PETERLOO - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Ten

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the European establishment lived in justified fear of revolution. The French had assassinated their monarchs, leading to a tyrannical Terror, and unleashing 20 years of Napoleonic wars that finally culminated in the bloodshed of Waterloo in 1815.  And the British government was highly sensitised from both the American revolutionary wars and the more recent Irish Rebellion of 1798. It was not impossible to imagine that Britain was in pre-revolutionary times - a mere 25 years later Marx and Engels would come to the same conclusion.  In doing so they were drawing on their experience of the major industrial towns of the North - Manchester chief among them - areas of rapid urbanisation, appalling social conditions, little labour protection, and no political representation.  This led many to agitate for reform - notably extension of the franchise and reform of the rotten boroughs. But some of the more famous orators of the reform movement were more radical - agitating for an abolition of the monarchy, for example, which was by definition treasonous.  

This combination of a government actively looking for sedition, and a  reform movement easily charged with treason, created the ideal conditions for a disaster, and that disaster was Peterloo.  Four years after Waterloo, sixty to eighty thousand northern workers gathered in St Peter's Field, Manchester to hear the famous, but peaceful, orator Henry Hunt. They were almost entirely unarmed.  But the local magistrates didn't wait for provocation - their prejudice made them believe that the very gathering was seditious.  They sent in the local yeomanry.  One has to understand that this was an age before we had an actual civilian police force.  And that while the yeomanry was expensively kitted out, these were just a bunch of untrained and untested local militia who unsurprisingly lost control and ran people down.  This caused chaos, so the magistrates sent in the actual armed forces to disperse the crowd. Unfortunately, the cavalry was poorly commanded (the Waterloo hero who should've been there was at the races watching his horse compete) and added further to the carnage. Around 15 people died and many hundreds were injured, entirely unnecessarily.  

The tragedy of the needless death of innocent men, women and children was confounded by the fact that Peterloo didn't really achieve anything. Indeed, by prompting the passing of the regressive Six Acts, if anything, it probably set back the cause of reform. Nonetheless, it remains an important event in British history because it's an appalling example of what happens when a government turns its army on its own people. And this lesson remains vital.  The Poll Tax riots in my own lifetime - with the government turning horses on its own people - is a case in point.  

Accordingly, I was very excited to hear that Mike Leigh was making a film about PETERLOO - and the failure of that film is a tragic waste of an opportunity to create a vital and urgent piece of media that could potentially speak to people who haven't heard of the event. I can't imagine else will be rushing to cover this topic soon and that's really sad.  Where did Mike Leigh go wrong?  After all, I loved his previous BFI London Film Festival entry, MR TURNER, and this film reunites Leigh with the composer and cinematographer - Gary Yershon and Dick Pope - from that film.

The first problem with PETERLOO is that pretty much the first ninety minutes of the film consists of different people reciting speeches or reading letters aloud, in static tableaux. The language is not updated and sounds anachronistic and over-precious to modern ears. The resulting footage is boring and visually unexciting. I would much rather have just read a history book.

The second problem is that when do we break away from the orators to some representative ordinary working class people, they are drawn so broadly as to be caricatures with all their "sithee"s.  There's even a Simple Jack character who survived a very thinly sketched Waterloo who's clearly set up to be sabre'd at Peterloo. The whole thing is rather condescending and also shows that maybe Mike Leigh was being too careful with this historical material and didn't feel he could properly fictionalise it. The problem is that when you don't draw us in on an emotional narrative level you may as well make a documentary rather than this plodding history. 

The third problem is that Mike Leigh condescends to us - the audience. There's so much Basil Exposition stuff in this film it's infuriating. The worst example is when the newspapermen are sitting in the office of the Manchester Observer saying things like "I don't think our READERS will understand what Habeas Corpus is".  "Well, it's the cornerstone of our constitution!" You can tell that the entire scene has been put in to explain habeas corpus to modern audiences. 

Finally, for all its earnest attempt at fidelity, PETERLOO fails to give us context when it really needs to. I wonder how many viewers will understand the difference between the yeomanry and the army, for example. I also missed visual context. This film was all tell and no show.  I needed Leigh to lift his crane up and show us the dynamic, bustling urban sprawl of Manchester, and to let us feel the insatiable growth of this city and the injustice of its not having an MP. Similarly, if you are going to show Waterloo and its traumatising impact on a young boy, lift up your crane and show us that battle! Don't just have a single cart and a single explosion. And if your budget doesn't allow for more or better, than work your script. 

PETERLOO has a running time of 154 minutes and rated PG-13. The film played Venice, Toronto and London and will open in the UK on November 2nd and in the USA on November 9th. 

