Gus Van Sant’s biopic ‘Milk’ opens on a far more restrained mood that one would expect considering the vitality of the character it portrays, but using the dictaphone recordings Milk made shortly before his death under the cloud of potential assassination, he creates a mesmerising story of a man with an aching love for humanity.
It’s these recordings that narrate the events that take us from Milk’s mid-life crisis in New York, his departure to San Francisco with his lover, Scott Smith (James Franco), where his political activism was ignited and finally to his premature death.
The threat of violence has pervaded much of Van Sant’s back catalogue, including ‘Elephant’, ‘My Own Private Idaho’ and ‘To Die For’ and with ‘Milk’ he creates a similar fatalistic tone; working with Penn to split Harvey Milk into two distinct personas: that of the narrator and the man who inspired a movement.
As Milk, Penn is working against a directorial tapestry moving from moody, contrast lighting in Milk’s kitchen as he solemnly speaks about his life, almost confessing it, to a vibrant chaos of roving camera, intercut Polaroids, home movie footage, disco divisions of the movie frame and in one heartbreaking moment, slow motion.
And Penn excels, balancing the dark interior guilt of a man who once battled his homosexuality rather than embracing it, with the explosion of irrepressible energy and charisma as he grapples with the media and the political machine. It’s a tremendously layered performance, and one that battles with the usual generic Oscar bait status of these kinds of prestige pieces and wins.
It’s the tortured relationship between the two men that forms the heart of the movie and offers up possibly the more complex performance from Brolin as he plays the part of a man driven down by the conservatism of his community while frustrated by the ease at which Milk’s flourishes. There’s also a sense that he is battling against confusion over his sexuality, but it’s never overplayed, much like the anger and jealousy that bubbles away beneath the surface for most of the film.
It all comes to a head with the scourge of Proposition 6, a Bill that would have made firing gay teachers—and any public school employees who supported gay rights—mandatory. The parallels to the present day are palpable and not only is it the catalyst for the tragic events that end the film, but it’s also a poignant reminder of what could have been in the aftermath of the recent Proposition 8.
In a film that has so many positives, not just in the work of Penn and Brolin, but the supporting acts like Hirsch’s Cleve Jones, a youthful embodiment of Milk’s revolutionary spirit; Alison Pill’s wonderfully charismatic campaign manager Anne Kronenborg and especially Franco’s charming and beaitific Scott Smith, it seems a shame to highlight the negatives, but a rather clunky and twee telephone call bookending two important events in the film and an irritating subplot involving Milk’s lover Jack Lira (Diego Luna) serve to disrupt the film.
But these are minor keys in an often operatic piece of cinema that speaks of astonishing victories and times of change; moments that resonate strongly as we witness the swearing in of the first black President and the whiff of hope in times of great uncertainty.
It seems unfair to question the hype surrounding Mickey Rourke’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, ‘The Wrestler’, his comeback is, after all, long overdo. But when you consider it as close to biography as an actor could hope for, you have to wonder if there’s really a performance here to critique or just Rourke baring every iota of his soul.
We know it’s been a long time since this new Brando invigorated audiences with his raw acting talent, street charm and good looks in movies like Rumblefish, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Nine ½ Weeks. We can see it in the pulpy mass of face flesh, fishy lips and scar tissue that opens the movie.
And this isn’t make-up, not in the same way as it was for his first faltering steps back into the limelight with Marv in ‘Sin City’. It’s a real body showing the same damage taken in boxing as Rourke’s Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson has suffered in his wrestling career.
He too has said goodbye to real fame a long time ago, restricted now to the faded glamour of small town venues on the lowly professional circuit. And while it might not be the high pomp of childhood heroes like Hulk Hogan, Aronofsky still takes time to depict some of the glitz seen in the billboard of success in the pre-credit sequence, from the bizarre names and the ridiculous costumes.
Most importantly though, he never denigrates wrestling as a sport, in the same way that gladiatorial combat was a sport millennia ago. Instead he makes a spectacle of it, providing visceral insight in much the same way as the Barry W. Blaustein’s documentary ‘Beyond the Mat’ did. Reaching almost Cronenbergian levels of body horror we see Rourke indulging in the method, as he rips a hole in his head using a concealed razor or in one traumatic sequence, winces as medics pick out staples, and glue his wounds back together.
It’s almost unbearable to watch, and made worse by the shots of the actual bout that resulted in the injuries, as Rourke and his opponent are tossed off ladders onto barbed wire wrapped tables and smacked with a variety of objects. The scene climaxes with a sickening moment as Rourke, alone in the changing room, staggers to his feet with wheezing, phlegm racked breaths before crashing to the floor with the onset of heart failure. It’s made worse by a later scene in a half-empty hall of a fan signing, the camera alighting on the crippled forms of former wrestlers, a leg brace here, a colostomy bag there.
