Tag: Elle Fanning

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Engaging but traditional biopic, very well-made and full of knock out performances

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Timothée Chalamet (Bob Dylan), Edward Norton (Pete Seeger), Elle Fanning (Sylvie Russo), Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez), Boyd Holbrook (Johnny Cash), Scoot McNairy (Woody Guthrie), Dan Fogler (Albert Grossman), Norbert Leo Butz (Alan Lomax), PJ Byrne (Harold Leventhal), Will Harrison (Bob Neuwirth), Eriko Hatsune (Toshi Seeger), Charlie Tahan (Al Kooper)

In 1961 Bob Dylan seemed to emerge from nowhere – or, if you like, from being A Complete Unknown – to become the big star of American music and the centre of a battle for the soul of American folk music. On one side, were the traditionalists – they loved Dylan’s thoughtful, lyrical ballads and use of guitar, harpsichord and other instruments. They believed Dylan could lead a whole new generation to traditional American music. On the other side were the modernists, inspired by rock and roll, and the new (electric) sound. A Complete Unknown is about Dylan’s – inevitable – journey towards exploring new music sounds, culminating in his strum-heard-around-the-world as he played an electric set at the Newport Folk Festival (to a mixed reaction to say the least).

That’s the meat of James Mangold’s traditional, but very well-made and enjoyable musical biography, a spiritual sequel to Walk the Line (with a decent, but drink-addled Cash here played by Boyd Holbrook). Much like that film, this tweaks and amends some historical facts, but manages to get close to the spirit of its subject all within a familiar biography set-up of early success, mid-way struggles and triumphant (of a sort) resolution. There is nothing in A Complete Unknown to surprise you but it’s still a highly enjoyable, very professionally assembled journey.

Its main success is the depth and insight with which it penetrates Dylan’s character. A Complete Unknown embraces Dylan’s enigmatic quality, not to mention his stubborn, relentless and obsessive focus on his music and the austere distance he can treat the world. This all comes across beautifully in Timothée Chalamet’s superb performance – not only a pin-point physical and vocal and impersonation, but also a soulful rendering of a poet who constantly pushed against being classified and categorised, bristling against ideas he should play certain songs certain ways.

The roots of the culture clash that will dominate the film are clear from the start when Dylan and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) drive from visiting visited Dylan’s hospitalised idol Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and Dylan flicks through radio channels. Dylan finds interest in all the different music they encounter; Seeger smiles pleasantly and nods his head, but clearly can’t hide his patient disregard for the electric beats of rock and roll. It’s the platform for the surly discontent Chalamet so perfectly embodies as Dylan is expected to pigeon hole himself as a folk singer, who (as he puts it) stands with his acoustic guitar at a mic and sings Blowin’ In the Wind for the rest of his life. A Complete Unknown falls in love with Dylan’s passionate self-expression, his search for his own sound.

That search frequently makes Dylan a difficult person to spend time with. Awkward and hesitant with other people – Chalamet’s Dylan is constantly cautious about exposing too much of his inner thoughts and feelings – the poetic writer mumbles in monosyllables and responds to fame with a grudging disdain that seems him rarely remove his sunglass shield between him and the world. He has no interest in fame and is positively alarmed at adulation from strangers (there is a neat line when he is unrecognised by a street vendor and asked if he has kids to which he wearily replies ‘Yeah, thousands’). Match that with his ruthless determination to put his artistic calling above anything else, and you’ve got a man who verges on using other people.

It feeds into Dylan’s relationships. At his request, his girlfriend Suzie Rotolo is very-lightly disguised as Sylvie Russo, played with an emotional richness by Elle Fanning. The film skips the more difficult parts of their break-up – Dylan stated the only song he regrated was one he wrote about Rotolo’s abortion, calling himself a shmuck for doing so. But in doing so, the film steams off Rotolo’s contribution to Dylan’s writing and much of her own dynamic and interesting qualities. The original Rotolo, an artist, was an important sounding board: we don’t see a jot of that here, as she is repackaged into offering Dylan much-needed stability and security, dealing with movie-girlfriend insecurity about Dylan’s attraction to collaborator Joan Baez.

Dylan returns to Russo when he needs comfort at times of stress (from dropping in on her apartment – and waking her new boyfriend – late at night, to bringing her with him to the folk festival when he intends to turn electric) but Chalamet’s simmering self-focus makes clear Dylan at this stage can’t settle into a mutual relationship. It also comes between him and Joan Baez, played with dynamic charisma by Monica Barbaro, Despite their attraction and musical synchronicity, Dylan never sees her as a true artistic partner, even calling round one night for a booty call followed by private song writing using her guitar (she throws him out). On tour together, Dylan archly points out he writes the song and he leaves Baez hanging at a concert when he flat-out refuses to play the advertised favourites. The chemistry however is still there, within when it tips into aggression.

