Matthew Lillard – Movie Musings

George Clooney is a family man dealing with difficulty from The Descendants

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: George Clooney (Matt King), Shailene Woodley (Alex King), Amara Miller (Scottie King), Nick Krause (Sid), Beau Bridges (Hugh), Judy Greer (Julie Speer), Matthew Lillard (Brian Speer), Robert Forster (Scott), Patricia Hastie (Elizabeth King)

Anyone expecting a straight comedy hasn’t been familiar enough with Alexander Payne’s career. Payne’s movies are triumphant, slightly quirky, explorations of crisis in the lives and emotions of middle-aged, middle-class men. Few directors do it as well, bringing both a lightness of touch and a profound understanding of the tragedy that can underpin ordinary lives. He has an astute understanding of the pain of opportunities lost. And The Descendants is full of these, just as it is full of the hope you can gain from seizing new opportunities in the future.

Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu attorney who is the last trustee representative in his vast family for a site of 25,000 pristine acres on Kauai. With the trust due to end, Matt is under pressure from his family to sell the land for hundreds of millions and gain them all their financial security. In the middle of this, his wife suffers a boat accident that leaves her in an unrecoverable coma. Matt has to rebuild the relationship with his two daughters Alex (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller) as well as deal with the reveal this his wife was planning to leave him for her lover, a married estate agent Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard).

Payne’s film is heartfelt, low-key and a marvellous showcase for George Clooney who has probably never been better as the grieving and shocked Matt, struggling to come to terms with revelations about his own life that come completely out of the blue. In particular, his own realisation that he has left far too much of his family life to his wife, and his wife has in any case a less than perfect relationship with their two troubled children. Alex (Shailene Woodley) has a history of substance abuse and hell-raising while her sister Scottie (Amara Miller) is using bullying as a way of acting out. King, its clear, has let his connection with his family drift away with his consumption in his work, a character flaw that leaves him with a serious of painful revelations about his own failures.

These revelations are expertly acted by Clooney, who gives the part a rawness and edge beneath his natural charm that becomes deeply involving. He makes Matt both desperate, bewildered and confused as well as kind, decent and forgiving. Payne’s films never present easy solutions to problems, and frequently hold up their leading characters as being the root of their own troubles. It’s the case here as well, as King must learn to realise that many of the problems he is discovering in his family life come out from his own mistakes and lack of focus. How should he respond to his discovery of his wife’s infidelity? How should he decide to react when he discovers his wife’s lover had his own family?

It’s never the easy choice, and it’s never a clean and easy solution that wraps everything up neatly. The problems we encounter will eventually require us to make intelligent, emotional decisions and accept there are no clean answers. When we meet Brian Speer, he’s not a bad guy just a bit weak. It’s the same throughout. Every character has depth and hinterland. Robert Forster as Matt’s father-in-law may seem foreboding and harsh – but then he is perhaps right to blame Matt for his daughter’s unhappiness, even while he never holds it too harshly against him. Alex’s spaced out boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) suddenly surprises Matt with his emotional insight into family dynamics.

And of course, his daughters who seem tearaways are in fact far more mature and supportive than might have been expected. Shailene Woodley is excellent as Alex, a young woman who doesn’t blame but demands to be part of solutions, and supports her father to make the tough calls. And the moral problems keep coming, mixed with surrealist comic touches. It’s the sort of film where Matt can make a shocking realisation about his wife, and then return to his table in his restaurant to be assailed by a garish traditional music band.

Despite all this Payne’s film captures a sense of affection and warmth without succumbing to sentimentality or easy solutions. The sort of satisfying outbursts of pain and cathartic anger are largely avoided for far more mature and realistic feelings of joint responsibility for problems and an acceptance that what our lives become are what we make of them as well as other people. It’s a sort of complex avoidance of black-and-white solutions that help to make the film feel truly real and grounded. While not many of us need to worry about the pressures of making decisions that will make us millionaires, all of us have had to deal with our own mistakes leading to others making mistakes and the emotional fallout that this can bring.

In the centre of Payne’s emotionally intelligent film are these excellent performances, with George Clooney hugely unlucky to miss out on an Oscar for his emotionally intelligent and rich performance here. Payne’s film takes the male mid-life and family crisis and subtly analyses from a host of positions and angles, not just the man itself. We can feel sorry for a bloke who has suffered blows but also see his own decisions have contributed to his position. It makes for a delightful and heartfelt film, which is beautifully made by Payne and superb showcase for intelligent, grown up film making.

Shakespeare meets Musicals in Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Alessandro Nivola (King Ferdinand of Navarre), Alicia Silverstone (Princess of France), Kenneth Branagh (Berowne), Natascha McElhone (Rosaline), Carmen Ejogo (Maria), Matthew Lillard (Longaville), Adrian Lester (Dumaine), Emily Mortimer (Katherine), Timothy Spall (Don Armado), Nathan Lane (Costard), Richard Briers (Nathaniel), Geraldine McEwan (Holofernia), Richard Clifford (Boyet), Jimmy Yuill (Constable Dull), Stefania Rocca (Jaquenetta)

Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known comedies. There is a reason for that – it’s simply not that good (it’s certainly the weakest Shakespeare play Branagh has brought to the screen). I’ve sat through some turgid, and terminally unfunny, stage productions of the play in the past – but this movie version presented something different, as Branagh plays fast and loose with the script and turns it into an all-singing, all-dancing musical, with only the barest sprinkling of Shakespeare dialogue.

