“Headhunters”

Synnøve Macody Lund and Aksel Hennie, "Headhunters"

That’s more like it.

Totally dissatisfied with my last visit to the cinema, I had to go to something better.  This adaptation of Jo Nesbo’s novel continues the Scandinavian takeover of all that is cool in the fictional crime world at the moment, and it’s really good fun.

The plot centres around a recruitment agency headhunter and part-time not so petty art thief Roger (Aksel Hennie), who raids the homes of the wealthy to keep his stunningly beautiful and statuesque artist wife Diana (Synnøve Macody Lund) in the lifestyle he thinks she demands.  Manipulated by a handsome and sleazy technology executive Clas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), he finds himself pursued across Norway and fighting for his life before, inevitably, turning the tables on his tormentor.

Hennie is great, a control freak who,  as soon as he becomes controlled by others, quickly goes to pieces.  Disaster after disaster piles up, forcing him into ever more surreal and absurdist scenarios in his reckless flight from certain death.  The breathless pace is relentless for the first hour and a bit as Roger finds himself up over his head in shit (literally), driving like a madman down a country road in a tractor with a huge mastiff dog impaled on the forklift at the front, or crawling out of a car mangled by an articulated lorry having been saved by two of the fattest policeman you have ever seen acting as a meat-filled airbag sandwich.  Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they damned well do, and the dismantling of the prissy, pert Roger into a bloody, battered, shaven-headed, hollow-eyed wreck is exceptionally well done.  Visceral it most certainly is: I found myself laughing at the bizareness of it all one minute and cringing and cowering in my seat at the horror of it the next – there’s one knife attack, in particular, that’ll have you crying mammy daddy.

Performances are very good but they are all largely supporting: Hennie is the movie’s core.  Macody Lund is outrageously gorgeous, and while I was concerned that her character was the stereotypical ice queen, the shame and the love she eventually exhibits were wholly convincing.  Coster-Waldau is seductively masculine, though he isn’t developed enough as a character to hold the villainy all on his own.  Most of the rest are a collection of misfits, some of whom are reminiscent of the weirdos of Deliverance.

It’s not perfect, though.  While the battering Roger takes is much more realistic than that dished out in the shite movie I saw earlier in the week, Roger’s survival of the car crash still stretches credibility.  In addition, the corporate conspiracy which is supposedly at the centre of all these shenanigans isn’t clearly explicated.  Finally, the tying up of loose ends Guy Ritchie-style is just too pat.

However, all in all, it’s another Viking crime success, and, especially in that first roller coaster eighty minutes or so, damned fine entertainment.  There is talk of a Hollywood remake: while there’s no reason why that should be a bad thing, you just know it will be…

“The Cold Light of Day”

Bruce and Sigourney discuss exacting revenge on their agents for involving them in this pile of keech...

Sometimes, when you have nothing to do and you decide to do something, you end up wishing you hadn’t bothered. This is 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back, along with the six quid entry fee that I would rather have given to the Big Issue seller outside the cinema.

Bruce Willis looks bored and grumpy for forty minutes (probably a result of dyspepsia at having been talked into appearing in such a clunker) before he’s killed off – don’t mind the spoiler because, believe me, you’ll be glad you didn’t go. Sigourney Weaver is classy, but looks as if she has a bad smell under her nose all the time. She does. It’s called the script. New pretty boy on the block Henry Cavill falls from a sixty foot tall building, is frequently beaten senseless, drives a car without wearing a seat belt which then flips over several times at 70mph, and is shot: yet he sustains nothing more than a cut across the bridge of his nose, a slightly discoloured eye socket and a limp that is designed to make him seem even more fetching, an indestructibility that no doubt made him perfect for his upcoming role as Superman (yawn… not again…). Putative Spanish love interest Verónica Echegui turns out to be the lead’s sister, which makes the preceding sexual tension a little queasy, and Madrid, which I’m visiting in a few weeks’ time and I wanted to gawp at, is lost amongst pointless car chases.

And I reckon we should all be mightily suspicious of the moral compass of any film in which the good guys turn out to be a Mossad assassination squad.

Quite frankly, Utter Pish: that, actually, would have been a better title, since “The Cold Light of Day” is just a catchy idiom plucked out of thin air which bears no relation at all to a film that takes place mostly murkily at night. That’s the last time I go to see any movie just because it’s the one that’s on at the most convenient time.  Hell mend me, I say.

