Category: Crime drama

Child 44 (2014)

Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman investigate murder in Stalinist Russia: It should be more interesting than it is

Director: Daniel Espinosa

Cast: Tom Hardy (Leo Demidov), Noomi Rapace (Raisa Demidova), Joel Kinnaman (Vasili Nikitin), Gary Oldman (General Nesterov), Vincent Cassel (Major Kuzmin), Jason Clarke (Anatoly Brodsky), Paddy Considine (Vladimir Malevich), Fares Fares (Alexei Andreyev), Charles Dance (Major Grachev), Tara Fitzgerald (Inessa Nesterova)

Adaptations of bestselling books are tricky things. Your source material already has a pre-existing fan base but you also need to bring new faces into the multiplex. Is that easy to do? Not always – and many films fail to strike a balance between telling the story for newcomers and satisfying the old fans. This is one of those failures.

Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) is a war hero and NKVD officer in 1950s Stalinist Russia. Initially complacent and sure that he is a good man doing his best in the system, his life is shattered after his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) – a woman who secretly hates her husband – is maliciously reported as a traitor, and Leo refuses denounce her. Banished to the outbacks of Russia, Leo feels compelled to find some redemption by investigating a child murderer. But Stalin has ruled murder is a capitalist crime “impossible” in the paradise of Communist Russia, making it a crime the all-powerful state has decreed cannot exist.

It’s hard to put your finger exactly on why this film never comes to life. It ticks nearly all the boxes of the original book’s plot (it in fact changes the one part of the book I found a “shark jump”, the identify of the killer itself). It’s well shot. There are some very good actors in it. It’s a good story. But it just doesn’t work – you never really invest in it. Perhaps the problem is the film has to jettison the interior monologues of the characters, so we lose much of the context of the action.

The book’s strength was its exploration of the nature of investigating crime in Stalin’s Russia: where crimes only exist if the state agrees they can, where investigation is largely unnecessary as the perpetrator is always proclaimed at the start, where those investigating the crimes are constantly in fear of being denounced for failures (“if the man I follow escapes, I will be accused of working with him”). The film fails to get this Stalinist tension across, so is left with just the bare workings of the plot without the novel’s context, making it seem like a “murder of the week” TV movie.

The attempt to get all the plot ticked means many actors get wasted in heavily reduced parts. A particular victim is Gary Oldman, who can’t be on screen for more than 15 minutes, and switches from obstructive boss to confidante as the plot requires. For the leads, Hardy and Rapace give quality performances (Rapace in particular is very good), and I did like the way the film really explored how Raisa’s feelings for Leo change from disgust and fear towards true affection. But you never really feel or care for them as you should.

However, they, along with the rest of the cast, suffer from the decision to give all the actors thick Roosian acksents. Why was this decided? Not only does this make some lines hard to hear (particularly Hardy’s) and stifles variance in delivery, but there is no need for it. Every character is Russian. They are all talking Russian. It’s all set in Russia. Why not have them use non-strongly accented versions of their own voices? Do we really need thick Slavic vowels to remind us we are in Russia?

Child 44 is a disappointing film, and perhaps the worst thing about it is, if you watch it before reading the book, you’ll probably wonder what all the fuss was about. By largely failing to get across the full complexity, danger and madness of the Stalinist system, it reduces the book’s plot into something flimsy and everyday. The whole adaptation has almost completely missed the point of what made the book so different and compelling in the first place. By doing so it turns the story into something that feels much more derivative than it actually was.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)

Tom Cruise and Cobie Smulders on the run – not as exciting as it should be

Director: Edward Zwick

Cast: Tom Cruise (Jack Reacher), Cobie Smulders (Major Susan Turner), Aldis Hodge (Captain Anthony Espin), Danika Yarosh (Samantha Dutton), Patrick Heusinger (The Hunter), Holt McCallany (Colonel Sam Morgan), Robert Knepper (General James Harkness)

Titling a sequel to any film Never Go Back is a real hostage to fortune. It’s not a great surprise that a quick internet search for reviews of this film throws up a plethora of puns around the film’s subtitle. It’s pretty obvious: but considering the general meh nature of this film, it’s also kinda fair.

Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) travels back to Washington DC to visit Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), a Military Police officer who has helped him with a number of problems in the past. He arrives, however, to find her under arrest for espionage – and after he starts asking questions, he quickly joins her in lock-up, under arrest for murder. Busting out of prison, they go on the run together to try and find out who has framed them.

Now I loved the first Jack Reacher film: I’ve seen it three times now and it has a brilliant combination of well-cut action sequences, witty lines, an involving plot and some interesting eccentric fringe characters (not least Werner Herzog’s Russian mobster mastermind), which fleshed the movie out into an entertainingly different man-gotta-do movie. This sequel shakes up the formula – but in doing so makes itself much more of an identikit movie, full of tropes we’ve seen before.

For starters, the main appeal of the first Reacher film was the character himself: a loner who plays by his own rules, operating like some sort of master-less samurai, was interestingly different; it was hard to predict how he might react in different situations. Here, teaming him up with Turner (good as Smulders is in the role) and a character who may-or-may-not-be his daughter turns Reacher into just another leg of a mismatched trio, an odd bunch on the run. Cruise tackles well Reacher’s conflicted reactions to taking on a father-child bond that has never crossed his mind before, but adding this parental element to the mix makes the movie start to feel like a high-class Taken reprise.

Secondly, Zwick’s direction doesn’t have the zing that the rather dry and uninvolving plot needs to bring it to life. There is very little of interest in the script, and no memorable lines at all. The best scene in the film is Reacher’s introduction – practically the only scene that captures the character’s slightly cocky defiance of authority, his seemingly omniscient awareness of how events will unfold and his simmering potential for violence coupled with a strong moral code. The storyline that built up to that opening scene sounds really interesting: I wish the film had been about that. No scene after that point really comes to life again. Zwick’s action directing is perfunctory and he can’t add the visual wit that Christopher McQuarrie introduced to such great effect in the first film.