LEGEND

2015 was the year of Krays films and the one I anticipated was LEGEND, starring as it did Tom Hardy and both Ronnie and Reggie, beloved 1960s East End gangsters who infiltrated the highest levels of English society until they finally got banged up.  But I'm sad to say that the movie is boring to the point of switching off, bar a few good set pieces.  Unlike most critics I don't think it's the fault of Hardy.  Some have called his portrayal of Ronnie - a heavily doped up, heavy drinking, violent paranoid schizophrenic - too broad.  On the contrary, from the books I've read and documentaries I've watched, Hardy seems to get Ronnie just right. He loved his brother. He loved being a gangster. He loved the protection his aristo lover gave him.  But he was very very sick and almost impossible to control. I think there's no doubt that Reggie would have had a long and successful career as a criminal if it weren't for his brother running around with impossibly ambitious American schemes and generally running successful ventures into the ground.  And then, of course, there were the murders. That Hardy also manages to portray Reggie is a testament to his skill at essaying a subtler but still menacing character who was unfailingly loyal to his brother, even at the expense of his tragically doomed wife Frances.

MR TURNER - LFF14 - Day Four

If ever there was a movie that deserved to be seen on the big screen it's Mike Leigh's MR TURNER. It's a character study of the celebrated Victorian painter in the latter years of his life and one of the chief triumphs of the film is to depict the English landscape and seascape with all the luminosity and beauty that Turner himself achieved. It comes as no surprise, then, to see Dick Pope win the cinematography prize at Cannes this year. 

The other of the film's award winners was Timothy Spall, who plays the painter through all of his moods and guises.  We see him as the doting son of his ailing daddy - joyous as the "old cove" comes to greet him after a trip to Holland.  We see him as the suave house guest of his aristocratic patron.  We see him utterly in command at the height of his career in a tour de force scene where he whistles through the Royal Academy as the Big Cheese, bestowing praise and advice and a mischievous thumb to the nose of Mr Constable.  We also see Turner as the intellectual - the man who won't be goaded by that pretentious pipsqueak Mr Ruskin into criticising the great painters of the past.  

But the great thing about this film is that it allows us to see the other side of the Turner  - the casual cruelty with which he denies the existence of his illegitimate daughters or uses his maid with almost bestial grunts - or makes a literal grab for his Margate landlady Mrs Booth.  His treatment of Constable is petty and mean, and while Haydon is a deeply irritating and proud man, he's also an artist that Turner might have done more to help.

Still, this is ultimately a sympathetic portrait. We feel the genuine warmth of his relationship with his daddy and the genuine talent of capturing the beauty not just of nature but of modernity.  But where the movie really gets us is in it final hour when Turner's star begins to fade.  His paintings become more ambitious and technically audacious as he strives to capture light at the expense of form.   We see the artist become a kind of joke in his own time - mocked by everyone from Queen Victoria to the working classes in a music hall.  The question is how far Turner was engaged in a deliberate throwing off of firm or how far he was affected by physical decline - notably the deterioration of eyesight from his diabetes.  (There's an excellent article on this subject here.) Suffice to say that the film is far more interested in the emotional impact of this than making a definitive argument either way.

As ever, Mike Leigh has approached his topic with insight, humanity and wonderful good humour. This is no stuffy period piece.  The language is a delight, and it's worth paying the price of admission just to see the contempt with which Turner's maid starts poking at bluebottles on a muslin cloth. Is she the most memorable and tragicomic put-upon servant since Baldrick? Ultimately, though, this movie is all about Timothy Spall. It's yet another superb, moving and memorable performance in a long career full of great performances, many of which are in Mike Leigh films.

MR TURNER has a running time of 149 minutes. The movie played Cannes where Timothy Spall won the Best Actor prize and cinematographer Dick Pope won the Vulcain Prize for the Technical Artist. It also played Telluride, Toronto and London 2014. It will be released in the UK and Ireland on October 31st, in Germany on November 6th, in France on December 3rd, in Belgium on December 10th, in the Netherlands on December 11th, in the USA on December 16th, in Sweden on December 25th, in Norway on January 9th, in Australia on January 22nd, and in Denmark on April 16th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 12 - BERNIE

“It’s not as bad as people say; he only shot her four times, not five.”

