Category: Female led film

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford rant and rage in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Director: Robert Aldrich

Cast: Bette Davis (Jane Hudson), Joan Crawford (Blanche Hudson), Victor Buono (Edwin Flagg), Marjorie Bennett (Dehlia Flagg), Maidie Norman (Elvira Stitt), Anna Lee (Mrs Bates), BD Merrill (Liza Bates)

Age isn’t kind on the careers of Hollywood actresses. Move into your 40s and the part offered quickly becomes “the grandmother”. It’s a fate that saw the careers of some of the greatest actresses of the Golden Years of Hollywood crash screeching to a halt. However, these actresses remained popular with many cinema goers. So it occurred to Robert Aldrich, why not throw a couple of them into the sort of roles that can riff on their careers and public images? Match that up with jumping on the bandwagon of films like Psycho and you could have a hit on your hands.

That’s what he got as well with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Jane Hudson (Bette Davis) is a former “infant phenomenon” on the stage, whose career fell apart as soon as she hit puberty. Her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), on the other hand, grew up to have a promising career in Hollywood – which then collapsed when a late-night driving accident (which Baby Jane is widely believed to be responsible for) left her paralysed from the waist down. Now in middle age, Jane and Blanche live in domestic disharmony, Blanche trapped upstairs at the mercy of Baby Jane, whose longing to rebuild her career sees her head down an ever steeper spiral of insanity.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane started a new genre in Hollywood – the freak hag-horror or psycho-biddy genre (those names alone show that at its heart this genre was basically demeaning) which saw Hollywood Grande Dames (frequently Davis and Crawford, though others got a look-in as well) parley their reputations into ever more formulaic riffs. Films like this quickly became cult viewing. Their extremes of make-up and performance, matched with the arch camp of the leading ladies hamming it up, made the genre extremely popular – and left films like Whatever Happened… far more fondly remembered than they deserve.

It’s popular to see Sunset Boulevard as a sort of precursor to this genre, a first try-out in taking an older era of Hollywood and turning it into a ghastly waxwork show. But Sunset still has affection  for what it shows (and above all captures the tragedy of the death of Silent Hollywood, treating its characters as people rather than freaks), while Whatever Happened has none, basically seeing the past as a parade of monsters, and these relics as waxworks to be mocked. There is no affection here for the past successes and glories of either star, instead we are invited to sit back and wonder at how far they might be willing to go to see bums on seats again. All of this to make money for the producers. Far from the art of Sunset Boulevard, this feels more like the exploitation of screen greats.

Although of course both stars were more than happy to get involved, even if they were less than happy working with each other. The background to the film, to be honest, often carries more interest than the very long, often slow, horror/black comedy during the film’s over-extended run time. Famously Davis and Crawford were long-standing rivals and their relationship over the course of making and promoting the film disintegrated into cheap one-upmanship and bitter recrimination. While the feud does probably give some edge to the screen antics, the very fact that it’s nearly the first thing people remember about the film probably tells you how memorable the actual experience is.

Davis throws herself into all this with creditable abandon. (She was Oscar nominated and Crawford wasn’t – although Crawford got the last laugh, having arranged on the night to collect the Oscar on behalf of eventual winner Anne Bancroft, performing on Broadway that night.) Davis designed the freakish but iconic look of Baby Jane, all painted face and little girl mannerisms, and her demented attempts to recreate her childhood act in her 50s (culminating in a bizarre and skin-crawling “Writing a Letter to Daddy” dance which was weird enough watching a 12 year old perform) can’t be faulted for commitment. Davis also manages to invest the bullying and cruel Jane with a deep sense of loss, regret and guilt (for her sister’s accident) that frequently bubbles over into resentment. It’s certainly a larger-than-life performance and Davis frequently dominates the film, even if the role is basically a cartoon invested with Davis’ own grace and glamour.

It doesn’t leave much for Crawford, whose Blanche is frequently left with the more po-faced, dull and reactive lines. Crawford doesn’t often make Blanche as sympathetic as you feel she should be – although the part plays into one of her strong suits of playing the martyr – and the film saddles her with a late act twist that doesn’t have enough time and development to really make much sense. However again you can’t fault her commitment, either to screams or to a scene where she attempts to climb down the bannisters of the stairs from her trap on the upper floor, where the effort, strain and pain on Crawford’s face are astonishingly real.

Those stairs dominate many of the shots of Aldrich’s serviceable and efficient direction – although he lacks any sense of the mix of cruel poetry and dynamite sensationalism that Hitchcock bought to similar material in Psycho. But it works nicely to give a sense of Blanche’s confinement and as a visual metaphor for the trap the house feels like. Aldrich also throws in a couple of other decent flourishes, not least as Davis’ lounge turns into a proscenium stage as she imagines returning to the big time.

But the film itself is, despite it all, lacking in any sense of kindness or warmth really for either its stars or old Hollywood. We are instead invited to gasp at them in horror, while the film drags on at great lengths, stretching a very thin plot (barely a novella) into over two hours of screen time. There are effective moments, but it’s a film that seems barely serviceable today.

Still Alice (2014)

Julianne Moore excels in Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice

Director: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland

Cast: Julianne Moore (Alice Howland), Alec Baldwin (John Howland), Kristen Stewart (Lydia Howland), Kate Bosworth (Anne Howland-Jones), Hunter Parrish (Tom Howland), Shane McRae (Charlie Jones), Stephen Kunken (Dr Benjamin)

Can we imagine a more difficult illness to deal with than Alzheimer’s? Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a linguistics professor at Columbia, diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s and slowly finds her capacity to use language – and her memories – slowly fade away. At one point Alice, as her ability to function begins to disappear, wishes she had cancer instead – not only because the illness is easy for others to understand, but it offers some form of treatment however fatal the disease may prove. Westmoreland and Glatzer’s heart-rending film covers the slow decline of Alice’s abilities – from forgetting words in lectures, to getting lost in her own house searching for the bathroom, to struggling to recognise her children.

Julianne Moore is at the centre of this emotionally devastating – but tender and moving film – dominating every scene as Alice. Moore’s sharp intelligence and focus as an actress is perfect for the professor, but her dedication really comes to the fore for the sensitive and truth-laden way she explores the decline that follows for Alice. It’s a performance – like the film – that works hard to avoid sentimentality, and instead follows the heart-rending sadness of slowly feeling your personality disappear. Because what are we really but the collection of our memories and experiences – and when these are gone from us, what is really left? 

