Minority Report (2002)

Tom Cruise messes with fate and the future in Minority Report

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Cruise (Chief John Anderton), Max von Sydow (Director Lamar Burgess), Samantha Morton (Agatha), Colin Farrell (Danny Witwer), Neal McDonough (Detective Fletcher), Steve Harris (Jad), Patrick Kilpatrick (Knott), Jessica Capshaw (Evanna), Lois Smith (Dr Iris Hineman), Kathryn Morris (Lara Anderton), Peter Stormare (Dr Solomon P Eddie), Tim Blake Nelson (Gideon)

If you could see what lies ahead for you in your future would you change it? Or would you accept what fate has clearly already decided? It’s one of many questions that Minority Report, Spielberg’s bulky, brainy sci-fi chase movie slash film noir, tackles. And the answer it suggests is: everybody runs.

It’s the year 2054, and murder in the District of Columbia is a thing of the past thanks to the Pre-Crime Division. Using three psychics, known as “pre-cogs”, permanently hooked-up to a machine that can visualise their visions of violent deaths and murders that will occur, the Pre-Crime team led by Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) arrest and imprison murderers hours, minutes and seconds before they even commit their crimes. Anderton believes passionately in the system – but his belief is shaken when the next murderer to be identified is none other than himself. Anderton is due to kill in a complete stranger in 36 hours – and immediately goes on the run to work out who this man is, why he would wish to kill him, and if there is any truth in the rumour that the pre-cogs don’t always agree, and that the most powerful pre-cog Agatha (Samantha Morton) can produce a “minority report”: an alternative vision that shows a different future.

Spielberg’s film is one that mixes searching discussion on fate, choice and destiny with the pumping, fast-moving action of a chase movie and the gritty, hard-boiled cynicism and intrigue of a classic film-noir. He frames all this in a brilliantly constructed, dystopian future where adverts and government surveillance can read our eyes wherever we go and identify us immediately (throwing personalised ads in the faces of people everywhere they step) and, in the interests of safety, people who have technically not done anything yet are imprisoned for life on the basis of things it has been determined they will do.

It makes for a pretty heady cocktail, and one which will have you questioning how much of what we decide is our choice and how much is destiny. If Anderton knows his destiny, can he change his fate? Will he have the willpower or the ability to avert his destiny? Or does knowing what will happen and where it will take place only drive him towards his fate? Put simply, does knowing the future in advance give you a chance to change or it or does it make that future even more likely (or perhaps even inevitable)? Spielberg’s film delves intelligently into these questions, throwing paradoxes and causality loops at the viewer with a genuine lightness of touch.

This works because the film balances these more philosophical questions with plenty of adventure and excitement. Several chase sequences – which make imaginative use of various pieces of future tech like driverless cars and jet packs – keep you on the edge of your seat. Spielberg tentpoles the film throughout with some brilliant set pieces, from Alderton’s race against the clock to stop a killer at the start to his own escape from the clutches of his former colleagues. 

These set pieces also differ in styles. These more conventional action sequences are sandwiched between others that are a mix of darkness, comedy, horror and slapstick. In one sequence, Alderton must attempt to hide in a bath of icy water (Cruise holding his breath of course for a prolonged period on camera) to evade a series of body-heat seeking metallic spiders, with Alderton desperate to protect his freshly replaced eyes from being exposed too soon to daylight. Later, Alderton will evade the cops thanks to the advice of pre-cog Agatha whose simple instructions (Grab an umbrella! Stand still for five seconds behind the balloons! Drop coins for the tramp!) wittily use her fore-knowledge of events to guide Alderton through a gauntlet of perils.

The horror is in there as well from those creepy spiders, not to mention the ickyness of Cruise carrying out an operation to replace his eyes to evade that all-intrusive retinal scanning. The sequence – with Peter Storemare as a sinister doctor who delights in leaving unpleasant tricks for the temporarily blinded Alderton (rotten food and sour milk being the most gross) – is a brilliantly vile, uncomfortable piece of kooky surrealism in the middle of a wild chase. And also tees up the bizarre dark comedy of Cruise – attempting to use his old eyes to break back into his former office – dropping his eyes and desperately chasing them as they roll down a corridor towards a drain. 

There are also darker themes in Alderton’s tragic background. Saddled with a drug addiction and a broken home, we learn Alderton is still struggling with the grief of losing a son to kidnappers – a loss he clearly holds himself personally responsible for. Getting tanked up at home and interacting with old home movies of his lost son, Alderton carries within a deep sadness and grief. It’s a challenge that Cruise rises to really well, his ability to bring commitment and depth to pulpy characters perfect for making Alderton a character you really invest in.

It also gives Alderton the tragic backstory and self-destructive problems so beloved of grimy, gumshoe cops of old noir films. That’s certainly also the inspiration for the drained out, greying look of the film that Spielberg shoots, with colours bleached and the future looking a confusing mix of clean, sleek machines and dirty, rain sodden streets. Alderton’s hunting down of his future victim has all the shoe leather and bitterness of classic Chandler. Meanwhile Federal Agent Witwer (a decent performance from Colin Farrell) chases him down with the determination of an obsessed cop, while also showing more than a few of the quirks of the maverick PI himself.

Minority Report is so good in so many places, it’s a shame that the final act so flies off the rails from the tone of what we have seen before, eventually stapling a happy ending onto a film that tonally has been building towards something very different. On a re-watch, there is just enough in the film to allow you to interpret this ending as a sort of fantasy or dream, but you’ll want the film to end the first time it crashes to black (you’ll know the point I mean). I prefer to believe the ending is a sort of dream – although Spielberg drops no hints to this effect in the film visually at all, in the way something like Inception does so well, to leave you questioning reality – because with that thought that final act betrays everything you have seen before in its simplicity and embracing of binary rights and wrongs.

