mccabe and mrs miller (w&d robert altman, w. brian mckay, edmund naughton)

There are a few Altman films I have always hoped to see on the big screen, and this is one of them. The anti-western western, by a master of the high Anglo-Saxon art of gentle satire. (The transformation of Gosforth Park into Downton Abbey represents everything that has gone wrong with Britain in the 21st century.) M&M is a typically baroque piece of work which opens with a lengthy, darkly lit sequence where Beatty’s McCabe visits a desultory tavern in a forlorn mining settlement which will one day become a thriving city. The sequence is shadowy, almost mysterious, as the locals ask themselves who this McCabe might be, mythologising him as a gunslinger (which he isn’t). It lasts for perhaps 15 minutes and sets out Altman’s stall to create immersive, confusing (as immersive procedures tend to be) and a novelistic kind of cinema, with Dickensian undertones. The narrative of M&M is underwhelming: Julie Christie’s opium smoking entrepreneur comes to town, in a strangely off-key sub-cockney performance, and goes into business with McCabe to set up the best whorehouse in town. The big players want to buy McCabe out, he arrogantly shrugs them off, with catastrophic albeit predictable results. The chemistry between Beatty and Christie, two luminous screen presences, never quite seems to flower and Christie’s role feels underwritten. The pacing is stately. Nevertheless, the world of the movie, this remote mountainous corner of the USA, is perfectly realised, and there’s an almost regal authority to Altman’s management of the grand set piece scenes, culminating in a final, glorious snow-bound shoot-out that is the equal of any Western that precedes it. This might not be his greatest movie, and the gender politics occasionally make one cringe, but, embossed with the hallmark of its humanist director, it is nevertheless a minor masterpiece. 

From Wikipedia:

Carpenters for the film were locals and young men from the United States, fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War; they were dressed in period costume and used tools of the period, so that they could go about their business in the background, while the plot advanced in the foreground.

vice (w&d adam mckay)

So, Dick Cheney, who the hell were you? What was that all about? As we enter another era, which makes the bogeymen of yesterday look like ‘maybe they weren’t so bad after all’, we’re left wondering. George W, who features heavily in a great performance by Sam Rockwell, (Vice is full of impressive performances, Bale’s being the icing on the cake), has been heavily rehabilitated in recent years. All of a sudden he isn’t the man who rushed headlong to war at the first opportunity, but a down-to-earth fellow who knows how to talk to his fellow americans and just happened to be president. Which is more or less how he’s played in McKay’s film, which makes it very clear that Cheney was the power behind the throne. Of course, this is the danger with revisionist history, something that has long afflicted Peter Morgan and is now occurring with James Graham in the UK: they turn men and women whose actions caused incalculable political and social damage into someone who might have walked out of a soap opera. We’re not much the wiser at the end of Vice as to what made Cheney tick. He doesn’t seem such a bad soul, and perhaps he wasn’t, but it’s the ‘perhaps he was’ that seems more important to me. The film tries to square its ends by putting titles at the conclusion giving figures for fatalities in the Iraq war, but this doesn’t really make up for the fact McKay soft soaps his role in Haliburton, and the personal gain he and his family levered as a result of the war. Because this is the heart of corruption, and it should be acknowledged that all political systems are always liable to corruption: who gains? It’s far easier to take ‘difficult epoch making decisions’ when you know they’re in your own personal interest. Vice lets Cheney off the hook here, in spite of the nice arty sequence of fish hooks at the end.

It’s the risk that McKay’s film-making takes. The jokey backhanders and the explicative, tongue-in-cheek subtitling. Personally, I rate him and respect him for getting movies made about big topics that need talking about. But having said that, Vice feels as though it bites off more than it can chew. It might have been far more effective if, rather than becoming a biopic, it had really given itself time to pick apart at the seams the reality of those days pre-and-post-911, pinning down the subject’s motives with greater clarity. Asking a few harder questions. And offering answers which were less easy to brush off.

