Category: Coming of Age film

My Week with Marilyn (2011)

Michelle Williams navigates the world of fame as Marilyn Monroe, escorted by Eddie Redmayne

Director: Simon Curtis

Cast: Michelle Williams (Marilyn Monroe), Eddie Redmayne (Colin Clark), Kenneth Branagh (Laurence Olivier), Judi Dench (Sybil Thorndike), Emma Watson (Lucy), Dominic Cooper (Milton H. Greene), Derek Jacobi (Owen Morshead), Dougray Scott (Arthur Miller), Toby Jones (Arthur P Jacobs), Julia Ormond (Vivien Leigh), Zoë Wanamaker (Paula Strasberg), Michael Kitchen (Hugh Perceval), Philip Jackson (Roger Smith), Simon Russell Beale (Cotes-Preedy), Robert Portal (David Orton), Jim Carter (Barry), Richard Clifford (Richard Wattis), Gerard Horan (Trevor)

In 1956 Laurence Olivier was the greatest actor in the world; Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star (and sex-symbol) in the world. Surely when they came together to make a movie, it would be cinema gold. It wasn’t. Olivier directed and starred with Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl, an almost impossibly slight puff piece, partly assembled (so rumour goes) so Olivier could sleep with Monroe. But it turned out Monroe’s fragile psyche and Stanislavkian approach to acting was incompatible with Olivier’s well-honed craft. The two did not get on.

Simon Curtis’ gentle, at times charming, but basically very lightweight film follows the making of the film through the eyes of Colin Clark. Clark, son of the famous art critic Kenneth Clark, was a naïve, romantic young man keen for a career in the movies through his father’s contacts. Hired by Olivier’s production company, Clark is tasked to take care of Monroe throughout the film. He becomes increasingly fascinated and infatuated with her as they spend more and more time together.

The film is based on Clark’s diaries, and he is played by Eddie Redmayne at his most fresh-faced. The problem with Clark is that, to be honest, rather than a young man on a journey of self-discovery, he comes across a little like a social-climbing creep and borderline stalker. Clark recounts a short-lived friendship that obviously had huge importance to him – but the film doesn’t want to deal with the fact it probably meant virtually nothing to Monroe, beyond some company during a lonely time.

It’s not helped by the fact Clark comes across slightly like a pushy groupie, the self-proclaimed guardian of Monroe’s needs – qualifications barely justified by his actions. The film wants us to think he got closer to the magic of celebrity than anyone, but he feels like a stranger with his nose a little closer to the portcullis. Quite frankly, Colin is the least interesting character in his own story, and Redmayne fails to really give him much depth for us to engage with. Instead he remains a slightly unsettling inverted snob, manipulated by Monroe. The film, you feel, just doesn’t get this. At the end someone tells Colin he is “standing taller” than when he first met him (the implication being the relationship has made a man of him – as if spending a bit of downtime with a celebrity was the only route to emotional maturity). But rather than being part of a sweet star-crossed romance, Colin feels like someone creepily attaching himself to someone vulnerable.

However, Michelle Williams is very good as Marilyn, capturing a real sense of her emptiness and insecurity. She perfectly captures Monroe’s physicality and vocal mannerisms. She is very good at capturing Monroe’s sense of permanent performance, of her glamour, kindness and innocence, mixed with her maddening vulnerability and (inadvertent?) selfishness. It’s a fine performance – better than the film deserves.

Because the film is afraid of remotely criticising Monroe at all – or really engaging with the deep psychological reasons for her depression, or addressing the possibility that part of her appeal was her slight blankness that any desires could be projected onto. Instead, the film suggests, she’s sad because men just use her. Apart from Colin of course. His kissing, skinny-dipping and sharing a bed with her are entirely unmotivated by any lustful yearnings.

The film is in love with Monroe, presenting her just as Colin saw her – perfection. In fact, just as Dougray Scott’s put-upon Arthur Miller says, she was probably exhausting and all-consuming. She certainly sucks the naïve Colin into her orbit, in a way he (or the film) hardly notices or understands. It wants us to think of this as a romance – in fact, Monroe’s fragility created a neediness that meant she didn’t feel she needed to consider other people, so overwhelmingly concerned was she with her own brittleness. The film essentially believes she was a star, so is basically allowed to do what she wants. The fact that she did so with an air of gentle vulnerability means the film gives everything she does a pass.

So it’s rather hard not to sympathise with Olivier’s growing frustration with Monroe’s unreliability. Kenneth Branagh triumphs as Olivier, surely the role he was born to play: very funny, but also with a patrician charm and all-consuming arrogance. Branagh taps into Olivier’s vulnerability, his sense that he may not be able to communicate his acting strength into movie stardom, that he is yesterday’s man. For all her difficulty, Monroe had that “star quality” that makes her the centre of your attention. I’d argue Olivier almost certainly had the same – but the film is so in love with Monroe, it needs to slightly bring Olivier down. Branagh, however, is so good that he constantly punctures the film’s attempt to force Olivier into a less sympathetic role than the one it indulges Monroe with.

My Week with Marilynis far from terrible – it’s just a rather empty film. It has a terrific cast with these British star actors all offering fine pen portraits of assorted actors, producers and agents. The film however is slight, and so in love with its fairy-tale elements, it doesn’t notice that Clark’s story is slightly more creepy and certainly a lot more emotionally empty than the film wants it to be. It wants to take us behind the curtain of a 20^th-century icon – instead it accidentally shows how impenetrable their screens are, and how easy it is for ordinary people to persuade themselves that the most fleeting of contacts was something special.

Lion (2016)

Dev Patel searches for his past in Lion

Director: Garth Davies

Cast: Sunny Pawar (Young Saroo), Dev Patel (Saroo Brierley), Rooney Mara (Lucy), Nicole Kidman (Sue Brierley), David Wenham (John Brierley), Abishek Bharate (Guddu), Divina Ladwa (Mantosh Brierley), Priyanka Bose (Kamla Munshi), Seepti Naval (Saroj Sood)

In 1986, Saroo (Sunny Pawar) is accidentally separated from his brother Guddu (Abishek Bharate) and mother (Priyanka Bose) after being trapped on a train that travels 1,600km to Calcutta. Unable to find his way home, and dodging the dangers of Calcutta’s streets, he eventually ends up in an orphanage. He is adopted by an Australian couple, the Brierleys (fine and tender performances Nicole Kidman and David Wenham). Twenty years later, a chance meeting with a group of Indian students brings Saroo’s (Dev Patel) memories flooding back– and dedicates himself to retracing his steps and finding his family in India.

Lion is an overlong expansion of a story that would really spark your interest when presented in a newspaper article. But Garth Davies’ film drains the dramatic life out of the story by ludicrously overextending the telling in order to try and eke as much emotion from the audience as possible. Lion is under two hours, but it really should be at most an hour and a half.