In fact one word to best describe the movie is gruelling. And not just in the fights; Aronofsky practically wrenching Rourke up by his cauliflower ears and instead of giving him the best material, offers him a challenge to turn the slight, yet clever script into something truly resonant; something truly astonishing.
You can see it best in the raw, uncontrived outpouring of emotion shared between father and daughter beside a clapped out pier. Refusing to go for the cheap moments, Rourke downplays each line beautifully, recalling the scene from ‘On the Waterfront’ where Brando berates his brother over leaving him little more than a bum.
And that’s pretty much the state of the majority of the ‘The Wrestlers’ cast; each one the bitter product of rampant 80s capitalism, turning people into little more than commodities to be churned up again and again. Just as Rourke craves the worship of the ring and brutalises himself to receive it, his only fleeting chance for romance, the stripper Cassidy (the equally fantastic Marisa Tomei) debases herself to earn the money that will get her out to somewhere better.
Sure there’s a whiff of cliché here, the film using a similar template to that of Rocky and its ilk, but it’s how Aronofsky flips it that makes it truly great. Rather than take us all the way to that happy ending, the final bout that should turn everything around, in this case a rematch between Ram and his old nemesis the Ayatollah, is actually the thing that makes that ending impossible. At least in the traditional sense.
Instead, Aronofsky leaves us stirred by a clearly unscripted moment that comes straight from the heart of Rourke, the actor. Addressing the crowd and most importantly, we the audience, Rourke pours out his heart, never apologising, but simply stating the facts; that as long as we’re around to support tremendous performances like this, he’ll ensure this renaissance continues. Simply put, rather than the 1,2,3 of abject failure that this could have been, it’s a resounding count of success.
It’s not often you hate a film before even seeing a single frame of footage, but the trailers to ‘Seven Pounds’ have already done an impressive job of outlining its horrible pretensions. But then what can you expect from the director and star of the equally rote ‘Pursuit of Happyness’ (even the bloody title pukes cute into your eyes), the film operating on an emotional level normally occupied by people who would decorate a cubbyhole in old Hallmark cards big spaniel ear shaped tears rolling down their rosy cheeks as they recall the loving messages contained inside each one. In other words it’s abhorrent.
It would be wrong to spoil too much of the story’s plot and thereby prevent anyone from reveling in its emotional intricacy, suffice it to say, Will Smith plays Ben Thomas, once an engineer, now a man racked by some terrible guilt and working as an IRS officer cum Samaritan. He spends his days flicking between bouts of interior redesign, read, smashing chairs in fine displays of emotional paucity, and touching the lives of an impressively diverse cast of characters including the blind, vegan beef selling piano player Ezra (Woody Harrelson- wasted); the dialysis imprisoned steward of Latino ice hockey players George (Bill Smitrovich- wasted); Emily (Rosario Dawson- I’ll get to her), the woman whose heart is defective in more ways than one and a Latino woman suffering domestic violence and blessed with angelic children (I don’t care, but she’s wasted too).
Don’t get me wrong, he touches others as well, including his brother, the only blessing bestowed on him being playing the part of a plot device at a critical point in the movie. Yes, he’s annoying, ‘Ima gonna ruin a moment of happyness by throwing in a revelation that changes your perception of the main character irrevocably. That is, if you actually hadn’t already worked it out or b) had given up caring’ man. Finally, there’s Ben’s best friend Dan (Barry Pepper- you guessed it: wasted!), a lawyer who is entrusted with some cryptic task that causes him to repeatedly break down uncontrollably. Certainly someone you’d want to trust with that case that could put you away for life.
But fortunately, director Gabriele Muccino doesn’t want you spend too long with these fascinating people. Oh no, that’d just reveal the astonishing lack of depth to any of them, each a few, quick strokes of quirk, our interest in them driven by the amount of sorrow, pain or suffering the story has inflicted on them. Instead, Muccino seems to regress to student preoccupation in his craft. Where every single interesting camera flourish or remotely clever editing technique equals storytelling gold. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the slow pan past bathroom doorways that screams moody, the intriguing out of focus shot, audio distortion, dreams cut into dreams and windscreen wipers that sound like a heartbeat; each of these are in play to ensure the structure of the movie is all kooky and mysterious.