Dylan goes his own way, and if that means turning against surrogate fathers Peter Seeger and Woody Guthrie, then he will. A Complete Unknown features one of Edward Norton’s finest performances as a warm, tender and heartbreaking Pete Seeger (matched with a wonderful performance from Eriko Hatsune as Pete’s wife Toshi). Norton is brilliant at making Seeger – an environmentalist and gentle, accommodating advocate of folk music – a portrait of inevitable disappointment-in-waiting. There is a heart-rending moment where Norton beams as if all his dreams have come true as Dylan plays his first Newport festival: heart-breaking because we know Dylan’s next performance (where a guilty Dylan brusquely shrugs off Seeger’s gentle pleading to stay acoustic for just one more day) will see these dreams left in shattered pieces.

A Complete Unknown is a handsome, very well-mounted film from James Mangold, who has proved time-and-again that he can explore classic Americana with a freshness and energy few other directors can match. The film is perhaps overlong – probably due to the innumerable recreations of performances from Dylan, Seeger and Baez, all excellent but there are far too many – and it’s biopic approach is relentless traditional. But it’s filled with a parade of rich performances (with Chalamet outstanding), rolls along with energy, carries an emotional impact and will leave you engaged and entertained throughout.

The Beguiled (2017)

Nicole Kidman struggles to resist the charms of Colin Farrell in The Beguiled

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cast: Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha), Kirsten Dunst (Edwina), Elle Fanning (Alicia), Colin Farrell (Corporal McBurney), Oona Laurence (Amy), Angourie Rice (Jane), Addison Riecke (Marie), Emma Howard (Emily)

A remake of Don Siegel’s adaptation of the original novel, The Beguiled throws a feminist slant on a story of a confederate soldier, Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell) who, in the later years of the Civil War, is found injured in the grounds of a girl’s school, where the women have continued to run the operation while the menfolk are consumed with (and by) the war. The school is run by the distant Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman), with the lead teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) and five students of varying ages. All of the girls and women find themselves entranced (beguiled!) with the deceptively gentlemanly McBurney, whose true aims may be darker than assumed.

Sofia Coppola’s version of the story shifts the attention onto the women of the piece, and their plight and emotional journeys. This is a perfectly legitimate stance to take – and showing effectively a colony of girls and women in the 1860s living some sort of structured commune life is interesting and different – but Coppola’s film has a coolness and distance to it that ironically makes it far less than beguiling than it should be.

Beautifully filmed as the film is, it’s slow pace and meditative tone – as well as the rather obvious points it seems determined to make about male and female relations – actually serve to make the film less engaging than it should be. Wonderfully framed and painterly in its execution, with an effective mix of classical and 1970s style, it still never quite sparks into life.

The cast also struggle to bring a heartbeat to their characters. Nicole Kidman brings her customary reserve and elegance to a woman who has hints of a mysterious past that troubles her to this day, but the role remains distant and difficult to read – more than the film really requires. A clash or seduction between her and Colin Farrell’s corporal keeps promising dynamite but the explosions never really seem to come. Farrell laces his role with charm and a gruff masculinity, but the role misses a sense of his own darkness or manipulative nature until quite late, with the final act revelations making him appear more angry and bitter than the role really requires. It all kind of sums up the film that gets lost in its artifice and fails to uncover its heart.

The film, you could argue, does its best to beguile the audience with McBurney as the film’s character are. We are shown at every angle his vulnerability and tender politeness, and hidden from us for too long are his more manipulative elements. Coppola’s film becomes an intense study instead of sexual feelings and relations within a confined space. From sensual hand washes from Miss Martha, to intense declarations with lonely teacher Edwina, to not-so-innocent flirtations with the pupils, there is more than enough evidence that McBurney’s desire to stay may well be as much linked to seeing the school as having the potential to be his own private harem. The film’s failure in this intense sexual politics is that, while it captures moments of the simmer of attraction, it fails to really establish the danger that McBurney could suggest, as a violent man of action with complete control over a group of women.

Indeed the final moments of the film even suggest that the school itself may be a sort of siren’s bay – although lord knows McBurney is no Odysseys – which I found a rather confusing beat. Effective as the final images, or the film’s last supper betrayals, may be, they don’t carry quite enough wait because the film never quite nails the sexual tension it is aiming for, or the sensual danger it is trying to establish as a theme within the film.

Other changes make less sense as well. Coppola deliberately changes the race of Edwina, from a mixed-race young woman to someone white enough to be played by Kirsten Dunst. While Dunst’s performance is fine, many of the themes of Edwina’s lack of confidence, her self-loathing, her feeling of having no place outside of the school, of being somehow less than other women are left in place. These themes of course make perfect sense for a mixed race woman in the 1860s who has landed a job through the connections of her father, but they make less sense for an attractive young schoolteacher with a privileged background. Coppola made the change because she felt that she could not do the theme justice, but she misses the fact that the very appearance of the character is the context needed for her to make sense.

The Beguiled is beautiful to observe and has its moments, but it never really comes to light the way it should. Thoughtful and poetic a director as Coppola is, she has created a film here that feels all artifice and no depth, that wants to paint a picture of the life of women in the civil war but never really has the energy and fire to make this come to life in a way to make the audience as engaged as they should be.

