State Of Play

I didn’t watch the BBC original: this is probably a good thing as tiresome comparisons would no doubt be pointless anyway. Let it stand on its own merits, or lack thereof. A bit of both, in fact.

Baffleck is a dour congressman. Is this good acting or is he phoning this in? It’s hard to tell. He’s certainly lacking substance and makes for a believable cipher politician, all slick poise and nascent abrasion. Anyway, one of his staff gets shoved in front of a speeding train and he’s all grief-stricken. He wells up. But in no time, he’s being romantically-linked with his late former underling and it’s not looking good. His whiter-than-white façade is looking flimsy and his future ambitions are at stake. What to do?

Implausibly enlist the help of former room-mate Russell Crowe, now a Pullitzer-winning (the film never confirms as much but you can imagine) journo with an edge and a taste for the big stuff (and the hard stuff – this is Crowe, you immediately imagine him glonking down a pint of Jim Beam as he bangs out his latest Gonzo-esque masterpiece at 3am). Crowe is unhesitant and quickly gets about finding out as much as he can about the deceased as part of his Affleck character-reboot. Several unlikeables join the fray: Jeff Daniels as a poisoned-looking suit, Michael Baresse as a dead-eyed assassin and an impressively detestable Jason Bateman as a smug club promoter.

As is always the case with the conspiracy-thriller, all manner of things unfold and one or two twists are never too far away. Unfortunately, there are no surprises, and that's without having seen the original or wikipedia-ing the story. It's all a bit unexciting and rather obvious. You will probably figure it all out before the first major scene is over, but that serves you right for not suspending your disbelief.

‘Corridors of deceit’ political films had their heyday in the 70’s, and Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy has a hand in this) was a superior hark back to those days of intellectual thrillers. This isn’t terrible by any means, and is a worthwhile effort. Some of the scenes aren’t lit sufficiently (what is this obsession with ridiculously low light in films these days? As though it lends a film dread and sophistication: it doesn’t – it makes you squint) and the film is too slight to keep you that interested. But it’s respectably respectful of its audience and some scenes are extremely well done. Underground car park dread? Lurking oddballs on night-time street corners? Always good to have these present and correct in such an endeavour and there are perfectly good examples within the two hours.

Helen Mirren is also in this as Crowe’s editor, and she’s having far too much fun to give any kind of performance. She’s not bad, she just isn’t trying. No need. Rachel McAdams is trying, but she’s lost: trying to buy her as some kind of driven cub reporter with an eye on Mirren’s job in 30 years is laughable. She’s cute with an IQ, with a Disney, box-office face but no real acting chops or spine. Robin Wright Penn is superb but gets about three scenes, and may well not even have a line in one of them. Wasted.

It’s left to Russell Crowe – drafted in as Leonardo DiCaprio jumped due to other commitments – to give the film its ballsy integrity and he carries the whole slightly daft thing with ease. He offers up a well-judged, clever performance – nervy when he needs to be, dubious at all the right times, always believable – that must rank along with his best. And you’re happy to see him bound off through the office victoriously at the close of play with doe-eyed McAdams by his side. You’re just worried if she can handle what’s next. Anne Hathaway would surely have gone several rounds, at least.

John Cazale

Some people just have one of those faces, destined to be utilised in a very specific way. Lantern jawed and furrowed of brow – bruiser. Dot-eyed and emaciated – nerd or geek. And so on. But what if you looked like John Cazale? Like a clown sans greasepaint in maudlin repose, or a 1920’s Italian-American barber fallen on fallow times. A puny conman, a boozehound salesman, a dyspeptic bus driver. Cazale could be anything, all too convincingly so. He was a slack bag of hangdog poses, and he had the only face I can think of that could shrug.

His great performances are numerous but, for me, he is especially heart-breaking and believably hopeless in Dog Day Afternoon, as the beleaguered catastrophe depressively trudging his way through an ultimately botched bank job in the shadow of Pacino’s overwrought pyrotechnics. He is tragedy manifest as a floppy-haired failure, exuding incompetence and discomfort, mumbling his way to disaster. A man forever glaringly out of place at just the wrong time and suitably unimpressed.