Moore’s work is superb here – she won virtually every prize going, including the Oscar – and the film is told entirely from her point-of-view. Meaning that jumps in time come as a surprise to us, as they would be for Alice. At one point a distressed Alice wakes up at 2am to try and find her phone, before being coaxed back to bed by her husband John (a carefully nuanced and realistic performance from Alec Baldwin). The next scene, the phone is found in the freezer. Alice laughs and says she was looking for that last night – “that was a month ago” John quietly tells their daughter. It’s sudden moments like that, using the language of film, that hammer home the impact of this disease. It turns a whole life into a choppily edited film, where see the highlights but never recall the day-to-day detail.

The film is clear on the burden – and the struggle for us to comprehend what will happen to us. Early in her diagnosis – while recording a series of questions (such as when is your birthday and what is your daughter’s name) – Alice secretly records a video, giving instructions for her suicide when those questions become impossible to answer. It never occurs to her that, when that moment is reached, she will struggle to comprehend the message, let alone recall the 3-4 instructions to find a secret pill stash without multiple referrals to the video. But this is part of the horror of a disease that changes our ability to be who we are. 

Westmoreland and Glatzer (who tragically died from complications from ALS shortly after the film’s completion) bought a personal connection to the material, and the difficulty of a family to watch a loved one slowly succumb to an illness in front of you. Alice’s family are supportive – but they also have their own lives to live. Her husband Jack does his best – but must continue with his career to fund Alice’s medical treatment, plus dealing with the walking death of a woman he has loved all his life. Her elder daughter, Anna, has her own family to raise. The illness does bring Alice closer to her youngest actress daughter Lydia (very sensitively played by Kristen Stewart), but that doesn’t stop Alice failing to recognise her after watching her performing in a play. There is no judgement here, just a recognition of how powerless family members can feel at times to really help those they love – particularly as they watch parts of their personality disappear in front of their eyes.

The film avoids the sentimentality of a hopeful ending. Two thirds of the way through the film has an uplifting moment of triumph – Alice successfully makes a highly personal speech to an Alzheimer’s conference (carefully highlighting her typewritten speech as she goes to be sure she doesn’t repeat herself). Many films would have stopped there, but Still Alice doesn’t avert its eyes from what comes next, as Alice continues to slowly regress, unable to dress herself or recognise even central elements from her life, language and words disappearing from her altogether.

So why Still Alice? Because deep down it’s still her, no matter if the ideas and words have been lost. In the moment – such as greeting her new grandchildren, even if she has forgotten that her daughter was pregnant – she becomes the woman she was. The film’s final conclusion shows that there is still, in there, the loving and warm woman she was – even if she can no longer use words or able to fully shape ideas in her head. 

It makes for a wonderfully involving, realistic, but also warmly realistic and genuine film that avoids sentimental and obvious answers, but instead presents the cold truth and realism of dealing with a condition. With Julianne Moore superb in the lead role, expertly charting the condition, and also capturing the mixture of frustration and agony at the knowledge of what’s being lost to mix slowly in with a more contented placidity. It’s wonderful work in a film that will provoke tears and thoughts.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Joan Crawford sacrifices everything for a daughter who doesn’t deserve it in Mildred Pierce

Director: Michael Curtiz

Cast: Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce), Jack Carson (Wally Fay), Zachary Scott (Monte Beragon), Eve Arden (Ida Corwin), Ann Blyth (Veda Pierce), Bruce Bennett (Bert Pierce), Butterfly McQueen (Lottie), Lee Patrick (Mrs Maggie Biederhoff), Moroni Olsen (Inspector Peterson)

There are few things that classic Hollywood did quite as well as a melodrama. Adapted loosely from a James M Cain novel – its murder plot line is a flourish solely for the screen – this is a triumphantly entertaining picture that mixes themes of sex and class with good old-fashioned family drama. It’s got psychology and it’s also got the high-concept family feuding around the building of a restaurant business that you could find in Dynasty. Put simply, Mildred Pierce is a prime slice of entertainment.

After her second husband Monte (Zachary Scott) is shot dead, Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) is brought in by the police for questioning. After the collapse of her first marriage to Bert (Bruce Bennett), Mildred has expanded her home-baking business into a full restaurant chain, with the support of Bert’s old business partner Wally Fay (Jack Carson). Mildred’s goal is to provide for all the needs of her eldest child Veda (Ann Blyth), a selfish snob who despises her mother for having to work for a living. The tensions between self-sacrificing mother and demanding, unloving daughter, lead Mildred to take a series of disastrous personal and business decisions, culminating in her wastrel, upper-class, Veda-approved, second husband Monte going down in a hail of bullets. But who pulled the trigger?

The murder mystery plotline adds effective spice to this very well directed (Michael Curtiz is at the top of his game) melodrama. Full of domestic thrills and spills, it races along like a combination page-turner and soap, perfectly matching a deeply sympathetic, self-sacrificing heroine with a host of deeply unsympathetic wasters, chancers and bullies. It’s capped by giving our heroine possibly the least sympathetic child in film history, the deliberately selfish and greedy Veda. 

Sure you could argue that its psychology is either pretty lightly developed, or thrown in only for effect. It’s never clear when or why exactly Veda and Mildred’s relationship went south so completely, or where Veda’s deep resentment and ideas above her station come from. It also avoids looking at how Mildred’s complete devotion has probably completely spoiled a child who clearly needed to be told “no” a lot more, a lot sooner. But it doesn’t really matter as the film follows the logic of an event-filled plot-boiler, throwing revelations and cliff-hangers at you left, right and centre.

In the lead, Joan Crawford took on a role that many had turned down before her – stars at the time were not keen to be seen playing roles that suggested they were old enough to have mothered children as old as Ann Blyth. The decision to push for the role paid off as she netted an Oscar and it’s the finest performance of her career. A somewhat haughty actress, Crawford here demonstrates depths of vulnerability and tenderness as a much-put upon woman who, despite everything, will stop at nothing to give her daughter what she wants. Crawford dominates the film, her air of self-sacrifice never once tipping over into self-pity, even as the character so desperately seeks for the sort of love and affection that is denied her from those around her. 

