Category: Political drama

The Apprentice (2024)

Heavy-handed anti-Trump message is made to almost work by two excellent performances

Director: Ali Abbasi

Cast: Sebastian Stan (Donald Trump), Jeremy Strong (Roy Cohn), Maria Bakalova (Ivana Trump), Martin Donovan (Fred Trump Snr), Catherine McNally (Mary Anne Trump), Charlie Carrick (Fred Trump Jnr), Ben Sullivan (Russell Eldridge), Mark Rendall (Roger Stone), Bruce Beaton (Andy Warhol)

No one has dominated recent global discussion more than Donald Trump. The Apprentice aims to expose how he was formed – inevitably, you can’t move for reviews referring to it as a Supervillain Origin Story – but really, it’s being sung for the choir and I’m not sure it really adds anything to the international conversation. I can’t imagine this film shifting the dial at all (which indeed it didn’t): if you hate Trump (and I am not a fan), it’s gonna confirm everything you think already and then some. If you are a supporter you’ll probably think it’s a shrill hatchet job. Both sides might well agree Abbasi’s film is a little hectoring.

Picking up in the late 70s, and running through the all-consuming Greed-is-Good Reaganite America, The Apprentice charts the friendship between up-and-coming would-be-property-mogul Trump (Sebastian Stan) and ruthless McCarthyite legend lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Cohn takes Trump under this wing, teaching him his three rules for success (always attack, never apologise, always claim victory no matter what). Under this guidance, Trump becomes the figure of bombastic, selfish egotism we see today – while Cohn, afflicted with AIDS, shrinks under his protégé’s shadow.

Watching The Apprentice I was reminded of Oliver Stone’s Nixon – and not in a good way. Stone is no supporter of Nixon, but his film is a surprisingly generous Greek Tragedy which plays fair with the 37^th President, acknowledging his strengths as well as his chronic character flaws. The Apprentice abandons any attempt to do the same by the halfway point. Part of that may well be that Trump is an infinitely more shallow, less complex, less accomplished figure than Nixon. But if The Apprentice had dared to find anything a little deeper in Trump (his complex relationship with his family would have been good for this) it might have had more impact.

Instead, it’s a Faust story where the power balance shifts from Mephistopheles to Faust. At first Cohn is all powerful, tempting Trump with the power and influence to transform him from two-bit rent collector to king of the world. But the more confidence Trump gains, the more he dwarves Cohn. And the more Cohn is slowly eaten away by weakening powers and the AIDS he refuses to acknowledge he has, the smaller and more desperate he seems. It’s almost a succubus tale, with Trump draining Cohn so much he ends the film passing off his mentor’s mantras as his own invention.

The film’s most interesting section by far is it’s opening hour. It’s the only part that presents us with a Trump we don’t know already. In an excellent, Oscar-nominated, performance Sebastian Stan not only captures Trump’s mannerisms he also searches under the man’s shallow surface. Stan makes the young Trump bashful, eager-to-please, over-awed by power and nervous in high society. Seeing a naïve, fragile, uncertain Trump whose father doesn’t love him is genuinely interesting – especially since we all know the cast-iron certainty he has today. It could have done with more of this, trusting us to lay our knowledge of the man today on top.

The main factor that really lifts The Apprentice our two leads. Both Stan and Strong find an emotional depth and insight in their characters (while never absolving them) that makes them more three-dimensional than Abassi’s film wants to make them. Jeremy Strong is particularly superb (and also Oscar-nominated) as Cohn. Whipper-thin, tanned, his head aggressively jutting forward he resembles a sort of angry ferret. Strong brilliantly captures the vicious contradictions in Cohn – the Jewish antisemite, the gay homophobe – and his demonic, but Strong brilliantly unpeels Cohn’s weakness. Trump absorbs all Cohn’s vices (and then some), but none of his few virtues – personal loyalty, patriotism. Strong never makes Cohn sympathetic, but also displays his pain, unhappiness and possibly even guilt, as he realises this uncaring monster will even consume his creator. (Strong’s final scene of the dying Cohn confronting Trump’s indifference one last time is superbly played).

Abbasi’s film is well-made – the photography frequently degraded to appear like grainy camcorder footage – and its filmed with a handheld, pacey immediacy. It captures the excess Trump lives in, with its golden surfaces and more-is-more bling. All of this is aimed at exposing the future President as overwhelmingly self-occupied, amoral and cruel, interested only in himself and seeing morals. None of that is a major surprise and Abbasi is a little too delighted with pricking Trump’s fragile ego, portraying him as impotent, sniggering at his hair loss and weight gain (although this allows a neat gag, with Trump telling a doctor the body has a limited amount of energy so exercise is actually bad for you – something he refuses to accept is not true).

Trump’s treatment of Cohn is the tip of the iceberg of the depths of Trump’s personal behaviour the film gleefully shows. Trump’s penchant for self-aggrandising speeches, his kneejerk homophobia about AIDS (his fear of catching it by touch leads to him fumigating items Cohn has touched), his indifference about relationships (swindling his father and dropping his alcoholic brother) all get ample coverage. He pursues Ivana (a very good Maria Bakalova) with a passion then, having got her, treats her only as something he can brag about (particularly her ‘improved’ breasts), becomes jealous of her growing fame. It overplays its hand by dramatising the disputed rape of Ivana by Trump – a crime so serious you feel it should be beyond question and not be treated as part of a parade of personal faults, never to be referenced again.

But that’s because The Apprentice never knows when to stop. If it had the courage to expand its opening hour, to explore the malign effect of Cohn on this ambitious young man, with a coda showing the fall of Cohn in the shadow of the Trump we recognise – it would have been a more interesting film. Instead, it seems designed to hammer home a political agenda rather than provide drama or insight making it more heavy-handed and obvious than it needed to be. Aside from the two marvellous performances from Stan and Strong, there is actually very little really here.

Conclave (2024)

Papal boardroom politics combine with detective mystery in this engaging mix of high- and low-brow

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Ralph Fiennes (Cardinal Thomas Lawrence), Stanley Tucci (Cardinal Aldo Bellini), John Lithgow (Cardinal Joseph Tremblay), Sergio Castellitto (Cardinal Goffredo Tedesco), Isabella Rossellini (Sister Agnes), Lucian Msamati (Cardinal Joshua Adeyemi), Carlos Diehz (Cardinal Vincent Benitez), Brian F. O’Byrne (Monsignor Raymond O’Malley), Jacek Koman (Archbishop Janusz Wozniak)

Few things have changed as little over 500 years than the election of a pope. Sure, they didn’t need to take away the phones of the Borgias and Medicis, but the idea of locking away the Princes of the Church in the Sistine Chapel until the Holy Spirit guides them towards choosing the next Heir to the Throne of St Peter hasn’t changed. But then neither (probably) has the ruthless politicking and barely concealed ambition of the cardinals (after all some were Borgias and Medicis!), many having dreamt their whole lives of moulding the Church into the shape they believe He wants it to be.

Politicking and spiritual and moral struggles with the temptations of ambition are at the heart of this excellent adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel. After the pope dies, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College of Cardinals, is responsible for organising the new Papal Conclave. Lawrence, struggling with doubts whose request to resign was recently rejected by the Pope, is part of the moderate wing and a supporter of Cardinal Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci). The other major candidates are conservative Canadian Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) and ultra-traditionalists Italian Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) and Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati). Lawrence slowly discovers severe reasons to doubt the suitability of all these candidates – while the number of cardinals suggesting he himself might be a suitable candidate grows.