Thirdly the story is just plain not that interesting. The conspiracy is hard to fathom (or care about) and the villains are poorly defined ciphers. In fact, outside of Smulders and Cruise, not a single actor makes an impression in this film: each supporting character is little more than a plot device, sketched with broad strokes. The family dynamic between Reacher-Turner-Dutton feels rather old-hat and robs us of Reacher’s most unique asset as a character – all part of turning the film into another run-of-the-mill thriller. For a fourth or fifth film in the series, doing something very different with the character might have worked: here we still want to explore the loner.

That’s really harsh: it’s not a bad film, just a disappointingly average one. There are some decent scenes and some grins. Cruise and Smulders give good performances. I’m glad they made a Reacher sequel. I just wish it had been a better one. I’m sorry, I can’t resist – this is one film that you will probably Never Go Back to.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Philip Marlowe: You ain’t seen the great detective this dishevelled before

Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Elliott Gould (Philip Marlowe), Nina van Pallandt (Eileen Wade), Sterling Hayden (Roger Wade), Mark Rydell (Marty Augustine), Henry Gibson (Dr. Verringer), David Arkin (Harry), Jim Bouton (Terry Lennox), Ken Sansom (Colony Guard)

Philip Marlowe: The Great Gumshoe as you’ve never seen him before. Altman has taken Chandler’s original novel and re-set it into the 1970s. Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is still a private eye but a sort of eccentric Don Quixote, an ambling, mumbling oddity too noble to take on “divorce work”. After he gives his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) a lift to Mexico, he is left facing police wrath after Terry’s wife is found dead. He is cleared only when Terry is found dead in Mexico, having signed a confession. But Marlowe can’t believe his friend capable of murder – and investigates further.

Altman’s Chandler adaptation was widely criticised at the time – largely because it was completely mis-sold as a mystery detective yarn, which it certainly is not. There are no clues, the mystery is pretty vague at best and the detective hero not only does virtually no detective whatsoever, but is such a naïve soul with such a trusting 1950s style code of honour that he seems swept along by events like a broken reed in a stream. Far from the Marlowe of Bogart or Mitchum, Gould’s Marlowe was an almost wilfully uncool, awkward social misfit, whose lack of engagement with the world stemmed far more from his own lack of understanding than any cynicism.

On top of that, the film is an unusual blend of old and new. Marlowe is a scruffy man out of time, constantly smoking (no one else in the film does) and shuffling from encounter to encounter. Vital conversations happen outside of our (and Marlowe’s) hearing. The camera roams as wilfully as its lead character, rarely standing still to let us absorb the action, but constantly offering us a series of subjective angles. Like much of Altman’s work, the naturalistic sound recording lets dialogue overlap and clash. The entire soundtrack is a riff on the themes in the title song, the music popping up throughout like pleasant musak. Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography is both an inversion of film noir with its California brightness and (through a technique of deliberate overexposure called ‘flashing’) a sepia infected look at the 1970s that draws a link back to the source material’s 1940s origins.

But the tone of the movie is the most unusual thing: a strangely addictive hipsterish take on Marlowe, in which the majority of other characters are as shallow and self-obsessed as you would expect of the 1970s: aside from Marlowe, the only character who seems to apologise or keep to his word at any point is the film’s least sympathetic and most violent character. The eventual killer reacts to being confronted with his crime with a blasé self-entitlement. Across the apartment from Marlowe’s bizarre old-school Hollywood apartment block, a commune of hippie ladies exercise topless outside at all hours; everywhere you turn there are clashes between the old and the new.

The film’s opening immediately establishes what the film is going to be like, and is also one of the best sequences in the film: a quiet, gently paced quest Marlowe undertakes to find cat-food in the middle of the night and his inability to persuade said cat to eat the “wrong” brand of food that he brings back home. This secluded existence is only broken by the arrival of Terry Lennox, who immediately beats Marlowe at a bet on the number of 7s in the serial number on a $10 bill (which he wins despite Marlowe having the higher number of 7s, as he successfully lures Marlowe into an incorrect challenge). It’s a wonderful summation of the film’s plot, as well as a series of clear insights into Marlowe’s personality: a man out of time easily manipulated by those around him, who can’t fool a cat or win a bet with the best hand.

Gould’s performance is absolutely central to the mood and tone of the film. His Marlowe is a counterpoint to the hard-bitten detectives of film noir. Instead, he is a scruffy mumbler, whose continual, conversational patter throughout the film feels more like a commentary he is running for his own amusement than any attempt to communicate with the world around him. Gould’s charm and otherworldly quality basically is the film: he’s hardly off screen and he “sets the tone”: the film’s ambling, slightly confused glances at the modern world, where dialogue and motives are both equally unclear, exactly match the beats of Gould’s interpretation of the character. It’s a perfect performance for the film, a sly gag that also has heart and character.

The film’s off beat tone and lackadaisical attitude are punctured at several moments by astonishingly sudden upturns in tempo, and scenes that sizzle with the threat of (or actual) violence. These moments are linked to Mark Rydell’s brilliant performance as fast-talking Marty Augustine, a man whose actions are totally unpredictable. He is responsible for the film’s only real act of violence – but it’s a striking moment of brutality that no-one sees coming (least of all the other characters, on whose shocked faces and stunned silence the camera lingers).

Rydell’s exceptional performance is the stand out supporting one here, but there is also some very good work from Nina van Pallandt as a woman who is part vulnerable wife, part femme fatale, and whose emotional state and motivations constantly seem to shift and change (at a pace the audience barely keeps up with, let alone poor Marlowe). Sterling Hayden’s Hemingway-esque author is one of those primal force-of-nature performances that can grate, but it works in a film where so many of the other characters are restrained.

