The Iron Lady

The consensus, from the reviews I’ve read, seems to be that The Iron Lady is a mediocre film with a stunning performance at its centre from Meryl Streep. I’d say that was fair – though to be honest, I don’t think the plot could ever please everyone. If it condemned Thatcher, it would be called a leftist fantasy and a distortion. If it painted her as saintly, it would get torn apart by all those who recall just how divisive Thatcher was. And sitting in the middle as it does, focusing on her Alzheimer’s and trying to project a balanced view, it gets decried for fence-sitting and having nothing to say.

I’m just about old enough to remember Thatcherite Britain, though more of my childhood memories come from the period when John Major was in power. My parents were comfortably middle-class and reaped some of the benefits of Thatcherism, so my early childhood was comfortable, brightly-coloured and joyful, one I will consider a kind of ideal just before the age of the Internet forever changed what it was like to be a kid, and which I hope I’ll live long enough to see painted as a kind of Utopia in films. But while we were comfortable in the 80s boom, my Dad was always left-leaning, had purposely chosen to work in an area with little wealth so that he was in low-income houses every day and was originally from a working-class background. While we had a strict – and pretty early – bedtime, one thing we were allowed to watch as a family despite all the vulgarity and swearing was Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show. So I grew up knowing at least through the lens of satire who the people in this film were – Thatcher herself, and Hurd and Heseltine and Howe. Thatcher was to me what she was on Spitting Image – a schoolmarm tightly controlling a cabinet of unintelligent man-children, who relieved herself in a urinal, heard the advice of Hitler in hiding and thought his ideas quite brilliant and of course, in that famous sketch that according to Ian Hislop now gets repeated by ex-cabinet members as though it really happened, answered the waiter’s ‘What about the vegetables?’ with ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’

Here, though, is something of a humanised Thatcher. The most interesting part, sadly all but skipped through, is how she went from being laughed at as a woman in a man’s world with no hope of election to being elected as an MP, rising up to become education secretary and finally Prime Minister. This is a fascinating success story that sadly, while represented, is a disjointed series of flashbacks, which seems to me a wasted opportunity. Four major elements of Thatcher’s tenure follow: the contrast between increased wealth for the UK while unemployment also skyrocketed; the breaking of the unions; the conflict in the Falklands with Thatcher’s excellent counter to why we should go to war over land most in the country don’t even care about and which is thousands of miles away – that on those grounds it is just like Hawaii for the US; and the poll tax, perhaps Thatcher’s biggest mistake and here shows as almost a direct cause for her party turning against her.

The very idea of a film about Thatcher struck me as absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more curious I became, and when Streep won the Golden Globe and is now hotly tipped for an Oscar, I knew that it would be a film worth seeing. Personally, I neither loathe Thatcher nor worship her. She was a strong leader at a time the country needed one. The Unions may not have needed breaking, but big changes had to happen and it’s uncertain whether or not they could be implemented any other way. The Falklands were justifiable but certainly more could have been done diplomatically – though it’s very likely without military response Argentina would not have budged. And the poll tax was always utterly absurd.

But Thatcherism is where Britain totally changed, including in the backlash against Britain. As the first scene with Thatcher buying some milk covertly makes plain, Britain today is almost nothing like the Britain Thatcher grew up in, and it’s only the coming decades that can show us whether or not that is for good or ill. Had Thatcher been in power longer, would we have almost no industry today outside pharmaceuticals? Without her, would we have far better exports today and not rely so much on banking? Would immigration and the EU be different? We don’t ask these questions of John Major.

Because I wanted neither an evisceration nor a deification, I don’t mind the presentation of Thatcher’s life. But what I did not like was the bulk of the film being given over to Alzheimer’s – the part that will likely win Streep the Oscar. It’s pure pandering to the Academy and the shadow of Iris is everywhere – after all, Dench really ought to have won the Oscar Halle Berry got in what I still feel was uncomfortably tokenism, and Jim Broadbent, playing a similar role to the one he plays here, won Best Supporting Actor for it. It seems cruel to portray a woman still alive as hallucinating her dead husband all the time, and seemed to me a very simple-minded portrayal of Alzheimer’s. It allowed for strong performances, yes, but for me the balance was all off and I couldn’t help thinking of all those satirical ‘how to win the Oscar’ comics and cartoons.

