nightmare alley (w&d guillermo del toro, w. kim morgan)

Nightmare Alley starts somewhat clunkily, with a lot of awkward edits as the plot sets itself up and introduces the world of the circus which Bradley Cooper’s Stan is about to become a part of. In this sense it feels like the adaptation of a novel to the screen, where the novel has limitless time to build its rhythm, whereas film, in particular narrative driven film, needs to hit the ground running. Stan’s journey towards becoming a key part of the circus company seems to happen almost overnight. The mystery of his past is left hanging (and never really resolved). At first it looks as though he’s on a mission of revenge, or seeking out a lost lover, but this turns out not to be the case and the film never makes any real attempt to justify why the good-looking protagonist needs to inhabit this world, rather than any other. It will turn out that much of this set-up is required to deliver the punch-line (or remate) with which the film concludes. It’s a pretty good punchline, so it’s just about worth it. As the would-be love story emerges, the film seems to settle down. The thematic of ambition and greed starts to take over, with the protagonist’s journey becoming more clear cut.

It feels worth dwelling on the plot to such an extent, because the most intriguing element of the film might be the tension between the requirements of story and the director’s desire to paint big set piece scenes. This is why we spend so much time in the circus, getting acquainted with a whole raft of characters who will be ditched at the halfway point. The circus, as many a director will attest, is a visual treat, a through-the-mirror wonderland. There are echoes of Pan’s Labyrinth in this fantastical world, but the demands of the narrative mean that the film has to move on and leave this spirit world behind. The film recreates this to an extent with the Mentalist scenes, but by now the issues of character and plot predominate.

The issue of the mentalist comes to the fore in the film’s second half. It’s a fascinating trope and the scenes where Stan manipulates his marks felt like they could almost come out of a PT Anderson film (specifically The Master). The issues of wartime loss and human susceptibly give Nightmare Abbey a weight, albeit a kind of unbalanced weight. The mentalist operating in high society represents a similar exploration of the sub-conscious to the world of the circus. The film isn’t lacking for ideas, and it feels as though one of Del Toro’s strengths is his ability to take the Hollywood world and give it a distorted Latino twist. (There were times when Nightmare Alley reminded me of the work of Juan José Saer.) It’s an unbalanced, contrived vision, which teeters on the edge of self-parody, but just about dragged this viewer with it to the film’s coda, a bathetic sucker punch. 

shame (d steve mcqueen, w abi morgan)

If anything makes me want to quit writing these things it's a film like Shame. To find myself reacting negatively to the work of someone who's debut feature I enjoyed so much takes the wind out of my sails. It probably makes me look like a malcontent, wilfully perverse. When these essays are supposed to be part of the process of being an active participant rather than a passive one. A mark of respect as much as an indication of my taste, good, bad or indifferent. Perhaps that makes the whole process somewhat narcissistic. Yo que se, as they put it so succinctly in Rioplantense Spanish.

Narcissism is appropriate, because if Shame is anything else, it's an almost grotesquely narcissistic film. Preening in the mirror of its attractive star. And his self-conscious attractiveness. He's a man without any real suggestion of a sense of humour, a kind of idiot savant womanising machine. No wonder he's unhappy. His unhappiness is revealed by shots of his face, contorted, repeated. Or shots of him hiding his face, as though he realises that this face is the cause of all his troubles. People have said that this is a film about sex addiction, or just addiction. It's clearly to a large extent a film about family. And its disfunctionality. But above all it's a narcissistic film about narcissism.

Narcissism isn't terribly attractive. The way to deal with this within a narrative is to observe the narcissist from outside, as in the case of Keats' poem. Try and get inside a narcissist's head and it's not going to be anything other than dull. How does the film attempt to combat this? It does so by purporting to be risque, to be out there, to be about sex and sexual deviance. But in reality that's just the arena for Brandon's narcissism to flower and for McQueen's camera to titillate. Any attempts at narrative within this context have nowhere to go, they are all going to end with an agonised portrait of the agony of Fassbender in his agonising penthouse. The character of Sissy has far more depth than that of her brother; but she is dealt with in the cursory fashion of unhappy females, doomed to do everything you'd expect, coming to a jarringly obvious end.

Hunger was a remarkable film in so far that it felt as though the director trusted his cinematic instincts to triumph at the expense of plot and character. There's a boldness to this attitude which allowed McQueen's visual and aural flair to flower. In Shame this flair is yoked to a pedestrian narrative which if anything seems to dilute McQueen's talents.

There's been a lot of love and garlands for this movie, but to my mind it felt, no matter how much I wanted to like it, like the work of people who inhabit a rarefied world where the makers' brilliance has become so all consuming that they need to make a film about it.  There's an almost Cameroonian air of self-satisfaction to its purportedly bleak examination of what it's like to suffer being overwhelmingly successful. The more Fassbender's face contorts - the agony and the ecstasy - the falser the whole farrago felt. In a way, it's a perfect film for our times, set in the uber shrine of mass individualism which our society is still aspiring to, in spite of the clear failure of the world it depicts.