Conclave is a very enjoyable dive into the mysterious world of papal politics. Part of its appeal is seeing that, under the mystery of centuries-old practices, elaborate robes and beautiful artworks, the struggle to elect a pope is a highly political business. Things ain’t changed that much since the Borgias, as various sexual, financial and other scandals crop up to scupper the chances of one candidate after another. As per 15^th-century papal tradition, take away those flowing robes and lapses into Latin, and this is a cut-throat boardroom succession struggle that leaves more than a few reputations in ruins (and it ain’t going to be easy – even the late pope’s signet ring only comes off his finger after a rough-handed struggle).

In fact, Conclave works as well as it does because it’s a sort of Succession meets Father Brown, a brilliantly paced and staged merging of high-brow settings with pulpy page-turner thrills. At its heart is a superb performance by Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence. Softly-spoken, Lawrence is dutiful, decent and diligent – and plagued with doubts about everything from his faith to his ambition, with permanently sad eyes, full of world-weary resignation. At one point Lawrence stares up at The Last Judgement, his eyes catching a man twisting in torment: he knows how he’s feeling. Unlike all the other cardinals, dripping with certainty, he’d rather be anywhere but there.

Lawrence becomes Father Brown, the quiet, level-headed priest going the extra mile to sniff out wrong-doing. As his concerns about many of his fellow cardinals emerge, he goes to rule-bending lengths to confirm these suspicions – and part of the delight of Conclave is how entertainingly it plays out murder mystery conventions alongside its papal shenanigans. Lawrence carries out his dogged investigation with an earnest sense of duty but what’s great about Fiennes’ performance is that he also manages to suggest the possibly of guilty ambition underneath. After all, Lawrence is a cardinal too, right? Why can’t he have a crack at being the Holy Father?

Lawrence has moments of temptation when the Holy See is dangled before him. Part of Conclave’s argument is that power is best suited to those most reluctant to carry it. Lawrence is one of the most reluctant among the papal players – but even he isn’t immune to guilty temptation. When he opens the concave with an off-the-cuff speech on moral conduct, is it subconsciously to establish his leadership? When he very publicly exposes one candidate’s misdeeds, is a side benefit demonstrating his own virtue? Conclave tracks Lawrence’s vote every time – and when he is tempted to vote for himself, an act of seemingly divine intervention takes place to almost tick him off.

It’s said at one point all cardinals have thought about their papal name. Lawrence shrugs this off, but later unhesitatingly gives an answer. Perhaps the only cardinal who hasn’t really thought about it is Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz, wonderfully serene), secretly appointed Cardinal of Kabul by the late pope, a man almost alone in thinking this is a quest to find the holiest. The rest? They could probably tell their regnal names without thinking. And unlike Lawrence, they are certain about everything: from their own suitability to how pleased God will be when they land it.

Peter Straughan’s sharp and intelligent script gives an array of opportunities for excellent character actors (Conclave would make a good play). Sergio Castellitto’s scene-stealingly bombastic Tedesco, forever vaping when not growling about how chucking the Latin Mass was the end-of-days, can’t imagine he won’t win. It’s a trait he shares with Lucien Msamati’s Adeyemi, although Msamati finds a vulnerable humility that makes Adeyemi’s eventual downfall surprisingly affecting. Lithgow’s imperious Tremblay drips with arrogance (his eventual comeuppance sees Lithgow brilliantly deflate like a pricked balloon). Stanley Tucci is brilliant as the charming, morally upright Bellini who then surprises even himself with how fiercely ambitious he is.

Berger sets all this in a brilliantly oppressive setting, for all the beauty on the walls around them. Berger superbly conveys the isolation of the conclave, lit almost entirely artificially in heartless hotel rooms (that feel like monastic jails) and a fluorescent-lit canteen. The sound design is a massive part of this, the rooms devoid of ambient sound, just a crushingly deadened stillness. Frequently Lawrence’s breathing fills the soundtrack, giving the film a confessional feeling. It all means the late on surprise sound of a gust of wind carries the same impact for us as it does the cardinals.

Male voices dominate in the Vatican, so it’s telling Conclave deliberately undercuts this by giving one of its standout moments to Isabella Rossellini’s primly professional Sister Agnes. Like the other nuns staffing the conclave, she barely speaks – meaning when she does, it seizes the viewer’s attention as much as she does the crowd of cardinals. The flaws of this world return in the film’s final (slightly forced) twist, which helps question how much the alpha-male clashes between these papal academics may have shaped the atmosphere of the Church, and not for the better.

Conclave is tightly directed film, and a great adaptation of a page-turning novel with a faultless cast brilliantly led by Ralph Fiennes. It mixes pomp and ceremony with a fascinatingly tense struggle for power, made all the more gripping that in the parade of languages we hear (and all the cardinals can switch easily from English to Latin to Italian to Spanish) the language of power and ambition is constant but unspoken – and when it is explicitly stated, it has a devastating impact on those who use it. It’s a great touch in an entertaining and engaging film.

Juggernaut (1974)

Disaster film masquerading as a sort of state-of-the-nation political satire of 70s Britain

Director: Richard Lester

Cast: Richard Harris (Lt Com Anthony Fallon), Omar Sharif (Captain Alex Brunel), David Hemmings (Charlie Braddock), Anthony Hopkins (Supt John McLeod), Shirley Knight (Barbara Bannister), Ian Holm (Nicholas Porter), Clifton James (Corrigan), Roy Kinnear (Social Director Curtain), Caroline Mortimer (Susan McLeod), Mark Burns (Hollingsworth), John Stride (Hughes), Freddie Jones (Sidney Buckland), Julian Glover (Commander Marder), Cyril Cusack (O’Neil), Michael Hordern (Baker)

Based on an event that almost happened – a bomb threat against the QE2 that led to a bomb disposal team parachuting onto the ship at sea, only to discover it was a haux – Juggernaut was a popular 70s thriller that today looks surprisingly dry. The ship here is the SS Britannic, caught in stormy seas. A calm man calls the firm’s director (Ian Holm) and to state he’s placed multiple high explosives onboard. Bomb disposal expert Anthony Fallon (Richard Harris) and his crew fly to the ship, captained by Alex Brunel (Omar Sharif), to try and disarm the bombs while Superintendent John McLeod (Anthony Hopkins) – whose family, naturally, is onboard – races against time to find the bomber.

Juggernaut can feel as sluggish as the cruise liner it’s set on, with large chunks feeling like they are being played for surprisingly low stakes. The passengers feel strangely impassive about their imminent deaths. When a member of the bomb disposal crew drowns on arrival no one seems to care. There is a strangely sombre mood everywhere, a general air of misery that seems in place long before the bombs are even announced. The police investigation is carried out by a team that thinks its hopeless and the captain retreats to his cabin to fiddle with executive desk toys.

Then you realise. This isn’t The Towering Inferno full of can-do action. This is a British disaster film, which is really about the depressing, dreary, dead-end feeling a lot of people in Britain had about their country (seemingly permanently in the grip of strikes, economic depression and political crisis) throughout the 70s. Juggernaut reflects this completely, the ship a weird state-of-the-nation place where even a bomb threat can’t shake the general feeling of grim acceptance that life doesn’t get any better than this, everyone and everything in charge is useless, so best get used to it.

Richard Lester appropriately then directs events in a very distanced way – perhaps he also wanted to put behind him his Hellzapoppin’ style that bought him fame and success with the Beatles. Most of the moments of action and tension are presented in a deliberately prosaic style (the culmination of the film happens in a distant long-shot with the final dialogue mumbled quietly) with a journalistic lens (there are obvious debts to Fred Zinnemann’s The Day of the Jackal in its forensic laying out of procedure, but with that film’s pace or urgency carefully compromised, despite the clock ticking down). As part of this, the characters become devoid of exactly that – character.

