City of God (2003)

Violence is a way of life in Fernando Meirelles calling card sensation City of God

Director: Fernando Meirelles, Katia Lund (co-director)

Cast: Alexandre Rodrigues (Rocket), Leandro Firmino (Li’l Zé), Phellipe Haagensen (Benny), Douglas Silva (Li’l Dice), Jonathan Haagensen (Shaggy), Matheus Nachtergaele (Carrot), Seu Jorge (Knockout Ned), Jefechander Suplino (Clipper), Alice Braga (Angélica), Emerson Gomes (Stringy), Edson Oliveira (Older Stringy)

After Parasite’s win for Best Picture, it’s easy to remember the last foreign language film that made such a comparative impact at the Oscars – and it didn’t even win anything! Capturing the public imagination, City of God is that most American of things: a gangster film. Chronicling the life and death danger of the lawless slums of Rio de Janerio in the 1960s and 1970s, the film is an electric mixture of Latin and US film-making, a compelling shot of adrenalin that captured the imagination of the film-going public and made many Hollywood films look staid and dull.

Shot on location with a largely non-professional cast, the film uses as our window into this world aspirant photographer Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who has a front-row seat for an emerging (true life) gang war that erupts in the slumps between unstable psychopath Li’l Zé (Leandro Firmino) and his rival Carrot (Matheus Nachtergaele) and bereaved former sniper turned bus conductor and killer Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge). Starting at the end, the film rewinds through time and moves from perspective to perspective in a series of dynamic short stories that slowly merge and meld together to complete the film’s whole.

The film is directed by Meirelles (who got an Oscar nomination) and Katia Lund (who didn’t). Meirelles invited Lund to collaborate with him on the project, and is generally credited with the film’s look, editing style, frenetic pace and distinctive style of sharply exposed Latin colours mixed with the look of a rock video, all dynamic angles and immersive action. Lund bought her documentary realism to the film, as well as working closely with the actors and helping to shape their parts of the story. Agreeing to take a specific “co-director” credit probably cost Lund the nomination, and it feels inexplicable she was unrecognised today, even more so since Lund has pioneered several successful TV series based around the world of the film.

Controversy aside, it’s a high water-mark certainly for Meirelles who has never quite managed to match it since (The Constant Gardener remains his best work since, marrying the dynamism here with one of Le Carré’s most emotional and strongest stories). With its lashings of Scorsese, Tarantino and De Palma (among others), City of God remains a hugely engaging and engrossing gangster flick that really feels like it captures the threat and grimy reality of the streets of Brazil. Each section of the city we see feels like a lawless wild west, where guns rule, the police have no say and a whole population of ordinary people keep their heads down and just try to avoid getting caught (literally) in the crossfire.

In this world violence is endemic, life is a short and brutish cycle of slaughter where danger leads inevitably to death, short-termism is the norm and a series of essentially childish young men see the excitement of crime turn into the brutality of a life of violence. None more so than the film’s vicious dark heart, Li’l Zé a young man with a flickering temper, a love of violence and death, barely able to relate to other people, unanchored in the world whose life is a self-destructive quest to be the biggest fish in his pond. Played with a swaggering panache by Leandro Firmino (and a chilling coldness as a child by Douglas Silva), the self-named Li’l Zé dominates the film as the sort of life-wire threat Joe Pesci used to be for Scorsese, never certain whether he will laugh or shoot.

Which makes him perfect for the unpredictability of the slums, where everyone wants to be a hood, drugs are rife and crime and murder is a legitimate way of living. The film splices together several short story narratives to illustrated this with Altmanesque confidence. Each section of the film is introduced as “the story of X”, all of them expanding from the starting story based around three wanna-be-hoodlums whose mixed fates reference everything from The Third Man to A Bout de Souffle. From this the film organically expands, using Li’l Zé as the fulcrum who hinges every other story around him towards disaster. It’s neatly cross-cut as well, starting the end before rewinding through a neat transition shot into the past to explain how we got where we are.

There seems to be no good deeds in the city. The most likeable character, Benny, is himself a gangster (and Li’l Zé’s only friend and restraining influence) who is fun-loving and cool while not adverse to theft and murder when needed. Kingpin Knockout Ned starts out as a man of good intentions, determined to clean up the town that has left him bereaved and hurt, but becomes consumed by the dark impact of violence. All the time, many of these gangsters are in love with their public image both the awe and fear they inspire in those around them as the most powerful people in the neighbourhood, and from their growing coverage in the press.

It’s a cycle that seems doomed to repeat itself, not least through the film’s introduction of “The Runts” a group of trigger happy pre-teen would-by gangsters, who roam through the streets waiting their chance to turn small stick-ups into a criminal empire. They are no more than following in the footsteps of Li’l Zé, shooting his gun and experiencing murder at their age and now zeroing on owning the whole slum. It’s the dark ambition of capitalism playing out on the streets.

The film works however as framing it around the jaunty, relaxed narrative of Rocket gives it the feeling of a series of shaggy dog stories and coming-of-age tales (and the film carefully mixes in among the gangsters plenty of reminiscences from Rocket around his teenager upbringing, his first love and his passion for photography). With someone as easy-going as Rocket as our guide, the film never becomes overbearing or depressing but instead as entertaining and engrossing. In a way it’s a shock to remember it features as much killing (including of a child) and mayhem as it does, as well as a world-weary nihilism too it that the odd person may escape the streets, but the general world there will never change.

A staggeringly confident piece of film-making, City of God remains an exciting and compelling piece of cinema.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)

Maggie Smith excels in stately literary drama The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Director: Jack Clayton

Cast: Maggie Smith (Judith Hearne), Bob Hoskins (James Madden), Wendy Hiller (Aunt D’Arcy), Marie Kean (Mrs Rice), Ian McNeice (Bernard Rice), Prunella Scales (Moira O’Neill), Alan Devlin (Father Quigley), Rudi Davies (Mary)

Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) is a lonely, frustrated Irish spinster who never found her place in the world. Arriving at her new lodgings in Dublin, Judith leaves behind her a whiff of scandal and a slight air of being someone you don’t want in your home. However, while her superior manner may not fool everyone, it’s enough to spark the interest of chancer James Madden (Bob Hoskins) brother of Judith’s lodger Mrs Rice (Marie Kean) – who is not remotely fooled by Judith’s pretence at upper-class gentility. While Judith wonders if romantic love may, after all, finally be round the corner for her with Madden, Madden himself wonders if the starting investment for his next dream is in his grasp.

Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Brian Moore’s novel is a stately passion project. An adaptation that Clayton had worked for years to bring to screen, it’s a quiet and respectful picture that moves with a graceful serenity over its runtime, covering emotional territory but never quite sparking into life. Clayton’s adaptation of the book is precise and perfect in nearly every way, with the film very true to Moore’s style and his ability to capture the domestic tragedy of small-scale, disappointed lives. But it’s not quite a film that hums with inspiration.

