Category: Historical biography

The Last Emperor (1987)

Bernardo Bertolucci directs the epic, intriguing but slightly hollow The Last Emperor

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Cast: John Lone (Puyi), Joan Chen (Wanrong), Peter O’Toole (Reginald Johnston), Ying Roucheng (Prison Camp Governor), Victor Wong (Chen Baochen), Dennis Dun (Big Li), Ryuichi Sakamoto (Masahiko Amakasu), Maggie Han (Yoshiko Kawashima), Ric Young (Interrogator), Wu Junmei (Wenxiu), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Chang), Jade Go (Ar Mo), Henry O (Lord Chamberlain)

In 1908 a toddler, Puyi, became the last Emperor of China – but in 1912, revolution made China  a Republic and he was reduced to only being Emperor of The Forbidden City, a place he has never left since 1908 and will not leave until 1924 when he is expelled from the city. As an adult Puyi (John Lone) remains a puppet, becoming Emperor of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, where he is again largely confined to his palace, his Empress Wanrong (Joan Chen) becoming an opium addict. After World War II, Puyi is imprisoned for ten years by the Maoist government, being re-educated into becoming an ordinary citizen of China.

Bertolucci’s film explores the life of this slight historical figure. I say slight, as Puyi is always and forever a puppet, buffeted by history. He owes whatever prominence he has to a quirk of fate, but never truly learns who he is or his purpose, only slowly realising his power is an illusion. It’s the main flaw of The Last Emperor – otherwise a sumptuous epic – that it is such a grand film about such a shallow person. Puyi is not particularly interesting in himself, and the film largely fails to turn him into an intriguing enigma. The Last Emperor – which hoovered up 9 Oscars, including Best Picture – is brilliantly made, frequently fascinating and breath-taking, but also strangely lifeless.

Bertolucci and producer Jeremy Thomas spent years raising the money and negotiating with the Chinese government to have unrestricted, exclusive access to the Forbidden City. It’s that which really makes the film effective. The first half of the film is set almost exclusively in The Forbidden City (flash forwards see the adult Puyi in post-war captivity, being questioned by his guards). The scale is stunning and is shot by Vittoro Storaro with a breath-taking opulence and fascinating eye for Chinese culture. Storaro also carefully distinguishes with colours each section of Puyi’s life, from the reds and golds of his childhood to the washed-out greens of his adulthood. The impact of this on screen remains impressive today – and Chinese co-operation produced almost 19,000 extras to populate it.

These early sections are the film’s strongest. Bertolucci was frequently intrigued with complex coming-of-age tales, balanced with leftish politics. The film is fascinated with the power/non-power of this child. He leads a strange dance of being a puppet and figurehead, who can still order his servants to obey his every whim. It’s an upbringing that would pervert any child – and Bertolucci shows it creates a man who lacks any sense of emotional awareness and maturity; not cruel as such, but unable to fully understand what it is to be human because he has never known anyone who is an equal.

His ‘power’ expresses itself in petulance, selfishness and sometimes acts of cruelty – and he becomes a man drifting through life, aware that he should feel more of a connection with people, but lacking the emotional self-awareness forming connections with people requires. It’s not helped by Puyi’s weak personality. Growing up effectively imprisoned – but all-powerful – in a single city means he constantly gravitates towards similar situations, be that a puppet ruler signing whatever he is told to in Manchukuo or expecting his servants to continue to dress him in prison (how is prison different really from the rest of his life?)

Bertolucci films this with an acute emotional understanding that counterpoints the wonderfully luscious scale of the film. All those expansive costumes, the gorgeous filming and the awe-inspiring location shooting helps us to understand the smallness and meekness of Puyi and his stunted emotional world. Only the arrival of an English tutor – played with an expressive playfulness by Peter O’Toole – shakes up this world and offers Puyi the chance of some sort of personality development. Sadly, his influence is all too short – and Puyi seems to take mostly the wrong lessons from it, of English exceptionalism and ‘doing your duty’ that convince him he’s got to try and maintain his position.

The first half of the film is breath-takingly, with Bertolucci carefully interweaving grace notes around Puyi’s lack of true parental love (his beloved wet nurse is expelled), his growing sexual awakening – from suckling at a late age to taking both a wife and a consort (and, for Bertolucci, the inevitable threesome scene – tastefully done). The bizarreness of this world, a tiny kingdom with its own rules and an empty figurehead living in a fantasy land are striking.

It’s after Puyi leaves that the film weakens. Perhaps knowing the Forbidden City sequences were the finest – and most gorgeous – parts of the film, most of Puyi’s life after is shunted into the final hour. This makes for rushed scenes and a number of “tell not show” moments, where characters bluntly (and swiftly) fill in various political and social events or openly state their thoughts and feelings. Puyi’s reasons for becoming Emperor of Manchukuo are only briefly sketched, but not as briefly of the characters of his new Japanese masters (Ryuichi Sakamoto – also the Oscar-winning composer – and Maggie Han, a seductive collaborator) as scenes race by as the film rushes towards its conclusion.

Perhaps also not surprisingly for an old Marxist (and with that need to secure the Chinese co-operation) the Maoist government gets a fairly easy ride, with the main representative of Maoist authority being a genial, supportive chap and the re-education camp treated as a genuine programme of self-improvement rather than indoctrination. But then you can also say it’s a sign of the film’s relative even-handedness – and it does touch on the Cultural Revolution (and its random denunciations) late, albeit with a gentle eye.

It’s a shame the second half of the film doesn’t hold up as well as the first half (a longer Director’s Cut fixes some of these problems), but the first half is intriguing, dynamically made and full of emotional insight. John Lone does a fine job in a rather thanklessly bland role as Puyi and Joan Chen moves from austere to depressed as his wife, but to be honest few other members of the cast make an impact (it’s one of the few modern Best Picture winners with no acting nominations).

Bertolucci’s film is superbly made, beautiful to look at, intriguing – and you can see its influence on Farewell My Concubine among others (Chen Kaige has a small role in the film, as does Zhang Yimou) – but it suffers slightly from being about such a non-person. You wonder how it might have worked better if it had kept a tighter focus – or skimmed over more of Puyi’s life rather than hurriedly trying to cover the whole lot – but what we end up with mixes the rushed with the extraordinary.

Out of Africa (1985)

Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in this sweepingly empty romance Out of Africa

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Robert Redford (Denys Finch Hatton), Meryl Streep (Karen von Blixen), Klaus Maria Brandauer (Bror von Blixen), Michael Kitchen (Berkeley Cole), Michael Gough (Lord Delamere), Suzanne Hamilton (Felicity Spurway), Rachel Kempson (Lady Belfield), Shane Rimmer (Belknap), Malick Bowens (Farah Aden), Joseph Thiaka (Kamante), Donal McCann (Doctor), Leslie Phillips (Sir Joseph Byrne)

In the 1980s Hollywood faced an identity crisis. Throughout the 1970s, the films the Oscars honoured and those that topped the box office were often one and the same. The industry saw itself as the purveyor of classy, intelligent, popular entertainment. But in the 1980s, people flocked to see the latest Rocky or Rambo film, instead of the likes of Kramer vs Kramer. Hollywood wanted to carry on feeling good about itself: so it honoured as “Best Picture” the sort of sumptuous, prestige products it wanted to shout from the rooftops about, even if people weren’t flocking to see them at the cinema in the same way. So something as mundane, average, tasteful and empty as Out of Africa hoovered up eight Oscars.

Based on Karen Blixen’s memoir of her 17 years (from 1913) owning and running a coffee farm among the British community in Kenya, the film reorganises a deliberately non-linear memoir (full of impressions and reflections, thematically arranged) into a simpler narrative, and throws in content from at least two biographies of Blixen (played by Meryl Streep). As such, the film charts her life, specifically her relationship with philandering and unreliable husband Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and love affair with British game-hunter Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford).