LLL isn’t really about anything. The King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola), invites his three best friends (Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Lester and Matthew Lillard) to join him in three years of academic study, during the course of which they will forsake all female company. Of course, no sooner than the deal is made but the Princess of France (Alicia Silverstone) and her three companions (Natascha McElhone, Emily Mortimer and Carmen Ejogo) arrive in Navarre. Will love blossom to prevent the plans of the King? You betcha.

It’s slight stuff. The play always feels a little bit unfinished – it ends with the lovers separated (or as the play puts it “Jack hath not Jill”) but with hints of hope. It’s oddly structured – more like the first part of a series of plays than a standalone (the lovers don’t get together until almost Act 4, and the men and women spend very little time together). There is a series of dull sub plots revolving around the academics of Navarre, with whole scenes made up of obscure Latin jokes. As the icing on the top, a clown and a foppish Spaniard form a bizarre love triangle with a busty country wench. None of these plots is really resolved at the end. It’s a play that focuses a lot more on floral dialogue and intricate poetry rather than narrative.

Branagh addresses a lot of these problems by simply trimming the play to the absolute bone. I would guess at least 65% of the dialogue has been cut – probably more. Although this means some roles are now so small they feel like sketches (in particular many of the more working-class characters and academics), it does mean that this has a bit more narrative thrust and energy than most productions. Moving the setting to 1939 also gives a good context to the play, and places the political issues into an understandable context. It also gives a tension to underlie the lightness of the rest of the play. Branagh manages to remove most of the cumbersome exposition dialogue by replacing it with a series of 1930s-style cine-news reels (spryly voiced by Branagh himself). He even resolves the “cliffhanger” ending of the play with a similar device (reflecting the tonal shift at the end of the original play), which helps to ground the otherwise lightweight play in a very real world, where war carries a cost.

Of course, the main invention was to replace the intricacy (and obscurity!) of some of the dialogue with song and dance routines. The songs are carefully chosen from the great musical composers of the 1930s and 40s, and are delicately interwoven with the dialogue. Now for the purist this could of course be a source of fury, but when the material is one of the weaker plays, getting this “greatest hits” version of the text alongside some excellent songs works really well.

The song and dance numbers also have a certain charm about them. Most of the cast are not especially talented singers and dancers – only Nathan Lane and Adrian Lester have song and dance experience (and it certainly shows when Branagh allows them to let rip). The actors went through an extensive “musicals boot camp”, which certainly taught them the steps, but the musical numbers still retain a charming amateurishness about them. Sure it helps a truly gifted dancer like Adrian Lester stand out, but it’s also quite sweet to see actors like Richard Briers tripping the light fantastic. (Check Lester out at around 3:10 in the video below).

The real issue with some of the actors chosen is less with their song-and-dance strength, but that their acting strength doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Branagh’s delivery and comic timing is spot on, and McElhone is a worthy adversary cum love interest for him; but Nivola and Silverstone are a little too out-of-their-depth to bring much more than blandness to their key roles. Amongst the supporting roles, Nathan Lane stands out in making Costard actually quite funny, but Lillard mistakes gurning for wit. Mortimer and Ejogo are engaging but have precious little screentime.

The film is shot with Branagh’s usual ambition on a set that has a deliberate air of artificiality about it, evoking the classic 1930s studio musical. All exteriors deliberately feel like interiors, and there are homages aplenty, from Singin’ in the Rain to Ethel Merman. Each musical number has its own unique feel and the majority are shot with Branagh’s usual love of long-take. Some of the numbers stick in the head longer than others – but that’s just the nature of musicals. Particularly good are I Won’t Dance, I Get a Kick Out of You, I’ve Got a Crush on You, Cheek to Cheek and a steamy tango to Let’s Face the Music and Dance.

LLL doesn’t want to do anything more than entertain – and sometimes it probably tries a little too hard to be light and frothy, as if Branagh was consciously kicking back after the mammoth undertaking of his uncut Hamlet. Perhaps that is why LLL appealed to him – Shakespeare comedies don’t get less treasured or more inconsequential than this, so he had total creative freedom to do what he liked, in a way that a Twelfth Night or a Much Ado About Nothing wouldn’t allow him. It’s the sort of film you need to plug into the mindset of – and some aren’t going to be able to do that. It’s not a perfect film, but the lightness Branagh handles things with pretty much carries it through.

Perhaps that lightness however is slightly the problem: in Branagh’s previous films he found a perfect mixture between influential reimaginings (Henry V), wonderful crowd-pleasers (Much Ado) and reverential labours of love (Hamlet). People probably expected something else from him than a high-budget, lightly amateur musical with precious little Shakespeare in it. I think this partly explains the hesitant response this has received from the public and critics since: it’s just such an unlikely ideal that people didn’t seem to know how to respond to it.

Of course, as anyone who has sat through an average production of the play can tell them, they weren’t missing much from what has been cut – and this is still an infectiously funny, frothy concoction. It may have a slightly mixed acting bag – some of the leads are underpowered, while some strong actors like Timothy Spall are underused – but the actors do seem to be enjoying themselves, and this enjoyment basically communicates to the audience. It’s not a concept that could have worked with a long running time, but it sure works for the short term. It’s an odd concept – and it was a huge box office bomb – but it’s one that works.