What inspiration it has is bound up with Maggie Smith’s superb (BAFTA winning) performance in the lead role as Judith herself. This is surely some of Smith’s finest work on screen, perfectly capturing every beat of this character study. Judith Hearne is a woman who relies on her upper-class background – her airs and manners – to cover up the facts of her poverty and, even more importantly, her chronic alcoholism. Couple this with her self-loathing, her confused attitudes towards God and her (barely consciously aware) mixed feelings for her deceased aunt (Wendy Hiller in imperious form in flashbacks) and she is a woman reeking of disappointment, depression and oppression as much as she does the booze she knocks back.

Smith’s performance progresses throughout the film, from a veneer of assurance to an increasingly poignant and tough to watch collapse into starkly raw emotional disintegration. Desperate in ways she hardly understands for emotional (and physical) content for another, she’s almost touchingly over-enthusiastic when offered the olive branch of friendship of a man, and the self-loathing and loneliness that channel her collapse into brutal alcohol-driven meltdowns show Smith holding nothing back but never once heading over the top. Smith totally understands how to get the balance between quiet tragedy and emotional force, constantly balancing the two expertly.

It’s her performance that is a triumph of small moments that build over time to carry emotional force, from her careful arrangement of a room to her confused slightly timid eagerness to please when in conversation with Madden. Smith’s superb in the role, never anything less than real her eyes little windows to the depths of sadness in her soul.

It’s a shame that the rest of the film doesn’t quite measure up to her and that, despite the force of her performance, the film never quite manages to capture the overall impact of domestic tragedy that the film needs in order to be something more than just a gracefully filmed package around a superb central performance.

Too many other plot directions end up in cul-de-sacs or never get explored. Madden’s frustrated sexual feelings – and his eventual assault on housemaid Mary (a decent performance by Rudi Davies) are simply never explored any further. Bob Hoskins gets short-changed with a character that doesn’t really go anywhere and whose darker side is demonstrated but then never referenced again. The film gives such force to the damage of Judith’s alcoholism and depression that her struggles with the church never quite gain the force they need. This is despite some sterling work from Alan Devlin as a bullying but empty churchman, not interested in hearing about problems that can’t be solved with doggerel and dogma.

The finest subplots feature Ian McNeice is superb as the bloated wastrel son of the landlady, a spoiled, lazy former student claiming to be working on the next great Irish poem (a work he estimates will take him at least another 5 years), but largely spends his time swanning around the house causing problem and sniping arrogantly at the residents. Marie Kean is also fine as the arch landlady who sees through all deceptions, other than her son’s.

It’s a shame that the film itself – for all the excellence of Clayton’s work – doesn’t quite come together into a really coherent package. What it kind of misses is perhaps the sort of sharp, knowing observation and dry wit that Alan Bennett bought to so many similar small-scale stories of wasted lives in Talking Heads. The film is on a grander scale than those, but somehow carries both less weight and less insight than an average Bennett monologue. Smith is superb – possibly a career best – but the film itself is more something to be admired than remembered.

Inception (2010)

Leonardo DiCaprio caught between dreams and reality in Inception

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Dom Cobb), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Arthur), Marion Cotillard (Mal Cobb), Ellen Page (Ariadne), Tom Hardy (Eames), Ken Watanabe (Saito), Dileep Rao (Yusof), Cillian Murphy (Robert Fischer), Tom Berenger (Peter Browning), Pete Postlethwaite (Maurice Fischer), Michael Caine (Professor Stephen Miles), Lukas Haas (Nash), Tallulah Riley (Disguise woman)

What is reality? It’s a question that for many of us never comes up. But in the artificial and exciting world of film, it’s a legitimate question. These worlds we watch unspooling before us on the cinema screen, so large, so real, so exciting. Could we get lost in them? And how much do the films we love echo the dreams that fill our nights, the movies we create in our mind to keep our brain active during those hours of complete physical inactivity? And what happens when the world of imagination and possibility becomes more compelling, more comfortable – and perhaps more real – to us than the actual flesh-and-blood world around us? These are ideas tackled in Inception: the blockbuster with a brain.

Set in some unspecified point in the not-too-distant future, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are “extractors”, shady corporate espionage experts who use experimental military technology to enter shared dream states with their targets. While in their dreams, they have complete access to their subconscious mind, where secrets can be extracted. A wanted man in the States, Cobb is forced to ply his trade despite his yearning to return home to his children. After a job goes wrong, their would-be target Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires the pair to take on a far more challenging role: rather than extract an idea he wants them to plant one – a technique called “inception” – into the mind of a business rival (Cillian Murphy) to get him to dismantle his father’s empire. To do the job, Cobb needs a new team, including dream “architect” Ariadne (Ellen Page), dream identity forger Eames (Tom Hardy) and dream compound chemist Yusof (Dileep Rao) – and needs to try and control his own dangerous subconscious version of his late wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) who is determined to destroy his missions.

Just a plot summary should give an idea of the twisty-turny world of imagination and ideas that Christopher Nolan mixes in with big budget thrills and excitements, in the most original sci-fi/philosophy film marriage since The Matrix. Of course it helps when you have the clout of having directed a hugely successful comic book series, but Nolan was brave enough to trust that an audience for this sort of action-adventure caper wanted to have their brains stretched as far as their nerves. So he creates a dizzying and challenging piece of escapism that plays around with the audience’s perceptions and understanding of the nature of dreams.

In the world of dreams, the film is a fabulous tight-rope-walk of dazzling concepts. Here everything is possible, with Nolan throwing at us worlds from film fantasy: intricate Samurai houses, brawling third-world streets, luxurious hotels, Bond-style winter bases and entire cities that literally fold, bend and reinvent themselves around the film’s dreamers, worlds that defy conventional rules of physics and time. This world is presented with genuine visual panache at every point, Nolan’s mastery of the language of film leading to a sensational series of slight-of-hand tricks and compelling set-pieces, all the while making you question which events are real and which are dreams or even dreams within dreams. In these worlds, the characters have the ability to literally shape a world to meet their needs, and the dangerous attraction of these worlds – even if they are not real – is the dark temptation that hangs over every frame.

Because it’s those ideas beneath the action that give the film depth as well as excitement, that ability to ask questions and openly invite the audience to begin theorising themselves to fill in any blanks. Within the world of Inception, characters can create dream states within dreams, to share one person’s dream while simultaneously all being inside the dream of someone else. These multiple levels are cleverly established as being as much of a risk for the characters in getting confused as they are for the audience, with the characters carrying personal “totems” to help them judge if what they are seeing is reality or not. This is made all the more difficult by the establishment that your subconscious will manifest people to populate the dream worlds – and these will turn on invaders they detect in the dream.

All of this tunnels down into the deep limbo of our subconscious – and also introduces as a concept Nolan’s fascination with time. In dreams, time moves at a different pace, and this differential becomes all the greater as you descend down levels in dreams within dreams. A few minutes can become an hour in a dream and become almost a day in the dream within it – and years within the dreams beyond that. This is brilliantly demonstrated by Nolan in the film’s dazzling central sequence as the film intercuts between three timelines in three different dreams – each impacting the other.