Pollack directs this epic with a clean, smooth, professional and lifeless tastefulness that makes it a long film full of pretty things, but a fundamentally empty experience. At the film’s conclusion, Karen is invited into the Men Only club for a drink where she is toasted. It feels like it should be the culmination of plot threads running throughout the film. But instead, its under-explored and unfocused, struggling for any attention. Rather than a culmination of a nearly three-hour experience, the moment feels unearned.

That’s about par for the course for a film ticking all the boxes of “prestige” movie making, but which tells us nothing at all. It’s clear Pollack has only a limited understanding of the intricate rules of the British upper-class community. We learn nothing about Africa, or the role of Empire there or the impact this had on the Kenyan people. Instead, the Kenyan people are seen as exotics or charming superstitious eccentrics.

The film is only interested in how beautiful colonial Britain was – the lovely clothes, the sumptuous set-design, the detailed props – and the gorgeous scenery. There is some focus given to the Kenyans – particularly Karen’s relationship with her servant Farah, very well played by a stern but wise Malick Bowens – but it is always defined as Karen visiting them, encouraging their education and pleading for their rights. There is more than a touch of the white saviour, and the film fails to really give us a sense of Karen gaining an understanding of the Kenyan people on their own terms, rather than hers.

That might be because the film is determined to turn the story into a straight-forward romance, giving most of its focus to Karen’s relationship with Denys. This is the root cause of most of the film’s problems, as Pollack casts two fundamentally unconnected actors. Streep gives a performance of such technical detail, you find yourself admiring the work while never really connecting with the character. Her Danish accent is perfectly studied, she has clearly read everything on Blixen she can find, and every single beat is perfectly observed. You can’t miss she is acting in every frame: there is nothing relaxed or truly intimate in the performance. It’s the work of a master craftsman.

This detailed excellence literally feels like it is happening in a different movie to the one Redford is in. Redford looks like he just stepped off the plane and started shooting. Pollack was convinced no English actor could play Denys in the sweeping romance he had in mind (Charles Dance anyone? Michael Kitchen – very good as Denys’ best friend – is far closer to what the part actually required, and would have been excellent). Redford was parachuted in and encouraged to play the role with his natural accent (is he still meant to be British? No idea).

The two performances never click together, and Redford’s Californian approach feels totally wrong for the Houseman-quoting, Mozart-playing, Great White Hunter he is meant to be. Not for one second can you forget this is the Sundance Kid – making it nearly impossible to buy into this relationship the film is trying to sell you, as well as making Streep’s Danish accent sound out of place (I mean why is she going to so much trouble when Redford can’t be arsed?).

All the romantic hair washing in the world can’t make these two stop being a chemistry free, jarring couple. Take away the sort of epic romance the film needs – the sort of thing The English Patient would do so right 11 years later – and all you really have left are two handsome actors in a very picturesque setting. Out of Africa looks lovely – but in a National Geographic way. The African Plains look wonderful, you’d have to do a poor job to make them look bad. Really the film is visually dull.

Pollack’s limitations as a director are revealed – he can’t give this the sweep and sense of the epic it needs and he can’t find depth in this canvas. Instead, everything is painted in the broadest brush strokes and any sense of romance it gets is from John Barry’s exquisite, luscious score. The film crams in as many shots of Africa as possible – but is bored witless by the story-telling and poetry that are supposed to be at the heart of Denys and Karen’s relationship. It rips the heart out of these two characters and their romance.

Out of Africa won all those Oscars – but feels like a box-tick exercise. Like the voters just thought everything in it musthave been Oscar-worthy. 1985 was a poor year for movies – perhaps only Ran, Brazil and Back to the Future have really grown in stature – but Out of Africa feels like the emptiest, least interesting, least effective prestige picture that ever scooped the Oscar. Nothing sticks in the memory – other than the repeated “I had a farm in Africa” line in Streep’s tongue rolling accent. Kitchen, Suzanne Hamilton and Brandaurer (charming and likeable as Blixen’s husband, despite playing a complete shit) are good, but nearly nothing else really works beneath its surface impact. Middle-brow, tasteful and pointless.

Amazing Grace (2006)

Ioan Gruffudd in full flight in the conventional but charming Amazing Grace

Director: Michael Apted

Cast: Ioan Gruffudd (William Wilberforce), Romola Garai (Barbara Spooner), Benedict Cumberbatch (William Pitt the Younger), Ciaran Hinds (Banastre Tarleton), Albert Finney (John Newton), Michael Gambon (Charles James Fox), Rufus Sewell (Thomas Clarkson), Youssou N’Dour (Olaudah Equiano), Toby Jones (Duke of Clarence), Nicholas Farrell (Henry Thornton), Sylvestra Le Touzel (Marianne Thornton), Stephen Campbell Moore (James Stephen), Bill Paterson (Heny Dundas), Jeremy Swift (Richard)

From 1782 to 1807 William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) fought a long – sometimes lonely – campaign to end the slave trade (and eventually slavery – the film confuses the two, with slavery continuing in much of the Empire for over twenty more years) in the British Empire. During that time, he competed with vested interests, parliamentary rivals and accusations of being a radical at a time when Britain was at war with Revolutionary France.

Michael Apted’s old-fashioned film covers this, hitting every beat you would expect for a biographical drama. It uses a traditional framing device of starting in the middle of the story: Wilberforce in 1797, depressed, hooked on laudanum and out of hope, revitalised by meeting Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai) who will become his wife. This makes for a perfect narrative tool as it means she can ask him questions like “tell me what happened” which serves as a neat entrée into a whole host of flashbacks sketching out in the swiftest means possible the history of abolitionism.

Amazing Grace could have been made in the 1930s, so closely does it hue to the classic rules of biopics. It’s practically a structural brother to The Life of Emile Zola, a hagiographical portrait of an (admittedly outstanding) man which shows the expected arc of moral awakening, early success, tricky mid-point, the sad years, getting the band back together for one final big push ending in friends and foes alike coming together to hail his accomplishments. It’s all threaded together with a script that carefully moves through every event, simplifies history down and sometimes wears its research rather heavily.

You can’t argue that it isn’t well-meaning and heartfelt, but its simplicity (and the careful traditionalism of its shooting) makes it look more like a well-made TV special than an actual movie. But if you are a sucker for such things, as I am, it has more than enough to engage you. It also makes a compelling case about the horrors of the slavery and allows a few moments of spotlight to fall on former slave turned abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (well played by Youssou N’Dour). It certainly has its heart in the right place, its passionate liberalism and sense of moral outrage very clear.

Gruffudd – his skill for playing reluctant moral authority and duty honed from playing Hornblower – is good as Wilberforce, his obvious investment in the subject matter clear. Garai doesn’t have much to do other than tee up flashbacks, but does it with charm. Many of the rest veer on the side of fruity: Hinds and Jones scowl effectively as slave-owning senior lords (for some reason they sit in the House of Commons; Jones is even playing a Duke for goodness sake!). Gambon twinkles as only he can as Charles James Fox. Finney hams up lustily as the blind John Newton. Best of all though are Sewell as an eccentric Thomas Clarkson and Benedict Cumberbatch in an early sign of star-quality as the morally divided, reserved but decent Pitt the Younger.

It all comes together into something that seems tailor-made for Sunday afternoons. Nothing wrong with that – and not every film needs to reinvent the wheel – and since it wears its heart so openly on its sleeve, you can’t help feeling warmth towards it. It’s a Spark notes look at history – and glosses over the fact that slavery itself continued for decades – but as hagiography it’s endearing and as a feel-good biopic it succeeds at what it sets out to do.