Dog Day Afternoon is considered Pacino’s film for obvious reasons: he’s very busy in it, a cartoonish volcano of over-zealous method acting. He yammers away and chews the scenery with aggressive abandon but it’s Cazale that holds it all together and embodies the true soul of the film. He knows what’s coming to him and we know it, but we can’t stop watching his meltdown. He’s quiet panic, the flipside to Pacino’s cocksure livewire. He’s us.

The Holy Mountain

Watching The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s second film, made in 1973, is like poring over a blueprint of the man’s mind; a mind so clearly abundant with ideas, insight and wisdom, so attuned to spirituality, ancient teachings, arcana and mysticism, that it’s something of a privilege, and a rare pleasure, to be granted access to it. Jodorowsky, now 80 years old, has made seeking enlightenment his life’s work and, like, for example, Lynch, Herzog and Tarkovsky - geniuses and visionaries all - sees it as his duty to use cinema to further our understanding of humanity, ourselves, the world and our place in it. It’s an admirable cause, certainly, and one you wish was more prevalent throughout filmmaking.

It’s not always easy - in fact, it’s never easy - to decipher the complex creative vision of a guy like Jodorowsky, but you wouldn’t want it any other way. The satisfaction of the experience comes, not with fighting to comprehend the workings of his brain, and his methods for converting the output into image form, but with simply immersing yourself in his ideas, his prescience, his skewed humour, his craziness. Jodorowsky may not possess the technical acumen of a director like Stanley Kubrick, for example - few do - but his every frame manages nonetheless to be a new, fresh and spellbinding work of art, a brief but pure and potent snapshot to add to the collections of images we’ve each stored away in our minds. Explaining this film - this masterpiece - is beyond someone of my intelligence, but, and it’s a cliché, yes, you really won’t have seen anything like it.

Fish Tank

The Observer recently conducted a poll to find the best ever British films, prompting luminaries and Ordinary Joe to shuffle their Merchant Ivory, Anthony Minghella and Danny Boyle films around. Withnail and Mike Leigh were present and correct, as were the other usual suspects. (No Morvern Callar, though - craziness.) But they should’ve hung fire until Andrea Arnold’s masterful new film, Fish Tank, was released. It’s hardly a departure from the fine Red Road, but it’s considerably better, and is surely the best British film since Trainspotting. It injects new strife into the Brit gloomfest, and every grubby, dread-inducing second of it makes Looking For Eric look like a charming TV movie. It’s determinedly scruffy, confrontational and doesn’t care whether you like it or not. But you will.

Arnold loves basking misery in sickly sunshine, high-rises that are blankly poised realms of imminent rebuke and defiant lost causes. She also loves people, particularly fuck-ups, the more problematically wound the better.

Katie Jarvis, remarkably a newcomer with zilch acting experience prior to this, is, honestly, staggering as Mia, pent-up and wired with erratic bile, self-hating and condemned to counting off her ASBOs and contemplating a life of fraught compromise. She’s trapped in a hellhole with her gobshite, mini-me little sister and her fuseless, wasted and left behind mum. Unless she heads out into the locale, which only leads to trouble of a different ilk. Before you know it she’s atomised and bloodied a young girl in a needless face-off and been thwarted in her attempt to free a horse. And the lairyness doesn’t lessen.

Michael Fassbender, as ubiquitous as it comes at the moment, is exceptional as mum's new piece, all rugged effervescence, a charismatic, platinum-tongued character that Mia doesn't really know what to do with. Clearly starved of a male role-model, she is by turns reluctantly intrigued and wilfully obstinate, unwilling to accept the possibility, initially, that he's anything but another let-down in-waiting. She slowly warms to him, notwithstanding the odd petulant eruption, and the combination of her sexual awakening and her gradual acceptance of this potential father-figure become horribly meshed in devastating fashion. Credit to Arnold for rendering the whole climactic episode with such unflinching, unjudgemental power. There are no victims and no perpetrators here: people collide and shit surely happens.