“The Artist”

Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, "The Artist"

It’s being hailed as a classic, though it isn’t really: it’s just so fantastically different from the mainstream CGI garbage that dominates the multiplexes these days, and so deserves all the awards it gets.

It’s a frothy and melodramatic tale of the death of the silent movie at the hands of talkies.  Both the leads - Jean Dujardin as silent heartthrob George Valentin and Berenice Bejo as rising star Peppy Miller – are sumptuously glamorous, Dujardin smilingly swashing his buckles and Bejo winking and grinning and doing those kooky-sexy flapper dances.  It’s “A Star is Born” all over again with laughs and cheeky dogs.  A real treat.

There are a couple of stunning moments. Peppy, alone in George’s dressing room, finds his suit on a clothes rack.  Sidling up to it, she slips her hand down one sleeve and grabs her ass.  As she leans into his imagined caress, the visual effect is totally convincing, and her devotion quite touching.  It’s a lovely moment.  Then there’s the scene where George, at the bottom of the bottle and at his wits end, savagely ransacks his apartment and burns all his old film, the perfect soundtrack capturing his wild pain.  And there were bits where, I admit, I had a tear in my eye.

I’m not sure what I’m left with, though.  It’s not a film that will stay with me in any lasting way, or one that I’ll be tempted to rush out to buy on DVD to watch again.  However, it’s a gorgeous whimsy that is brilliantly scored and beautifully shot, and damned fine entertainment to boot.

“Another Earth”

Another Earth

It’s been a year of movies about alternate realities, what with Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” (which I missed in the cinema and must get on DVD!) and the gorgeous ”Never Let Me Go”.  This is an end of year offering in the same vein, and it’s quite, quite beautiful,  if just a little bit empty.

You have no idea of the power of that image on the big screen, another luscious Earth hanging in the sky, offering so much but somehow also suggesting the menace of the unknown.  After all, what could be more frightening than knowing that somewhere, another you had got it all right, had made the correct decisions, had achieved all that you had ever wanted to, was more successful and attractive and loved?  Could we cope with a happier us somewhere? That’s the torture offered here to Rhoda (Brit Marling),  a callow, ambitious 17 year old who finds her life changes beyond belief when, drunk and squinting to the night sky to catch a glimpse of the newly discovered planet, she kills a mother and child in a head on collision that puts the father John (William Mapother) in a coma.  After serving 4 years in jail and her place at MIT (used so often as a metaphor for paradise for the new achieving classes) down the tubes, Rhoda takes a dead end janitorial job and, as a result of her own inability to face up to what she has done, finds herself cleaning for John as some kind of atonement.  When she wins a place on a space mission to “Earth 2″, she wonders if, up there, John’s family might still be alive.

The movie centres on Marling’s performance.  Marling -  slightly wonky nose, teeth that aren’t quite straight – is a heart-stopping, incredible beauty, and she’s an interesting character.  A whizz-kid economics graduate, she rejected a career shafting the world economy in Goldman Sachs to take up film making.  She stars, co-wrote the script and co-produced the movie.  There’s a prodigious talent there – she’s not yet 30 – but perhaps also a whiff of prodigious privilege?  No matter, her portrayal of Rhoda is exceptional, a blank slate of shock and grief.  Skeletal and grey at the beginning of the film, as she realises redemption may lie either in John’s arms or on Earth 2, she opens up like a flower ever so gradually, always on the brink of closing in again for good.   Given that her own script is so spare – lengthy silences between the occasional moments of luminous beauty – she carries the emotional weight very powerfully indeed.

It’s also beautifully shot.  Beginning with a grainy, shaky, almost out of focus handy cam style, the only pinsharp image is of that glorious orb hanging in the sky.  As warmth returns to Rhoda, though, light and heat invest the film.   Marling loses that flat monochrome, Mapother loses his corpse-like dead sheen and the world they inhabit becomes tentatively alive again.

It’s a relationship, though, that doesn’t quite work for me.  Perhaps it’s the brevity of the script – with so much drama, emotion,  and quantum metaphysics to pack into 1 hour 40 minutes, something has to give – but the enormity of what has happened to Rhoda and John makes their affair just a little on the glib side.  They fall into a  rather chaste version of a steamy sex session after he plays the saw for her (yes, that’s right), and in a minute he’s begging her not to go, and a minute later telling her to get the hell out.  I needed more development of that, and perhaps a more experienced scriptwriter could have done it.  And the end – clever though it is in its dreadful implication that nothing could be better than it is – seemed to spin us out of that emotional core.