The film is an absorbing character study, and at the same time a sly commentary on both the 1970s, the source material and film itself: Gould’s Marlowe at points seems to be pushing on the wall of self-awareness (most notably in a hospital scene late in the film, a masterpiece of misdirection): later, Third Man style, he walks past another character without offering a beat of recognition, before (as the credits roll) he inexplicably starts dancing down a boulevard, the camera watching him in long shot. Hooray for Hollywood (the only other music in the film) bookends the film.

It’s a fascinating and highly enjoyable film with a series of striking scenes and character moments that capture the attention and imagination. It’s a film that needs, however, a certain expectation going into it. Don’t expect a detective story, don’t expect detection even, but instead a unique merging of comedy, social commentary, satire and drama powered by an almost wilfully off-hand lead performance. It’s the sort of unique concoction only Altman could have made. There isn’t really anything else like it.

Match Point (2005)

Love and lust collide in Woody Allen’s bizarrely classless Britain

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Chris Wilton), Scarlett Johansson (Nola Rice), Emily Mortimer (Chloe Hewett Wilton), Matthew Goode (Tom Hewett), Brian Cox (Alec Hewett), Penelope Wilton (Eleanor Hewett), Ewen Bremner (Inspector Dowd), James Nesbitt (Detective Mike Banner), Rupert Penry-Jones (Henry), Margaret Tyzack (Mrs Eastby), Alexander Armstrong (Mr Townsend)

Match Point was originally intended to be filmed in New York, but Woody Allen could only raise the cash in Britain – so the location was shifted to London. The effect is a little bit like Julian Fellowes switching Downton Abbey to become a kitchen-sink drama in Liverpool: research has been done, the facts are all ticked off, but the understanding of the people and their situation just isn’t there. Maybe Allen should have hired Fellowes as a consultant. At least Fellowes could have told him an upper-class Covent Garden opera buff probably isn’t going to be in raptures about Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s The Woman in White.

Chris Winter (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a tennis pro, now making a living as a coach in an upmarket London club. He coaches Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode), and they discover a shared love of opera. Soon Chris is a regular visitor to the Hewitt family, a suitor and later husband to Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and an employee at his father’s big city firm. He has everything he wants – except for Nola Rice (Scarlett Johnasson), Tom’s American actress fiancée…

The film was critically acclaimed in America but received a much more muted response here in Blighty. I can see why. Allen’s main problem is that he is tone deaf to the class hierarchy in this country. As such, he creates a Britain here that is close to something we would recognise, but subtly off. Chris is clearly from a lower social class than the family he marries into, he’s employed as a coach in a tennis club and he’s clearly less well travelled than the others. The family he marries into has a massive country house with servants, goes shooting at the weekend, runs a huge London business – it’s a modern day Downton Abbey.

If the same story was created by a British writer and director, Chris would clearly be presented as an ambitious, even ruthless, social climber looking to move up the ladder by doing everything he can to marry into a rich family and inveigling himself into their lives. Allen, however, doesn’t present the relationship like this – in fact, watching the film, I think it’s clear that he doesn’t really realise that Chris and his in-laws are in a totally different social class. He treats them all as if they are basically social equals, with money the only difference between them. For the British this just doesn’t fit in at all with our experience of the class system in this country – we know the Hewetts and Chris would always be aware of the social background difference between them, and that someone would comment upon it during the course of the film. No-one ever does. Class remains unmentioned. For a British person this just isn’t right.

So the “tragedy” if you like (or character flaw) of Chris should be that he is drawn sexually towards Nola Rice, despite it flying against his ambitions for moving upwards in his class. Instead, Allen’s script treats it solely as an affair of passion: the fact that the two “outsiders” in the social class (the working-class Irish boy and the American actress) are drawn to each other isn’t commented upon at all. The Hewetts are more suspicious of Rice because she’s an American and an actress, but the fact she (like Chris) doesn’t have a penny isn’t an issue. There is a lot of fertile ground here that any British director or writer would just know – but Allen fundamentally just doesn’t get it: he thinks the Hewetts are middle class not the loaded 1%+.

Of course, some of the problems are connected to Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the lead part. Watching him in this film, I can’t help but feel this is a solid 7/10 performance by an actor who normally bats a 5-6: he’s doing some of his best work on film, but his inadequacies as an actor can’t be overcome. It’s the eyes and voice for me: there just never seems much going on behind the eyes, and his unmodulated voice doesn’t bring any shading to his line deliveries. Chris should have the air of a slightly ruthless, ambitious but charming social climber – think Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets – but this is out of his range. Instead Chris is just a sort of blank that you can impose their own ideas on: it sort of works for the film, but it misses dozens of possibilities. He does well with the second half of the film and his guilt about the murder is well played, but it’s simply less subtle acting than is called for in the first half. He’s an average actor giving a performance above himself here.

Scarlett Johansson fares much better as a character who changes and develops dramatically over the course of the film, from mysterious, confident, sexy girlfriend to needy, frustrated, betrayed mistress. It’s a dramatic development throughout the film that is so skilfully done, it never feels jarring. Much of the cast is also strong: Matthew Goode is a real stand-out as Chris’ subtly spoilt brother-in-law, as is Emily Mortimer as a happy wife who never wants to think about the lie her life is. Rupert Penry-Jones and Margaret Tyzack have great cameos among the all star British cast.

The film takes place in a picture-postcard London (all the great sights are ticked off), and Allen directs with his traditional unfussy camera work. There is a certain pleasure to seeing big name British comic actors in tiny roles throughout (Paul Kaye, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Alexander Armstrong among others pop up in small roles).