There are some great dialogue exchanges and lines in the film that don't try to hard to ingratiate themselves or make forced commentary, as can be the case too often with kitchen-sink cinema. 'I like you, I'll kill you last.' 'I've got the number for Childline, if you want it?' And, during an embrace, 'I hate you!' 'I hate you too!' All such exchanges just hang there, as much humorous as pointed, perfectly believable and extremely affecting.

Fish Tank is a picaresque, a sequence of scrapes, a drably electric nightmare, with our vantage point, Mia, ducking and diving and ducking in-and-out of dives with clenched fists. Arnold throws her into various scenarios almost as though to record her ability to repel all-comers, accusatory finger gleefuly poised on her self-destruct button. Her combustibility is never more than a fraction beneath the surface, and anyone and everyone seems likely to fuel it any given moment. Equilibrium is an impossibility and hope is drowning in pint dregs. Yet, and testament to the brilliance of the young star, she is easy to empathise with, despite her snapshot irascibility. When we see beyond the vitriol, there's a lot to like, and for such a previously unbeknownst first-timer to imbue Mia with such depth is remarkable. We know her dreams of becoming a dancer are likely a pipedream but we want her to make it anyway. She is driven, but to where? Right to the upper echelons of British cinema, if nowhere else.

Two Lovers

James Gray’s fog-cloaked triangle of torment hit cinema screens a few months back to less-than-zero fanfare and respectful if largely whelmed critical response. It finds its proper home on DVD, cataloguing as it does (think Cassavetes meets PT Anderson, or a downer spin on Hannah And Her Sisters) the story of Joaquin Phoenix’s deeply troubled coaster, allergic to life but hanging around (by a thread – the film begins with an abortive suicide plunge) on the off chance that something will emerge to provide much-needed succour to his wearied, tragedy-freighted existence.

Two such glimmers puncture his malaise. Vinessa Shaw’s slow-burn option 1 – elegant, malleable, altruistic family girl, and option 2 – frazzle-burn Gwyneth Paltrow’s beautiful, game, bruised, fluctuating drug-addict. Phoenix spends the film allowing his mother and father to coerce him into Shaw’s gentle, securely appealing orbit whilst coveting Paltrow, polar opposite, a flaky disaster zone of caustic magnetism.

Phoenix, a lead-limbed phantom of a man who ebbs rather than flows, works at his Israeli immigrant dad’s dry-cleaning business but is barely there: he plays the fool and waits for closing. He is teetering, still consumed by the hell of a catastrophic engagement that was brought to an abrupt end, and he wears the expression of a man with no core, augured vacuous and vanquished by torment.

Phoenix captures such a debilitated state brilliantly in a career-peaking turn. He is not self-consciously showy about his character's mental state, and underplays things to a pitch-perfect level, allowing his brief bout of delirium as the film culminates have that much more impact. He emanates despair but is strangely likeable. It's without doubt the best thing he's done. Paltrow is similarly mesmerising and warrants more attention for another exceptional supporting role.

The inexorable elision with Shaw draws close and Phoenix, with no seeming convictions or entrenchments, inevitably lets things happen; anything is a distraction. More of a distraction, and perhaps a chance of a reclamation of whatever life Phoenix had prior to the capitulation of his life, is Paltrow, the plaything of Elias Koteas’ adulterous sleazebag, in limbo between animated allure and black-hole of evasive malaise. Phoenix gravitates toward danger, furtive curiosity prompting his pursual of Paltrow, the neighbourhood femme fatale, in full-view in her amber-lit apartment across the yard, and strikes up a burgeoning, easily-forged friendship via late-night telephone exchanges and ‘chance’ meetings on subway platforms.

The crux of the film, which path Phoenix will opt for – thrilling doom or comfortable acceptability – is left right until the last gasp of the final reel, and the decision is, in any event, made for him. He inadvertently finds, in the end, equilibrium, and fate steps in to absolve his careening self-destructiveness.

