Tag: Tom Burke

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Deliriously overblown and full of demented imagination even if it never quite feels necessary

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa), Chris Hemsworth (Dementus), Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack), Lachy Hulme (Immortan Joe), Alyla Browne (Young Furiosa), George Shevtsov (History Man), John Howard (People Eater), Angus Sampson (The Organic Mechanic), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Josh Helman (Scotus), Charlee Fraser (Mary Jabassa), Elsa Pataky (Mr Norton)

Is there a more demented mainstream film series than Mad Max? Furiosa follows the balls-to-the-wall excess of Mad Max: Fury Road with more of the same and a mythic atmosphere of Godfather Part II-backstory deepening. What you end up with might feel slightly odd or self-important – over two and a half hours of direct build-up for a pay-off we saw almost ten years ago (perhaps that’s why Furiosa ends with a cut-down play-back of the major events of Fury Road spliced into the credits, so we can all be reassured the villains left alive here got their comeuppance later). Furiosa is frequently overlong, a little too full of its love of expansive world-building and never quite convinces you that we actually need it – but then it’s also so bizarre, Grand Guignal and totally nuts perhaps we should just be happy that, in a world of focus-grouped content, it even exists.

We’re back on the desert wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia as motorbike riding goons kidnap young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from the Green Place hoping to use her to persuade crazed war lord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to lead his forces there. Despite the heroic efforts of her mother (Charlee Fraser), Furiosa remains a captive with only a secret tattoo on her arm (guess what’s going to happen to that…) to guide her home. Dementus provokes a resources war with cult-leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), with Furiosa traded, then escaping a hideous fate as one of Joe’s wives, instead growing up secretly-disguised as a boy (becoming Anya Taylor-Joy) as part of Praetorian Jack’s (Tom Burke) War Rig crew. Then the war between Immortan Joe and Dementus explodes again, foiling Furiosa and Jack’s plan to escape and giving Furiosa a change at revenge against Dementus.

That sprawling plot outline hopefully gives an idea of the ambitious bite George Miller is taking out of his world. While Fury Road took place over, at most, a few days, Furiosa stretches well over twenty, so gargantuan in scale and newly invented locations (as well as the mountainous citadel, we get the oil-rig nightmare of Gas Town and the Mordor-like Bullet Town) that it squeezes most of the entire Act Five war between Dementus and Immortan Joe into a brief, tracking-shot, montage. Furiosa is actually rather like a fever-dream Freud might have had after reading an airplane thriller, split into on-screen chapter titles – each with portentous (and sometimes pretentious) names like ‘The Pole of Inaccessibility’ – and a self-important narration dialling up mythic importance. If Fury Road was like someone stabbing an adrenalin-filled syringe straight into your heart, Furiosa is a like being told a detour-crammed story by someone a bit the worse-the-wear after a long night.

Not that Furiosa shirks on the banging madness of Fury Road’s slap-in-the-face action. It features a mid-film War Rig vs motor-bike raiders pitched-driving battle that is so extreme you wonder no one got crushed under wheel while making it, perfectly capturing the addled madness of Fury Road. A Chapter 4 pitched battle at one of Furiosa’s Dystopian-on-speed locations sees destruction, devastation and disaster on an even grander scale than anything else Miller has done before in this series, with an entire mining crater turned into a whirligig of firey destruction. That’s not forgetting three desperate desert chases – the finest of which is the film’s opening sequence, which see Furiosa’s mother track down and ruthlessly dispatch Furiosa’s kidnappers with a velociraptor-like ruthlessness and efficiency. No wonder Miller can put a whole war into a single shot – and why he feels comfortable ending Furiosa with a surprisingly personal and small-scale confrontation.