So yes, I agree with the verdict that this is a mediocre film centred on a strong performance – but perhaps my reasons for finding it mediocre are different from others’. Oh, and I don’t know why Anthony Head seemed to be impersonating not Geoffrey Howe but my Uncle Ray, but it really tickled me.

Chronicle

On the one hand, Chronicle made me roll my eyes at the painfully strained need for an illusion that it was being filmed diegetically – ‘The camera needs to stay on for our investigation’, says one police officer, horribly obviously – and at the tired old story I’ve seen a hundred times before. On the other, it was fun, never dull and had some very funny moments.

Chronicle is basically your typical superhero origin story. Three very different friends find a mysterious glowing thing and it gives them super-powers. As their powers grow, so do tensions, until it all comes to a head. It reminded me of X-Men with a touch of Akira. Aimee, hilariously, spent the whole thing thinking of telekinetic hedgehog Silver from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. But superhero films don’t have to be fresh and original to be entertaining – indeed, they rarely are.

Two things are distinct about Chronicle. Firstly, the use of cameras within the world of the story, which of course began with Blair Witch Project, reached its apogee with Cloverfield and is now outstaying its welcome. There was really no need for it here, except maybe to cut down the budget, and it would be better without it. The second is the teenaged angst driving the whole thing. Main character Andrew has the kind of high school existence that through its media representation makes me thank my lucky stars every day that I didn’t grow up in the States, and makes the concept of God Bless America somehow gratifying and attractive. He is slight and awkward, which means he is mercilessly bullied – he is physically assaulted, mentally abused and his property is stolen and damaged. At a rave, he, his cousin (who tries to distance himself from the popularity game but comes over as arrogant as a result) and the popular high school quarterback investigate a cave, and soon after gain the ability to levitate small objects. This grows into being able to lift larger and larger things and even to fly. The different boys have different gifts – at first it seems like the quarterback will have the brute strength, the cousin will be able to defend himself strongly and Andrew will be have the most versatile power, but that never gets developed.

Sadly, the boys all think too small. They don’t fly far away to begin an amazing new life, returning to benefit those close to them. They don’t seek to improve the world, or fight crime like characters from Kick-Ass or Watchmen. They remain secretive, other than putting on a magic show, and then Andrew’s unstable mental state and difficult home life leads to him deciding to get some money. Does he go to fight drug lords in Cuba? Does he bust down into diamond mines? Does he go and steal the bonuses of corporate CEOs? No. He beats up some local drunks who recognise him for their cash, then robs a gas station (not even flying to one miles away), makes a mess of it and ends up in hospital. Soon after, he and his cousin are yelling ‘TETSUO!’ and ‘KANEDA!’ at one another (or pretty close) and Andrew totally loses control and needs to be stopped. How the film ultimately ended felt to me like what ought to have been its middle point.

The film could have been so much more, of course it could. But it works on its small-scale level, too. The film ends with most questions – including where the powers came from and how the world reacts in the wake of superhumans becoming definite, undisputable fact – unanswered, but it doesn’t really need more than that: it’s primarily about two cousins and how you shouldn’t abuse weedy kids because they might suddenly get very strong and very angry.

Sometimes the best superhero films keep the scale small. That said, this one was very much so-so – worth seeing but not rewatching. Hancock is a much better small-scale riff on the superhero, and Unbreakable does the serious parts better.

Coriolanus

The overwhelming sense from this film is of good timing: it’s been a little while since the last fashionable Shakespeare adaptation, Ralph Fiennes is a bigger star than ever thanks to his visibility in the Potter franchise, and with the last year’s news dominated by riots and uprisings against dictators, the decision to modernise the story must have seemed incredibly fortunate and certainly comes over as remarkably relevant.