Munich (2005)

Eric Bana leads a team of Mossad agents in Spielberg’s uneven terrorism drama Munich

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Eric Bana (Avner Kaufman), Daniel Craig (Steve), Ciarán Hinds (Carl), Mathieu Kassovitz (Robert), Hanns Zischler (Hans), Geoffrey Rush (Ephraim), Ayelet Zurer (Daphna Kaufman), Mathieu Amalric (Louis), Michael Lonsdale (Papa), Marie-Josée Croze (Jeanette), Lynn Cohen (Golda Meir)

At the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist cell, Black September. The world was shocked and appalled. Israel responded with a hard-line anti-terrorist campaign, that saw Mossad teams traversing the globe, assassinating Palestinian leaders involved with Black September. They learned not only was terrorism a hydra, but that the moral high-ground erodes quickly when the shooting starts. Can terrorism be defeated by violence? Munich argues not: instead suggesting violence is a beast that feeds itself – an argument that, in 2005 in the fourth year of the War on Terror (the film ends with a shot of the World Trade Centre) was increasingly relevant to another country, traumatised by the slaughter of innocents.

Adapted by Tony Kurshner and Eric Roth, it’s based on a book Vengeance by George Jones about the man who claimed to be the leader of the Mossad cell (whether that is true or not is debated). He’s fictionalised here (to side-step that issue) as Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana). His team consists of driver Steve (Daniel Craig), explosives expert Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), forger Hans (Hanns Zischler) and clean-up man Carl (Ciarán Hinds) with Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) as their handler. The team hunt down and eliminate their targets – but as the mission goes on they pay a heavy cost, both in their eroding of their own moral certainties and in blood as they become targets for repercussions.

Spielberg’s film is his least flashy, least sentimental and (I suppose) most mature film, a cold-eyed, even-handed look at the Middle East conflict that acknowledges faults and consequences on all sides, draped in the muted colours and bleached out photography of 1970s conspiracy thrillers. It’s also a very long and very self-consciously important film, that makes mis-steps and at times is crudely obvious as well as being more interested in posing questions than presenting any answers. Where it is at its best, is demonstrating how campaigns like this are tasks worth of Sisyphus.

Munich takes a long, hard look at the cost of violence – both on its victims and its perpetrators. Death in this film is slow, painful and frequently disturbing. Shot people stagger and slump in drunken shock, dying slowly. Bomb victims are ripped apart, recognisable limps left hanging from walls and ceilings. Machine gun bursts tear bodies apart. The cost of inflicting this violence leaves increasingly deep psychological violence on the team (we don’t get to see if it does on the Palestinians, a limit to the films even handedness), as it becomes harder and harder to treat those they kill as faceless monsters, rather than men with families of their own.

Spielberg reconstructs the horror of the killings in Munich with a documentary realism, not shying away from the horror. It follows the appalling opening moments of the attack, with the athletes taken hostage and the shocked world media reaction. Spielberg returns later in the film to restage the final murder of the athletes at the Munich airport with sickening detail (perhaps too much – but more of this scene later).

Showing the impact of violence from both sides, Munich strains at always being even-handed (despite this both sides attacked it for bias). It’s an Israeli story so we mostly see the psychological impact of carrying out the violence on the Israeli team, and little of the Palestinian perspective. But the film throws in a chance meeting between Avner and what-could-be his Palestinian equivalent, where Avner is brutally told that, when fighting for their home, the Palestinians will never give up, and consider any price worth paying – attitudes he can’t help but recognise as he fights for his own home. The film has clear sympathy with the sufferings of the Jewish people, and their need for a home of their own – but wonders if this is the right way to defend it. Spielberg is a friend to Israel – but wants to be an honest one.

What starts out as clear and simple (a campaign against terror) becomes morally complex. The team’s first targets are sympathetic, family men. When Avner talks to a later bomb victim, he’s friendly and welcoming. A Palestinian cell they (accidentally or maliciously) end up sharing a safe house with, thanks to their mutual French contacts, are surprisingly relatable. The mission’s accomplishments are unclear – the targets are killed, but all that happens is more people take their place. Worse, those that do are only more infuriated by the campaign of violence.

That’s the question – how do you fight terrorism? It breeds on a belief of injustice and persecution – and Spielberg’s film suggests, all the campaign does is pour petrol on that fire. Avner becomes a paranoid psychological wreck by the end of the film, plagued with a loss of moral certainty. The film argues that the only result of all this has been the price he and other have made – an end to the violence is further away than it was at the operation’s beginning.

Spielberg’s film is strong on showing the pointlessness of this campaign. What it’s less strong on is answers. In many ways, the film boils down to a simple “deep down we are all the same, why don’t we just get along” message. While handsomely filmed and daring in its questioning about the futility of anti-terrorist (and indeed terrorist) action, it’s a simplistic film, largely lacking nuance. The characters are ciphers – Bana, for all his skill, plays a shell of a character, designed to make statements, who is alternately ruthless or questioning as the plot demands. Because the film strives so hard to remain even-handed, it brings little to the table itself in terms of proposed solutions, merely focusing on telling us what we know: an eye for an eye eventually makes his all blind.

It’s also a film that has more than its fair share of clumsy mis-steps. It’s view of the world is picture post-card in is simplicity. First thing we see in Paris, is a shot of the Eiffel Tower. Go to London and it rains. First shot in Holland is our characters on bikes. Its characters are largely plot devices, well played but rarely fleshed out in people who feel like human beings, more like mouthpieces to express viewpoints.

Most atrocious of all, the film concludes with a penultimate sequence staggering in its misjudgement. Retired and living in America, Avner makes focused, vigorous love to his wife intercut with the showing of the final deaths of the athletes in brutal detail. It’s tasteless, ill-judged and horrendously unclear. I suppose we are meant to think Avner is purging himself of his burden of guilt – but the scene is so appallingly done, so grossly detailed it comes across as both offensive and insultingly twee in using the deaths of real people (staged in detail) to help our lead character feel better about himself. When Spielberg does sex, he invariably gets it wrong – and does again here.

Munich is a very worthy film, but it’s too-long, dramatically simple, for all its daring commentary on the war on terror. It’s well-acted – Michael Lonsdale and Matthieu Almaric are very good as Avner’s French contacts, while Hinds is a stand-out among the team – but the characters are ill-formed and the entire film takes a very long time to make a very simple point. Well-made but a film trying a little too hard to always be profound.

Argo (2012)

John Goodman and Alan Arkin say hoorah for Hollywood in Ben Affleck’s middle-brow, over-praised award-winner Argo

Director: Ben Affleck

Cast: Ben Affleck (Tony Mendez), Bryan Cranston (Jack O’Donnell), Alan Arkin (Lester Siegel), John Goodman (John Chambers), Victor Garber (Ken Taylor), Kyle Chandler (Hamilton Jordan), Tate Donovan (Robert Anders), Clea DuVall (Cora Amburn-Lijek), Christopher Denham (Mark Lijek), Scoot McNairy (Joe Stafford), Kate Bische (Kathy Stafford), Rory Cochrane (Lee Schartz), Taylor Schilling (Christine Mendez)

There is an art to telling a “true story”. Apollo 13 is a masterclass in turning a story everyone knows into edge-of-the-seat tension. For many people, Argo does a similar trick. It doesn’t for me. I can’t understand the praise for this middle-brow, conventional movie other than that its smoothly made blandness makes it easy to watch. I got so annoyed when re-watching it I threw my slipper down in anger, like the middle-class rebel I clearly am.

Anyway, the film kicks off with the US embassy in Tehran being stormed on 4th November 1979. While the embassy staff are taken hostage, six embassy officials escape and find shelter with the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber). But how to get them out of the country safely? CIA extraction officer Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) comes up with the “best bad plan we’ve got” – set up a fake Hollywood production company, finance a fake movie, fly to Tehran, then fly the fugitives out on Canadian passports, passing them off as the movie’s crew on a scouting mission. The cover film is sci-fi epic Argo, and with producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and famous make-up artist John Chambers (John Goodman) on board to give the project realism, the mission is on.