The problem is the central section in Australia, while our hero tries to locate his roots. It just isn’t quite interesting enough, despite sterling, committed and emotional work from Dev Patel. Put simply, even with an extraordinary story like this, the film can’t help but communicate Sarro’s obsessions through cinema’s clichés. So we get a madness board with pins and bits of string to link clues. We get Saroo increasingly dishevelled. We get him driving away family and girlfriend. We get moody, tearful glances into the middle distance. Even the final solution to the mystery occurs after a spark of inspiration during a rage fuelled “I’m going to wreck this board and give up” moment. This whole section just serves to reduce the story into movie-of-the-week territory.

The film just doesn’t quite connect with us as it should. Perhaps because of the amount of time given over to very slow Google Earth searches, or overblown camera tracking shots across train lines, or expansive slow, piano-scored moments of emotional torment from Saroo. It’s a shame because there are flashes of good material in there – Nicole Kidman’s has a stand out scene to explain why she chose not to have children – and Dev Patel is the best he’s been. But it doesn’t quite work. After Saroo’s emotional revelation at an Indian friend’s house and realisation that he is “lost” (and this quiet devastation from Patel is affecting), the story doesn’t really kick off. It just slows down.

It’s a shame as the opening third of the film with young Saroo lost in Calcutta is very well done, even if it seems virtually every male living on the streets is a paedophile. The early scenes with Saroo and his brother are very good, and establish the strength of their bond. Sunny Pawar does a marvellous job as the lost boy, and Garth Davies films Calcutta with an earthy realism, as well as having a wonderful sense of empathy for the vulnerability of children. It’s also striking to see how uncommented upon a child alone on the streets of Calcutta goes. The dangers Saroo dodges feel genuinely threatening, and helps us invest emotionally for the rest of the film.

The moments that flash back to this do get overplayed later. Much as I initially liked Saroo hallucinating his brother and mother appearing around him in the streets of Melbourne, it’s a card that quickly gets overused. Like many of the ideas in this film, it gets hammered home a little too much. It’s that whole middle section, with poor Rooney Mara saddled with the thankless part of supportive girlfriend. You could have cut it down by 20 minutes and had the same impact. Garth Davies’ direction simply gets carried away with the lyrical sadness, to try and tug our heartstrings.

The problem is the most moving part of the film is the final sequence where we see the real people meeting in the streets of Khandwha. Nothing else in the film really measures up to this genuine emotion. Particularly after we’ve watched a man searching Google and behaving moodily for well over forty minutes. It’s a film that loses its way because it’s moments of emotional reality like that which make these stories truly profound – and a dramatisation can never provide that. With the film also unable to find a way to make the search as dramatic and engaging as the getting lost and being found, it also flounders in the middle, taking way too long to get us to the destination. It’s got its moments, but it’sa well assembled film that outstays its welcome.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Dev Patel is the Chaiwala living the dream in Slumdog Millionaire

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Dev Patel (Jamal Malik), Freida Pinto (Latika), Madhur Mittal (Salim), Anil Kapoor (Prem Kumar), Irrfan Khan (Inspector), Ayush Mahesh Khedehar (Jamal [Child]), Tanay Chheda (Jamal [Teenager]), Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail (Salim [Child]), Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala (Salim [Teenager]), Runbina Ali (Latika [Child]), Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar (Latika [Teenager]), Saurabh Shukla (Constable Srinivsas), Mahesh Manjrekar (Javred), Ankur Vikal (Maman)

Re-watching Slumdog Millionaire, it’s surprising to think that back in 2008 this film was so garlanded with awards (EIGHT Oscars!) and heralded so quickly as a classic. While it’s a well-made and at times rather sweet (with a hard-edge) fable, it’s also seems slightly less unique and genre-defying than first appeared. Never mind a list of the greatest Best Picture winners, I’m not even sure it’s the greatest Danny Boyle movie. But saying this, it’s still a fine movie – and one I arguably enjoyed more re-watching it almost ten years on then when I saw it in the cinema.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is an eighteen year-old Muslim, a chaiwala working in a Mumbai call centre. He enters the Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, hosted by egotistical Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor), and to the astonishment of everyone is one question away from the ultimate prize of 20 million rubles. Arrested by the police and questioned before his final show, he explains via flashbacks how his experiences allowed him to answer each question. His life-story is one of danger and conflict in the slums and criminal underworld of India, tied closely to his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and their childhood friend Latika (Frieda Pinto), whom Jamal has loved his whole life.

Part social-realist tale, romance, family drama and fairy-tale, Slumdog’s main triumph is probably its ability to juggle half a dozen tones and genres so successfully. This is most strikingly demonstrated by fact that so many came out of a film that opens with its lead character being waterboarded and tortured by policemen, saying it was a brilliant feel-good movie! In fact, Boyle’s film is far more complex, touching on themes ranging from child exploitation and prostitution to gangland politics to social corruption, via murder, betrayal and mutilation. How does this a film crammed with this sort of material make you feel rather positive at the end?

Boyle’s, and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy’s, trick is to follow in the footsteps of that other great juggler of urban social comment and larger-than-life characters – Charles Dickens. Dickensian is perhaps the best word to describe Slumdog – it throws the viewer into the slums of Mumbai, glancing at this world with all the keen social commentary Dickens used to bring to Victorian London. As young children, Jamal and Salim are thrown in with a Fagin-like gang boss, while Latika develops an (admittedly much more gentle) Estelle-like connection with them both. Like David Copperfield, our hero moves from place to place (or frying pan to fire!), with an episodic charm, each event adding to the spectrum of his life. It works really well as it taps into a reassuringly familiar story structure that makes us feel narratively safe, no matter how much peril our heroes undergo.

What’s fascinating is placing this familiar material into (for us) a more exotic location. I suspect many American viewers watching were even less familiar with India as such a mixture of extreme wealth and poverty sit side-by-side so naturally (and again how Dickensian does that sound?). Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is astounding for its energetic immersion in the streets of Mumbai –it’s like an explosion of Boyle’s high-octane, camera-shaking style seen in so many of his other films. It not only makes the film feel fresh and vital, it also manages to present India as something very different for those only familiar with the country as a Taj Mahal postcard.

The most compelling parts of the film are those in the first half that throw us into the Mumbai of Jamal and Salim’s childhood. Helped immensely by six terrific performances from the child and teenager versions of our three leads, these sequences (just over the first half of the movie) immediately involve the viewer in the fates and feelings of these characters. Perhaps because the film is shot in such an immersive style, you feel as if you have experienced the dangers (and occasional joys) alongside them, and developed a close bond with them.

Despite the romantic plot of the movie, the true story is the jagged relationship, with its loyalties and betrayals, between the innocent, gentle dreamer Jamal and the more ruthless, realist Salim. The film charts the lengths they will go to protect and help each other – or sometimes in Salim’s case not. Salim is a fascinating character – easily the deepest, most conflicted of the three – who even as a child has a moral flexibility, happy to gain the benefits of a ruthless criminal lifestyle, while still having enough conscience to know what he has done with his life is wrong.