On the other hand, it ends up being the very modernisation that holds back this film from being a truly outstanding adaptation and renders it rather dull and, in all honesty, student-y.

Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare’s very best, despite some excellent moments. The original legend of a good soldier who is a poor politician ending up first exiled for his belief that eagles should certainly be beyond the reach of crows, only to return as a threat and then to end up in the worst position of all because he didn’t have the courage of his conviction and relented only really has an hour or so’s good story, with the rest fleshed out (expertly) by the relationship between Coriolanus as his closest friends, his family and his rival Aufidius.

Fittingly for a Shakespeare adaptation, the setting seems to sit somewhere between contemporary Britain and Rome, with filming in Belgrade giving the scenes of bitter war a grim authenticity. The best and most memorable scenes of the film are confrontations between armies turned into cells of soldiers infiltrating enemy territory and having grim, brutal clashes.

The true strength of this version is its powerful performances, though. Fiennes starts a little falteringly, but is excellent at showing a powerful man becoming vulnerable. I’m not sure I can imagine a better Volumnia than Vanessa Redgrave, who superbly balances ruthlessness, softness and slightly alarming madness. Gerard Butler’s Aufidius deals very well with a difficult part (both a great authority and a bit of a weird fanboy when Coriolanus shows up), and for all its silliness 300 has given him an onscreen gravitas that will benefit him for the rest of his career. James Nesbitt’s politician is perfectly pitched between likeable and loathsome, too, and Brian Cox is deeply reliable in a mature, understated Shakespearean performance.

But as I said, it’s the modernisation that makes the production really falter. On one side, the scenes with Coriolanus coming into contact with the common people fall horribly flat, and the scene with him getting opinions from the marketplace only for them to be quickly turned jumps about loosely and doesn’t work. It was a mistake getting real-life newsreader Jon Snow, for it will badly date the piece and to be honest makes it look like a BBC drama, as he seems to pop up all the time in the likes of Doctor Who. Tamora and Cassius are oddly-cast, and I was never sure whether they were supposed to represent the common people, rabble-rousing outsiders or vaguely meant to make it seem like the setting was actually Rome despite not having Italian accents. Either way, both were too exaggerated for the parts.

But more than that, the problem was that modernisation saps the scale. It’s alright for Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, where there are extravagant parties and huge churches, but here all the pomp of the Roman senate becomes men in suits in a conference hall, armies clashing become five guys in a tank on a desolate road and historic confrontations become TV talk show appearances. I’d much rather see a lavish, high-budget version with legions and togas and gold everywhere, and the change is really one thought of by hundreds of Fringe students before now. Some less grainy cameras for the external shots would have been nice, too, for a 2011 film with big-name stars.

On a side note, this is the last time I will be going to a cinema to see something arty. Popcorn has simply ruined the experience for me. Some morons a row in front of us had big bags of popcorn and couldn’t eat with their mouths closed. In a largely quiet, intense film like this it was absolute torture and I wished I could be at home watching on my projector. Selfish, idiotic people. I don’t understand the association of popcorn with the cinema, I really don’t. I’d like to say it didn’t affect my impressions of the film, but it certainly ruined the experience. I’m paying for a monthly subscription to the cinema anyway, so it’s not like they get less money if I pirate (though one ‘ticket sale’ less will be recorded), and I just hate popcorn that much. From now on, only loud films with things blowing up or people screaming all the time for me. I never again want to be stuck for two hours with selfish idiots going CRUNCH CHOMP GLMMPH CLUMP GULP in a darkened room.

War Horse

It’s a perfect marriage, really – Spielberg, perfectly poised for a comeback on the back of a film from JJ Abrams that was basically a tribute to him, adapts book and West End play War Horse for the screen, minus big puppets but plus real horses and gorgeous scenery. The subject matter of warfare recalls his superb Schindler’s List and memorable Saving Private Ryan, while the unabashedly sentimental story of a horse surviving against all odds nods back to his work for children.