Around her most of the cast – with the exception of Eve Arden’s entertaining, wise-cracking best friend (Oscar nominated) – are basically a bunch of sharks. None sharper than Ann Blyth’s (also Oscar nominated) sweet-faced but dead-inside daughter. Rarely has a display of more naked grasping, snobbish disdain ever been captured on film, matched with unapologetic greed. Veda has no compunction about the moral consequences of her actions and, like Zachary Taylor’s archly lazy Monte, is as interested in spending Mildred’s money as she is contemptuous of its source. 

Curtiz’s film constantly however plays with our judgements and expectations of people. Veda has more than her share of moments of pain and vulnerability as she shares some of the more painful travails of her mother. Similarly, Wally Fay (very well played by a roguish Jack Carson) oscillates between being a trusted confidante of Mildred, and a lascivious greedy creep. First husband Bert (a somewhat dry Bruce Bennett) starts as a love rat but may have more decency about him than anyone else (except Mildred).

The film is wonderfully shot in luscious black-and-white by Ernest Haller, in a dynamic noirish style. Water reflections lap across ceilings. Smoke from fires and cigarettes rises up and seems to dance and swirl in the light. There are some beautiful shots of faces – the camera work in particular perfectly locates a vulnerability in Crawford’s superior features – and there is a beautiful shot late on when two people caught in an illicit kiss roll their heads back from the shadows to emerge into the light. The entire design of the film is spot-on, and it looks and sounds fabulous today.

Mildred’s struggles make this a brilliant example of the stereotypical “women’s picture”, a tale of a woman struggling against all the odds to make her way in the world, with the twist that the daughter she is straining to support is a monster and the men she chases are feckless wasters. Mildred makes chronically terrible decisions throughout but for the best of motives – and part of the film’s appeal is that you are so invested in her fundamental decency you are willing her not to make the same mistakes again and again.

Curtiz’s melodrama is brilliantly enjoyable and never lets up. It’s also a feminist icon of a sort – Mildred is never punished for having a career, indeed she’s celebrated for it (and is far more savvy about it than nearly all the men). She leaves her husband, runs her own household, pushes for her own divorce all while protecting and providing for her child (not her fault the child ain’t worth it). Mildred Pierce is ahead of its time, and still a fabulously entertaining film.

Misbehaviour (2020)

What price progress in Misbehaviour?

Director: Philipa Lowthorpe

Cast: Keira Knightley (Sally Alexander), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Jennifer Hosten, Miss Grenada), Jessie Buckley (Jo Robinson), Greg Kinnear (Bob Hope), Lesley Manville (Dolores Hope), Rhys Ifans (Eric Morley), Keeley Hawes (Julia Morley), Phyllis Logan (Evelyn Alexander), Loreece Harrison (Pearl Jansen, Miss Africa South), Clara Rosager (Marjorie Johansson, Miss Sweden), Suki Waterhouse (Sandra Wolsfield, Miss USA), John Heffernan (Gareth Stedman Jones)

In 1970, the Miss World Competition in London was disrupted before a world-wide TV audience by Women’s Liberation campaigners, furious at the competition being the public face of a world that judged women on appearance rather than personality. The disruption was led by post-graduate UCL student Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) and commune radical Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley), and rather overshadowed for many the fact that, for the first time in history, black female competitors like Miss Grenada Jennifer Hoosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) were treated as genuine contenders for the title. Misbehaviour recreates all this wonderfully, but also makes an intriguing exploration of the different ways women can make themselves a place in the world.

It would have been very easy for Philipa Lowthorpe’s engaging film to have designated villains – after all with the casual sexism and objectification of the Miss World competition, you could easily have assigned the competition runners as baddies. Instead the film is richer than that, full of people who genuinely feel they are doing their best in the roles they’ve been given in life. If there is a villain, it’s society itself which traps women into certain roles, and doesn’t allow them to grow.

The film follows three plot lines – the women’s liberation movement, the background of staging the Miss World Competition, and the lives and expectations of the contestants themselves. Of these three plots, the women’s liberation movement is surprisingly the least engaging. Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley do decent jobs, but their characters are more one-dimensional and lack real development (they start the film as passionate rebels and end the film the same way), with this lack of plot being padded out by movie clichés of the “you’re off the protest” variety. 

The real interest surprisingly is the competitors themselves. Like the protestors, the film is keen to not blame the contestants. The ones we follow are smart, intelligent, passionate women who are, by and large, willing to play the game to get their future ambitions realised. We see this most of all for Miss Grenada and Miss “Africa South” (a black South African shoe-horned into the competition to counter accusations of legitimising apartheid): the competition places them in the position of representing victimised minorities, groups that have their options sharply restricted. Having spent their lives being told that only being white, blonde and blue-eyed is beautiful, the chance to set an example to others is important to them – and the film doesn’t downplay or demean this at all.

This is captured particularly in the exploration of Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Miss Grenada, Jennifer Hoosten. A woman willing to use the competition as a springboard to try and build herself a professional career, she is an intelligent and dedicated woman who understands the nature of her competition. Hoosten however rejects being positioned as a victim, as well as the way Women’s Liberation crams all women’s aims into a single homogenous goal. Why should another group of women tell her what is best for her – isn’t that what men have been doing all her life? As a black woman, her only way to get the opportunities that someone like Sally Alexander has – education and career – is to play the hand that nature has given her the only way she can. Mbatha-Raw captures this all extremely well in a quietly judged and affecting performance.

Similar feelings motivate the rest of the competitors. Miss Africa South (an engaging Loreece Harrison) just wants to keep her head down and get home to her family, letting her presence alone make her statements. Miss Sweden (a fiery Clara Rosager) rails against the control and management of the organisers on every aspect of her life while at the competition. It’s a film where women are working to find their place in the world, but accepting that not all those goals will be the same. Keeley Hawes does excellent work as Julia Morley (co-runner of the competition with her husband, a brash Rhys Ifans), a woman trying her best to reform the competition from within.