Trumbo (2015)

Bryan Cranston is the put-upon idealist Trumbo under the scornful eye of Helen Mirren

Director: Jay Roach

Cast: Bryan Cranston (Dalton Trumbo), Diane Lane (Cleo Trumbo), Helen Mirren (Hedda Hopper), Louis CK (Arlen Hird), Elle Fanning (Nikola Trumbo), John Goodman (Frank King), Michael Stuhlbarg (Edward G Robinson), Alan Tudyk (Ian McLellan Hunter), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Virgil Brooks), Dean O’Gorman (Kirk Douglas), Stephen Root (Hymie King), Roger Bart (Buddy Ross), David James Elliott (John Wayne), Christian Berkel (Otto Preminger)

Hollywood loves to make movies about itself. It particularly loves to make movies where Hollywood is seen to be working on a higher moral plane. Trumbo is a film about the Hollywood Ten – the ten major screenwriters, directors and actors in Hollywood whom the industry blacklisted in the 1940s because of their sympathy for communism. Their leading light was Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), a rich screenwriter who finds himself imprisoned and unemployable. Trumbo encourages the writers to group together and write under pseudonyms for cheap film studios – although the right-wing in Hollywood continues to persecute them. Trumbo cannot reveal his identity as a writer – even after winning two Oscars – until 1960 when Kirk Douglas gives him a credit for Spartacus.

Trumbo is a very earnest, straightforward and rather bland re-tread of a key moment in Hollywood. It’s made with very little imagination, and remixes the world of 1940s politics into something that bears more resemblance to the political situation now than it does to the time. That’s not to defend the House Committee on Un American Activities (HUAC), the Congress Committee that led the campaign against communist subversion in Hollywood. Their persecution of communists flew in the face of American ideals of free speech, and their ruin of the lives of innumerable actors, writers and directors not found to be ideological pure is appalling.

But this is a film that simplifies its politics into a world of good and bad. It also works hard to try and whitewash Hollywood. Watch this film and you would believe it was Congress that had worked overtime in order to ban certain Hollywood creatives from working. Not so: the black list was put forward by the movie studios themselves and endorsed by the various guilds. Famous actors and directors, such as Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, furiously dropped their support for the Hollywood Ten after feeling they had been deceived by the Ten about their Communist associations. The film mentions none of this of course, running with a Hollywood-vs-Congress story line and crowbarring in people like McCarthy and Nixon who had very little to do with HUAC.

The main Hollywood figures campaigning against the Black List are either faceless Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals types, or lip-smacking, practically mustachio-twirling gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (played with ludicrous OTT camp wickedness by Helen Mirren). John Wayne is the only recognisable Hollywood “legend” shown on the side of these guys – and, while he does get mocked for his non-war-record early on by Trumbo, he is quickly shown to be a moderate pushing for forgiveness for those who repent (and is noticeably absent from the villainy of the organisation later in the film) – Hollywood doesn’t want to be too harsh on one of its own.

Roach’s political simplicity also affects the actors who found themselves in an impossible position. As Michael Stuhlbarg’s Edward G Robinson points out, writers can work under a pseudonym, actors can’t. I was reminded of when Elia Kazan won an honorary Oscar and several famous Hollywood actors refused to applaud him, as Kazan had “named names” (or rather confirmed names HUAC already knew) when pulled before the committee. Robinson here is rammed into the same position, denounced as a snitch and a traitor for confirming the names of the Hollywood Ten when many of them are already in prison. As at the Oscars, I’m not sure it’s our place to judge. It’s cosy to assume “I would have told them no” but who can say if we would have or not? And can we really judge those who decided they didn’t want to go to the wall for a communist cause they didn’t believe in (as Kazan and Robinson didn’t, being more left-wing sympathisers than Stalinists like Trumbo)?

It’s another part of the film’s simplicity that Communism is not of course interrogated any further. Watch this film and the political views of Trumbo and his colleagues come across as nothing more than a more idealistic version of Obama-ism. In reality, Trumbo was a Stalinist who pushed for non-intervention in World War II until Russia was attacked by Hitler. This is not mentioned or explored in the film at all. In fact, the complexity of these idealists climbing into bed with a regime soaked red with blood that was suppressing freedom across large chunks of the globe isn’t even raised. Roach wants to tell a story about good-old-fashioned-Hollywood-democrats being persecuted by nasty right-wingers.

Away from the film’s simplicity it’s nothing special. Roach does competent work and there is the odd good scene. Trumbo himself is basically a rather selfish arsehole, who judges everyone around him and frequently ignores his put-upon family. Cranston does a decent job as Trumbo – but you can’t help but feel his generous Oscar nomination was in part a recognition for his work on Breaking Bad. Dean O’Gorman and Christian Berkel get some of the best scenes as Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger working with Trumbo on Spartacus and Exodus. Bizarrely, the film totally avoids diving into the themes of Spartacus– or exploring what Trumbo was thinking about when he wrote “I’m Spartacus”, that paen to unity from the pen of a man abandoned by everyone, surely a hugely personal line not in the original source material – and instead skirts only on the surface, ticking off events. It kinda sums the film up: a solid enough to watch, but basically forgettable, that never engages with the inner lives of the men it claims to understand.