolates audiences and credit for this goes to Tony Kushner’s script that takes an otherwise heavy political story and turns it into an accessible mainstream film. Spielberg refuses to idolise his characters, even Lincoln and this only wins the director more plaudits. A director that can, like few others balance films such as Lincoln with the more mainstream, such as War of the Worlds (2005). The grey scale cinematography brings Lincoln’s world to life and the film is perhaps the most noteworthy of all its recent awards competitors. 

On Torture and Zero Dark Thirty

Much has been written and said about Zero Dark Thirty’s responsibility to American audiences and how exposed they should be to the dark side of their recent history. We speak here of course of torture. Kathryn Bigelow’s film does not shy away, nor enhance unrealistically scenes of torture. Zero Dark Thirty approaches torture as necessary in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, in fact it is information received through torture that leads to his capture.

Yet the idea that torture uncovers information of no value is not uncommon, therefore Bigelow’s film very purposely takes a firm pro-torture standpoint without juxtaposing it with a criticism of American policy. This is a brave move and one that has earned the film much criticism for even daring to show torture. However, Americans and the world over know that torture is a part of their recent history and therefore it is legitimate to present it. Whether torture led to the capture of Bin Laden is another matter, but one that Bigelow, in her attempt to create a piece of entertaining narrative cinema, need not abide by.

Regardless of the historical facts (and Zero Dark Thirty would do itself many favours by removing its opening declaration of verisimilitude), Zero Dark Thirty is a gripping thriller, fantastically acted, directed and structured and one that need not answer for its images.  

On the Inconsistencies of Tarantino with Django Unchained

A consistently polemic figure, Quentin Tarantino’s latest, Django Unchained highlights the divisive director’s inconsistencies as a filmmaker. At points brilliant, at others dull, Django Unchained displays, once again, the breadth of Tarantino’s cinematic awareness in its style and substance.

Django Unchained follows the story of freed slave Django on his quest to free his wife from plantation owner, Calvin Candie. The inconsistencies within the film lie not only in Tarantino’s style and audience awareness, but also in the content.

At close to three hours long, the double climax of the film feels like a slap in the face, especially as the latter climax lacks any of the wit of the first two hours. It is a strange move to make as the film looses two of its most interesting characters and becomes entirely violence with no intent. Such inconsistencies in how an audience will interpret his work are why many Tarantino film since Jackie Brown (1997) suffer from repeat viewings. 

Audiences know from Inglorious Basterds (2009) that Tarantino plays it loose with history and this is no criticism as he had no responsibility to be accurate, but this is not the issue in his handling of America’s slave trade. Tarantino offers us, with Django Unchained, a virulent criticism of white America and on screen we are presented with images of slaves being forced to fight to the death, being ripped apart by dogs and kept naked in a steel box in the midday heat; all powerful, deliberate and contentious images. Yet this is not a film about the slave trade, it is a film that uses the slave trade to its advantage. The loquacious speeches, stylish aesthetic, anachronistic music and cartoon violence serve as constant distractions to the simple slave turned freeman narrative. It is difficult to make a serious point when heads explode in gushes of red and characters are blown, exaggeratedly away by gunshots. This is as much as film about slavery as it is a film dedicated to a single genre.

As with all Tarantino films it has moments of sheer brilliance that used to be unidentifiable simply due to their ubiquitousness in his first three features. The Ku Klux Klan arguing over the eyeholes in their hoods is hilarious and the first hour where Django and his German partner search for the Brittle Brothers is gripping. Yet as a whole piece of work, just like Tarantino’s output since the late 90s, Django Unchained doesn’t work.  

On the Power of Les Miserables

Musicals belong on the stage. This is not some cinema snobbery, but a matter of form. Cinema relies on the audience to suspend their belief or reality and invest in those offered by the narrative at hand. Whether it’s a philanthropic scientist bringing dinosaurs back to life or a 1930s gangster running from the law, if we don’t feel enveloped in the world on offer, it’s difficult to really like a film.

Les Miserables suffers this fate. Tom Hooper has created a sumptuous world on film and allowed fans of Les Miserables to see the world brought to life in a way not possible on stage. Yet, on stage we, as an audience, have certain expectations – an orchestrated, singing narrative – that musical theatre provides. These same techniques on film, even though we go in expecting them, are difficult to accept. The story, the songs, the characters may be the same, but the experience is entirely different.

This is not to wholly discount Hooper’s Les Miserables; it is a steamroller of a film. Aesthetically, Hooper and his team have created something special. The film is incredibly well acted and the characters and narrative entirely gripping. At two hours forty it drags and the last thirty minutes feel as long as the first two hours combined. As a film it is difficult to like Les Miserables, but impossible not to be dragged along by its powerful impetus.  

On Gangster Squad

Channelling The Untouchables (1987) and, in its mismatched group of heroes, Avengers Assemble (2012), Gangster Squad is as impressive as neither and chooses style over substance. A sociopathic East coast gangster takes over Los Angeles reeking violence and corruption over the city. The honest and incorruptible chief of police recruits a group of LA police officers to leave their badges at home and take the fight to the gangsters. What results is a series of messy and violent deaths and messier character development.

The characters are introduced in a way that echoes a trashy, power ranger’s style show. We meet them in their environment performing a magnificent seven-style skill (knives, guns, technology) before we move on to the next. This doesn’t suit the seriousness of the story and results in a complete lack of investment, emotionally and narrative based, in the characters.  

The most interesting, but unfortunately rarely explored aspect of Gangster Squad is the idea of post WWII syndrome; the question of where do these violent men fit into a civilised world when all they’ve known for the last several years is fighting and violence? Some go the way of the gangsters, but what of those that chose good, how do they fit into society? The film attempts some exploration of these themes and is at its best when it does, but ultimately it succumbs to cheap and easy genre clichés. A waste of such a talented cast.