Argo won itself a lot of friends on the way to its Oscar for Best Picture. Why? Because this is a very easy-to-swallow, middle-of-the-road film that successfully turns an American foreign policy disaster into a charming heist movie with a happy ending. It faithfully follows the pattern of all heist movies: the crazy idea, pulling together the perfect team, the difficult rehearsal, the weak link who pulls it out of the bag at a crucial moment even the panicked “we do it anyway!” ending as the best-laid-plans need to be partially improvised on the fly.

In fact, for all its desperate attempts to look like a smart, political, 70s-style piece of cinema making, The Sting is by far and away the 1970s film it most resembles, for all it wants you to think it’s The China Syndrome by way of All the President’s Men. The film starts with an inspired story-board montage of the way Western interference in Iranian politics from 1953-1979 effectively ruined the country. But that’s as good as it gets politically. After that, any further attempt to engage with either Iran or America’s foreign policy gets completely abandoned. It becomes a simplistic rescue story stuffed full of uncomplicated goodies and baddies.

Hollywood of course loved it. Why wouldn’t it? There’s only one thing Hollywood loves more than a film that takes good-natured insider pot-shots at itself. And that’s a film where Hollywood saves the day. Argo does both. It’s a celebration of how Hollywood may be shallow, but when push comes to shove it delivers. Alan Arkin (Oscar-nominated for a role he could play standing on his head) coasts as a (fictional) old-school producer, selling the film’s mediocre punchlines about the Golden Globes, WGA and the uselessness of directors. Argo has a real “slap-on-the-back” air to it, the sort of gentle roast you might get from a guest speaker at an end-of-year party.

But of course you want to know: why did I threw my slipper? Quite frankly, Argo is a con. It starts with a burst of documentary-style realism, charting the attack on the embassy. The film uses a range of different film stocks, including home-movie style footage and newsreel material. It gives an impression of complete factual reality. But, like the movie, that’s just an impression. None of the footage we see is from the time period. It’s all glossily re-created to give the idea that we are watching something snatched from the headlines.

It’s probably the last time the film touches reality. Because from there Argo is a “true” story only in the broadest sense. Almost every single specific in the film is invented or repackaged. Most crucially, the film presents all this as a CIA operation from top-to-bottom. In reality, it was a Canadian operation, with the CIA providing assistance. Not the impression you get here. Even worse the end even has the team at Langley smugly smacking each other on the back and saying they’ll give the Canadians the credit for National Security reasons. Ouch. Not content with that, it also falsely accuses the Brits and New Zealanders of leaving the fugitives hanging out to dry. Ouch again.

I don’t mind most of the film’s other myriad inventions. Its fine to hugely expand the Hollywood stuff, as it’s fun. I don’t care that Mendez (who was Hispanic by the way – but I guess Affleck with a beard is the next best thing) was only in Tehran for 36 hours not the several days he is in this film. Building a bit of tension at the airport passport control – until that weak link proves his worth by talking fluently through the made-up film’s plot – is classic heist cinema. It’s cliched but its fine.

What really, really bugs me is that Affleck and team obviously decided the real story wasn’t exciting enough so – while poking fun at the shallowness of Hollywood – turned this story into exactly the sort of shallow adventure-fantasy that’s Hollywood’s bread-and-butter. In real life, there were nerves at the airport, and a delay to the flight. And there is a lot of old-school-conspiracy-thriller-tension that could have been created with that – if the film really was the sort of The Parallax View style thriller it wants you to think it is.

But that’s not bombastic enough for Affleck et al. Instead the ending is ludicrously overblown, stuffed with problems to overcome. The mission is off-then-on-again (this convoluted resolution requires a real-life childless man to have two kids at school). Then the Iranians work out something is up, and tear through the airport, guns waving in a race to stop the flight. Police cars race onto the runaway as the plane carrying our heroes takes off. And then I threw my slipper.

I threw it because it makes no sense. If the Iranian secret service knew about the extraction, they wouldn’t run through the airport. They’d RADIO THE CONTROL TOWER and stop the plane taking off. They’d scramble jets to bring the plane back while it was still in Iranian airspace. They certainly wouldn’t race cars onto the runaway – and I’m not sure a civilian plane would take off with an armoured car just underneath its wing. Nothing like this happened, or would happen. Its reality filtered through the tired cliches of Hollywood movies. It doesn’t even feel true.

Argo starts trying to comment on world affairs, but then focuses overwhelmingly on a minor victory in the middle of a disaster. The Iranian hostage crisis was a national humiliation that lasted years. But in this film, Affleck shows he learnt something from Pearl Harbor – just like that film’s celebration of the Doolittle raid, this uses a small success to excuse a disaster. We even get Jimmy Carter bragging in voiceover that the crisis was resolved without resorting military force: the only reason for that was because the military strike Carter himself ordered was so ineptly planned it had to be humiliatingly cancelled mid-mission.

Argo doesn’t care. It’s a cuddly story about Hollywood saving the day, that starts with a critical eye and turns into a cheerleader for Carter’s disastrous policy in Iran. The hostage crisis is a tough story it doesn’t want to talk about (a brief scene of some hostages undergoing a mock execution only reminds us that the film can’t be bothered to talk about them). It repackages disaster as triumph and pretends to be a cleverer, richer film than it is. It apes 1970s conspiracy thrillers and political films but is only a faint shadow of them. Garlanded with awards, it’s competent-at-best.

Apollo 13 (1995)

Bill Paxon, Kevin Bacon and Tom Hanks are stranded in space in Apollo 13

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Tom Hanks (Jim Lovell), Kevin Bacon (Jack Swigert), Bill Paxton (Fred Haise), Gary Sinise (Ken Mattingly), Ed Harris (Gene Kranz), Kathleen Quinlan (Marilyn Lovell), Chris Ellis (Deke Slayton), Joe Spano (NASA Director) Xander Berkeley (Henry Hunt), Marc McClure (Glenn Lunney), Clint Howard (Sy Libergot), Ray McKinnon (Jerry Bostwick), David Andrews (Pete Conrad), Christian Clemenson (Dr Charles Berry), Brett Cullen (CAPCOM1)

“Houston we have a problem”. Those calmly spoken words coat an ocean of disaster in Ron Howard’s brilliant reconstruction of the disaster-that-very-nearly-was, Apollo 13. Without a shadow of a doubt Howard’s finest film, this is brilliantly tense and hugely engaging that builds an edge-of-the-seat tension around a true story. You can’t watch it without being filled with breathless admiration for the ingenuity of those in mission control and the courage of those in space as they worked together to bring the mission home. Truly “Failure is not an option”.

On a mission to the moon, Mission Commander Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) and crew Fred Haize (Bill Paxton) and late replacement Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) are left desperately trying to salvage their ship after an accident strikes. Meanwhile back in Houston, Flight Director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) and replaced crewman Ken Mattingley (Gary Sinise) lead a dedicated team juggling every inch of mathematical, scientific and practical knowledge they have to bring the ship home.

Apollo 13 is a masterpiece of reconstruction. Every inch of the NASA space programme is reassembled in perfect detail. Every nut and bolt, from procedures to the interplay between the astronauts and Ground Control. There isn’t a single false note, and every single element of the production, photography and editing is carefully placed to support this total immersion in period. Howard’s technical direction is brilliantly done, intercutting with a fabulous sense of pacing between the crew in space and Ground Control back here on Earth. It becomes one of the most engrossing and involving true-life stories you can imagine.

I love this film. I love every second of it. Every single time I see it – and I must have watched it at least once a year since 1996 – I get wrapped up in the tension and, perhaps even more than that, the inventiveness needed to solve problems in space. The film throws conundrums at us time and time again. The command module needs to be restarted to land the ship – but only has enough power to keep a coffee machine running for a few hours. A vital course correction, that a computer could calculate and perform, needs to be carried out by hand. The weight of moon rocks needs to be replicated in the landing module. And, most brilliant of all, the NASA boffins need to work out literallyhow to fit a round peg into a square hole in order to replace a CO2 filter – using nothing but the pile of equipment on the spaceship.

