Tag: Lily James

Rebecca (2020)

Lily James and Armie Hammer do their best in an overblown Rebecca the swops Gothic chills for lovely costumes and locations

Birector: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Lily James (The second Mrs de Winter), Armie Hammer (Maxim de Winter), Kristin Scott Thomas (Mrs Danvers), Keeley Hawes (Beatrice Lacy), Ann Dowd (Mrs Van Hopper), Sam Riley (Jack Favell), Tom Goodman-Hill (Frank Crawley), Mark Lewis Jones (Inspector Welch)

Hitchcock’s film version of du Maurier’s novel casts a long shadow. Few have taken up the challenge to film it since – and Ben Wheatley’s is the first film version in nearly 80 years. But you can be pretty certain that, unlike Hitchcock’s, this one probably won’t be being watched 80 years from now.

In Monte Carlo, a young woman (Lily James) meets and falls in love with rich Cornish landowner Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), a widower on holiday. They marry and return to his seat at Manderley. However, on arrival the second Mrs de Winter finds that she is living in the shadow of Maxim’s deceased first wife, Rebecca. This feeling is encouraged by the passive aggressive manipulation of Rebecca’s devoted housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas). Slowly, the second Mrs de Winter starts to worry that even her sanity starts to be slipping.

Wheatley is a director with a love of thriller and horror, and he really should be a natural fit to take on du Maurier’s gothic creepiness. But Wheatley feels almost constrained by the period title and beauty. This is a film that totally misses its gothic beats, instead settling for being a lusciously filmed costume drama. It has only a few traces of the unsettling psychology or air of ghostly possession that the story requires, and even those are chucked in haphazardly and then forgotten in order to make way for a pretty sunset or generic shot of Lily James looking sad in the rain.

The inescapable feeling on watching this is that Wheatley actually wants to turn the story into a more conventional romance. The age difference between Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter has been almost removed. With Armie Hammer too young and Lily James too pretty, there is no ambiguity to Maxim’s feelings or motivations, nor any power imbalance to their charming, sunlit courtship, filled with carefree drives and charming beach picnics. Gone are the suspicions (for both the second Mrs de Winter and us) as to what a rich, sophisticated older man could see in a shy, unremarkable, average-looking girl who’s employed as little more than a servant.

It also removes much of the vulnerability and uncertainty Mrs de Winter should feel, by bringing her onto more equal terms with her husband. From du Maurier’s vision of an innocent woman feeling out of her depth as she’s plunged into an alien world, unable to break through the hauteur of a distant, older husband, we instead get far more of a conventional whirlwind romance that sours when the couple return home.

It’s not really the fault of the two leads, who give sterling work. Lily James has just about the right vulnerability to her, even if she’s still got a bit more spark than the quiet, demure character needs. But James has a fabulous sense determined earnestness to her, an eagerness to do the right thing and not let anyone down (her greater dignity and strength also pays off in sequences where Mrs de Winter takes on a stronger position in the marriage).

As Maxim, Armie Hammer has the right sort of authority and conveys the distance and coolness of the character, even while he is clearly too young and at times seems a bit hampered by his accent and setting. (Like some American actors, he at times struggles to fully comprehend the issues of class within the film.) Perhaps the main weakness to the casting is, by playing up his charm and romanticism, you never really think for a moment that this is a bloke who might have murdered his wife. It also makes him never feel like the sort of chap who could honestly ever have though about dispatching his new wife. It again strips out much of the darkness and dread of the original.

Needless to say, Kristin Scott Thomas has a ball as Mrs Danvers, the obsessed and bitter housekeeper, a part that hardly pushes her to her limits but which she delivers more than enough in. Wheatley pays homage to several of Hitchcock’s shooting decisions around the character, and the conveying of her menace is probably the film’s most successful beat.

However, the film fails at too many other important points. The sense of the previous Mrs de Winter haunting the home is lost completely. Too often the creepiness and psychological fear the film is aiming for gets lost, with periodic bursts of Cornish singing used too obviously to suggest unsettling menace. One very successful sequence set in a room of mirrors just serves to flag up how painfully absent the sense of threat and fear are from the rest of the film. To be honest, it’s a film that needs more darkness, more shadows. Instead everything is lit with all the prestige handsomeness of Merchant Ivory and Sunday dramas. Why did Wheatley go for this visual approach? Did he feel that it was expected from the lovely locations and luscious costumes?

And the costumes and the sets do look lovely. The shooting colours are vibrant and beautiful. It’s very grand and charming and it turns a haunting novel with dark deeds at its heart into something safe and neutered.

