Tag: Philip Baker Hall

The Insider (1999)

Mann’s finest film is a chilling breakdown of the insidious strength of corporations

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Dr Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace), Diane Venora (Liane Wigand), Philip Baker Hall (Don Hewitt), Lindsay Crouse (Sharon Tiller), Debi Mazar (Debbie De Luca), Stephen Tobolowsky (Eric Kluster), Colm Feore (Richard Scruggs), Bruce McGill (Ron Motley), Gina Gershon (Helen Caperelli), Michael Gambon (Thomas Sandefur), Rip Torn (John Scanlon), Cliff Curtis (Sheikh Fadlallah)

For decades we persuaded ourselves smoking was problem-free. Then, when we finally decided sucking tar into your lungs several times a day probably didn’t go hand-in-hand with good health, Big Tobacco bent over backwards to argue they didn’t believe for one minute nicotine was actually addictive. This lie – they were improving the hit to increase the customer base – was blown upon by corporate whistle blower, and former B&W employee, Dr Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe).

But the battle over the reporting of the story also exposed the fault-lines in corporate-owned media companies, as Wigand’s 60 Minutes interview was canned by a CBS network terrified of legal action imperilling a corporate sale, much to the fury of crusading producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who spent months bringing Wigand in only to see him brushed aside. The Insider charts these two stories merging into each other: the deadly campaign of intimidation and smears against Wigand, segueing into the caving of CBS in the face of legal threats with Bergman left furious, betrayed and turning his campaigning fire against his own employers.

This all comes grippingly to life in Michael Mann’s superb slice of All the President’s Men inspired-reportage, turning this 1996 TV-and-business scandal into a sleek, intelligent thriller that takes a chilling look at how corporate America rigs the game in its own favour with impunity. The Insider is as rightfully furious at the dirty-tricks and menace of the tobacco companies, as it is at the subtly insidious way corporate interests pollutes news reporting. It does this while also presenting its two heroes as flawed men with more in common than they might think: competitive alpha males, both prone to taking rash, destructive actions in fits of head-strong self-righteousness, caring about their own moral code over the needs of others.

The Insider splits into two clear acts: the agonising decision of Wigand to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance, in the face of immense personal and professional pressure and Bergman’s subsequent struggle to deliver on his word and get Wigand’s confession on air. The first half offers the more traditional heroics – and the more overt hero-and-villain structure, but increasingly I find the second half, of news shows being dictated to by their paymasters more-and-more unsettlingly prescient, becoming increasingly relevant the older the film gets.

But that first half makes for a compellingly tense pressure-cooker view. It’s powered by an excellent performance by Russell Crowe (effortlessly convincing as someone twenty years older, and collecting his first Oscar nomination). Crowe makes Wigand principled but prickly, brave but confrontational and at times frustratingly self-righteous. His moral qualms are finally sharpened into action his fury at the blunt-intimidation from B&W’s sinisterly avuncular CEO (a masterful cameo from Michael Gambon – one of the great single-scene performances in movies) and its implication that he cannot trusted to stick to his NDA. Wigand barely involves his wife (a tightly-wound Diane Venora) in his decisions, only mentioning his dismissal in passing and deciding to appear on 60 minutes (a decision that will shatter their lives) unilaterally.

But Wigand also has higher motives. He wants to be able to look his daughters in the eye, having sold-out to burnish the dirty-deeds of B&W with his scientific skills. He’s rightly affronted by the lies Big Tobacco has sold the public and undergoes enormous sacrifices (financial, marital, professional, legal, death threats and a public smear campaign) to see things through. Mann’s cool mix of starkness and shadows, full of drained out colours and greys, is perfect for a world where Wigand is shadowed by strangers at a driving range, receives bullets in his mailbox and searches late at night for who has left footprints in his garden. Crowe superbly conveys a man acting out of an increasing sense of moral imperative, struggling desperately to hold himself together under immense pressure.

This section of the film – especially with its clear antagonist – plays as a superb personal and political thriller, Mann expertly conveying lurking menace. In 1999 the second half of the film, the struggle to actually broadcast Wigand’s interview, was often seen as slightly underwhelming. But actually it shows a different type of danger: less overt and heavy-handed corporate power with its legal injunctions and bullying FBI guys hoping for a cushy retirement job with the corporation, more how these corporate masters assert control in quiet, less direct ways to decide what we hear or see.

Our journalists have no fear when confronting criminals or terrorists – The Insider’s prologue establishes this with Bergman and host Mike Wallace not flinching in the face of gun-toting Hezbollah fighters guarding the Sheikh they have arranged to interview. But they face far greater threats to their integrity when confronted with lawyers and corporate directors (effectively embodied by Gina Gershon and Stephen Tobolowsky as uncaring suits) whose threats are indirect and insidious. Wigand’s interview could imperil the sale of CBS and the bonus of the corporate suits, and in that scenario journalist principles can go hang. Christopher Plummer is, by the way, superb as the charismatic Wallace, who caves to pressure then convinces himself he hasn’t, a super-star of the airwaves who loses part of his wider integrity trying to protect his position.

