Category: Film about greed

Quiz Show (1994)

Ralph Fiennes excels as the man who as the answers he shouldn’t have in Quiz Show

Director: Robert Redford

Cast: John Turturro (Herb Stempel), Rob Morrow (Richard Goodwin), Ralph Fiennes (Charles Van Doren), David Paymer (Dan Enright), Paul Scofield (Mark Van Doren), Hank Azaria (Albert Freedman), Christopher McDonald (Jack Barry), Elizabeth Wilson (Dorothy Van Doren), Mira Sorvino (Sandra Goodwin), Allan Rich (Robert Kintner), George Martin (Chairman Oren Harris), Paul Guilfoyle (Lishman), Martin Scorsese (Martin Rittenhome), Barry Levinson (Dave Garroway)

Imagine, if you can, a time when we trusted everything we saw on television. When whole nations crowded around to watch a show, and would run home to make sure they didn’t miss it. When the people appearing on the box in the corner were like members of the family invited into our home. In our cynical age of streaming and distrust, such ideas are impossible to imagine. Now we doubt anything we are shown on the box – and the first brick in that wall fell into place with the rigged quiz show scandals on American television in the 1950s.

Twenty-One is the biggest hit on NBC, with reigning champion Herb Stempel (John Turturro) correctly answering every question that comes his way. But the show’s sponsor, Geritol, is worried: Stempel’s ratings are at a plateau, and they feel the show needs a new champion. So producers Dan Enright (David Paymer) and Albert Freedman (Hank Azaria) look to recruit the sort of face of Twenty-One the sponsors want – and find him in clean-cut, Ivy league, charming Columbia League instructor (or “Professor” as they insist on calling him – and Van Doren’s move from reminding him he hasn’t qualified for that title, to happily accepting it is telling in itself) Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes).

They offer Van Doren the chance to win the show by telling him the answers in advance, while offering Stempel a career in television if he will agree to throw the next edition of the programme. Both men are plagued with indecision, but Stempel throws the game and Van Doren provides the correct answer to his final question – the exact same question he had been asked at his audition. Van Doren, seduced by the fame, quickly agrees to be given the answers in advance of the show, but the unreliable Stemple is dropped by NBC and instigates Grand Jury proceedings. The records are sealed but this piques the interest of Congressional lawyer Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow), who begins to see the potential to “put television on trial” – while being deeply conflicted by his growing friendship with Van Doren, keen to be seen as co-operating with any investigation.

Quiz Show remains Redford’s finest directorial achievement by far, a rich, fascinating, beautifully made film with a profoundly rewarding and engrossing reflection on fame, television and the media in 20th-century America. Told at a gentle but compelling pace, probably the strongest weapon in its arsenal is a fantastically literate, well-constructed, dryly amusing and affecting script by Paul Attanasio. Scenes are beautifully assembled, crammed with well observed character beats and wonderfully quotable lines. It’s a script that would stand up extraordinarily well as a play itself, and Redford allows it plenty of room to breathe in his assured, unshowy and perfectly judged direction.

This is a film that analyses exactly how truth and entertainment are supposed to be inter-related. The rigging of quiz shows – and it was systematic across a range of shows on all channels – was a detailed lie to the American people. But, the film asks, what was the real harm of this? What are these quiz shows for? Tests of intellectual attainment or pieces of entertainment for the masses? As Scorsese’s Geritol executive says, people weren’t watching the questions, they were watching the money.

And money is where the villainy lies in this film. For a film rich in period detail, Redford makes clear that there is a definite sense of class that underlies all the action. Decisions are made on the show based on selling things – advertising hours and Geritol products. And there are people in this show – the heads of corporations like NBC – who are making millions out of peddling rigged entertainment shows to the people. And when the chips come crashing down, it’s not these executives who are in the firing lines; it’s the little people who were the face of the enterprise – the contestants themselves – who pay the price.

It’s the exact opposite of what Goodwin wishes to achieve when he starts his investigation. He wants to add some moral force, some legislative control, to what you can and cannot present as fact and fiction on television. What he fails to understand – and what the film does – is that deep down people don’t want this. They want the excitement and the thrills – and at the end of the day wouldn’t care less if they never found out everything presented to them was carefully scripted. This lasts today: do we care that comedy sketches are not improvised but carefully scripted? Do we care if game show contestants are carefully pre-selected? Again, as Scorsese’s sponsor representative states, all any investigation will accomplish is TV shows figuring out other ways to get the high ratings: and simpler questions and less erudite competitors will be the way to go.

Because it’s all the glamour and excitement and drama we like to watch, not displays of intellectual accomplishment. It’s something the film understands – and something that comes across very clearly in Ralph Fiennes’ exquisitely well-judged performance as Charles van Doren. A genuinely intelligent, decent man, Fiennes’ performance works so well because he makes clear that under the WASPish, patrician decency of van Doren is a fundamental shallowness, a laziness and hunger for the quick buck and easy success. Constantly, Fiennes’ confident grin and easy manner hide his unease and guilt at his conduct. But he clearly can’t help himself, a Faust wrapped up in his pact.