In contrast, the relationship between Latika and Jamal is far less complex. Frieda Pinto doesn’t actually appear until almost two thirds of the way into the movie – and she and Patel have only really one dialogue scene together to establish a romantic link. The romance between them is in fact the standard fairy-tale – two young friends as children who become unknowing sweethearts. The film relies on us being invested in their fates as children to want to be together, rather than building a link between two grown adults. This is the structure of a Prince Charming and a Princess in distress rather than grown-up storytelling – but it clearly works because it taps into our own fundamental first experiences of how stories work.

Dev Patel is a very sweet and highly engaging lead – and how could we not be immediately on the side of a pleasant, gentle young man whom we first see hanging from a ceiling with electrodes on his feet? Patel has a low-key decency about him that becomes more engaging the more you watch the film. Since most of his narrative function is to offer linking scenes to the far more dynamic and exciting flashbacks – and since the character of Jamal has very little real depth to him beyond “he’s a good guy” (again like a fairytale his innocence is untouched by events) – it’s quite a testament to his performance that you end up feeling as close to him as you do.

But it’s clear to me second time around the framing device of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire contest is the most disposable, and least interesting part of the movie. It does have the film’s most outright enjoyable adult performance, a swaggering, ego-filled turn from Amil Kapoor, but it’s still all much more predictable, obvious and functional than the adventures we see as our characters grow up. We know Jamal is going to keep getting things right (and thank goodness each question he answers, he learned the answers consecutively through his life! What a mess that might have been otherwise narratively!), so the fact that Boyle keeps what is essentially the same scene each time seeming interesting is quite something.

The gameshow however is the “quest” of this romantic fairy-tale. And fairy-tale is really what the film is: Jamal is there to try and find and save Latika. So in the end it doesn’t really matter that Latika hardly feels like a character, or that we’ve been given no real reason to think she and Jamal are in love other than the film telling us that they are, or that the plot of the film is really as flimsy as tissue paper. The film is a dream, a romantic fable. The genius of Boyle is to use a whole load of familiar, Dickenisan-style tropes to place this into a social-realist travelogue, a dynamite dance of flamboyant film-making techniques. So perhaps that is the point about Slumdog: on repeated viewings, like fairy-tales, its plot tricks and narrative sleight-of-hand become more obvious. But you get more of a respect for the confidence with which the trick is played.

Addams Family Values (1993)

The Addams Family Values: Goth meets summer camp fun in this engaging comedy

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Cast: Anjelica Huston (Morticia Addams), Raúl Juliá (Gomez Addams), Christopher Lloyd (Uncle Fester), Joan Cusack (Debbie Jellinsky), Christina Ricci (Wednesday Addams), Carol Struycken (Lurch), Jimmy Workman (Pugsley Addams), Carol Kane (Grandma Addams), David Krumholtz (Joe Glicker), Peter MacNicol (Gary Granger), Christine Baranski (Becky Martin-Granger)

The Addams Family was a serviceable family comedy about a bizarre group of Halloween style characters, who delighted in leading lives of cartoony horror. It drifts along, and was a big hit, but its sequel Addams Family Values is several times smarter, more confident and funnier. As a comedy family saga mixed with cartoon creepiness, it’s hard to beat.

Celebrating the birth of their new child (“He has my father’s eyes” / “Take those out of his mouth”), Morticia (Anjelica Huston) and Gomez (Raúl Juliá) hire a new nanny, Debbie Jellinsky (Joan Cusack) to care for the baby. On her advice, they also decide to send the insanely jealous Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) to a summer camp – needless to say they do not fit in with the All-American, Apple-Pie ideals championed there. Debbie meanwhile has wicked designs on becoming the widow of their rich Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd).

Addams Family Values gets a lot of comic juice out of some very witty set-ups. Everyone involved in the film feels more relaxed and happy to let the comedy breathe. Sonnenfeld lets the set-ups come naturally and allows the characters to come to the fore. Every joke in the film comes from watching the characters bounce off their circumstances. Of course, a lot of this comes from the fact the film doesn’t need to do any of the heavy lifting of introducing the world or the characters – it rightly assumes we know what we are getting from the start – but it still makes the film hugely entertaining.

A lot of the humour comes from the brilliant summer camp plotline, with its passive-aggressive, jolly-hockey-sticks owners (a very funny Peter MacNichol and Christine Baranski) and their naked favouritism for the popular kids. Placing the Addams children into a world of normal teenage politics and the forced jollity of adults who would rather still be one of the popular kids at school is a brilliant touch. This clash of values makes for no end of comic glory, culminating in a disastrous Thanksgiving play, which is a triumph of the sad and overlooked over the popular kids (because who watching any film favours the popular kids?).

Christina Ricci is brilliant in this – her deadpan sense of comic timing is spot-on. Every scene and every one-liner is stand-out. The film even finds time for a sweetly semi-romantic plotline between her and loser Joe Glicker (David Kumholtz, also very good as the kind of kid who likes to read A Brief History of Time). Ricci ends up carrying a lot of the film’s comic material, and she’s so perfect in the role that to a lot of us she will always be Wednesday Addams, never mind what she does.

The summer camp plotline is so drop-dead funny and memorable, it rather overshadows the film’s actual plot about Debbie’s attempts to seduce and murder Fester. Sonnenfeld struggles to make this main plot come to life – his real delight is in the sketch-based comedy of the summer camp and the Addams’ love for the grotesque and the extreme. Having said that, Joan Cusack is wickedly sexy and funny as a heartless social climber.

Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá remain divinely perfect as a couple so besotted they can barely look at each other without bursting into a steamy tango, or an avalanche of flirtatious foreign language banter. Juliá rips into the dialogue with a flamboyant gusto, and he’s a perfect foil for Huston’s supercool, arch one-liners. Sonnenfeld never lets the introduction of a baby affect their comic darkness in any way, which is a perfect set-up for comedy.

Addams Family Values is terrific good fun and always keeps you laughing. It’s a load better than the original, and has some terrific comic set-pieces in. Sure it’s got a pretty basic plot, but it’s directed with a wicked dryness by Barry Sonnenfeld and its cast are now completely comfortable in their eccentric characters. The tone always seems spot-on between the surrealist darkness and the childish, cartooney horror. It’s a very entertaining film.

The Last Detail (1973)

Randy Quaid, Jack Nicholson and Otis Young are sailors on a wild week in the classic The Last Detail

Director: Hal Ashby

Cast: Jack Nicholson (Signalman Billy Buddusky), Otis Young (Gunner’s Mate Richard Mulhall), Randy Quaid (Seaman Laurence Meadows), Clifton James (MAA), Carol Kane (Young Prostitute), Michael Moriarty (Marine Duty Officer), Nancy Allen (Nancy), Luana Anders (Donna)

When you see Jack Nicholson in a film from his late period – basically the 90s onwards – it’s easy to wonder what all the fuss is about. It’s sometimes hard when you see him eating the scenery to remember that in the 1970s Nicholson did a run of such mighty, landmark performances that he basically earned the right to do what he wanted for the rest of his life. The Last Detail is an often overlooked classic from the 1970s – and Nicholson is simply outstanding in it.

Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Mulhall (Otis Young) are “lifers”, career sailors who are ordered to take a young sailor, Meadows (Randy Quaid), from Virginia to Portsmouth Naval Prison in Maine. Meadows will serve eight years for stealing $40. Given a week to make the journey, Buddusky and Mulhall at first plan to get Meadows there as soon as possible so they can have a leisurely return and spend their per diems on a blow-out. However, feeling sorry for Meadows’ harsh punishment and lack of life experience, they decide instead to take their time on the journey and show Meadows a good time – including drinking, whoring and general hi-jinks.

The Last Detail is a brilliant slice of 1970s filmmaking, an episodic road movie with a script to die for and a simply superb performance from Nicholson. Hal Ashby’s film is both a celebration of the rebellious attitudes of the 1970s and a sad acceptance of their failure. It’s a heartfelt film where we discover and understand more and more about each character and find out more about the age as well. It’s also a lovely story of bromance – of three men who come together, find themselves developing a very close bond, but are trapped by the rigid organisation they are part of.

The film is completely Nicholson. This is the sort of tour-de-force that cements him in any list of the greatest screen actors ever. It’s just a marvellous performance, near perfect. Buddusky is the ultimate impotent rebel, a man with a natural rough leadership quality over those at his level, but who basically lives within a societal prison that he can’t really imagine breaking free from. Buddusky will let rip – never better than the marvellous sequence where he erupts against a racist barman who also refuses to serve the underage Meadows (“I am the MOTHERFUCKING SHORE PATROL” he suddenly screams, after almost a minute of slow tension build-up) – but he’s also quiet and thoughtful. Watch Nicholson’s reaction shots when he listens to Meadows reminisce on his childhood dreams of being a vet. What a masterclass of quiet acting – Budduksy is enchanted, irritated, sad, bored, confused, moved – all at once and more.

Buddusky feels a brotherly affection for Meadows – perhaps also, a reflection of his own sense of being trapped. Nicholson alternates between affection and frustration with a touch of self-loathing. At one point during a drunken night at a motel, he demands Meadows punch him out, because he is the one taking him to prison. Meadows refuses – sweetly these guys are the best (only?) friends he’s ever had – Buddusky reacts by punching a cupboard repeatedly in fury. Later, during a fumbled sexual encounter for Meadows with a prostitute, he is kindly and understanding. It’s a fascinating performance of frustration, confusion and unaimed anger. There is nothing he can’t do.

Young is excellent as Mulhall (there is a great sequence where Mulhall berates Buddusky for his risky attitude, revealing Mulhall’s basic conventional outlook), while Quaid’s Meadows is an endearingly innocent figure: a kleptomanic with no friends, a sad family background (a visit to his abandoned family home reveals his mother to be an alcoholic), a sad, lonely boy who (unwisely) looks to a prostitute for emotional connection, and holds an unfulfilled dream of becoming a Master Signalman. He still takes on the others’ confidence through – just watch how Meadows grows in assurance as the film goes on. All three of these actors spark off each other brilliantly.

Ashby’s camera drifts gently, allowing the actors a great deal of freedom. Ashby shot the film in chronological order which works brilliantly – not least in that you see Randy Quaid grow in confidence as an actor just as the character emerges from his shell. Scenes are allowed to loosely continue, often past the point you might expect, which really allows the actors to breathe and the characters to grow: scenes of the characters drinking (rather feebly) in a carpark (as they can’t get into a bar) feel organic and almost improvisational. Ashby uses a lot of dissolves and fades to mark the passage of time – often in the middle of conversations to move us from one point to another – which also work really well.

This works perfectly for Nicholson, as it allows us to learn more about Buddusky’s shallow rebellion. Buddusky may rail against the oppression of the navy but he’s totally reliant on the grounding it gives him. Mulhall is more open about this – as a black man, it has given him some standing and a steady income to support his mother – but Buddusky is adrift in the real world. Watch him flirting with a college girl at a party. He’s hopeless, falling back on how navy work is man’s work, repeating it several times like a mantra before a crude joke. Nicholson’s first introduction is him (hungover) telling a soldier where his superior officer can stick his summons. Next time we see him, he’s arrived to see that officer. Buddusky badmouths everything and boasts of being “a badass” all the time – but every time he’s with an officer Nicholson seems to shrink and clam up. He can rebel only in words, on his downtime. On the clock he just has to fit in with the rest.

Part of the visual genius of the casting is Young and Quaid are both over six feet, making Nicholson look smaller and stunted. It’s a really neat visual metaphor for his sense of rebellion. He and Mulhall may bitch and moan about the injustice of the navy – but there is never really any question that they won’t carry out the task they are doing. Neither man has any real aim or goal in life, nor any particular insight or any plan. They just want not to be told to do things they don’t want to do. Meadows is off to prison – but Mulhall and Buddusky are also “lifers”. They ain’t going nowhere. They might not always like it, but they’d rather do that than drop out – when they meet genuine counter-culture types, none of them can understand or relate to them at all.

But the film is not depressing – it’s actually rather moving and lovable – because the bromance between the men is so well drawn. They grow to care a great deal for each other. They may not always have much in common, but they clearly have a whale of a time in each other’s company. The laughter feels genuine and grows from the actors’ own obvious rapport – I’m pretty sure they are near corpsing a few times – and it’s infectious. There is a dream-like freedom to the film – for its duration, reality is suspended and they can be free. They’re like children allowed out of school for the day. It’s hugely, engrossingly enjoyable and moving.

The Last Detail is a simply brilliant film. Ashby is a partly forgotten film maker, but films like this have a quiet, unflashy poetry to them. Robert Towne’s script is perfect – foul-mouthed and barbed, but full of unexpected emotional depths and beautiful character beats. Young and Quaid are excellent – but oh man Nicholson. He is so good in this film, it has to be seen to be believed. He is a living, breathing force of nature – he burns up the screen, but it never feels like showmanship. He’s sublime – it might be his greatest ever performance. And this is a great film that, in demonstrating the weakness of the rebellious feelings of the 1970s, might just understand that era better than many other films. An overlooked masterpiece – you should make it your mission to seek it out.

Leon (1994)

Jean Reno teaches Natalie Portman the ways of death in classic romantic thriller Leon

Director: Luc Besson

Cast: Jean Reno (Leon), Natalie Portman (Mathilda), Gary Oldman (Norman Stansfield), Danny Aiello (Tony), Michael Badalucco (Mathilda’s Father), Ellen Green (Mathilda’s Stepmother)

Luc Besson is an interesting film-maker, part visionary, part pulpy stylist. He has undeniable talent and visual flair, but far too often wastes this on trashy and juvenile comic book films, with a teenager’s preoccupations rather than a focus on story and character. One of the few exceptions to this is Leon, a film that marries his vibrancy with a heartfelt story.