It’s another masterful touch – the impact of actions on dreamers’ bodies in the level above can be felt in their world. A slap to the face in the real world can send someone in the dream flying across a room. A bucketful of water turns into a tidal wave in the dream. The dreamer falling in the world above removes gravity in their dream (giving Joseph Gordon-Levitt a cult fight scene in a gravity free world that sees him gracefully leaping from floor to ceiling to wall). The visuals are extraordinary, but the intriguing logic of the inter-relation between reality and the dreams – and the way dreams struggle to explain external effects – lend all the more credence to the mixing of reality.

But then, as Nolan suggests, isn’t that film after all? In dreams we move from location to location and struggle to remember the journey in between. We find ourselves doing tasks and not knowing how we started. Chases, faulty logic, sudden reversals and changes – these are the rules of film, it’s editing slicing out the boring bits and focusing on the reality. We are dropped into the middle of Cobb’s story and only slowly find the backstory, a gun filled chase through an African city is almost indistinguishable from similar sequences in the dreams. The final sequence of the film is a purposefully cut series of images that are very true to the rules of film, but feel alarmingly close to the rules of dream (unsettling us about whether what we see at the end is truth or dream, a debate that continues today). It makes for fascinating stuff, as well as a commentary on film itself.

Nolan’s film is gloriously entertaining, even if in its haste at points it does fail to explain how certain events and concepts truly work – but doesn’t really matter so compelling is the journey. The cast, enjoying the chance to mix action hijinks with genuine characters and dialogue are very strong, with DiCaprio anchoring the film wonderfully as the conflicted, lonely, defensive and daring Cobb. Hardy made a name for himself in a cheekily flirtatious performance, which sparks wonderfully with Gordon-Levitt’s more po-faced Arthur. Page creates a character both naïve and at times almost gratingly intrusive. Cotillard makes a difficult balance look easy playing a character part real and part dream figure. Watanabe is archly dry as the investor. There isn’t a weak link in there.

It may at times move too fast and not always make itself completely clear. It might be a bit too long in places and take a little too long to make its point – but it’s ambitious, challenging, intriguing film-making that rewards repeated viewing. Not least with its cryptic ending in which we are forced to ask how much of what we have seen is real and whether – like Cobb perhaps? – we should even care at all if the end result is so positive. With the fascinating world of dreams – and the rules there that we encounter – it gives us a firm grounding for the its meditation of the dark attraction of fantasy, embodied by the genial wish fulfilment of the movies where adventure lies around each corner and the heroes triumph.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins carry out a strange dance in the compelling The Silence of the Lambs

Director: Jonathan Demme

Cast: Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling), Anthony Hopkins (Dr Hannibal Lecter), Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford), Ted Levine (James “Buffalo Bill” Gumb), Anthony Heald (Dr Frederick Chilton), Brooke Smith (Catherine Martin), Diane Baker (Senator Ruth Martin), Kasi Lemmons (Ardelia Mapp), Frankie Faison (Barney Matthews)

Is there a more unlikely Oscar winner than The Silence of the Lambs? In fact, double down on that: is there a more unlikely film to have won all five of the Big Ones – Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay – only the third film in history to have achieved that (It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest being the others)? Re-watching the film, it’s actually a triumphant vindication for Hollywood to have chosen a thriller for the ages, a complex and intriguing puzzle wrapped in an unsettling outer layer of thrills and horror, as if the academy was (late in the day) finally tipping an award-lined hat to the film’s spiritual grandfather, Hitchcock himself.

Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a trainee FBI agent, in the final weeks before her graduation. Out of the blue she is plucked from Quantico by the head of the Behavioural Science Unit, Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn), to interview notorious psychiatrist-turned-cannibalistic-serial-killer Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), now interned in a psychiatric prison-cum-dungeon in Baltimore. Crawford hopes the Lecter might be able to shed light on the motives of “Buffalo Bill” (Ted Levine), a serial killer kidnapping and skinning young women across a number of states. Lecter can shed some light – but the price is an opportunity to investigate further into the psyche of the determined and ambitious Starling. A three-way game of cat-and-mouse between Bill, Clarice and Lecter soon starts to emerge.

Demme’s film is a sublimely made entertainment that brilliantly pulls together the trappings of multiple genres (there are splashes of horror, thriller, police procedural, romance and black comedy to name but a few) into an unsettlingly tense and engrossing whole. It’s truly a film Hitchcock would have been proud of, a masterfully assembled thrill ride where every shot serves a purpose, and each scene is carefully constructed to establish a clear story and push the audience’s buttons. It has two of the best tense “prolonged misdirects” in film history (wittily signposted in advance by an early car chase that is revealed in a pull-away to be a training exercise in Quantico – don’t trust your eyes!) and it brilliantly immerses you in the world and emotions of Clarice Starling.

Demme’s aim was to get us to empathise above all with Clarice, as she descends into the dark underbelly of this terrifying world. Demme uses a carefully selected combination of POV shots and straight-to-camera addresses to deliberately put us into the position of actually “being” Clarice Starling. From following her perspective through rooms and corridors, to seeing the characters she is talking to address the camera directly as if talking to us, through to carefully placed close-up shots that allow us to study the thoughts and feelings travelling across Clarice’s face, it brilliantly allows us to invest overwhelmingly in her without us even really noticing we are doing it.

And of course that is put together with Jodie Foster’s extraordinarily brilliant performance in the role. One of the film’s many strengths is exploring the nature of being a determined, brave and ambitious – but still slight and feminine – woman in the alpha-male world of crime investigation. Clarice fends off in virtually every scene not just discrimination and instant judgement, but a parade of half-spoken advances and flirtations from male colleagues. Foster’s brilliance is to make a character who is determined but humane, slightly vulnerable while never weak. She’s the key driver of the story, but also both an insider and outsider in her world, partly motivated by a desire to prove herself, partly by an attempt to vanquish haunting childhood memories of weakness and loss.

It’s these feelings under the surface that attract the interest of Hannibal Lecter, and the strange dance between them is the heart of the film’s appeal and it’s magic. Why does Lecter want to know about the facts of Starling’s life (that quid pro quo he archly asks for)? Does he want to analyse her? Does he want to help? Does he want to amuse himself with her terrible memories? Or is he just bored? He hardly seems to be certain himself, but the intimacy shared revelations provide is neatly played with by Demme in sequences between the two (they barely share the frame by the way more than twice) that hum with a tension of danger, but also a thrill of illicit romance, mixed with incestuous interest (Starling the orphan, Lecter the father-like man of wisdom helping her catch the killer). And it works with us as well – we are so invested in Starling that, just like her, we end up liking Lecter (even though we know we shouldn’t).

Of course it helps that Hannibal Lecter is portrayed in a performance of magnetic, career-defining brilliance by Hopkins. Hopkins modestly claimed playing Lecter was easy once you mastered the voice and the physicality – but that’s to downplay the extraordinary skill mastering those aspects concern, and the bravura brilliance with which Hopkins plays to the camera but never tips into absurdism. It’s an arch, knowing, winking performance that also carries with it an intense, psychotic menace, a delirious capacity for violence (as we find out). Demme introduces the character sublimely – after the build-up, his ram-rod stillness, polite manner and refined behaviour are somehow even more unsettling. Sure Brian Cox in Manhunter may be more conventionally chilling, but Hopkins is like an elemental demon playing with our childhood bogeyman fears, a guy who seems even more dangerous as he playfully chats one minute, then beats you to death with a truncheon the next.