After all what would his father – the famous poet and academic Mark van Doren, played with a beautiful ease, grace, intelligence and iron-clad honesty by Paul Scofield, a sublime actor at the top of his game – think of this all if he found out? The scenes between the two men – one the proud, loving but quietly demanding father, the other the successful, shallow, quietly desperate son – are the film’s strongest moments, consumed with the tension of the unspoken. We can see the pressure of familial expectations reflected elsewhere in Herb Stempel’s wife’s disappointment at finding that Stempel himself was a coached as much as van Doren.

John Turturro goes larger as Stempel, a bitter and frustrated man addicted to the attention and glamour TV has bought him which he has always felt has been denied him. Stempel’s desire for fame, his assumption of a persona in the public eye which is part studied, part eagerness to please his audience, gets to the heart of TV’s power. It’s the box in every room, and it can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. It’s a box with the potential to weave magic – and it’s the tricks behind the magic that are difficult to see. For all we know the magician doesn’t saw the assistant in half (as Hank Azaria’s crude producer puts it), it makes it hard to enjoy the trick when you know it is one.

It’s ideas like this that the film gets to so cleverly, and which turns the American quiz show into an intelligent metaphor for the corrupted ambition of America itself. The dream is to get to the top, and this was a way of offering a short cut for it – and all to help big business sell its products and make money. This is the subversive truth at the heart of Quiz Show, but it’s easy to forget as we, like the American people, have the obvious villains of the ordinary contestants be crucified by the media, rather than those who really profited. Redford’s film is smart enough to constantly remind us of this, to humanise the contestants and to show the darker elements underneath. Quiz Show is a great film.

The Last King of Scotland (2006)

Forest Whitaker dominates as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland

Director: Kevin Macdonald

Cast: Forest Whitaker (Idi Amin), James McAvoy (Nicholas Garrigan), Kerry Washington (Kay Amin), Gillian Anderson (Sarah Merrit), Simon McBurney (Stone), David Oyelowo (Dr Junju)

Forest Whitaker won every award going for his performance as Idi Amin. A film can perhaps only begin to scratch the surface of what a megalomaniac nutjob Amin was, and the depths of his depravity and corruption. But The Last King of Scotland is perhaps less focused on that, and more on the pull that people as charismatically self-absorbed and larger-than-life like Amin can have on the weak-minded and, on a wider basis, how this can end up with him leading an entire country on a not-so-merry dance, everyone desperate to gain the love and approval of a single dominant personality.

That weakling is Dr Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) a young medical graduate from Edinburgh, who is arrogant, cocksure over-sexed and over-here in Uganda, keen for adventure and to get as much sex and experiences in as he can while he’s over here. A gap-year student with a desire for the easy life, after a chance meeting Garrigan becomes chief-physician and confidant to Amin, a man with a deep love for Scotland and who likes to think of himself as a father to those around him. It takes Garrigan a long time to realise that this indulgent, if bad-tempered, charismatic father-figure is in fact a brutal dictator, his eyes eventually opened by the experiences of one of Amin’s wives Kay (Kerry Washington) who pays a heavy price for mothering an epileptic and adultery. Will Garrigan escape from Uganda?

Macdonald’s film gets a brilliant sense of both the exotic appeal of Uganda at the time (and or Amin) and it’s heat-embroiled danger. The camera work is flooded with yellows and grimy details, that makes every scene feel like its bathed in heat (and later danger) as well as giving it a documentary realism (helped by its use of handheld and immediate footage). The story of the film itself is a fairly basic morality tale, but these stories work because of their universality and it’s clear that Garrigan’s selfishness, shallowness and self-interest is going to lead to a terrible awakening.

The film’s real strength is Whitaker’s tour-de-force as Idi Amin. Whitaker is an actor who has been straining at the leash for an explosive roll, and he gets one here. If ever there was a part that would allow an actor to let rip it’s the one, with Amin part Hannibal Lector, part decadent Roman emperor, a low-rent Hitler with an ego larger than his country. But the bombast and childish fury work because it is built within the framework of a sort of puffed-up magnetism, a charismatic “hail-fellow-well-met” bonhomie that suggests this guy could be the best fun in the room. So dripping in assurance and confidence is Amin that he becomes strangely attractive – and the sort of all-powerful force of nature that would have most of us smiling if we caught a word of approval from him.

The trick of the film is to front-and-centre this lighter, fun-loving aspect. It’s easy to enjoy it like Garrigan as Amin charms the audience as much as he does its lead character. Sure there may be violence at the margins, but good-old-Amin is just doing what needs to be done. He’s brilliant with the people. It’s funny when he on-a-whim appoints Garrigan to decide a major architectural pitch from several countries. He’s playful and enthusiastic. When he’s cross with people he seems at first more disappointed than angry. It’s only as the film goes on that we realise we have been gaslit as much as Garrigan, that Amin may be a fun guy but he also cares nothing for anyone and that the more his focus shifts away, the more we see his callous paranoia and lack of any moral scruples.