Allen doesn’t understand Britain like he does Manhattan, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a decent film. The story’s theme of luck or chance vs fate doesn’t quite coalesce for me, but the feeling of events closing in on Chris late in the film does work very well, and I certainly felt the tension of whether Chris would get away with his eventual crime (even if I never really quite cared for Chris himself). Allen rates this as his favourite of his own films – which I guess goes to show you are never the best judge of your own work.

Rififi (1955)

Master thieves at work!

Director: Jules Dassin

Cast: Jean Servais (Tony “le Stéphanois”), Carl Möhner (Jo “le Suédois”), Robert Manuel (Mario Ferrati), Jules Dassin (César “le Milanais”), Magali Noël (Viviane), Claude Sylvain (Ida), Marcel Lupovici (Pierre Grutter), Robert Hossein (Rémy Grutter), Pierre Grasset (Louis Grutter), Marie Sabouret (Mado), Janine Darcey (Louise)

After you’ve spent some time watching some pretty duff films, finally sitting down and watching a masterpiece of any genre is a complete relief. That’s pretty much what this film is. Which is particularly interesting when you learn the film is based on a book that Dassin (it’s director) described as one of the worst books that he had ever read. He took the job only because (with his blacklisting in Hollywood) he was worried he would never work again, and only on condition that he could completely restructure the original script.

Newly released from prison, Tony (Jean Servais) is approached to take part in a smash-and-grab raid on a jewellery store by his old criminal contacts. He rejects the idea, but after discovering his former lover has left him for a gangster rival in his absence he changes his mind, on condition that the smash-and-grab plan is replaced by a complex operation that will clear out the shop’s safe containing over 250 million Francs’ worth of jewels. But in the criminal underworld, they discover there are always bigger fish circling to take their cut by any means they can.

I watched this film three days ago, and its effect was so lasting I feel almost as if I have watched it several times in my mind’s eye since then. Jules Dassin, an under-rated director, has a mastery of visual language and tense narrative that burns nearly every single scene into your retina. Rififi is a technically assured, dazzling piece of cinema that gives heft and weight to a simple story, and also has something interesting to say about human nature and the codes that dictate the lives of thieves.

Any discussion of the film probably needs to start with its highlight: a 28 minute sequence detailing the robbery itself, told in near silence and shot with forensic detail. In fact, so intelligently thought-through was this scene that in many countries it earned the film a ban, as it was feared it was too much of a “how-to” guide for thieves. The scene is a unique creation of Dassin’s – the comparative scene in the book is no more than 2-3 pages. Here it’s a quarter of the movie.

The scene is blisteringly tense, and the decision to keep the action silent means every single noise (a piano key, the whirr of a drill, the bang of a hammer) carries huge tension. There is, as many reviewers have noted, no particular reason for the thieves to keep to strict silence – but it’s dynamite cinema. Dassin combines this tension with a delighted observance of the ingenuity of these criminals. Everyday items are brilliantly repurposed to perform specific tasks (I particularly enjoyed the use of an umbrella as a vital tool). Dassin celebrates the effectiveness and skill of these burglars, and their technique and skill is infectiously entertaining.

Dassin probably invented the genre of the heist movie here – and he encourages us to feel a delight in the accomplishment and ambition of the heist. But he also reminds us that these are criminals: weapons are banned as they will guarantee a long prison stretch; the couple whose house they invade are ruthlessly chloroformed and tied up; a policeman is bludgeoned as part of the get-away. In the third act of the film we see that Tony in particular is no shrinking violet when it comes to violence.

The build-up to the heist establishes each of the characters clearly, along with the flaws that will revisit them later: Tony makes enemies too easily, Jo’s loyalty affects his judgement, Mario is too happy-go-lucky, César has a weakness for women. A number of sequences show us the gang’s preparations – from hours of surveillance, to an amusing sequence where they experiment with methods to beat the store’s top-of-the-line alarm before a moment of inspiration hits them.

The third act of the film however takes us into a dark exploration of the loyalties and codes of honour that govern the criminal underworld. Tony’s enemies try to muscle in on the proceeds, leading to a series of increasingly violent episodes, as move and counter move is made to secure control of the funds. Here Dassin again pulls no punches – we have swearing, we have murder, we have a strung-out junkie kidnapping a child in return for a free hit – and it’s brilliantly put together.

It also tells us something. Tony has a code – and whether we agree with it or not, he’s faithful to it. Dassin himself plays the man whose fondness for a vain singer will leak out the plot details (it’s a lovely performance – and the man who was blacklisted must have had some delight here in playing a grass) and the confrontation scene with Tony is great: “I really liked you” Tony states sadly and regretfully: that doesn’t change his mind. Tony’s rival Grutter lacks even Tony’s sense of fairplay and his ruthlessness puts the other gangsters into perspective and questions Tony’s ideas of a code of honour among thieves: Grutter is a success precisely because he doesn’t give a toss about that sort of thing.

If the film has a flaw, it’s in its treatment of the female characters. Although Dassin arguably suggests that in this mileu many of them are just powerless passengers swept along by the actions of their men, they still seem less than fully formed characters, defined by simple character traits (Louise is a mother, Viviane is shallow, Ida is a flirt). The one dull section of the film follows Viviane singing in a nightclub – a scene introduced solely to drop the title and explain its meaning.

The film is also, at best, neutral in what it expects us to make of Tony brief whipping (off-screen) his ex-girlfriend Mado with a belt, after she betrays him with the gangster Grutter. Particularly as Mado seems to believe herself at fault rather than Tony. The scene is more about Tony – it’s his feeling of powerlessness that the camera focuses on – and Mado seems to shrug off the three blows she receives as just the price of living. Ah well, that’s the fifties for you I guess. And it’s not as if Tony – a moody man perfectly capable of cold blooded killing later – is a saint in any case. We also have the balance of Jo and Mario’s loving regard for their wives – and César’s misguided affection for Viviane.

