The Coen Brothers revisited their Big Labowski style with Hail, Caesar! and filled it with an impressively large cast of characters. Even though it left a few loose ends, it was hugely entertaining. There were a lot of happy faces at the penultimate MovieNight of the season.
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Beautiful to look at, and at times, engaging to watch, but perhaps Terence Davies might have done better to not stick so closely to the novel. Tom Huddleston’s review (below) pretty much hits the nail on the head. Still… another great MovieNight!
Writer-director Terence Davies’s adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbons’s 1932 novel of life in the Scottish countryside is like an old familiar tune, a lusty ballad of love and heartbreak sung with passion and power, and just a handful of off-key notes. Agyness Deyn plays Chris Guthrie, prim but proud daughter of a cruel, religiously maniacal farmer (Peter Mullan). The suicide of his long-suffering wife kicks off a chain of disasters for Chris and her brothers. But just when times seem darkest, everything changes: Dad mercifully keels over and Chris is left in charge of the farm and the family’s money, and she begins to eye local lad Ewan (Kevin Guthrie) as a potential husband.
The hour or so that follows is close to flawless: like sunshine after a lifetime of rain, Chris’s life is transformed, and the film with it, as what had promised to be a relentlessly dour and grimy experience is suddenly glowing with joy and sweetness. Davies’s love for his characters is impossible to conceal: a scene of flirtation between Deyn and Guthrie as a flock of hurrying sheep breaks around them like a river is almost painfully beautiful. Michael McDonough’s landscape cinematography is rapturous, consciously echoing Nicolas Roeg’s work on the 1967 ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’, a film with which this shares ample DNA.
But in its later stages, as WWI darkens Chris’s horizon, the film begins to slip into cliché: one character’s emotional transformation is so clumsily handled as to be almost laughable, while an unnecessary hop over the English Channel and into the trenches feels manipulative and off-message. But even then, the sheer visual grandeur sweeps you along, and Gibbons’s central themes – the importance of forgiveness, the power of human endurance, the wonder and permanence of nature – hold it all together.
Review by Tom Huddleston for Time Out London
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What a fun MovieNight that was! A good mix of long-time guests, old friends, new friends, and a crop of first-timers came out to watch this treat. Props to Norris (and there need to be many more if I ever get around to updating the Successful Suggesters page) for pointing this out to me. Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise was a visual treat seasoned with delicious dark comedy. There was more than a hint of Brazil to it, and that is surely a good thing.
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Robert Eggers’ gorgeously creepy The Witch earned the distinction of being the first MovieNight feature to be “previewed” in a special Friday night presentation, the week before its “official” Thursday night screening. I still feel that it is somewhat misleading to call The Witch a horror movie, although I do understand the reasoning for doing so. To me it is more of an occult mystery drama. There are no sudden frights… you know that bad things are going to happen, and when they do, they are deeply disturbing. The casting was excellent, and the attention to period detail was acute… little wonder, since until this directorial debut, Mr. Eggers has been credited in other films as art director and costume designer.
Oh… and my favorite line in the movie? Satan’s words, voiced by Black Phillip, the goat, “Remove thy shift.” Good stuff.
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Another beautiful MovieNight ended with a bit of a dance party… I guess we needed a dance to recover!
Mike D’Angelo, in his succinct review for The A. V. Club, had this to say about Breathe:
Codependent relationships get explored in movies now and then, but almost always within the context of either a bad romance or a dysfunctional family. Breathe, the second feature directed by French actress Melanie Laurent (best known for playing the vengeful Shoshanna in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), tackles the subject from a refreshingly novel angle, depicting a platonic friendship that quickly grows toxic. What generally happens in this situation is that one party constantly oscillates between affection and contempt, while the other becomes addicted to the whiplash effect; a feedback loop takes hold, and things spiral out of control. Breathe”which Laurent adapted, with Julien Lambroschini, from Anne-Sophie Brasme’s novel Respire (also the film’s original French title) makes every step in that ruinous cycle seem both plausible and disturbing, and it somehow manages to do so without unnecessarily demonizing anyone in the process.
Still, the movie does have an explicit identification figure: Charlie (Josephine Japy), a teenage girl who’s first seen struggling to be invisible while her parents (Isabelle Carr and Sasha Bukvic) fight over breakfast. Charlie has a best friend, Victoire (Roxane Duran), with whom she’s been tight since grade school, but she nonetheless finds herself immediately intrigued by new transfer student Sarah (Lou De Lage), a playfully rebellious charisma machine who treats Charlie like her long-lost sister. A few early hiccups seem like simple misunderstandings and Sarah feels understandably hurt, for example, when Charlie introduces her to someone as a classmate rather than as a friend. When Charlie confronts Sarah, in the mildest way, about some apparent lies in Sarah’s personal biography, however, a full-scale war suddenly breaks out, punctuated with cease-fires that briefly make it seem as everything has worked itself out. It hasn’t.
It’s perhaps no surprise that Laurent, who could probably have played Sarah herself a decade ago, gets superb performances from her two young leads. Her formal control is nearly as strong… so much so that what appears to be a rookie mistake at one crucial point (abruptly abandoning the film’s well-established point of view for what looks like a clumsy exposition dump) is ultimately revealed, at the end of a long tracking shot, to be a devastating coup de cinema. What’s more, the film’s jagged rhythm beautifully mirrors the stop-start frustrations of its central relationship, which is never allowed to become reductive. Sarah’s bad behavior has its roots in a troubled home life (and De Lage, a potential star, locates subtle shadings in a role that could easily have become a stock villain), while ostensible heroine Charlie is selfish enough that she abandons her longtime bestie Victoire the moment Sarah shows up. Only the very last scene (taken straight from the book) feels a touch overdetermined, in the sense of being predictably inevitable. Even there, Laurent stages the denouement so expertly that the belated appearance of the film’s title card, following a sudden cut to black, feels like an instruction to the audience.
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Mike Leigh returned to the MovieNight screen this week with Life is Sweet, his funniest work, in my opinion. There is always something funny in Mr. Leigh’s bitter sweet, slice-of-life observations, but here the cringe-factor is kept to a minimum… it’s easy to laugh and feel good about laughing. It was a good call to include subtitles. There was so much more to pick up, and for some, the movie might have been unfathomable!
Other Mike Leigh films shown here over the past years include Abigail’s Party, Nuts in May, Naked, Happy Go Lucky, and Another Year. That really does make him our favorite!
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