Certainly we start getting a sense of the ruthlessness he is prepared to exhibit to enforce his rule in Uganda and the brutality with which he will suppress any resistance. Aides killed in a failed assassination attempt illicit no sympathy. He feels no guilt or responsibility for anything he does. In one brutal moment he berates Garrigan for failing to counsel him against expelling all Asians from Uganda. When Garrigan protests he did, Amin only responds with “Yes, but you did not persuade me Nicholas!” the sort of inverted logic practised only by the insanely self-obsessed.

Whitaker’s performance powers all this, a magnetic masterclass in insanity, charisma and paranoia. He’s well matched by James McAvoy (the film’s real lead) whose performance is similarly a masterclass is shallowness and petty triteness. If anything the film is almost too successful in this. A Garrigan is such a little arsehole it takes quite a force of will to build up any sympathy for this serial shagger playboy. It’s capable to think as the fire turns on him that perhaps he deserves this – and the number of (mostly black) characters who lay down their lives to protect him starts to get a bit wearing after a while.

Because this in part is a film where actual Ugandans are not heard that much. The two principle characters we see are both victims: Kerry Washington in a thankless part as the attractive young wife you just know from day one Garrigan will climb into bed with and David Oyelowo as the sort of noble doctor you only seem to find in movies. For all its horror at Amin’s crimes, it’s still largely filtered through the eyes of a young, white, innocent abroad who sees up-front the dangers but the real victims of Amin, the Ugandans themselves, are clichés or elevated clichés.

While you could say that was not the point of the film, it still means we miss some of the real danger and psychopathy of the leading character, so absorbed are we in seeing the increasing peril of the white man caught up in it all. It’s why The Last King of Scotland doesn’t quite work as well as it should, any why it settles in the end for a being a morality tale plot-boiler about a monster at the heart of the forest, rather than a deeper and more intelligent film about the tragedy of an African state. It’s still enjoyable for all that, but it could have been more.

The Passenger (1975)

Maria Schneider and Jack Nicholson hit the road in Antonioni’s partly frustrating, partly masterful The Passenger

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Cast: Jack Nicholson (David Locke), Maria Schneider (The Girl), Ian Hendy (Martin Knight), Jenny Runacre (Rachel Locke), Charles Mulvehill (David Robertson), Steven Berkoff (Stephen)

Ever wanted to jack in your life and have a go at being someone else? It’s a temptation we’ve all felt at one time or another, that chance to make a completely fresh start free of all those burdens and expectations of our own lives.

It’s a temptation thrown in the way of David Locke (Jack Nicholson) a British-American journalist, trying to make contact with rebel groups in the deepest Sahara deserts of Chad. Returning, after a failed excursion, to his ‘hotel’ in the tiny, beat-up village in the middle of the desert he finds that the only other resident, an Englishman, has died of a heart attack. The two man have a physical similarity, enough for Locke to decide to swop places with the dead man and leave Chad under a new identity as David Robertson. Curious to follow the details left in Robertson’s appointment diary, Locke finds that he has taken the identity of an arms dealer – making sense immediately of why Robertson was also in the hotel at the time – forcing Locke to stay one-step ahead of both the arms dealers and his wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) and producer Martin (Ian Hendry) keen to talk to him about ‘Locke’s’ death.

If that sounds like it might be an action packed thriller – you’d be wrong, because let’s not forget that this is an Antonioni film, and if there is one thing you can expect from the revered auteur of the Art-House, it’s that his films are mysteries wrapped in enigmas. The Passenger is no exception, a slow, intriguing mood piece that only partially allows the audience even half a chance to puzzle out what it’s about, mixed with striking images and haunting sequences of fundamental unknowingness. Despite the paragraph above there is almost no plot in The Passenger, with the film instead focused on themes of alienation, existentialism, destiny, fate and identity. In other words all the big stuff.

Much of this is captured in the character of Locke. Played by Jack Nicholson in a stripped-down, purged style a million miles away from the “Jack” of legend, Locke is a blank. We spend almost the entire film with him, but learn virtually nothing about him. What desires or miseries or depressions drive him to abandon his life and head out into a new life? We have only vague whispers about an unhappy marriage (with a wife having an affair with someone else) and a general listless dissatisfaction with his own life and career. Locke is a character yearning for some kind of release, some kind of higher meaning – the happiest he seems to be in the movie, is hanging over the side of a cable car, arms outstretched, pretending to fly over the waters below. It’s a freedom like that – some sort of total unshackling from the modern world altogether – that he seems to want or need.