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Regarding this last point, it’s perhaps worth addressing the Shakespeare correlative. Someone else who wrote political drama, and could obviously be used as a reference by the likes of Morgan, Graham and Mckay. There are two significant points to take on board here. One is that Shakespeare’s editorial line never fudges things. Richard 3, Richard 2, Henry 4, Henry 5: the virtues and faults of these characters are very clearly delineated, there’s no sitting on the fence (as opposed to the treatment of his tragic heroes, for example). And secondly it should be noted that Shakespeare never commented explicitly on contemporary politics. The closest he got was Henry 8. Perhaps because it was too dangerous or perhaps because he decided that it wasn’t the dramatist’s role to attempt to re-present the events of the day. In the relatively new fashion for re-presenting contemporary history, (docu-fiction), there’s always the suspicion that there’s a tendency to oversimplify, to paint with a brush that doesn’t allow for the subtlety of fine detail, detail which history will provide. There’s something which feels dangerously opportunistic and cosy about Graham’s depiction of Cummings, for example. Perhaps Brecht’s Arturo Ui is also relevant here. The “balance” demanded by docu-fiction is just as dangerous as the “balance” which contemporary broadcasters seem to believe necessary, without ever realising that the “balance” they provide is skewered by the fact that the theoretically neutral position adopted to arbitrate this balance is never actually neutral, is always the product of a system with its own interests. 

hail caesar (w&d ethan coen, joel coen) & the big short (d adam mckay, w. mckay, charles randolph)

Hail Caesar

There’s not that much to say about Hail Caesar. A packed out Saturday night Ritzy settles down to watch some escapist fare and gets what it pays for. No matter how much the film theorists might speculate about an subtext of “faith” in years to come (the word Clooney cannot utter), the film’s narrative barely holds together; instead there’s just enough in its bricolage of ideas to muddle by as a plot. Reminding us that film, the artistic medium most lacking a process of creative unity, is no more than a collection of sequences which sometimes makes for a coherent whole, and sometimes doesn’t. And that sometimes this lack of coherence matters, and at others it doesn’t much. In this case, it doesn’t much. There are some lovely sequences which pastiche or homage the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood; some lovely comic moments; some lovely cameos. All strung together like a bunch of mismatching pearls by a narrative that just about gets the film from start to finish. Some of the comic moments, notably the meeting of the religious elders and Fiennes’ lovely cameo as the director of mannered, Cowardian melodramas are worth the ticket price alone. Hail Caesar might be more like a review sketch than a serious drama, but on a dank Saturday night in Brixton, it goes down a treat. 

The Big Short 

So, the demise of the intelligent Hollywood star-fuelled blockbuster has been overrated. All this in a year when Spotlight, which I haven’t seen, won an awards competition which people take note of. The Big Short is a fluent, compelling tale of how the system failed in 2008, which manages to pull it off despite making its protagonists a group of disconnected white guys who never meet and who make it rich by outwitting that said system. It really shouldn’t work as a movie, under any of the usual terms. Sympathetic hero - no. Clear protagonist - no. Unity of action - no. However, whilst Hail Caesar is not really a film about faith; The Big Short is. The faith of the individual in his capacity to hold firm to his beliefs when all the evidence is screaming that he’s wrong. This is the uniting narrative of all the eight lead characters; although none more so than in the case of Christian Bale’s drum-toting investment guru, whose main function in the movie is to do nothing other than wait. Waiting, as we all know, is fundamentally anti-dramatic. There’s no action in waiting. There’s stress and no release valve. Even the drums Bale bashes don’t help much. Yet this is what his character does for the best part of two hours. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Which is largely down to two things: McKays bravura direction, which isn’t afraid of flirting with ridicule and in the process provides a light touch to what might have been a dour tale; and Steve Carrell’s grandstanding performance as the one banker who really seems to care, his shock at the stupidity of his nation constantly etched onto his face. The film makes much play of being based on fact; there is something in the relentlessness of Carrell’s performance, its lack of any sense of redemption or catharsis, which helps to convince us that this is indeed a real character, who will die being pissed off, rather than a script developed concept who has to go on his journey towards a greater sense of enlightenment. The film, with its flouting of so many of the standard rules of script-assembly, is something of a heist in itself.