It’s an almost excellent production though, and  is a very welcome addition to the downbeat, low-tech sci-fi genre that has become so popular recently with films like “Never Let Me Go” and “Moon”.  It is also, at heart, an apocalyptic movie – in snatches of media coverage, we hear dire warnings of mutually assured destruction, and we know this ain’t going to end well – and takes that wonderful approach of looking at the end of the world from the most human of standpoints.  For that reason, it sits in the same category as my favourite low-tech, sci-fi apocalypse now movie, the blackly comic “Last Night” by another prodigy, Canadian Don McKellar.  From 1998 – McKellar wrote, directed and starred – it tells of ordinary people spending their last day alive as the world ticks closer to an unamed end at midnight.  McKellar and Sandra Oh are totally convincing as two strangers thrown together in amongst the emotional wreckage of a world on its very last legs.  It’s terrific.

“Moneyball”

Brad Pitt in "Moneyball"

I don’t get baseball.  It’s too complex – why don’t they just get on with a good game of rounders – and can’t see why it generates such sentimentality: the reaction it gets seems like some sort of outpouring of a national spiritual psyche, like cricket to Englishmen.  And I hate cricket.  For me, football (real football, the game with the feet that Pele played) is the really beautiful game, especially when played by Barcelona today or Brazil circa 1970.

However, there’s no denying it inspires some really good movies – “Field of Dreams” and  “The Natural” are the most obvious – that seem to embody tales of honour and courage and true sportsmanship (or the negation of it, as in “Cobb”): on the other hand, football movies are invariably shite, “The Damned United” being possibly the only notable exception because it centered on the life of one of the most fascinating and irascible characters of the late 20th century (and I don’t mean Don Revie).

“Moneyball”, though, is a bit of a disappointment.  It’s entertaining, charming, interesting: but it’s a tale about money, and money is the grubby element in sport.  It centres on the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics, a team hampered by a budget of “only” $32 million, about a quarter of the major teams like the Yankees.  That $32 million is seen as chickenfeed for a sport that involves chucking a ball and swinging a bat is pretty obscene in itself; how many African kids could you save from starvation with that amount of dosh?

So it loses sympathy then and there.  Sure, the fight of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to change the culture of guru scouts and mammothly overpaid stars has echoes in all major sports, including the lunacy that has become football in Europe, and it’s a fight we want them to win, but… it’s just not personal enough, and there’s no real investment in the characters.  As they try to shape a team based not on overblown reputations and huge salaries but on the statistical analysis of overlooked or ageing or injured or wayward players who might actually get the job done for a lot less, the sense of danger for either of them is minimal.  Beane may lose his job, but the threat is actually never made by anyone other than blowhard commentators; Brand, a Yale economics graduate, will find a career in any boardroom.  So for neither character is this a do or die enterprise or a moral war of right against wrong or a seemingly insurmountable, mad tilt at windmills; and that sense of “so what?” is compounded by the fact that, as Beane himself says, the team at the start of the movie is way below crap, and the owner seems to think second best is a perfectly satisfactory state of affairs – so what the hell has anyone to lose anyway?

In addition, we don’t get to know anyone enough to care, especially the players who Beane and Brand stake it all on.   I’m sure a US audience who know the true story and the people behind the movie will appreciate it much more, but one name becomes another for a British audience.  Everyone except Beane is drawn one-dimensionally, especially Brand, whose idea the moneyball strategy is but whose motivations are never explored and who is ignored at the end of the movie during the customary “where are they now?” paragraphs.

Of course, that’s because this is a Brad Pitt movie.  I like Pitt and think he’s a very capable actor, despite doing smug vanity projects like “Mr and Mrs Smith” or the Oceans series.  I think he’s at his best towards the deranged end of the spectrum, as in “12 Monkeys” or “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (a true classic).  In this, he plays Beane as stoically single-minded rather than maniacally obsessed, and therefore comes across as nice but a bit dull, cuddly but a bit scuzzy.  No doubt millions of women will disagree, but he’s not as handsome as he once was, and he’s nowhere near as dangerous.  That’s a pity, especially when an actor of the stature of Philip Seymour Hoffman is so underused as the team manager Art Howe and the only possibility for dramatic conflict – as there must have been, given that Howe refused to follow Beane’s lead for a large part of the season and left Oakland at the end of 2002  – is unaccountably missed.  It would have been good to see the two actors going head to head, though one suspects Hoffman might have shown Pitt up just a bit.  The drama suffers as a result.