So why doesn’t he go for it? Why doesn’t he just junk Robertson’s appointment diary and escape properly into the wide world, well beyond the reach of Chad rebels, curious wives and BBC Producers? Perhaps because he is a Passenger himself, a man who lacks the essential will and freedom of purpose to make his own destiny, to escape the structure of a world he finds so constricting? Instead, he seems bound of a wheel of fire, compelled somehow to continue following some sort of structure unable to yank himself fully free of the chains of this modern world. He wants to be a free spirit, but he remains a little man, to whom events happen, who is approached by people, who follows directions not forging his own path.

He gets as close as he can to opening up by talking to a passenger of his own, a mysterious girl (played with an unaffected naturalness by Maria Schneider that is part graceful reality, part wooden stiffness but works perfectly) he encounters while following Robertson’s trail. He first spots her sitting on a bench in London, then sees her again atop Guadi’s La Pedrera in Barcelona. Is this coincidence? Is this fate? Destiny? Or is this a curious suggestion that the girl may be more than she seems? None of these questions is answered by the film, but it fits perfectly in with the unknowing vagueness and quizzical unpredictability of its events. Hammering home the blank unknowability of Schneider’s character, she isn’t even named in the film. She joins Locke on his journey, but her motivations are as vague as his – is it escape, a bohemian lark, a curiosity that guides her? Who knows?

The film continues in this vein, showing Locke drifting from Chad to the UK to Berlin, Barcelona and Seville, never seeming to allow Locke more than a few seconds of freedom. Is the film asking if there is any such thing as true freedom, that even after swopping lives Locke still finds himself locked down into following a series of pre-arranged duties, like a train on a line? It’s not clear, but it’s beautifully filmed. Antonioni’s mastery of the camera shines throughout the film, and it’s full of haunting and immersive imagery, not least in his skilful use of locations and framing, with Locke and the Girl frequently positioned oddly or even dwarfed by the architecture and locations around them, from the plains of the desert to the towers of Gaudi.

Antonioni also saves for this film some sequences which are simply breathtaking in their cinematic mastery and beauty. His control of technique is near faultless – while his art house vagueness might have you pulling your hair out at points, these sequences will have you winding the film back just to relax in their skill and confidence again. Early in the film, we see Locke sit and fake his passport in his Chad hotel – oh for the days when identity theft was as simple as glueing a new photo into a passport – the camera smoothly moves around him, while he listens to recordings of Robertson and he meeting, until it settles onto the balcony (all this in one take) at which point Robertson walks into frame and continues the conversation, Locke following him and, there we go, Antonioni has taken us suddenly into the past. Without a single cut, the camera follows the conversation before panning back round to Locke sitting once again writing.

It’s a sequence that cineateases would be raving about, if it wasn’t dwarfed by the film’s penultimate shot, a stunning seven-minute single take that would be simplicity itself to make with CGI and Steadicam today, but was somewhere achieved without the invention of others. Starting on a single shot of Locke’s Seville hotel room, the pan slowly focuses on events outside the grilled window, the camera slowly zooming in on the outside until it passes through the grill and rotates 180 degrees back to see the room from the outside, while the Girl and other mysterious people arrive and leave outside. It’s a beautiful, brilliant, sublime, masterful piece of cinema. It’s compelling, surely one of the greatest “one-take” shots in all of cinema. Simply perfect. Directors could sit and dream of making such a shot.

Antonioni’s masterful direction and wilfully obtuse exploration of his themes makes for a film that is at time frustratingly unreadable, but also crammed with opportunities for the viewer to insert their own views and interpretations, something that is only going to become more tempting (and rewarding) with repeated viewings. Alongside that, it’s a simply beautiful and sublimely made piece of cinema – and if for no other reason deserves your time.

King of Thieves (2018)

Michael Caine leads the Old Lags on one last hurrah in the misjudged King of Thieves

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Michael Caine (Brian Reader), Jim Broadbent (Terry Perkins), Tom Courtenay (John Kenny Collins), Charlie Cox (Basil/Michael Seed), Paul Whitehouse (Carl Wood), Michael Gambon (Billy “The Fish” Lincoln), Ray Winstone (Danny Jones), Francesca Annis (Lynne Reader)

In 2015, a group of old lags robbed a safety deposit company in Hatton Garden. Over the Easter weekend, the gang broke while the facility was empty, drilled through a wall, climbed into the safe and cleared out almost £14 million in cash, diamonds and other goods. The crime captured the public imagination largely because the robbers, bar one member of the gang, were all over 60. This country has a certain nostalgia for rogues, and a tendency towards a condescending affection for the aged. In real life, the only thing remotely charming about these hardened criminals, many of them with extremely violent backgrounds, was their age.

James Marsh pulls together a great cast of actors for his heist caper. Brian Reader, the brains behind the operation, is played with gravitas by Michael Caine. Terry Perkins, the man who cuts Reader out of the profits, is played by Jim Broadbent. Tom Courtenay, Ray Winstone, Paul Whitehouse and Michael Gambon play the rest of the lags while Charlie Cox is the young tech expert who brings the possibility of the heist to Reader’s attention. With a cast like this, it’s a shame the overall film is a complete mess from start to finish.