Lowthorpe juggles these interesting themes – giving oxygen to all these points of view – within a fascinatingly precise reconstruction of the competition itself and the protest. As part of this Greg Kinnear contributes a spot-on performance as Bob Hope, here a sexist comedian from a different era who can’t understand the changing world. The film gets a lot of comic mileage as well from the jaw-dropping sexism of the BBC coverage and the drooling perviness of the reporters rushing to interview the competitors.

“This isn’t the end of anything, but this could be a start” says Lesley Manville in her waspishly delightful cameo as Hope’s wife. She’s right, the world didn’t change overnight. But as the film captures it started getting people thinking, even if it accepted that not all women will have the same view. Sally Alexander and her mother can disagree on women’s roles – “Why would I want to grow up like you?” Sally berates her housewife mother (very well played by Phyllis Logan) – but the two characters can still come together and agree that having opportunities is still better than not. And perhaps that’s what the film is arguing for: all these women are stretching for opportunities. And if that means the world needs to change so half the population gets the same chances as the other half, so be it.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

William Holden falls under Gloria Swanson’s spell in Billy Wilder’s superb Hollywood satire Sunset Boulevard

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: William Holden (Joe Gillis), Gloria Swanson (Norma Desmond), Erich von Stroheim (Max von Mayerling), Nancy Olson (Betty Schaefer), Jack Webb (Artie Green), Fred Clark (Sheldrake), Robert Emmett O’Connor (Jonesy), Lloyd Gough (Morino); as themselves: Cecil B. DeMille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, HB Warner

Imagine if Charles Dickens had been born a hundred years later. He would surely have headed to Hollywood – and if he had, surely would have written something like Sunset Boulevard. Because who is Joe Gillis but another shallow Pip, dreaming of fortune and wasting his brains, who turns up at Satis House but stays on to become Miss Havisham’s live-in lover? Sure Wilder is more cynical and bitter than Dickens, but I guess even optimist Dickens killed off Little Nell so maybe he too would have had Joe Gillis end (and start) the film face-down in a swimming pool with three bullets in his back?

The cops arrive to find Joe (William Holden) exactly like that, while we hear Joe’s acidic commentary outlining exactly how this state of affairs came about. Joe is a screenwriter in Hollywood (he’s in the second tier of a second tier profession in the movies) who can’t get his latest script made for love nor money. Dodging the debt collectors set on reclaiming his car, he pulls into the drive of a mysterious house. It’s the home of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a forgotten silent film star who now lives out her days in her mansion, dreaming of her past glories and planning for a return to stardom that will never come, tended to by her loyal butler Max (Erich von Stroheim). Joe is roped in first to rewrite the (terrible) script she has been working on for her comeback, and then to become her live-in lover. But can such a situation survive Hollywood’s cold heart and Joe’s own self-loathing and desires to restart his screenwriting career in partnership with ambitious young studio script reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson)?

Billy Wilder’s poison-pen love letter to Hollywood skewers the coldness at its heart. It does this with a triumphant mix of the grotesque and the heartfelt, the surreal and the coldly realistic, an insider’s guide to the world behind the magic of film-making and a story about those shut out of that very world. Hollywood is a shallow, bitter town where you’re either top of the bill or no-one at all. Would people from any other profession write such a bitter denunciation of their job that is also laced with affection and love? Maybe it has something to do with this being a unique profession which you have to love to enter, but once there you work with people who see it as a business.

The smell of desperation is there from the start, with Joe peddling his dreadful sounding baseball movie The Base Is Loaded to a polite but uninterested producer. Dropping a host of names and accepting any number of changes to the story (including changing it into an all-female sporting musical), Joe might once have had a talent but, as he says, “that was last year, this year I need money”.  William Holden was a late choice for Joe, but he is perfect in the part, capturing the air of the self-loathing cynic, a man bright enough to understand he’s shallow, a hack and desperate for any touch of the fame and fortune Hollywood can bring him.

Just like Pip, Joe is a young man who feels he is entitled to a life he scarcely seems to be qualified for. No wonder he settles into a life as Norma Desmond’s gigolo – it may well damage his sense of masculine pride to be an emasculated house-boy, but my God the suits are nice. And what talent does Joe even really have anyway? The script he is peddling barely seems to have any merit at all, and his extensive polish of Norma’s vehicle is still so alarmingly bad it never even gets the slightest consideration from Cecil B. DeMille. But Joe can’t let it go because he’s like a moth drawn towards those bright Hollywood lights.

And those bright Hollywood lights have consumed forever Norma Desmond. Wilder pulled Gloria Swanson out of an enforced semi-retirement to play the silent screen siren, whose career her own so closely parallels. It’s easy to remember Norma as a sort of Psycho-ish grotesque, a demented Miss Havisham living in her own crazy patchwork world of memory and delusion. Swanson certainly channels brilliantly the expression and body language of silent cinema into the part, and Desmond’s use of the sort of exaggerated gestures from that era in everyday life hammers home how her life hasn’t moved on from her glory days. 

But that would be to overlook the immense skill in Swanson’s performance. Norma may be sad, desperate, probably more than a little unhinged – a larger than life Miss Havisham to whom the “the pictures got small”, but she’s also a real person. Swanson makes it clear she genuinely loves Joe, she’s generous when she wants to be, devoted in her own way and immensely fragile. She takes a delighted pleasure in entertaining – a sequence of her reliving her glory days for Joe’s amusement (he couldn’t give a toss, making it all the more painful), capped with a charmingly delightful Chaplin impersonation shows a Norma who loves entertaining, loves putting a smile on people’s faces. Sure she’s obsessed with fame and desperate to reclaim it, but she’s also deep-down a real person.

But then that’s part also of Wilder’s romantic look at cinema. He can totally understand the bitter, destructive “business” part of it, but he still loves the show. His insiderish film is full of loving tributes to old Hollywood. Norma sits and watches real film footage of the real Gloria Swanson. The visit to Paramount Studios delights not only with its “backstage pass” feel, but also in the excitement with which the ageing extras and stage hands greet Norma. Norma’s weekly card games are staffed with genuine silent movie stars like Buster Keaton. Cecil B DeMille even pops up as himself (on the set of his film Samson and Delilah), kindly trying to guide Norma out of the studio even as he lacks the guts to tell her that her dream of a comeback is stillborn.