Bernie Tiede was a good, god-fearing man, who went out of his way to please.  His patient, caring manner was an asset as a funeral director, and his willingness to throw himself into small-town life made him beloved by his fellow residents of Carthage, Texas.  So much so, that when it was revealed that Bernie had shot Marjorie Nugent four times in the back, none of the townsfolk believed him guilty. Oh, they knew he shot her dead, for sure.  But they figured that someone as mean-spirited as Marjorie must have incited Bernie to take leave of his senses for a moment.  Tragically for Bernie, prosecuting attorney Danny Buck knew full well that despite a full confession, four bullets in the back, and Bernie’s ample use of Marjorie’s money, he wasn’t going to get a conviction in Carthage. So he got the trial moved a mere 44 miles away to Saint Augustine, where Bernie's charismatic personality wouldn't get in the way of a fair verdict.

The wonderful thing about Richard Linklater’s new fictionalized retelling of Bernie’s true story is that he allows us to fall in love with Carthage, its quirky inhabitants, and with Bernie himself. By the end of the movie, we can’t quite believe that any humane jury would convict Bernie, and sit in fear that those no-good inbred St Augustinians won’t do him right.   Because this movie isn’t so much a character-driven crime drama as a Coen Brothers style love-letter to small-town Southern life.   We luxuriate in the broad accents, marvel at the cast-iron certainty of the town gossips as they declare that Bernie FOR A FACT was or wasn’t this or that, and laugh at their incomprehension of Austin hippies.  It’s hard to think of any recent use of faux-documentary talking heads that is as successful and hilarious as Linklater's use of  the Carthage townsfolk – narrating, commenting on, and judging the story at each twist and turn. 

Because I warmed so much to these people, and started to identify so strongly with them, the movie turned from what could’ve been a real downer into effectively a rather heart-warming experience. On one level this was a movie about really nasty aspects of human nature – a man so wanting to be liked that he wills himself into an emotional prison, and a woman delighting in his pain.  But rather than being brought down by the depiction of a bizarrely, horribly, sado-masochistic relationship (emotionally, not sexually, that is!), I left the cinema positively full of faith in humanity. Because Carthage was a small town where ordinary townsfolk knew just what was what, and a good guy was a good guy, even if blighted by a sudden act of rage.

All of which tells you that native East Texan, Richard Linklater, is pretty much in love with Carthage, and doesn’t really make much attempt to give a balanced view of Bernie. Or maybe he does, but the truth really is that Bernie was a good guy, despite the slightly suspect love of the high life to which Marjorie's money gave him access. By now, I’m so complicit in the “free Bernie” campaign I can’t even tell. All I know is that Linklater somehow managed to capture both the black humour and the tragedy at the core of Bernie’s need to please.  I laughed a lot, I was fascinated, and I won’t soon forget the tale. Massive praise also to all three leads.  Jack Black gives a more modulated performance than is typical in his mainstream films, as the gregarious, needy Bernie. Shirley Maclaine as mean old Marjorie is just an acting masterclass. Look at the scene where she listens to Bernie sing a duet in a theatrical rehearsal, imagining him singing a love song to her. Her face shows a cynical old woman melting.  And finally, you have to hand it to Matthew McConaughey, an actor who is brilliant in inverse proportion to his screentime.  Banality in mediocre rom-coms turns into piquant cameos – first in TROPIC THUNDER, and now as the fame-hungry prosecutor Danny Buckland. 

BERNIE played Los Angeles and London 2011.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 6 - ANOTHER YEAR

Mike Leigh returns to the Festival with a typical Mike Leigh product: heightened social realism mixing comedy and tragedy - finely observed, and improvised by the actors he often works with. The resulting film is a quality product if less memorable than, say, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, and less scarring than SECRETS AND LIES.

The movie is set around a couple called Tom and Jerry (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) - solidly middle-class, nice, cheerful, and happily married. They have a 30 year old son called Joe (Oliver Maltman) who through the course of the year finds a cheerful Poppy-lite girlfriend called Katie (Karina Fernandez). They all get on really well. This stands in sharp contrast with the people who surround them and who are, by turns, taken under their wing. As the movie opens we see Jerry, a counsellor, deal with a depressed woman called Janet (a cameo from Imelda Staunton). And then, the person who really anchors the work is Lesley Manville, playing a lonely middle-aged woman called Mary, who consoles herself by drinking too much and constructing an unrealistic fantasy that Joe will ask her out. Finally, we meet Tom's elder brother Ronnie (David Bradley), recently bereaved, living numb in a grey house.