And doesn’t the idea that corporations can squeeze the life out of journalistic stories feel even more chilling today? After all, virtually every single news outlet out there is owned by a major business, all with their own agendas. Can we really believe they’ve not all made calls on gets reported, based on what their shareholders might think? Mann’s film skilfully – and rather chillingly – shows how quickly they can re-work the agenda. It leaves Lowell Bergman raging (as only Al Pacino can) against the betrayal of trust he’s being forced to make towards Wigand.

Crowe’s pressure-cooker performance stole many of the headlines on release but The Insider also benefits from an excellent Pacino performance. Utterly committed to his principles and – just like Wigand – utterly unwilling to compromise them even an inch, no matter the cost, Bergman will pick up the windmill-tilting banner, and charge with it at his own paymasters. No one can rip through speeches quite like Pacino, but he gives Bergman a real genuineness, grounded in a fundamental decency, whose righteous anger is underpinned with world-weary disbelief that it’s come to this.

It grounds an excellently studied breakdown of a journalistic turf war. The Insider plays like All the President’s Men, if Woodward and Bernstein had been spiked after they nailed the story. Mann demonstrates the influence in The Insider’s crisply immersive photography that employs depth of frame and gyroscopic deep-focus, as well as in the crisp editing and the film’s mesmerising emersion in the complex details of building a story. Combine that with a gripping conspiracy thriller on the machinations of ruthless corporations and The Insider makes for a compelling film.

Zodiac (2007)

A chilling chronicle of the hunt for a serial killer told with a superb mix of journalism and filmic flair

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal (Robert Graysmith), Mark Ruffalo (Inspector Dave Toschi), Robert Downey Jnr (Paul Avery), Anthony Edwards (Inspector Bill Armstrong), Brian Cox (Melvin Belli), Elias Koteas (Sergeant Jack Mulanax), Donal Logue (Captain Ken Narlow), John Carroll Lynch (Arthur Leigh Allen), Dermot Mulroney (Captain Marty Lee), Chloë Sevingy (Melanie Graysmith), John Terry (Charles Thieriot), Philip Baker Hall (Sherwood Morrill), Zach Grenier (Mel Nicolai)

It’s one of the great unsolved mysteries of American history, like San Francisco’s version of Jack the Ripper. For a large chunk of the late 60s and early 70s, a serial killer known only as “the Zodiac killer” murdered at least five (and claimed 37) innocent people, all while sending mysterious, cipher-filled letters to San Francisco newspapers, taunting police and journalists for failing to catch him and threatening further violent acts. The investigation sifted through mountains of tips and half clues but only produced one possible suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen: though no fingerprint or handwriting match could conclude a case.

The story of the hunt for this elusive killer, stretching into the 1980s and concluding with another dead-end coda in 1992, is bought to the screen in a film from David Fincher that expertly mixes cinematic flair with journalistic observation. Channelling All the President’s Men and 70s conspiracy thrillers as much as it does the dark obsession of Fincher’s Seven, Zodiac is a master-class not only in the bewildering detail of large-scale investigations (in the days before computer records and DNA evidence) but also the grinding, destructive qualities of obsession, as those hunting the Zodiac killer struggle to escape the shadow of a case that grows to dominate their lives.

Zodiac focuses on three men, all of whom find their lives irretrievably damaged by their investigation. At first, it seems the drive will come from Robert Downey Jnr’s Paul Avery. Avery is the hard-drinking, charismatic, old-school crime correspondent on the San Francisco Chronicle. In a performance exactly the right-side of flamboyant narcissism, Downey Jnr’s Avery is a man who likes to appear like he takes nothing seriously, even while the burden of the case (and a threat to his life from the Zodiac killer) tips him even further into a drink habit that is going to leave him living in a derelict houseboat, in a permanent state of vodka-induced intoxication.

The second is Inspector Dave Tosci, a performance of dogged, focused professionalism from Mark Ruffalo. He’s confident he’ll find his man, and will go to any lengths to do it, staying on call night and day, and hoarding facts about the case like a miser. He relies more than he knows on level-headed, decent partner Bill Armstrong (played with real warmth by Anthony Edwards). Tosci’s self-image and belief slowly crumble as every lead turns dead end, every gut instinct refuses to be backed by the evidence. The killing spree becomes his personal responsibility, a cross he bears alone for so long that when a belated letter from Zodiac surfaces in 1978, his own superiors believe Tosci sent it in some vain attempt to keep a cooling case alive.

Our third protagonist, present from the arrival of the very first Zodiac letter at the door of the Chronicle, is Jake Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith. A quiet, studious, teetotal political cartoonist who is literally a boy scout, Graysmith spent a huge chunk of the 70s and 80s trying to crack the case, eventually turning his investigation into a best-selling book. It’s Graysmith who becomes the focus of Fincher’s investigation of obsession. The glow of monomania is in Gyllenhaal’s eyes from the very start, as the cipher and its deadly message spark a mix of curiosity and moral duty in him. He feels compelled to solve the crime, but it’s a compulsion that will overwhelm his life. The Zodiac is his Moby Dick, the all-powerful monster he must slay to save the city. (“Bobby, you almost look disappointed” Avery tells him, when Avery suggests some of the Zodiac’s murderous claims are false, as if reducing the wickedness of the Zodiac also reduces the power of Graysmith’s quest.)