Leon (Jean Reno) is a professional hitman working in New York, a dedicated professional with the stunted emotional maturity of a young teenager. One day the family of his next door neighbour is ruthlessly slaughtered by demented, drug-dealing cop Norman Stansfield (Gary Oldman), leaving only precocious 12-year Mathilda (Natalie Portman) alive. Despite his concerns about involving himself in the world, Leon takes Mathilda in – and these two outcasts develop a deep emotional bond, part mentor-pupil, part father-daughter, part celibately romantic.

In many ways, Leon should be an uncomfortable viewing experience. It’s a film that explores the growing emotional and sexual awakening of two characters, one of whom is a 12 year old girl, the other a hitman in his 40s. In fact it’s hard to imagine it even being made today by a Hollywood studio (it was controversial enough at the time). However, it works because the characters are so skilfully established. The 12 year old is precociously mature emotionally and sexually for her age, the man is so emotionally stunted and childlike in his outlook on the world he effectively feels like a 14 year old. The sexual interest is all from the girl, and is constantly batted gently aside (with a confused lack of understanding) by an adult who doesn’t understand the adult world and its feelings. As such, the film manages to side-step the creep factor and turn itself into a sort of touching fable.

It further works because our two leads give such terrific performances. Jean Reno perfectly understands Leon’s childish appreciation of the world, his touching faith in other people (his father-figure Tony is clearly swindling him), his simple delight in things (his wide-eyed appreciation of Singin’ in the Rain is very endearing). He’s naïve and has a child’s lack of understanding of violence and its impact. He’s focused so tightly on his narrow world, he’s clearly never developed any real emotional understanding of the wider world. Reno creates a character who is a seasoned killer who feels like a under developed teenager – emotionally and sexually he’s pretty close to being a 12 year old himself. His interest in Mathilda is rooted more in an elder brother/sister relationship. You get the feeling sex has never even really entered his mental equation. It’s a masterful performance, effortlessly cool but also stirringly real, sweet, vulnerable.

Equally brilliant is Natalie Portman’s enthralling performance as Mathilda. She creates a character who is sexually daring, seemingly far more adult and savvy than Leon in many ways, but is still recognisably a vulnerable child. She’s spiky and defiant, but this hides a deep rooted sensitivity and a desperation for love and affection. Her continued expression of sexual interest in Leon is as much rooted in a desire to feel part of a genuine caring family unit as it is some desire to initiate sexual contact. Her performance is perfectly nuanced and searingly real. Portman also feels both simultaneously adult and childish, so she never feels as out of place.

The film also works because it feels like a slightly unworldly drama. The rules of this world seem slightly fairy-tale like. It happens in a dreamy New York, with shady gangster chiefs, corrupt cops and hitmen moving serenely from location to location, with seemingly no intrusion of “real” people into this equation. The world seems oddly off-kilter, a self-contained fantasy where Leon is some sort of gentle ogre and Mathilda an Alice in Wonderland. While it’s set in a real place, Besson’s film feels like a sort of violent bedtime story. It becomes harder for sex in this context to seem threatening.

Instead, despite the killing and slaughter, this is a sweet and even slightly sentimental love story, about two souls who have an inherent understanding of each other. It’s a deep bond that transcends their ages and social conventions. Besson really understands this, and it’s what motivates and powers the film. They switch roles between child and adult smoothly: So one moment Leon is almost fatherly, teaching the basics of sniper work to Mathilda, the next she teaches him to read. There are undertones of sexuality, but the feeling is that neither of these characters really understands the complexities and realities of sex, because one is too young and the other is too emotionally immature.

Besson’s film making around this is sublime. The film is stylish beyond belief, the camera and editing fluid and dynamic. Action scenes hum with tension and excitement. The violent confrontations (of which there are many) are brilliantly done. Besson draws extraordinary, heartfelt performances from the two leads and creates a wonderfully moving fantasy-tinged world. His invention and pulp style brings a unique feel to what is a heartfelt, rather tender story. It’s a perfect marriage of style and content, where both complement each other. The story feels heartfelt, the execution gives it a swaggering extra dimension.

The tender reality of Reno’s and Portman’s performances – and the marvellous gentleness which Besson films this with – allows other parts of the film to go fully over-the-top. This is not least the case with Gary Oldman’s ramped-up-to-eleven Stansfield, a Grade A nutter. Oldman leaves nothing in the dressing room here, completely letting rip. In a way a performance of such utterly demented excessiveness should be absurd. But with the other performances feeling so genuine, and Besson’s fairy-tale styling, means Oldman feels a perfect part of this world, the dark monstrous heart of a corrupted land. In any other context it wouldn’t work, but here it really does.

Leon is a very tender, exciting and emotionally moving film – a great example of stylish film making married to a genuinely moving storyline between two people who feel like realistic, three dimensional characters. Both the style and the heart of the story complement each other perfectly. It’s a terrific piece of film making, with three performances at the heart each on their own way a stand-out. It must surely be Luc Besson’s finest ever film – and a height he’s very rarely ever reached again.

Election (1999)

Reese Witherspoon runs for office in high-school satire Election

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Matthew Broderick (Jim McAllister), Reese Witherspoon (Tracy Flick), Chris Klein (Paul Metzler), Jessica Campbell (Tammy Metzler), Phil Reeves (Principal Walt Hendricks), Molly Hagen (Diane McAllister), Colleen Camp (Judith Flick), Delaney Driscoll (Linda Novotny), Mark Harelik (Dave Novotny)

High school can be a great setting for films that want to comment on our adult world, because they are such exact microcosms for society. Few films get this idea as effectively as Alexander Payne’s simply superb Election.

In an Illinois high school, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is a civics teacher who loves his job but is increasingly annoyed by high-achieving student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), who he also unconsciously blames for the dismissal of his friend Dave for having an affair with her. Tracy is a ruthless careerist, the sort of girl whose hand is always first up in class, and she wants more than anything to win the election to school president. Feeling it his duty to stop Tracy, McAllister persuades football star Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against her – and slowly unleashes a hurricane of ruthless campaigning and dirty tricks that leads to disaster.

This sharp and brilliant satirical comedy avoids jumping to any easy conclusions: instead it ruthlessly skewers everyone involved. Other films would make McAllister a crushed victim, broken down by events and Tracy’s unstoppable force of will. Instead, Payne turns him into an increasingly self-deluding whiner whose impending mid-life crisis becomes more and more evident. There is a particularly sly decision to cast Broderick as this weak-willed, selfish, self-proclaimed victim. Who cannot think about Ferris Bueller now all grown up into a klutzy loser, ineptly trying to initiate an affair with his wife’s best friend and mentally super-imposing Tracy’s head onto his wife’s body during a routine pregnancy-focused coupling?

In fact, watching the film it’s fascinating to see how much it charts McAllister’s disintegration into bitterness and self-justification. By any measureable standard, everything he does is fairly indefensible, while his annoyance with Tracy is rooted in his barely self-acknowledged sexual fascination with her. By the end of the film, as his cheery voiceover recounts his failures and personal and professional disasters with a self-deceiving optimism, you can’t help but begin to wonder how much this manic cheerfulness infected everything McAllister has told us from the start.