Like “Super 8″, this is by no means a bad movie, and it’s obviously helped by a slick script co-written by megastar writer Aron Sorkin: however, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations nor to the hype it’s been getting in the press.  Worth seeing, but only once.

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

Gary Oldman

A film that is everything it’s cracked up to be.

Of course, the plot is well known to anyone with two brain cells and an interest in literature (worryingly few these days, perhaps) so there’s no need of a spoiler alert, but I won’t give away the baddie, other than to say it’s just who you would expect it to be.  However, the book and its TV version perhaps gave away the game a little too easily, and the film version, constrained as it is by brevity, manages to keep what is in the originals a major plot line which makes the ending inevitable as a more subtle subtext.  If you don’t know the plot, it may just surprise you.

Of course, this is a film about bastards doing bastardly things under the guise of loyalty to country or ideology.  What is actually going on is one big self-referential, back-slapping, self-conceited game of chess, played out not for any apparent gain but for the sake of one-upmanship.  If one cannot trust any information from any one from any where, what is the point of it all, other than the game itself?

Gary Oldman promised so much in scene-chewing early roles as Sid Vicious and Joe Orton, and then seems to have spent so much of his talent playing cartoon villains (“The Fifth Element”?  “The Book of Eli”?) while frequently buried under a ton of make up and prosthetics (Mason Verger in “Hannibal” or “Dracula”).  Only in the recent “Batman” series has he been allowed to play a part with real dignity in Commissioner Gordon, but even that is a two-dimensional comic character.  So it’s great to see him in a  role that reveals what a brilliant actor we always thought he might be.  It’s a magnificent performance of understatement; Smiley is the least smiley of people, a cold, obsessively self-controlled individual who seems to eschew personal engagement as much as possible.  Thus, when the veneer cracks and we see the real human under the surface, it’s stunning.  His gentle but pitiless dismantling of a character on an airfield is a chilling glimpse of cruelty; his anguished, silent reaction to his wife’s infidelity, glimpsed through a window at a Christmas party, is a brief moment of momentous vulnerability; and his flash of anger at his prey’s stupidity is a hint of an actual moral code. However, the most gobsmacking scene is when, describing his meeting with Karla, his Soviet arch-rival, he forgets his audience and inhabits the scene, talking to an invisible person, lighting a non-existent cigarette.  It reveals a compulsion that runs too deep to be healthy.  I can now forgive him for “Lost in Space.”

The rest of the cast – almost uniformly British and at the top of their game – is excellent.  Tom Hardy invests the part of a “mechanic” used to doing terrible things with some real moral ambiguity:  I don’t want to end up like you, he tells Smiley and his sidekick Guillam, I want out, I want a family.  Fat chance.  The rest of the Circus crew are  arrogant and callous game-players, jockeying for position and for the ear of the Minister (who is also an arrogant, callous game player).   Colin Firth is as handsome as ever, but that handsomeness in invested with a flabby loucheness that, by the end of the film, is distinctly repulsive, while Toby Jones (who was wonderful as Truman Capote in “Notorious”) is the perfect little clockwork dictator.  The only character we can feel any sympathy for – a young Russian woman attempting to defect to escape the brutality of the man she is married to – is summarily executed, her brains spattered across the wall of a torture cell simply to send a machismo message from one spycatcher to another.

It is all about sex, of course.  There’s a rich undercurrent of it throughout the film.  Sex drives most of them, whether it is Guillam’s homosexuality or Haydon’s bisexuality or Smiley’s infatuation with his barely glimpsed, erotomaniac wife.  Esterhase is a preening little peacock strutting his stuff with two women on the dance floor, Tarr is a bullish sexual predator, Prideaux a yearning, jilted lover, while men gather round the desk of a new blonde typist in a perfect re-enactment of 70′s sexism – and yet it is all so suppressed, so contained, so… secret.  Wonderfully done.