The real Graysmith commented when he saw the film, “I understand why my wife left me”. It’s a superb performance of school-boy doggedness, mixed with quietly fanatical, all-consuming obsession from Gyllenhaal, as the film makes clear how close he came (closer than almost anyone else) to cracking the case, but nearly at the cost of his own sanity. Graysmith pop quizzes his pre-teen children on the case over their breakfast (a far cry from, at first, his instinct to shield his son from the press coverage) and as he becomes increasingly unkempt, so his house more and more becomes a mountain of boxes and case notes.

It’s the secondary theme of Zodiac: how obsession doesn’t dim, even when events and evidence drop off. The second half of the film features very little new in the case (which peaked in the early 70s) but focuses on the lingering impact of the ever more desperate and lonely attempts to solve it. Armstrong, the most well-adjusted of the characters, perhaps knew it was a hopeless crusade when he threw his cards in and left the table after a few years to spend time with his children while they grew up. Avery cashes out as well – even if his health never recovers. Tosci is cashiered from the game, and even Graysmith finally realises the impact on him.

That second half of the film is long. Too long. It also, naturally, leaves us with no ending – a sad coda that hints at the guilt of primary (only) suspect Arthur Leigh Allen, but gives us (just like the surviving victims) no closure. It’s fitting, and deliberate, but still the only real flaw of Zodiac is that, at 150 minutes, it’s too long. The deliberate draining of life from the case, like a deflating balloon, also impacts the narrative, which consciously drops in intensity (and, to a degree, interest – despite Gyllenhaal’s subtle and complex work as Graysmith). It’s even more noticeable considering the compelling flair with which Fincher delivers the first half of his scrupulously researched film.

Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt spent almost 18 months interviewing everyone involved with the case. Nothing was included in the film unless it could be verified by witnesses. That included the crimes of the Zodiac: only attacks where there were survivors are shown, the only minor exception being Zodiac’s murder of a taxi driver (where only distant eye-witnesses were available) – even then, every event is confirmed by ballistics and no dialogue is placed into the mouth of the victim. The film also acknowledges the unknown nature of the Zodiac killer: each time the masked killer appears in recreations of his crime he is played by a different (masked) actor, subtle differences in build, tone of voice and manner reflecting the contradictory eye-witness statements. These chilling scenes are shot with a sensitivity that sits alongside their horrifying brutality. Fincher felt a genuine responsibility to reflect the horror of what happened, but with no sensationalism.

Instead, he keeps his virtuoso brilliance for the investigation. The newspaper room filling with the super-imposed scrawl of the Zodiac killer, while the actors read out the words. Restrained but hypnotic editing, carefully grimed photography, camera angles that present everyday items in alarming new ways, a mounting sense of grim tension at several moments that makes the film hard to watch. A superb sequence surrounding the Zodiac’s demand to speak to celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli (a gorgeous cameo from Brian Cox), first on a live TV call-in show, then in person (a “secret meeting” swamped by armed police, which Zodiac, of course, doesn’t turn up to). This is direction – aided by masterful photography (Harris Savides) and editing (Angus Wall) – that immerses us in a world (like drowning in a non-fiction bestseller), while never letting its flair draw attention to itself.

Zodiac was a box-office disappointment and roundly forgotten in 2007. It’s too long and loses energy, but that’s bizarrely the point. It implies, heavily, that Allen (played with a smug blankness by John Carroll Lynch) was indeed the killer, but doesn’t stack the deck – every single piece of counter evidence is exhaustingly shown. In fact, that’s what the film is: exhaustive in every sense. It leaves you reeling and tired. It might well have worked better, in many ways, as a mini-series. But it’s still a masterclass from Fincher and one of the most honest, studiously researched and respectful true-life crime dramas ever made. And just like life, it offers neither easy answers, obvious heroes or clean-cut resolutions, only doubts and lingering regrets.

The Truman Show (1998)

Jim Carrey starts to wonder if there is more to his life than meets the eye in The Truman Show

Director: Peter Weir

Cast: Jim Carrey (Truman Burbank), Ed Harris (Christof), Laura Linney (Hannah Gill/Meryl Burbank), Noah Emmerich (Louis Coltrane/Marlon), Natascha McElhone (Sylvia/Lauren Garland), Holland Taylor (Alanis Montclair/Angela Burbank), Brian Delate (Walter Moore/Kirk Burbank), Paul Giamatti (Simeon), Peter Krause (Truman’s boss), Harry Shearer (Mike Michaelson), Philip Baker Hall (Network executive), John Pleshette (Network executive)

Have you ever fantasised that your whole life was a movie? It would be great wouldn’t it? You’re the star of every scene, the story lines always have a happy ending and you always emerge as the hero. But what if your life really was a massive TV series? What if everyone you had ever met was an actor playing a role? What if every experience in your life had been carefully scripted? What if nothing you knew was a real or even remotely true? That’s no-where near as fun.