I watched this film after first watching ITV’s forensically detailed four-part series, Hatton Garden, covering the heist in full detail. That drama was far from perfect, but it was vastly superior to this. The main strength of Hatton Garden was that it never, ever lost sight of the fact that this was not a victimless crime. Real-life small businesses went bust due to property lost in the heist. Families lost priceless, irreplaceable heirlooms. Items of hugely sentimental value have never been recovered. Lives were damaged. On top of that, Hatton Garden stresses the grimy lack of glamour to these thieves, their greed, their paranoia, their aggression and their capacity for violence. Far from charming rogues, they are selfish, greedy old men who fall over themselves to betray each other and are clueless about the powers and abilities of the modern police force.

King of Thieves occasionally tries to remind people that these were hardened career criminals. But it also wants us to have a great time watching actors we love carry out a heist against the odds, like some sort of Ocean’s OAPs. James Marsh never manages to make a consistent decision on the angle he is taking on these men or the crime they carried out. It’s half a comedy, half a drama and the tone and attitude towards the burglars yo-yos violently from scene to scene. The end result, basically, is to let them off with a slap on the wrist.

“It’s patronising” rages Reader at one point at the media coverage of the crime, annoyed at how it stresses their age as if that somehow makes it a jolly jaunt. Never mind that the film does the same. The score contributes atrociously to this, a series of jazzy, caperish tunes that echo the 60s heydays of these violent men (Reader and Perkins had both stood trial for murders, and were lucky to get off) punctured with some cheesily predictable songs. Tom Jones plays as our heroes comes together, and Shirley Bassey warbles The Party’s Over as things fall apart. The old men banter and bicker about the confusions of the modern world like a series of talking heads from Grumpy Old Men and the general mood is one of light comedy.

The film does try and darken the tone in the second half, post-robbery, as things start to fall apart and tensions erupt in the gang. Here we get a little bit of the mettle of the actors involved in this. Jim Broadbent, in particular, goes way against type as Perkins’ capacity of violence (even at a diabetes-wracked 67) starts to emerge. Tom Courtenay’s Kenny Collins emerges as manipulative liar, playing off the robbers against each other. Ray Winstone sprays foul language around with a pitbull aggression. Even Michael Caine roars a few death threats, furious at being betrayed by the gang.

But it never really takes, because the film never throws in any sense of the victims of this crime. Blood is never drawn in this slightly darker sequence of the film. Even the clashes between the gang are played at times for light relief. Anything outside the gang is ignored. The victims? Who cares. The cops? There is barely a policeman in this film who has a line.

The film undermines the whole point it might be trying to make – that these were dangerous men – by succumbing to romanticism at its very end. As the captured old lags await trial, we first see them laughing and joking with each other as they prep for court and then, as they walk towards the dock, the film throws up old footage of the actors from the 60s, 70s and 80s, stressing their romanticism. Look, the film seems to be saying: these were criminals, but they were old fashioned criminals, remember when Britain used to make its own underdog crims instead of being awash with hardened, violent gangs? It’s hard to take. And it’s like the whole film. A tonal mess that finally absolves the robbers who ruined lives and who still haven’t returned almost £10 million of ordinary people’s goods. King of Thieves isn’t charming. It’s alarming.

Beowulf (2007)

A CGI Ray Winstone faces off against monsters, temptation and fate in Beowulf

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Ray Winstone (Beowulf), Anthony Hopkins (King Hrothgar), John Malkovich (Unferth), Robin Wright (Queen Wealtheow), Angelina Jolie (Grendel’s Mother), Crispin Glover (Grendel), Brendan Gleeson (Wiglaf), Alison Lohman (Ursula)

Around the turn of the century a new style of film-making (and I guess acting) burst into the world of Hollywood. There had been special effects and there had been animation. We’d seen actors transplanted by CGI into any number of settings and locations. But motion-capture was something else. Its leading pioneer is of course Andy Serkis, and the art involved essentially placing a load of dots on people’s faces to record every inch of their movements and then feed this physical performance into a computer to create a CGI personality that unified actor and special effect.

Zemeckis, always a pioneering film maker, was fascinated by the art and had used it on previous films – but Beowulf was his real push to create something that couldn’t have been done without motion capture. So Ray Winstone – a bulky middle aged actor – is here transformed through the computer into a slim, muscular man in his early thirties. Winstone plays Beowulf himself, and Zemeckis’ aim here was to bring to life in a way that had never been done before the ancient poem. And not only the humans would be motion captured: Grendel and his mother (played by Crispin Glover and Angelina Jolie) would also be powered by real-life human performances.

It makes a fascinating film visually to watch. Zemeckis’ camera work has the complete freedom to roam anywhere around the actors (every move they made was recorded into the computer from every angle). And he doesn’t hold back, with the camera swooping and sliding around every dimension and angle of the locations, often moving freely and swiftly with a series of engrossing tracking shots and fast moving sweeping panoramas.

