Category: Political drama

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006)

Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney take on the British in The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Director: Ken Loach

Cast: Cillian Murphy (Damien O’Donovan), Pádraic Delaney (Teddy O’Donovan), Liam Cunningham (Dan), Orla Fitzgerald (Sinéad Ní Shúilleabháin), Laurence Barry (Micheál Ó Súilleabháin), Mary Murphy (Bernadette), Mary O’Riordan (Peggy), Myles Horgan (Rory), Martin Lucey (Congo), Roger Allam (Sir John Hamilton), John Crean (Chris Reilly)

There are few directors in British cinema who have such impeccable left-wing credentials as Ken Loach. Each of his films is powered by a social and political conscience and chronicles the travails of those on the left, those struggling for the down-trodden and unfortunate, or those on the bottom rungs of society’s ladder. It was perhaps only a matter of time before he made a film about that blistering sore on the British conscience, Ireland (just as he is surely destined to eventually make a film about Palestine). It’s not a surprise that Loach’s film, with its vicious denunciation of British policy in Ireland, was met with a vitriolic response by much of the UK media, just as it was scooping Loach the first of his two Palme d’Ors at Cannes.

The film opens in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Many of the Irish are in open revolt for independence, with Teddy O’Donovan (Pádraic Delaney) a leading IRA figure in Cork. His younger brother Damien (Cillian Murphy), a doctor, is persuaded to join the cause by his horror at the actions of the British “Black and Tan” troops in Ireland, vicious flying squads empowered to act with impunity. When the war eventually leads to a negotiated peace and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922 that divides Ireland in two as a Dominion in the British Empire, the two brothers are divided. Teddy sees this as a stepping stone to peace for further gains later; Damien sees it as betrayal of the socialist message he and many others fought for, which will change only “the accents of the powerful and the colour of the flag”. A civil war across Ireland is inevitable between the government “pro-treaty” troops (supported by the British) and anti-treaty former-IRA members.

The history of Ireland is one of tragically missed opportunities, of poor British policy decisions throughout the nineteenth century (including delaying emancipation for Catholics, and a refusal to grant any level of Home Rule to Ireland for over 70 years, despite three votes on the issue in Parliament) eventually leading to many “peaceful” political movements in Ireland becoming completely discredited and the bullet seen as the only way to self-government. There is no doubt at all – as the film is not shy showing – that British policy in Ireland was often shameful, brutal, repressive, and helped enforce lasting bitterness and resentment, the impact of which is still felt today.

So, despite the furious backlash against the film as being anti-British in the press, it’s clear that The Wind That Shakes the Barley tells hard truths of the violence on both sides – of ransacked homes, murders, shootings and repression. Loach’s film unquestionably favours the Irish perspective and places their actions within a heroic context, while the British soldiers are nearly to a man foul-mouthed, arrogant, violent louts (although an officer does get a speech saying what do they expect since the black and tans are all bitter ex-front liners from France who have nothing else in their lives to come home to). But it makes a legitimate point, and it’s hard not to agree that British occupation of Ireland was, at best, a mistake and worst case a crime.

Loach’s film is harrowingly well-made, expertly shot by Barry Ackroyd, a testament once again to what a vivid and engrossing director Loach can be. Shoot-outs and violence are shot with icy-cold camerawork, mixed with handheld confusion. Political debates (of which there are many) are shot with passionate intimacy, the camera roving between the faces of those on both sides. The film’s reconstruction of Ireland in the 1920s is brilliantly done, and its engrossing recreation of the guerrilla warfare tactics of the IRA is fabulous. The acting is very good, with Cillian Murphy excellent and passionate in the lead role. Loach’s earnestness, married to his cinematic skill, is clear.

The real problem with the film is Loach’s left-wing politics, not his anti-British-establishmentism. To Loach the real tragedy in Ireland was not the civil war, but the compromise that large parts of the country made to sign the treaty with Britain and turn their back on aiming to turn a poor country into something closer to a socialist one, with collectivised industry, less power to the church and a greater equality between the rich and the poor. Loach’s film is squarely stacked in favour of the left-wing firebrands who continue the fight with the IRA, and firmly against those who support the treaty and look to gradually build a lasting peace.

To Loach, it feels like there is little real difference between the British and the pro-treaty forces. The They are both moral cowards and bullies who are fighting to maintain a status quo. There is no legitimate case made for the treaty. Those who support it in the film – like the increasingly nervous, twitchy pro-Treaty Teddy (as if Loach wanted to show him physically weighted down with guilt) – are either mealy-mouthed and guiltily shifty or hectoring bullies (like the priest who preaches pro-treaty/anti-socialism from the pulpit).

Loach is right that independence was a cause that bought everyone together, and in his argument that that the lack of a unifying idea of what the country would become next would inevitably lead to fracture and collapse. But never once in the film do we hear the voice of the ordinary Irish people, and what they wanted. Inconveniently, when put to the ballot, pro-treaty parties won the election of 1921, so the film has to have Damien (as is often the case with those on the extreme of both ends of politics I find) claim that the people didn’t understand what they were voting for, and if they did they would have agreed with him. The film’s final scene ends at a ruined house, but never once does the film (or Loach) reflect on how this embodies the catastrophic harm simple, everyday people were suffering over this period – and that they may have wanted a chance for the fighting to stop and a shift to peaceful progress towards greater independence rather than die in a ditch for nebulous political goals.

The film’s main enemy is actually compromise. Compromise is what Teddy and his gang accept when they plead for the chance for the fighting to stop, and for the country to settle for 80% of their demands now, and the rest later. Compromise is what Damien won’t settle for, and why he’ll restart a war to the death for his beliefs. Maybe it’s just me, but the art of living seems to be one of compromise and peace is built on agreements and a statesman-like acceptance that complete victory is often impossible without unacceptable loss. It’s a belief the film has no time for, and Loach seems to be advocating that the IRA should have completely rejected the treaty and instead fought to the bitter end (an action that would have probably turned Ireland into a wasteland) in the name of the socialist dream, rather than deal with reality.