Of course the odd thing today is that I suspect there are more than a few people out there who would still consider that a decent pay-off – even if they couldn’t know that they were on television, at least they would be on it. The Truman Show predated much of the surge of reality TV that was to come in the 00s, when shows like Big Brother made putting everyday (at least at first) people into situations and simply watching what happens became TV gold. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is approaching his 30^thbirthday. Little does he know that his entire life he’s been at the centre of an elaborate TV show and that the hometown he has never left is a giant self-contained film studio. But as incidents begin to pile up, Truman suddenly questions his reality – while the show’s cast and production team work to keep him in ignorance. After all, we can’t let this ratings cash cow die!

With a precise, sharp and intelligent script by Andrew Niccol, Peter Weir’s film is a triumph. It’s partway between drama and satire, but never lets the one compromise another. It could have become a lumpen message film about the intrusion of media into our lives. Instead it’s an acute satire of TV gone mad, with a very real, sympathetic character who we invest in. Effectively the movie works on the same premise as the fictional TV show: the viewers know the world they are seeing is larger than life, but they know the character of Truman is grounded and true. It works as it bases its satirical attacks around a heartfelt story of a man (unwittingly at first) on a quest for freedom.

It’s two horses the film rides extraordinarily well – and even effectively comments on. Throughout the action we cut to the same regular joes watching the show: people in a bar, security cops, a pair of old ladies on a sofa. These people are aware they are watching a show – and watching a man effectively imprisoned – but have their emotions manipulated with ease, first by the producers then by the excitement of Truman’s very real quest. As they gasp and cheer as Truman works his way out of his prison, there is not a shred of acknowledgement to them that buy ‘booing’ the TV network they should also be booing themselves for watching in the first place. Instead they treat it just as another episode of their favourite show, the celebrations as transient and hollow as their tears of joy as the producers reintroducing Truman’s long-lost father in an attempt to ‘explain’ the strange circumstances he’s seen.

The Truman Show itself takes place in a perfect, unintimidating slice of 50’s inspired nostalgia. It’s a perfect picture of Americana – and its conservatism is itself a satire. Of course the producers set the show in the most cosy, comforting setting they could imagine. The rose-tinted past is always something we turn to for comfort viewing (take a look at the success of Downton Abbey). Alongside that, it’s a world run by advertising: Truman’s wife frequently stops to deliver scripted adverts, singing the praises of household products; a pair of old buffers have the job of pushing Truman up against a different advert hoarding every day; Truman’s friend Marlon praises their beer with every sip.

And in the sky: we have the studio itself, run by the shows creator Christof. Superbly played by Ed Harris, as part hipster artist, part messianic genius (“I am the creator” he tells Truman near the end, his voice coming through a beam of skylight, adding after a half-beat “of a television show”), Christof has carefully plotted Truman’s entire life from birth. He partly sees himself as Truman’s father – but he as much sees Truman as a tool he can manipulate for his own ends. A hands-on show-runner, Christof believes himself a genius whose will cannot be questioned. This softly-spoken dictator is a terrifying insight into what happens when self-appointed artistic geniuses can explore their ideas with no regard for morality and no restraints.

Truman himself is a charming, sweet, decent fellow – I suppose if nothing else Christof has done a superb job of bringing him up. But his entire life is a manipulated lie. The whole town is full of subconscious messages encouraging him to stay – as is the advice from his wife and best friend. Most cruelly of all, he has been deliberately traumatised into a terror of water by being made to feel responsible as a boy for the drowning of his father. Christof even boasts of his ingenuity in this “plot line” to help insure Truman would be too scared to ever consider leaving his home.

Jim Carrey was a revelation as Truman – Weir was the first director to refocus his comic mania into something more intimate and true. The part still makes a lot of hay from Carrey’s rubbery comedic chops – its part of Truman’s charm – but he matches it with a Jimmy Stewartish decency and earnestness. As the illusion begins to crack, his bemusement turns to something between disbelief and anger, but never compromises his humanity. You can see why billions of people watched him – and also understand why a man so accommodating and decent has not questioned his life before. Witty, gentle and human it’s a great performance.

But perhaps the film’s greatest strength is Weir’s sharp, clear-eyed, largely unobtrusive direction. The film makes nifty use of all the thousands of cameras contained in Truman’s world – with shots taken from button cams, CCTV, dashboards and all sorts. Its intermixed with normal camera angles, but gives us a beautiful sense of Truman’s world, and the TV world coming together throughout. The pace of the film is perfect and its slow reveal of information delicately done. Weir’s intercutting between ‘fictional’ and real world is superbly judged and the film wears its satire very lightly as well superbly mixing what could have been a dark film of imprisonment and abuse with a lightness and charm. Above all, it manages to both be a compelling story with a sympathetic hero and a sharp-pronged criticism of the shallowness of media and its viewing public.