The final product is what happens if a combination of styles are thrown together in a way that service not the story, but how each element of it could be best presented. When the film wants to show off the set and costumes, it’s bright and beautiful. At the few times it wants to suggest ghostly intimidation, we get some chanting and a few darkened rooms and billowing curtains. Neither plays well off the other and the film ends up feeling professionally mounted but workmanlike. It’s a shame as Wheatley could have really made something of this. But it feels like he has been forced into a prestige costume drama straightjacket.

The Dig (2020)

Ralph Fiennes plays an amateur digger who makes a huge discovery in the poetic The Dig

Director: Simon Stone

Cast: Carey Mulligan (Edith Pretty), Ralph Fiennes (Basil Brown), Lily James (Peggy Piggott), Johnny Flynn (Rory Lomax), Ben Chaplin (Stuart Piggott), Ken Stott (Charles Phillips), Archie Barnes (Robert Pretty), Monica Dolan (May Brown)

One of the greatest archaeological finds in British History, the Anglo-Saxon burial ship in Sutton Hoo revealed vast treasures and cultural insights that are very rarely glimpsed. Land-owner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), a widow with a young son Robert (Archie Barnes), hires self-taught excavator Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to investigate the curious mounds on her land. Brown discovers one of them holds the buried ship. But the dig is taken from his control by the British Museum, led by Charlie Phillips (Ken Stott): professional archaeologists who want to ensure the work is ‘done properly’. With tensions of class and profession, everyone must race against time to complete as much of the work as possible before the outbreak of the Second World War.

On the surface, The Dig is a charming, heart-felt reconstruction of a fascinating moment of archaeological history, mixed with engaging (but familiar) stories of a working-class amateurs being patronised by upper-class professionals. However, Stone’s film manages to have a richer second layer. With war approaching, and mortality constantly on the mind of most of the characters, it’s also a subtle investigation of legacy, the past and death itself.

Stone’s film develops this with its rich, poetic filming style. Beautifully shot in a series of gorgeous hazy hues, with dynamic use of low-angles and wide-angle lenses, Sutton Hoo is given an almost mystical beauty. Stone also makes extensive use of playing dialogue over images not of the conversation, but smaller moments in character’s lives, from casual meetings to cleaning shoes, that as such take on a profounder meaning. It’s a visual representation of how our legacy is often a snapshot of images and relics, moments that stay in the memory even when events (or conversation in this case) has moved on. It’s subtly done, but carries a beautiful impact.

Then of course, it’s not surprising legacy in on the mind. Each of the characters is at a tipping point in their own lives. Edith Pretty – so consumed with quiet grief over the loss of her husband that she is desperate for there to be something on the other side – is struggling with her own health, aware she will shortly leave her son an orphan. Her cousin Rory prepares for service in the RAF – service she fears will shortly leave him dead (the dangers of the airforce are clearly shown when a trainee pilot crashes and drowns near to the dig).

This connection to the briefness and intangibility of life pushes people to address their own choices. After all they are all standing in the grave of a man considered so important at that the time, a ship was dragged several miles to honour him – and today we have no idea who he was. Married archaeologist couple Stuart and Peggy Piggott confront an amiable loveless marriage (he’s gay, she’s falling in love with Rory) that shouldn’t define their lives. Basil has dealt with quiet grief at a childless marriage, and sees his work in astronomy and archaeology as his legacy.

These ideas are gently, but expertly, threaded together with a reconstruction of the key issues around the dig. Needless to say, the academics – led by Ken Stott at his most pompous – have no time for Basil’s home-spun methods. Basil’s predictions of the Anglo-Saxon tomb are constantly dismissed until he literally digs the ship up. Immediately he is benched to clearing soil (and only on Edith’s insistence is he allowed to remain at all) and later his name will be scrubbed out of the official record. It’s always the way with Britain – and a sign of how tenuous our legacies can be.

The personal stories are not always as well explored. The film has its flaws, not least the sad miscasting of Carey Mulligan as Edith. In reality, Edith was in her mid-50s when the ship was discovered. The film was developed for Nicole Kidman, but with her withdrawal Mulligan (twenty years too young) was drafted in. Sadly, nothing was changed to reflect this: meaning the characters years of spinsterhood before marriage lose impact (seriously how old can she have been when she married? She’s got a 12 year old son!). A softly underplayed romantic interest between Edith and Basil is also rather unsettling considering the vast age difference between them. (It’s better to imagine it as a platonic bond).