It’s that which is the real problem with the film: its hard-headed clinging to the belief that any form of compromise is anathema, that death is preferable to altering your beliefs one iota, that prolonging a bloody civil war is the right thing to do rather than accept any agenda that doesn’t completely match your initial dream. Loach’s faith in his politics is admirable, but The Wind That Shakes the Barley sets out a didactic vision of Irish politics that gives no legitimate argument to the pro-treaty side, and only listens to the socialist wing of the anti-treaty group. It’s a one-sided view of history and, increasingly, a dangerous one.

On the Basis of Sex (2018)

Felicity Jones does earnest, dedicated work in an earnest, dedicated film: On the Basis of Sex

Director: Mimi Leder

Cast: Felicity Jones (Ruth Bader Ginsburg), Armie Hammer (Martin Ginsburg), Justin Theroux (Mel Wulf), Kathy Bates (Dorothy Kenyon), Sam Waterston (Erin Griswold), Cailee Spaeny (Jane C Gisnburg), Jack Raynor (James H Bozath), Stephen Root (Professor Brown)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an extraordinary person, her pioneering work to bring about sexual equality in the USA something that has made an actual, permanent change to her country for the better. This biopic covers the early years of this campaign in the 1970s, and if it at times gets a little too bogged down in the conventions of these sort of biopics, it does tackle them with genuine passion.

At Harvard in the mid-1950s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) is one of the first women allowed in to study law – and finds that she faces a battle to constantly prove that she deserves to be there. Her husband Martin Ginsburg (Armie Hammer), himself an accomplished lawyer, is endlessly supportive and encouraging, but Ruth continues to find that she struggles to be treated as an equal in the male dominated legal world of the 1950s and 60s. All this changes when her husband brings to her attention a tax case that discriminates against a male carer – and she realises this could be a vehicle to establish a precedent that American laws are unconstitutional when they discriminate on the basis of sex.

Mimi Leder directs a film full of warmth, respect and feeling for the importance of the story it is trying to tell. While it at times seems a tiny bit overwhelmed by the responsibility of bringing such a pioneering person’s story to the screen, it still manages to bring enough character and flair to it to make it an engaging watch. Perhaps you might feel at times you are only beginning to scratch the surface of RBG’s extraordinary life – but the film still treats you with the respect to assume that you can follow the legal arguments being outlined, even as it structures much of the film with clichés.

It does have some fine sequences in it though, not least a running visual image of Ruth walking up steps towards important buildings. The opening sees her lost in a crush of young male Harvard students, struggling to find her own space in a male dominated world. Later she climbs the steps outside the Court of Appeals, this time at the head of a progress of men following her behind. And finally the film bookends its opening Harvard steps sequence with Ruth – this time alone – climbing the steps of the supreme court: shots and cuts echo the opening of the film as Felicity Jones is slowly replaced by the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Felicity Jones does a decent job as Ginsburg, although she struggles with a slightly awkward make-up job to age her up. She however captures the fire in Ginsburg’s belly and her passion to right wrongs, as well as the demanding intellectual ability that at times made her a domineering and difficult person. She doesn’t always find much wit in the role, but she really wins the empathy of the audience with the injustice she faces – not least from the very start having to justify why she has taken a place at Harvard from a man in the first place.

It helps as well that she has such a fine scene partner for so much of the film in Armie Hammer, who is excellent as her supportive, way-ahead-of-his-time husband Martin. Taking on most of the domestic chores – and combined with his own brilliant career – Martin was as much a fascinating figure as Ruth. Hammer plays with a joyful, charismatic relish, perfectly mixing intellectual curiosity with an innate decency. It’s also a generous performance that complements Jones perfectly.

The relationship between these two is the emotional heart of the film, frequently raising warm smiles from the audience. An early scene where Martin is diagnosed with cancer after collapsing during a game of charades tugs at the heartstrings, not least for the sudden pained look of panic that crosses Martin’s face as he collapses, and Ruth’s protective rush to his side. These two argue once in the film – and that an argument based around Martin encouraging Ruth to live the life she wants – and the film goes out of its way to show that their life together was an equal partnership, where both were determined to support and protect the other.

It’s a lovely relationship to place at the film’s centre – even if Hammer is essentially playing the supportive wife role that so many biopics of men have featured (Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything for starters springs to mind!). That points at one of the weaknesses of the film: its predictability. Structurally it follows the route of many of these sort of biopics, with initial struggle, a cause, set-backs, pep-talks, sudden nerves before the eventual demonstration of triumph. Frankly nothing in the film narratively is remotely surprising, and Leder, despite a few touches of flair, largely directs with a workmanlike assurance.

Workmanlike is a little harsh, but is probably the film’s main weakness. While it’s well-played and has an excellent story – and, I will say it again, a script that largely expects its viewers to follow the legal points – it also can’t quite figure out a way to tell the story that doesn’t squeeze it into the biopic clichés that you’ve seen dozens of times before. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Not exactly: but it also makes the film at heart an engaging middle-brow drama, which seems a shame when Ruth Bader Ginsburg is anything but.

Made in Dagenham (2010)

Up the Women! British comedy wallows in nostalgia but tells a still relevant tale of sexual equality

Director: Nigel Cole

Cast: Sally Hawkins (Rita O’Grady), Bob Hoskins (Albert), Miranda Richardson (Barbara Castle), Geraldine James (Connie), Rosamund Pike (Lisa Hopkins), Andrea Riseborough (Brenda), Jamie Winstone (Sandra), Daniel Mays (Eddie O’Grady), Richard Schiff (Robert Tooley), Rupert Graves (Peter Hopkins), Kenneth Cranham (Monty Taylor), Nicola Duffett (Eileen), Lorraine Stanley (Monica), Roger Lloyd-Pack (George), Andrew Lincoln (Mr Clarke)

You’d like to think a film made ten years ago about a strike for equal pay in the 1960s would be more of a history piece than something that still carries real relevance today. But this is still a world where women are often paid less than a man, and where their work is often devalued or held as less “important” than their male counterparts. Made in Dagenham looks at all these issues with a rose-tinted, feel-good stance that aims to entertain first and make you think second. Nothing wrong with that, but it means the film is largely just a crowd-pleaser, when you feel it could be more.