These problems all need to be solved by people low on sleep, high on stress and – in three obvious cases – stranded, cold and alone in space, and each one is carefully explained by the film’s very natural but highly detailed script and then relayed into nail-biting efforts to solve them. (James Horner’s score also works wonders here, communicating the awe of space and our vulnerability in that black void expertly.) In no other film can the tearing of a plastic bag have you gasping at the impact it could have on life or death.

Added to the impact of this, is the engrossing excitement of watching brilliantly trained professionals tackle the sort of situations that would reduce you or I to sweaty panic. Other than a brief moment of recrimination between Haise and Swigert (authoritatively quashed by Lovell’s “Gentlemen, we are not doing this”), everyone stays more cool, calm and collected than you could possibly expect. This also means that flashes of urgency or emotion carry huge impact in communicating stress: when Libergot stresses powering down the ship is the only way for the crew to survive or Lovell is caught on radio ranting he is “well aware of the Goddamn gimbels” while trying to pilot a ship leaking oxygen through a barrage of debris to a soundtrack of alarms, the pressures they are trying to cope with come thundering home to us.

The extraordinary work of the actors also goes a long way towards the film’s success. If any film cemented Tom Hanks’ everyman quality, it was this one. His Jim Lovell is calm, controlled and extremely grounded, a professional with a realistic outlet, a devoted family man and overwhelmingly ordinary for all the extraordinary things he’s done. Hanks brings the role a huge authority and acres of empathy and relatability. He seems both vulnerable, human and professionally assured. I’d trade both his Oscar-winning performances for this one.

The whole cast follows his lead. Bacon and Paxton are very good as the rest of the crew, juggling moments of fear, frustration and black humour. Ed Harris became a star character actor overnight with his brilliant performance as Kranz, another committed professional who refuses to countenance failure and guides the ground team through super-human efforts, while keeping his own emotions carefully under control. Kathleen Quinlan is impressive as Lovell’s wife, keeping the morale of those left behind as high as she can while barely controlling her own fear. Gary Sinise’s Ken Mattingley channels his resentment at being benched from the mission into a Herculean commitment to bringing them home.

It’s that commitment on the ground that Howard’s film so brilliantly understands. A lesser film would have focused overwhelmingly on the courage of the astronauts alone, and heightened their struggles to pilot the spacecraft and survive. Apollo 13 understands above all that this was a team effort – and the casting and scripting feeds brilliantly into this. No one is the “hero”, no one “saves the day”. Every character focuses on their own small piece of the puzzle and has to trust all the others worked out. The film gives huge amounts of time over to the boffins and geniuses of Mission Control – all brilliantly played by a host of character actors – and its respect for these unsung heroes is as great as it is for Lovell and his crew.

Howard also understands exactly when to up the music, editing and effects and when to slow the film down and let events quietly play out. Moments in space where the actors have to quietly reflect, or when we check in on the fears and concerns of the families back home, contrast perfectly (and carry even more impact) when they sit alongside the scenes of failures and rushes to save lives. As for that re-entry scene… is there any more tense scene in a true story film than that long, long wait to see if Apollo 13 will return from space? There are certainly fewer moments that will get those specks of dust irritating your eyes – I get a lump in my throat just thinking about it.

Everything in Apollo 13 is spot on. I would go further and say I’m not sure there is a single wrong beat in it. It’s Howard’s masterpiece – his infamous snubbing for an Oscar nomination is inexplicable, his direction here is vastly superior to winner Mel Gibson’s work on Braveheart. It turns a true-life story into an impossibly tense, deeply involving, hugely emotional story. The actors – some of whom shot for weeks in a “vomit comet” plane to replicate weightlessness, an effect that works superbly – are outstanding. Every single technical aspect of the film is spot on. Its emotional impact is as absolute as the admiration and respect you’ll feel for the real NASA crews that guided this mission home. Apollo 13 is a classic. I can’t imagine anyone not finding something in it to like – not many films you can say that about.

Braveheart (1995)

Braveheart (1995)

Gibson’s Oscar-winning epic mixes great action and bad everything else – how did it win?

Director: Mel Gibson

Cast: Mel Gibson (William Wallace), Sophie Marceau (Princess Isabelle), Patrick McGoohan (Edward I), Angus MacFadyen (Robert the Bruce), Brendan Gleeson (Hamish), David O’Hara (Stephen), James Cosmo (Campbell), Peter Hanly (Prince Edward), Catherine McCormack (Murron MacClannough), Ian Bannen (Bruce’s Father), Sean McGinley (MacClannough), Brian Cox (Argyle Wallace)

Think back to 1994 and a time when no one really knew who William Wallace was and Mel Gibson was the world’s favourite sexy bad-boy. Because by 1995, William Wallace had become the international symbol of Scottish “Freedom!” and Mel Gibson was an Oscar-winning auteur. Can you believe a film like Braveheart won no fewer than five Oscars, including the Big One? History has not always been kind to it – but then the film was hardly kind to history, so swings and roundabouts.

It’s the late 13th century and Scotland has been conquered by the cruel Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) – a pagan apparently, which just makes you think that Gibson and screenwriter Randall Wallace simply don’t know what that word means. William Wallace (Mel Gibson) saw his whole family killed, but now he’s grown and married to his sweetheart Murron (Catherine McCormack). In secret, as the wicked king has introduced Prima Nocte to Scotland, giving English landlords the right to do as they please with brides on the wedding night. When Murron is killed after a fight to avoid her rape, Wallace’s desire for revenge transforms into a crusade to win Scotland its freedom. A brilliant tactician and leader of men, battles can be won – but can Wallace win the support of the ever-shifting lords, such as the conflicted Robert the Bruce (Angus MacFadyen)? Will this end in freedom or death?

Even in 1995, Braveheart was a very old-fashioned piece of film-making. You can easily imagine exactly the same film being made (with less sex and violence) in the 1950s, with Chuck Heston in a kilt and a “Hoots Mon!” accent. In fact, watching it again, I was struck that narratively the film follows almost exactly the same tone and narrative arc as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – with the only difference being if that film had concluded after the Sheriff’s attack on Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood gutted alive in the streets of Nottingham.

This is a big, silly cartoon of a movie, that serves up plenty of moments of crowd-pleasing violence, low comedy, heroes we can cheer and villains we can hiss. Mel Gibson, truth be told, sticks out like a sore thumb with his chiselled Hollywood looks and defiantly modern mannerisms. The film takes a ridiculously simplistic view of the world that categorises everything and everyone into goodies (Wallace and his supporters) and the baddies (almost everyone else).

It’s also far longer than you remember it being. It takes the best part of 50 minutes to build up to Wallace going full berserker after the death of his wife. A later section of the film spends 30 minutes spinning plates between Wallace being betrayed at the Battle of Falkirk and then being betrayed again into captivity (you could have combined both events into one and lost nothing from the film). There is some lovely footage of the Scottish (largely actually Irish) countryside, lusciously shot by John Toll and an effectively Celtic-influenced romantic score by James Horner. In fact, Toll and Horner contribute almost as much to the success of the film as Gibson.

Gibson is by no means a bad director. In fact, very few directors can shoot action and energy as effectively as the controversial Australian. The best bits of Braveheart reflect this. When he’s shooting battles, or fights, or brutal executions he knows what he’s doing. Even if I’d argue that Kenneth Branagh managed to make much less than this look more impressive in Henry V. The battles have an “ain’t it cool” cheek to them, that invites the audience to delight in watching limbs hacked off, horses cut down and screaming Woad-covered warriors ripping through stuffy English soldiers. It’s probably not an accident that the film channels more than a little bit of sport-fan culture into its Scottish warriors.