So how can you not feel sorry for Norma, who is clearly locked up in her haunted house on the outskirts of town, a million miles from reality, surrounded by endless reminders of her past glories. It’s so all-encompassing it traps Joe as well – at one point Wilder shows him trying to storm out, only for his pocket watch to literally get caught on the door. This place of dreams is staffed by the butler Max, a beautifully judged performance of Germanic chill mixed with doe-eyed devotion from Erich von Stroheim, also playing a dark version of himself as Norma’s pioneering former director (and husband) now reduced to protective butler. The entire house is a mausoleum without any escape.

The only character who seems truly positive is Nancy Olson’s wonderfully sweet Betty Schaefer, passionate about crafting a career for herself in the cinema. But even she is ruthlessly ambitious, a woman quite happy to consider jilting her fiancée for Joe’s attentions and has her eye on the price of success. She may have the talent, but she’s also got the sharpness.

Billy Wilder’s film brilliantly explores all these divides and contradictions in Hollywood and its history. Because what is Hollywood but a town that pays lip service to the past, but only has eyes for the future? Particularly with women. Female stars have a short shelf life and then they are dispatched. Poor Norma is still glamourous, still clearly has star quality – but as far as Hollywood is concerned she may as well be a million years old. No wonder Joe, used to these attitudes, is so ashamed to be kept by her – a woman he constantly refers to as a middle-aged friend. 

The dialogue, as you would expect from Brackett and Wilder, is superb from top to bottom with zingers and well-constructed dialogue exchanges so well placed they will survive for as long as there are movies. The film is beautifully shot by John F Seitz – part gothic horror, part dark romance, part neo-realist. Its pacing is perfect, its four act construction perfectly put together. All four of the principals (all Oscar nominated, none winning) are pitch perfect, sketching out characters that feel real and mixed with tragedy and loss as much as they are larger-than-life otherworldliness.

It’s the mixture of the freak show and the heart, in the massive Havishamesque estate, that marks this out as Hollywood does Dickens. The astute understanding of central characters, with enough depth to understand their shallowness, the grotesques that revolve around them but still have their humanity, it’s all there. Wilder mixes it with his own Hollywood emotions and his dry wit and cynicism to create a damn near perfect movie.

Gravity (2013)

Sandra Bullock is stranded in space in Gravity

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Sandra Bullock (Ryan Stone), George Clooney (Matt Kowalski), Ed Harris (Voice of Mission Control)

It’s often been said space is mankind’s final frontier. It’s beautiful and awe-inspiring. But it’s also a terrible place, a void where the normal rules that dictate how our bodies operate are completely suspended. We can only breathe what we carry with us and the lack of any atmosphere or gravity means a few metres might as well be a million miles. It’s in many ways the perfect conditions for a survival film – which, at its heart, is what Gravity is.

On a mission in space to repair the Hubble telescope, a collapsed satellite triggers a chain reaction of space debris hurtling in orbit at extreme velocities. Turned into a vast number of deadly bullets flying completing an orbit once every 90 minutes. This shrapnel destroys the mission, leaving specialist Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) as the only survivors – and left with their only chance of return to Earth being to travel somehow to one of the other space stations in orbit and hitch a ride home on one of their escape pods.

Cuarón’s film is an engrossing and edge-of-the-seat 90 minute thrill ride, combined with a quietly meditative reflection on how our internal pain can make us drift through life. The film is titled Gravity but it’s there to draw attention to what is missing in the film. Not only the obvious – the lack of pull on her body – but also the lack of grounding in Stone herself. In mourning for the loss of a child, Stone has very little ties to earth or indeed anything. She is drifting through her life emotionally, much as she drifts through space itself. When asked why she likes it up in space, she replies “the silence”. She’s a woman untethered from life on earth in more ways than one.

So this is a film that is not just a survival but also a rebirth. We see Stone go through immense, dangerous moments of tension and terror, battling against all the odds to survive and return home. At the same time, the film carries an emotional weight because it’s also about Stone making a conscious decision to survive, to decide to re-engage with and commit to the world – to choose life if you like. Someone suffering from grief and depression as she does at the start of the film, may well have understandably embraced despair. Instead, the film is her coming to terms with the loss of her daughter, and a resolve to live her life for her.

All of this happens of course in the vast majesty of space, a vision beautifully captured by Cuarón. Filmed in an immersive style, with several long takes that don’t draw attention to themselves – a shot length that serves the purpose of the story not vice versa – and Cuarón is happy to use quicker cuts where needed. The camera follows the journey of Stone in epic and intimate detail, with shots exchanged between vast panamas of the astronauts as dots in space, to extreme close ups that bore into Stone’s eyes and capture her emotions from guilt, to hope, to terror. 

The long opening shot, that ducks and weaves around the weighless astronauts in space as they repair the Hubble telescope is of course a technical marvel, but it also brilliantly established the situation and the joy and fear of being an astronaut, of being allowing in the darkness and emptiness of space. It sets the scene perfectly from later shots that throw you into the adrenalin burning terror of spinning wildly in space with no resistance to slow you down or dodging debris moving at thousands of kilometres per second through space.

In fact the film is almost unbelievably tense – probably the most tense space film since Apollo 13 and in that we actually knew they were coming home alive (in a nice nod to that film, Ed Harris ‘reprises’ his role as mission controller in a voice-only cameo). With its brilliant immersive style, and the emotional bond it swiftly builds with the viewer, it means you will find you hardly draw breath along with the heroes. I’ve seen the film three times and each time after the first viewing I was sure it wouldn’t have the impact the first viewing had. But goddamn it, it works every time. The film is quick – at little under 90 mins – but you won’t feel it (in fact if anything you might be relieved).

Cuarón won the Oscar for direction, and the film is not just a load of flash and technical marvel (although it has a lot of both). It’s grounded in a very simple emotional story of survival, matched with an internal story (not overplayed) of resolving and dealing with grief. A lot of that works from the effectively unflashy performance from Sandra Bullock, who is very good in a part that requires not just physical but also emotional commitment. She’s well supported by George Clooney, who is perfect as the charming but calm and controlled mission commander who mentors her through the early stages of survival in space.