At the Ford factory in Dagenham, the female sewing machinists are not paid as skilled workers, and are forced to accept less work. Frustrated at the patronising attitude from their all-male union reps, and encouraged by foreman Albert (Bob Hoskins, lovely in one of his cuddliest performances), the women decide to go on strike for equal play, led by Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins). As public attention builds, the Ford owners in America mobilise for a battle and the strike attracts the interest of Secretary for Employment Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), someone who knows the struggles a woman faces in a man’s world.

It’s no great surprise based on the fluffy, charming tone of this film that Nigel Cole’s previous credit was Calendar Girls. (Also no surprise that, like that film, this has been turned into a crowd-pleasing stage musical.) William Ivory’s script deftly sketches out some familiar movie-dynamics for its characters, establishes clear heroes and villains, gives us a good sprinkling of information and “things to think about”, mixes in at least one tragic sub-plot and provides a steady stream of high points, heart-string tugging moments and punch the air moments. As a piece of writing playing to the masses, it’s pretty flawless.

It’s in love with the 1960s details, with nostalgia dialled up to 11, with a love of the look, feel and styles of the era and plenty of sound cues mixed in that will have you tapping your toes. It’s all designed for you to have fun, and if that means some of the deeper questions get a bit lost at points, that doesn’t really matter.

And there is more than enough enjoyable material to be seen in setting up a series of bigoted or patronising men (gamely played principally by Kenneth Cranham and Rupert Graves) and seeing them knocked down. You could argue that a slightly braver film would touch at the implications of what Richard Schiff’s corporate big-hitter says about equal pay: make it more expensive to make cars here and we will make our cars somewhere else. (In fact it was pretty hard to forget that, watching the film today, as Brexit has already caused at least three major car factory closures in the UK. In fact the film is very happy to talk all about equal pay for women in the Western World but never even raises the question of how we are quite content to have people in the third world slave away in conditions far worse than this for a few pennies an hour.) But that’s not the film’s point, and instead it’s all about those male-female relationships.

Sally Hawkins does a good job as a woman slowly growing a social and political awareness and then turning that new-found enlightenment on her own domestic life with well-meaning but of-his-time husband Eddie (a sweet but cluelessly sexist Daniel Mays). It’s all conventional stuff, but Hawkins and Mays play it very well.

The real meat actually comes from plotlines elsewhere. Rosamund Pike is excellent as a woman with a first in history from Oxford, reduced to wheeling out nibbles for her patronising husband and keeping her ideas to herself. Geraldine James and Roger Lloyd-Pack get the tragic plotline of a couple struggling with his post-war undiagnosed PTSD, which gets most of the heart-string tugging.

Eventually all is made well by Miranda Richardson’s Barbara Castle, floating into the picture to wave a magic wand and save the women’s bacon. Richardson thoroughly enjoys herself in a rather cardboard role, at least two scenes of which are solid exposition, in which Castle’s lecturing of two uppity civil servants is used to introduce the political context. By the end you won’t be surprised that good triumphs. But it’s a film which largely only looks to put a smile on your face, and doesn’t really look at the wider implications or injustices of unequal pay. To the film’s credit it has a final montage of the real Ford women talking about their lives and the battles they had to be respected, which gives it a bit of extra depth. A truly brave film would have found a few minutes – and that’s all it really needs – to look at the wider issues (then and today) economically and socially, and to make us think a little. As it is this just entertains, which is what you want, but it could be more.

Primary Colors (1998)

John Travolta and Emma Thompson are definitely not the Clintons in Primary Colors

Director: Mike Nichols

Cast: John Travolta (Governor Jack Stanton), Emma Thompson (Susan Stanton), Adrian Lester (Henry Burton), Billy Bob Thornton (Richard Jemmons), Kathy Bates (Libby Holden), Larry Hagman (Governor Fred Picker), Stacy Edwards (Jennifer Rodgers), Maura Tierney (Daisy Green), Diane Ladd (Mamma Stanton), Paul Guilfoyle (Howard Ferguson), Kevin Cooney (Senator Lawrence Harris), Rebecca Walker (March Cunningham), Allison Janney (Miss Walsh), Mykelti Williamson (Dewayne Smith)

In 1998, America was engrossed in what seemed like a never-ending series of scandals around Bill Clinton, with Clinton facing impeachment. The news was filled with Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal catch-ups seemingly non-stop. Surely in the middle of that, a film that charted earlier scandals about Slick Willie would be a hit? Well Primary Colors proved that wrong. A thinly veiled portrait of the Clinton run for the White House, based on a novel written by Joe Klein who followed the Clintons on the campaign, it tanked at the box office. Possibly due to audiences having Clinton-fatigue – but also perhaps because it’s a stodgy, overlong and slightly too pleased-with-itself piece of Hollywood political commentary.

The film sticks pretty close to real-life timelines. John Travolta is Arkansas Governor Jack Stanton (Travolta does a consistent impersonation of Bill Clinton both vocally and physically during the whole film), who’s running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, supported by his (perhaps) smarter, ambitious wife Susan (Emma Thompson, doing a neat embodiment of Hillary without impersonation). Eager young black political operator Henry Burton (Adrian Lester) is recruited to help run the campaign – and finds himself increasingly drawn into the secrets of the Stantons, not least Jack’s persistent infidelities that seem to go hand-in-hand with his empathy and genuine passion for helping people. As scandal builds on scandal, the campaign to run for President becomes ever more unseemly.

Primary Colors asks questions that, to be honest, are pretty familiar to anyone who has ever seen a Hollywood film about politics. We’re presented with a Clinton-Stanton who wants to help America to re-educate itself in a modern world, who weeps with emotion when hearing a man recount his struggles with literacy (a fine cameo from Mykelti Williamson), who wants to rebuild America’s economy and build opportunities for all. And at the same time, he can’t keep it in his pants, is quite happy to dodge as much as possible the consequences of his actions, and is blithely disinterested in the impact his infidelities have on other people. Essentially the film wants to ask: at what point does a man’s personal behaviour and morals start to outweigh his good intentions?