The main confrontation is between Furiosa and her self-proclaimed warlord – and would-be surrogate Dad – Dementus. Furiosa gives Chris Hemsworth the opportunity he’s been waiting for, allowing to flex his comic muscles, chew hilarious lumps out of the scenery and still show his menace. He makes Dementus an overgrown child, brilliant at stealing but with no idea about how to use them, obsessed with self-improvement (his dialogue is full of verbose, overwritten phrases, like a psychotic thesaurus) and only really happy when he’s smashing something. Introduced framing himself like a zen-like messiah, it doesn’t take long until he’s charging around on a chariot drawn by motorbikes, tasting other people’s tears and giving self-aggrandizing speeches while torturing Furiosa’s nearest-and-dearest. It’s a gift of a part, funny, scary, loathsome but strangely likeable even when he does awful things.

Opposite him, Anya Taylor-Joy actually has less to work with as Furiosa (she only takes over the part almost an hour into the film). Although this is meant to be a Furiosa film, it rarely feels like its telling us much more than we already know, especially since much the skills that ‘makes’ Furiosa what she is in Fury Road takes place in montage and her desire for freedom and to protect others are swiftly established so that any new-comers can unhesitatingly root for her. If Dementus is all talk, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa is silent and simmering, her humanity either shrinking or quietly growing from moment-to-moment. She has a quiet romance with Tom Burke’s world-weary Praetorian Jack, but this really about converting her into a mythic figure of vengeance rather than making her a personality.

A vengeance we’ve already seen pan-out in Fury Road. I’ll be honest, for all the grand scale of Furiosa, I don’t really feel I learned anything about its central character here I hadn’t already picked up from Theron’s brilliantly expressive performance in the first film. For all the impressiveness of the scale, a lot of Furiosa boils down to physically showing us things that were implied in the first (second?) film – from locations, to the reasons why Furiosa lost her arm to giving us clear reasons for her motivations. But all this is already there – and with brilliant economy – in Fury Road. Telling us all again feels like Miller giving us the footnotes (Furiosa Silmarillon perhaps?) rather than anything truly new and the Homeric backdrop Miller is going for never really clicks into place.

So the most successful swings are not narrative but visual. Furiosa reminds you what an absolutely insane extreme world Mad Max is. Death cults of radiation-deformed albinos? Villains who bottle milk straight from the nipple (not a cow’s), while another obsessively fondles his exposed, pierced ones? A villain who straps a battered old Teddy bear to himself? Action set-pieces that throw in everything – flying bikes, lava lakes and arms stoically lopped off? Even time-jumps are done imaginatively, like a wig, caught in a branch, decaying in front of our eyes. Every single design decision in this – and the gorgeously sun-kissed photography – is dialled up to eleven for George Miller’s very personal vision of pulpy, dystopian chaos.

You can wonder at times – as I did – whether we really needed a two-and-a-half hour film that’s expands the thematic depth of a chase movie which already outlined its characters motivations and personalities with impressive economy. But then, there are moments in Furiosa that just feel like they’ve been pulled out of someone’s crazy dreams. It’s put together with such a good mix of pulp poetry and head-banging craziness by George Miller that after a while you just go with it. And it sticks with you in a way focus-grouped Marvel films never seem to.

The Invisible Woman (2013)

Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Jones excel in the thoughtful and well handled The Invisible Woman

Director: Ralph Fiennes

Cast: Ralph Fiennes (Charles Dickens), Felicity Jones (Nelly Ternan), Kristin Scott Thomas (Mrs Ternan), Tom Hollander (Wilkie Collins), Joanna Scanlan (Catherine Dickens), Michelle Fairley (Caroline Graves), Tom Burke (George Wharton Robinson), Perdita Weeks (Maria Ternan), John Kavanagh (Reverend Benham), Amanda Hale (Fanny Ternan)

In 1865 Charles Dickens was involved in a train accident. While he worked tirelessly, tending to those caught up in the accident, he was also extremely careful to hide the fact he was travelling with a young actress called Nelly Ternan. Ms Ternan was his lover, had been for several years, and the couple were returning from Paris. Dickens managed to avoid the inquest and preserve the secret of his affair. Because, while he was happy to publicly announce his separation from his wife, the idea of the public hearing that he had an affair with someone 27 years younger than him was unthinkable.