But with that massive caveat, Minority Report is a very impressive film – and for at least the first hour and fifty minutes probably one of Spielberg’s best. It gets lost in the final act – and I know I said this but please let that be a fantasy – but until then this is a brilliant mix of genres and intelligence and Hollywood thrills with Cruise at his best. It’s exciting and its emotionally involving. Ignore that ending and it’s great. When you re-watch it, pretend you can’t see that future.

The Four Feathers (1939)

John Clements jacks in the soldier’s life, then has to prove he’s not a coward in The Four Feathers

Director: Zoltan Korda

Cast: John Clements (Harry Faversham), Ralph Richardson (Captain John Durrance), C. Aubrey Smith (General Burroughs), June Duprez (Ethne Burroughs), Allan Jeayes (Geveral Faversham), Jack Allen (Lt Thomas Willoughby), Donald Gray (Peter Burroughs), Frederick Culley (Dr Sutton), John Laurie (Khalifa)

Who doesn’t love a sweeping boys own adventure? The Four Feathers is a prime example of a classic late Victorian adventure story by AEW Mason, where stiff-upper lipped British men do what must be done for honour, Queen and country in the face of hordes of dangerous ruthless natives. Okay, you can see typing that why some of these attitudes can be seen as “troubling today” – and the film’s occasional non-PC stumbles (John Laurie blacks up – as does every other actor playing a speaking African – as radical leader Khalifa, while his army is referred to by an on-screen caption as “fuzzy-wuzzies”). But it’s a product of its time, and its attitudes are really less racist, than the sort of patronising parental colonialism, where the Khalifa has to be stopped as much because he is a danger to his fellow natives as he is the British rulers.

Anyway, putting it’s “of its time” attitudes to one side, The Four Feathers is an endearing, enjoyable and wonderfully made adventure story. After the death of General Gordon (see Charlton Heston’s epic Khartoum) in 1885, war is declared on the Khalifa in the Sudan. However young Harry Faversham (John Clements) resigns his commission on the day of the announcement that his regiment will be shipped out, feeling his obligation to join the army has ended with his father’s death and worried that he will prove a coward. His friends Durrance (Ralph Richardson), Willoughby (Jack Allen), Burroughs (Donald Gray) and fiancée Ethne Burroughs (June Duprez) are singularly unimpressed and all send him white feathers of cowardice. Realising he has led down everyone, Faversham disguises himself as mute, Sangali native (including facial brand – ouch!) and heads out to the Sudan to help his friends and regain his honour: and do they need it, as Durrance is blinded and Willoughby and Burroughs captured by the Khalifa.

The Four Feathers was shot on a huge budget at the time, with extensive on-set location shooting, and it barrels along with an old-fashioned sense of adventure that is hard not to get a little bit swept in. Of course, it’s also easy to question some of the film’s colonialist, white-man’s burden attitudes and also its opinions on what constitutes bravery and nobility (leaving the army because you never wanted to be in it in the first place is seen as yellow-bellied nonsense, which I suppose makes sense for a film made just before World War Two). 

But take it as a product of its own time, and the film works extremely well – easily the best version of the many that have been made of AEW Mason’s book. While epic, it gives us a low-key, dignified lead character who it’s easy to admire and relate to. John Clements plays the role with an expected upper-class stiffness in places, but he’s also a man bursting with desires to be something more than a soldier, then plagued with guilt and self-loathing when he believes he has betrayed all those he is closest to. Clements’ performance anchors the film extremely well, and makes Faversham into an admirable, very human protagonist, pushing himself to insane levels of deprivation and suffering to redeem himself in his own eyes, as much as in his friends.

Those friends are also not painted as arrogant buffoons or cruel, knee-jerk bullies. Ralph Richardson mines a great deal of sympathy from Durrance, a man determined to do his best but (its implied ) living under a deep sense of inadequacy and fear himself, who knows he is second best in most things, especially in love, and who accepts the ill fortunes that befall him with an eventual stoic good-nature. The film’s most successful sequence, features a wordless disguised Faversham, guiding the blind Durrance not only back to the British troops, but also helping him to find some will to carry on living. Its sterling work from Richardson, and his physical intelligence – his initial blindness is almost comically blundering, before the character trains himself to move and act almost as if he still had his sight – makes for further emotional connection.

All this is set in a sweeping, marvellously entertaining, grand-scale by Zoltan Korda. No expense was clearly spared, and the large scale sequences of battles and attacks – as well as the shots of armies moving across the desert wasteland – carry a great deal of scale and impact. The film barrels along with an impressive force, throwing events and actions at us throughout, all while juggling the personal stories of its lead characters. The technicolour shooting of the film has a classic gorgeousness about it, and the film has more than its fair share of decent lines. The film highlights a number of rather stirring battle set pieces, as red coated Englishman fight against overwhelming odds, the sort of thing that we are meant to frown at today but actually remains rather gripping.

The Four Feathers may be dated in places, but as a piece of classic entertainment from its era it’s hard to beat. The action adventure is full of bangs, shots and stiff-upper lipped Brits overcoming trials and tribulations. Faversham is a grounded and relatable character, and his doubts and fears make him admirable, not least because of the great lengths he goes to in order to overcome them. The Four Feathers still entertains today because it feels like exactly the sort of classic Sunday afternoon adventure story that appeals to boys of all ages.

Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)

Jean Louis-Barrault mimes up a storm in French masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis

Director: Marcel Carné

Cast: Arletty (Claire “Garance” Reine), Jean-Louis Barrault (Baptiste Deburau), Pierre Brasseur (Frédérick Lemaître), Marcel Herrand (Pierre-François Lacenaire), Pierre Renoir (Jéricho), María Casarès (Nathalie), Louis Salou (Comte Édouard de Montray), Gaston Modot (Fil de Soie), Fabien Loris (Avril), Marcel Pérès (Director of the Funambules), Pierre Palau (Stage manager)

Les Enfants du Paradis is France’s Gone with the Wind or Casablanca – a beloved classic that holds an unshakeable place in any list of great French films. And you can’t argue with that, this is the sort of gem of a film that should be watched and seen by anyone who loves movies. Carné’s magisterial epic hums with a mix of romance and drama, comedy and tragedy, hope and despair. It not only captures the magic of theatre, but also the different shades and variations of love and lust. A totemic expression of art and life, it opened immediately after the liberation and ran for 54 solid weeks in Paris.

Set in the Parisian theatre scene of 1820-1830, the film charts not only the early foundation of French theatre, but also four very different men who all share a love for one enchanting, elliptical and magnetic woman, the mysterious Garance (Arletty). These men (all fictionalised versions of real people, except de Montray) are pioneering mime artist Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), aspiring classical actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), ruthless artiste and criminal Pierre-François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand) and arrogant Comte Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou). The lives and feelings of these five characters clash and interweave over ten years.

In many ways, it’s a miracle that Carné’s film exists at all. It was shot on a high budget in occupied France. Filming was disrupted by the war and the peace – the actor originally playing small time hustler Jéricho was sentenced to death for collaboration and fled the country to be replaced by Pierre Renoir (son of the painter, brother to the director) – and its star Arletty was in prison for having an affair with a German Luftwaffe officer when the film was released. The film was split into two as Nazi rules prevented any films from being longer than 90 minutes. Half the vast number of extras were members of the Resistance using the film as cover. Its skilled art director Alexander Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma were secret Jews (Trauner was living under a false name with Carné). Filming delays struck the production time and time again. How did this get made?

Well it’s a wartime miracle, and a gift to any film-lover because Carné’s film is a magisterial achievement, a beautifully paced epic that mixes spectacle with human emotion. It looks simply sublime. Trauner’s set and design are astonishingly ambitious and real, beautifully bringing to life both the streets of Paris and the theatre of the early nineteenth century. The detail and costumes are sumptuous and the world it invokes all-consuming. You can see why the film was considered an almost unbelievable folly to mount during wartime. But it creates the perfect bustling, real life drama for Carné’s poetic story to be built around. 

Carné worked with Jacques Prevert, possibly France’s greatest screenwriter, on the script and crafted a romantic epic that manages to seem timeless. In its sweep and detail it shows every stratum of French society, and shows the same human emotions drive us all from high to low, no matter the background. On top of that, it mixes a romantic sweep with a real understanding of the selfishness, greed and flaws of humanity. Prevert’s script juggles the narrative balls of all these characters and uses each of them to show different facets of the passion and obsession of love. 

Carné’s camera works beautifully, exploring Trauner’s set brilliantly to recreate beautifully the beginnings of French modern theatre. He knows when to keep the camera simple, and when to use extravagant shots: his opening crane shots through the bustling streets of Paris are superb, as is the carefully static camera that captures Barrault’s early mime routine. He has a wonderful understanding of the backstage world of theatre: very few other films have captured the mood and atmosphere of life behind the scenes. He also is perfectly at home with Prevert’s literary and witty script, packed with good lines. There are superb scenes from start to finish – despite its length, everything feels essential and the pace never slackens, because each moment teaches us something about character or deepens our understanding of their relationships and the world of the film. This is possibly one of the paciest and leanest three-hour films you will ever see.

At the centre of all this is Arletty as the mesmerising Garrance. Arletty juggles a hugely difficult role: Garrance is, in some ways, with her desire for liberty, her strong will, her mysteriousness, her desire for independence clashing with her sense of being bent to the will of men, an expression of France herself, following in the footsteps of Delacroix’s Liberty or Joan of Arc. Arletty’s performance is fine, playing up to this legendary unknowability, although I will say she is (whisper it) at nearly 50 too old for the part (in high definition she looks noticeably older than most of the men courting her). I must confess re-watching it that I would have loved the astonishingly talented María Casarès to play the role (she is exceptionally heartfelt and tragic as Baptiste’s devoted but unloved wife-to-be), but it’s a very hard part, a role that has to be everything to all the men in the film, but also whose true desires (under the masks she must wear) are hard to know. 

Arletty’s slightly stagy and theatrical, mannered performance is perhaps shown up as well by the more genuine and enjoyable performances around her. As mentioned, Casarès is sublime as the tragic Nathalie. Pierre Brassuer is extraordinarily entertaining and larger-than-life as Lemaître, a bon-vivant with ambition but who is willing to accept that life moves on and relationships change. Marcel Herrand is wonderful as Lacenaire, a character of immense shades of grey, part ruthless crook, part bitter cynic, part romantic. Lacenaire’s actions defy characterisation but constantly feel true, and Herrand plays the role with a sly wit tinged with danger that I love.