And the look is perfect.  There’s that distance that you would expect of a Swedish director like Thomas Alfredson – just take a look at his chilly “Let the Right One In” – and the graininess of the print combined with the perfectly realised cheap and smoky interiors gives it an unmistakable Cold War feel.  It is a throwback – and a much more successful one than “Super 8″ – to the heyday of the 1970s, evoking reminders of “Callan”, “Public Eye” and, of course, the Alec Guinness original series.

It’s an absolute shoe-in for some Oscars, hopefully for Oldman,  and I’m sure it’ll  spur further le Carré adaptations; “Smiley’s People” is an obvious choice.  The one I’d really like to see, though, isn’t a Smiley novel at all: “A Perfect Spy” is le Carré’s greatest book and, I think, one of the best British novels of the last fifty years.  Oh, that would be a belter.

“Super 8″

Super 8

Steven Spielberg was responsible for a lot of my sniffly moments in cinemas from the 1980s: yes, I cried when ET came back to life, and cried when he went away on his spaceship (“Come” / “Stay”) and don’t deny you did too.  And a scene that always has me in absolute tatters is when Schindler is leaving the camp after Germany has surrendered, and his workers press a little gold ring in his hand, and touch and soothe him as he goes to pieces thinking about how many more he could have saved.

It’s all emotional manipulation, of course, but that’s what cinema does.  There’s no point in criticising a film for successfully doing what it sets out to do, although when it goes wrong it’s as if it’s been ladled on with a bucketful of sickly sweet honey; the ending of “AI”, for instance, is one of the most dishonest bits of cinema I’ve ever seen.

This is billed and marketed as a Spielberg film, even though it’s directed by JJ Abrams and only produced by the man himself.  It’s a definite and deliberate throwback; set in 1979, it feels in many ways just like Spielberg’s epics of that time – although those weren’t clumsily telegraphed with a suitable soft rock soundtrack that includes, of course, “My Sharona”.  Thematically, it’s all there; troubled teenage central character coping with emotional distress while trying to grow into adulthood;  lost and frightened alien trying to get home; honest, mid-West sense of community threatened by remote and arrogant government forces; sensitive kid, dumb kid, fat kid, mad kid, pretty blonde girly kid.  Stylistically, too, some of the touches are distinctly 70s-Spielberg; shots of bicycles being taken from the rack reminded me as much of the beach shots of “Jaws” as “ET”, while there are characteristic scenes of family dysfunctionality  (God, do Americans really behave like that at meal times?).  Of course, there also has to be the final feelgood signing off as the  feuding families realise their commonality and stare in awe at the departing alien in a wistful lineup shot.

However, Abrams’ stamp is on it too, most especially in the portrayal of the creature, which is far  too reminiscent of his breakthrough movie, “Cloverfield”: it is savage, panic-stricken, multi-limbed and largely unseen.  Keeping the beast hidden until as late as possible is becoming a bit of a cliché; we know it’s ugly, so just show us the damned thing.  As such, we never really feel any sympathy whatsoever for the creature; it’s a nasty piece of work because, even if it does keep the nice humans alive for no discernible reason, it slaughters the nasty humans in unspeakable ways.

As far as it goes, it’s entertaining enough, but again Abrams isn’t Spielberg.  There is none of  the subtlety of the master’s use of the surprise; in “ET”,  the whole cinema goes “Ah” when the little turd-like thing croaks “ET go home!” because it’s just so damned cute.  And sometimes you expect a surprise, and it doesn’t come.  Abrams’ surprises are all of the pyrotechnic whizz-bang kind and, while some are undeniably impressive (a shell exploding in a house is a truly visceral moment), they are too one-dimensional.

There’s also a problem with the plotting.    For instance, in “ET”, part of the joy of the film was watching the problems the two species had with communication with each other, the developing awareness and understanding.  Here, it is deemed essential to tell us of the creature’s emotional state and motivation, so Abrams falls back on the tired old cliché of the “psychic connection”;  “How do I know it’s frightened and wants to go home?  Well, it touched me and I just knew”.  Codswallop.