The scenes between these two characters dominate the film (even if they take up no more than ten minutes of its runtime), and their relationship (beautifully shot as a game of one cagey upmanship that turns into semi-flirting, that turns into something in between) defines the movie and its legacy. Lecter’s magnetism was such that in later movies he would increasingly become an anti-hero of sorts, a lord of misrule rather than a brutal and indiscriminate killer, but here he’s terrifying and satanic, just as Starling is courageous and noble as the lady on a quest.

And that quest targets Buffalo Bill – a deeply unsettling performance of psychological unease and self-loathing by Ted Levine. The film was controversial at the time for its killer being both a transsexual and gay (although the film makes clear it’s a desire to be anyone apart from who he is that drives all these feelings), especially as at the time these groups were barely represented positively in the movies. But it also makes for singularly unsettling character, living in a subterranean cave-like basement, surrounded by moths, his voice slurred childishly while carrying no sense of shame or regret for his actions.

The hunt for Bill is the film’s story, and Demme uses the devices of cinema to make this as tense and unsettling an experience as needed. The camera prowls terrifyingly around Bill’s domains. Howard Shore’s score makes a deeply unnerving use of mournful refrains. Frequently scenes – such as the post-mortem inspection of a victim’s body – are often silently scored, making the mechanical noises of the investigator’s trade (such as the loudly clicking and whirring camera) deeply jarring. The film is grim, but relies more on reaction rather than bathing us in horrors, and implication brings the greatest terror. Every sequence of the film is perfectly assembled to leave us struggling to breathe – not least as events place Starling in more and more peril.

With its playful sense of black comedy, mixed with genuine terror and thrills, The Silence of the Lambs genuinely feels like the film Hitchcock was born to make. Everything in the film is perfectly assembled to serve the film’s aims – there is not a foot wrong in its assembly, and it’s sad that Demme never hit these sort of heights again. But the film is like a twisted companion piece to Psycho (only better), and in Hopkins and Foster produced two landmark performances. While the film engrosses us in Starling’s struggles in a man’s world, it also overwhelms us with Hopkins’ devilish magnetism and dark mystery. And what to make of the relationship between Starling and Lecter? It’s a mystery so enigmatic that it continues to grip today and it’s the secret behind the success of this compelling masterpiece.

Quai des Brumes (1938)

Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan are star-crossed lovers in Quai des Brumes

Director: Marcel Carné

Cast: Jean Gabin (Jean), Michel Simon (Zabel), Michèle Morgan (Nelly), Pierre Brasseur (Lucien), Édouard Delmont (Panama), Raymond Aimos (Quart Vittel), Robert Le Vigan (Le peintre), René Génin (Le docteur), Marcel Pérès (Le chauffeur), Léo Malet (Le soldat), Jenny Burnay (L’amie de Lucien)

It translates as “Port of Shadows” and it’s the shadows you are likely to remember in this noirish tinged classic of French cinema. A major success story when it was released in France, it also stands as some sort of milestone as being one of the few films condemned by both the pre-Vichy French government and Nazi Germany. More pleasingly, it’s also a firm testament to the brilliance and vibrancy of pre-War French cinema and the creative imagination of Marcel Carné.

Jean (Jean Gabin) is a soldier on the run, deserting his regiment to lead his own life in South America. Arriving in the port of Le Havre, he ends up in a run-down bar on the edge of the town where he meets the beautiful young Nelly (Michèle Morgan) a woman on the run herself from two unpleasant men. The first is local gangster Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) a braggart with whom Jean has already had a few run-ins. The other, even more dangerous, is Zabel (Michel Simon) Nelly’s godfather, a ruthless man under a genial façade who is obsessed with Nelly. Jean and Nelly fall in love, but how far will Jean go to put his own hopes for the future in doubt to protect Nelly?

Shadows dominate Carné’s beautifully atmospheric film. Jean emerges as if from nowhere on the road to Le Havre – nearly run over by the truck driver who picks him up. The bar is buried in the mists of the town. Shadows loom from every building and throw most of the city into a mysterious half-light. The action largely takes place in backrooms and cellars. Every frame tells you from the start things will not turn out well, with every decision carrying an underplayed air of foreboding. You can just tell every moment is putting another nail in the coffin of Jean’s chances of escape to that new life. The film is a brilliant slice of noir, expertly assembled with an artist’s eye by Carné, one of the most overlooked genius directors of his era.

This darkened, gloomy style of the picture echoes the intentions of Carné and his regular collaborator, scriptwriter Jacques Prévert. The focus on the picture is the individual – in this case Jean and Nelly –trying to escape the control of both the state (the army) and also the domineering bullies that hold the local power (Lucien and Zabel). It’s no coincidence that Jean is an army deserter, and there is no sense of guilt on his part or even a fraction of recrimination is aimed towards him from anyone he encounters. Jean himself talks despairingly of the grim reality of killing and his wish to make his own choices. Carné was originally to make the film in Germany, but Goebbels was not having any film made in Berlin where the hero was an army deserter.

So instead the film was shifted – wisely – back to France, not the French government was that happy either. With Carné and Prévert’s vision of a listless, tired, corrupted France where people like Jean simply refuse (it seems) to do what they are told, and where the few representatives of local government we meet are trivial non-entities, it’s not a surprise that the film was soon being blamed for sapping French spirit. As a sop to the French criticism of the script (and many of the films backers were desperate for its downbeat nihilism to be replaced by a more conventional upbeat, romantic ending) Jean does at least show respect for his army uniform – despite everything it’s never dirty, and when he takes it off its neatly folded. Today it seems even more like an impressionistic touch.

It’s the nihilism that runs through the film. We know Jean is good guy – he encounters a dog on the road to Le Havre that follows him with a singular devotion, unable to bear being parted from him – but the film itself has a shadowy feeling of despair and destruction throughout. Jean feels like a doomed hero from the start, a passive figure despite his bravado, who impulsively drifts from event to event – it’s when he chooses to become engaged that he dooms himself. Nelly is seemingly at first a femme fatale – and her reveal is a masterstroke of cinema – but really she’s as much a victim as Jean, someone very vulnerable, lonely and scared who wants a way out but can’t see how to even begin to find one. But then even the nemesis that runs through the film is low-key and trivial – Lucien is a joke, while Zabel for all his creepiness is also little more than a novelty gift shop owner.

The power of the film comes from seeing these two trapped figures surrounded by a world of darkness, listless depression and emptiness. And of course from the performances. The film is a reminder again that at this time Jean Gabin may well have been the greatest actor in the world. With a cigarette dangling, raffish cool under a surly salt-of-the-earth taciturnity, he turns Jean into the sort of enigmatic noir-hero years before the term was evented. Dripping with charisma in every frame, he’s both a Bogartish cynic and a De Niroish slice of muscle, a working class martyr. Nearly as good is Michèle Morgan, vulnerable and yearning into a surface of sexy cool. The two make a winningly attractive pair, not just sexy but with a growing romantic feeling.