The affair is deduced from careful deduction and the small remaining correspondence (both parties destroyed large numbers of letters) by the biographer Claire Tomlin. Her book forms the basis of Fiennes’ thoughtful, careful and intelligent film, with the director playing Dickens and Felicity Jones as Nelly Ternan. The Invisible Woman is restrained and unjudgmental film-making, that largely avoids obvious moral calls and weaves a beautifully constructed tale of two people who make themselves both happy and miserable.

And that misery is partly due to the times they live in. It’s an era of Victorian morals, where all that matters is the surface appearance and any real emotions underneath can go hang. But it’s also a world where very different rules apply to men and women. Dickens can leave his wife (in a press announcement) – but of course a woman could never do the same. It’s a world of strictly defined rules, with clear roles for both genders that cannot be deviated from. And it forces Nelly Ternan to travel to Paris, because the public shame that would come with her pregnancy by Dickens would destroy her. It’s why, years after Dicken’s death, she is lying about how well she knew the man (even changing her name and age to further distance herself) so that she can conform with the expectations of being a school-master’s wife (and ensure she will not be thrown out to the streets).

The rules are so strong that both Dickens and Ternan are as much in thrall to them as anyone else. Dickens is willing to bend the rules – but only so far. He would clearly never dream of living openly with his unmarried partner and their child as his friend Wilkie Collins (a perfectly cast Tom Hollander) would do. And Nelly Ternan is as outraged at this liaison – and as desperately uncomfortable in their home – as any prim housewife would be. In fact, in many ways, Nelly is even more conservative than Dickens.

But then she has to be. After all, he would be a rogue, she would be a whore. Choices aren’t great for women – and in her chosen career of actress, Nelly is clearly far more enthusiastic than she is talented. It’s worries about the career that leads to her mother – an excellent performance of motherly love mixed with a quiet understanding of the world from Kristin Scott Thomas – all but encouraging Dickens to seduce her daughter. Because, for an independently minded woman passionate about the art, if you can’t be an actress your other option is to be a muse.

Even Dickens seems quietly ashamed at his seduction of this woman, while she half-persuades herself it isn’t happening until it is. So, what draws them together? Refreshingly this isn’t a question of an older man excited by a younger woman – or a naïve woman swept up by a powerful man. Instead, these are kindred spirits. Both of them are passionate, intelligent and questioning. They both express an emotional honesty and openness. They have shared passions for literature, theatre and stories. It’s a romance that slowly blossoms and is based on a shared feeling. It would have been easier to tell a story of seduction and abuse – but this is a more intelligent film than that. At that fatal train accident, its Dickens who yearns to stay with Nelly and its Nelly that urges him to leave to preserve his secrets.

As these two, we have two actors with beautiful chemistry. Felicity Jones is inspired as Nelly Ternan. She both idolises Dickens, but is also drawn towards him on a very human level. She is astute, but conservative and at times even remote. Her older self, over a decade later, is both prickly and defensive – and those are qualities you can trace in her younger self, and not just because of her fear of disgrace. It’s a beautifully judged performance, both older than her time and also with a vibrancy and energy that entrances.

Fiennes, a more reserved actor, seems like an odd choice for the bon vivant Dickens – but he brilliantly excels in the role, full of energy and room-filling dominance. He marvellously conveys the charm and passion of Dickens, but also his thoughtlessness. This is after all a man who drops his wife by newspaper announcement and builds a barrier between their bedrooms. Who loves Nelly, but not enough to make her anything but a secret. Who is passionate and excited about his work, but can be turn distant and cool in his personal life. It’s a fabulous performance.

And the two leads are centred in a low-key, poetic film. You get the sense that there is a danger in getting to close to genius. Dicken’s wife Catherine – a beautifully sad and lonely performance from Joanna Scanlan – even warns Nelly about it (while delivering a gift from her husband, sent to her by mistake). It’s a danger that shapes Nelly’s whole life – but also her life is enriched by having Dickens in it. It’s a film that avoids obvious moral judgments – and while there are things done which cause pain, everyone is living in an imperfect society. Fiennes direction and use of visual language is wonderful and this is an impressive film.