Juggernaut actually is more about taking rebellious swings at British politics than solving a crisis. The British government – embodied by a smugly self-satisfied John Stride’s three-piece-suit apparatchik – makes it quite clear the 1,200 souls on the Britannic are expendable if the cost compromises the government. Juggernaut has more discussion of government subsidies than every other disaster film alive. The navy is run by fusty rules-bound types (interestingly, the private enterprise company is presented much more favourably – Holm, as its representative, is principled, decent and the only guy who really cares about the passengers). The bomber is a disillusioned former government worker, shafted on retirement by the cheapskate MOD (he even asks for an embarrassingly small amount of money). Fallon, in his cynical style, constantly bemoans how nothing in the country works and how useless his bosses are.

Juggernaut flings together an American style disaster and action plot, with a kitchen-sink drama about British society. While its interesting, personally I feel mashing these two genres together creates a slow, dry action-adventure and a shallow, social commentary. The tone seems to have confused some of the actors: Omar Sharif seems literally all-at-sea. A potential romance with Shirley Knight’s character deliberately goes nowhere – the film so takes the unconventional route with plots likes this that you state to wonder why on earth Knight even agreed to do it). Anthony Hopkins permanently feels like his attention is elsewhere. The smaller roles tend to come out best: Stride’s uncaring official, Roshan Seth as waiter who pretends to speak less English than he does (a neat social commentary on cultural expectations in the 70s), Michael Hordern in a scuzzy cameo as a bomb expert – all of them make more impact.

Lester does treat himself to several amusing background events. A nameless passenger who doesn’t let the ship’s imminent explosion get in the way of his exercise regime (he runs into almost every single main character at some point). Throw-away gags (very much in the style of The Three Musketeers) are common, such as market stall owner turning to place something on his stall, not noticing it’s been sent flying by a speeding police car or a flustered Holm feeding Rice Krispies to his kid then his dog. You could make the surrealist argument the real hero is Roy Kinnear’s entertainment officer, relentlessly continuing the good cheer. From umpiring half-hearted badminton matches in a squall to jollying the passengers through a fancy dress party that could also be their last evening on earth, Officer Curtain is determined ‘civilisation must be preserved’. Is there a better vision of what it felt like living in 70s Britain, clinging to the fading memory of the Blitz spirit?

Richard Harris – in a neat and no-doubt-boozy pairing with David Hemmings – is the only one of the leads seemingly allowed to inject life in this, or able to marry up the counter-culture harrumphing and tense wire-cutting action in a performance of amusing cynicism and cocky pride. Juggernaut – for all it boils down to our maverick hero having to choose between the red and blue wire – is actually fairly detailed (and praised by experts) on the process and teamwork of bomb disposal, even if Harris’ less-than-steady hands are not what I would want standing between me and death.

Away from him though Juggernaut is a curiously unhurried, slow and sometimes-less-than-gripping thriller that really shines a light on the slightly run-down, depressed and bewildering place Britain was to many people in the 70s. A land it seems where everything felt a bit hopeless and pointless and nothing seemed to work – except the bombs used to blow the place up. Expect that and you’ll find stuff to enjoy: expect The Towering Inferno and you are in for a disappointment.

Megalopolis (2024)

Coppola’s ambitious epic commits the cardinal sins – boring, hard to follow and immensely tedious

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Adam Driver (Cesar Catilina), Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Franklyn Cicero), Nathalie Emmanuel (Julia Cicero), Aubrey Plaza (Wow Platinum), Shia LaBeouf (Clodio Pulcher), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (Fundi Romaine), Jason Schwartzman (Jason Zanderz), Kathryn Hunter (Teresa Cicero), Dustin Hoffman (Nush Berman), Talia Shire (Constance Crassus Catilina)

I wanted to like it. Honestly I did. I really respect that Coppola was so passionate about this dream project that he pumped $120 million of his own money into it to make it come true. You can’t deny the ambition about a film that remixes modern American and Ancient Roman history, within a sci-fi dystopia. But Megalopolis is a truly terrible film. Coppola wanted to return to the spirit of 1970s film-making: unfortunately what he’s produced is one of the era’s self-indulgent, overtly arty, unrestrained and pretentious auteur follies where an all-powerful director throws everything at the screen without ever thinking about whether the result is interesting or enjoyable.

In New Rome (basically New York), Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a visionary architect and inventor, who created ‘megalon’, a sort of magic liquid metal. His vision is to use it make a glorious new Rome. He’s opposed by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who wants to focus spend on practicalities rather than castles-in-the-sky. This leads to a series of increasingly dirty political flights between Catilina, Cicero and Catilina’s cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) the degenerately populist nephew of super-wealthy banker Crassus (Jon Voight), who is married to TV star and ambitious social climber (and Catiline’s former girlfriend) Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Catilina is also in a tentative relationship with Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Or yes and he can mysteriously stop time. Somehow. Even he doesn’t know how.

The film is a sympathetic portrait of Catiline, a powerful Roman who (probably) caused a scandal by shagging a Vestal Virgin then attempted to mount a coup with a heavily pandering populist set of promises which led to his suicide (after defeat in battle) and his followers being executed by then-consul Cicero. Megalopolis’ version mixes this with elements of Caesar’s career and remixes Cicero, Claudius Pulcher and Crassus into versions of their historical forbears. It’s a neat idea, but it’s utterly bungled in delivery. Megalopolis is a film practically drowning in pretension, bombast and self-importance, its script stuffed with faux-philosophy and clumsy political points, its Roman history crude and obvious.

It feels pretty clear Megalopolis should be three to four hours and has been sliced down to two and a quarter. The problem is it feels like it goes on for four hours and practically the last thing I could imagine wanting as the credits roll was watching yet more of this nonsense. The most striking thing about Megalopolis is how boring it is (I nearly dropped off twice – and I was in an early evening showing). It hurtles through a series of impressive-looking-but-dramatically-empty set-pieces that often make no real narrative sense and carry very little emotional force. Characters are introduced with fanfare and then abruptly disappear (Dustin Hoffman’s fixer gets a big moment then literally has a building dropped on him) and the final forty minutes is so sliced down it loses all narrative sense.

Megalopolis feels like a bizarre art project, a collage of influences, opinions, concepts and inspirations, as if Coppola had been collecting ideas in a scrapbook for forty years and then put them all in. His heavily-penned script forces clunkingly artificial lines into its character mouths, frequently feeling like a chance to show off his reading list. Marcus Aureilus, Goethe, Rousseau and Shakespeare among others showily pop-up, alongside speeches from the real Cicero. Driver even does a (to be fair pretty good) rendition of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, though it’s a sign of the film’s self-satisfied literariness that I can’t for the life of me work out why he launches into this at a press conference. Laurence Fishburne delivers the occasional narration with such poetic clarity, you almost forget it’s full of dull, gnomic rubbish, straining at adding depth to bland, fortune-cookie level statements.

It’s not just literary influences. The film is awash with pleased-with-itself cinematic references. Most obviously, Metropolis homages abound in its design, while Coppola’s breaking the film up with stone-carved chapter headings is a silent-film inspired touch. As well as Lang, there are clear nods-of-the-head to Abel Gance’s Napoleon (most obviously in its troika shots) while the smorgasbord of influences checks off everything from Ben-Hur to Vertigo to The Greatest Show on Earth (and damningly not as good as any of those, even DeMille’s clunker). All of this is combined with a wild mix of cross-fades, double exposures, sixties-style drug-induced fantasies and half a dozen other filmic techniques that are all very impressive but feel like a young buck looking to impress, rather than providing a coherent visual language for the film. Catiline’s time-stop abilities are some sort of clumsy stand-in for the powers of the film director – calling cut whenever he wants – but what we are supposed to make of the point of this in a film as randomly chaotic as this I have no idea.