Jean-Louis Barrault, himself a famous mime artist, is physically perfect as Baptiste – his mime sequences are extraordinary in their detail and grace – and he makes for a fascinating nominal lead. A romantic in some ways, a nervous young pup who idealises Garrance (while Lemaître sees her more as an equal partner, Lacenaire a kind of protégé, and the Comte as property who can be brought and sold) who turns down advances offers from Garrance due to his idealised view of her, his development is fascinating. Starting as our romantic lead, Prevert and Carné slowly reveal that the years turn him into someone approaching a selfish obsessive, barely able to function when Garrance is near, who jilts his wife and child in a heartbeat when he has the opportunity to see her, an obsessive who will sacrifice others without a thought to feed his fire. 

Does Garrance return this love? Perhaps yes, it’s one of the mysteries of the film. This is, after all, a world abounding with actors and liars, where people take on personalities all the time. A blind beggar gleefully shows his disability is a façade when someone buys him dinner. Pierre Renoir’s hustler Jéricho has as many nom-de-plumes as he does dodgy deals. Garrance perhaps recognises in Baptiste the only one of her potential lovers who has no desire to bend any part of her to his will – Lemaître will place his ambition first, Lacenaire would have her a partner in crime, the Comte would control her every move – and maybe this is what draws her to him. 

But the romance in the film is never that simple: instead it’s as likely to cause harm as happiness. Carné’s beautiful and wise film shows love is never simple and romance is never as harmless as we might like to think. The dialogue is perfectly assembled, the acting superb and every shot of the film is beautiful. Les Enfants du Paradis is a classic must for lovers of film, but also for lovers of theatre – its recreation of early nineteenth-century theatre is perfect – and a film that you can watch and enjoy time and time again.

The Driver (1978)

Isabella Adjani and Ryan O’Neal buckle up in The Driver

Director: Walter Hill

Cast: Ryan O’Neil (The Driver), Bruce Dern (The Detective), Isabella Adjani (The Player), Ronee Blakely (The Connection), Matt Clark (Red Plainclothesman), Felice Orlandi (Gold Plainclothesman), Joseph Walsh (Glasses), Rudy Ramon (Teeth)

The Driver was Walter Hill’s attempt at making a pure genre film. Characters? Who really needs ‘em – how about we just name every character after their function? Plot? Let’s keep it really simple – cops and robbers? Events? Let’s never take longer than 20 minutes to get from one action, car-chase set-up from another. The Driver is an alarmingly simple piece of genre film-making – which means you can see why it’s been so popular with a generation of film-makers who have admired its stripped down cool and sparse chill.

The Driver (Ryan O’Neal) is a supernaturally gifted escape car artist, who lives his life by an almost samurai code and rigid punctuality. The Detective (Bruce Dern) is the obsessed cop willing to bend the rules in order to catch this uncatchable man. The Detective hires a gang of criminals to hire The Driver to be part of a bank job – he’ll let them get away with the heist if they will help him catch The Driver. But things are never that simple.

The Driver barely has a plot at all really – it’s totally about the vibe of creating something so stripped down there is barely anything left. Like pure experience cinema. However, somehow, a piece of pulp cinema like this still manages to end up feeling very self-important and pleased with itself, for all its grimy realism. 

For starters, it’s hard not to feel slightly annoyed by none of the characters having names. On top of this they are all treated, to varying degrees, as unengaging ciphers, plot devices rather than human beings. When they speak they tend to stand and stare into the middle distance while doing so, or drop elliptical statements that feel important but are actually pretty empty. This isn’t helped by casting a selection of actors who are pretty balsawood in the first place: Ryan O’Neal is no one’s idea of Laurence Olivier, although at least his wooden delivery pretty much matches up well with a bland cipher like the Driver. Isabelle Adjani, in her first English language role, feels rather confused by the whole thing and goes for a dead-eyed inscrutability.

Perhaps, with the lack of energy coming from his co-stars, Bruce Dern goes all out as a character who, really, makes no sense at all as the lawman so obsessed with justice he’ll break the law to enforce it. Dern pretty much chews the scenery with wild-eyed intensity, even though in dialogue he also has too fall back on the same empty, metaphorical nonsense as the other two.

This all makes for a strange mixture of bizarre art installation and hard-boiled, super driving stunts. Everything that doesn’t take place behind the wheel of car is laced with a portentous self-importance. The driving in this film is, by the way, fabulous. The film has three major sequences of driving expertise which signpost each act, and each is shot and framed with an influential edginess by Hill. Using low angles, and strapping the camera onto the bonnet of the car, the film throws us into the middle of all the wheel-spinning action.

The opening sequence – a high speed escape from a robbery that narrowly falls behind the Driver’s tight schedule causing all sorts of problems – is a perfect entrée for what will come, neon lit cars burning down and through downtown LA, engaged in all sorts of fast turns and clever tricks to shake off tails. Hill follows this up with an entertaining sequence mid-movie, where the Driver proves his unquestionable skill by expertly manoeuvring at high speed around a car park, skilfully and deliberately knocking parts of the car off as he goes round. This all builds towards the final chase, which rips through a building estate and finally a factory as the Driver chases down the thieves who have fleeced him of his cash.

Ah yes, the cash. There is a complex sting operation going on here around some cash from a job being kept in a locker in a train station, but it hardly really matters (the film barely stops to explain it anyway). You only need to know it’s a trap but the Driver needs it as the results of this big job. Like the characters, events in the film matter only as far as their plot function requires. It makes for an odd viewing experience, but this has influenced so many films later – not least Drive which is a remake in all but name – that The Driver, for all it is a slightly frustrating watch at the time, is assured now of a classic status you wouldn’t have expected when it bombed at the box office on release.

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.