It might well have been far too ahead of its time when it was released. It looks smarter and smarter each passing year. Truman’s world is an Instagram paradise, and with social media we’ve got even more used to spending our leisure time looking through other people’s lives rather than our own. It’s all part of what helps make Niccol’s script so sharp and prescient. Directed superbly by Weir and wonderfully acted – perhaps most of all by Harris’ Warhol turned dictator – it keeps you entertained, invested and leaves you cheering. Just like the viewers watching Truman being manipulated. Which makes you realise: is the film attacking its audience as much as anyone else? After all, we’d all watch this stuff in real life: look at how we rubberneck at accidents. What’s wrong with us eh?

Magnolia (1999)

Family dramas come together in Paul Thomas Anderson’s beloved Magnolia

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Jeremy Blackman (Stanley Spector), Tom Cruise (Frank TJ Mackey), Melinda Dillon (Rose Gator), April Grace (Gwenovier), Luiz Guzman (Luiz), Philip Baker Hall (Jimmy Gator), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Phil Parma), Ricky Jay (Burt Ramsey), William H Macy (“Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith), Alfred Molina (Solomon Solomon), Julianne Moore (Linda Partridge), Michael Murphy (Alan Kligman), John C. Reilly (Officer Jim Kurring), Jason Robards (Earl Patridge), Melora Walters (Claudia Wilson Gator), Felicity Huffman (Cynthia), Eileen Ryan (Mary), Michael Bowen (Rick Spector)

After the success of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson landed a terrific deal: he could make what he wanted, about anything at all, at any length he liked. “I was in a position I will never ever be in again” is how Anderson remembers it. And thus was born Magnolia, a beautifully assembled labour of love, an imaginative remix of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts with biblical imagery. A sprawling collection of short stories, which leans into high tragedy and melodrama, Anderson’s Magnolia is the sort of film that is always going to find a special place on a film buff’s list of favourite films.

The film follows the lives of several people over a single day in LA. Legendary host of long running quiz show What Do Kids Know? Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) is dying of cancer and desperate to reconcile with his traumatised daughter Claudia (Melora Walters). Claudia is tentatively starting a relationship with devout and kindly police officer Jim Kurring (John C Reilly). Former champion of Gator’s show, “Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith’s (William H Macy) life is a disaster after his parents stole his winnings, and he’s struggling to hold down even the most basic of jobs. Former producer of the show Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) is also dying of cancer, cared for by his dedicated nurse Phil (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Earl’s wife Linda (Julianne Moore) is wracked with guilt, while Earl himself is desperate to reconcile with his estranged son Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise), now a self-help guru who coaches men on how to pick up women.

If you can’t see the links between the works of Robert Altman here, then you clearly need to look again. But it’s well worth it, as Anderson is a worthy successor to the master. He directs with a fluid confidence that comes from a director making a picture to please himself. Magnolia is frequently self-indulgent in its style and quirks, but it doesn’t matter when the effect of watching the film is so rewarding. From long takes to having the characters (all of them in different locations) sing along with Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” at a key moment in the film, there are flourishes here that will annoy some but will be precisely what others fall in love with the film for.

And that love is deserved as this is a thoughtful and intelligent film about the impact the past (and specifically our parents) can have on us. As the man said, “they fuck you up, your Mum and Dad”. Certainly the case here. From “Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith to Claudia Gator, the film is crammed at every level with children (young and old) who have had their lives negatively affected by their upbringings. The past is a heavy burden, and it’s near impossible to shake-off – and in the cases of Donnie and Claudia brings with it a heavy dose of self-loathing.

But what’s striking is that problems with the past don’t result in the same outcomes for people. Who would have thought that seemingly misogynistic motivational speaker Mackey’s beef with his dad is that Earl walked out on him and his dying mother when Mackey was a teenager? Part of the fascinating psychology of the film is how a son who loved and cared for his mother grew up to encourage men to treat women just as his father treated his mother. Is this some sort of perverse way to feel closer to the father who abandoned him? Perhaps Mackey has defined his life around hatred for his father, along with a deep longing for love – and perhaps his inability to deal with these feelings led to a professional career espousing the exact opposite? One of the neat things about Anderson’s film is that it largely avoids pat answers to this sort of thing. It’s left up to us to decide for ourselves – and perhaps reflect on how every person is an unanswerable riddle.

Whatever the answers are, it’s clear that parental problems are being paid-forward. The new Quiz Kid champion Stanley Spencer is a precocious child genius, being treated as an ATM by his father, who brags about his son while passive-aggressively demanding Stanley keep winning to continue funding his failing acting career. Stanley is a desperately unhappy child, more than smart enough to realise he is a performing monkey but unable to escape. And how can you get out of knots like that? After all, the film shows us one possible future for Stanley with Donnie – but walks a deft tightrope on whether the same life of loneliness and disappointment is inevitable for Stanley or not.