Mank (2020)

Gary Oldman excels as Herman J Mankiewicz in David Fincher’s bitter Hollywood epic Mank

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Gary Oldman (Herman J Mankiewicz), Amanda Seyfried (Marion Davies), Lily Collins (Rita Alexander), Arliss Howard (Louis B Mayer), Tom Pelphrey (Joseph L Mankiewicz), Charles Dance (William Randolph Hearst), Sam Troughton (John Houseman), Ferdinand Kingsley (Louis B Mayer), Tuppence Middleton (Sara Mankiewicz), Tom Burke (Orson Welles), Joseph Cross (Charles Lederer), Jamie McShane (Shelly Metcalfe), Toby Leonard Moore (David O Selznick)

It’s 80 years old, but age has not withered Citizen Kane’s mystique, still one of the greatest films ever made. The story of its creation has intrigued generations, a fascination only increased by the larger-than-life personalities involved, from Orson Welles down. David Fincher’s lovingly made, but bitingly shrewd deconstruction of classic Hollywood, explores the creation of the film by focusing on its credited co-writer Herman J Mankiewicz, the film neatly intercutting between the alcoholic Mankiewicz drafting the screenplay while in enforced retreat and his prime years as a writer-for-hire to the major Hollywood studios of the 1930s.

Mankiewicz is played by Gary Oldman (at 62, already seven years older than Mankiewicz was when he died). A noted wit, Mankiewicz makes an excellent living running the writers’ room at Louis B Mayer’s (Arliss Howard) MGM. Mankiewicz views the work of writing films as slightly beneath him, easy money (“Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots” he cables Ben Hecht). Mankiewicz’s sociability eventually finds him an informal role as “court jester” to newspaper tycoon (and MGM bank roller) William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and he builds a warm friendship with Heart’s shrewd mistress, actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). The relationship sours as Mankiewicz grows disgusted by the dirty tricks campaign MGM and Hearst launch against the left-wing candidate for governor in 1936. In 1939 Mankiewicz works on the script for Citizen Kane, hired by Orson Welles (Tom Burke) with the support of an assistant Rita (Lily Collins) who helps him craft the words and stay sober long enough to type them.

Fincher’s film can easily be seen as a loving homage to old-school Hollywood. Certainly, Fincher fully embraces 30s filming style. From the carefully crafted period credits to the slightly distorted sound that apes the echoey on-set recording of classic Hollywood, this is a technical masterpiece. Beautifully shot in a series of sultry black-and-white images, with several visual references to Citizen Kane, it looks simply marvellous. The musical score is a brilliant mixture of Herrmannesque and classic Hollywood symphonic music with an edge. Even the casting has a slight old-school Hollywood unreality about it, from Oldman being at least 30 years too old to Amanda Seyfried being too young. Fincher embraces every flourish and stylistic tic from the Golden Era of Hollywood.

But the film is about as far as you can get from rose-tinted glasses. Instead this is a vicious, angry, look at Hollywood’s corruption, that owes as much to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood is a carnival of greed and abuse of power, where art takes a second seat to cold hard cash (“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies!” Louis B Mayer exclaims). Power is abused, lies are peddled to the public (Upton Sinclair, the Democratic candidate for governor, is subtly savaged by MGM-propaganda films) and the rich shamelessly steal from the rest.

The film doesn’t give a pass to the “talent” either. Mankiewicz and his writers’ room – a who’s who of greats, from Ben Hecht to George S Kaufman, SJ Perelman and Charles MacArthur – are blasé and spend as much time playing cards and seducing broads as they do scribbling ideas. Mankiewicz sets the tone, a super-smart wordsmith who thinks the movies are a joke and never invests himself in any of his work, happy to simply pick up a pay cheque. Mankiewicz doesn’t care about the quality and completely misses (or doesn’t even understand or care about) the power of movies. Anyway, his judgement is terrible, denouncing The Wizard of Oz as an epic disaster in waiting and never bothering to ensure he receives credit.