As we pass through the year, we see that Tom and Jerry are kind and sociable and create a lot of fun around them. They are constantly telling people to sit down and have a cup of tea and asking them if they are okay. But, in essence, the people who surround them aren't okay - they are miserable - miserable and pretending, badly, not to be. This is best shown by a superb little end-scene for the character Jack, played by Phil Davis. His wife is ill. Jerry asks if he's okay and he says "Well we try not to let it get us down", but then looks to the ground forlorn.  So, how far is the friendship of Terry and June enabling that delusion, by blithely making cups of tea - and how far is it making it worse by presenting these poor folk with an image of smug domestic bliss? To that end, I found ANOTHER YEAR problematic, but I think I was meant to. I also found it, despite the laughs, a profoundly depressing, if well-made, film.

Additional tags: Michele Austin, Karina Fernandez, Martin Savage, David Bradley, Oliver Maltman, Gary Yershon

ANOTHER YEAR played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opens in the UK on November 5th. It opens in the Netherlands on November 11th; in France on December 22nd; in the US on December 31st and in Germany on January 27th 2011.

ME AND ORSON WELLES - thin

British thespian Christian McKay is charismatic, enigmatic and pitch perfect in his portrayal of legendary theatre and film director, Orson Welles. He is all thick, creamy charm and wonderfully, audaciously, self-confident. You want to be in his presence, to be caught up in the excitement of pulling off a daring production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar against all the odds. McKay's Welles convinces us that art matters, and that excellence is possible, and that if the artist wants to charm a little radio secretary or two in the meantime, well, who is he to be pinned down by conventional bourgeois morality? All hail, the brilliant wunderkind Orson Welles, and woe betide you if you dare to question his ducal rights.

The tragedy of ME AND ORSON WELLES is that Richard Linklater has not fashioned a framing device interesting enough to hold our attention when Welles is off screen. Indeed, Welles must be turning in his grave to see his grand personality reduced to romantic-comedy fodder. For, in this ill-advised film, we are asked to see Welles through the eyes of a naive, romantic schoolboy (Zac Efron with his first decent haircut), who gets a bit-part in Welles' production. For much of the movie's runtime, the schoolkid follows Welles around, filching his best pick-up lines and moving in on his PA (Claire Danes) only to get ideas above himself and mess it all up. We are supposed to care about this young kid losing his illusions about what it takes to get ahead, and worse still, to care about his romance with a drippy wannabe writer (Zoe Kazan) with eyes so wide she could be a Disney heroine.

All of this is so much nonsense. What we really care about is Welles and his genius and his relationship with long-time collaborators - his producer John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) and his best friend, Joe Cotton. The movie sags when Welles is off-screen. Frankly, I would've put up with just seeing him schmooze chicks, but what would've been superb would've been a portrayal of how he worked. Sadly, other than one seen where he discusses The Magnificent Ambersons, we get precious little of that.

The resulting film is too frail a frame upon which to hang a biopic of such a great man. It is likely to disappoint all potential audiences. The HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL crowd will no doubt be annoyed to see their pet outshone by an older, less handsome man, and the cineastes will be teased but not satiated by McKay's performance. Little scene gems - a big band led by Jools Holland with Eddi Reader as the singer - are wasted on such a thin film.

ME AND ORSON WELLES played Toronto 2008 but has only just been released in the USA and the UK. Never a good sign.

ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING - a qualified thumbs up from the target demographic

A sure sign of ageing: I offered The Kid a chance to see the WALL-E preview; she asked to see ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING instead. Since when did The Kid know about thongs? And have I taught her nothing about cinema? Ah well, youth must be indulged even if the mere title of the movie brought me out in hives.

ANGUS, SNOGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING is based on a series of exceptionally successful children's books by Louise Rennison. The books are narrated by a teenager called Georgia Nicolson who is willing to do anything to get a boyfriend. The film is a catalogue of her attempts - from changing her physical appearance to taking snogging lessons to using an innocent bystander to make her putative boyfriend jealous. The whole thing is pretty formulaic, including the fact that Georgia manages to piss off all her friends in the third act before a completely unearned happy ending in the fourth. (The evil baddie got pretty harsh treatment - I thought unnecessarily harsh.)

The message of the film is apparently that young girls should be happy looking the way they look, because Mr Right will like you just the way you are. Laudable enough. But why did I have to sit through ninety minutes of dialogue so puerile I got seriously worried about The Kid's sanity? To give you a flavour, here's the description of the one of the books from the website: "The third gorgey book about Georgia's adventures - guaranteed to have you laughing your knickers off. Find out how Georgia copes with her rapidly expanding nunga-nungas!" I mean, dear gods, did Ms Pankurst chain herself to the railings for this?! Clearly, I am not the demographic for this movie, and I strongly suggest that you drop your over 12s at the cinema and pick them up afterwards.