It’s things like this that make the film so much more than a straight political satire. Tracy Flick may be a ruthlessly ambitious young woman, who believes she has a nearly divine right to win – but she’s also the child of an equally ruthless woman (using Tracy to relive her own life), who has been sexually exploited by one of her teachers, whose smiles and enforced cheerfulness and drive hide a volcanic anger and insecurity. She could have been simply a smiling force of political ambition – but instead she feels like a real person diverting her own problems into a domineering careerism.

All of which adds a rich hinterland to the film and helps make it even funnier than it could have been. This might be the best political satire ever made. It’s certainly one of the funniest. There are zinger lines every few minutes. The satire is pin-sharp. Tracy is the qualified political hack that the normal people can’t relate to. Paul the Bush-like jock who can speak the language of the common man but manifestly lacks all qualifications. Tammy represents the anarchic frustration and alienation so many feel for the political process. The entire election is a shrewd, subtle skewering of every campaign in politics you’ve ever seen. Even the jobsworth geeks who run these things get it in the neck – “Larry, we’re not electing the fucking Pope” McAllister snaps (at the end of his tether) as he has the ludicrously elaborate election rules explained to him again.

But the film doesn’t forget the humanity: McAllister is a deluded man, but he feels real. He’s so inept at everything from seduction to deception it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him. (As if to visualise his uselessness, he spends the last third of the film mostly with a massive swollen eye from a bee sting). Tracy has her own problems. Paul, far from being a heartless jock, is the most sensitive and caring person in the film (even if he is as dim as a failing lightbulb). Tammy’s a touching combination of good natured cynicism and obsessive, vengeful stalker.

Of course, it also helps that the acting is outstanding, the comic timing (both in acting and direction) perfect. Reese Witherspoon might never have been better than as the ruthless Tracy, a hurricane of hilarious repeated concepts from political biographies. Chris Klein is very sweet as Paul, a guy it’s impossible not to like. Jessica Campbell is perfect. Broderick holds the entire film together with a superb schleppy moral weakness. Payne’s direction brings all these elements together brilliantly – and has a way with the freeze frame and quick edit that provides a series of striking visual gags.

Election is a classic film – a brilliant satire on politics and elections, but also human nature itself. The characters have depth and reality that makes the jokes hit home with force. The use of voiceover narration from all the main players helps bring us even closer to them, and helps expose their inner personalities even more. I think this might be the best film Payne has made – Sideways and The Descendantsreceive the greater plaudits and attention, but this is his sharpest, wittiest film, and the one that is perhaps the most rewarding of repeat viewing. It’s simply a brilliant, small scale classic.

Walkabout (1971)

The blistering heat of the Australian wilderness is the setting for Roeg’s profound and troubling film

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Cast: Jenny Agutter (White girl), Luc Roeg (Brother), David Gulpilil (Aboriginal boy), John Mellion (Father)

Some films are hard to read. Others delve gently into ideas so complex and obscure that they need patient attention to follow. And other films are so elliptical and enigmatic they almost defy understanding. Walkabout is such a film. What is it about? You could almost say “everything and nothing”.

The surface story is strikingly simple. A 17-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter) and her much younger brother (Luc Roeg, the director’s son) are stranded in the Australian outback after their disturbed father first attempts to kill them (perhaps?) and then sets their car on fire and shoots himself. Quickly lost, with no idea how to get back to civilisation, they meet a young Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on Walkabout. He saves them and agrees to guide them back to civilisation (perhaps?). But how far can cultural understanding go?

The story Roeg is telling underneath this bare-bones plot, though, is intriguing and troubling. Roeg uses the setting to explore the complex interrelationship between Western civilisation and the native civilisations it has displaced in many parts of the world. It’s also about ageing, sexual awakenings and the barriers (some of which we place ourselves) that prevent communication. This is all set in Roeg’s stunningly photographed, dreamlike representation of the Australian outback which is part surreal combination of cross-cuts and editing, part dark nature documentary.

It’s a haunting film where it’s never clear exactly what is happening, or what each of the characters is aiming to do ( “I don’t know” is a common refrain heard in the film). From the start, there is clearly something wrong with the Father in some way (with dark suggestions that he has too great an interest in his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality), but why does he turn partly homicidal (he puts little effort into pursuing his children) and then suicidal? The film gives no real clue.

This confusion about motives continues through the film. Does the Aboriginal boy really understand (or intend) the need to deliver the siblings back to civilisation? At one point he walks up a hill, is talked at by a white woman from a nearby settlement, then returns giving no indication he has discovered what they are searching for. Later he does the same after finding a road. Does he want to help? Or is he unwilling to let go of the spiritual closeness he can feel between the three of them?

Similarly, Agutter’s character undergoes a spiritual experience so profound, and yet so unsettling to her carefully conventional upbringing, she seems unable to process it. In the company of the Aboriginal boy we see her begin to relax and lose some of her carefully guarded inhibitions (this culminates in a famous naked swimming scene, which got the film in plenty of trouble in 2003 when the Age of Consent was raised to 18). But at the same time, she is never really able to communicate with the Aboriginal boy.

Her attempts to do so are almost laughably incompetent. While her younger brother develops a natural rapport using sign language, she is hopelessly wedded to verbal communication (she doesn’t even think to mime drinking when asking for water). In the outback, she clings far longer than the boy does to the accoutrements of civilisation in clothing and their radio. While she does relax, only at rare moments do we feel her humbled by the land around her. Their first moments together can be seen in the video.

Only for the briefest of brief moments, in an abandoned hut, do they meet briefly as equals – a silent moment of eyes meeting and a brief understanding of shared affection. It is shattered by her complete rejection shortly afterwards of the Aboriginal boy’s courtship dance – scared and confused (as much by her own obvious interest earlier), she pointedly ignores the dance, leaving the boy outside all night. The next day she and her brother are dressed in their school uniforms, as if nothing has happened.

Roeg’s final nihilistic observations – we may at points come closer together as a species, but we will only rarely ever be able to overcome the barriers we have created between ourselves. We may develop an immediate bond with people in extreme circumstances, but the closer we get to “normality” the quicker we reject those bonds and revert back to our ingrained behaviours.

This is all fascinating and deeply engrossing stuff – and it’s the sort of material you can reflect on over and over again. Roeg mixes this in with plenty of dark comparisons between our soulless modern world and the “savage” world of the Aboriginals – a comparison never flattering to the modern world. Roeg uses intercutting to point these up, particularly between the hunting of the Aboriginal boy, his respectful killing of a kangaroo, and our own mechanical slaughter and processing of meat. Now to be honest these sort of cutbacks are thuddingly dated and heavy-handed – the sort of holier-than-thou opinion making that quickly gets on the nerves.