Dead Poet's Society (1989)

Robin Williams is an inspirational teacher (is there any other type in films?) in Dead Poet’s Society

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Robin Williams (John Keating), Robert Sean Leonard (Neil Perry), Ethan Hawke (Todd Anderson), Josh Charles (Knox Overstreet), Gale Hansen (Charlie Dalton), Norman Lloyd (Headmaster Gale Nolan), Kurtwood Smith (Mr Perry), Dylan Kussman (Richard Cameron), James Waterson (Gerard Pitts)

“Oh Captain, My Captain!” Your feelings for Dead Poet’s Society are probably directly linked to how you react to that desk-standing ending. A triumph of emotional film-making? Or garishly over-sentimentalised nonsense? I’ll go for the latter myself, as I found myself non-plussed and unengaged with this conventional “idealistic teacher changes lives of young boys” story. Seen it all before. 

In 1959 at elite, all-male prep school Welton Academy, four young students (Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, Josh Charles and Gale Hansen) are surprised by the unorthodox teaching methods of their new English teacher, Welton Academy old boy John Keating (Robin Williams). Rather than teach the stuffy, facts based curriculum, Keating encourages the boy to use their hearts and minds, to be creative and above all to carpe diem as much as they can. The boys start an illicit poetry club (?) and begin to explore their own artistic leanings – but their conservative parents and school won’t stand for this challenge of the orthodox and when tragedy strikes it’s Keating who gets the blame.

Dead Poet’s Society already feels a bit dated, and it’s story line treads all too familiar ground of fusty seniors struggling to understand the artistic stirrings of the youngsters inspired by the sort of maverick inspirational teacher that everyone at one time or another has dreamed of being. Naturally of course (as per the rules of films) all the other teachers are either cynical, disinterested or box tickers. For a genuine artist like Weir, I was struck by how plodding this film was in its story and construction and also its ideas and themes. It’s a struggle between generations played out at a point in history where the cultural revolution of the sixties was just about to happen. These ideas were already over twenty five years old when the film was made – and this adds nothing really too the mix.

Instead we get the standard tropes we might expect, as the students play out expected and predictable plots. Nervy Ethan Hawke, at first too shy to speak, finds the courage to express himself. Josh Charles sets out to woo the girl he loves (at times this is more than a little creepy). Proto-rebel (and no doubt soon to be sixties activist) Gale Hansen begins bucking authority and writing scurrilous articles for the School newspaper. And Robert Sean Leonard begins to defy his domineering father’s wishes to focus solely and exclusively on a medical career by landing the part of Puck in a local play and dreaming of a career in the theatre.

Despite the focus of much of the film’s promotion (and in people’s memories) on Robin Williams’ central performance, the story line is all about these boys. And I will say there are some fine performances from these four principles – three of whom went on to have notable careers. Particularly fine is Robert Sean Leonard, who gets a meaty pile to play with as a young adolescent who lacks the courage to tell his father what he really feels and carries all this with a confidence and assurance (even though his Puck performance is hardly the work of genius the film insists it is!).

It’s unfortunate that most of what they do is the totally expected collection of school yard clichés, which builds towards an inevitable and predictable, sad, sentimental, ending. Keating is the standard inspirational teacher, given to flights of fancy and eccentric touches (tearing pages from books, leading the boys in sports designed to build their poetry skills, encouraging the boys skilfully to recite their own poetry) that will either leave you wishing you had him as a teacher or leave you cold. 

Watching it now, and seeing Keating interact with his students, you can’t help but feel his increasing closeness with the boys, his encouraging them to call him “Captain” (in one skincrawling moment he doesn’t even turn around when walking until one of them addresses him as this!), his taking them to plays, his obvious favouring of a few key students would all contribute to him struggling to get CRB cleared. I actually found his character rather grating, although the film does use a good few moments to underline how Keating rebukes the boys for their more thoughtless and pointless acts of rebellion and how he urges Neil to gain the support of his father before acting.

Nothing particularly wrong with Robin Williams performance though, even though the thing you feel impressed people the most was this most energetic of funny men restraining himself in a relatively straight and low-key part. It’s a role several actors could have taken on just as well, but Williams does a sound job.

It’s a shame that the film itself is so deeply bland. Its later sentimental touches become increasingly heavy handed and overbearing, and it’s parable of betrayal and corruption in a 1950s school hits its points equally hard. There is nothing really fresh or unique here, and the film itself never brings its story to life in a way that feels fresh or unique. It’s a film widely loved, but to be honest for the uninitiated has more than enough moments of weakness for you to want to check out of this class.

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.

The Wife (2018)

Glenn Close is the supportive but perhaps secretly resentful Wife of novelist Jonathan Pryce

Director: Björn Runge

Cast: Glenn Close (Joan Castleman), Jonathan Pryce (Joseph Castleman), Christian Slater (Nathaniel Bone), Max Irons (David Castleman), Annie Starke (Young Joan Castleman), Harry Lloyd (Young Joseph Castleman), Elizabeth McGovern (Elaine Mozell)

The old cliché used to be: behind every successful man, there’s a woman. The Wife explores just such a woman – and uses this story for a brilliantly structured, tightly written exploration of the tensions and sacrifices that underpin a partnership (and relationship) where the man is the sole public figure. In 1992, Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce) is a hugely successful novelist, being honoured with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Standing beside him at all times is his wife Joan (Glenn Close), silent, supportive, taking care of all her husband’s needs. But as her husband is surrounded by praise and flattery, has her patience finally begun to snap?

Much of the attention for The Wife has focused on Glenn Close’s performance as Joan. And while her performance is superb, there is much more to this film than that. This is a well written, brilliantly acted, carefully shot relationship drama that manages to explore interesting details about how sexism, gender expectations and the patriarchy turn some brilliant, intelligent and gifted women into ciphers who must hide their skills under a bushel. The Wife is an engrossing, small scale drama that leaves you with a lot to think about.