It’s no wonder Jean throws himself into threatening and roughing up the pathetically weasily Lucien (Pierre Brasseur very good as a weak-willed bully who can lash out with the viciousness of a child) and squaring up to domineering Zabel. Michel Simon is terrific as the grandfatherly shop owner whose own dark obsessions and possible perversions become harder and harder to ignore. These two very different threats stand at opposite ends of the film and both contribute to its bleak ending.

Because of course Jean isn’t going to make that boat. The act of violence the film finally unleashes – after all that foreboding warning that it’s coming – is suitably shocking in a 1930s way, while the eventual fall of Jean is both fitting and also tragic in its low-key abruptness (it was later echoed by Brian de Palma in Carlito’s Way). With its gloomy atmosphere, its grim foreboding but also passionate love story at its heart, Quai des Brumes is a classic of French poetic realism.

White Heat (1949)

Top of the World Ma! Cagney excels in his final and greatest Gangster role White Heat

Director: Raoul Walsh

Cast: James Cagney (Cody Jarrett), Virginia Mayo (Verna Jarrett), Edmond O’Brien (Hank Fallon/Vic Prado), Margaret Wycherly (Ma Jarrett), Steve Cochan (“Big Ed” Somers), John Archer (Philip Evans), Wally Cassell (“Cotton” Valletti), Fred Clark (Daniel “The Trader” Winston)

After winning an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Cagney left Warner Brothers to form his own production company. When that folded, he swallowed his pride and re-entered the Warners’ fold. Money was driving the relationship: and it was the pay cheque that got Cagney to return one last time to the role of a psychotic gangster in White Heat. And if he had to go back, why not make that gangster the most psychotic of the lot? After all who else could make it to “the top of the world”?

Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) is the leader of a gang of criminals, to whom no act of larceny, violence or murder is taboo. A botched train hijack – during which Jarrett shoots two unarmed train drivers – attracts the full attention of the law, but Jarrett dodges justice by having himself sent down for a minor crime that happened at the same time as the train hijack. Not fooled, the Feds send an undercover operative, Hank (Edmond O’Brien), into the prison as Cody’s cellmate “Vic Prado”, tasked with getting the details of the train job and locating the mysterious fixer who set up the job. But such schemes didn’t take into account Jarrett’s psychological disturbance – powered above all by his obsessive, overwhelming love for his mother (Margaret Wycherly), the one dominant influence over his life.

Raoul Walsh’s film is a brutally efficient gangster flick which may be a little too long (the mechanisms of tracing and tracking a car are covered in far too great a depth…), but ticks all the boxes of the genre with exceptional skill and dexterity. It’s shoot-from-the-hip (literally) melodrama, and has all the internal logic of a schoolground game of cops and robbers, but Walsh’s direction is pin-point perfect, and the film is based around a series of stunning and effective set-pieces and crammed with a sort of deep (even disturbing) psychological insight that puts it miles ahead of many of films of the genre. Walsh also throws in some of the finest stylistic touches of film noir, with Virginia Mayo’s femme fatale, darkened frames, dubious morals among even our heroes (one of whom is a practised deceiver and liar) and a whirlwind monster at the centre.

But the film soars and flies because of Cagney, and the no-holds barred sharpness of Jarrett. The film revolves above all around the deep emotional emptiness and need in Jarrett, which sees him lean on O’Brien’s Falon (“like my kid brother!”) and, most famously, fixate like a toddler on his mother. Freud would have had a field day with Jarrett’s obsessive love for his mother, with Cagney turning him into the little boy lost. Consumed with headaches, he literally climbs into her lap so she can comfort him. The slightest criticism of her leads to instant reaction (not least knocking his wife off her chair – how can the poor woman compete with this beatified mother figure?)

This culminates in one of the film’s most famous sequences, as Jarrett digests in prison the news that his mother has died. Sitting in a crowded dining room, he passes word down to a new inmate for an update on his mother. Slowly the question is passed down the line of prisoners – and with trepidation the news of her death is passed back. And here is the Cagney magic. He seems too stunned at first to take it in then a series of low moans explodes into a titanic screaming fit, matched only by the violence he takes out on all who stand in his way. Walsh and Cagney kept the response secret from the entire room of 300 extras, all of whom seem as stunned as us by Jarrett’s total lack of control, his complete consumption in grief.

Cagney’s performance is just about perfect, a simmering mummy’s boy who is also a charismatic leader of men. A dangerous psycho who seems aware that he is not quite normal. A lonely man desperate for love. And Cagney has so many beautiful touches that could only be him – the quip as he plugs with bullets a car boot with a luckless gang member in it, the sly kick away at Virginia Mayo, that screaming sequence. It’s a performance of complete power and charisma, the gangster psychoanalysed and reduced to his bare essentials for a personality barely functional and obsessed with his mother.

Margaret Wycherly is similarly excellent as that mother, as sly and self-confident as her son and clearly as accomplished at leading a gang as him (I love the smug half smile she gives herself after evading the FBI tail she picks up). Edmond O’Brien does sterling work in the “straight man” role of the undercover cop, walking a line between judging and even perhaps sorta liking Jarrett a bit (even if he does get saddled with the mandatory “that’s the moral of the story” final line). Virginia Mayo is a wonderful mix of sex appeal and needling cheapness as Jarrett’s two-faced wife.

The film culminates in one of the most famous endings of all time – one you’ll know even if you haven’t seen the film – as the law catches up with Jarrett at last in a shoot-out at a gas plant. Finally driven mad by betrayal and abandonment – although lord Cagney’s performance makes clear that only a tenuous grip on sanity has been present in Jarrett from the start, fractured beyond repair by the loss of his mother – Jarrett insanely shoots at the police from atop a burning gas plant, before immolating himself (and most of the factory) with the cry “Made it Ma! Top of the world!”. As Jarrett heads down to a firey hell, so Cagney signed off on the gangster flick with perhaps the most dangerous, disturbed and also intriguing gangster on film. It’s such a mighty performance that the Hays-Code mandated final line of tutting disapproval at the criminal life from O’Brien feels even more forced and unnecessary than ever.

Parasite (2019)

The Kim family juggle poverty with dreams of improvement in the brilliant Parasite

Director: Bong Joon-Ho

Cast: Song Kang-Ho (Kim Ki-taek), Choi Woo-shik (Kim Ki-woo), Park So-dam (Kim Ki-jeong), Jang Hye-jin (Kim Chung-sook), Lee Sun-kyun (Park Dong-ik), Cho Yeo-jeung (Park Yeon-gyo), Jung Ji-so (Park Da-hye), Jung Hyeon-jun (Park Da-song), Lee Jung-eun (Gook Moon-gwang), Park Geun-rok (Yoon), Park Seo-joon (Min-hyuk)

I’m writing this in the glorious after-glow of Parasite’s shock win for Best Picture, finally breaking (after 92 years!) the taboo on foreign language films lifting the Big One at the Hollywood’s annual love in. So let’s just say: not only is it a delight to see Hollywood breaking “the 1-inch barrier of subtitles” (to quote Bong from his Best Director at the Golden Globes), but also it’s a thrill to see the Oscar go to something that can make a legitimate claim to being the Best Picture of the Year – not to mention a film that speaks to the modern world in a way very few nominees have done since Get Out.