A few of these sequences do work well. Near the end, the Aboriginal boy hunts when he is nearly crushed by a truck carrying two modern hunters. The truck skids to a halt and the hunters gun down several animals (the rather tiresome editing uses a series of still shots, crash zooms and distorted sounds) while the Aborigine looks on with confusion and disdain. In another sequence, the white woman the Aborigine met heads back to a settlement, where white men seem to be exploiting Aboriginal labour. She sits sadly on the bed staring into the distance. Moments like this, despite the often dated editorial tricks, do carry a real sense of the divide between two cultures.

Other sections of the film make similar points about the wildness of both the outback and the city world, but with increasingly dated and tired visual tricks – do we really need an umpteenth shot of maggots eating a corpse? Or more quiet pans along cold 1970s commercial surfaces? This is a shame, as the photography is beautiful. Roeg has an eye for a brilliant image – his shots of the Australian outback are some of the best use of sun and desert on film since Lawrence of Arabia. The film’s shots of the desert are simply stunning, with Roeg’s hypnotic series of images guaranteed to not only haunt your mind, but also to show an angle on the world you won’t have seen before.

Walkabout may be slightly dated in some of its production and editing techniques, but it’s a deeply thoughtful, unsettling work that asks profound and difficult questions about civilisation, life and death – the sort of film that rewards revisiting and reinterpretation. While many parts of it clunk in places, or have a distinct 1970s flashiness in their filmmaking, when it moves away from these rather clumsy ideas to deal with concepts that are more spiritual and intriguing, it’s a fascinating film.

The Cider House Rules (1999)

Michael Caine and Tobey Maguire deal with moral dilemmas in this handsome adaptation of John Irving’s Dickensian novel

Director: Lasse Hallström

Cast: Tobey Maguire (Homer Wells), Michael Caine (Dr. Wilbur Larch), Charlize Theron (Candy Kendall), Paul Rudd (Lt. Wally Worthington), Delroy Lindo (Arthur Rose), Erykah Badu (Rose Rose), Heavy D (Peaches), K. Todd Freeman (Muddy), Kieran Culkin (Buster), Jane Alexander (Nurse Edna), Kathy Baker (Nurse Angela), Kate Nelligan (Olive Worthington), J.K. Simmons (Ray Kendall)

The Cider House Rules is the sort of well-constructed literary adaptation that Hollywood excels at producing: a well-crafted script (Irving adapted his own novel extremely well), juggling serious affairs without hectoring the audience, handsomely mounted, with a Dickensian style and a cast of heavyweight actors delivering performances that speak of their investment in the film.

In a Maine orphanage in the 1940s, Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire) is raised by Dr Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine) as a surrogate son. Larch is a domineering autocrat with a passionate love for his charges, whose humanitarian instincts lead him to perform illegal abortions. Troubled by this – and feeling pressured into succeeding Larch’s as director – Homer leaves with a young woman (Charlize Theron) and her fiancée (Paul Rudd) after she visits for an abortion. Working as an apple picker in their orchard, under Mr Rose (Delroy Lindo), Homer learns important lessons above love and duty.

There are many similar films that feel like dull awards-bait, and the fact that this one avoids that is a major point in its favour. It’s very easy with material like this – cute orphans and tear-jerking speeches – to feel Cider House is a manipulative film (and I guess in a way it is) but it’s put together with such commitment and sincerity I found it genuinely moving. Hallström’s warm and beautifully paced direction creates a marvellous coming-of-age tale with characters whose flaws can be as deep as their warmth is vibrant.

The film also manages to move beyond its ‘coming-of-age’ roots with intelligent (but not too heavy-handed) mulling on the nature of “rules” – both those imposed on us and those we impose on others. Dr Larch (a magnetic performance by Oscar-winner Michael Caine) is a maverick, disregarding the abortion laws as he believes it is better he does abortions rather than someone untrained; he is also perfectly willing to impose his own rules on Homer as testaments to be followed without question. Similarly the “Cider House Rules” written on the wall of the apple workers’ lodgings are rejected outright by the working gang for their own unspoken code of conduct, no more effective than the system it replaces. All the characters are forced to draft their own rules (or principles) they can live with, matching their circumstances and actions.

The film also looks gently at the conflict between our desires and our duties, with Homer and Candy both yearning for freedom from their natural inclinations to have something to serve. This is presented as a struggle without a natural “right or wrong”, even if the apple orchard is a loose Garden of Eden, into which evil is admitted with tragic (and life-changing) consequences. A small criticism would be that the charismatic warmth of Caine’s performance and the family atmosphere of the orphanage are so endearing that it does unbalance the dilemma Homer eventually faces – instead of the audience feeling as torn as Homer about whether he should stay or return, most audience members I think would want him to return to the orphanage forthwith!

Tobey Maguire is so perfectly cast as the naïve in some ways, wordly wise in others, old-boy-young-man that he effectively reprised Homer Wells as Peter Parker a few years later. His sweet face –uncomplicated innocence and charm are in every twitch of his smile – carries the film, and his easy-going desire for a simple life makes perfect sense of the character’s rebellion against Larch’s benevolent dictation. Equally good for me though is Theron as Candy. She is a wonderfully expressive performer: midway through the film she is caught off-guard by an overlong hug from Homer, and a series of conflicted emotions from shock, to guilt, to attraction play across her face.

There is hardly a weak performance in the film, with Hallström drawing excellent work from the young orphans. Amongst the sprawling, Dickensian feeling cast, Caine is marvellous as the part dictator, part humanitarian Larch making a larger-than-life character feel real and grounded. Lindo captures the pride mixed with arrogance of Mr Rose. There are plenty of other excellent performances, not least from Baker and Alexander as two contrasting nurses in the orphanage.

I almost feel slightly guilty for the impact Cider House Rules had on me. In many ways it’s exactly the sort of safe, middle-of-the-road “serious” drama that seems designed to attract the notice of Oscar voters. But it’s told with a great deal of skill and dedication, and delivers so many emotional moments with warmth and feeling, I found myself genuinely moved by it. In fact I felt a bit teary at least twice. This is closely linked to some excellent performances – and a wonderful swelling musical score by Rachel Portman – but despite being the sort of middle brow Hollywood film it’s fashionable (and easy) to attack, I thought this was engaging, moving and thought provoking from start to finish.

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan struggle with their obvious discomfort in this ghastly, hellish, joyless film

Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson

Cast: Dakota Johnson (Anastasia Steele), Jamie Dornan (Christian Grey), Eloise Mumford (Kate Kavanagh), Jennifer Ehle (Carla Wilks), Marcia Gay Harden (Dr. Grace Trevelyan-Grey)

For some reason, about ten years ago everyone got wildly turned on by reading a series of books ripped off from Twilight, which followed the adventures of a timid student and her induction into the world of sexual spanking by a controlling billionaire. It was like tepid porn you could read in the open and talk about in the office. The entire genre of “mom porn” (now to be spotted in every supermarket book section) was born.