Oldman perfectly captures the shambling, slightly rotund and scruffy disdain of Mankiewicz, as well as brilliantly suggesting that the booze and cigarettes are an aid to forget his own disgust and self-loathing. With Oldman’s verbal dexterity triumphant (Mankiewicz actually carries more than a few echoes of his Winston Churchill), Mankiewicz’s real gift (and reason for living) is clubability and a skill at getting on with everyone. He’s the ultimate insider in a profession he thinks is an unworthy joke. It’s what gives him the ability to drop perfectly formed, biting bon mots at the drop of the hat – and this devil-may-care attitude amuses William Randolph Hearst (a chillingly still and powerful Charles Dance who can turn from congenial to menacing in a moment).

It’s also what wins the friendship of Marion Davies, who Mankiewicz recognises as a kindred spirit, a woman of intelligence and sensitivity, playing a role in an industry she holds in uncertain affection. This is career best work from Amanda Seyfried, giving Marion intelligence and a touching vulnerability. However, unlike Mankiewicz, she is happy in the role she has been ‘cast in’. It would never occur to her to launch the sort of scathing attack on this gilded set that Mankiewicz’s script for Citizen Kane becomes.

The film is in fact less interested in the writing of Kane than you might expect.Kan, even with Tom Burke making a wonderfully detailed Orson Welles. It does however make sure to give most of the credit for story and dialogue with Mankiewicz, with Welles reduced to a petulant tantrum (the inspiration for Kane’s room wrecking) when Mankiewicz demands credit. (The film is in effect a dramatisation of Pauline Kael’s Raising Kane essay, which attempted to shift the key creative contribution from Welles to Mankiewicz). But then perhaps Mankiewicz finally realised films can be a vehicle for respectable, worthy work.

That is surely the lesson Mankiewicz learnt from the 1936 Gubernatorial campaign. His offhand remark inspires MGM to refashion its news reel department into a propaganda machine. Mankiewicz is plagued by guilt, self-loathing and disgust for his employers over this cynical and destructive abuse of power – but also his own failure to exploit his skills and talent to really make a difference (in a way his brother Joseph manages to do). Again, Fincher’s intelligent and beautifully crafted film leaves all this lingering in the mind, its initial impact only growing over time as you digest its complexities.

However, it is a film perhaps a little too absorbed in its detail to keep an eye on the heart. There are several scenes that feel missing. The film needs more of Mankiewicz as the court jester at Hearst’s. It needs more space to allow us to understand where Mankiewicz’s rage and bitterness really comes from. It needs more time to tackle his mixed feelings about his work. More exploration of the foundations of Citizen Kane. The pace sometimes flags and it’s a cold and admirable film rather than one that can be love, occasionally feeling a little pleased with itself (with its deliberately scuff-marked film and burned reel marks). I can well imagine some people using the dreaded word “boring” and it’s really a film for the cine-buff rather than the casual viewer.

The main flaw – and it might well be a big one – is that there isn’t enough focus given to what motivates Mankiewicz to turn so completely against the gilded in-crowd. Even when haggling over credit with Welles, Mankiewicz still points out he (unlike Welles) is a Hollywood insider and will win any arbitration. But the motivations of the film are hard to find amongst the skilful recreation of its design. The characters at times seem a little to artificial and lifeless.

But it has a host of other positives, all superbly marshalled by Fincher’s pitch perfect direction. The cast is superbly led by Oldman. Among the rest, Arliss Howard is terrific as the venal and hypocritical Louis B Mayer, Tuppence Middleton very affecting as Mankiewicz’s put-upon wife and Lily Collins charming as Mankiewicz’s assistant Rita Alexander. With its evocation of Hollywood style spot on, Fincher’s film also brilliantly deconstructs the dark, corrupt heart of Hollywood where powerful producers and money men are focused on their own ends. Shown through the eyes of one disaffected insider, it makes for a film-buffs delight and an intriguing if sometimes cold viewing.