The film has a series of breathtaking set pieces – collapsing Hubbles, spinning astronauts in space, desperate space walks trying to grab any inch of objects to stop them drifting into space, collapsing space stations, burning up on re-entry – all of them shot with an elegance that marries technical excellence and dazzling camerawork and vision with a powerful story. A bag of tricks but one that is delivered with real heart.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel are part of an illicit affair in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Director: Céline Sciamma

Cast: Noémie Merlant (Marianne), Adèle Haenel (Héloïse), Luàna Bajrami (Sophie), Valeria Golino (The Countess)

There have been several well-known, successful films made that have focused on male gay couples but, perhaps because female directors are simply fewer in number, there have been fewer films that have focused on lesbian love stories. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a triumphant course correction to this, a film that is both a beautiful artistic statement and also a deeply moving and involving romance drama, subtly and truthfully told. 

Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a young female artist in late eighteenth-century France, who is summoned to an isolated island to paint the daughter of a Countess (Valeria Golino). The daughter – Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) – has been plucked from her chosen life in a convent after the death of her sisterm and is now set to marry a Milanese nobleman. A painting of her is needed to “seal the deal”. Problem is, Héloïse refuses to sit for any artist – so Marianne is to pretend to be her companion in order to study her and paint her from memory. However, as the trust between the two women grows, Marianne confesses to Héloïse – and destroys the painting – an action that finally leads to her agreeing to sit for a new painting. As the Countess leaves the two women alone on the island with just a maid, Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), the painting continues – as does the bond between them.

Sciamma’s film is beautifully made, an artistic triumph of intense feeling that helps us forge a deep emotional bond with these two women. Sciamma uses mid shots and close-ups for almost 70% of the film, an effect that brings the women’s faces – and the often micro-emotions that cross them – into sharp focus, as well as building a stunning sense of intimacy between them and the audience, as if we are pressed close up against them. It allows us as well to really feel the growing physical closeness between the two women, as they more and more share the frame. 

Sciamma only breaks away from these to longer shots when the camera moves outside of the house – to capture the women walking to and from the house across the island’s beach – or when disagreement has broken between them. The effect is stunning, totally immersive, and allows the two actresses to beautifully convey a deeply felt courtship that takes well over half the film to flower into an actual relationship after a prolonged, hesitant, second-guessing courtship.

Noémie Merlant is wonderful as Marianne, the artist who has struggled all her life as a woman in a man’s world, restricted by what she is and is not allowed to paint (from themes to nude men – which are of course out). Marianne is a woman with a thick skin, who is careful to avoid opening herself up, but eager to form a bond beyond this. The “artist” of the relationship, she has spent her life observing the world but only rarely allowed herself to be part of it. Her quietness is neatly contrasted with Héloïse’s more noticeable immediate chill, which is itself a careful shield from a world where she has no choices, but reveals a deep longing for emotional and intellectual freedom and a humming tenderness and gentleness. It’s an equally superb performance from Adèle Haenel.

Both women are struggling to express themselves in a men’s world. A man hardly speaks in the entire film (and other than in the film’s opening and coda, they don’t even appear) but the presence of men hangs over the entire film. The little commune of independence that Marianne, Héloïse and Sophie form – a very equal, comfortable naturalness where they cheerfully exchange roles, with the maid relaxing while the mistress cooks – can only exist while men are distant. The judgements and decisions of men affect all their lives – from Marianne’s painting to Sophie’s pregnancy, which the women work together to avert. 

When we do see men they are distant and selfish. On the boat over to the island at the start of the film, not a single man lifts a finger to save her painting gear after it is dropped in the ocean (forcing Marianne to dive in herself); at the film’s conclusion, the male servant who arrives promptly takes the centre of the kitchen and demands to be served dinner. The women’s enjoyment of leading their own lives – from their relationship, to Marianne’s triumphant decision to sketch a recreation of Sophie’s abortion, capturing a moment no man would ever choose to paint (or have a clue how to) stresses that, never mind sexuality, women got to make very few decisions of their own in the eighteenth century.

But it’s the relationship that is central, and it’s beautifully and organically developed with an immensely involving delicacy. Every beat is perfectly placed and the effect is overwhelmingly emotional. Sciamma uses music only three times in the film: once Marianne’s enthusiastic to recreate Vivaldi on a harpsichord for Héloïse’s enjoyment early in the film (a touching sign of her eagerness to share her passions), again for a haunting but beautiful moment of singing from a group of peasant women on the beach, and finally a powerful echo of the movie’s first use of music, surely bound to take its place as one of the great endings of film. 

For the titular painting itself, the one that captures Marianne’s feelings about Héloïse rather than the one she paints for the suitor, it appears only briefly on screen and we never see its creation. What we see is the moment that inspired it – a Héloïse so wrapped up in Marianne that she never even notices her dress catch fire in a bonfire on a beach – and it’s that which is truly important. At that moment we know everything about what that moment means to both women, and the force of a love that will last the lifetime of both women and shape their emotions and lives in profound ways. Sad, beautiful, joyful, triumphant Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a great piece of film-making.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)

Maggie Smith excels in stately literary drama The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Director: Jack Clayton

Cast: Maggie Smith (Judith Hearne), Bob Hoskins (James Madden), Wendy Hiller (Aunt D’Arcy), Marie Kean (Mrs Rice), Ian McNeice (Bernard Rice), Prunella Scales (Moira O’Neill), Alan Devlin (Father Quigley), Rudi Davies (Mary)

Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) is a lonely, frustrated Irish spinster who never found her place in the world. Arriving at her new lodgings in Dublin, Judith leaves behind her a whiff of scandal and a slight air of being someone you don’t want in your home. However, while her superior manner may not fool everyone, it’s enough to spark the interest of chancer James Madden (Bob Hoskins) brother of Judith’s lodger Mrs Rice (Marie Kean) – who is not remotely fooled by Judith’s pretence at upper-class gentility. While Judith wonders if romantic love may, after all, finally be round the corner for her with Madden, Madden himself wonders if the starting investment for his next dream is in his grasp.

Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Brian Moore’s novel is a stately passion project. An adaptation that Clayton had worked for years to bring to screen, it’s a quiet and respectful picture that moves with a graceful serenity over its runtime, covering emotional territory but never quite sparking into life. Clayton’s adaptation of the book is precise and perfect in nearly every way, with the film very true to Moore’s style and his ability to capture the domestic tragedy of small-scale, disappointed lives. But it’s not quite a film that hums with inspiration.