It just takes a long time to ask it. A very long time. Primary Colors is a film that could easily be half an hour shorter, and you would miss very little. It’s a stodgy, overlong, smug drama that takes a gleeful delight in how clever it’s being making a film about the Clintons that-isn’t-about-them. It’s weakened as well by using an overly familiar device of putting a naïve and well-meaning audience surrogate character at its centre. We’ve seen this growth of disillusionment before, but Adrian Lester (in a break out role) fails to make Henry Burton a really interesting character – he’s little more than a cipher that we can project our views onto, and Lester is too reserved an actor to make him a character we can effectively invest in as a person. Instead he becomes a largely passive observer that more interesting characters revolve around.

Those characters being largely the Stantons themselves. John Travolta does a very good impersonation of Clinton, but he offers very little insight into the sort of person Clinton is, his motivations or his feelings. Like the character, the role is all performance and you never get a sense of how genuine his goals are and how much ambition is his main driver. As scandals pile up, Travolta is great at capturing Clinton’s sense of hurt that anyone would question his morals (even as his actions display his fundamental lack of them), but the role is short on depth.

Emma Thompson gets less to play with as Hillary. In fact, she disappears from the second half of the film, after an affair plotline between her and Lester was cut completely from the film (something that makes certain scenes, where actors are clearly responding to this non-existent plotline, amusing to watch). But she manages to make the role something a little more than impersonation, delivering a whipper-sharp, ambitious woman who has buried her resentments about her husband’s betrayals under a wish to achieve a higher goal.

The rest of the cast deliver decent performances, but the stand-out is Kathy Bates as a long-time Stanton friend turned political fixer, who sees her idealisation of the Stantons turn to bitter disillusionment. Bates at first seems to be delivering another of her custom-made “larger than life” roles, but as the stuff hits the fan she layers it with a real emotional depth and complexity. It’s a caricature role that she turns into something real, a woman who feels genuine pain at seeing her deeply held political convictions and ideals being slowly disregarded by her heroes.

But then we get her point. Don’t we all feel a bit like that when we think back about Bill Clinton? The more we learn about his affairs and sexual scandals – and the more that #MeToo develops our understanding of how powerful men can abuse their power to take advantage of star-struck young women – the less sympathetic he seems. The film too suffers from some really out-of-date views of male sexuality. Billy Bob Thornton’s political fixer exposes himself early on in the film to a female worker, but this is shrugged off as “banter”, as opposed to a criminal offence – and the film largely avoids giving any air time to Stanton’s principal victim, the teenage daughter of a black restauranter whom he may or may not have impregnated. Stanton uses his power to gain sexual favours – one of his earliest acts is casually picking up a gawky English teacher who’s giving him a guided tour of her school (a funny cameo from Allison Janney) – but this is largely categorised as a personal weakness that doesn’t impact his suitability for the Presidency, something that feels more and more uncomfortable.

However, Primary Colors’ real problem is that it is overlong and a little bit too pleased with its intricate reconstruction of semi-true events. Although there are funny lines and decent performances, the film lacks any real zip and it gives no real insight into modern politics (other than perhaps deploring the compromises politicians must make) or the Clintons themselves. Instead it settles for telling us things we already know at great length and making safe but empty points about modern America. Far from exploring a Faustian pact where we accept deep personal failings in politicians because we believe that, overall, they could be a force for good, instead Primary Colors is all about turning shades of grey into obvious clear-cut moral choices.

Our Kind of Traitor (2016)

Stellan Skarsgård is the Russian traitor whose secrets pose a danger for the British elite in Our Kind of Traitor

Director: Susanna White

Cast: Ewan McGregor (Perry MacKendrick), Stellan Skarsgård (Dima), Damian Lewis (Hector), Naomie Harris (Gail MacKendrick), Jeremy Northam (Aubrey Longrigg), Khalid Abdalla (Luke), Velibor Topic (Emilio Del Oro), Alicia von Rittberg (Natasha), Mark Gatiss (Billy Matlock), Mark Stanley (Ollie)

John Le Carré’s works often revolve around a dark, cynical view of government agencies as corrupt, indolent and focused on petty or personal concerns rather than doing what’s best for the country and its people. Is it any wonder that there has been such a burst of interest in adaptations on film and television of his work?

Our Kind of Traitor is straight out of the Le Carré wheelhouse. On a holiday to save their marriage (after his infidelity), Perry (Ewan McGregor) and Gail (Naomi Harris) bump into charismatic Russian gangster Dima (Stellan Skarsgård). Perry and he strike up a surprising friendship – and before he knows it Perry is agreeing to carry information from Dima to the British intelligence services. This attracts the attention of MI6 officer Hector (Damian Lewis) who sees this as an opportunity to expose the corrupt links between Russian criminals and high-level British bankers and politicians. Dima, however, will only hand over the goods if he is promised asylum for his family – something the British authorities, aware of the mess his revelations could cause, are not happy to allow…

Susanna White, veteran of some excellent television series of the last few years, puts together a confidently mounted and generally well-paced drama, with many of the expected Le Carré twists and turns. If she leans a little too heavily on the murk – the green and blue filters on the camera get a big workout here – it does at least mean that we get a real sense of the twilight world the characters operate in, meaning flashes of wide open space and bright daylight carry real impact. She also really understands how violence is often more shocking when we see the reaction of witnesses rather than the deed itself – all the most violent and tragic events in the film are seen at least partly from the perspective of the reactions of those witnessing them. The sense of danger on the edges of every action, stays with us while watching this unjust nightmare unravel.

It also works really well with one of the core themes of the movie: our ability to feel empathy for other people and how it affects our choices. Dima is driven towards defection because of his distaste for the increasing violence of the next generation of Russian criminals, and their lack of discrimination about who they harm. He’s all but adopted the orphaned children of a previous victim of violence, and his motivation at all points is to insure his family’s safety. Hector, our case officer, is motivated overwhelmingly by a sense of tragic, impotent fury about his rival ensuring Hector’s son is serving a long sentence in prison for drug smuggling.

And Perry is pulled into all this because he has a strong protective streak – something that eventually saves his marriage. Perry frequently throws himself forward to protect the weak, with no regard for his safety, from his unending efforts to protect Dima’s family to throwing himself in fury at a mobster roughing up a young woman. His intense empathy and protective streak motor all his actions and run through the whole movie.