And honestly, for a few moments it’s almost intriguing. But just for those few moments because as soon as the dalliance between Ben and Emily gets a little serious, and they’re sharing bucolic moments in a golden field, swapping deliciously creaky platitudes about living life to the fullest, the film practically turns off that one vaguely interesting feature and comes out of the Hallmark closest like a juggernaut.
If it wasn’t bad enough that the extended scenes between the pair lets slip the absurd twist that caps the movie, they let you realise how bad an actor Will Smith can be. He’s emoting here on an infantile level, scrunching his face up and wrinkling his nose like a skinny teddy bear with allergies. Love me it says, I’m a tortured soul with an unbearable secret that’s only really painful to you, the audience, when you realise how implausible it all is. Comparatively, Rosario Dawson as Emily gives a beautifully measured performance, doing her best to elevate each of her lines and battling admirably against some bizarre handheld camera scenes she shares with Will.
Unfortunately, she too is wasted with the rest, and once the truth behind Ben’s trauma is revealed all the audience can do is wince as one of the most laughably awful sequences involving a bath of cold ice and a box jellyfish is unravels onscreen to the accompaniment of the hysterical soundtrack. Not only is it ridiculous and seemingly yet another quirk that seems to take the place of actual insight, it shows up the film for the vanity project it truly is.
It’s short it’s Oscar bait, and because it’s Oscar bait, and not a film made solely to enrapture and entertain, Will Smith and his cronies forget how to bring all the disconnected elements together to make all this sacrifice meaningful. It’s up to the director to act as frenzied shepherd, herding all the characters we’d forgotten about, Harrelson’s Ezra specifically, back into the story pen while Ben thrashes about like a beatific, yet Parkinson afflicted Muhammad Ali. And that’s what you’re left with really. A reminder of far better work from Will Smith rather than the sad trap of rampant egoism that he appears to have become snared by.
Edward Zwick like most directors is a sculptor, paring down a story until, standing before him, is its essence. Unfortunately, rather than the fine tools most artisans would have on their work bench, Zwick is swinging a sledgehammer and hoping like hell that he doesn’t lose anything important in the process.
His latest film Defiance opens on grainy footage depicting the Nazi invasion of Belarus and the extermination that followed it; painting a familiar picture of the Jewish people as a harried, oppressed minority, beaten into submission by an unstoppable evil.
While these brothers are sallow-skinned and hollow-eyed they are not like the cowering masses we saw in the footage. They are angry and committed to survival and after disappearing into the forest, set their minds to doing just that. It’s an interesting twist and so it’s almost a shame then that parallels can be drawn with the far superior ‘Glory’, Zwick’s Oscar winning tale of another oppressed minority fighting for their country in the face of great prejudice and seemingly for little reward.
What’s most disappointing about Defiance is that it takes a similar foundation, in this case, the solidarity of the Jewish community that forms around the Bielski brothers and their forest sanctuary, but ditches the potential central conflict for portentous symbolism and sledgehammer subtlety.
The Bielski’s are from rough, working class stock and yet for some inexplicable reason they not only protect and feed the first groups of fleeing Jews, they seek out more at Ghettos marked for liquidation. Though the heart strings are plucked by the procession shots of Jews being lead to relative freedom accompanied by a forlorn violin, a number of the people they save are such arrogant, preening individuals that you really wonder why they bothered. In fact Zwick litters the film with pointless moments for two intellectuals who are either berating Tuvia about God and his responsibility to his people or discussing topics of such mundanity that you’re literally willing them to get pegged by the Germans.
There’s an intriguing class issue here that is barely picked up on and while there is initial friction between Tuvia and Zus over why they should risk life and limb for those who would normally shun them, the scenes are so throwaway and repetitive to be insulting. It comes as little surprise when Zus joins up with the Russian partisan force shortly after, his character the only one with any semblance of depth and his criticism the one thing that shows how superficial the film really is.
And with his departure so goes the hero of the story; the increasingly mechanical script leaving us with the twin tediums of Tuvia and Asael, brought together by their refusal to commit to an accent and their one-dimensionality. Pity poor Daniel Craig as he’s saddled with upteen allusions to Moses and the Messiah either clutching a tree branch staff or sermonizing from a crisp white horse like a Belarusian Aragorn. Bell fares far worse as a wimpish marker for a crushingly unsubtle sequence juxtaposing a marriage in the seemingly Edenic forest with a partisan raid. They’re little more than mouthpieces for corny romance and stock character moments.
By the climax it’s almost as if Zwick realizes his mistake and after discovering the Germans have pinpointed the position of the camp, Zus and his comrades are brought back with a horribly inept moment of epiphany like a crusading Jewish A-Team. Not only does the proceeding action feel horribly underplayed and horribly scored, it serves to further undermine Tuvia as even Asael gets to do some soldiery and give yet another stirring speech.