And while the special effects of the 1970s were, by today’s standards, crude, at least they had some humanity and reality.  The train crash which sets the story in motion is preposterous, of course.  A tiny pick up truck collides head on with a thousand ton military train built to withstand nuclear attack, and derails the whole damned thing while sustaining only relatively minor damage to its right front wing.  The film ends with a “battle scene” in which tanks and jeeps pointlessly drive around shooting up a town with no apparent plan; the alien’s underground at the time, and the tracks of the tracer shells would suggest that these soldiers are so incompetent, they’re much more likely to shoot each other.  Finally, I’m sure CGI specialists high-fived each other at how detailed and how accurately they portrayed every single bit of metal in the town as it whizzes through the air in the final scene, but I found it largely unwatchable because of the confusion of it all – and no-one nice gets hit by a flying fork…

The film ends, like “ET” and “Close Encounters”, with a shot of the spaceship leaving Earth; no winding up of the characters, no continuation of the human plotting to see the aftermath of the events.  In those earlier films, that works because there’s a sense of loss, a sense that we have been visited by something wonderful and we want it to come back; in this film it’s just a relief, because then the carnage can end.

“Source Code”

Michelle Monaghan, Jake Gyllenhaal

Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s wee boy) avoids difficult second feature syndrome with a cracking sci-fi starring the always reliable Jake Gyllenhaal.  I  liked his first film, Moon, very much because in addition to hitting all the right techno-buttons required of the genre, it also created huge empathy for the main character, the equally impressive Sam Rockwell lost in space.  Source Code is far more high concept: scientists create a way of hacking in to the last eight minutes of a dead person’s short-term memory in order to influence the future – and whoever came up with that idea deserves a long rest in a dark and quiet room.  In this case, Gyllenhaal is sent back repeatedly to the terrorist bombing of a commuter train to identify the guilty party so that a much bigger attack can be averted.

Once more, Duncan ensures that the audience identifies with and roots for the characters, something missing from similar recent releases such as Inception.  We find ourselves willing the decent Gyllenhaal and the pretty girl next door Michelle Monaghan to do the impossible, to change time, to win out against their horrific destinies, and all of the  Fancy Dan stuff about Time and Quantum Mechanics and Warp Drives (sorry, wrong movie) and The Matrix (sorry, wrong movie again) really doesn’t matter, since the story boils down to a tale of love against the odds.  What is nice is that the beautiful Monaghan isn’t in love with the dashing, handsome army captain Gyllenhaal, whose face she doesn’t see, but with a geeky teacher the audience only sees in reflection; “I knew he was a keeper,” she giggles at one point.  Now that’s a really, really clever touch.

Totally at  a tangent,  in the opening title sequence, Duncan manages to make Chicago look like the most beautiful place on earth.  Quite a feat.  I haven’t been as gobsmacked by the first five minutes of scene-setting in a movie since that epic sequence of the biplane flying over the Sahara in The English Patient.

Of course, this is also a movie that warns us of the heartlessness of the military-industrial complex, and the rapaciousness of corporate greed that strips both science and humanity of any dignity in the pursuit of “higher goals”.  It amazes me how many hugely popular and financially successful film narratives are built on a bedrock of anti-corporatist, anti-corruption, anti-technology, anti-military  and anti-government  sentiments, and yet when it comes to the ballot box, we settle for the same old same old.  It’s almost as if we are willing to tear down the world  and see the possibilities of better ways to live in our movies, but are terrified of actually doing anything to change the  one we have in reality.  Sad, really.

“Never Let Me Go”

Carey Mulligan in "Never Let Me Go"

“Never Let Me Go” is one of my favourite novels, for literary and personal reasons.  Kazuo Ishiguro is, I think, the best novelist writing in English today, and over the last few years, he has explored alternate realities in the most unsettling ways: “The Unconsoled” is a true masterpiece that could be my Desert Island book, a weird dreamscape even better than “Lanark”.

The problem with converting “Never Let Me Go” to film is that this story of clones bred as human organ repositories has suffered from an audience used to inferior films telling the same story in the Hollywood way, such as “The Island”. Here, Tommy and Kate are never going to rebel, never going for a shoot their way to redemption solution:  Ishiguro doesn’t do one-dimensional. He is the master of stoicism, that quiet acceptance of our fate that is ultimately how most humans react to the worst of times.  For Stevens in “The Remains of the Day”, his cry against his lot was one day trip to the seaside on an abortive investigation of his feelings for Miss Kenton before his final decision to practice “banter” to please his master; for Tommy, it is one long keening wail when he realises his love for Kate will never gain him a deferral before he acquiesces to the surgeon’s knife for the last donation that will result in “completion”.  Both scenes in both books wrench the gut, and, despite filmic tinkering, have much the same effect on screen; but a viewer brought up on a diet of explosions and car chases will ask, “why don’t they do something?” The reality, even in this most unreal of worlds,  is that no-one ever does.