It’s the epitome of bittersweet, and it’s absolutely the right way to end the film. Resolution, of sorts, in tangled, achingly definitive finality. As the end nears, there is a scene that both captures and provides a fitting microcosm of Phoenix’s fate. He walks alone through darkness, a mercilessly exiled figure, as a muted carnival of New Year parties unfold mutedly in his peripheral vision. He is ostracised, ineluctably, and he is in his element: out of the picture, a silhouette on a street whilst revelry and life comes and goes everywhere else.

James Gray will do well to get anywhere near the nuanced poignancy of this film again. He lets the actors breathe addled life into their characters, and Phoenix and Paltrow mutually benefit from their jostling for supremacy in each of their shared scenes. Koteas and a wonderfully subdued Isabella Rossellini, as Phoenix’s quietly fraught mum, also do stellar work. The masterclass performances lead the film away from being considered an admirable curio to being within touching distance of classic status.

The Hurt Locker

It might be that the wounds haven’t yet healed, or that the pro-war, patriotic section of America won’t hear the voices that oppose the conflict, but, for whatever reasons, Hollywood’s attempts at meaningfully portraying the war in Iraq have, by and large, failed. Box-office figures for the likes of Rendition, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Stop/Loss and Redacted, films which, to varying degrees of success, all took issue at America’s War on Terror in the Middle East, don’t make for good reading, so it’s interesting to see how The Hurt Locker, the latest film directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Strange Days), is being so widely lavished with praise.

It tells the story of Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), a soldier assigned to a special bomb-disposal unit to replace the previous team leader, Staff Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce), who is killed while trying to deactivate an improvised explosive device (or IED) in a town square in Baghdad. The film begins with a tense sequence showing the lead-up to Thompson’s death. The unit – Thompson, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) – first sends in a robot to dismantle the IED by remote control; the camaraderie and banter between the three men a sign that they’re a strong team, calm, at ease with each other, and completely full of trust. The robot breaks down, however, and Thompson makes the decision to go in himself, donning the special bomb-disposal suit and approaching the device under the watchful eyes of his two colleagues, who are primed to look out for any possible dangers or disruptions. Bigelow ramps up the suspense by streeeetttttcccchhhhing time to its fullest limits, with Thompson taking short, unbearable baby steps towards the bomb, reporting his progress every few paces until he’s in the ‘kill zone’, the IED’s blast radius, the place he’ll leave only in pieces if the bomb goes off. He deactivates the IED and is setting off slowly back to safety when Eldridge spots a man at a nearby butcher’s stall holding a mobile phone. Both Eldridge and Sanborn know what this means but they’re too late; the man dials a number into the phone and detonates the bomb, killing Thompson instantly.

When we encounter Sergeant James, the unit’s new leader, for the first time, he’s telling Sanborn that he doesn’t intend to step into Thompson’s shoes; he’s just there to do his job. He’s strangely relaxed, removing the protective coverings from the windows of his barracks (‘I like the sunshine’) and kicking back on his cot listening to music. Where Sanborn seems to be the ultimate professional, attuned to any sort of risk and determined, as any soldier would be, to steer himself and anyone else clear of it, James seems to almost welcome the danger, as proven by his first bomb disposals with the unit.
The set pieces Bigalow constructs to show James’ complete ignorance of, or disregard for, the risk he’s exposed to are brilliantly done and, at times, hilarious. In the first of these, the unit is sent to dismantle an IED which is buried under trash and debris in a deserted section of the city. Though Sanborn advises sending in the robot to investigate, James immediately rejects the suggestion and opts to go in himself, putting on the bombsuit and sauntering casually towards the kill zone. He sets off a smoke bomb to create a diversion, much to the chagrin of Sanborn and Eldridge, who are there to provide surveillance and rifle cover. James cuts the wires on the first bomb, only to discover another longer cable leading off away from him. It’s a superb moment, shot from directly above, when James softly yanks the cable out from beneath the dust and rubble and unearths another four or five of the same IEDs, all connected to each other. Where most people, at this point, would probably shit their pants, with James it’s a trifling inconvenience – like he’s opened a bottle of milk to find it slightly curdled – and he calmly goes about neutralising the bombs one by one. When he returns to his unit moments later, Sanborn chastises him for his recklessness.
The darkly comic tone of this scene is present throughout most of the film, and it’s certainly refreshing given the subject matter. (You’ll do well to find laughs in Rendition and Lions for Lambs, for example.) It reminded me of the HBO series, Generation Kill, written, as with The Hurt Locker, by a journalist who was embedded with the US army in Iraq, which both portrayed the American soldier as one who largely welcomes the opportunity to put his life on the line and showed that many elements of war are humorous and ridiculous. (It’s not a new idea, but one which doesn’t seem to have been widely explored in relation to Iraq. As I said, maybe, in some cases, the wounds are still too fresh.)