I found this an enjoyable film, and with some real beauty, but not one I’d watch again any time soon, and one that could have been rather more affecting without some of its sillier moments. The plot is that a drunken old farmer risks everything buying a beautiful thoroughbred horse, mostly as a snub to his landlord. His son, who had seen the horse before and become rather taken with it, takes responsibility for training it up and it surprises everyone by adapting to being used as a workhorse. The farmer’s luck remains dismal, though, and a storm ruins the crops, so much to the son’s distress, the father sells the horse – WWI is breaking out and the cavalry need horses. So Joey the Horse goes off to war. On horseback, his new rider faces death and has a very fanciful vision of the horse living through the rest of the war and changing hands several times before finding a happy ending. Well, that’s not actually what happens, but it seems to me the most rational explanation for what actually unfolds: Joey is taken by the Germans, but lost again when two deserters are shot, then spends a while in a fairytale jam-making mill with a sassy little French girl. He is taken again by the Germans, though, and made to pull heavy artillery, which will kill even workhorses in a matter of weeks. However, he survives like this well over three years, at which point he gets free of the Germans as they retreat – presumably to the Hindenburg Line – faces down a tank that for whatever reason is driven by men who think chasing horses is a good plan, runs across No-Man’s land in a tangle of barbed wire, and lays there until he can be rescued, touchingly by soldiers from each side working together. And then the real unlikely coincidences begin.

It’s very mawkish and unlikely, but frankly, if you come to the film expecting anything different, I’d consider you a little uninformed. It’s after all about a horse surviving not just a few battles in the Great War, but its entirety, on both sides. If you simply accept that it’s a sweet fairy story set in the most dismal of worlds, you can enjoy this story, even if like me it’s your area of particular interest and study. And the fanciful character of the filmmaking only enhances it. No, a village in Devon shouldn’t be so often beautiful rolling hills and glorious skies and streets that are very obviously actually in the Cotswolds, but that’s all part of a romantic image of Britain at the time that is rather nice – and makes me feel lucky that my early childhood was in a picturesque part of the countryside. No, it doesn’t make a terrible amount of sense that three years’ crippling labour are glossed over, but it allows for the big resolution of the Armistice and what comes after. It doesn’t matter that the operations on the Somme in 1918 (which lest we forget was the battleground after years of hard struggle – the iconic Battle of the Somme was in 1916, the Germans then fell back to the Hindenburg Line, pushed the Allies back again and then finally retreated again and were overrun in 1918 with the Hundred Days Offensive) largely seem to involve running across a small bit of No-Man’s land and occupying empty but booby-trapped trenches. This isn’t a film to go to for great believability or accuracy – it’s simply a nice story about a horse in a sad time in human history.

For that reason, I consider it a decent film, but not one that I felt was a great weepy or worth multiple viewings. Nor do I feel any great need to see the play, which I always felt I should have gone to before now. Better stories have been told about WWI, most of them true. On the other hand, while it’s WWII films Spielberg is known for, especially ones that reflect upon The Holocaust, it is WWI that moves me the most, and this story is a fascinating addition to its mythos.

The Artist

I wasn’t entirely sure about The Artist based on the trailer, though a small part of that was not liking the way they had chopped up ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, by far my favourite bit of big band swing (which in the film itself was replaced by a very similar original track we can charitably call an homage). It seemed like it would be a tribute to 1920s silent movies, I thought it looked entertaining but perhaps overly simplistic and not as clever as it thought it was.

to 1920s silent movies, I thought it looked entertaining but perhaps overly simplistic and not as clever as it thought it was.

Well, it indeed wasn’t quite as smart or innovative as it wanted to be, and suffered from a severe lack of subtlety in places, but it was nonetheless a very enjoyable watch and a loving tribute to a bygone era.