Bong’s superb picture has found such universal appeal perhaps because it so completely understands questions of class and wealth in our modern world. Set in an unnamed South Korean city, we are introduced to both the extreme poor and the extreme rich. At the bottom end of the scale – living in a half-basement apartment – are the Kim family. At the top – almost literally, living in a sprawling, modernist apartment bathed in sun with a large private garden at the top of a hill – are the Park family. When son Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-Shik) lands a job at the Parks’ teaching English to their daughter, he quickly begins to work with sister Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) to manipulate Park Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeung) to hire each member of the family in turn in a job in the household. But from there, the best laid plans spiral firmly out of control.

The less you know about the structure and events of Parasite going into it, the more you will gain from the film. What Bong has created here is a superb medley of genres, developing from a black-comedy-heist-caper into thriller territory, with a splash of horror and lashings of intelligently subtle social commentary. This is a film for the modern age, addressing questions of class, cultural resentment, societal divisions and the damaging impact of the super-rich and super-poor living side-by-side in ways that are profoundly insightful and fundamentally universal.

Who are the parasites in Parasite? You could argue its society itself. At first it seems obvious on the surface that the Kims – living half beneath the surface of the city itself, inveigling their way into homes and roles, ruthless in acquiring their aims – fit the bill. But what about the Parks? So sheltered by money (“She can afford to be nice” says Kim dismissively of Mrs Park) they seem barely able to organise their own lives without the aid of an army of employees, placing no real value on them as people, only as extensions of their own house.

It’s all part of Bong’s skilful shift of perceptions throughout the film: the Kims are in some ways sympathetic (for the extreme poverty and desperation) but also they have no concern about hurting other people or manipulating them to get what they want. At the same time, we invest in seeing the well laid plans come to fruition, despite the impact it has on other people affected by their schemes. But as the film progresses, the innate selfishness and thoughtlessness of the Parks, their assumptions that their problems are of more concern than other people’s, that the world should revolve around them, makes them less sympathetic and the Kims more rounded and human.

Bong’s film brilliantly outlines this class war, every frame enforcing the insane split between such completely different worlds all rammed into the same city. The Parks’ apartment is a triumph of modernist design, the Kims’ flat a lightless dive with a regular tramp who pisses just outside their window. The Kims scurry to distant corners of the apartment to gain access to roving free wifi and stretch limited food supplies and their few pennies to the absolute limit. The family takes menial jobs to make ends meet, including folding a never ending pile of pizza boxes (boxes that seem to grow to dominate their flat).

At one point the camera follows the progress of the Kims as they leave the Park house and scamper, in an almost surreal series of long shots, down a never-ending parade of steps and streets, literally descending further down-and-down into the gutters of the city. It’s superb moments like this in Bong’s intricately designed film that constantly show us the divides between these people, the Parks living practically on Olympus with the Kims in Tartarus. These are problems that infect every society in the world, and the difficulty of making both rich and poor actually understand each other and find common ground to relate on are the problems we all see around us every day.

That’s even leaving aside the triumphs of Bong’s directing confidence, his mastery of tone and genre. The first half of the film is very funny – with Bong even leaning on this by having his characters drop dialogue that subtly refers to the ease with which the Kims’ plans come together – and has a delightful heist movie vibe. But the bubbling barriers between class hint at the tensions and danger that we feel lie in wait in the film, and threaten to break out. Korea is a volcano with the Kims and Parks sitting on the top, but it’s a volcano that the whole world can recognise. As Bong makes the film darker, leaner and even more menacing with hints of tragedy, it feels like the world correcting itself.

The acting is superb across the board with Song Kang-Ho hilarious and then deeply affecting as Mr Kim, a man slowly pushed beyond what he can bear. Cho Yeo-jeung is terrifically endearing and frustratingly thoughtless as the naïve Mrs Park. Park So-dam is brilliant as a super-smart Ki-jeong Kim, brilliantly manipulating left-right-and-centre. There is not a false note in the cast, the entire ensemble perfectly combining to create the class-conscious world of the film. To say too much more would be spoil it!

Bong Joon-ho’s film is Western break-through but really it’s a universal condemnation of the dangerous influence of class. And with Bong’s mastery of cinema – this is such a well directed film, both in terms of tone and every single shot contributing brilliantly to the whole – this has produced a film that feels like a very modern, prescient and profound masterpiece, a film that speaks to and almost defines the problems of the modern world. While at the same time being immensely entertaining and unpreaching. Thank goodness that 1 inch barrier came tumbling down.

Colette (2018)

Keira Knightley tries her best in this light but safe biography Colette

Director: Wash Westmoreland

Cast: Keira Knightley (Gabrielle Colette), Dominic West (Henry Gauthier-Villars/Willy), Eleanor Tomlinson (Georgie Raoul-Duval), Aiysha Hart (Polaire), Fiona Shaw (Sido), Denise Gough (Missy), Robert Pugh (Jules), Rebecca Root (Rachilde), Julian Wadham (Ollendorff)

In the era of #metoo what could make for a more relevant storyline today than this biography of Gabrielle Colette (Kiera Knightley), a young woman who marries literary playboy Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West) aka Willy. Henry brings her back to Paris, and reveals the secrets of his success – he is the front man for a host of ghostwriters, producing articles and even novels for the public. Colette writes a novel for the “factory”, based on her own childhood – Claudine àl’école – which Willy initially rejects but later publishes under his own name (after he has suggested revisions to improve its plot and general raunchiness). The book is a smash – and Willy is a sensation – as are the sequels, but the growing frustration Colette feels at her lack of recognition, combined with the growing sense of freedom she finds in their open marriage, starts to lead her to question what she wants from her own life.

Colette is a decent, rather middle-of-the-road and middlebrow literary biography, that dabbles with controversy and racy content, but essentially follows a fairly traditional structure of our hero finding her own voice. The most interesting thing about it, despite the obvious surface message of the woman exploited by a man, is to suggest that while Willy certainly profited from Colette’s work, he was also the primary driver in her development as a writer and that the two of them maintained a stable working partnership for years until events led to their collapse.

Much has been made in particular of a scene where Willy locks Colette into a room to write – and there isn’t a single review that hasn’t mentioned it – but, in the context, it’s Colette who has failed to focus on the writing (which the pair have already been paid for), or wdo the work she has committed to do, much to Willy’s disappointment when he returns to the country home that the advance for the book has paid for. While her objections are at first furious she swiftly settles into writing in the room (and there is no suggestion that this event is any more than a single one-off, a shock tactic from Willy to get Colette creating again). This isn’t to say the film is suggesting that Colette shouldn’t have received all the credit and freedom from the start, but it does raise more interesting questions: yes Willy was taking advantage of her, but yes he also pushed her to achieve things she would never have done herself.

It’s all part of Dominic West’s superb performance as Willy, skilfully balancing a man who (until the final act of the film) is neither flat-out villain or misunderstood hero, but a man of shades of grey: flawed, selfish, lazy, thoughtless but also encouraging of his wife’s exploration of her own sexuality and creativity, supportive and capable of acts of charming sweetness and kindness. Westmoreland makes clear that for much of the marriage their relationship was functional and a good match, for all it was founded on the false sands of Colette being denied the public credit for her own work. Sure he spunks their money up the wall continuously, but he also helps her become an artist.