The entire tone is all over the place. A scene of tragic maudlin grief will immediately be followed by sex farce. An attempted murder by a Buster Keaton inspired pratfall. A speech so overburdened with philosophical and literary allusions it practically strangles the person speaking it will lead into a joke about boners. The cast splits into two halves: one seems to have been told this is a serious film which requires deathly sombre, middle-distance-starring pontificating; the other half that they are making a flatulent satire. The random mix of acting styles has the worst possible effect: it makes those in the first camp seem portentous and dull; and those in the second like stars of an end-of-pier adult pantomime.

Driver makes a decent fist of holding this together, even if Catiline is an enigmatic, hard-to-understand character whose aims and motivations seem as much a mystery to Coppola as they do to the poor souls watching. But he can deliver a speech with conviction and seems comfortable mixing soul-searching with goofy dancing. Nathalie Emmanuel, though, is utterly constrained by taking the whole thing so painfully seriously that the life drains out of her. On the other side, Aubrey Plaza is the most enjoyable to watch by going for out-right-comedy as a vampish, power-hungry woman who uses her body to dominate men. Shia LaBeouf also goes so ludicrously overtop as a faithful version of the seriously weird Claudius Pulcher – he engages in cross-dressing, murder, incest and drums up crowds by quoting Trump and Mussolini – that it’s either daring or just as much of an unbearably self-satisified art project as the rest of the film depending on your taste.

But the main problem with Megalopolis is that its smug, pat-on-the-back, aren’t-I-clever artistic self-indulgence makes the film painfully slow and terrifically boring. How could a film that features riots, assassination attempts, orgies, murders, an actual meteor strike and magic time-stopping be as dull as this? When everything is thrown together without no emotional coherence whatever. Characters we don’t relate to or understand, who are either po-faced ciphers or flamboyant cartoons, stand around and quote literature at each other, while the director tries a host of flashy tricks he’s liked from other movies and never gives us an honest-to-God reason to give a single, solitary fuck about anything that’s actually happening at any point to anyone in the film.

It is perhaps the ultimate auteur folly. A director creating something that only appeals to him, at huge expense (and I suppose at least he paid for it himself rather than wrecking a studio) where no one was allowed to say at any point “this makes no sense” or “this is heavy-handed” or “this scene doesn’t mesh at all with the one before it”. Instead, it throws a thousand Coppola ideas at the screen, in a film designed to appeal to pretentious lovers of art-house cinema who like to tell themselves Heaven’s Gate is the greatest film ever made or the artform peaked with Melieres and it was all down-hill from there.

To approach the film in its own overblown style: whenever an auteur crafts, Jove plays dice with the Fates to decide on the cut of the cloth for Destiny’s Loom: should it come up sixes, the Muses smile, but should it be Snake Eyes, Pluto himself shall claim his due from those who would seize Promethean fire.

That makes as much sense as chunks of the film.

Rollerball (1975)

Violent science-fiction dystopia satire ends up making blunt, uncertain points

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: James Caan (Jonathan E.), John Houseman (Mr. Bartholomew), Maud Adams (Ella), John Beck (‘Moonpie’), Moses Gunn (Cletus), Ralph Richardson (The Librarian), Pamela Hensley (Mackie), Barbara Trentham (Daphne), Shane Rimmer (Rusty), Richard LeParmentier (Bartholomew’s Aide)

It’s the future, but it might as well be Ancient Rome. The world is ruled by Corporate Caesars, holding supreme power, controlling information and plucking anyone they want for anything, be it for a job or as a partner in bed. The masses are kept pliant and happy by being fed Bread and Circuses. Namely Rollerball, the world’s most popular sport, a hyper-violent mix of American football and ice hockey played in a velodrome, with teams competing to score by thrusting a metal ball into their opponent’s goal, with rules to prevent only the most egregiously violent acts. It’s a game designed by with a simple message: the individual is powerless, the system is all.

Problem is, like any game, some players are better at it than others. And the best player there has ever been Jonathan E (James Caan) is a living legend for Houston, tougher and more passionate about the game than anyone else alive. He’s a living contradiction of the secret principle of the game: an individual can make a difference. Naturally the Corporation want him gone, offering him a generous package to retire. Problem is Jonathan doesn’t want to retire. What else is there to do, but to remove the few rules Rollerball has, and establish how futile individual effort is by killing Jonathan in the game. But Rollerball’s greatest ever player isn’t that easy to kill.

All of which makes Rollerball sound both cleverer and more exciting than it actually is. Because Rollerball is a deeply sombre, rather self-important film that makes obscure, slightly fumbled points about the war between the system and the individual, within a coldly Kubrickian framework that suggests Jewison and co misunderstood what made 2001 a sensation (it wasn’t just clean surfaces and classical music). It’s actually quite a problem that the only time Rollerball even remotely comes to exciting life for the viewer is during the game sequences: and seeing as the film is criticising our love of gladiatorial blood sports, that can hardly be what it’s aiming for.

Rollerball is shockingly po-faced and lacks even a hint of humour at any point (except perhaps a reliably eccentric cameo from Ralph Richardson as an only half-sane custodian of an all-seeing computer). There is little satirical spice that might provide a bit of lighter insight into the ruthless, business-driven world the film is set in, or that might demonstrate how concepts we are familiar with (sports and television) have been tweaked to manipulate and pander to the masses. Combined with that, every character in the film is sullen, serious and (whisper it) dull and hard to relate to.

This is best captured in Jonathan himself, played with a lack of an uneasy stoic quality by James Caan. Caan later commented he found the character lifeless and lacking depth, and you can see this in his performance. Caan never seems sure what angle to take: is Jonathan a defiant individualist or a guy utterly at sea in the system who can’t understand why he is being told to stop playing the game he loves? Rollerball wants to settle for both: it doesn’t really work. Jonathan spends his time outside the ring, moping and staring into the middle-distance. He holds a candle for the wife taken from him by an executive, but this is never channelled into a motivating grief or ever used as way to make the scales fall from his eyes about the nature of the system he’s working in.

In fact, Jonathan remains pretty much oblivious to the brutality and cruelty of the sport he’s playing – which, by the end of the film, regularly clocks up impressive body counts in every match. He’s still perfectly capable of throwing an opponent under the wheels of a motorbike, thrust a goal home and then bellow “I love this game!”. Never once does he, or the film, question this love. Not even an on-pitch assault on his best friend (which leaves him in a vegetative state) or watching his teammates being crushed, incinerated, battered and smashed seems to register with him intellectually or emotionally.

Rollerball needed a character with enough hinterland to grow into that or could denounce on some level (even privately) the violent spectacle he’s wrapped in, capable of a moral journey or making an imaginative leap. We don’t get either. Instead, Jonathan E feels like a care-free jock who wants to carry on doing his thing, because he has a good-old-fashioned dislike of being told what to do. In the end it fudges the whole film: Jonathan E is neither sympathetic or interesting enough to be a vehicle for the sort of satirical or political points the film wants to make.

Not that these ideas are really that interesting anyway, essentially boiling down to a mix of familiar “Big Business Bad” and “the proles will take any loss of freedom lying down, so long as they get some juicy violent action to watch”. None of this hasn’t been explored with more wit and wisdom elsewhere. Never-the-less Rollerball lets its points practically play trumpets to herald their arrival as they stumble towards the screen. There is nothing here Orwell didn’t cover better in a few paragraphs of 1984.

Norman Jewison does a decent job staging this though, in particular the violence of the Rollerball games, with bodies crushed, maimed and thrown-around. There is a fine performance of heartless corporate chill from John Houseman. But, when the film makes its points, I’m not sure what on earth it’s trying to say. Is it a tribute to the strength of one man’s character? Does it matter if Jonathan E acts out of a stubborn lack of knowledge or understanding? As the crowd watches a deadly match in stunned silence, have they finally had enough? As they praise Jonathan E rapturously is Rollerball suggesting we are just naturally inclined to love strong-men dictators? I’ve no idea what is happening here – and I’m not sure that Rollerball does either.