It’s a shame then that his actual character isn’t quite interesting enough to hold the story together. Nothing wrong with McGregor’s performance, the character itself is rather sketchily written. Aside from his protectiveness we don’t get much of a sense of him and – naturally enough – he’s often a passenger or witness to events around him. Similarly, Naomie Harris does her best with a character that barely exists.

Instead the plaudits (and meaty parts) go to Skarsgård and Lewis. Skarsgård dominates the film with an exuberant, larger than life character who never feels like a caricature and reveals increasing depths of humanity and vulnerability beneath the surface. Lewis matches him just as well, at first seeming like a buttoned-up George Smiley type, but with his own tragic background motivating a long-term career man to slowly build his own conscience.

Our Kind of Traitor handles many of these personal themes very well, but it doesn’t quite manage to tie them into something that really feels special. Instead this feels a bit more like a Le Carré-by- numbers. We get the shady secret services, government greed, good people trapped in the middle – even some of the characters, from the foul-mouthed spook played by Mark Gatiss to Jeremy Northam’s jet black Aubrey, seem like they could have appeared in any number of his novels.

There is a film here that is wanting to be made about the invasion of the UK by dirty Russian money – but it never quite comes out as this Dante-esque, Miltonian spiral. Instead the film too often settles for more functional thrills, a more traditional or middle-brow approach that works very well while you watch it, but doesn’t go the extra mile to turn this into something you will really remember.

American Hustle (2013)

Glamour and confidence tricks in David O. Russell’s flashy American Hustle

Director: David O. Russell

Cast: Christian Bale (Irving Rosenfeld), Amy Adams (Sydney Prosser), Bradley Cooper (Richie DiMaso), Jennifer Lawrence (Rosalyn Rosenfeld), Jeremy Renner (Mayor Carmine Polito), Louis CK (Stoddard Thorsen), Jack Huston (Pete Musane), Michael Peña (Paco Hernandez/Sheik), Elisabeth Röhm (Dolly Polito), Shea Whigham (Carl Elway), Alessandro Nivola (Anthony Amada), Robert De Niro (Victor Tellegio)

In 2013, American Hustle was nominated for ten Oscars and won none of them. Somehow, being invited to the big party but not receiving any prizes was strangely fitting for a film about small time grifters forced into a big game way beyond their control. Russell’s film is like a celebration of his strengths and weaknesses as a director: it’s stuffed with some very good (if rather mannered) performances, offers lots of dynamic film making, but is still basically a rather cold and arch film that’s hard to really invest in – rather like a con game in itself.

In 1978, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is a small-time grafter, running scams with his partner and lover Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who uses the identity of a young English aristocrat “Lady Edith Greenslly”. Rosenfeld longs to leave his unstable, selfish wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) for Sydney, but fears he will lose all his access to his adopted son. Rosenfeld and Prosser’s career of clever investment frauds is brought to an end when Prosser is caught red-handed by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper). DiMaso forces the pair into his entrapment operation, targeting New Jersey politicians with offers of bribes as part of a Fake Sheik investment. Initially it targets Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), but the operation quickly expands, as the ambitious and impulsive DiMaso constantly follows every connection and the operation expands to dangerous levels, taking in the mafia. Scared, Rosenfeld and Prosser desperately try to play both ends against the middle.

American Hustle is a decent film, which pulls together the sort of capers, turmoil and antics that you would expect from a film about a long con. It throws into the melting pot the vibes of several other films, from The Sting to Goodfellas, and asks us to admire the results. Russell encourages the actors to play it with an edgy verisimilitude that pretty much works as a metaphor for con men. Each performance is an effective display of high-wire character acting work laced with arch, studied tricks. But only rarely do you get a sense of something that’s real.

That’s part of a film that wants to have a cake and eat it as well. It’s striking in the entire story that the most sympathetic character is the initial target, Jeremy Renner’s well-meaning, passionate New Jersey politician, bamboozled into taking a bribe (money he mostly uses in the local community) because he is convinced it’s a crucial part of getting Arab investment. It’s even more striking that the most honest, subdued (and deadly) character is the Mafia kingpin Victor Tellegio, played with chilling menace by an unbilled Robert DeNiro. Nearly everyone else on the side of the entrapment operation is pretty much a selfish prick or verging on the unhinged.

But then that’s part of the point of the film, which throws two people who know what they are doing (Rosenfeld and Prosser) at the mercy of people playing with fire (Roselyn and in particular DiMaso, a permed, tightly-wound powderkeg). This is one hell of a performance from Bradley Cooper – and a sign again after Silver Linings Playbook that Russell and he have a natural understanding. Cooper is a force of nature, a bundle of terrible impulses combined with an utter lack of shame or self-control, who is quite happy to trample over everyone to get what he wants and has no regard whatsoever for the danger he puts himself and others into. Utterly unpredictable, he never sticks to a plan, veers between rage and hysterical laughter and, worst of all, is always convinced he’s right.

It’s DiMaso who spins the operation into dangerous waters with his vaulting ambition to land yet another big fish, recklessly peddling insubstantial, unprepared lies on top of each other – to the terror and horror of practised peddlar of bullshit Rosenfeld, whose whole successful schtick is based on saying “no” and having the mark do all the desperate work. DiMaso’s approach not only puts the operation at risk, it puts lives at risk – not that DiMaso cares, preoccupied as he is with his childish one-upmanship with his boss and a teenage sexual obsession with Prosser.

What chance do the (mostly) small-fish politicians and local figures have, whose lives are placed on the altar of DiMaso’s ambition? It’s no wonder that, late in the film, our conmen heroes start to feel guilt and remorse – none more so than Irving Rosenfeld. Played by Christian Bale with the sort of tricksy, Olivier-ish disguises that he so loves (in this case increased weight, a balding comb-over and a pair of tinged glasses he obsessively fiddles with), Rosenfeld is an operator happy with the level he is working at and incredibly wary of stepping up into the dangerous big leagues. Justifiably convinced of his own professionalism at fleecing money and winning trust, Rosenfeld has no problem with taking money from the selfish but every problem in the world with destroying the life of a fundamentally honest man. Bale’s performance, for all the tricks, manages to successfully build a picture of a selfish man who believes himself in his way to be honest in a way and is just trying to make his way.