Where Gibson’s film is more mundane is in almost everything else. The rest of the film is shot with a functional mundanity, mixed with the odd sweeping helicopter shot over the highlands. Its similarities to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves are actually really strong, from the matey bonhomie of the gang at its heart, its pantomime villain, the moral certainty of its crusades and the fact that Mel Gibson is no more convincing as a 13th-century Scot than Kevin Costner was as Robin Hood. But at least Prince of Thieves knew it was a silly bit of fun. Braveheart thinks it’s got an important message about the immortality of Freedom.

Alongside that, it’s a film that focuses on giving you what you it thinks you want. Gladiator – in many ways a similar film – is a richer and more emotional film, not least because it has the courage to stick to being a film where the hero is faithful to his dead wife and whose triumph is joining her in death. In this film, there are callbacks throughout to the dead Murron – but it doesn’t stop Wallace banging Princess Isabelle, or the film using the same sweeping romantic score to backdrop this as it did for the marriage of Murron and Wallace. What on earth is it trying to say here?

It goes without saying that the real Wallace did not have sex with Princess Isabelle and father Edward III – not least because the real Isabelle was about ten when Wallace died and I’m not sure putting thatin the film would have had us rooting for Wallace. Almost nothing in the film is historically accurate. Wallace is presented as a peasant champion, when he in fact was a minor lord (the film even bizarrely keeps in Wallace travelling Europe and learning French and Latin – a big reach for a penniless medieval Scots peasant). Even the name Braveheart is taken from Robert the Bruce and given to Wallace. The Bruce himself – a decent performance by Angus MacFadyen – is turned into a weak vacillator, under the thumb of his leprous Dad (a lip-smacking Ian Bannen).

The historical messing about doesn’t stop there. Even Wallace’s finest hour, the Battle of Stirling Bridge, is transformed. The film-makers apparently felt the vital eponymous bridge “got in the way” – a sentiment shared by the English, who in reality were drawn into its bottleneck and promptly massacred. Instead we get a tactics free scrap in a field – fun as it is to watch the Scots lift their kilts, it hardly makes sense. The Scots culture in this film is a curious remix of about five hundred years of influences all thrown into one. Prima Nocte never happened. The real Edward II was a martial superstar – but here is a fey, limp-wristed sissy (the film’s attitude towards him stinks of homophobia). Almost nothing in the film actually happened.

But the romance of the film made it popular. It’s a big, crowd-pleasing, cheesy slice of Hollywood silliness. The sort of film where Wallace sneaks into someone’s room at the top of a castle riding a freaking horse and no-one notices. It tells a simple story in simple terms, using narrative tricks and rules familiar from countless adventure films since The Adventures of Robin Hood. It looks and sounds great, enough to disguise the fact that it isn’t really any good. Because it has a sad ending, scored with sad music, it tricked enough people to think it had depth and style. In fact is a very mediocre film, hellishly overlong, that turns history into a cheap comic book. It remains in the top 100 most popular films of all time on IMDB. It’s about as likely an Oscar winner as 300.

Lincoln (2012)

Daniel Day-Lewis gives on the great transformative performances as Lincoln

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Abraham Lincoln), Sally Field (Mary Todd Lincoln), Tommy Lee Jones (Thaddeus Stevens), David Strathairn (William Seward), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Robert Lincoln), James Spader (WN Bilbo), Hal Holbrook (Preston Blair), John Hawkes (Robert Latham), Jackie Earle Haley (Alexander Stephens), Bruce McGill (Edwin Stanton), Tim Blake Nelson (Richard Schell), Joseph Cross (John Hay), Jared Harris (Ulysses S Grant), Lee Pace (Fernando Wood), Peter McRobbie (George Pendleton), Gloria Reuben (Elizabeth Keckley), Jeremy Strong (John Nicolay), Michael Stuhlbarg (George Yeaman), David Costible (James Ashley), Boris McGiver (Alexander Coffroth)

It took me three viewings until I felt I got Lincoln. Previously – in the cinema and the first time at home – I respected it. I admired the skill with which it was assembled. But I had found it hard to see it as much more than a critically acclaimed civics lesson, Spielberg at his most prestige. Returning to it the third time with the pressure well and truly off, suddenly I discovered a film I’d never seen before, an intensely dramatic telling of the perilous struggle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. A vibrant, beautiful and surprisingly intense story of how close Congress came to vetoing it. What had seemed a stuffy museum piece, instead came to life as a dramatic piece of cinema. It goes to show you should never be afraid to give something another go. Or two.

This biopic of Lincoln goes down a very modern route of avoiding covering the Great Man’s entire life. Instead it zeroes in on little more than a crucial month. It’s January 1865 – in what we know are the final months of the President’s life – and Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) confronts a terrible choice. Civil war has torn America apart for year and peace may be on the horizon. But Lincoln fears a reformed America, with all its Southern slave states back in the fold, will find a way to end his Emancipation Proclamation and restore slavery to its height. To prevent this, Congress must ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ending slavery. But, with many in Congress worried that such an Amendment will end any chance of peace, Lincoln is in a terrible position. Should he sacrifice peace for abolition? Or vice versa? Either way, it will be a no-holds barred fight on the floors of Congress.

Spielberg’s film is near perfect in its shooting and editing, while its historical detail is brilliantly on-point. You couldn’t fault a moment of its making. However, what makes the film a success is the director’s skilful ability to combine graceful (even stately) old-fashioned film-making expertise, with a truly compelling sense of the passions and dangers we face when democracy is in action. And the overwhelming tension when the stakes are high and we have no guarantees of the end result. Another film – the stately civics lesson I once took the film for – would have shown the passage of the bill as a Whiggish inevitability, a progress filled march to a better world.

Lincoln isn’t like that. This is a film that shows politics then and politics now ain’t that different. For every principled man, there a dozen looking out for the main chance, marking time or who are too scared to worry about right and wrong. The Amendment is delivered not by impassioned oratory from the President. It’s carried by skilled floor management and the employment of a trio of political lobbyists with briefcases stuffed with cushy job offers in the rebuilt America.

Votes are brow-beaten out of people, threats and persuasion are used in equal measure. There is no winning people over with poetic oratory. At one point, Lincoln makes a simple and heartfelt plea for one congressmen to do the right thing: the guy votes against him. One of the film’s moments of triumph sees fervent abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens refuse to be provoked into expressing his true views on the floor, instead offering a statement that he does not believe in equality “in all things”, knowing any other answer will be used to build opposition against the bill. Is there any other film in American politics where one of the biggest cheer moments is one of our heroes compromising and spinning his true views into something far less threatening?

It’s all part of the film’s demystification of American history as not being something made from marble, but instead being real and true. If anything though, this sense of realism – of danger and the very real possibility of defeat – makes the final vote (a long sequence that almost plays out a congress vote in real time) both far more dramatic and also surprisingly moving. Because we appreciate every step of the backroom handshakes, fights, compromises and (let’s be honest) corruption and shady deals that got us here. And, more than anything, the film has made clear Lincoln is willing for this brutal war (the horrors of which, both in battle and bloody aftermath, intrude at key points in the film) to go on for as long as it takes, to ensure this Amendment.

Lincoln is the heart of the film: and it’s almost impossible to state how central Daniel Day-Lewis is to the film’s success. This is an extraordinary performance. I don’t think you can understate how venerated Lincoln is in the American memory. With his distinctive features and a permanent memory of him sitting like a marble God in the centre of Washington, it’s hard for many to imagine that this was ever a real man. But Day-Lewis has turned in a performance here that transforms Lincoln into a living, breathing man but never once compromises his greatness.

From the voice (a wispy lightness, a million miles from the deep, Shakespearean accent you would expect – and entirely accurate) to the ambling walk, to the film’s embracing of Lincoln’s eccentric monologing, his love of whimsy and jokes, his autodidact passion for language, his warmth and love for his family – and his righteous anger when frustrated by those who cannot see the big picture – this is extraordinary. Day-Lewis is compelling in a way few actors can be. His Lincoln is superbly human. Every moment is beautifully observed, but this is so much more than an actor’s tricks. His Lincoln is someone you can come out of the film convinced that he was talking to you, that you understand him as a human being not a cipher. I felt I knew and understood Lincoln more from watching this film than I ever had from a history book. It’s breathtaking.