The only opinion that matters, I suppose, is that of The Kid. She had a great time, once she got over the shock of the changed title, lack of berets(?) and collapsed storyline. Apparently, the screenwriters have combined events from different novels, presumably saving us from sequels, and massively beefed up the parents marriage trouble storyline. She thought Robbie was cute (Aaron Johnson - the kid from THE ILLUSIONIST and THE THIEF LORD) and that Georgia was perfect. I also thought that Georgia Groome gave a charming performance. Moreover, she was playing a role a million miles away from her turn in LONDON TO BRIGHTON. She's evidently an actress to watch. Finally, though, even The Kid thought the denouement was just too ridiculously fairy-tale. And she has a pretty high hurdle-rate for schmaltz. So, all in all, I guess it's a qaulified thumbs up from the fan-base.

ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING goes on release in the UK on July 25th. It opens in Italy on August 1st; in Belgium on August 13th; in Germany on August 28th; in Australia and Russia on September 18th; in Norway on September 26th; in the Netherlands on October 2nd; in Spain on October 2nd; in Sweden on October 17th and in Denmark on January 2nd 2009.

MAN OF THE YEAR - a liberal wet dream

BARRY LEVINSON has had a patchy career - from hits like RAIN MAN and GOOD MORNING VIETNAM to his more recent, rather anonymous, films of which MAN OF THE YEAR is an exemplar. It's a half-baked attempt at political satire in which a Jon Stewart-like talk show host runs for President on a tide of popular dissatisfaction with Washington cronyism. He gets elected thanks to a computer voting glitch, exposed by a life-threatened whistle-blower. Robin Williams is good value as the TV host, at least in the scenes where he's allowed to let rip at stand-up. But the intervening drama, featuring Jeff Goldblum as the corporate heavy and Laura Linney as the do-gooder whistleblower, is dull. This isn't rapier-sharp satire but obvious, earnest, liberal angst. On balance, you'd do better to just rent some Robin Williams or George Carlin stand-up.

MAN OF THE YEAR was released in 2006 and 2007 and is available on DVD.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY - En Ra Ha-ha-ha!

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY is a marvellous film from British writer-director Mike Leigh. Unlike some of his best known films - VERA DRAKE, SECRETS AND LIES - HAPPY-GO-LUCKY is remarkably up-beat and life-affirming. I've heard some people describe it as less consequential than Leigh's previous films because of that. I think this is to profoundly misunderstand the movie, but I can see why they do it.

The movie is about a thirty year-old primary school-teacher called Poppy who lives in contemporary North London. She doesn't own a house or a car and she hasn't got a boyfriend. But she is happy: she has great friends, a job she is passionate about and a full life. Poppy expresses herself with a big grin, almost constant laughter and a quick wit. She wears loud, bright, clashing clothes. Indeed, she looks like a refugee from the 1980s.

I thought I might find Poppy's twittering optimism annoying, being a dreary old cynic myself. But the whole point about this film is that Poppy isn't delusional or superficial or blithe. She is, in fact, fully engaged with the world. When confronted with racism, or homelessness, or violence or physical pain, she doesn't walk on by but deals with the situation head-on. And all the time, she does so with patience, empathy and a cheerful disposition. Moreover, she isn't a martyr: she knows when to withdraw from a situation. So, instead of choosing not to see the grim realities of life, Poppy makes a positive, intelligent choice to see all that hardship but to deal with it.

To that extent, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY is, as one of the characters says in the final scene, a film about people who "choose to make their own luck". In other words, it's a film about the power of individual choice: that on a small scale, every day, we can make choices that make life better. And what could be more consequential than that?

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY is then, a film that has a positive and important message. But that description makes it sound terribly earnest and dull. And that's precisely what it isn't. The movie is full of closely observed scenes of how good friends behave in each other's company - indeed, it's rare to see such credible depictions of mature female friendship on screen. It's also a tremendously funny movie, but like all of the best comedy, has its roots in every-day situations that we can all relate to.

The movie is universally well-acted. Sally Hawkins won the Silver Bear at Berlin for her performance in the lead role, but Alexis Zegerman (perhaps better known as a playwright) is fantastic as Poppy's stalwart, best friend Zoe. Eddie Marsan, once again, is transfixing in his role as a tightly wound, paranoid driving instructer, and Kate O'Flynn is hysterically funny in a small role as Poppy's younger sister.

What more can I say but that Mike Leigh has once again produced cinema that is intelligent, thought-provoking, original and uniquely his. This is without doubt one of the best films I have seen all year.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY played Berlin 2007 where Sally Hawkins won the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Actress. It is ucrrently on release in the UK. It opens in the Netherlands in May 15th; in Germany on July 3rd; and in the USA on September 25th.