That way also involves balancing between two very different women. Amy Adams does decent work as a blowsy fake-aristocrat, sporting a series of tops with neck lines that literally plunge down to her waist, although she is perhaps a little too “nice girl next door” to really convince as the love-em-to-manipulate-them Prosser. She’s not also helped by the script giving her an ill-defined arc of self-doubt linked to pretending to be someone else. Sweet as the genuine love can be her between her and Rosenfeld – and excellent as her chemistry is between Bale and Cooper – it’s the character who remains the least knowable in the film.

Also not helping is the fact that Jennifer Lawrence burns through the film as Rosalyn, the sort of electric, larger-than-life but still very real performance of arrogance, selfishness, dangerous stupidity and greed that marked her out as a major actress. Whether inadvertently putting Rosenfeld’s life at risk through blabbing details she’s half-overheard and half-understood, cleaning the kitchen while singing an aggressive rendition of Live and Let Die or nearly burning the house down because she won’t believe metal can’t go in “the science oven” (aka microwave), Lawrence is the film’s MVP.

Russell’s film showcases all these actors brilliantly, but his overall story remains a little cold and not as clever as it thinks. With a film about conmen you expect a final rugpull – and this film sort of manages one – but the story telling to take us there isn’t quite as articulate and clever as it needs to be in order to be really satisfying. Perhaps it’s the film’s ragged, hip, indie style of telling – or the air that the actors are making a lot of this stuff up as they go with edgy, semi-improvised performances – but the film never really engrosses or engages. For all that we see the inner worlds of Rosenfeld and Prosser, I can’t say I really, truly cared what happened to them.

Instead Russell focuses on the marshalling of his resources, and cool, slick film-making. He uses expert camera work and editing, mixed with a superbly chosen soundtrack, overlaid with voiceover, sudden transitions, some narrative jumps and a vibrant sense of cool to make a story that finally feels a little too much like a style-over-substance trick – in fact a con game all of its very own, as enjoyable and entertaining as the rest of the film, but when it finishes you realise your pockets are empty.

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.

Us (2019)

Lupita Nyong’o prepares to take on the dreaded Us

Director: Jordan Peele

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o (Adelaide Wilson), Winston Duke (Gabe Wilson), Shahadi Wright Joseph (Zora Wilson), Evan Alex (Jason Wilson), Elisabeth Moss (Kitty Tyler), Tim Heidecker (Rosh Tyler), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Russel Thomas), Anna Diop (Rayne Thomas), Madison Curry (Young Adelaide)

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a tough film to follow. Smart, socially aware, funny, scary and haunting, it’s both one of the best horror films in years, and also one of the finest films made about modern America. It means his follow-up has some tough shoes to fill. Us perhaps doesn’t quite fill them as well, but judged on its own terms it’s another example of what a witty, skilled and intelligent film-maker Jordan Peele is and how skilfully he is able to both defy and define genre tropes.

The less you know about the plot the better, but Lupita Nyong’o plays Adelaide Wilson, a woman returning with her family to spend a holiday at Santa Cruz beach. While her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Evan (Jason Wilson) are filled with excitement about the trip away, Adelaide fears returning to the location where she traumatically got lost one night in a hall of mirrors and encountered what felt like a doppelganger of herself. But as strange coincidences begin to mount up on their holiday, Adelaide begins to fear her whole family may in fact be in great danger…

Us mixes moments of unbearable tension with beats of almost slapstick humour. But, like Get Out, it’s also a film that leaves you grasping at the implications of its setting and ideas and opens up an ocean of possible interpretations and meanings. There is no chance at all Jordan Peele is a one-hit wonder, because this film is a blindingly good, brilliantly made chiller/thriller that stays with you once you leave the cinema.

It has such an impact largely because Peele is such an immersive and mesmerising director. His mastery of the tricks and turns of the genre are obvious, but what really makes this go the extra mile in effectiveness is his brilliant understanding of cinema. The camera work here is superb: he knows exactly how long to let a shot linger, exactly how a slow zoom or pull out can build tension and fear to such excellent effect, how the right choice of music can give a scene anything from an ominous Omen-like terror to a streak of black comedy (there is one musical choice that is so perfectly hilarious and yet bleakly dark that it will have you laughing out loud despite the horror of the scene it accompanies). Us is a superbly made film by a master movie-maker, with every moment giving some imaginative flourish or striking image.

Us is also a film that works because of its depth and the humanity of its characters. Each character is given establishing moments – big and small – that immediately ring true and allow you to understand and relate to that person in seconds. Peele’s horror comes not from blood and guts – which is present but never exploitative (this is a million miles away from a mindless slasher) – but from watching people we have grown to care for and like going through ghastly events. A prolonged home invasion sequence is almost unbearable to watch in the chilling hopelessness of the family caught up in it: and it works because the empathy we have built up for these people allows us to put ourselves immediately into their shoes. The film has a brilliant understanding of our universal fears, from not being safe in our homes to being powerless to protect our children, and uses these for great effect.

The second half of the film (thankfully!) doesn’t continue this unbearable, stomach pulling dread (if it did you wouldn’t be able to watch it) and probably segues more into science-fiction-thriller territory. Not that that’s a problem as the film remains gripping and compelling throughout. It also delves further into the fascinating themes that Peele is confident enough to place on the table without feeling the need to hammer home an interpretation or meaning for the viewer. There are questions here throughout about the underbelly of America, the unspoken questions of class that run through the country. “We are Americans” the ‘villains’ of the film proudly state at one point – and the more we learn about them, the more we understand about why they cling to this idea of belonging. And of course why they feel the way they feel about their country.

What is class in America? How is this nation divided by the haves and the have nots – and how does it affect the decisions people make about their lives? What impact does commercialisation and the need to both have things and to be part of something have on us? What in modern America can both bring us together and drive us further apart? These are questions that run throughout the film – without clear cut answers – but challenge you to think for yourself.

The performances in amongst all this are brilliant. Lupita Nyong’o probably won’t get the awards recognition she deserves here for an extraordinary performance of empathetic gentleness and distress hardening into a grim determination to do whatever is necessary to protect her family. Nyong’o has a double role in the film, and this second performance is equally wonderful, a triumph not only of physical acting but also of tortured psyche. Winston Duke is equally good as a lovable doofus of a husband, while Wright Joseph and Evan Alex give exceptional performances as their children.