It also means that having real performances behind every creature in the film adds a real human dimension to even the most vile monsters. Crispin Glover’s physical commitment – not to mention the searing, twisted pain in his every moment – humanises Grendel in a way his simple monstrous appearance never could. The later dragon has a real feeling of humanity behind it, for all its scales and arrogant cruelty. Angelina Jolie reported she felt surprisingly uncomfortable when she saw the final realisation of her performance as Grendel’s mother – imagined here as an extremely seductive succubus, permanently naked with perfectly formed curves – but the entire thing works because of the performance behind the animation.

Some of the motion capture isn’t always of course completely successful. There is something still slightly too shiny, slightly too polished about the faces – part of the film being a slightly strange halfway gap between animation and real acting. The eyes suffer most – for all the efforts of the animators there is something still slightly dead behind, something not quite of the human face about them. It’s something that you can’t help but spot, and can’t help but be disconcerted about.

But it largely comes second to some of the imagination that exists in this version of the story. Zemeckis’ film making is often visceral and bloody – and the action sequences are as involving as he manages to make the other sequences are engaging. Not everything works: Beowulf fights Grendel in the nude, and the decision to have Beowulf’s ‘bits’ constantly obstructed by a series of fortuously placed items smacks somewhat of Monty Python and seems tonally off from the rest of the film. But by and large it works.

It does this because the script from Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery mixes the original poem with something reminiscent of Macbeth. One of its key themes is the seduction of power and the inner guilt of heroes who know that they have feet of clay. Grendel is reimagined as the son of Hrothgar – seduced by Grendel’s mother with offers of power, he creates with her Grendel, the living embodiment of his flaws. Grendel’s mother represents the creeping temptation of greed, ambition and the “old ways” (the film plays up the Christianisation of the Vikings in the background throughout). She’s effectively all the witches rolled into one (but much hotter).

And Beowulf is ripe ground for our temptations as it’s made clear right from the start that – while clearly a great warrior – he is also a triumphalist blowhard who enjoys repeating and expanding his own myth. A story recounted about his fighting sea monsters during an epic sea swimming competition (‘It used to be just one’ comments best friend Wilfric) is a masterpiece of puffed up self-promotion on top of genuinely impressive deeds, Beowulf’s words diverging from the story we see on screen towards in the end is a neat foreshadowing of his eventual seduction by Grendel’s mother.

Beowulf isn’t an empty boaster though. He’s a sympathetic Macbeth who feels guilt about the “sound and fury” that his life story has become. The aged Beowulf in the second half of the film is weary, tired and full of self-loathing, his great name an oppressive weight he can’t live up to or escape from. He’s a man who knows all the time he has feet of clay, but the name of a God – and that the name is so important he can’t let anything puncture it. Wilfric twice refuses to allow Beowulf to divest his conscience: the legend is so important it’s been printed as fact.

Ray Winstone handles this all pretty well – even if a lot of this requires sorrow behind the eyes, that motion capture simply can’t provide – even if the transformation of his face makes him look more like Sean Bean than a younger version of himself. Hopkins and Malkovich embrace all the cavorting and expressive body movement of motion capture like the old hams they can be. The film’s real highlight is Robin Wright who makes a great deal of Hrothgar then Beowulf’s sad wife, unhappy, quietly aware of both her husband’s flaws and perhaps the only level headed person in the Kingdom.

Beowulf has some fine technical work, but its real lasting interest is the psychological depths it tries to explore in its hero. Far from the perfect warrior, he’s someone doubtful and doubting, whose insecurities and vulnerabilities grow throughout the film and finally – like a mix of Lear and Macbeth – only becomes fully sympathetic at the very end. It makes for an interesting remix of a story nearly older than any other in our culture.

Loro (2018)

Toni Servillo stands out as Berlusconi in Sorrentino’s scattergun satire

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Cast: Toni Servillo (Silvio Berlusconi/Ennio Doris), Elena Sofia Ricci (Veronica Laria), Riccardo Scamarcio (Sergio Morra), Kasia Smutniak (Kira), Euridice Axen (Tamara), Fabrizio Bentivoglio (Santino Recchia), Roberto De Francesco (Fabrizio Sala), Dario Cantarelli (Paolo Spagnolo)

No one films decadence like Paolo Sorrentino. Many of his films have gone overboard to demonstrate Italy’s shallowness, corruption and greed. Loro feels like the subject he has been building towards his entire career: the heart of the whirlwind himself, Silvio Berlusconi. Sorrentino’s film is about Berlusconi, but it’s as much about the Italy he has created and the impact on Italians themselves. Its title translates as “Them” – and the film juggles with the idea of which “them” it’s referring too.