The Insider (1999)

Mann’s finest film is a chilling breakdown of the insidious strength of corporations

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Dr Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace), Diane Venora (Liane Wigand), Philip Baker Hall (Don Hewitt), Lindsay Crouse (Sharon Tiller), Debi Mazar (Debbie De Luca), Stephen Tobolowsky (Eric Kluster), Colm Feore (Richard Scruggs), Bruce McGill (Ron Motley), Gina Gershon (Helen Caperelli), Michael Gambon (Thomas Sandefur), Rip Torn (John Scanlon), Cliff Curtis (Sheikh Fadlallah)

For decades we persuaded ourselves smoking was problem-free. Then, when we finally decided sucking tar into your lungs several times a day probably didn’t go hand-in-hand with good health, Big Tobacco bent over backwards to argue they didn’t believe for one minute nicotine was actually addictive. This lie – they were improving the hit to increase the customer base – was blown upon by corporate whistle blower, and former B&W employee, Dr Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe).

But the battle over the reporting of the story also exposed the fault-lines in corporate-owned media companies, as Wigand’s 60 Minutes interview was canned by a CBS network terrified of legal action imperilling a corporate sale, much to the fury of crusading producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who spent months bringing Wigand in only to see him brushed aside. The Insider charts these two stories merging into each other: the deadly campaign of intimidation and smears against Wigand, segueing into the caving of CBS in the face of legal threats with Bergman left furious, betrayed and turning his campaigning fire against his own employers.

This all comes grippingly to life in Michael Mann’s superb slice of All the President’s Men inspired-reportage, turning this 1996 TV-and-business scandal into a sleek, intelligent thriller that takes a chilling look at how corporate America rigs the game in its own favour with impunity. The Insider is as rightfully furious at the dirty-tricks and menace of the tobacco companies, as it is at the subtly insidious way corporate interests pollutes news reporting. It does this while also presenting its two heroes as flawed men with more in common than they might think: competitive alpha males, both prone to taking rash, destructive actions in fits of head-strong self-righteousness, caring about their own moral code over the needs of others.

The Insider splits into two clear acts: the agonising decision of Wigand to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance, in the face of immense personal and professional pressure and Bergman’s subsequent struggle to deliver on his word and get Wigand’s confession on air. The first half offers the more traditional heroics – and the more overt hero-and-villain structure, but increasingly I find the second half, of news shows being dictated to by their paymasters more-and-more unsettlingly prescient, becoming increasingly relevant the older the film gets.

But that first half makes for a compellingly tense pressure-cooker view. It’s powered by an excellent performance by Russell Crowe (effortlessly convincing as someone twenty years older, and collecting his first Oscar nomination). Crowe makes Wigand principled but prickly, brave but confrontational and at times frustratingly self-righteous. His moral qualms are finally sharpened into action his fury at the blunt-intimidation from B&W’s sinisterly avuncular CEO (a masterful cameo from Michael Gambon – one of the great single-scene performances in movies) and its implication that he cannot trusted to stick to his NDA. Wigand barely involves his wife (a tightly-wound Diane Venora) in his decisions, only mentioning his dismissal in passing and deciding to appear on 60 minutes (a decision that will shatter their lives) unilaterally.

But Wigand also has higher motives. He wants to be able to look his daughters in the eye, having sold-out to burnish the dirty-deeds of B&W with his scientific skills. He’s rightly affronted by the lies Big Tobacco has sold the public and undergoes enormous sacrifices (financial, marital, professional, legal, death threats and a public smear campaign) to see things through. Mann’s cool mix of starkness and shadows, full of drained out colours and greys, is perfect for a world where Wigand is shadowed by strangers at a driving range, receives bullets in his mailbox and searches late at night for who has left footprints in his garden. Crowe superbly conveys a man acting out of an increasing sense of moral imperative, struggling desperately to hold himself together under immense pressure.

This section of the film – especially with its clear antagonist – plays as a superb personal and political thriller, Mann expertly conveying lurking menace. In 1999 the second half of the film, the struggle to actually broadcast Wigand’s interview, was often seen as slightly underwhelming. But actually it shows a different type of danger: less overt and heavy-handed corporate power with its legal injunctions and bullying FBI guys hoping for a cushy retirement job with the corporation, more how these corporate masters assert control in quiet, less direct ways to decide what we hear or see.

Our journalists have no fear when confronting criminals or terrorists – The Insider’s prologue establishes this with Bergman and host Mike Wallace not flinching in the face of gun-toting Hezbollah fighters guarding the Sheikh they have arranged to interview. But they face far greater threats to their integrity when confronted with lawyers and corporate directors (effectively embodied by Gina Gershon and Stephen Tobolowsky as uncaring suits) whose threats are indirect and insidious. Wigand’s interview could imperil the sale of CBS and the bonus of the corporate suits, and in that scenario journalist principles can go hang. Christopher Plummer is, by the way, superb as the charismatic Wallace, who caves to pressure then convinces himself he hasn’t, a super-star of the airwaves who loses part of his wider integrity trying to protect his position.

And doesn’t the idea that corporations can squeeze the life out of journalistic stories feel even more chilling today? After all, virtually every single news outlet out there is owned by a major business, all with their own agendas. Can we really believe they’ve not all made calls on gets reported, based on what their shareholders might think? Mann’s film skilfully – and rather chillingly – shows how quickly they can re-work the agenda. It leaves Lowell Bergman raging (as only Al Pacino can) against the betrayal of trust he’s being forced to make towards Wigand.

Crowe’s pressure-cooker performance stole many of the headlines on release but The Insider also benefits from an excellent Pacino performance. Utterly committed to his principles and – just like Wigand – utterly unwilling to compromise them even an inch, no matter the cost, Bergman will pick up the windmill-tilting banner, and charge with it at his own paymasters. No one can rip through speeches quite like Pacino, but he gives Bergman a real genuineness, grounded in a fundamental decency, whose righteous anger is underpinned with world-weary disbelief that it’s come to this.

It grounds an excellently studied breakdown of a journalistic turf war. The Insider plays like All the President’s Men, if Woodward and Bernstein had been spiked after they nailed the story. Mann demonstrates the influence in The Insider’s crisply immersive photography that employs depth of frame and gyroscopic deep-focus, as well as in the crisp editing and the film’s mesmerising emersion in the complex details of building a story. Combine that with a gripping conspiracy thriller on the machinations of ruthless corporations and The Insider makes for a compelling film.

Scoop (2024)

Interview dramatisation which mostly fails to turn news into drama, making empty points

Director: Philip Martin

Cast: Gillian Anderson (Emily Maitlis), Keeley Hawes (Amanda Thirsk), Billie Piper (Sam McAlister), Rufus Sewell (Prince Andrew), Romola Garai (Esme Wren), Richard Goulding (Stewart MacLean), Amanda Redman (Netta McAlister), Connor Swindells (Jae Donnelly), Lia Williams (Fran Unsworth), Charity Wakefield (Princess Beatrice)

It was one of those interviews that shook the world – largely because it was such car-crash TV. Prince Andrew (played, under layers of effective make-up, by Rufus Sewell) desperately wanted to distance himself from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and BBC’s Newsnight was seen as the most appropriate outlet for a reputation-restoring chat with a proper journalist, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson). The interview was booked by producer Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) – whose book Scoops inspired this – and advocated for by Andrew’s senior advisor Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes). The revelation of Andrew’s priceless mix of out-of-touch privilege and shallow dimness, combined with his inability to understand the impact on anyone but himself, consigned him to royal oblivion.