Peele throws in a late narrative twist – effectively signposted throughout – which challenges many of our assumptions about what we have been watching, but doesn’t distract from the social questions he has been tackling throughout the film in a subtle way. Once again his narrative control is flawless and the depth he can suggest behind horror tropes is staggering. Us is perhaps more of a fairground ride than Get Out, more about the terror of being chased and the black comedy of ordinary people fighting back with extreme violence, but it’s a damn entertaining one and leaves you with more to think about the longer you reflect on it.

BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Adam Driver and John David Washington infiltrate the KKK in Spike Lee’s brilliant, thought-provoking, political message film BlacKkKlansman

Director: Spike Lee

Cast: John David Washington (Detective Ron Stallworth), Adam Driver (Detective Philip Zimmerman), Laura Harrier (Patrice Dumas), Topher Grace (David Duke), Jasper Pääkkönen (Felix Kendrickson), Ryan Eggold (Walter Breachway), Paul Walter Hauser (Ivanhoe), Ashlie Atkinson (Connie Kendrickson), Corey Hawkins (Kwame Ture), Michael Buscemi (Jimmy Creek), Robert John Burke (Chief Bridges), Fred Weller (Patrolman Andy Landers), Harry Belafonte (Jerome Turner)

BlacKkKlansman feels like it would make great material for a comedy film. The true story of the first black cop in Colorado, who in the 1970s tricked the Ku Klux Klan (over the phone) to give him membership of the party, working with a white colleague for face-to-face meetings. Hard to believe but, as this film says, “Dis Joint is based on some fo’ real, fo’ real shit”. And the film has more than its share of comic beats. But Spike Lee is far smarter, and far more worried about where America is going, to simply make a film that turns the KKK into a gang of idiots. Instead this becomes a dark, terrifying vision not just of what America was but what it is.

Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is that first black cop. Ambitious and keen to do his bit, he points out that he is perfect for some undercover work – and after first investigating some of the civil rights movement (and falling for Black Student Union Leader Patrice Dumas, played by Laura Harrier) he is motivated to turn his attention to the Klan. Cold calling local organiser Walter (Ryan Eggold), he quickly finds himself welcomed to the Klan (who are of course completely unaware of his race). Working with fellow undercover detective Zimmerman (Adam Driver), a more relaxed Jewish cop, who can handle the face-to-face meetings, Stallworth opens an investigation into extremism in the far right, with their main target being Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace).

Spike Lee’s film starts as a clever balance between exploring the central comedy of this set-up – the black cop busting the KKK – and an exploration of the racial tensions that were barely concealed in America in the 1970s. Stallworth experiences a parade of suspicion and resentment of the police from his fellow African-Americans, while some of the responses from the police officers range from suspicion to outright racist distrust. It’s his brilliant handling and understanding of the racial tensions in America that power the movie – and give it the impact and importance it undoubtedly has.

The comic timing in much of Washington’s phone calls with various hard-right racists is spot on, and the film gets laughs from the gullibility and foolishness of the Klan (Duke talks at length about how he can always tell the difference vocally between a white man and a black man). But Lee knows that extremism like this fundamentally isn’t a joke – and it’s certainly not in this film, which wraps up a part cop-caper, part undercover thriller with a sharp political message.

Because no matter how stupid the KKK are, we are left in no doubt about how dangerous, violent and vile they truly are. The racist language, the repeated use over and over again of every insulting term imaginable for African Americans and Jews, the prolonged fantasy talk about lynchings and murders, the amount of guns these people have available to them, the mix of suave “public face” racists and the violence-as-a-first-resort hicks and hillbillies that follow them… It’s beyond alarming, its’ terrifying. And Lee is quite clear – give any of these people even the slightest piece of endorsement and encouragement, and they would gleefully enact another Holocaust. There ain’t nothing funny about that.

Instead, scene after scene of Adam Driver’s undercover cop interacting with this human slime shows no amount of humanity or empathy can be found at all among this appalling crowd of people. You feel the terror of these people and Lee fills every scene with a mounting tension and horror that slowly strangles (fittingly) the initial comedy of the set-up. But then that is part of Lee’s extraordinary work on this film, an angry blast of politically motivated invective wrapped up in an entertaining story. Lee makes it clear that we are kidding ourselves if we think racism is a problem of the past, or something that can be easily wrapped up (it’s easy to see why he was so pissed off that Green Book, a far more cosy, reassuring and hopeful film about racism, scooped best picture). The film ends with an alarming flash forward to shots from Charlottesville, reactions to the murder of Heather Heyer and shots of Trump mindlessly talking about “very fine people on both sides”. The message “America First” is shouted as proudly in the 1970s plotline as it is in the real life footage of 2017. Hammering home Lee’s fears that the KKK have never had a warmer environment to work in than they do today.

Lee’s film does struggle when it comes to the plot that he builds around the events of the film. The film makes clear that in many ways the whole investigation was for nothing and produced no lasting results: it unearthed KKK sympathisers in key government departments (all of whom were “sent to Alaska” in the words of Stallworth) but was then abruptly closed down. While this real target is referenced in a throwaway scene or two, a late fictionalised bomb plot by the KKK – which of course revolves around Stallworth’s fictional black power girlfriend – doesn’t quite ring true and feels slightly out of place.

But the real aim of the film is Lee’s political message, and on that score this film is powerful, sticks in the mind and leaves a lasting impression. Lee’s direction is also a brilliant mixture of flash and sensitively filmed set-pieces. There are superb cameos from Harry Belafonte (in a heartfelt speech) telling a story of historic lynching, and Corey Hawkins as articulate, passionate activist Kwame Ture. Both these sequences stand out, with Lee’s controlled direction knowing when to move the camera and when to hold it and let the power of the words and emotions do the work.

The cast all give outstanding performances. Driver is chameleonic (and Oscar nominated) as the cop who moves naturally between his own liberal views and his easy approximation of racism. Washington is brilliant in the lead role as the dedicated lawman, willing to prove himself among the racists of his own department. Grace and Eggold stand out as two different types of the face of “acceptable” KKK. Lee’s film builds on these performances with his own passion to create a truly lasting and important piece of filmmaking. Never believe the world has changed: this film reminds us immediately that cozy stories that talk of “how far we’ve come” are fairy tale fantasies that distract us from the danger of a racial lynching being just round the corner.