These familial clashes are introduced in the first hour and then simmer with exquisite timing during the film’s second hour. Anderson’s brilliant decision to build the film around a live recording of Gator’s quiz show means we are constantly reminded (as the show plays in the background throughout other scenes) that everything we are seeing is happening at the same time. The second hour of the film is a superbly deft cross-cutting from storyline to storyline, each building in tension. The desperation and entrapment in each scene beautifully spark off and contrast with each other. The sequence is at times marginally undermined by a slightly oppressive music score, but it’s beautifully assembled and shot and carries a real power – a superb balancing act of almost real time action that plays out for a nearly the whole of the second act.

And Anderson knows skilfully to balance the gloom with real sparks of humanity and decency. Two characters in the film – Reilly’s cop and Hoffman’s nurse – are decent, kind and generous souls who have an overwhelmingly positive impact on every character they encounter. Both characters – and both actors are superb in these roles – are quiet, low-key but humane people who offer a quiet absolution to a host of characters, and opportunities to move on from the burdens of the past. Hoffman’s Phil is a genuinely kind person, who puts others before himself while Reilly’s Jim (surely the best performance of the actor’s career) is such a sweet, well-meaning, honest guy, that you understand why so many people feel bound to unburden themselves to him.

There is a lot to unburden in this film, and some of these moments tip over into melodrama at points. There are tear stained deathbed confessions, and angry, tearful moments of resentment and guilt bursting to the surface. At times, Magnolia is a little in love with these big moments, and indulges them too much, but it offers so many moments of quiet pain that you forgive it.

Not that the film is perfect. Today, even Anderson says it’s too long – and it really is. Unlike Altman, Anderson is less deft at pulling together all the threads in an overlapping story. This is effectively a series of short films intercut into one – the plot lines don’t overlap nearly as much as you might expect, with only Jim moving clearly from one plotline to another. It’s also a film that is driven largely by men. Of the few female characters, all are defined by their relationship to a man (and an older dying man at that), and not one of the female characters isn’t some form of victim.

Anderson’s failure to really wrap the stories together means you can imagine unpicking the threads and reducing the runtime. Julianne Moore’s role as Earl’s guilty, unfaithful trophy wife (is she unaware of Earl’s own past of infidelity?) could have been easily shed from the film. Moore, much as I like her, gives a rather hysterical, mannered performance that feels out of touch with some of the more naturalistic work happening elsewhere in the film. The most melodramatic of the plots (every scene features Moore shouting, weeping, shrieking or all three), it also ends with the most contrived pat “hopeful ending”. It’s a weaker story that lags whenever it appears on screen.

Magnolia starts with a discussion of coincidence, but it’s not really about that – and the coincidence of all these people seems largely in the film to be reduced to the fact that they are all living in the same city with similar problems. It’s a slightly odd note to hit, as if Anderson slightly shifted the focus away from lives moving into and out of each other, in favour of a series of more self-contained linear stories. (That opening montage discussion of three (fictional) moments of fate and chance, while beautifully done, could also easily be trimmed from the film).

But then, these tweaks wouldn’t change the fact that Magnolia is a superbly made film, or that Anderson is a great filmmaker, even if he doesn’t quite manage to create the sprawling, interweaving, state of the nation piece he’s aiming for here. But as a collection of beautifully done short stories, it’s great. And the acting is superb. Tom Cruise drew most of the plaudits for an electric performance of egotism and triumphalism hiding pain and vulnerability near the surface, Anderson using Cruise’s physicality and intelligence as a performer better than perhaps any other director. Among the rest of the cast, Hall is superb as the guilt ridden Gator, Macy very moving as the desperate Donnie and Melora Walters heartrending as the film’s emotional centre, who ends the film breaking the fourth wall with a tender smile, that is perhaps one of the most beautiful final shots of modern cinema.

All this and it rains frogs at the end as well. But that introduction of biblical bizarreness is both strangely profound and fitting for Anderson’s stirring and inspiring film.

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow get wrapped up in murder and mayhem in The Talented Mr Ripley

Director: Anthony Minghella

Cast: Matt Damon (Tom Ripley), Gwyneth Paltrow (Marge Sherwood), Jude Law (Dickie Greenleaf), Cate Blanchett (Meredith Logue), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Freddie Miles), Jack Davenport (Peter Smith-Kingsley), James Rebhorn (Herbert Greenleaf), Sergio Rubini (Inspector Roverini), Philip Baker Hall (Alvin MacCarron), Celia Weston (Aunt Joan)

Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley – sociopath, confidence trickster, human blank piece of paper and murderer – is so unknowable he’s been played on screen by actors as wildly diverse as Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich, Barry Pepper and, perhaps most famously today, by Matt Damon. Ripley’s complexity – Highsmith described him as “suave, agreeable and utterly amoral” – and his general blankness and ability to adapt to different situations make him a challenging character to bring to the screen. Minghella’s film goes for a dark, Hitchcockian feeling drama that gives a lot of focus to feelings of sexual confusion and inadequacy in Ripley that motivate his actions and increasingly spiral out of control, leaving him isolated and damaged.

Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) allows himself to be mistaken by the owner of a shipping line, Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), as an old Harvard classmate of his son Dickie (Jude Law). Inveigling his way into Herbert’s trust, he is sent to Italy to persuade Dickie to return to America and take up a job in his father’s company. Happily taking the all-expenses-paid trip, Ripley finds himself besotted with the glamour and easy charm of Dickie, a handsome playboy, and soon positions himself as travelling companion to Dickie and his fiancée Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow). But Dickie’s attention is only fleeting, and soon Ripley feels betrayed as Dickie starts to refocus elsewhere – leading eventually to Ripley murdering Dickie in a fit of jealous pique and using his faint resemblance to Dickie’s passport photo to assume his identity and live off his allowance – all the while dodging meeting Marge, friends of Dickie and the police (who are searching for the disappeared Tom Ripley).

Minghella’s film is a complex, psycho-sexual thriller, shot with a sun-kissed warmth that accentuates the glamour and style of the Italian Riviera, while subtly keeping us distant from the characters and their increasingly complex motives. The richness and lushness of these expensive lives look as appealing and seductive to us as Ripley finds them when he arrives. However, its dark undertone is never lost, and the film is edited and assembled with a certain chill and coolness while Gabriel Yared’s score mixes some fun jazz remixes with more a ominous tone as the bodies start to pile up.

I love a lot of Minghella’s work. He’s an intelligent and literate director, and the script he prepared for this film shows that he’s a master of taking complex, multi-layered pieces of fiction and turning them into something impressive and cinematic. But watching The Talented Mr Ripley, with its effective mix of period charm and sixties swing, its clever apeing of sixties filming styles, its riffing on Hitchcockian tropes and its picture book locations around Italy, part of me wonders if this film started pushing him too far down the path of being a “literary” director. His film is intelligent, and alternates between being chilling and fun, but at times it’s also wearing its “important film-making” badge a little heavily. It’s like the film is straining a little too much for prestige, as if the luscious design, complex plotting, sharp dialogue and clever visuals are aiming a little too much for matching The English Patient’s Oscar hoovering.

Maybe that’s why, despite everything that is good here, this film doesn’t have quite the same success as that film. This is, I’ll confess, an odd thing to say in a film that is generally very positive – if a little too long – but there it is. Sometimes these things are intangible in a way. Part of the film’s problem is that very complexity of plotting and motivation that he (arguably) builds on from the book. One of the film’s biggest question marks hangs over Ripley himself.

Imagined here as a slightly diffident, awkward, closeted graduate, he never really convinces as the kind of ruthless opportunist the plot demands him to be. Much as the film – and Damon’s performance – nails the sociopathic blankness of Ripley, his ability to switch smoothly from persona to persona, at the same time Ripley either seems to care too much or too little. Damon never quite convinces as a man so in love with the highlife that he is happy living off the allowance of (and pretending to be) the adored friend he bludgeons to death in a boat.

This is where the homosexual undertone of the original has been converted into a overtone – and the film’s overplaying of Ripley’s physical, puppy-dog attraction to Dickie make him feel more dependent. The film works really hard to make him as sympathetic and vulnerable as possible, to make him a victim of his own warped circumstances and morality, and it never quite manages to make this make sense, or to carry real consistency. For all you feel Minghella wants us to think we are drilling into what makes a killer, the more we learn about Ripley the less substantial as a character he feels.

Damon, despite this, gives a good and generous performance. Generous because, playing quite a pathetic, indescribably blank man, he really manages to fade into the background of scenes. It does mean that he cedes most of the best work to his co-stars. Jude Law is radiantly cool, fiery, passionate, selfish and hugely attractive in a star-making turn as Dickie. Philip Seymour Hoffman is the epitome of a Bullingdon club bully turned young adult as Dickie’s school friend, seizing scenes with a louche aggressiveness. Cate Blanchett is equally brilliant as a warm, friendly socialite who inadvertently stirs terrible ideas in Ripley.

These actors are all highlights in a superbly mounted production, but one which doesn’t reveal or tell us as much as we might expect. Instead, Minghella gets slightly lost in his own intelligence when adapting the book, pushing the story into deeper, psycho-sexual motivations for its character that end up obscuring and fudging the actions he carries out in the film. It’s a gorgeous looking film, packed with wonderful scenes, but Damon’s Ripley seems too sensitive, too prone to the edge of tears, impossible to see as a man who could become a serial murderer. By giving a greater hinterland to Ripley, Minghella also changes the character fundamentally. It makes for an interesting development – but Ripley’s desperation, his essential weakness, his lack of control make him feel inconsistent with the setting and plot he is in.