Scoop tries its best to turn the behind-the-scenes story into drama – but, to be honest, it comes across as a hugely underwhelming Frost/Nixon-lite. It’s hard not to feel an episode of Netflix’s The Crown would have dealt with this with more depth and interest than this manages. Scoop commits the cardinal sin of any “plucked-from-the-TV-headlines” biopic: all its most interesting parts are pitch-perfect recreations of an interview you can watch at your leisure on YouTube. Once you’ve got over how well Anderson and Sewell have captured their subjects, that’s basically it.

That’s Scoop all over. It’s a film that’s all flash and no substance. Martin and screenwriter Peter Moffat work overtime to suggest that this interview was a seismic piece of journalism, a sort of David-v-Goliath reveal. It ends with the Newsnight team giving themselves a self-congratulatory round-of-applause for “having given a voice to the victims” – a bit rich considering neither the interview or this film gives them much more than a second or two. Maitlis and co are shown to be trembling with nerves before interviewing this Royal Spare who no-one ever took particularly seriously (as McAlister bluntly tells him at one point), something which feels a bit odd since we are repeatedly told Maitlis has quizzed Bill Clinton among a score of other names.

There is a Spotlight-ish attempt to show the Newsnight team verifying some facts before the interview takes place – Scoop is one of the few films you’ll see where a paparazzi photographer, played as a cheeky wideboy by Connor Swindells, presented as a noble crusader for the truth – but it never rings true. No real facts about the Andrew-Epstein case were either unknown, in dispute or revealed during the interview. Andrew wasn’t even undone because of “gotcha” questions: it was because he performed so catastrophically badly, painting himself as the “real victim” and revealing he existed in a reality no ordinary person could begin to recognise.

There is very little drama in Scoop. Based on McAlister’s book, Scoop is duty-bound to place her as centrally as possible. Problem is the slogging hard-work of building trust over time to land big interviews is quite undramatic. Instead, the film boils McAlister’s work down into a chance email, a pub chat and a bit of Hollywoodish-straight-talking from McAlister during a meeting with the prince. This sells her skills short. In fact, unlike Frost/Nixon which got chunks of drama out of the will-they-won’t-they dance to set-up the interview, Scoop gives the impression everyone wanted it to happen. In fact, it makes it look so straight-forward, you end up thinking McAllister’s bitter colleague might be right – how highly skilled is her job?

The desire to centralise McAllister creates further problems: their nominal lead’s key involvement ends before the stuff the film is really interested in (the interview) even begins prepping. Scoop falls back on plucky outsider to keep her involved, retrofitting McAllister (a producer with nine year’s experience with world leaders) into a working-class outsider, who needs to force herself into “the room where it happens”. Problem is as soon as she’s in the room, McAlister has nothing to say or do (one suspects the whispered legal battles connected with a rival mini-series on the same subject stopped the writing of any McAllister-ish insight here, for fear it would be promptly denied by the Maitlis-backed rival production).

McAlister becomes a side-bar, a largely silent background character in her own story. Not quite the message that the film wants to promote on female empowerment (even if her bosses are all women). There are similar odd notes in here. Amanda Thisk’s colleague, an aggressive male we are clearly not meant to sympathise with, resigns when the interview is agreed saying it’s a terrible idea. Scoop paints him as a chauvinist bully, furious at being over-ruled by a woman – problem is he’s right. The most effective moment on this subject is arguably more about privilege in general, as Andrew demeans a female cleaner for incorrectly sorting his teddy bear collection. As mentioned the actual victims remain voiceless and nameless on the margins, barely meriting even a post-credits mention.

Perhaps the real problem with Scoop is it wants to be an All the President’s Men style journalism film but the interview was really a soapish showbiz story. There is not investigation, no wrongs bought to light. There is no gladiatorial duel (compare to Frost/Nixon). Andrew essentially commits reputational suicide in front of his stunned opponents, when confronted with fairly routine, fact-based questions. It’s not like toppling someone really important – and the film is so careful about legal implications it avoids putting any stance on what Andrew may or may not have done, knowingly or otherwise.

What the film doesn’t want to say is that Newsnight landed a big hit by giving us exactly the sort of easy-to-digest, car-crash, celeb news it’s staff start the film scorning. Now a film embracing that would be interesting! In the film McAlister says they need to rejuvenate the programme, to stop talking in an echo-chamber to the Metropolitan elite on subjects like Brexit but focus on the things people really care about and challenge its viewers with positions that differ from their own. Was this story about Prince Andrew in any way at all an answer to that challenge? No. Did it change the world? No. Did it really deserve a film – and that rival three-part series? Scoop never suggests it does.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

Savage satire on the cruelty of entertainment, heavy-handed at times but also ahead of them

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Jane Fonda (Gloria Beatty), Michael Sarrazin (Robert Syverton), Susannah York (Alice LeBlanc), Gig Young (Rocky Gravo), Red Buttons (Harry Kline), Bonnie Bedelia (Ruby Bates), Michael Conrad (Rollo), Bruce Dern (James Bates), Al Lewis (“Turkey”), Robert Fields (Joel Girard), Severn Darden (Cecil), Allyn Ann McLiere (Shirl), Madge Kennedy (Mrs Laydon)

Wheeling out the desperate for entertainment was a mainstay of TV for much of the early noughties with the Simon Cowell factory repackaging human lives for entertainment. But it’s hardly a new phenomenon. During the Depression in 30s America, the country was gripped by a new craze: dance marathons. In exchange for prize money and (perhaps!) a shot at stardom, regular people came off the streets to dance (or at least move around the dance floor) for as long as possible (with short breaks every hour). These shows went on and on, hour after hour, day after day for months at a time, with the audience paying to pop in and gawp.

It doesn’t take much to see how class comes into this. The competitors are the unemployed and out of luck, attracted as much by regular food and a roof over their head. The audience are rich and comfortable, tossing sponsorship bones towards the manufactured ‘stories’ that take their fancy. The event is controlled by a manipulative, alcoholic MC (Gig Young) spinning stories and drama for the crowd. As days turn to weeks the contestants become ever more haggard, drained and physically and emotionally shattered: cynical Gloria (Jane Fonda), homeless Robert (Michael Sarrazin), aspiring actors fragile Alice (Susannah York) and distant Joel (Robert Fields), retired sailor Harry (Red Buttons) and bankrupt farmers James (Bruce Dern) and his heavily pregnant wife Ruby (Bonnie Bedelia).

Pollack’s viciously nihilistic satire throws all these into a hellish never-ending treadmill of physical movement and psychological torture that leaves each character washed out, drained, doused in sweat with sunken, sleepless eyes. You can clearly see the links from They Shoot Horses to Rollerball all the way to The Hunger Games. It’s a grim look into part of the human psyche that, ever since the Colosseum, takes pleasure out of watching the suffering of others for entertainment. The crowded audience – eating popcorn and cheering on their favourites – are as indifferent to the sufferings of the contestants as the organisers with their quack medical teams.

Designed to gain the maximum sense of claustrophobia – once we enter the hall for the dance competition, we never see the outside again for virtually the whole film – the film constantly grinds us down with the exhausting relentlessness of the show. Pollack intercuts this with brief shots of Robert being questioned by the police – moments we eventually realise are flashforwards, making it clear tragedy is our eventual destination. A siren that sounds like nothing less than an air raid warning is repeatedly heard, warning competitors any brief respite they have is coming to a close. The actors become increasingly shuffling, wild-eyed and semi-incoherent in their speech and actions, grimly embodying characters acting on little sleep, in situations of constant strain.

But then that’s entertainment! Part of the thrill for the crowd – whipped up by Gig Young’s showman, a man who oscillates between heartless indifference and flashes of sympathy for his stars (hostages?) – is watching them push on through never-ending pressure. It’s clear to us as well – from their desperate, fixed determination to complete any physical challenge set and the relish with which they consume any food given – that the contestants will tolerate anything just to have, for a few weeks, a taste of something they couldn’t hope to get living on the streets.