Runge’s camera is slow and subtle, carefully zooming into parts of the scene that don’t seem at first to be central, but are revealed to be so. Many of these moments centre around Joan, a woman quietly at the edge of scenes, ignored by people, responding only when required. She calmly follows her husband’s lead, while quietly tending his needs (reminding him of appointments, making sure he takes his medicine, apologising for his abruptness). 

This sort of framing requires a lot of quiet, “reaction” acting from Close – and she excels at this. Close’s performance is a masterclass in subtlety, her face a mask of micro-reactions that leave the viewer guessing at all times exactly what she is feeling about all of the events she witnesses. No scene covers this better than when she listens in on the line as her husband is informed of his Nobel prize – her face slowly, carefully, unreadably changes from delight and pride to something far more equivocal, her face frozen in a look of – well is it anger, horror, frustration? It’s impossible to tell. After that, the entire film is a study in interpreting the exact feelings this woman has for the behaviour of, and praise for, her husband. What does she feel about this? What does she really think? How far does loyalty to her husband stretch?

Muck-raking, sensationalist would-be Castleman biographer Nathaniel Bone (a wonderfully sleazy Christian Slater) has a good idea that there is a lot of anger there – and gambles in a series of offers and interjections that Joan’s loyalty only stretches so far. How far is she responsible for the literary success of her husband? Flashbacks carefully woven into the film show in the early sixties the young Joan (played very well by Close’s real life daughter Annie Starke) as a promising literary writer who falls under the influence of her charismatic professor, young Joe (Harry Lloyd a slightly awkward fit as the arrogant bohemian writer). In the boorish, Mad Men-ish 60s, Joan feels her chance of being recognised as a writer in her own right is close to zero – indeed she’s told to forget it altogether by a bitter former alumna of her Ivy League college, played archly by Elizabeth McGovern – so decides hitching her star to Joe, a promising potential author, seems the best option.

But how much of that promise can Joe actively achieve? And how much of a literary as well as a personal partnership is this marriage? And has Joe lost all track of this? It’s easy to overlook how essential Jonathan Pryce is to the success of this film, but his Joe is a wonderful creation, a bombastic, larger-than-life, selfish even slightly childish figure, everyone’s idea of the great artist, living the cliché of constant praise and a series of seductions. Pryce’s Joe is a domineeringly unattractive figure who slowly reveals his own emotional fragility wrapped in dependency – and the scenes with him and Close (that take up much of the movie) first hum with unspoken tensions and then later throb with the cathartic release of these feelings. 

Those scenes when they come – and you can tell they’re coming from the start – are fantastic. Close is on the top of her game here, utterly believable as a woman who over the course of a few days slowly begins to question every decision she has ever made in her life. What Close does so brilliantly though is to show the balance, the lack of certainty, the mixed feelings she has – that people who in some way infuriate her, also provoke great love in her. Pryce is just as fabulous as her equally aggrieved husband. There are moments in these late scenes that tip into melodrama and cliché – but the general thrust of the scenes is so strong, you feel it gets away with it.

Runge has directed a marvellous low-key piece of work that feels like it would make an excellent play. It raises questions on the place of women in the 20th century – and the film’s setting is crucial, as a Joan growing up 10 years later might well have had a very different life – and the film has a brilliant eye for the everyday sexism and patronising assumptions made by people about the wives of ‘great men’. Powered with two brilliant central performances, this film deserves to be seen as something much more than just Close’s vehicle to possible (but sadly not to be) Oscar glory.

Brideshead Revisited (2008)

Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw and Matthew Goode make for a bad revisitation to Brideshead

Director: Julian Jarrold

Cast: Matthew Goode (Charles Ryder), Ben Whishaw (Lord Sebastian Flyte), Hayley Atwell (Lady Julia Flyte), Emma Thompson (Lady Marchmain), Michael Gambon (Lord Marchmain), Greta Scacchi (Cara), Patrick Malahide (Mr Ryder), Felicity Jones (Lady Cordelia Flyte), Ed Stoppard (Lord Brideshead), Jonathan Cake (Rex Mottram), Joseph Beattie (Anthony Blanche)

There are some books that have been filmed definitively and you feel just shouldn’t be touched again. Perhaps the most definitive case is Brideshead Revisited. An 11-part, almost 13-hours-long, series from the height of the mini-series era, ITV’s 1981 Brideshead Revisited dramatised literally every page and every event of the just over 300 page novel, and did it with a perfect understanding of the book’s richness and complexity. So what hope could a film have – even if it is written by that man who had such a triumph with that other definitive production, the BBC Pride and Prejudice – Andrew Davies himself?

In the 1920s in Oxford, aspiring artist Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) falls in with the bohemian set of fellow student Lord Sebastian Flyte (Ben Whishaw). Sebastian takes Charles to his family home of Brideshead, a beautiful, entrancing family estate. But Sebastian is an unhappy man, increasingly prone to drinking, conflicted about his family’s strong Catholic faith and his own sexuality. He’s also tortured by the growing love between Charles and his sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). Their domineering mother Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) attempts to guide the family as she wishes, but Sebastian’s alcoholism leads to a crisis. Years later Charles and Julia restart their relationship, only to find Catholicism and fate once again intruding to complicate matters.