Of course it inspires everyone else in the cast to give their best. The at times difficult marriage between Lincoln and his wife gives some wonderful material for Sally Field (easily her finest performance in decades). Mary Todd Lincoln is aware she will always be a disappointment for her husband as a partner, but equally feels that her public mourning for this lost child speaks of a deeper humanity than her husband. Loyal if questioning, she’s also abrupt and clumsy enough at times to be a liability.

Tommy Lee Jones is exceptional as Thaddeus Stevens, prickly, difficult but also morally pure (the film has helped rediscover the unjustly overlooked Stevens). Previous Lincoln performers Strathairn and Holbrook give very good support. James Spader is great fun as colourful lobbyist. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is all restricted ambition as Lincoln’s son. Jared Harris shines in a few scenes as Grant. Gloria Reuben has a few beautiful moments as Mary’s confidante Elizabeth Keckley.

Lincoln is a film shot with all the prestige of an American Merchant-Ivory, in love with the power of democracy. But it’s also open-eyed on how a system like America’s works, and how perilous delivering “the right thing” can be. Emotional and engrossing, it’s powered above all by a towering sublime performance by Daniel Day-Lewis who might as well be the 16th President reborn. It took me three viewings to see the richness here – but I am so glad I stuck it out.

Nicholas and Alexandria (1971)

nicholas-and-alexandra-1971
Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman bring the Romanovs to life in Nicholas and Alexandra

Director: Franklin J Schaffner

Cast: Michael Jayston (Nicholas II), Janet Suzman (Empress Alexandra), Harry Andrews (Grand Duke Nicholas), Tom Baker (Rasputin), Jack Hawkins (Count Vladimir), Ian Holm (Yakovlev), Curt Jurgens (Germany consul), John McEnery (Kerensky), Laurence Olivier (Count Witte), Eric Porter (Stolypin), Michael Redgrave (Sazonov), Irene Worth (Queen Marie Fedorovna), Roderic Noble (Prince Alexei), Ania Mason (Olga), Lynne Frederick (Tatiana), Candace Glendenning (Marie), Fiona Fullerton (Anastasia), Michael Bryant (Lenin), Brian Cox (Trotsky), Maurice Denham (Kokovtsov), Roy Dotrice (General Alexeiev), Julian Glover (Georgy Gapon), John Hallam (Nagorny), James Hazeldine (Stalin), Alexander Knox (US Ambassador), Vivian Pickles (Krupskaya), Diana Quick (Sonya), John Shrapnel (Petya), Timothy West (Dr Botkin), Alan Webb (Yurovsky), John Wood (Colonel Kobylinsky)

When I was growing up, Nicholas and Alexandra was a popular movies in our house. And, as a history buff, I can’t help but be sucked into it’s grand-scale epic scope (a cast of stars play out the beginnings of the Russian Revolution!). You can certainly look at Nicholas and Alexandra and see a film that at times is bloated and lacking flair. But as a representative of a particular type of genre, with grand scale production values covering decades of earth-shattering events in a three hours, it’s a thoughtful and at times even rather moving picture.

Nicholas II (Michael Jayston) is Tsar of all the Russias. With the film starting with his (typically) disastrous decision to fight the Japanese in 1905 (a war that literally sunk Russian naval dominance) we see a parade of misguided, poor and short-sighted-but-well-meaning decisions by Nicholas – encouraged by his strong-minded but politically naïve Tsarina Alexandra (Janet Suzman) – eventually lead to the First World War and a revolution that will overthrow him. On a personal level, the couple also deal with the heartbreaking haemophilia of their son Alexei (Roderic Noble) and Alexandra’s dependence on the destructive Rasputin (Tom Baker). As their lives go from supreme power to imprisonment and eventual murder, the film also covers a host of Russian politicians from statesmen to socialists, all of them wanting to build Russia in their own image.

Franklin J Schaffner’s epic sometimes gets a bit overwhelmed by its impressive reconstruction of Imperialist Russia – the set design and photography is wonderful and the film marshals the inevitable cast of thousands with skilful effect. What the film does very well is marry up the epic with the personal. Because this is both a chronicle of the reasons for the outbreak of the Russian revolution, but also a domestic tragedy of a royal family horrendously ill-suited to the high position birth has called them to.

The film’s vast scope does mean it has to make a frequent resort – particularly in its first half – of feted stage actors explaining events at each other. Particularly rushed are scenes featuring the socialist revolutionaries, where actors like Michael Bryant, Vivian Pickles and Brian Cox have to contend with bullet point dialogue and lines of the “Trotsky, let me introduce you to Stalin, he’s just back from Siberia” variety. Nicholas attends frequent meetings where the likes of Laurence Olivier, Eric Porter, Harry Andrews and Michael Redgrave carefully fill him in on what’s happened and the likely (invariably historically correct) outcomes. At times it does make the film a rushed pageant.

The film however makes it work by continually bringing itself back to the personal story of Nicholas and Alexandra themselves. The film is expertly carried by relative newcomers (at the time) Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman. Jayston – an astonishingly close physical match for Nicholas II – gives a perfectly judged characterisation of the Tsar. He’s a decent, well-meaning, dedicated and hard-working man who would make an excellent bank manager. As a supreme leader he’s a disaster – stubborn and so convinced that it is his holy duty to be father of the nation, while with a weary smile he short-sightedly vetoes any social or political progress what-so-ever. As one character tells him late in the film, he lacks any imagination: he can’t reinvent an absolute monarchy in the modern age, because it’s fundamentally beyond him to picture how anything can be done differently from hundreds of years of precedent.

Rational and calm he’s strangely almost more content out of power, focusing on his family and tending his garden. Not that his flaws depart – he remains an appalling short-sighted judge of character and situations to the very end (nearly every statement he makes is wrong). Jayston tackles a difficult role with ease and assurance – he carries most of the film and I think it’s only that Nicholas remains such a reactive character that Jayston doesn’t get more credit for his work here.

Much of the “nominations” attention went to Suzman, who has the more electric (but in some ways simpler role) as Alexandra. She brings to the marriage all the qualities Nicholas lacks – defiance, determination, ambition – and those are just as destructive. Just like her husband she’s stubborn and a terrible judge of people and situations, who clings loyally to terrible influences (like Rasputin) and puts her family and personal concerns above the preoccupations of the throne and the people. She’s prickly and harder to like than Nicholas (who she clearly dominates with her stronger personality) – but Suzman grounds her confrontationalism in a genuine love for her family.

The film’s second half, which largely focuses on the end of the regime and the last few months of the families lives being shuttled from one inhospitable safe house to another, makes a successful contrast with the grander scope of the first half. With the focus now more intently on the family themselves, particularly quietly contrasting their former supreme power with their new helplessness, it helps to bring out the heart. Schaffner’s film is very good at quietly building the dread as we head towards the inevitable end (the final few moments of the film are almost unbearably tense). In the whole family, only Prince Alexei seems able to comprehend that they are doomed. But removed from supreme power, Nicholas and Alexandra relax into what they would have been happier being: decent, kind, middle-class homebuilders.

Schaffner’s direction may not bring the burst of poetry that he managed with Patton – but he’s very good at building our empathy for these misguided and foolish autocrats. So much so, you’ll be screaming at Nicholas “Of course you should give the people a parliament!” while never actually hating him – because, stubborn and misguided as he is, he means well. However the film doesn’t let us forget what Nicholas is a figurehead of. Sequences demonstrating the sour, resentful poverty of most Russians are common – not just the 1905 march on the palace (that ends in a panicked officer ordering a massacre), but the grim faces of average Russians greeting the celebrations of the centenary of the Romanovs, while pissed aristocrats and Cossacks barrel about throwing empty of bottles of booze around. The tensions of Russia, and the inevitability of disaster, is never forgotten.