What inspiration it has is bound up with Maggie Smith’s superb (BAFTA winning) performance in the lead role as Judith herself. This is surely some of Smith’s finest work on screen, perfectly capturing every beat of this character study. Judith Hearne is a woman who relies on her upper-class background – her airs and manners – to cover up the facts of her poverty and, even more importantly, her chronic alcoholism. Couple this with her self-loathing, her confused attitudes towards God and her (barely consciously aware) mixed feelings for her deceased aunt (Wendy Hiller in imperious form in flashbacks) and she is a woman reeking of disappointment, depression and oppression as much as she does the booze she knocks back.

Smith’s performance progresses throughout the film, from a veneer of assurance to an increasingly poignant and tough to watch collapse into starkly raw emotional disintegration. Desperate in ways she hardly understands for emotional (and physical) content for another, she’s almost touchingly over-enthusiastic when offered the olive branch of friendship of a man, and the self-loathing and loneliness that channel her collapse into brutal alcohol-driven meltdowns show Smith holding nothing back but never once heading over the top. Smith totally understands how to get the balance between quiet tragedy and emotional force, constantly balancing the two expertly. 

It’s her performance that is a triumph of small moments that build over time to carry emotional force, from her careful arrangement of a room to her confused slightly timid eagerness to please when in conversation with Madden. Smith’s superb in the role, never anything less than real her eyes little windows to the depths of sadness in her soul.

It’s a shame that the rest of the film doesn’t quite measure up to her and that, despite the force of her performance, the film never quite manages to capture the overall impact of domestic tragedy that the film needs in order to be something more than just a gracefully filmed package around a superb central performance.

Too many other plot directions end up in cul-de-sacs or never get explored. Madden’s frustrated sexual feelings – and his eventual assault on housemaid Mary (a decent performance by Rudi Davies) are simply never explored any further. Bob Hoskins gets short-changed with a character that doesn’t really go anywhere and whose darker side is demonstrated but then never referenced again. The film gives such force to the damage of Judith’s alcoholism and depression that her struggles with the church never quite gain the force they need. This is despite some sterling work from Alan Devlin as a bullying but empty churchman, not interested in hearing about problems that can’t be solved with doggerel and dogma.

The finest subplots feature Ian McNeice is superb as the bloated wastrel son of the landlady, a spoiled, lazy former student claiming to be working on the next great Irish poem (a work he estimates will take him at least another 5 years), but largely spends his time swanning around the house causing problem and sniping arrogantly at the residents. Marie Kean is also fine as the arch landlady who sees through all deceptions, other than her son’s.

It’s a shame that the film itself – for all the excellence of Clayton’s work – doesn’t quite come together into a really coherent package. What it kind of misses is perhaps the sort of sharp, knowing observation and dry wit that Alan Bennett bought to so many similar small-scale stories of wasted lives in Talking Heads. The film is on a grander scale than those, but somehow carries both less weight and less insight than an average Bennett monologue. Smith is superb – possibly a career best – but the film itself is more something to be admired than remembered.

Colette (2018)

Keira Knightley tries her best in this light but safe biography Colette

Director: Wash Westmoreland

Cast: Keira Knightley (Gabrielle Colette), Dominic West (Henry Gauthier-Villars/Willy), Eleanor Tomlinson (Georgie Raoul-Duval), Aiysha Hart (Polaire), Fiona Shaw (Sido), Denise Gough (Missy), Robert Pugh (Jules), Rebecca Root (Rachilde), Julian Wadham (Ollendorff)

In the era of #metoo what could make for a more relevant storyline today than this biography of Gabrielle Colette (Kiera Knightley), a young woman who marries literary playboy Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West) aka Willy. Henry brings her back to Paris, and reveals the secrets of his success – he is the front man for a host of ghostwriters, producing articles and even novels for the public. Colette writes a novel for the “factory”, based on her own childhood – Claudine àl’école – which Willy initially rejects but later publishes under his own name (after he has suggested revisions to improve its plot and general raunchiness). The book is a smash – and Willy is a sensation – as are the sequels, but the growing frustration Colette feels at her lack of recognition, combined with the growing sense of freedom she finds in their open marriage, starts to lead her to question what she wants from her own life.

Colette is a decent, rather middle-of-the-road and middlebrow literary biography, that dabbles with controversy and racy content, but essentially follows a fairly traditional structure of our hero finding her own voice. The most interesting thing about it, despite the obvious surface message of the woman exploited by a man, is to suggest that while Willy certainly profited from Colette’s work, he was also the primary driver in her development as a writer and that the two of them maintained a stable working partnership for years until events led to their collapse. 

Much has been made in particular of a scene where Willy locks Colette into a room to write – and there isn’t a single review that hasn’t mentioned it – but, in the context, it’s Colette who has failed to focus on the writing (which the pair have already been paid for), or wdo the work she has committed to do, much to Willy’s disappointment when he returns to the country home that the advance for the book has paid for. While her objections are at first furious she swiftly settles into writing in the room (and there is no suggestion that this event is any more than a single one-off, a shock tactic from Willy to get Colette creating again). This isn’t to say the film is suggesting that Colette shouldn’t have received all the credit and freedom from the start, but it does raise more interesting questions: yes Willy was taking advantage of her, but yes he also pushed her to achieve things she would never have done herself.

It’s all part of Dominic West’s superb performance as Willy, skilfully balancing a man who (until the final act of the film) is neither flat-out villain or misunderstood hero, but a man of shades of grey: flawed, selfish, lazy, thoughtless but also encouraging of his wife’s exploration of her own sexuality and creativity, supportive and capable of acts of charming sweetness and kindness. Westmoreland makes clear that for much of the marriage their relationship was functional and a good match, for all it was founded on the false sands of Colette being denied the public credit for her own work. Sure he spunks their money up the wall continuously, but he also helps her become an artist. 