Midnight Run (1988)

Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin go on the road in terrific buddy-movie action comedy Midnight Run

Director: Martin Brest

Cast: Robert De Niro (Jack Walsh), Charles Grodin (Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas), Yaphet Kotto (Special Agent Alonzo Mosely), John Ashton (Marvin Dorfler), Dennis Farina (Jimmy Serrano), Joe Pantoliano (Eddie Moscone), Richard Foronjy (Tony), Robert Miranda (Joey), Jack Kehoe (Jerry Geisler), Wendy Phillips (Gail), Danielle DuClos (Denise Walsh), Philip Baker Hall (Sidney)

There are few comic set-ups you can get better mileage from than an “odd couple” – they meet, they argue, they grow closer, they fight again, they reconcile. It’s a standard formula. Midnight Run throws this together with a road trip formula (two people have to get from A to B but via every other letter of the alphabet). Really it should be hugely predictable. But Midnight Run is well written, very well acted and hugely fun – it manages to feel both light and frothy, but also sufficiently real and dangerous. It’s a great comic movie.

Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) is a down-on-his-luck bounty hunter. Having been run out of the Chicago police force years ago for not taking a bribe, he’s skilled at his job but fundamentally unlucky and disenchanted. He’s looking for one big job to get him out: and it comes when mob accountant Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas (Charles Grodin) skips bail. Hired by bail bondsman Eddie Moscone (Joe Pantoliano), Walsh has four days to find the Duke bring him back to LA before his bail is forfeit – manage it and he’ll get a cool $100k. But the Duke has stolen millions from the mob – so they want him dead, the FBI want him to testify, rival bounty hunters want to take him in – it’s all working out into a very long week for Walsh.

I really enjoyed Midnight Run when I first watched it years ago – and it’s been years since I’ve seen it – so it’s a delight to find it is as good as I remember. In fact, if anything, I think it might be better. It’s very funny – without anyone playing the material for overt or obvious laughs – but it’s also got a lot of soul. It never loses sight of the characters at its heart, in particular the loneliness, sadness and regret at the heart of Walsh, who presents a chip-on-his-shoulder stance to the world, to hide a decent and honourable man who can’t believe his principles are rewarded.

De Niro took on Midnight Run because he wanted to try comedy (he had just played Satan and Al Capone, so probably had earned a rest). Walsh is probably one of his best comedic performances, because he treats it with the investment he gave his greatest roles. He makes Walsh a real person – and he’s willing to downplay the comedy. He doesn’t mug or play to the camera (as he has more recently), he just plays the role with a slight wryness, a touch of lightness from the actor, while the role itself is kept real. His increasing frustration and world-weary resignation matches up perfectly with the hint of sadness he keeps under the surface. It’s a very effective performance.

It helps as well that De Niro allows Charles Grodin to carry the bulk of the comedy. Grodin was cast over the wishes of the studio – but it was an inspired move as the chemistry between the two actors is fantastic. They play off each other brilliantly, Grodin the more worldly, urbane and dry accountant, opposite the stressed out Walsh. Grodin is very funny, and very genuine – and he’s as whippersmart as the Duke himself, constantly keeping us on our toes as to when the Duke is telling the truth, and when he is pulling the wool over our (and Walsh’s) eyes.

The film throws these two into a series of increasingly hilarious events – from a panic-attack on a plane, to a sneaky piece of con-man work in a back-district town – but mixes it up with genuine moments where the two open up to each other (there is a wonderful scene where Walsh, under the Duke’s gentle probing, final opens up about his past). Each of these moments is wonderfully played, and works so well because the two actors have a genuine connection between them. Both lift the other: Grodin clearly helps De Niro relax and loosen up, De Niro encourages Grodin to bring a greater depth to his acting than ever before.

The contrivances and competing parties they take on also throw in plenty of fun problems. My recording from the BBC from years ago was somewhat sanitised, so it’s a surprise to hear how many times De Niro uses the f-word in this film! Martin Brest films all this with a controlled restraint – perhaps a little too much control (Yaphet Kotto has talked of his misery of performing endless takes of even the simplest scenes). But the dangers Walsh has to take on walk just the right line between feeling real, and feeling comedic.

So we have a sinister gang-boss (played with lip-smacking relish by Dennis Farina), but his underlings on the ground are realistic-feeling, but non-too-bright gangsters (sharp enough to keep track of Walsh, dull enough to constantly say the dumbest things). The Feds are led by a tensely wound-up Yaphet Kotto, but the comedy comes from his cold stares at his underlings, who are prone to state the obvious. John Ashton is good value as a rival bounty hunter, a regular joe not-as-smart-as-he-thinks, but more than smart enough to win the odd hand. Joe Pantoliano gives possibly one of his most Pantoliano-performances of weasily whininess as Walsh’s bail bondsman boss.

Midnight Run rattles along brilliantly. It’s hugely entertaining, with a series of surprisingly high-blown action set-pieces (all met with a dry reaction from the Duke – “I’m sure we’re completely safe” when a pursing gun-laden helicopter temporarily drops out of view – and in turn a furious “Will you shut the fuck up!” from Walsh). Martin Brest gets the balance just right between comedy and drama, and creates a very funny movie where you end up caring a great deal for the characters. It’s a road-movie, buddy comedy that feels fresh and really works because it manages not to feel like it’s trying too hard. And of course it has a great closing scene – and one of my favourite end-lines to a movie ever: “Looks like I’m walking”. Check it out. You’ll like it.