And of course Tony our “hero” is certainly an anti-hero. In his first scene he’s stroppily demanding “in” on a poker game he doesn’t have the funds for. He’s demanding and surly with everyone except his godson. He is ruthless when he needs to be. Jean Servais’ crumpled, baggy face and dead-eyed stare genuinely make him look like a man who has spent five years inside. His adherence to his moral code is so rigid no level of regret will stop him punishing those whom he deems have deserved death. Dassin also undercuts his potential tragic greatness, as trivial events – a missed phone call principally – lead him to destruction.

The film’s final sequence is inspired, and again wordless. A dying man races a car through the city to return a child to his mother. Is it devotion to the child? Does he want to get the money back to the only family he has? Has he accepted death? Is he racing for a chance of living? Around him the camera whirls, the editing is frantic and the child cavorts in the car oblivious of the danger. It’s a sequence that is both moving and strangely profound. It’s the final masterstroke in a film full of them.

Primal Fear (1996)

Richard Gere prepares an impossible defence for unbalanced Edward Norton. Twist ahoy!

Director: Gregory Hoblit

Cast: Richard Gere (Martin Vail), Laura Linney (Janet Venable), John Mahoney (John Shaughnessy), Alfre Woodard (Judge Shoat), Frances McDormand (Dr Molly Arrington), Edward Norton (Aaron Stampler), Terry O’Quinn (Bud Yancy), Andre Braugher (Tommy Goodman)

Courtroom dramas are the bread and butter of film drama. You get to deal with good vs evil, right vs wrong – and you even have two advocates on each side there duelling it out on camera for you. Primal Fear came at a time when John Grisham and his like were ruling the bestseller charts, and it’s a fine demonstration of that very late 80s to mid 90s genre: the all-star court case film.

After the murder of a beloved archbishop in Chicago, bloodied altar-boy Aaron Stampler (Edward Norton) is found near the scene. There seems no doubt that he’s guilty. Top city lawyer Martin Vail (Richard Gere) takes his case for the publicity of a big trial, but finds himself believing the boy to be innocent. As the trial begins though, Vail’s psychiatric investigation reveals Stampler has a split personality – his gentle main persona and a violent defensive personality, “Roy”, who admits to the crime.

This is an advanced, well-written trial thriller which, through a combination of some neat lines and some very good performers, manages to bring a lot of life and originality to what could have been a collection of stock characters. Instead, each character in the film feels real and their actions seem part of a coherent personality. The mechanics of the plot also move very smoothly, with a well-handled twist. And as a bonus it has something to say about human nature, about our need to believe in something and how easy it is to tell lies about ourselves and believe them from others.

The film is shot with a good eye for grimy real-life locations and muddy shade-of-grey morality. Hoblit’s direction is crisp and straightforward and he avoids getting any pyrotechnics in the way of the actors – here the performances are the special effects. It’s also a brilliant twist movie that doesn’t telegraph the fact it contains a twist until it suddenly pulls the rug out from under your feet. Hoblit doesn’t give us any advantages over the characters and has the restraint not to show his hand too early – instead he sucker punches us with a sudden downer ending. It’s a masterpiece of genre craft film-making.

Richard Gere at first glance is playing well within his range – a smirking hotshot focused on the win, willing to defend anyone and anything. However, what Gere does really well here is play his persona as an actual persona of the character. The “real” Martin Vail, it becomes clear, is actually almost naïve in his underlying faith in the justice system. He has a touching faith in people and the twist of the film works because we believe how much Vail unwittingly allows himself too be manipulated and conned. He’s the sort of true believer who can playfully mock his faith because his belief in it is absolute. It’s even more crushing, then, when that faith is so cruelly used and abused. The final shot of him alone on the street all but screams “My God, what have I done?”.

But though this film has some of Gere’s best work, this is Ed Norton’s movie. Incredibly, this was Norton’s first ever film, and he seizes the film absolutely by the scruff of the neck. Re-watching the film now, it’s less of a surprise when Aaron’s “Roy” personality bursts out – Norton is so well known now you are almost waiting for him to really let rip – but he nails the contrasts between the stammering, gentle Aaron and the ferocious Roy. You always know which one he is at any time – and even better than that, Norton drops subtle hints throughout to set up the film’s twist (which I won’t give away). His performance is largely a triumph of masterful control of acting tricks and a brilliant demonstration of range, as well as a swaggering display of confidence, rather than a subtle piece of character work, but it’s still an absolute knock out for all that – and totally believable.

Strong performances also come from Laura Linney, making an awful lot of the role of Gere’s courtroom nemesis and part-time lover. Andre Braugher is particularly good as an investigating officer. Alfre Woodward is stern and authoritative but fair minded and just as the judge. Frances McDormand makes what could have been a wet liberal doctor feel like a genuinely caring and dedicated intelligent professional. There isn’t a weak link in the cast, and every character beat feels well observed and natural. How many genre films have failed to manage that?

It all works extremely well and offers all the courtroom fireworks you could want with maximum efficiency. All the actors are working at the top of their game, and the direction keeps the action taut and intriguing. Here’s the thing: the plot makes little sense if you think about it, and Norton’s plan depends on so many variables he could never have known that it would success. But the film is made with such confidence and assurance that it never really matters. The twist still has a lot of impact today – and the film bravely offers no happy endings, only hammers home the system’s corruptness. A very good example (perhaps one of the best) of the courtroom genre.

Lawless (2012)

Brothers in crime. You can get a taste of the performances just from this still image.