The all-star cast throws up several fine performances, backing the quietly assured leads. Olivier brings moral force as Count Witte – with an impassioned speech on the eve of the breakout of the first world war, all but breaking the fourth wall as the rest of the court continue their work around him. Hawkins demonstrates he has one of the most emotive faces in cinema as retainer Vladimir, while Andrews is bluff and loyal as Grand Duke “Nikolasha”. Irene Worth brings a sanctimonious pride to the Queen Mother’s talking truth to power.

There’s also some great work from less recognisable names. John McEnery (who should have become a bigger star) is fabulous as an impassioned Kerensky who finds himself stuck in the same mistakes as the Tsar. John Wood is very good as a Colonel feeling increasingly morally conflicted. Alan Webb is chillingly affable as their final warden. Later to take on the mantle of Doctor Who, Tom Baker gives Rasputin a mixture of restraint tinged with madness (as well as having the most prolonged death scene on film).

Nicholas and Alexandra is, in some ways, grandly old-fashioned. But it’s got a surprisingly strong heart and sense of empathy in it. It acknowledges the dreadful mistakes and stubborn lack of imagination of the Romanovs – and the many that their misguided principles led to poverty and death – but it also acknowledges both their well-meaning intentions as well as presenting their tragic ends. At times it’s a run-down of events of the final years of Tsarist Russia, but it also manages to tell an affecting family story of flawed people. It’s what makes it work.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2020)

Judas and the black messiah
Daniel Kaluuya excels as the betrayed Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah

Director: Shaka King

Cast: Lakeith Stanfield (Bill O’Neal), Daniel Kaluuya (Fred Hampton), Jesse Plemons (Agent Roy Mitchell), Dominque Fishback (Deborah Johnson), Ashton Saunders (Jimmy Palmer), Algee Smith (Jake Winters), Darrell Britt-Gibson (Bobby Rush), Lil Rel Howery (Judy Harmon), Martin Sheen (J. Edgar Hoover), Amari Cheatom (Rod Collins), Jermaine Fowler (Mark Clark)

In the 1960s, America was in violent turmoil. Simmering racial tensions were exploding, as a younger, politically engaged generation refused to accept the status quo of the past. Facing them was a reactionary, institutionally racist law and order system, determined to take any steps necessary to stop them. Violence was inevitable and the anger and resentments of that time still carry a powerful legacy today. It’s these emotions that Judas and the Black Messiah engages with. Impassioned and ambitious film-making, it often tries to do too much but still leaves a powerful impression.

In Chicago in 1968, Bill O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) is a car thief and conman, who uses a faked FBI badge to steal cars. Arrested (and beaten), he is given a choice by FBI Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) – serve time for his offences or turn informant for the FBI. O’Neal is ordered to join the Black Panther Party – and to get as close as he can to the charismatic leader of the Illinois chapter, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). Hampton is radical, but also a visionary leader who is attempting to build a “rainbow coalition” that will unite black, Puerto Rican and white working classes to campaign on a wide range of social issues, from race to healthcare and education: a vision the FBI sees as a nightmare. O’Neal’s information is used to help frame Hampton, as events build inexorably towards his permanent removal.

Judas and the Black Messiah is dynamic and electric film-making. Shaka King’s film hums with righteous fury at the hypocrisy, racism and violence of the law enforcement agencies towards the Chicago black community (effectively the police are an occupying force, perpetrating violence and injustice). While not shying away from the violent response from many of the Black Panthers – including showing one white police officer executed while begging for his life – it paints an unsparing picture of the racism and cruelty of the Chicago police. Innocent black people are bludgeoned and abused. Those in the Black Panthers are framed for crimes, brutalised in prison and murdered in police custody. The outrage and fury of the film is both justified and affecting.

Simultaneously there is a powerful sense of grief at the loss of a golden opportunity – and the inspiration of a visionary leader, who could have grown to become a key figure in American history. King’s film explores the all-too-short life of Hampton before his murder. It delicately paints his charisma but also carefully establishes his vision. His recognition that social, educational and medical improvements are at least as important to ordinary black people as political rights. His attempt to build a coalition of the downtrodden, white and black. His status as the only man who could unite this coalition. His loss an incalculable tragedy for his cause and also for America.

This powerful picture is further framed by Kaluuya’s marvellous performance as Hampton. Kaluuya perfectly captures the charisma and electricity of Hampton’s public speaking, his ability to marshal words and move crowds. With a bulked-up physicality and head-cocking defiance, he wonderfully conveys Hampton’s ability to persuade and inspire, his lack of fear and passion to see justice done. But Kaluuya also makes him wonderfully human. In intimate moments with his girlfriend Deborah (very well played by Dominique Fishback), Kaluuya makes Hampton gentle, shy, even a little nervous – giving him a very real emotional hinterland that sits naturally alongside (and contrasts with) his activist public persona. This is a stunningly good performance.

It also, perhaps, unbalances the film slightly. King’s film is ambitious – but it is attempting to do too much within its two-hour runtime. This is a film that wants to explore the corruption of the law forces, the terrible plight of black Americans, the life of Fred Hampton and the story of his betrayer Bill O’Neal. It’s this final story that actually ends up feeling the least defined – and least engaging – of the film’s plot threads (unfortunate as it’s the one that gives the film its title).

None of this is the fault of Lakeith Stanfield, who gives a marvellous performance of weakness, fear, self-preservation and regretful self-loathing as O’Neal. But his relationship with Hampton never feels close or personal enough. In fact, the two of them feel very distanced from each other. The sense of the personal in the betrayal is lost. The idea of O’Neal struggling between loyalty to Hampton and his FBI handler Mitchell (who encourages O’Neal to see him as a sort of surrogate father) is weak, because we never get a real sense of a very personal link between O’Neal and Hampton, or a real sense that O’Neal is deeply conflicted about his betrayal. (Indeed, the film is reduced to explicitly telling us that O’Neal is struggling between betraying the Black Panthers and a true belief in their cause, which feels like a failure of narrative.)

Fundamentally, you could split the film into two movies. One which focuses on Hampton and in which O’Neal is little more than an extra. And another that zeroes in on O’Neal’s struggle with the FBI and fears of being caught, in which Hampton is a distant, inspirational figure. What King’s film fails to do is effectively is bring these two characters together properly. The personal nature of the relationship (and the betrayal) is lost. This isn’t Jesus betrayed by one of his disciples – more like Jesus being cashed in by someone at the temple. It’s a loss to the film.

It feels at times as if O’Neal was the original “hook” but that King became more interested – perhaps rightly – in Hampton and the tensions in Chicago (and America more widely) at the time. Similarly, the film is fascinated by the corruption of the FBI – Martin Sheen makes a chilling, latex covered, appearance as Hoover – and by questions over how far Mitchell (Plemons, decent bur fatally compromised), a relative liberal, is willing to go. In both plot lines, O’Neal is an entry point but becomes less and less the focus. It partly explains perhaps why Stanfield – clearly the “lead” – ended up joining Kaluuya in the supporting actor category at the Oscars. He may well be the lead but his story is the least compelling of the several threads here.

Judas and the Black Messiah is still hugely effective in many places. Its main weakness is in trying to juggle these various plot threads, and not always succeeding in bringing them together as well as it should. Because the O’Neal plot line needs to take up a good share of the run time – but is the thread the film seems least interested in – it does mean some of these scenes drag more than they should, making the film at times seem longer than it should. You can’t help but a feel a film that focused on Hampton alone would have been stronger. King’s film still makes powerful points – but its ideas are sometimes blunted and crowded out by its attempt to cover so much. Impassioned and ambitious, it doesn’t always completely succeed.