For all the film’s workmanlike structure and obvious telling, this does make for a far more interesting version of the story than the straight “ogre-victim” story you might expect, even if it does start to get a bit bogged down in sexual shenanigans. The mostly focus around bisexual American socialite Georgie (Eleanor Tomlinson with a soapy Southern accent), who becomes the lover of both Colette and Willy. It’s part of the sense of Colette questing for an identity, but the idea of what this is and what the journey is never quite solidifies into something really incoherent. Though I suppose you could argue the journey is Colette realising she doesn’t need Willy, and that shorn of him she can survive far better on her own than he can without her.

Part of this is connected to Keira Knightley’s solid, but not quite deep enough, performance as Colette. As is often the way with her best work, Knightley works her socks off here and is clearly completely committed to the role and the film – but she just isn’t quite capable of elevating the depths of her skill to meet the full demands of the film. She doesn’t disgrace herself at all, but it’s a performance that never had enough fire and life to really become compelling.

It means you don’t quite get the powerful feminist message the film is aiming for. Knightley’s performance isn’t quite strong enough to counter-balance West, and the film’s failure to put together a compelling story line around what Colette actually wants – the film eventually settles for a rather ill-thought out phrase about wanting to lead her own life – means it peters out without much impact. There is a powerful story in here around women being denied recognition for their own talents and skills, but it never quite coalesces as it should.

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

Dev Patel makes a charming lead in this Dickens adaptation that finds the comedy but misses the heart

Dir: Armando Iannucci

Cast: Dev Patel (David Copperfield), Tilda Swinton (Betsey Trotwood), Hugh Laurie (Mr Dick), Peter Capaldi (Mr Micawber), Ben Whishaw (Uriah Heep), Paul Whitehouse (Mr Peggotty), Aneurin Barnard (James Steerforth), Daisy May Cooper (Peggotty), Morfydd Clark (Dora Spenlow/Clara Copperfield), Benedict Wong (Mr Wickfield), Darren Boyd (Mr Murdstone), Gwendoline Christie (Jane Murdstone), Anthony Welsh (Ham Peggotty), Rosalind Eleazar (Agnes Wickfield), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Mrs Steerforth), Anna Maxwell Martin (Mrs Strong)

If Charles Dickens ever had a favourite child, it was probably David Copperfield. His novel – heavily inspired by events in his own life and upbringing – is an epic masterpiece, part coming-of-age story, part heart-warming family saga, part social satire. It’s quite a challenge to boil down its hundreds and hundreds of pages – and multiple plot points and characters – into less than two hours, but that’s the task Armando Iannucci takes on here. Does it work?

Well, to be honest, not quite. There is a lot to admire here, I’ll say that straightaway. And maybe I’m hard on it as I’ve read (or listened to) the novel at least three times. But for me this version drains out the heart of the novel. It zeroes in on the comedy – and there are several scenes and characters that are inarguably funny – but in doing so it removes or peels away anything bittersweet or with even a hint of sadness. It’s funny, but also a strangely empty and unengaging version of the story that it’s hard to get invested in and finally seems to drag.

Iannucci uses a terrific framing device, inspired by Dickens’ own public readings of his work. The film opens with Copperfield (a wonderfully jovial and engaging Dev Patel) publically introducing his novel to a theatre full of people which, with a flourish, disappears as he walks into the scenery and into his own past. Iannucci sprinkles his film with little flourishes like this to remind us of the semi-created nature of what we are watching, from Mr Murdstone’s hand looming into the Peggottys’ boat to pluck Copperfield into the next scene, through to the use of projected imagery at key points to fill in visually backstories the characters in the scene are relating.

The book has been well pruned and structured – and this is in some ways a triumph of compression, since it ticks off nearly all the main storylines of the plot (with some changes) and includes all the main characters. The real purist will decry such things as the loss of Barkis and Mr Micawber’s famous lines, or the translation of Mr Creakle into a factory owner or Rosa Dartworth into Steerforth’s mother. But these are necessities of adaptation and much of the storyline remains the same (if abbreviated). The script punches up the comedy a great deal – Iannucci has been vocal in his feeling that Dickens does not get the appreciation he deserves as a comic writer.

The script also digs up a few gems in the novel – Copperfield’s nervousness in reading, his inability to read to Murdstone’s gaze, is imaginatively reinterpreted as dyslexia. The semi-Freudian longing he feels for the warmth and innocence of his lost childhood is neatly captured by casting Morfydd Clark (very endearing and charmingly ditsy) as both his mother and his first love Dora. There are several laugh-out loud moments and a charmingly freewheeling love for absurdity.

But what doesn’t work is that the heart and soul of the novel has been stripped out. There is, to put it frankly, no pain or difficulty here. The tears in Dev Patel’s eyes at the end of the film as he closes his recital with the audience and reflects on the triumphs and losses of his life feel unearned. Put frankly nothing seems that hard, for all poverty rears its head at time. Even the Murdstones are less fearsome and cruel than they need to be. Worst of all, anything of any real emotional depth or tragedy from the book is removed. The two key tragic deaths of the book are actively reversed here, with both Dora and Ham surviving at the end. The complexities of Copperfield’s feelings for Dora and Agnes are resolved with immense ease for a traditional happy ending in a garden of the heroes surrounded by friends and families (exactly the sort of happy ending that Greta Gerwig gently poked fun at in Little Women).

It’s all boiled down and told for jokes and the emotional engagement just isn’t there. Dev Patel enters the film too early – Copperfield is a young adult before he even heads to his aunt’s house – meaning the lost, vulnerable sense of sad childhood turning into a happy one is completely lost, and Copperfield’s fragility is too quickly brushed aside. Mr Micawber (a funny turn from Capaldi, but far too wheedling) is played so much for laughs that his essential decency and kindness is lost in favour of a man who spends his life borrowing cash. Too often humour is the first and only port of call, and finally it crushes the heart out of the story.

There are triumphs in the film’s cast. Hugh Laurie is simply outstanding as Mr Dick – warm, funny, wise, surreal, eccentric, half a philosopher, half an engaging and excited child – it’s Laurie’s finest performance ever on film. Benedict Wong is very funny as the alcoholic Mr Wicklfield. Tilda Swinton has great fun as a battleaxe but wise Miss Trotwood. Nikki Annuka-Bird could cut glass as Mrs Steerforth. Aneurin Barnard makes for a charmingly dissolute Steerforth. Ben Whishaw is terrific as the unctuous and ambitious Uriah Heep. The colour-blind casting works a treat to bring a range of wonderful actors in.

It’s just a shame the story doesn’t translate as well. There is a theme somewhere in here of Copperfield trying to work out his identity (much prominence is given to his multiple names and nicknames) but it never really takes flight, serving as a fig leaf of an arc rather than an actual arc. It’s a film full of jokes and fine moments – but with no heart, and no real engagement with the audience, it ends up feeling far longer than reading the book.