Director: John Hillcoat

Cast: Shia LaBeouf (Jack Bondurant), Tom Hardy (Forrest Bondurant), Jason Clarke (Howard Bondurant), Guy Pearce (Marshal Charley Rakes), Jessica Chastain (Maggie Beauford), Mia Wasikowska (Bertha Minnix), Dane DeHaan (Cricket Pate), Gary Oldman (Floyd Banner)

Bootlegging, the Deep South, corrupt cops and the honourable code of criminals. It’s the sort of cocktail that’s made up dozens of films, some good, some bad, some ugly. This one definitely falls into one of the latter two camps.

It’s 1931, and the Bondurant brothers (Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke) run a moonshine business out of their Virginian countryside garage. One day the cops come a-calling, led by a corrupt US Marshall (Guy Pearce). They want a piece of the action. The brothers say no. So war breaks out…

Truth be told, this is actually quite a boring film – a pointless, clumsily constructed shaggy dog story that neither makes a point about the shabbiness of a bootlegging life of crime, nor challenges romantic assumptions about the small time crook challenging the system. There are a couple of random flashy scenes thrown in to allow the film-makers to demonstrate their technical expertise, but it’s all as weightless as a braggart regaling their guests at a dinner table. Hot air masquerading as a lungful of fresh stuff.

The performances dance between underpowered, over stretched and over indulged. Shia LaBouef doesn’t make his nominal lead a fully formed character. Jason Clarke makes no real impact in an underwritten role. Tom Hardy is the best of the bunch, but barely stretches himself as a bearlike family leader. Of the other major parts, Guy Pearce gives the kind of twitchy, pyrotechnical performance that is often mistaken for brilliant acting, all highblown showing off and no depth. Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska are wasted playing contrasting love interests. Gary Oldman pops up for one scene as an overblown crime lord.

These performances drift along in the formless plot. There are nasty moments of violence that serve no purpose and don’t seem to tie into established characters personalities. There are also poorly judged plot developments: at one point Jessica Chastain’s character is raped – mercifully off screen – an event never mentioned again. Characters are brutally dispatched; one has his manhood removed and posted to another character, others are strangled, shot or battered to death with spades. The violence continues on and off until the film ends with a confrontation scene between goodies and baddies. Nothing original or unique happens in this film – we’ve all seen it time and time again. There is no thrust to the story, no feeling that it is building towards a point or that a thematic point is being built. It’s just events happening for the sake of it.

Despite its flash and bravura crashes and bangs this is an empty, tedious movie that goes nowhere, says nothing and has no point. Nearly all the events of the film are predictable, from the fate of the villain to the crippled best friend (Dane DeHaan) who has victim written all over him from the first frame. Its surface sheen (it looks great, has a decent score etc.) and the look-at-me acting is enough to fool you for a moment into thinking “this must be a good film”. But it ain’t.

Sicario (2015)

Emily Blunt goes to war with the Cartels, not realising she’s just a pawn.

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Emily Blunt (Kate Macer), Benicio del Toro (Alejandro Gillick), Josh Brolin (Matt Graver), Daniel Kaluuya (Reggie Wayne), Maximiliano Hernández (Silvio), Victor Garber (Dave Jennings), Jon Bernthal (Ted), Jeffrey Donovan (Steve Forsing), Raoul Trujillo (Rafael), Julio Cedillo (Fausto Alarcón)

The War on Drugs. Smack a military title on it and it helps people think that there is some sort of system to it, that it carries some sort of rules of engagement. Whereas the truth is that it is a nebulous non-conflict where the sides are completely unclear and the collaborators are legion.

Sicario follows a shady covert operation, run by a combination of the FBI, the CIA, Columbian and Mexican law enforcement and, well, other interested parties. Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is recruited to the task force because someone with her experience is needed, and finds herself working for maverick, almost pathologically unconcerned, CIA man Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). Graver, in turn, is working closely with a South American freelance operative (Del Toro) whose background and goals remain a mystery to Kate. Far from a clear targeted operation, Kate slowly realises the operation is effectively an off-the-books black op, which she has almost no control or influence over.

Villeneuve has directed here an accomplished, if rather cold, thriller. It denies its audience the release of action, the reassurance of justice or the satisfaction of integrity being rewarded. Instead the film takes place in a hazy never-world, never fully explained to either the viewer or Kate (our surrogate), where it gradually becomes almost impossible to tell who is working for whom and for what reasons – and there is a feeling that those in the film don’t know either.

The whole film has a sense of Alice in Wonderland about it (at the end of the film our heroine literally goes down a tunnel into a strange new land). Emily Blunt’s Kate seems at first to be on the ball, but events throughout the film demonstrate time and again that she is hopelessly out of her depth and little more than a fig leaf to enable her new bosses to bend laws to breaking point. Instead the world she finds herself in is dark, unsettling, confusing and lacks any sense of clear moral “sides”.

In fact, that is one of the most interesting things about this movie. It presents a female lead who is constantly manipulated and defeated throughout the film. Kate is in fact totally ineffective throughout and serves no real narrative purpose to the events of the film other than allowing those events to take place. At the same time, she’s strong-willed, she’s determined and she’s fiercely principled, as well as being an engaging character (helped immensely by Emily Blunt’s empathetic and intelligent performance).

This works so well because Kate represents what we would normally expect in a film – we keep waiting for that moment where she makes a successful stand, or blows the scandal open, or brings someone to justice – this never happens. Instead the film is a clear indication of the powerlessness of the liberal and the just in a world of violence, aggression and corruption – that people like Kate will always be steamrollered by people who are willing to smilingly do anything to achieve their goals and don’t play by any semblance of rules that we would recognise. In a more traditional film, she would end the film arresting some (or all) of the other characters with a defiant one-liner. Instead, she never lays a glove on anyone.