George Valentin is one of the great stars of the silent era. One day, a pretty young fan called Peppy Miller is pictured kissing him on the cheek, which propels her to fame in her own right. However, the silent era is ending and the talkies are taking over. While Valentin and Peppy begin a mostly chaste liaison that others – including Valentin’s estranged wife – may misinterpret, Valentin resists the transition into pictures with sound and gets left behind. The girl who rose up from nowhere to become Hollywood Royalty, though, was perfectly positioned for it, and becomes its new icon. In the end, it is Valentin who has nothing, but just maybe Peppy’s old loyalties will be able to save him.

The obvious comparison is to Rudolph Valentino, but the character is more an amalgam of John Gilbert, who butted heads with his studio head, whose career flopped when talkies arrived, who turned to booze and who an old-flame-turned-big-star attempted to rescue – and Douglas Fairbanks, who played the sort of characters Valentin plays here, and who lavished much of his personal wealth on a last silent film even when talkies had already taken over. There are elements of Mary Pickford as well as Garbo in Peppy, too, and the prominent influence on the film’s overall style is arguably their United Artists co-founder DW Griffiths (with Niblo and Sennett around the edges, of course). The end comes with a fanciful nod to Fred and Ginger.

It’s not really an original or imaginative plot, one that would no doubt occur to most with any interest in silent film, or possibly anyone who has ever seen the beginning of Mack & Mabel. Indeed, I much preferred the way Hugo treated the films of the decade before these, and much was too heavy-handed: a dreadful dream sequence reflecting Valentin’s anxiety about talkies, for example, or the scene where his estranged wife exclaims in titles ‘We need to talk! Why won’t you talk?’ just when his stubbornness about not transitioning to the talkies is dragging down his career. On the other hand, the devotion to a full film in black and white and glorious 4:3 with – barring the very end – only music and a single song is not only fun to watch and a fond homage, but really makes the film memorable in concept. The casting was also great, with one or two familiar, distinctive faces (John Goodman and James Cromwell) complimenting the two main actors’ perfect looks, the leading lady only vaguely familiar from A Knight’s Tale and the director’s previous works with them unfamiliar to me.

Possibly a film those who have seen very little silent cinema will love more than those more familiar with the era, as they will find it more novel and more original in story times, it is nonetheless a very enjoyable, straightforward love story with a satisfying ending, engaging characters and a superb conceptual hook. Oh, and I also enjoyed the fact that its quiet soundtrack prevented the usual loud munching of popcorn – it would have been too distractingly loud, so people refrained.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Only two years ago, the first of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films came out, a cleverly reimagined portrayal of Holmes that was less aloof, detached, robot-like genius with an occasional opium habit and more drug-addled rock star of the detective world who stumbles from case to case causing problems for all around him and cursed with the ability to make stunning insights based on tiny observations. Rather than the unmemorable Blackwood of the first film, this one seems Holmes pitted against his nemesis Moriarty, as the original cliffhanger hinted it would. This of course made for a much more interesting cat-and-mouse game, but not only is there a worry now that this amusingly alternative version of Holmes will become the mainstream (making me long for the original version to make a return), but there was also the problem of giving Moriarty a motive that would seem intriguing and personal. Beyond a vendetta against Watson established purely because Holmes tried to avert it, there’s a supposed twist in that what Moriarty is really after is to start a large-scale war which will result in huge profits for him, because he has cornered the market in weaponry and other industries associated with warfare. It’s such an overused idea that it has its own TV Tropes page – ‘War for Fun and Profit’, and the idea was cliché in Star Trek, cliché in Gundam Wing, and it’s cliché here.

Still, there wherefores are peripheral, and it’s the stylistic delivery that works here. It’s by turns funny (that poor dog!), visually striking (the slow motion sequences) and clever (it’s not what the disguised ambassador does but what he does not do that gives him away). There’s a good mixture of action, comedy and pathos and the ending is satisfactory.

There’s also the appearance of Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes, an excellent foil to his brother and a bit of casting that I’m sure will evoke much commentary about the irony of Fry playing Mycroft to an American acting as the British Holmes while his long-time comedy partner who is British plays a famed American TV character based on Holmes, so I won’t need to add much to it here. It also reunites him with his Wilde co-star Law. On the other hand, having read about all his various body issues and extreme lack of confidence in The Fry Chronicles, I was mostly wondering about the psychological impact of the nude scene he had on the actor, rather than having the intended reaction of ‘Look, an inappropriately naked and unsightly man, how funny.’ But then, I’ve always had hang-ups about on-screen nudity, even wit nothing revealed.