It’s still more engaging than the rather awkward love triangle the film introduces late on between the married Piggotts and Edith’s (fictional) cousin Rory. It’s fairly familiar stuff – the closeted gay Piggott, the growing realisation of this by Peggy and the obvious charm and gentle interest of Rory – and more or less pans out as you might expect, although at least with a dollop of human kindness.

The film’s other delight is the acting. Ralph Fiennes is superb as the taciturn Basil, a dedicated self-taught man who knows what he is worth, but struggles to gain that recognition. Fiennes not only has excellent chemistry with Mulligan and Barnes, he also suggests a quiet regret in Basil as well as a fundamental decency tinged with pride. For all that she is miscast, Mulligan does very good work as Edith while Chaplin, James and Flynn make a lot of some slightly uninspired material.

The Dig is at its best when asking quiet and gentle questions about life and when it focuses on the platonic romance between Basil and Edith. Directed with a poetic assurance by Simon Stone, it doesn’t push its points too far and gets a good balance between fascinating historic reconstruction and more profound questions of mortality.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)

Will Lily James and Michiel Huisman find true love in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society? You have one guess.

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Lily James (Juliet Ashton), Michiel Huisman (Dawsey Adams), Glen Powell (Mark Reynolds), Jessica Brown Findlay (Elizabeth McKenna), Katherine Parkinson (Isola Pribby), Matthew Goode (Sidney Stark), Tom Courtenay (Eben Ramsey), Penelope Wilton (Amelia Maugery)

Every so often I get challenged to write a really short review. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is the sort of film where I could almost write a review that was shorter than the film’s title. Look at the poster – everything you are now expecting from this movie, it completely delivers. It’s as warm, unthreatening, comfortable and familiar as Sunday dinner at your Gran’s.

In 1948, novelist Juliet Ashton (Lily James – so winning you overlook the fact that she’s clearly too young for the part) receives a chance letter from Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), a farmer in Guernsey. Adams tells her about the book club that sprang up between himself and other islanders during Guernsey’s occupation by the Nazis, where reading books gave them a chance to escape the horrors of the occupation. Leaving her slightly put-out American fiancée (Mark Reynolds) in London (one guess as to what romantic pairing we’ll end the film with, by the way) she heads to Guernsey to meet the group and write an article about them – and finds herself swept up in a mystery around missing member of the club Elizabeth McKenna (Jessica Brown Findley).

It’s a film that virtually writes itself, the sort of predictable Sunday-afternoon, British film where the 1940s look impossibly glamourous and everything turns out wonderfully happily in the end. You won’t be challenged by anything in it, you can simply sit back and enjoy it. Everyone involved in the film does clearly understand what they are making here though: it’s light, fluffy and unchallenging but it’s professionally made and everyone gives it their all.

Perhaps it’s a sign of how much the film is pitching for the Downton Abbey audience that it has no fewer than four actors from that show in key roles. Lily James is radiant and charismatic as Juliet – sweetly earnest and also with a determination to wrestle out a truth once she senses a story. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that she is going to be won away from her dull Yankee pilot (Glen Powell in a totally thankless role of blandness) by the earthy, romantic, caring and intellectually stimulating charm of Game of Thrones’ Dario Naaheris, Michiel Huisman (the sort of role an actor can play standing on his head but he’s still very good).

Penelope Wilton does some good work as a widow clinging to happier memories that she can’t bear to see affected by harsher truths. Jessica Brown Findley has little to do, but to be honest it’s not a problem as the part is such a straight re-tread of her Lady Sybil role from Downton she could probably do it in her sleep. The last Downton alumnus, Matthew Goode, is rather funny as Juliet’s sweet but good-naturedly exasperated publisher. For the rest of the cast, Katherine Parkinson oscillates between comic timidity and soulful sensitivity and Tom Courtenay gives a playful old man performance which can’t have stretched him.

Not being stretched is what the film is all about. Even the mystery at the film’s centre isn’t particularly gripping or – even when the truth is revealed – something that really has much impact on anything. And it’s hardly the focus anyway. It’s really a film that wants you to enjoy the photography and landscapes, and to root for the two leads to fall in love with each other. It wants you to feel little else, and carefully avoids getting you to invest your emotions in other aspects of the story so you can’t get upset. It’s the sort of film that you could call “lovely”, that passes an hour or two perfectly well, and at the end of it you’ll tell people it was fine. Then you’ll never think about it again. Ever.