Brideshead Revisited is a rich, sweeping, heartfelt and profound look at so many themes it seems impossible to cover them all in a single sentence. It touches upon questions of faith, class, politics, friendship, sexuality, love – all of them sensitively and intelligently explored by Evelyn Waugh. The TV series captured all these themes with an acute, empathetic emotional intelligence. This film, forced to telescope action into two hours, simplifies and sexualises the novel to make it as boiled down and simple as possible. While this probably makes for a decent, but nothing new, film for those who don’t know the novel, for those of us who do it’s nothing less than a total travesty.

Everything is made as straight-forward and basic as possible. Subtle suggestions from the novel are turned into blunt, simplified assertions that clang out of the actors’ mouths and hit the ground. This is especially clear in the character of Charles Ryder, a fascinating observer in the novel, both a snob and a romantic, capable of great warmth and kindness and also a distant indifference. Here, he’s little more than a social climber (his lower middle class roots are stressed), constantly being asked “What do you really want?” by other characters. His attachment to Sebastian, and introduction to the Brideshead house, seems based less on a magnetic friendship and more on his unspoken desire to be part of an “in-crowd”.

Ah yes, that relationship with Sebastian. Ben Whishaw’s performance as Sebastian is, quite simply, one of the worst realisations of an iconic character you are ever going to see. The novel’s Sebastian, is an impossible glamourous, handsome, slightly effete, but magnetically charismatic figure who effortlessly wins admirers and friends everywhere – so much so, that his intensely vulnerability, sadness and self-loathing that lead to his alcoholism are spotted way too late, and then hideously mismanaged. The character Whishaw plays here is so different, he’s effectively Flyte in name only.

It all stems from the film’s longing to put the book’s suggestion of a homosexual bond between Charles and Sebastian to the forefront. So we are made perfectly aware of Flyte’s feelings, and Whishaw turns the character instead into a stereotypical, limp-wristed, effete, tragic gay man struggling with a hopelessly unrequited love for Charles that pushes him over the edge to depression. Oh yes, it has to be unrequited love because we can’t have Charles show any homosexual inclinations. Particularly as the film is desperate to reposition Charles and Julia into a “love-at-first-sight” romantic couple from the start. So of course we have Charles twice rejecting sexual advances from Sebastian (once with the cold shoulder, the second time with an angry push). 

But in sexing up the content on the surface, the film totally kills the bond between the two characters. There is, frankly, no reason for Charles and Sebastian to be friends. Sebastian is from the start a slightly pathetic figure, so you never get a sense at all why Charles is drawn towards him. This then magnifies the feeling that Charles main motivation is the house (and Julia) and that he sees Sebastian as someone he must tolerate (and whom he later feels guilty about) rather than as a friend. Sebastian himself loses all his complexity, instead becoming a slightly pathetic, tragic, overlooked figure reduced to screaming at Charles “You only wanted to be my friend because you wanted my sister!” By pumping up the subtext, the film kills the central relationship of the book – and completely undermines the tragedy of Sebastian.

But then Andrew Davies was keen – as he stated himself in interviews – to reposition the novel as a conventional great romantic novel. Now it’s true that Charles calls Sebastian in the novel the “fore runner” for his feelings for Julia (and this relationship between Julia and Charles is, I will say, one thing the TV series didn’t quite nail), but in no way was she his main focus from the start. It makes Charles’ treatment (and, let’s be honest, leading on) of Sebastian crueller, and it also crudely simplifies the novel into a “love against the odds” story that we’ve seen a thousand times before. It drains the novel of one of the factors that made it original in the start.

So we end up with a Charles who basically, rather oddly, suffers the company of Sebastian but treats him as someone he wants to shrug off. We’ve got a romantic plot line between Julia and Charles that has been reduced to the most basic, cookie-cutter, Mills and Boon romance you can imagine. And the film still struggles through to attempt to deal with the book’s (perhaps) other major theme, religion. Catholicism, guilt and the power (and domination) of faith is key to the book – but here, it’s a crude subplot that positions religion as a sort of trouble-causing piece of mummery that gets in the way of happiness. Pretty much as far as you can get from Waugh’s understanding of the complex demands of faith, denial, guilt and love.

You could say it’s unfair to continually compare the film to the book and TV series. But not only is this meant to be an adaptation, but the film chose to shoot at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, just as the TV series did. So we see scenes play out, often in the exact same location as the masterful TV series. If the film doesn’t want to try and be original and find a new location, and visually apes the TV series as much as possible, it feels fair enough to compare it – and it find it wanting.

It’s a well-made film, I’ll give it that, and I like Adrian Johnstone’s score, but it’s turned an intelligent and absorbing novel into a sub-Merchant Ivory period prestige piece, with the focus on the lovely locations and the beautiful costumes rather than anything else. Performances wise, Matthew Goode is fine (but can’t escape the shadow of Jeremy Irons), but Hayley Atwell probably comes out best as a vibrant Julia (who gets, in a way, much more to do than the book gives her). For the rest, Emma Thompson gives a far too mannered performance as the domineering Lady Marchmain (here unquestionably a villain) and Michael Gambon coasts as the dying Lord Marchmain (who here turns up literally out of the blue at the end of the film to die).

Brideshead Revisited is an irrelevant piece of celluloid that brings nothing new whatsoever to the novel or the TV series. Worse it takes the key themes of the novel and subverts, ruins or mangles them in order to try and turn the story into a straightforward heterosexual romance. In doing so, it removes everything that makes the original interesting, unique or compelling – and makes people wonder why they should bother going back to the book – surely the worst offence of all.