Anyway, it came at last (so to speak): the film of the book. With it came EL James’ atrocious dialogue (full disclosure here: I’ve not read the book, but I looked up some quotes and read the synopsis on Wikipedia, so I reckon that’s probably better than reading it), paper thin characters and event-less action. Along, of course, with the sex. Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a young student who encounters Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), a mysterious billionaire. He likes spanking. She’s never done anything down there (“You’re a virgin”, “yes”, “but you’ve done other stuff?” “no” “oh my god” – goes one classic exchange between the two). Bless, she doesn’t even know what a butt-plug is. I guess she will find out.

I’ll be blunt. This is possibly one of the worst, most offensive, horrible films I’ve ever seen. I’m actually rather angry I watched it. Nearly everything about it stinks: the acting and film-making craft are as vile, tasteless and revolting as the ideas behind it. First and foremost, Jamie Dornan honestly looks like he vomited with shame after completing every scene. Dakota Johnson does a reasonable job with a character who is as well-developed as the stains on Grey’s bedding, but since she is merely required to look alternately sad, timid or (god help us) “aroused” (expressions which bear a distinct resemblance to each other, mostly involving biting her lip and opening her eyes really wide beneath her “frumpy geek girl” fringe), she hardly needed to be much more than competent to bring this sad excuse for a protagonist to life. Ehle and Harden hopefully picked up big paycheques for selling their talents to this dreck.

As a relationship film, this is awful. Imagine Pretty Woman, but if Richard Gere could only get it up by smacking Julia Roberts in the mouth. It’s that charming. Factor in if their sex scenes had been shot with all the creativity of high-end porn, with the actors unconvincingly panting and sighing throughout and you get an idea of how sexy this film is.

The original author of the novels, EL James, had unprecedented creative control, and the tension between her demands for the film and the film-makers’ ideas is evident throughout. The film is a real hotch-potch: James had rejected one script by Patrick Marber (of Closer fame) for deviating too strongly from the book. That script presumably attracted Taylor-Johnson’s involvement as director – she wanted, it seemed, to make a serious relationship drama. EL James wanted an illustrated edition of her book. While I respect James’ insistence to get what she wrote on screen, I would also say she’s not a film-maker, and has no idea about what works on screen. What ends up here is a compromised mess – about half a Taylor-Johnson/Marber style “serious exploration of an unsuitable relationship” film, half James’ soft-porn spankathon shit.

The sex is one of the main problems with this film – there is nothing remotely enjoyable, titillating or even amusing about the joyless couplings in this film. Jamie Dornan looks like he’d rather be literally anywhere else during the sequences, a constant expression of embarrassment behind his eyes. The poor guy looks like he’s desperate to take Anastasia home to meet his mother. Both the sex and the spanking in this film are pretty tame, but he sets about both with a grim eyed determination, as if he was already thinking of getting back to his trailer and phoning his real life wife and kids. In fact, the film would make a perfect cold bath – I simply can’t imagine ever wanting to have sex again watching this film, let alone indulge in any of the “erotic” games it features, which it manages to make look as enticing as root canal.

The big thing missing from this film is any fun whatsoever. A large slice of the blame for this must go to Taylor-Johnson. I suspect she wanted to make a film that was a serious examination of relationships, and the unexpected dangers desire can lead us into. However, she was pushing against the source material (and the all-powerful author), and her efforts were always going to be doomed. This is taken from a book that is, to put it bluntly, a piece of sub-Cinderellesque shit with extra spanking. What it really needed was not an artistic approach, but more of the camp “I know this is rubbish, just enjoy it” direction – in other words, it needed an efficient (even knowing) hack director, not an artist at the helm.

By trying to look at the dynamics of power relationships in a serious way at least part of the time, Taylor-Johnson (assisted by Dornan’s fantastically awkward performance) manages to highlight what a humourless, manipulative, controlling wanker Christian Grey is. By any objective measures, he is clearly a controlling and abusive boyfriend. Filmed entirely seriously, with moody music in the background half the time and none of book-Anastasia’s laughably cheesy descriptions of the latest antics of her “inner goddess” (usually to be found dancing the hula or turning cartwheels), this film throws into sharp relief what is actually happening in this story: an experienced, controlling man finds a naïve, inexperienced younger woman and coerces her into servicing his desires. The “negotiation” talk is one of the most uncomfortable examples of this: “we can negotiate” says the man who holds all the cards, to the girl who doesn’t even know what she can or should ask for.

Throw in the fact that he is multi-billionaire who gets his rocks off by fucking his girlfriends the same way he (presumably) fucks his business rivals, only makes him seem even more of an unredeemable asshole. His ostentatious gifts of new cars, his controlling forbidding of Anastasia to drink on her nights out with friends, his insistence on coming to remove her from one of these nights out when she’s only met him twice and has not asked for his help or his presence, his demand for her to sign a contract, his following her to her parents’, his not taking no for an answer… Need I go on? The more the film focuses on these darker sides of the relationship, the more you look at Grey less as a messed up Prince Charming, and more like an abusive predator.

Grey is also clearly purchasing his new part-time live-in mistress like a piece of meat, and he treats her like a piece of property throughout. Tragically (and I’m not sure the film realises this) Anastasia is so sweet and vulnerable she seems to think that she just has to accept all this spanking and rope game malarkey as just part and parcel of having a boyfriend (“Do we still get to go to the theatre” she rather sadly asks when enquiring into the new rules of their relationship). I don’t get overwhelmed with sympathy with her though: every hesitancy is overcome by a new extravagant display of Grey’s wealth. The film does build towards her walking away – but she hardly does this with any decisiveness. Despite the film’s best efforts, she in no way comes across as an equal partner or a strong character.

So the film’s serious tone is a major problem in that sense. It’s also a major problem as Taylor-Johnson just ends up turning this into a totally dull, lifeless film. Almost nothing happens in this film. Trivial events and dull conversations are interrupted occasionally by the actors rutting with all the passion of two people eating a microwave meal. The film’s sex scenes are, incidentally, totally unbalanced: throughout his session in the red room, we see endless shots of Johnson’s assets but Dornan politely keeps his jeans on almost throughout. The camera’s perfunctory, joyless efforts to capture Johnson’s nipples in every scene it can (never miss a chance to edge them in at the corner of a shot!) just builds this feeling of no-one enjoying their work, but shovelling onto the screen what the readers might want so they can all go home.

The only way this fucking piece of garbage could ever have really worked on the screen is if someone had basically accepted it for what it was: a steaming pile of manure written to titillate those scared of searching the Internet for real porn. If it had been treated like the ghastly, campy piece of crap it was, then the film itself could have been the ultimate “bad” film. But Taylor-Johnson’s attempt to create a serious relationship drama crashes up against EL James’ dire, pig-eared prose and depthless characters, and instead creates a film both tedious in the extreme and offensive.

Honestly, not even as a camp watch will this work – it is dull, horrible and awful. It thinks it’s a dark Cinderella tale. It’s just a dark story about a horrible man. Avoid, avoid, avoid.