Darkest Hour (2017)

Gary Oldman, rather surprisingly, rather is Churchill during his Darkest Hour

Director: Joe Wright

Cast: Gary Oldman (Winston Churchill), Kristin Scott Thomas (Clementine Churchill), Lily James (Elizabeth Layton), Ben Mendelsohn (George VI), Stephen Dillane (Lord Halifax), Ronald Pickup (Neville Chamberlain), Samuel West (Anthony Eden), David Schofield (Clement Atlee), Malcolm Storry (General Ironside), Richard Lumsden (General Ismay), Joe Armstrong (John Evans), Adrian Rawlins (Air Chief Marshall Dowding), David Bamber (Vice-Admiral Ramsay)

One of my favourite ever TV series is Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, a chronicle of Churchill’s time out of government (basically 1929-1939). It covers the political clashes between Churchill and his rivals brilliantly, as well as giving us a real feeling for Churchill’s own personality and flaws and featured a brilliant performance from Robert Hardy. Darkest Hour takes off almost where that series ends – and I think it might just be a spiritual sequel. And, for all its flaws, I might even grow too really like it.

Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour is a beautifully filmed, imaginatively shot retelling of the crucial first month of Churchill’s premiership. Wright uses a great device of flashing the date up (in an imposing screen-filling font) as each day progresses. Apart from brief moments, the action rarely leaves Whitehall, with the focus kept tightly on the politics at home. Will Churchill win over the war cabinet to continue the war, or not? It revolves around dialogue shot with tension and excitement, and is structured key Churchill speeches: each carrying all the emotional impact you could expect and beautifully performed, with goose-bump effect by Gary Oldman.

Because yes, this film’s one piece of genuine excellence, and what it is really going to be remembered for, is the brilliance of Oldman’s performance. This is one of those transformative performances where the actor disappears. Of course it’s helped by the make-up, but there is more to it than that. The voice, the mannerisms, movement, emotion – as a complete recreation of the man it’s just about perfect. Whatever the film’s flaws, Oldman nails it. Sure it’s larger than life – but so was Churchill.

Oldman’s Churchill is irascible, demanding and temperamental – but he’s also warm and humane. In one beautiful moment he conducts a conversation with an un-encouraging Roosevelt, where his features seems to shrivel and shrink with despair, while his voice keeps up the optimism. Moments of gloom hit home, but there is also humour (and Oldman is actually rather funny in the lead role). There’s moments of pain, guilt and depression – it’s terrific.

However it does mean some of the other actors scarcely get a look in. Kristin Scott Thomas in particular gets a truly thankless part, no less than four times having to counsel a depressed Churchill with variations on “You’re a difficult but great man and your whole life has been leading to this moment” speeches. Lily James actually gets a more interesting part as Churchill’s admiring secretary, getting the chance to be frightened, awed, amused and frustrated with the Prime Minister – and she does it very well, even if her part is a standard audience surrogate figure.

The characters are neatly divided in the film: they are either pro- or anti-Churchill. The “pro” characters largely get saddled with standing around admiringly around the great man (Samuel West gets particularly short-changed as Eden becomes Churchill’s yes man). The “anti” characters mutter in corridors about how unpredictable and dangerous he is, how he could wreck the country etc. etc.

To be fair to the film, it does at least treat the doubts of Halifax (Stephen Dillane – all clipped repression, he’s excellent) and Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup – serpentine and tactical, although Chamberlain’s hold over the Tory party was nowhere near as great as this film suggests) as legitimate concerns. It does weight the dice in favour of Churchill, and we don’t get enough time to fully understand the reasons why peace with Hitler might have seemed reasonable in 1940 (tricky to get across to a modern audience so aware of Hitler’s status as evil incarnate). But Halifax’s stance that it was better to cut your losses than fight on to destruction is at least treated sympathetically, rather than making him a spineless weasel (as others have done).

The film really comes to life with the conflict between the Halifax-Chamberlain alliance and a (largely alone) Churchill. The cabinet war room clashes have a fire, energy and sense of drama to them that a lot of the rest of the film doesn’t always have. It sometimes drags and gets lost in filling the time with “quirky” moments with Churchill. There is a bit too much domesticity that feels irrelevant when we know the fate of the nation is at stake.

But then this is a sentimental film. Not only is it in love with Churchill (we see some blemishes, but his air of perfection goes unpunctured), but it uses devices that feelas you are watching them like sentimental film devices. None more so than Churchill bunking down on a tube train to exchange encouraging words with regular people and for them to tearfully recite poetry at each other. In fact it’s a testament to Oldman that he largely gets this hopelessly fake-feeling scene working at all.