Their desperation doesn’t even enter into the moral calculations of those running the show. In fact it’s something that makes them easier to manipulate. Part of the MC’s calculations is creating a relatable story of suffering for the chosen few ‘leads’ any one of which can lead to a triumphant feel-good ending. Potential love-matches are pushed together, sentimental favourites are promoted. Alice’s fine clothing is quietly destroyed by the team running the show because it doesn’t fit a narrative of penniless dreamers. The participants are crafted into “characters”: the ageing Harry as the “Old Man of the Sea”, Gloria and Robert – thrown-together, last-minute partners –as star-cross’d lovers (despite their extremely tense personal relationship).

It all gets too much for the contestants. Serious medical conditions are not unusual – the frequent refrains from the (so-called) medical staff that “we’ve got a dead one” before exhausted, unresponsive contestants are slapped or thrown into ice baths to revive them speaks volumes. When a contestant does indeed die, the event is quietly hushed up for the audience with another feel-good fantasy of noble retirement. Those desperate for a shot at stardom – something they have no hope of getting from a show designed to turn them into drained-out zombies for the entertainment of the masses – are reduced to quivering messes. None more so than Alice – played with a heart-rendering fragility by Susannah York channelling Streetcar Vivien Leigh – who begins the film confidently performing a Shaw monologue and it ends it barely connected to reality.

York’s fine performance is one of several in the film. Young won an Oscar as a MC Rocky, the consummate showman who sometimes surprises us with flashes of humanity (which he clearly drowns with the bottle) before his professional ruthlessness kicks in. Red Buttons is excellent as the rogueish Harry who realises he’s out of depth far-too-late, Bedelia and Dern very good as an experienced couple earning a desperate living from marathons. Particularly fine is Jane Fonda who grounds the film with a gut-punch of a performance of barely concealed rage, deep-rooted self-loathing and brutal, angry cynicism as a woman who understands exactly the show she is in but has no choice but to play along, while hating herself for doing it.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They feel in many ways ahead of its time and for all time – after all, entertainment like this hasn’t died out. Pollack’s film is harshly lit, and his direction is very strong, even if the film does sometimes make its points with a little too much repetitive force. It’s also a film – with its metaphor of suffering horses standing in for suffering people –a fraction too pleased with its own arty contrivance (a slow-mo and sepia tinged opening lays on its symbolism a little too thick, while its flash-forwards yearn a little too much for a French New Wave atmosphere). Michael Sarrazin isn’t quite able to bring depth to the – admittedly deliberately blank Robert – making him an opaque POV character, a role he effectively surrenders on viewing to Fonda.

But despite its flaws, They Shoot Horses Don’t They is a remarkably hard and incredibly bleak film on human nature, which doesn’t let up at all as it barrels to its almost uniquely grim and nihilistic ending. It offers nothing in the way of hope and paints a world gruesomely corrupted and completely indifferent to the thoughts and feelings to the most vulnerable in it. It is ripe for rediscovery.

American Fiction (2023)

Intelligent, challenging satire mixes with moving family drama in this excellent debut

Director: Cord Jefferson

Cast: Jeffrey Wright (Dr Thelonius “Monk” Ellison), Tracee Ellis Ross (Dr Lisa Ellison), Issa Rae (Sintara Golden), Sterling K. Brown (Dr Clifford Ellison), John Ortiz (Arthur), Erika Alexander (Coraline), Leslie Uggams (Agnes Ellison), Adam Brody (Wiley), Keith David (Willy the Wonker), Okrieriete Onaodowan (Van Go Jenkins), Myra Lucretia Taylor (Lorraine), Raymond Anthony Thomas (Maynard)

Dr Theolonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is fed up. His new book is getting no traction with publishers, who want a “Black book” not the classics-inspired literary novels Monk writes. His family life is at a point of crisis: his mother (Leslie Uggams) has rapidly onset dementia, his doctor sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) is divorced and tired of being the only child looking after her, his plastic surgeon brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) is embracing his coming-out and divorce with drugs and a parade of younger boyfriends. In need of money to pay for his mother’s care, Monk pours his frustrations into writing exactly the sort of book publishers want: My Pafology, a crime-drugs-and-deadbeat filled stereotypical low-brow “Black” novel that he submits as a joke. Needless to say, the liberal white publishers come back with bank-busting advances, wowed by this “authentic Black voice” – much to Monk’s disbelief and self-loathing indignation.

This satire is the flashy clothing American Fiction dresses itself up in. In this impressively confident debut from writer-director Cord Jefferson, it frequently pulls out some whipper-sharp comic lines as it skewers the guilt-ridden pretentions of the liberal white elite, so concerned with being seen to care about embracing Black culture, that they don’t even notice they have effectively ghettoised Black culture into exactly the sort of crime-and-drugs nonsense Monk satirises in his fake novel. It’s a good joke, and the fact that Cord Jefferson’s film wears it a bit thin (the parade of self-congratulatory white people falling over themselves to praise the novel are fundamentally reprising the same joke each time – nothing new is added once you’ve got it the first time) doesn’t change that.

Interestingly, as I sat in an Oxford cinema-screening exclusively filled with white people laughing, I realised American Fiction is its own sort of meta-satire. How many people in the cinema I sat in realised they were proving the point of the film? American Fiction displays to white people a funny sketch about our own concerns to be seen to be saying and doing the right thing. We laugh at these idiots and reassure ourselves that we would never be so utterly unaware about our patronising gate-keeping, while also embodying many of the attitudes the film is skewering. We want to be seen to be right-on and laughing at the right things. It’s a neat way for Jefferson to both entertain and challenge us.

Jefferson’s film is partly about urging us to break beyond our shallow ideas of what “Black America” must be. Monk comes from an affluent middle-class family that, skin colour aside, wouldn’t like out of place in the Hamptons. His background is one of beach-house second-homes, art on the walls, lacrosse sticks in his bedroom and a family where everyone has a doctorate. He even has a devoted housekeeper, expertly played by Myra Lucretia Taylor, who’s both an honorary aunt and also a shrewd commentary on stereotypical Black servants, calling the children “Mr Monk” and “Mr Cliff”.

While Monk writes about the urban ghetto with satiric anger, it’s clear that world is almost totally alien to him. The film itself acknowledges it: in an intriguing exchange, Issa Rae’s author of a more stereotypical ‘Black’ novel (We’s All Lives in the Ghetto) even calls out Monk for us air of class-based judgement around other parts of the Black community, social commentary I would have liked the film to challenge more (The film encourages us to question Monk, a snob and arguably a slight bully, but frequently gives him a pass by contrasting him to the ridiculous and more selfish characters around him). It would have been interesting to see more of the reaction to the book from Black readers, not just white ones eager to show their credentials.

American Fiction though takes on the targets it goes for with a certain aplomb. Publishers, literary prize givers and the overtly-but-dutifully-PC are effectively skewered. It’s also one of the few books that really gives a sense of writing. Monk’s drafting of the novel sees the characters he is bringing life to appear in his study with him, parroting his dialogue and then turning to discuss character, motivation and make suggestions to the author. More of this, giving us more insight into the novel and the assumptions that underline Monk’s writing of it, would have given an interesting extra dimension to the film’s satire.

Jefferson’s clever and vibrant film suckers us in with satire, but really flourishes as a complex family drama. He offers an affecting and compassionate storyline of siblings who have grown apart due to their natural inclination to independence, distance and repressed emotion. (It’s suggested this is a trait inherited from their father, a famed surgeon with a rollcall of infidelities.) American Fiction beautifully sketches very natural portraits of siblings who know exactly how to push each other’s buttons, but also quickly fall back onto a shared language of memories and mutual experience. For all the satire, it’s as a heartfelt, small-scale family piece that the film really excels.