Regrettably, but inevitably, the suspense that propels the first half hour of the film eventually subsides, when the unit, out in the desert, encounters a team of British private militants, led by Ralph Fiennes, and eventually becomes embroiled in a firefight with unseen Iraqi insurgents. All of the Brits, bar one, are shot, and Sanborn and James are forced into a slow watch-and-wait cat-and-mouse sniping game with the Iraqis, who are hidden in a building way off in the distance. It’s here, and in the macho male bonding scenes that follow, that the relationships between the three men in the unit are initially cemented, as James seems to finally take on the responsibility of team leader and helps the panic-stricken Eldridge, who, as we’ve seen earlier in the film, is having trouble coping with both Thompson’s death and his own vulnerability.

Not every part of The Hurt Locker works. There’s a distracting subplot in which James befriends a young Iraqi boy, ‘Beckham’, who hangs around the soldiers’ camp selling fake DVDs. Later in the film, the unit is on a mission reconnoitering an abandoned warehouse which insurgents have been using as a hideout for making IEDs when they discover the dead body of a boy. Although the boy’s face is bloody and disfigured, James is convinced it is Beckham – Sanborn and Eldridge aren’t so sure – and explains that the insurgents were intending to use the boy’s corpse to make a ‘body bomb’; indeed, James cuts open the boy’s chest and finds explosives planted in it. The impact Beckham’s apparent death seems to have on James doesn’t quite correspond to how his character has been presented to us so far. OK, so we see that he is human – who wouldn’t be traumatised by such an experience? – but, until now, our impressions of him are that he’s an adrenaline junkie, at home in the army; a guy who you’d expect to mark the killing of a child down to the unnecessary yet inescapable collateral damage of war. The fact that James then sets out on a rogue mission to find Beckham’s house and track down the people responsible for the ‘body bomb’ doesn’t quite ring true. (Incidentally, Beckham turns up alive and well later.)

All war films tend to make some sort of judgement; usually, in its most boiled-down form, that the act of war is futile. Some, rightly or wrongly, set out to glorify military action and bestow hero status on the men whose stories they’re telling. Few, however, go to pains to encapsulate the thrill some men get from participating in the conflict. As the quote that begins The Hurt Locker says, ‘War is a drug’, and, however unfathomable it may be, there are men out there who find their only true place in life is in the military. There’s a scene towards the end of the film when James returns home to his wife (Evangeline Lilly) and child, and we see his discomfort at having to visit the supermarket and do odd jobs around the house. Home is the last place he feels at home in. He tells his child that the boy will grow up to learn that sometimes there’s only one thing in life a man can love. In James’ case, it’s the thrill of war, and the film ends with him disembarking the plane in Baghdad for another 365 days in rotation.

The Hurt Locker isn’t flawless, but it’s undoubtedly a fine film and deserved of all its plaudits. Bigelow’s direction is taut and assured, and her typically accomplished handling of action scenes and set-pieces (a la Point Break) is once again in evidence. With British cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (United 93, The Wind That Shakes The Barley) on board, the film is visually spectacular; the ruin and heat of Baghdad made to look, at times, breathtakingly beautiful. The cast is marvellous too: despite being relatively unknown as far as lead actors go, Renner, Mackie and Geraghty each turn in superb performances, particularly Renner, who possesses the laconic swagger needed to do justice to William James, screenwriter Mark Boal’s brilliantly fashioned character, a composite of several soldiers he encountered in his time in Iraq, all of whom got that same satisfaction from being there, in the desert, waiting for that next hit, the drug of combat.