Wright’s film makes a point later of demonstrating that – reporting back to the Tory party the results of this conversation – Churchill uses the names of the people he met, but completely replaces their words with his own. But it still gets itself bogged down in this sentimentality – including a teary end caption on Churchill being voted out of office. Every scene with Churchill and Clementine has a similar chocolate box feel, as does a late scene with George VI (who seems to flip on a sixpence between pro and anti-Churchill – although Ben Mendholsen is very good in the role).

Darkest Hour is an extremely well-made film. It’s told with a lot of energy – and it has a simply brilliant lead performance. Joe Wright finds new and interesting ways to shoot things: there are some great shots which frame Churchill in strips of light surrounded by imposing darkness. But its not brilliant. It will move you – but that is largely because it recreates actual real-life, moving events (who can listen to Churchill without goosebumps?). But it’s given us one of the greatest Churchill performances and it’s worth it for that if nothing else. And, for all its flaws, and the safeness of its storytelling, I actually quite liked it – and I think I could like it more and more as I re-watch it.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

Sisters doing it for themselves. As I’m sure the film would have said in the dialogue if it had the guts.

Director: Burr Steers
Cast: Lily James (Elizabeth Bennet), Sam Riley (Fitzwilliam Darcy), Jack Huston (Wickham), Bella Heathcote (Jane Bennet), Douglas Booth (Mr. Bingley), Matt Smith (Mr. Collins), Charles Dance (Mr. Bennet), Lena Headey (Lady Catherine de Bourgh), Sally Phillips (Mrs. Bennet), Aisling Loftus (Charlotte Lucas)

Back in the 1990s, Harry Enfield and Chums did a sketch in which The Terminator (played by Martin Clunes) arrives in early 20th-century England, and spends a weekend at a country house searching for his victim. His violent antics are met with po-faced, stiff upper lip responses from the Upper Crust members of the household and uncomplaining reserve from the servants. It’s very funny. It sticks in the mind. It brilliantly mashes up costume drama with sci-fi drama. It’s five minutes long.

This film is effectively the same gag but stretched far beyond any possible welcome to an agonising 104 minutes, in which the same comic beat is repeated over and over again. “Oh look! Those posh girls/blokes in frocks are discussing tea and table arrangements! And now they are slaughtering a herd of zombies! While continuing the conversation! What larks!”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the poster child of a mercifully short-lived literary novelty: classic novels rewritten with genre elements. This trend also saw sea monsters inserted into Sense and Sensibility and hard-core sex scenes inserted into Jane Eyre (the worst of all, as the author had the cheek to suggest that Bronte would of course have got those scenes in if she could). It was a best-seller, but only in the sense that it was the ultimate ‘I-don’t-know-what-to-get-you-for-Christmas’ gag gift. But years after the moment had passed, the movie adaptation lumbered towards the big screen.

Morbid curiosity made me watch it (over several nights on Netflix, I hasten to add) and it’s exactly what it appears to be: a student sketch that is worthy of maybe a slight smile for the first few minutes, but then totally collapses the longer it goes on. Now I like Jane Austen films and I like zombie films but still I didn’t like this. Firstly it’s a terrible zombie film – the action moments are poorly shot and hard to follow, the action dull and the “laws” around the zombies in the movie are inconsistent (some zombies are super killers, others are lumbering brainless beasts). Secondly, all that Zombie stuff makes it a pretty bad Austen film. Worst of both worlds.

The Austen bits are (unsurprisingly) by far the best bits. There is a good cast here: Lily James and Matt Smith in particular would be very well cast in a proper adaptation. Anything interesting comes largely from Austen (the characters, the emotions, the bulk of the watchable stuff in the first half) anything dull from the source material (the zombies, the action, the final 30 minutes). The idea of society being fundamentally unchanged by a zombie invasion makes no sense at all (would money still be the driving factor in a world destroyed by the undead?). Much of the fighting involving the female characters has a slightly uncomfortable leering sexuality about it (“Look at those hot chicks pull knives from their undergarments! Phrroooaaahhh!!!!”) as well as being far too over choreographed.

Zombies is a pointless film of a forgotten fad. It’s one of the worst zombie films ever made. It wastes our chance to see some of these actors give decent performances in a proper adaptation. Pleasingly, it bombed catastrophically at the box office, probably because it appeals to no one: the zombie action isn’t anywhere good enough to interest the genre fan, the Austen fan is more likely to bung on their Firth/Ehle DVD than check this mess out. None of them are missing anything. Zombies isn’t the must-see abomination it needed to be to have any shelf life – it’s a blatant attempt to rake some more cash from a horse flogged to death. If you want to get a sense of it, save yourself 135 minutes and watch that Harry Enfield sketch instead. I guarantee you’ll laugh a heck of a lot more.