For all the film’s workmanlike structure and obvious telling, this does make for a far more interesting version of the story than the straight “ogre-victim” story you might expect, even if it does start to get a bit bogged down in sexual shenanigans. The mostly focus around bisexual American socialite Georgie (Eleanor Tomlinson with a soapy Southern accent), who becomes the lover of both Colette and Willy. It’s part of the sense of Colette questing for an identity, but the idea of what this is and what the journey is never quite solidifies into something really incoherent. Though I suppose you could argue the journey is Colette realising she doesn’t need Willy, and that shorn of him she can survive far better on her own than he can without her.

Part of this is connected to Keira Knightley’s solid, but not quite deep enough, performance as Colette. As is often the way with her best work, Knightley works her socks off here and is clearly completely committed to the role and the film – but she just isn’t quite capable of elevating the depths of her skill to meet the full demands of the film. She doesn’t disgrace herself at all, but it’s a performance that never had enough fire and life to really become compelling.

It means you don’t quite get the powerful feminist message the film is aiming for. Knightley’s performance isn’t quite strong enough to counter-balance West, and the film’s failure to put together a compelling story line around what Colette actually wants – the film eventually settles for a rather ill-thought out phrase about wanting to lead her own life – means it peters out without much impact. There is a powerful story in here around women being denied recognition for their own talents and skills, but it never quite coalesces as it should.

Philomena (2013)

Judi Dench and Steve Coogan go on a road trip into the past in Philomena

Director: Stephen Frears

Cast: Judi Dench (Philomena Lee), Steve Coogan (Martin Sixsmith), Michelle Fairley (Sally Mitchell), Barbara Jefford (Sister Hildegarde), Anna Maxwell Martin (Jane), Mare Winningham (Mare), Sophie Kennedy Clarke (Young Philomena), Kate Fleetwood (Young Sister Hildegarde), Sean Mahon (Michael Hess), Peter Hermann (Pete Olsen)

Describing Philomena as a sort of odd-couple buddy road movie with a heart seems like exactly the sort of trite journalistic spin that Coogan’s Martin Sixsmith spends most of the film deriding. But it’s a pretty accurate label, in this heartfelt and entertaining film that mixes looking at Irish church scandals, with both the shallowness and promise of journalism and a heartfelt meditation on the virtues of forgiveness.

Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), a former government spin doctor, dismissed from his position is struggling to find a new purpose for himself in writing and journalism. After a chance meeting with waitress Jane (Anna Maxwell Martin) at his editor’s New Year party, he is introduced to her mother Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) an Irish woman whose son was given up for adoption by the convent Philomena had been sent to over 50 years ago. She has spent years trying to find him, but made no progress. At first Sixsmith is dismissive of this human interest story, but slowly begins to invest in the story, as he and Philomena travel to the US to try and find her lost son.

Philomena is a film that doesn’t pull punches in its moral outrage at the decisions made by convents in Ireland in the 1950s to separate ‘sinful’ mothers from their children and find them new homes. The distress of the young Philomena is clear, and the steps the church took to put barriers in the path of helping these children and their parents reuniting (from burning records to bare-faced lies) are as infuriating as their moral superiority is outrageous in its hypocritical cruelty. But it’s not a film that wants to make a simple or political point. 

If the film has a problem with religion, it’s with the institutions that run it, not the faith itself. For all her ill-treatment, Philomena’s faith has been unshaken by all that has happened to her, and she like the film can separate the flaws of individuals from the principle of faith. The film may take aim at the Catholic church for making people feel sex is something dirty and shameful, but it won’t turn its guns on God himself. Near the film’s conclusion, Philomena even rebukes Martin for his rage (on her behalf) against the nuns who treated her wrongly, pointing out that she is the victim not him and that how she chooses to respond to it is her business – and if she chooses reconciliation and forgiveness that is her choice.

It’s a part of the films light and shade, very well drawn out in Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope’s script that mixes serious reflections on such matters as truth, faith and forgiveness with some good jokes and entertaining banter. The film deviates considerably from the true story it was based on – Philomena in real life never went to America – but in doing so it unlocks the story as a filmic narrative. The odd mother-son type relationship that the distant and cynical Sixsmith and the warm and engaging Philomena develop as they travel America gives the film heart, not least as Philomena constantly surprises Sixsmith with her worldliness and socially moderate views. The two characters end up bonding in a way that is straight out of a Movie-101 but it stills very real and touching.

A lot of that works so well because of the chemistry between the two leads. Judi Dench is just about perfect as Philomena. Dench expertly mixes the twinkle and charm of Philomena’s incessant Irish patter and capacity for small-talk (and fascination with everything from Mills and Boon to hotel toiletry) with a devastating emotional vulnerability and aching pain at the loss of her child, which has clearly been part of her life for so long she has learned to a certain degree to live with it. In one of her greatest screen performances, Dench will have you laughing one minute then spin on a sixpence with genuine emotional devastation or a capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation that seems impossible after what she has been through. The film builds real affection for both her old-world politeness charm and Irish loquaciousness and her emotional strength of character.

She’s well matched with Coogan, who uses his deadpan archness to excellent effect as Sixsmith. Although the film is called Philomena, it’s Sixsmith who represents the audience, and it’s his expectation of being emotionally manipulated by the story that we share at the start – and his growing investment in it that we also share. Coogan keeps the details very small, but along with a skill at delivering deadpan one-lines, he also has a considerable capacity for moral outrage and genuineness (well hidden) that serves the film very well. Sixsmith starts the story as self-pitying, supercilious and interested only in selling the story – the fact he ends it so bound up in rage at the treatment of Philomena, is a testament to Coogan’s skills for subtle character development.

Frears’ directs with a small-scale sharpness of camera and lack of flash that has been at the foreground of so many of his films, letting the focus lie on story and character. The road movie sequences that this film highlights so much are little triumphs of small-scale character story-telling, and while the jokes they feature – and even the emotional points they make – are familiar they are delivered with such grace and feeling they nearly all land.

Perhaps reflecting Coogan’s experience with the British media, it’s Fleet Street that emerges as the most 2D here, with Michelle Fairley playing a tabloid editor interested only in the story, delighting in tragic twists as they will make for even better headlines. It’s the film’s only real crudeness, but packaged within such a well-acted and richly entertaining whole, that makes a strong case for forgiveness not vindication being the true path to inner peace, it doesn’t seem to matter.