I remember seeing “Monster’s Ball” in the cinema years ago, for which Halle Berry deservedly won an Oscar for an outstanding performance as “trailer trash” whose husband has been executed for murder. At the end of the film, the executioner, Billy Bob Thornton, gently outlines his plans for their future together, unaware that she has found out his role in her husband’s death. Berry says nothing, the horror and confusion and dread and hope all played out on her face. As the audience left, I heard someone say, “I didn’t get that. Why did she just blank him?” It’s perhaps the EastEnders generation talking, those who expect every drama to be played out in loud and obnoxious crisis, accompanied by “Riiiiccckkyyyyy!!!” God help us.

This is a gorgeous film, scored perfectly by Rachel Portman. My only query is about a cast that includes Keira Knightley (no I don’t hate her, and think she’s much maligned in some quarters) who is too old for the part of an 18-year-old Ruth. Imagine that – Keira Poutley too old for a part! Andrew Garfield is a sweet lad, suitably gauche and puppyish despite the horrors of his situation, while Charlotte Rampling seems to be settling for those parts in which she’s typecast as a stone-cold bitch. Of course the plaudits go to Carey Mulligan as Kathy, the emotional core of the film, who does a beautiful job of investing utter humanity in a character who is, to all intents and purposes, not considered human. She has the most perfect face to express wisdom and love and compassion in a single look.

“True Grit”

Over and over again, we hear about the demise of the western, about how it is an outdated and archaic cinematic form: and then a western pops up and, all of a sudden, it’s been “revived.”

Fact is, it’s never gone away, and there have been some cracking examples over the last few years.  I particularly liked The Proposition,  still a western because of its theme of frontier conflict between corrupt authority and equally corrupt anarchy, but genre-bending in the sense it is set in Australia.  There have been plenty of more traditional examples, such as the disappointing 3:10 to Yuma and the underrated Appaloosa. Then there are those that are updated, such as the stunningly nihilistic The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,  or the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.  And then, of course, the genre has been spun into the future, with another Cormac McCarthy tale, The Road, and the sublimely cool Serenity.

But there have been two cast iron classics recently.  One was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,   just a gorgeous and – okay, it’s a cliché – elegiac telling of the end of the wild west hero/villain: and now this, another Coen brothers masterpiece.

Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfield

There is so much that convinces about this film.  The performances are superb: Jeff Bridges hasn’t been so charismatically grizzled since The Big Lebowski,  Matt Damon has never been so convincingly gauche.  Josh Brolin excels in the tiny part of the seriously mentally subnormal villain, Tom Chaney, the unlikeliest assassin of a US senator you could ever imagine.  Hailee Steinfeld is perfect as Mattie Ross; hopefully, unlike the original’s Kim Darby, she will do a Natalie Portman or Jodie Foster, and get the chance to develop as a real talent in further roles.

Then there’s the landscape, of course, the whirling snow flurries and the denuded woods and the desert edges all filmed so perfectly.  But the shining feature is the script, lovingly recreated from the source novel by Charles Portis.  I’ve rarely heard more erudite dialogue, certainly never in a western.  All the characters – even Chaney – speak with an elegant formality that just smacks of truth.  There is none of the spitting spaghetti western here (though God knows there’s nothing wrong with that), but rather the haughty bearing of the Victorian age transposed across the Atlantic.  They speak in sentences, not grunts, and there is hardly a contraction in the whole text.   Take these simple, beautiful lines, spoken by Chaney as he is abandoned by his gang with Mattie:

“Chaney: They will not wait for me at The Old Place. Lucky Ned has left me, knowing I am sure to be caught when I leave on foot.

Mattie:  He is sending a mount.

Chaney:  That was a story. Keep still now. I must think over my position and how I may improve it.”

Mannered, delicious words.  It’s a dream of a script.  I’ve downloaded it and am treasuring reading it and learning from it.  Utterly magnificent.

It rockets into number 2 on my list of all time favourite westerns: I’m afraid nothing yet trumps Once Upon a Time in the West, reviewed in its glorious restoration here.