Nixon (1995)

Anthony Hopkins triumphs as Nixon in Oliver Stone’s surprisingly sympathetic biopic

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Richard Nixon), Joan Allen (Pat Nixon), James Woods (HR Haldeman), Powers Boothe (Alexander Haig), Larry Hagman (“Jack Jones”), Ed Harris (E. Howard Hunt), Dan Hedaya (Trini Cardoza), Bob Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover), Madeline Kahn (Martha Mitchell), EG Marshall (John Mitchell), David Paymer (Ron Ziegler), David Hyde Pierce (John Dean), Paul Sorvino (Henry Kissinger), Mary Steenburgen (Hannah Nixon), JT Walsh (John Ehrlichman), Sam Waterston (Richard Helms), Brian Bedford (Clyde Tolson), Tom Bower (Francis Nixon), Kevin Dunn (Charles Colson), Annabeth Gish (Julie Nuxon), Tom Goldwyn (Harold Nixon), Saul Rubinek (Herbert G Klein)

In 1995, there was one person the chronicler of the 1970s American experience, Oliver Stone, hadn’t covered: Richard M Nixon. The man who was the embodiment of the dark scar on the American consciousness, the grim, unlovable presence behind the war in Vietnam, the protests and the deep, never-ending wound of Watergate, who seemed to drag the country further and further into the abyss. The man who besmirched the office, the least popular president ever, the national shame. With Stone’s searing attacks on everything from Vietnam policy to the conspiracies behind the Kennedy assassination, you’d expect his film on Nixon to be a condemnation. What people didn’t expect was a film as strikingly even-handed as this, which recasts Nixon not as a gloating villain, but a Shakespearean figure, a Greek tragedy of a man destroyed by chronic character flaws.

Opening with a crushed Nixon, like a drunken Gollum cradling his precious, listening to his precious tapes in the bowels of the White House during his final days in office, the film is told in a fascinatingly non-linear style – loosely falling into two acts, cutting backwards and forwards in time. The first act covers most of Nixon’s career up to the presidency, focusing on his Quaker childhood and the influence of his mother Hannah (Mary Steenburgen), his defeat in the 1960 election to Kennedy and his years rebuilding his political standing. The second half takes a more linear approach, covering a Presidency becoming increasingly bogged down in the inept cover-up of Watergate and increasingly desperate attempts to save his presidency, intermixed with foreign policy successes.

What is really striking is that Stone’s movie finds a great deal of sympathy for this troubled and complex man. He’s a man who has greatness in his grasp, dedicated, intelligent and with vision – but fatally undermined by self-loathing, self-pity and a bubbling resentment about not having the love of the people. Like Lear raging against the storm, or Macbeth bemoaning the impact of his vile deeds, Stone’s Nixon becomes a sympathetic figure, even while the film makes no apologies for his actions, his aggressive bombing of Cambodia (the film notes at its end the bombing led directly to the massacres of the Khmer Rouge) or his failures to claim any responsibility for how he caused his own end.

Stone’s empathetic vision of Nixon is shaped largely by Anthony Hopkins’ titanic performance in the lead role. Hopkins makes no real effort – beyond teeth and hair – to look like Nixon, but brilliantly embodies Nixon’s awkward physicality and, above all, his angry, bitter, resentful personality. It’s not an imitation, but it totally captures him. Hopkins has got it, and the disintegration of Nixon over the course of the film into the shambling, miserable, twitching, even slightly unhinged mess he became in the final days of his presidency is astounding.

It works because Hopkins never loses sense of the potential for greatness in Nixon – sure he’s socially awkward (Hopkins superbly captures Nixon’s awkward grin, his stumbling nervousness in conversation), but politically he’s assured, confident and has huge insight into realpolitik. His flaw is that he wants to be both the master politician and the people’s champ, to be Nixon and JFK, to have the people cheer him to the rafters. It’s a longing that turns to resentment, fuelling insecurity and fear, that causing him to be so afraid of being cheated that he cheats first and bigger.

It’s that potential for greatness that swims through Stone’s masterfully made, electric film. Stone’s love for mixing film stock, fake newsreel footage, snazzy camerawork, switching colour stock, stylistically eclectic sound and music choices and bombastic lecturing comes to the fore here – and I accept it won’t be for everyone. But for me it works. It’s a big, dramatic movie because it covers an epic theme. From its early echoes of Citizen Kane – the White House as Xanadu, those missing 18 ½ minutes of the tape Nixon’s “Rosebud” – through to the accelerated pace and film stock as events spiral out of the President’s control, it’s an explosion of style that really works, even if there are points which are too on-the-nose (a scene where Nixon’s dinner talk of war is interrupted by a steak that leaks gallons of blood as he cuts into it, is clumsy in the extreme).

Stone’s theories revolve around the true villain being the government-financial power system itself, a grindingly oppressive beast chews up and spits out the men who think they can ride it. Nixon may know about the danger of the system, but he’s as powerless as anyone else. Its tendrils extend everywhere, from the creepily domineering CIA chief Helms (Sam Waterston, unsettlingly intimidating in scenes restored in the director’s cut) to the shady Texan money interests (led by an excellent Larry Hagman of all people) who sure-as-shit want to get rid of that liberal, Cuban surrender monkey Kennedy, by any means necessary (“Say Kennedy dont run in 64?”).

Nixon wants to control it, to do some good – and the film is excellent at stressing how Nixon’s poverty-filled Quaker background gave him a drive to achieve but also a chippy insecurity and moral standards from his imperious mother he can never hope to meet – but what hope does he have? In any case, his own deep moral failings doom any chance of forging his own goals, sucking him into a quagmire where long-running dirty deeds, shady deals and unedifying company consume him. “When they look at you they see what want to be. When they look at me they see what they are” Nixon complains to the painting of Kennedy, the rival whom he can never eclipse, the man born with all the advantages Nixon never had, the millionaire embraced by the people while the working-class Nixon is reviled. It’s these resentments that consume and destroy Nixon, and Stone presents this as an epic tragedy of a great politician, crushed by his fundamentally human flaws.

Around Hopkins, Stone assembles a brilliant cast. Joan Allen is superb as Nixon’s loving but insightful wife who won’t shy to speak truth to power. James Woods is perfect as the bullishly aggressive, fiercely loyal Haldeman. Paul Sorvino does a wonderfully arch impersonation of Kissinger, always keeping his distance. David Hyde Pierce makes a smoothly innocent but determinedly self-preserving John Dean, Powers Boothe a wonderful cold Alexander Haig. Only Bob Hoskins gives a performance slightly too broad as Hoover – but he still laces the role with a crackling menace.

Nixon is a great film, an explosion of style (perhaps at times a little too much), which painstakingly strips bare the President’s psyche – his doubt, guilt, bitterness, resentments and finally overwhelming self-pity. Powered by a titanically well-observed performance by Anthony Hopkins, who is just about perfect in every frame – every nuance feels real – Nixon is a wallow in the dark underbelly of America, which hints throughout at the even greater dangers that lie under the surface, the powerful system maintaining the status quo that sees presidents come and go, but never allows any real change. It’s a remarkable film.