As the film fades to black and fills in the remaining years of the Bielski brothers, you flash back to an earlier moment where Tuvia, stricken by typhus and facing insurrection in the camp, executes one of the ringleaders. It’s brutal, and shocking and hints at a far more complex character and film than this prosaic Robin Hood and His Not So Merry Men take on hokey heroism that chokes on its own worthiness and marks out Zwick as little more than Michael Bay on Valium.
Slumdog Millionaire is in a rather interesting position coming as it does off a wave of rave reviews from the US press and ending the year not only at the top of many Best of Year lists, but with a slew of award nominations under its belt. It now moves to the UK, a new year and with such a burden of expectation on this underdog story about love, life and persecution in poverty stricken Mumbai that one might expect a chillier reception from this country’s more cynical critics.
Well with the popular home grown talent of such interesting oddities as dark comedy ‘Shallow Grave’, the cult film ‘Trainspotting’, zombie horror ’28 Days Later’ and recent apocalyptic sci-fi, ‘Sunshine’ it seems safe to say that the cup of praise will continue to overflow.
Danny Boyle is an intriguing director in that unlike many of his peers he’s not quite managed the success his talents so clearly deserve. He’s either continually underestimated or cursed by an almost X-Factorian nonchalance, with critics assuming his success will be ensured by someone else down the line.
Unfortunately this hasn’t quite been the case which is rather baffling when you consider the fact he shows with each film, as he does so brilliantly with this one, an almost prodigious grasp of genre; mixing it up like a new Howard Hawks and punctuating everything with his kinetic visuals and moments of violence that never feel gratuitous, only meaningful.
In fact with one caveat it’s easy to say that Slumdog is Boyle’s most accomplished film to date; taking all of the things that make him such an exciting director and pushing the envelope further. You can see him completely immersing himself in another culture and a city’s energy and it feels like a perfect match. In fact, there’s a sense that this is not the only one the film has to offer.
There are two scenes in the movie that are of such technical and sensory power that you could almost end the film there and herald its success with the rest. Both the police chase through the Mumbai slums and the hijinks on a train moving through the striking Indian landscape crush together adrenalised imagery as the camera careers past the colour popping of green moss on river walls, golden sands and head wraps, multicoloured trash mountains and the contrast of crisp sky blue uniforms against earthy dyed rags.
Along with the composer A.R. Rahman both of these are scored by the fusion artist M.I.A, another huge talent that plays with genre, but this time musically and it’s a version of her track ‘Paper Planes’ that most plays on the ears. It all looks so damn confident and cool that you wish everything that follows and mixes in with these moments could be as good, and it very nearly is.
Interestingly, the problem has already been noted by M.I.A herself. In a recent interview she comments on an initial wish that Boyle had kept greater distance from the more traditional Bollywood elements and while Boyle wanted to appeal to both East and West, it’s the ending where this wish proves possibly to be a mistake.
Up until this point he uses a flashback structure to juxtapose the gritty reality of our hero Jamal’s childhood with the more fairytale aspects of his current position on the Indian version of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’. How he got there is the thrust of the movie, suffice it to say that it takes memories as breadcrumbs approach with pivotal events like a song he is forced to sing when forced to work as a beggar giving him the answers to the show’s questions.
It’s a brilliant concept and it allows Boyle to parody some of the sentimental and more escapist parts of the Bollywood aesthetic like the movement of a hand that might have been made to do something vile or a dance of great joy and love that very nearly precedes a horrific scarring. Each of these moments are ably supported by the great casting, most especially by the child actors who while not having the recognition of the older Skins actor, Dev Patel, capture both the terror and exuberant spirit of life in Mumbai.
Unfortunately, while this balance between the fantasy and the reality is maintained so brilliantly for 99% of the film’s running time, the moment the fantasy slips into reality is where the film falls apart. While you have to admire the romance of a contest phone call being used to swap faltering words of love rather than to win a quiz, every moment after that is like a jarring hammer blow against the precision filmmaking.
Not only is the death of a key character hijacked with a horribly obvious metaphor about money being the root of evil, the actual reunion of the two main characters, the very bloody thing the audience has been hoping will happen throughout the film, is completely vomited on firstly by some turgid guff about destiny, a concept we’d already got in a far more subtle way earlier in the film, and then a dance sequence that just feels tacked on.
It’s everything terrible about Bollywood and while it doesn’t completely scupper it, and to some will be a clever riff on that genre, it feels like a horribly amateurish cap to a far cleverer and quite frankly, downright fantastic movie.
