Friends & Crocodiles

Friends and Crocodiles follows the career of Paul, a brilliant entrepreneur who has made his fortune from retail. As well as being talented, he is also feckless and unstable. We open in 1981, when Paul is the owner of a beautiful country house set in a vast estate (echoes of Richard Branson's purchase of The Manor near Oxford a few years earlier). We then follow Paul's volatile career, which becomes intertwined with that of Lizzie, a talented manager, whom he recruits as his PA from a local estate agent. She brings order to the chaos of the house, which Paul has filled with an assortment of freaks who are all expecting to make it big in something. Lizzie storms out of his employment after a stunt at one of Paul's parties puts people in danger and as the years progress their paths cross at intervals, their relationship slowly mutating into one of grudging mutual respect. Despite the chaos he creates around him, it is his judgement that she ends up respecting, against the entrenched wisdom of the whole business establishment.

The film is a sharp, accurate and very involving tour of Britain over the last quarter century, through the high noon of Thatcherism, the wobbling confidence of the Major years, the dot com boom and the subsequent meltdown, through to the present. The lunacies, the technologies, the pain and the silliness. Maybe you had to live through it and suffer with it for Friends and Crocodiles to work. But even without that it's a vision very difficult to ignore.

Nowhere on television have I seen colour used as it is here. Almost every shot is a work of art, which of course makes it sound pretentious. It isn't pretentious on screen -- just a succession of startling, highly unusual and often very beautiful images. In some ways reminiscent of Fellini's movies, but more rooted in the everyday.

Underpinning it are the expert performances of Damian Lewis as Paul and Jodhi May as Lizzie, which are crisp, sharp and utterly believable.

Though handsomely produced and fairly diverting, this is ultimately a rather silly movie. Characters rise and fall and undergo drastic transformations at the whim of its simple-minded plot. (Mike Leigh's two-hander "Career Girls" seemed similarly unrealistic, but its characters were so endearing that it didn't matter.)

The biggest problem with "Crocodiles" is that it has a high school freshman's idea of what the workaday business world is like. The heroine's ascent is never believable, nor are the emotional changes she goes through. The three bosses we see -- a fussy, posturing little fellow played by Allan Corduner, a ruthless corporate CEO played by Patrick Malahide, and some pushy, fault-finding fat guy at the beginning -- are all ridiculous caricatures. The office Corduner presides over resembles a kindergarten class. The Damian Lewis character is treated by everyone there with inexplicable deference and indulged for months in ways no real-life company would put up with. (In fact, his character's imperturbable smugness throughout the film is increasingly hard to take.) And in light of what's happened in the real world, his success in establishing a string of old-fashioned bookstores seems sadly ironic.

The movie also forces us to watch too many long, lavish parties, and it's a reminder that -- for me, at least -- there's nothing more boring (although they were probably fun to stage).

On the other hand, Jodhi May remains fairly breathtaking in just about anything; and considering all the closeups and screen time she gets, I have the impression that Poliakoff was as enamored of her as I am.

While looking and feeling like big production TV from the BBC the central question marks are really the pivot points of Friends and Crocodiles.

Set initially in the a multi-millionaire's world of bizarre parties and meaningless hedonism it is a timeless journey into one man and one woman's counterbalancing act. He wild. She composed. He unorganized. She overly so etc;

The Eighties in Britain were a time of an implosion of time and security, and rapidly followed by immense greed. On the flip-side of this was a vast sub-culture spawned by the rejection or denial of access to the success of Thatcherite policies.

But this is not a film about politics, or even economics, and it has a strong surreal edge to it - it is definitely worth viewing for the juxtaposition between the work ethic - protestant, bourgeois, uptight - and the new entrepreneur - free-wheeling, charismatic, and mesmerizing.

Largely successful Poliakoff writes a great visual script and directs in sweeping tranches of panoramic vistas - this is largely a film based on ken Russell's sensibilities of what make film work - it is bold, and fun, but for my taste at the end of the day - a bit like the Eighties themselves - had loads of style but the substance is obscure...

It works best in the unreal world of parties and we thought it fell apart when the parties ended. Brilliant first half. Weaker second.

The rise and fall and redemption are too commonplace - here the acting should have had power rather than a footnote to the parties - and we were left wondering if,like the Eighties, it was all a bad hangover and a fitful night.

This film starts off with a great flourish, with Damian Lewis doing a perfectly tuned & on-target portrayal of a calm cool feral madman entrepreneur of the 1960s or 1970s, Paul Reynolds, surrounded by a collection of pretentious sycophants whose archetypes range back to the early Roman era. They party & posture amid Paul's palatial estate when Lizzie strolls in. Straight & serious Lizzie, for whom Paul develops an inexplicable attraction that ultimately leads to his & the film's doom. Lizzie, fresh from secretarial school, is hired by Paul as his personal assistant, although she never displays any sign of business or political aptitude. Given the task of organizing Paul's large collection of notes & papers into some kind of accessibility, she proudly shows him her accomplishment: everything's been prettily packaged & shelved in four color groups of boxes, no labels in sight, apparently interpreting her duties to be interior decoration.

As played by Jodhi May, Lizzie splits her emotive energies between the coy tilted head smirks teenage girls give dad when they want $80 for new jeans and hysterical outbursts that make you wonder if this takes place in an alternate universe without the benefits of psychotherapy.

There are other problems in placing this film in a known universe, although it tries hard to represent specific points in time. Early on, Paul dreamily says to Lizzie, "Computers, you should get into computers, that's where the future is. Women used to prevail in the field of computers but now the the guys are taking over." Oh yeah?

The film becomes increasingly choppy & episodic as it proceeds. I began to feel as though I were watching a version of "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead" (sans Shakespeare or Stoppard) as done by Ed Wood, i.e. all the real action taking place in another universe.

Vague generalizations substitute for plot movement, grand statements about corporations being hippos & the future of business being in telecommunications & the internet, not vacuum cleaners. Unh hunh. No mention of laptops or cell phones.

Too bad. The first 20 minutes on Paul's estate & the ideas driving Friends & Crocodiles had a lot of promise. Great title, too. But the title's explanation, like the rest of the movie, are a terrible letdown.

I enjoyed Friends and Crocodiles and strongly suggest viewing it more than once. More nuances are then perceptible which fleshes out the story line that otherwise is convoluted and can be confusing. Both Paul and Lizzie demonstrate an extreme level of self control, although each of a different nature and each exhibited in vastly different ways. Lewis and May are exceptionally well suited for those two roles and do an excellent job of keeping the viewer focused on their personalities and the theme, rather than have attention wander off on other characters or subplots. The interplay between the two of them can easily be viewed as signifying human interaction in areas other than the business world.