Heat (1995)

De Niro is packing Heat

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lt Vincent Hanna), Robert De Niro (Neil McCauley), Val Kilmer (Chris Shiherlis), Jon Voight (Nate), Tom Sizemore (Michael Cheritto), Diane Venora (Justine Hanna), Amy Brenneman (Eady), Ashley Judd (Charlene Shiherlis), Mykelti Williamson (Sgt Drucker), Wes Studi (Detective Sammy Casals), Ted Levine (Detective Mike Bosko), Dennis Haysbert (Donald Breedan), William Fichtner (Roger van Zandt), Natalie Portman (Lauren Gustafson), Tom Noonan (Kelso), Kevin Gage (Waingro), Hank Azaria (Alan Marciano), Danny Trejo (Trejo), Xander Berkeley (Ralph)

In the mid-90s, Heat was the cinematic event of the year. De Niro! Pacino! Together! In one scene! The two acting heavyweights – wildly proclaimed and popular since the 1970s – had of course made The Godfather Part II together but had shared no scenes. Here, however, we’d see them both at the same time riffing off each other. The great thing is that there is so much more to Heat than just that one scene. Heat is a sort of poetic cops and robbers flick, part stunning action adventure, part profound exploration of the internal souls of men chasing down leads, both good and bad.

Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) is a skilled career criminal who lives his life with a monastic self-denial, saying you can have nothing in your life “that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner”. Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is a bombastic, egotistical, workaholic detective with a self-destructive family life. Naturally, these two men find themselves on opposite sides, as McCauley plans his next job and Hanna works to stop him. But the men, with their similar codes dedicated to their chosen career, find that they have an increasing mutual respect – not that that will stop either of them “putting the other one down” if push comes to shove.

Heat is the pinnacle of Michael Mann’s career, and his most triumphant exploration of the conflicted, complex, masculine personalities at the heart of the high-adrenalin worlds of crime and police work. Mann has a gift for giving the simple rush and tumble of cops and robbers a sort of epic poetry, like a metropolitan Beowulf, and he achieves this again here. Heat is a film that throbs with meaning, it’s cool blue lensing and chilly, modern architecture serving as a perfect counterpoint to the cool, professional and focused personalities of its characters.

Heat also goes the extra mile by building this playground confrontation into a mythic battle of wills, a battle of principles and ways of living that seem separated only by a few degrees. Mann invests this with such sweep, such grandiosity (without pomposity), such scale that it becomes a sort of modern epic, a film where intense meaning can be mined by the viewer from every scene. Whether there is in fact any meaning there – avoid listening to Mann’s commentary which drills down so many of his elliptical character beats and open-ended scenes into the dullest, most predictable tropes that he had in mind while filming – is another issue, but Mann’s trick as always with his best work is to make something really quite small and everyday seem like a grand, timeless epic.

It all boils down to that famous coffee shop scene, where De Niro and Pacino for a few magic moments come together. It’s a scene that explicitly asks us to see cop and criminal and understand that there is in many ways very little to choose between them. It hinges on the gentle competitiveness of the actors, and the way they subtly play off each other. It also plays on our own histories of these two actors, of decades of seeing them as two sides of the same coin, both carrying so much cultural baggage for a string of iconic roles that saw them rule Hollywood for over a decade. It’s the sort of scene given extra investment, where you sense the mutual respect of the actors fuelling the strange bond that powers the scene. 

It’s also the one scene of the film that Pacino underplays in. The rest of the film he goes way bigger, powering through each scene with an explosion of shouting and drama. It’s a performance ripe for parody, with more than an edge of ham, but it just about works. Pacino turns Hanna (hilariously the character shares a name with a BBC political journalist of the 1980s) into the purest form of adrenalin junkie, a larger-than-life personality who tears through people and cases with a focused determination that allows no room for a personal life. De Niro downplays far more by contrast, apeing a sort of 1940s noir cool, a monkish insularity that prevents anyone from getting close to him, mixed with a laser-guided determination to do whatever it takes to make his score.

Mann’s film throws these two characters into a series of stunning set pieces with the bank robbery at the centre (“the one last score” that McCauley can’t pass up no matter the danger). The robbery – and the shoot out that follows it – is a triumph of action cinema, brilliantly shot and edited. The gun play is stunning, with Andy McNab having served as a consultant for the actors on the use of automatic weapons. The scene rips through the screen, spewing bullets all over the place in a ruthless, no-onlooker-spared rampage that also really pushes the limits of effective sound design. That’s just the highlight of several scenes that – with guns or otherwise – hum with tension, danger and excitement.

Mann also has enough room in this film though to skilfully establish a number of supporting characters with compelling story lines of their own. Val Kilmer is a tad wooden as McCauley’s number two, but his storyline of troubled marriage is mined for unexpecting pathos (thanks also to Ashley Judd’s fine work as his wife). Kevin Gage is very good as a psychopathic criminal unwisely brought on board to fill a slot in an early robbery. Dennis Haysbert has his own tragic plotline as a criminal trying to turn straight. Diane Venora is excellent as Hanna’s neglected wife, as is Portman as his vulnerable daughter-in-law. This isn’t to mention excellent performances from a rogues gallery of character actors, from Jon Voight to William Fichtner. 

Mann keeps all these plotlines perfectly balanced in a film that is very long but never drags for a minute. Crammed with exciting set pieces and brilliant sequences, it’s a film that manages to feel like it is about a very masculine crisis – the failures of men to balance the personal and their career, selfishly harming those around them because of their addiction to action. Mann’s film looks brilliantly at the essential emptiness and sadness this leads to – as well as the blinkered drive that never prevents men from stopping for a second and changing their lives, no matter how many reflective cups of coffee they have. Mann partners this existential, poetic feeling drama with the ultimate crash-bang cops and robbers and thriller, which will leave you on the edge of your seat no matter how many times you see it. Quite some film.