The film follows the career of Berlusconi from 2006 to 2009, as a he deals with the aftermath of losing power and the boredom of having very little to do in his palatial mansion. All around him – like flies around honey – the newly rich try everything to gain Berlusconi’s attention, throwing lavish prostitute-and-drugs parties. But what does Berlusconi want? Is it more of the same, is it a return to power, is it a chance to do good, is it a chance to make amends, is it a return to the spotlight? Who is Berlusconi?

Sorrentino’s film follows his usual style, and makes full use of his dynamic and electric directorial style. Boy this guy loves to keep the camera on the move, and he combines it with some snappily filmic editing that creates a series of scenes that fit sharply together. Sorrentino really can cut the hell out of a picture, and his style lends itself perfectly to depicting the extreme hedonism at the centre of the lives of many people whom he makes films about. His fast cut editing style, dynamic camerawork and use of modern music stringing it all together make for a perfect visual language for the shallowness he sees in large parts of modern Italy. But this approach doesn’t always engage the viewer, leaving them watching the technique instead – and that’s arguably what happens here.

A large chunk of the first half of the film centres around Riccardo Scamarcio’s Sergio Morra, a fictional “businessman” from Southern Italy who uses attractive women and drugs to land lucrative government contracts from ageing officials. Just in case we are in any doubt, it’s made clear very quickly that Morra is unbelievably shallow, venal, corrupt and interested only on what he can take from his country. His life is one of unalloyed selfishness, centred around drug-fuelled orgies (filmed very well by Sorrentino of course!). Morra builds a partnership with Berlusconi’s fading mistress (extremely well played with more than a hint of tragedy by Kasia Smutniak) focused solely on getting as close as possible to power. Almost all of the first 45 minutes (and yes that is too long!) is centred around establishing Morra’s vileness and his empty world. It’s as clear a portrait of modern Italy captured in one man as you can wish for, but its constant unpleasantness and prolonged sex and drugs with little plot gets more than a little wearying after a while. We get it Paolo!

But Sorrentino wants to make a clear point here: Berlusconi’s Italy has given rise to people like this, people who have an interest only in what they can take from the country, people who think being able to throw the most lavish party, having the most money, making the loudest noise makes them “better” than regular people. It’s these people interpreting the image of Berlusconi as giving them a green light for greed. When we promote puffed up egotists and fun-lovers as our leaders, then grasping venal imbeciles like Morra with no sense of morality or decency see that as an invitation to join them at the top table.

After this introduction to Morra, when we finally meet Berlusconi himself it’s surprising how different he seems. Yes he’s a casual, shallow, rather grandiose figure – but in the hands of Toni Servillo, Sorrentino’s regular collaborator, he’s a more complex person than you might expect. Bored and a little depressed at home, Berlusconi also sees himself as far more than just a party animal turned politician. He’s a man, for all his shallowness and greed, who needs to believe that he is there for the good of the people. But what the film doesn’t quite do is “nail” him – perhaps because he is unnailable – but the film doesn’t feel like it lands a true blow. Or even makes a really clear point about the presidency of this man. Sorrentino’s anger is in every frame, but I’m not sure he really puts together a convincing – or completely engaging – argument about this.

Servillo’s performance as Berlusconi is the true highlight of the film, a complex mystery of a man who wants to be decent, but not enough to change or to actually carry out selfless acts. Sorrentino sees him as a salesman at heart – the salesman who sold himself as the corrupted answer to all Italy’s problems – and the film’s highlight is probably a sequence when Berlusconi girds his tired salesman’s loins to cold-call a random ageing woman, plucked from the phone book, to flog her a flat in an apartment block he hasn’t even started to build yet. It’s a neat capturing of what energises this man behind the fixed smile – and a sign as well of how little reality matters to this peddler of dreams. You can see why business partner Ennio Doris (played also by Servillo, making Doris a neat facet of Berlusconi’s own personality) pushes him to get back to selling and blagging to rebuild his confidence.

Sorrentino grounds most of the film in the growing disillusionment of Berlusconi’s wife Veronica, expertly played by Elena Sofia Ricci. Smart, quick-witted but too ready for too long to sacrifice her principles for the comfort of marriage to the loaded Silvio, Veronica becomes, if not exactly a conscience, at the very least a voice for sanity in Berlusconi’s world. In a film where the majority of the characters are gilded fronts like Berlusconi or soulless obscenities like Morra, she is the closest thing we have to a decent person.

Veronica’s growing sense of discomfort at the “me-first”, power and money above everything world that Berlusconi has created draws the viewer’s attention to the other “them” the film deals with. Yes, we have the party-loving elite here, but the other them are the people we hardly see – the regular Italians, the ordinary citizens. These intrude rarely into the film, but tellingly they dominate the final sequences of the film which deal with the aftermath of the L’Aquila earthquake. As firefighters rest from their labours in the ruined city – including saving a statue of Jesus Christ from a ruined church – the camera pans across their exhausted, sweaty faces staring wearily, while the word “Loro” remains on screen.