This is partly because it gives such wonderful opportunities to a fabulous array of actors. Jeffrey Wright, so often a supporting player quietly adding depth to a series of under-written franchise films, is excellent as Monk. Wright perfectly captures his hangdog resentments, his bitterness at not getting a fair deal and middle-age ennui. He also brings to life the pre-emptive walls Monk has built up to keep pain (and other people) out, the same intellectual distance that makes his books hard-sells. Combine that with Wright’s expert comic timing – not only his awkwardly uncomfortable shifts into his urban persona, but also his head-in-hands exasperation at the shallowness of the world – and this is a brilliant showcase for a consistently impressive actor.

Equally fine is Sterling K Brown as Monk’s frequently selfish brother Cliff, trying to enjoy life while he can – like Wright, Brown’s comic and emotional touch are spot-on. The film touches on themes of generational homophobia – their increasingly senile mother, sensitively played by Leslie Uggams, is clearly disapproving of his sexuality – but doesn’t hit this beat too hard. Tracee Ellis Ross is a breath of life-filled air as Monk’s sister while Erika Alexander gives emotional weight and depth to a slightly underwritten part as Monk’s new neighbour turned girlfriend Coraline.

American Fiction is frequently stronger when it focuses on crafting this low-key, realistic family drama, refreshingly clear of manufactured drama. What people will remember though is funny (if slightly one-note) satire – Monk even turns his story into exactly the sort of cross-racial appeal movie ready to collect awards, that you could argue American Fiction itself is. American Fiction ends with several alternative endings, each of which just made me feel Jefferson himself wasn’t sure how to end it. But, on the whole, this is a highly promising debut from Cord Jefferson, crammed with excellent dialogue and performances, which casts a fresh and urgent eye on important questions.

The Old Oak (2023)

Loach’s swansong is a passionate, if slightly out-of-time, call for peace and understanding

Director: Ken Loach

Cast: Dave Turner (TJ Ballantyne), Ebla Mari (Yara), Claire Rodgerson (Laura), Trevor Fox (Charlie), Chris McGlade (Vic), Col Tait (Eddy), Jordan Louis (Garry), Chrissie Robinson (Erica), Chris Gotts (Jaffa Cake)

The OId Oak is likely the swansong for 87-year-old Ken Loach, Britain’s leading independent film-maker and high-priest of left-wing political cinema. It’s an engaging valedictory effort, crammed with fine Loach touches. But it’s a film that feels slightly politically out-of-time, which works better not when making tub-thumbing points but as a simple plea for a love and understanding. There are worse things Loach (who I’ve sometimes found rather trying for all his brilliance) can sign off with.

In a small town near Durham, TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) is a former miner and passionate union man now struggling to keep his pub, The Old Oak, alive in the face of mounting costs. World-weary, he is roped into helping Syrian refugees settle in their new homes in the town. Many locals, bitterly feeling the town has been left behind by government, can barely hide their fury at these refugees. But TJ finds they re-ignite in him a desire to make the world a better place, particularly as he forms a fatherly friendship with Yara (Ebla Mari), a passionate young photographer, who doesn’t know if her own father is alive or dead and wants to build links between the refugees and the local community.

The bond between TJ and Yara is at the heart of this gentle film, with Loach drawing beautifully natural performances from Dave Turner (a former fireman union boss) and Ebla Mari. One of Loach’s greatest strengths has always been his ability to poetically draw out hugely endearing relationships. TJ and Yara are a perfect example, two people who recognise loss and isolation in each other. TJ’s purpose in life has gone, never finding anything to replace his union campaigns of the 80s, estranged from his family and going through the motions to keep his pub alive. Yara has lost her home and everything she has known, the only memento of her father being her treasured camera, facing hostility from all around her.

The Old Oak centres this relationship in a passionate cry for empathy between different communities. The refugees arrive lost, isolated, confused and scared, fleeing conditions far harsher than many of the people in the town could understand. Far from having an easy-ride (as many accuse them of, seeing them get free homes and furniture) they desire nothing else but to go home, but are forced to make the best of it here. It’s a perspective that never occurs to many of the townspeople, seeing them only as interlopers not victims with whom their community – that has never really recovered from pit closures – has more in common with than they suspect.

TJ and Yara both recognise this – and want to build bridges not burn them. Much of The Old Oak revolves around TJ’s efforts to convert his disused back room – a shrine to union action when the room was the heart of the mining community – into a food bank to support both refugees and local alike. Loach’s humanitarianism comes to the fore here in the brief stories we hear about the users of this food bank: the small boy who can’t believe the food is free, the sulky teenager who finds care she rarely encounters elsewhere, the proud boy promised his ‘secret’ thathe needs the food bank will be kept. These are real people, with real problems, which Loach excels at bringing to life.

Loach is equally skilled at subtly staging personal pain. The director of Kes hasn’t lost his touch with the staging of deaths of beloved pets. The emotional pull TJ’s dog Mara has over him – much of his life’s meaning coming from tending for this small dog – and the impact of her loss is beautifully played with a raw grief by Dave Turner and staged with maximum emotional impact by Loach without a stroke of sentimental manipulation. Just as the smashing of Yara’s camera in the film’s opening moments by an unpleasant yob, berating the arrival of these interlopers, carries real impact from the gentle desolation on her face. The building of relationships, instigated by mutual pain and a hope for a better future, is The Old Oak’s strongest material.

It’s the political content that never quite pulls itself into focus. Loach’s sympathy for the working-class community is clear. He demonstrates forcefully these communities have been left with almost nothing, lacking hope or purpose and facing lives of underfunded lack of opportunity. No wonder kids bristle when they see refugee children given old bikes and toys for free. Or that locals bristle at seeing houses assigned for free after they have had to scrimp and save to buy theirs. But I wonder if Loach finds himself slightly confused with some of the prejudices and lack of socialistic international brotherly love in some of the working class today.

Loach has always clinged to the idea of the workers of the world uniting. But throughout The Old Oak he tacks away from really facing the racially-based anger and prejudice in some working class circles and avoids tackling where some of this racism and xenophobia comes from. Or facing the fact that it’s more widely shared, on some level, by more people than he might care to think. (He seems more relaxed linking it to old battles – inevitably one of the most hostile is the son of a scab from the mining days.)

The film shows the angry grousing of the many of the regulars, but avoids getting under the skin of why they are angry about this invasion of their space, eventually writing them off as simply lacking true working-class solidarity. While sympathising with the struggles faced by many of the working class, as a consequence of decades of under investment and alienation from the status quo, Loach feels uncomfortable with acknowledging how some of this has fed into prejudice – or how the working-class dreams of Scargill have been corrupted into “us and them” ill-informed ranting.

Instead, Loach wants to fast-track to a picture he’s more comfortable with, showing many of the local community perform sudden 360 turns towards acceptance and brotherly love, with remaining racists written off as bad apples. The creation of an atmosphere where the younger generation are encouraged to feel xenophobic racial hatred – kids beat Yara’s brother outside of the school, filming it to post on YouTube, where it is watched with glee by some of the regulars – is unaddressed. It’s telling Loach seems certain getting everyone together for an old-fashioned socialist sing-along will help solve problems. It feels like a naïve, if touching, idea that doesn’t really ring true.

The Old Oak sometimes feels like a film from a man slightly out-of-step with the times (the many clumsy shots of phones playing YouTube videos adds to this). It’s a film made up of effective scenes – including a heartfelt sequence in Durham cathedral – but not quite drawn together into a satisfying whole, with so many plot developments kept off screen that it starts to feel it hinges on contrivance. It works best as a simple, human plea for love and understanding – but a more accurate understanding, or a willingness by Loach to really turn a harsh eye on the negative side of the working-class communities he has dedicated his life to, seems to have evaded it.