The flip side of her naïve optimism here is Benecio Del Toro’s nihilistic, dead-behind-the-eyes mysterious freelance operative. Del Toro is magnetic here, his character a dark mirror image of the role he played in Traffic, as if that character witnessed every kid he watched playing baseball in that film gunned down before him. He’s like a dark growly end-justifying-the-means shark, who conveys just enough of a flicker of paternal interest in Kate (does he see her as a reminder of what he used to be like?) to show there is someone still human in there. He prowls the edges of scenes before seizing the movie by the scruff of the neck in the final quarter with horrifying brutality.

Del Toro’s rumpled smoothness is a perfect match for the ink jet blacks and bright desert shine of this wonderfully photographed film. Roger Deakin’s cinematography is beautiful to look at and also rich with variation and imagination – from bleached out, hazy mornings to red dawns, from subterranean tunnels to neon lit nightclubs, Deakins presents images in striking new ways. The use of sound is also brilliant in the film – lingering, unsettling silences throughout slowly give way to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s beautiful spare score. There are fine supporting performances from Maximiliano Hernández as a doomed cop, sleepwalking through a corrupt life, Daniel Kaluuya, who is very good as an even more idealistic FBI agent who thinks he understands the world better than he does, as well as from Josh Brolin and Victor Garber.

Sicario offers no comfortable answers. In fact, it offers almost no answers at all. The world it shows us is one where there is no conventional right or wrong, only attempts to control the chaos. Our expectations as a viewer are so persistently subverted that it almost demands to be seen twice to truly understand what sort of story it is actually trying to tell. This helps to make it a cold and distancing film – but it lives in a cold, distant world where sometimes you reach the final frame and only then begin to understand who the baddies might have been and how you’ve only helped funnel the badness towards a controlled point rather than slow down or stop it.

Rashomon (1950)

Rashomon: “Everybody Lies” – Gregory House would love this film

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune (Tajōmaru, the Bandit), Machiko Kyō (The Samurai’s Wife), Masayuki Mori (The Samurai), Takashi Shimura (Woodcutter), Minoru Chiaki (Priest), Kichijiro Ueda (Commoner), Noriko Honma (Miko), Daisuke Katō (Policeman)

Rashomon is one of those films that Stuart Galbraith described everyone as “knowing it even if they haven’t seen it”. Its structure of unreliable narrators telling different versions of the same story has been employed on almost every single recurring drama that has been screened since its making. You’ve seen the Rashomon story, even if you’ve never seen the film.

In the rainy (no-one works with rain visually better than Kurosawa by the way) countryside, at an abandoned house (it’s called Rashomon, so even the title doesn’t really mean anything to the story) a Priest, a Woodcutter and a Commoner discuss a recent crime in the forest. A bandit, a samurai and his wife all met in the forest. The Samurai was killed. In the investigation, the Bandit, the Wife and the Samurai (via the Medium, imagine if Morse could call on her!) all tell different versions of the story, as does a surprise witness to the crime. Which story was true? Or were they all lies?

One of the main differences watching the original Rashomon now is that we have become so used to the concept of multiple versions of the same story being told that we expect a final answer to be presented. Most often now, the final version of the story is the true version and it allows us to understand for ourselves what was true and what was not in the other versions in the story. This is not the case here: there is no answer. The viewer will never know what happened in the glade: we are in the same position as a jury at a trial – we are presented with four compromised, conflicting stories and we need to select for ourselves what (and who) we choose to believe. The camera is as much of an unreliable narrator as the actual storytellers in the film.

Imagine what a, for want of a better word, head-f*ck this must have been back in the 1950s. They’d never seen anything like it before in a film. Characters might lie, but generally the camera never did. This was the time of Hays Code America, where criminals never got away with it, murderers were always revealed in the final frame and justice prevailed. Rashomon is nothing like this: there is no truth, just a series of lies or obfuscations, with the final story potentially as compromised as the rest. In a world where even a character as likeable as Alec Guinness’ in The Lavender Hill Mob has to end the film being hauled off to jail in chains, it must have been unsettling. People must have felt like the Priest does in the film: “Who can I trust? Where is goodness in this world?”

Of course, many theories have sprung up about what is going on here and what the actual story is – some theories place a lot of emphasis on the importance of the knife (Kurosawa indeed lets the camera linger strikingly on this knife, embedded in the ground, in version 1). Even the actors on set allegedly bugged Kurosawa for the solution – but the film isn’t about this. It’s about the lies we tell, and maybe why we tell them, not about the truth. The camera doesn’t even allow us to see the body (except from its POV) so we can’t even make a decision ourselves on the nature of the wounds to help us choose between the two possible murder weapons. The truth is effectively not even a character.

So Rashomon is a revolution in narrative terms – but is it good? David Thomson, in writing on Rashomon, pointed out that the device would work better in a story where everyone believed they were telling the truth. I have to say I think he is right. In fact, that is what I had expected – subtle variations in telling, or in delivery of lines, slight twists from story to story. Each story through is actually pretty much completely different (versions 1 and 4 are the closest to each other, but 2 and 3 are totally different) and that does rather rob the story of some depth. If everyone is just lying because they need or want to, that robs the idea of some strength. Anyone can make something up – but none of us can recall perfectly a moment and what everyone involved in that moment could be doing. A film that reflected on that would really have something to say – by removing this idea, I felt a little bit cheated. This might be tied into the modern expectation of there being some sort of mystery to solve here, but I genuinely think that’s a structure that works better and is more satisfying narratively – probably why that way of telling the story is more common today.