And I also had problems with both the larger plot and the details. I could accept they would infiltrate Moriarty’s arms base when they don’t really need to in order to search for Rene, but after that there seems a great leap. They know Rene is working for Moriarty, but I cannot understand how Holmes deduced that the disguised ambassador had to be him. Why could it not have been one of numerous men working for Moriarty rather than Rene himself? It wasn’t made clear.

Plus lots of details were stretched, or relied on coincidence. Would Moriarty really leave the book that was his cipher in plain view when Holmes was visiting? Could he really rely on Holmes drawing the wrong conclusion when he went to the Opera for my (everyone’s?) favourite part of Don Giovanni? Did they really have to have their final confrontation over a game of chess, that most laboured of images?

Fun, but certainly not without its flaws.

Hugo

A lot of people still react with surprise when they hear Scorsese has made a children’s film. But it’s been a very long time since Goodfellas and Casino, and he’s amply proven his versatility since. And this ought to bring home to a wider audience that he can make interesting, stylistically superb films with great affection. I suspect this’ll be the best film this Xmas.

Based on what looks like an awesome mixed-media novel, Hugo is the story of a little boy who lives in a fanciful version of Gare Montparnasse, with a grandiose façade and a tower, winding the clocks and evading the station inspector, who will send him to the orphanage if he realises his drunken uncle is no longer there to do his job. His father, a watchmaker, left him just one thing – a large automaton – and though he gathers parts to try to get it working, it needs a special key. He gets in trouble trying to steal from a toymaker, who in turn takes from him his father’s notebook. But what is in the notebook makes the toymaker hesitate, and his pretty young daughter has a very distinctive key about her neck…

All I knew going into Hugo was that it was suitable for kids, that it looked quite steampunk-ish on the poster and that somewhere along the line the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès were involved, names familiar from my master’s degree. And indeed, this film made me glad to have got that rather useless qualification, because there was a lot of familiar stuff here. The story revolves around a fanciful version of Méliès’ life (somewhat oddly pronounced with the ‘s’ voiced here), both triumphs and tragedies exaggerated to make for a good yarn, and this allows Scorsese to not only recreate the fun setpieces of Méliès’ best (and Le Voyage dans la lune remains my very favourite piece of pre-Expressionist film footage, with its tumblers and funny effects), but to put in references to other films and famous scenes, from melding that famous the Montparnasse disaster with echoes of both Jean Renoir and the Lumière train film (and of course I had to duck away when the actual film was played, just before the onscreen audience did, in accordance with the popular urban myth) to a scene that will definitely bring to mind The 39 Steps. He even inserted Helen McRory (one of several Harry Potter cast members in this film) into original Méliès footage! Part of the love for film here seems to be Scorsese’s own.

The cast is excellent. The children are the centre of it all, of course, and do superbly – the boy playing Hugo was adorable and will make an interesting Ender. The girl – who I only later realised was Hitgirl from Kickass – was both tomboyish and feminine and managed to pull off that tired character quirk of proudly using long words because she’s bookish. Kingsley is reliably superb and ought to do more roles like this. Sasha Baron Cohen will no doubt see his stature further rise from this – he popped up in Sweeney Todd but a lot of people still don’t think of him as an actor who will appear in other people’s films. Here, he manages loathsome, ridiculous and appealing, no mean feat. McRory, Jude Law and Christopher Lee are strong in their small roles, and though reports are conflicting, I’m convinced that was Johnny Depp putting in a cameo as the guitar player.

One slightly odd point was that when Hugo put his hair in a side-parting, he looked remarkably like a friend of ours. Which had us laughing at certain points! Overall, though, this was a superb little film and the first in many years that has actually made me interested in the video game tie-in.