It’s in that final shot that Sorrentino’s film really seems to land. Because amongst all this partying and greed which has dominated – and often exhausted the viewer – we are finally reminded that the people really paying the price are the regular people, whose needs are not monitored, who are readily and easily forgotten. Sorrentino’s film may drift too often in really making a point or feeling like it nails Berlusconi. But when it makes points like this it really works.

The Founder (2016)

Michael Keaton accepts the praise as Founder of the McDonalds Business Empire

Director: John Lee Hancock

Cast: Michael Keaton (Ray Kroc), Nick Offerman (Richard McDonald), John Carroll Lynch (Maurice McDonald), Linda Cardellini (Joan Smith), B.J. Novak (Harry J. Sonneborn), Laura Dern (Ethel Kroc), Justin Randell Brooke (Fred Turner), Kate Kneeland (June Martino), Patrick Wilson (Rollie Smith)

McDonalds. The Golden Arches are ubiquitous, not just in America but across the whole world. But how did this happen? How did a small business – just one stand in a small town in America – suddenly become a global monolith?

Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) is a luckless travelling salesman, selling supplies to drive-in diners. In California he encounters a diner the likes of which he has never seen before: a walk-up restaurant serving high quality food in disposable packaging, instantly. The business is McDonalds, run by brothers Dick (Nick Offernan) and Maurice (John Carroll Lynch). Kroc instantly recognises the potential of the business, and strikes a deal to franchise the formula across America, although the McDonald brothers will maintain control over all changes. Kroc, however, has the drive and ambition the McDonald brothers lack – and he slowly begins to stretch and expand the deal, taking on more and more power. Eventually he will become “The Founder” of the business that bears his original partners’ names.

What’s interesting about The Founder is that it has a certain element of wanting to have its cake and eat it. It’s simultaneously a semi-celebration of American entrepreneurship and a condemnation of big business crushing the little guy. This sounds like it should make for a confusing film but actually it kinda works. It fits the complex world of major business successes – someone like Kroc had the skills and the ruthlessness to actually make McDonalds into a global super-company in a way the McDonald brothers never did. At the same time, Kroc is clearly incapable of creating anything himself (even most of his business-building ideas come from other people) and the McDonald brothers have the real “American” entrepreneurial invention to create something new.

So the film becomes an engaging story of how businesses grow and develop, which largely manages to remove Hollywood sentiment from the equation. Kroc isn’t exactly a hero – he’s selfish, ruthless and places himself first constantly – but he’s not exactly a villain either. He’s a downtrodden striver, who has too continually push to be accepted by those who look down on him. He has a sense of loyalty and love for his brand – even while he begins to shut the McDonald brothers out of their own business. Similarly the McDonald brothers have a homespun honesty to them, but they are also naïve and unrealistic in their demands and desires for the business.

The film relies a lot for its success on Keaton’s slightly tragic desperation in the lead role, his yearning to improve and better himself. The first half of the movie shows his charm but also demonstrates his business acumen, his genius in recognising that what the McDonald brothers have invented could work on a huge scale. He’s hard-working and initially luckless, and the snobbish knock-backs he receives from banks and investors when peddling an idea get us on his side – after all we know it’ll be worth billions. It’s a Capraesque spin: he’s the little guy bucking against the system who becomes the very monolithic monsterous system himself. We can’t even be certain where we see the flip.

What becomes clear is that Kroc himself is somehow empty, somehow slightly devoid of depth, a man able to move smoothly from concept to concept with no lingering sense of guilt. He discards the McDonald brothers (after copyrighting their name) with as much calmness as he drops his wife (Laura Dern, in a thankless part as The Loyal Wife). Despite this though, the film never brings itself to condemn Kroc. It’s a little in love with the chutzpah of Kroc’s success and his persistent positivism, while seeing those he has had to drop on the way as tragic victims of the monolithic American business success Kroc has created.

We are invited to have similar sympathetic feelings about the hapless McDonald brothers: innocents in a world of business, able to create something that can change the world but hopelessly incapable of translating it into the type of scale that it could achieve. The film doesn’t forget that the McDonald brothers are the victims here, and Offerman and Lynch are both superb as two brothers with a deep personal bond and a love for their business and each other. But it also partly follows Kroc’s line – these two do not have the vision and ambition to take their idea to the next level. They are innovators but they are small-scale ones. The film daringly doesn’t just take their side as the little guys crushed by the system; it also allows itself to consider if they to a certain extent failed themselves. They never learn either, accepting Kroc’s handshake agreement for future royalties at the end of the film, an agreement we are all too aware even when it is happening will probably never be met.

The film has a certain love for the Americana of McDonalds and fast food joints, and it’s both an advert for the triumph of the business (the customers are all uniformly happy, and the ordinary employees in Kroc’s empire are all wonderfully warm) and a sad testament to the small businessman being swept aside by the big company. It’s quite a feat for the film to manage both at the same time and remain coherent. It’s both an advert for and attack on McDonalds, but it holds both these ideas simultaneously at the same time really well. Well worth a watch.