Vice (2018)

Christian Bale slaps on the make-up as Dick Cheney in Vice

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Christian Bale (Dick Cheney), Amy Adams (Lynne Cheney), Steve Carell (Donald Rumsfield), Sam Rockwell (George W Bush), Alison Pill (Mary Cheney), Lily Rabe (Liz Cheney), Jesse Plemons (Kurt), Tyler Perry (Colin Powell), Justin Kirk (Scooter Libby), LisaGay Hamilton (Condoleezza Rice), Eddie Marsan (Paul Wolfowitz), Bill Camp (Gerald Ford), Don McManus (David Addington)

There is a film to be made about the turmoil of the Bush presidency. It’s not this film. Adam McKay’s flashy, clumsy, cartoonish, smug, tedious, overlong, arrogant and polemical film quickly outstays its welcome, drowning any legitimate ideas and theories it has under a wave of high-minded, angry shouting at the viewer, frequently mistaking flash and bombast for actual political insight and producing the sort of heavy-handed, angry political commentary that wouldn’t look out of place in a cheap student review. And flipping heck I’m on the liberal left!

Anyway, the film follows the career of Dick Cheney (Christian Bale under an impressive pile of make-up) from his early wash-out days. Told by his wife Lynne (Amy Adams) to buck his ideas up or lose her, Cheney becomes an intern for Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), rising through the ranks due to his ruthless efficiency and loyalty, becoming Chief of Staff under Ford and Secretary of Defence under Bush. So he’s a natural choice for the inexperienced George W Bush (Sam Rockwell) to balance the presidential ticket. In return, though, Cheney wants control over a few areas – energy, foreign policy, defence etc. etc. – that the lazy Bush has no interest in overseeing. So a quiet, backroom politician changes the office of the Vice President to become the most powerful man in the world. Boo hiss.

McKay’s intention with this film is to reveal the hollowness, greed and utter lack of integrity in its subject. Well he never lets us forget this aim – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so openly hated its lead character, which so completely refused to see any redeeming qualities in him whatsoever. Christ, even Downfall took a few minutes to show Hitler was generally kind to those who worked for him. The film is so unrelenting in its loathing for Cheney that it starts to feel like a being shouted out for over two hours by an “it’s the end of the world” fanatic on a street corner. This does not make for good entertainment.

The film has no subtlety whatsoever. Not for a single second does it even consider the remote possibility that anyone in the Republican party might, perhaps, just maybe, even if it was only some of the time, believe that they were doing something for a principled reason, even if it was a principle those on the left don’t agree with. Instead, all the characters are shown as selfish, greedy and corrupt, using ideology solely to gain power and then using power only to enrich themselves. It’s the sort of lazy political views that turn people off liberals – the idea that anyone who doesn’t share a liberal viewpoint is by definition evil. Some of us grew out of this kneejerk assumption that everyone who doesn’t agree with us is self-serving and cruel. Not McKay.

On top of which, McKay’s film is made with the overt flash and brio that is the hallmark of the hack director using the tools of cinema with no understanding of their proper use. Wonky camerawork, cutting between timelines, throwing in newsreel footage, breaking the fourth wall, using strange camera angles, chucking in cameo actors to amusingly comment on events (Alfred Molina and Naomi Watts principally) and editing it with flash don’t make you a great director. They make you someone who has seen a lot of films and lot of techniques, but has no understanding of how to use them to craft an overall effect, instead thinking that if you throw all of them at the wall at once, you’ll be a master craftsman.

The film is full of studenty bits of invention that must have seemed oh-so-clever on paper in McKay’s script. Forty minutes in, with Cheney’s career looking over with the end of the Bush presidency, McKay starts running the credits – only to snap back into the film with the fateful phone call from Dubya. It’s clever and raises a quick chuckle, but doesn’t add anything to a sense of turning point in Cheney’s life. It’s followed by a clumsy metaphor of moments being like tea cups balanced on top of each other (inevitably these are later shown tumbling down) to represent how key moments of history build on each other. The real nadir is a moment when Dick and Lynne fall back into cod-Shakespearean dialogue in the bedroom as they discuss a possible vice presidency. ‘We don’t have Shakespeare’s psychologically insightful dialogue’ (I paraphrase) says the voiceover, before this skin-crawling hand-in-mouth sequence that shows McKay knows as much about Shakespeare as he does subtle political commentary.

Ah yes the voiceover. Perhaps not knowing how to marshall his childish political points in actual scenes and dialogue, McKay uses a voiceover from Jesse Plemons’ ground-forces marine to spell out as bluntly and crudely as possible the basic and trivial points it wants to make. The damn film already feels like being hectored by a crank, so why not make it feel even more like a polemic by having a character bitterly explain why everything is wicked and evil at you? The narration bores – and joins the general feeling of the rest of the film, that it goes on forever and ever and ever and never, ever, ever says something really interesting or revealing.

The performances are a mixed bag. Bale gives a decent turn as Cheney, capturing his mannerisms and conveying a sense of dark ambition, but it’s a role he could play standing on his head. Amy Adams turns Lynne into a Lady Macbeth, in a reheat of her performance from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Every other performance is a crude cartoon – Carell’s Rumsfeld a putty-faced joke, Sam Rockwell’s Bush (an impossibly generous Oscar nomination) a cartoonish buffoon. Everyone else coasts through it, patting themselves on the back.

There is an argument to be made that Cheney’s legacy is far from good, and it’s certain that we are paying a heavy price for interventions in Iraq. Many of the policies were less than savoury and left a less than positive benefit. But this film hammers these points home with all the charm of a ranting, drunk politics student who has read one book and watched a lot of YouTube videos. With McKay’s soulless, clumsy, look-at-me direction layered on top, this is a flat out terrible film. Save yourself what feels like much more than its two hour run time. In fact I’ll summarise it for you: CHENEY IS EVIL AND HORRIBLE AND HE (LITERALLY) HAS NO HEART. There you go. You don’t need to see it now.