Away from the narrative through, Rashomon is the sort of technically assured, inventive film that’s technique has now been so absorbed into our visual language that we actually don’t notice it any more. But before this film, the sort of revolving tracking shots following the characters around the forest had never been attempted before. The shots looking up towards the sun, showing the light breaking through the leaves, had been thought impossible. Even the fact that the whole thing is shot outside is ambitious. The effect of the rain thundering down on the ruined house throughout the framing device is brilliantly done (apparently the water was dyed black so it showed up on the camera), perfectly reflecting the ambivalent mood of the men discussing the case.

Throughout the film, Kurosawa directs with a visual flair that roots the camera as a key player in the telling of the stories. Shots are cunningly arranged between versions to allow contrast and comparison, with the camera placed in subjective positions rather than objective ones, meaning we “see” in the stories only what the person telling the story would choose us to see. It feels very modern – and watching it you can see why many Japanese cinema aficionados moan about Kurosawa being acclaimed in the West primarily because he has had the most influence on Western film making because in turn he was very culturally influenced by Western film making in the first place. I’m no expert on Japanese film-making (like most people I’m largely limited to Kurosawa), but heck it’s pretty clear that he’s a master film maker.

The performances in the film have a high blown intensity about them that should totter the film into silliness but somehow don’t. Toshiro Mifune, objectively, overacts wildly but he’s such a gifted performer that it becomes a magnetic animalism, a sort of eyeball-searing dynamism. Kyō’s performance is perhaps a little too much, but its wildness and nerveless intensity gradually work within the story. Shimura, Chiaki and Ueda are terrific as the homespun average-Joes discussing the case.

Kurosawa’s Rashomon is an impressive technical and narrative accomplishment of its time, but it can never have the same impact when we watch it today, because it’s been integrated so completely into our story-telling and visual language, that watching it now you find it slightly hard to see what all the fuss was about in 1951. Watching it from a modern perspective, you can see elements of the film’s narrative that could have been done more effectively, and you wonder if it’s perhaps more of a short con played on the audience that works very well than a classic – but it is the first time anything like it was ever attempted, and for that reason, if for no other, it will live on in film history.

23 Paces to Baker Street (1956)

Van Johnson hears something’s up

Director: Henry Hathaway

Cast: Van Johnson (Philip Hannon), Vera Miles (Jean Lennox), Cecil Parker (Bob Matthews), Maurice Denham (Inspector Grovening), Isobel Elsom (Lady Syrett), Estelle Winwood (Barmaid), Liam Redmond (Mr. Murch), Martin Benson (Pillings), Patricia Laffan (Alice MacDonald)

It’s an age-old truth that the movies always believe we can admire a hero more, if we see them struggling to overcome some form of disadvantage or disability that would normally rule them out of carrying out the actions they are trying to do. So what fits into that mould better than a blind man going up against a gang of criminals?

Philip Hannon (Van Johnson) is a successful American playwright living in London, who has lost his sight. One day in a pub, he overhears a conversation between a man and a woman that he suspects is related to the planning of a crime. But, unable to persuade the police of his suspicions, he has only his former secretary Jean (Vera Miles) and butler Bob (Cecil Parker) to help him investigate.

This is the sort of reliable B movie material, with some decent parts and interesting twists, that usually gets remade as a big-star, big-budget modern Hollywood drama. You know the sort of thing: Russell Crowe is a blind writer investigating a crime. In fact, it’s almost a surprise that this has never been remade, as it is an entertaining, diverting small-scale movie – the sort of thing that you can imagine settling down in front on a wet Sunday afternoon.

It’s a sort of sub-Hitchcock drama –fairly similar in tone to Rear Window – and there are several beats in there that totally fit with the master’s dramatic style. In fact, that’s what makes it such a quintessential B movie: everything about it feels like a slightly cheaper alternative to a major picture. Which isn’t a criticism as such: it’s just a very workmanlike, efficient little thriller, which fits neatly into Hathaway’s CV of safe, unspectacular film making. It’s still well made and does exactly what you would expect, but it’s not going to knock anyone’s socks off.

Van Johnson may similarly be a low rent Jimmy Stewart, but he’s pretty effective in this role, suitably vulnerable in places, while still suggesting enough of the prickly demeanour of the man who doesn’t want to be a victim. He also resists the temptation to overplay the blindness – something the whole film actually does quite well. As the man holding the entire film together he does a good job, and he even manages to be more or less believable as a successful playwright. Watching it, you think it’s a bit of shame he’s not better known today – he’s a good (if unspectacular) actor. Vera Miles offers some good support as a supportive love interest while Cecil Parker is quite droll as the butler.

The mystery itself has a few nice twists in it – the final twist is nicely set-up, enough for you to see it coming as we reach the dénouement (a well-staged confrontation in a darkened flat, which gets a lot of tension from watching our blind lead trying to identify all the lights in the house so he can remove their bulbs). The story sometimes doesn’t give us too much of a chance to work out the twists and turns before key clues are revealed by Hannon, but that’s no major problem. It’s also quite well filmed, with some nice shots of 50s London skylines.

It’s a decent and interestingly done film that gets some fresh content out of the blindness of its hero, never portraying him as a victim but as a proactive and determined man. Claims that this is some sort of lost classic are overdone – it’s never more than a sub-Hitchcock B picture – but it’s still highly watchable, has some engaging characters and some decent thriller sequences, and you care about the lead characters, even if you don’t particularly care about the crime itself and its victims (the victims in particular are pretty vague characters). It also relies rather heavily on the legendary heightened senses that blind always seem to have in Hollywood films. But for something that basically sounds like the plot of an ITV two part drama, this is solid craftsmanship.

One final note: the title means nothing. At one point Hannon guides a man through the fog. Turns out he’s 23 paces from his destination: Baker Street. The Hollywood suits were keen to drop in the “Baker Street” reference, to suggest a link to Sherlock Holmes. So goes to show – Conan Doyle, always good box office!