Maybe I've misinterpreted it. I kind of hope so. 

the damned united (d. tom hooper; w. peter morgan)

There's a moment when what one takes to be Nigel Clough, a fine midfielder in his day, is sitting in the back of his father's car and reading something like Shoot magazine. It's 1974 and he must be about the same age as me, an 8 year old absorbed in the farcical detail of football. Eight year old's tend to know quite a lot, more than they're given credit for, and one wonders what young Nigel made of his dad's leading Leeds to their worst start in many a season, including a home defeat to QPR, sadly not featuring footage of Stan Bowles, the one man Brian has told his bunch of Leeds terriers to stop. Bowles, so my memory tells me, had a dissolute flair, something he had in common with Clough, the subject of the movie. It's the kind of flair which seems less and less common in the British game (which was always distrustful of flair) - names like Currie, Hudson, Marsh, Osgood etc used to light up our culture, a direct link to perhaps the last true flair player of them all, Gascoigne, as though brilliance, the capacity to make the jaw drop in wonder, is no longer the preserve of the British psyche.

Sadly, Hooper's movie echoes this trend. The idea is interesting enough, but this feels in the end like a workmanlike, mid-table kind of movie, run by a cautious board more worried about the perils of dropping down the leagues (doing a Leeds or a Derby or Forest) than tilting for glory. There's one scene in the film, when Clough rails at the Derby chairman, which explicitly refers to this kind of insipid cultural approach, with Clough pointing out that without his genius Derby would still be scraping around in the then second division. That the script should put its finger on the creative conundrum which links both cinema and football; the need to balance ambition with caution on the financial playing field; only for the film to then retreat from Clough's challenge, seems perhaps indicative of the culture we inhabit. Smart enough to know the rules, but never brave enough to break them.

Elsewhere, Morgan's script is functional but rarely flies. Odd notes of exposition sneak in (as Clough explains his rivalry with Revie to Taylor for the benefit not of Taylor, who surely knows this, but the audience), and a noticeable trope continues to dominate the narrative, of two powerful men headed for inevitable confrontation (The Deal; Frost/ Nixon; Last King of Scotland). However, in this instance, the Clough/ Revie rivalry feels contrived (which is not to say that it is); a somewhat clunky narrative tool to explain Clough's maverick ambition. As even the most casual follower of English football knows, Clough was in another league to Revie. Even if he needed the impetus of the rivalry, it is only a mechanism of his ambition, not the root (much as Ferguson loves to stimulate rivalries with any other manager who threatens him, from Wenger to Keegan). The scene which really seemed to reveal the serrated tension which made Clough tick was the one where he cannot bear to watch the match and hides away in the bowels of the stadium instead, agonising as the minutes pass. Here was a glimpse of the nervous tension which Clough channelled into his management; however the film's psychological portrait of Clough remained too skin deep, too thinly veined, to live up to the intensity this moment revealed.

Which takes us to Sheen's performance. Sheen's a clever actor, and a talented one. But the more of these turns that he does, the more one starts to wonder if he's really a soulful one. Perhaps he is, but at the moment it feels as though the mimicry, the details and the finickity ambition to embody the subject he's playing are in danger of getting in the way of his engagement with that subject. His Clough feels like looking at a near flawless reproduction of the real thing: it's very impressive, but it's never quite the real thing, and if anything the flawlessness draws attention to that gap that exists between the impression and the reality. Rather than involving the audience in the story it acts as a kind of Brechtian alienation technique, and I'm not convinced that's the object of the exercise, or if it is I'm not convinced the director realised this.

As much British cinema seems to do now, The Damned United indulges in a nostalgic vision of Britain before the dawn of Sky Sports or the Premier League, when stadiums were run down and men were men. The local colour has its moments, and there is a sense of a lost England, one where Derby County could win the league. However, within this context, the way it affected the characterisation seemed unconvincing, nowhere more so than in the depiction of the fag-smoking Leeds team, who seemed like a bunch of Dickensian raggamuffins, with their surly attitudes and curly locks. The notion seemed to be that back in those more innocent days, you could become the best team in the country through sheer thuggishness, and footballing ability was a secondary requisite. Leeds under Revie were just the biggest thugs on the block. Even if there is a germ of truth in this, the whole thing is drawn out and caricatured to absurd levels. And it also conveniently ignores the fact, as noted above, that back in the day, there were players of remarkable flair, individuals, who flowered in the then first division. The pathos of what has been lost might have been all the stronger had the script found a way to connect with the fate of Clough's teams in the 21st Century. And talking of pathos, if that's the right word, there seemed to be some going with the end note stating that Clough (and Taylor) were the first and only British managers to retain the European cup, on a day when Ferguson was poised but failed to emulate them. It does seem in some way indicative of the film's weaknesses that the moments that were really powerful and evocative were the documentary shots at the end of the strange duo on the bench, or being interviewed, moments when the full extent of Clough's almost disconcerting, messianic genius finally shone through.

the last king of scotland (dir. macdonald; w. morgan)

The first time the young Scottish doctor meets the dictator is a moment of high drama. The dictator, whose speech the feckless Scot has admired already, has an accident – his car has hit a cow, and he’s suffered a minor injury. The doctor is summoned, the cow lies wailing in misery on the side of the road. The doctor tends to the president whilst the cow wails. His humanitarian instincts working in overdrive, the doctor seizes the President’s pistol, lying on the car bonnet, and puts the cow out of its misery. The sudden action leads the soldiers to prime their rifles. The dictator looks like he might order anything. The doctor realises he’s out of his depth. The dictator learns he’s Scottish and embraces him. The woman the doctor fancies admires his reckless heroism.

It’s a beautifully structured and executed scene which sets a standard that The Last King of Scotland can never top. Unfortunately it comes at the end of the ‘first act’: the moment when Idi meets Doctor Garrigan.

Forest Whitaker proceeds to deliver a bravura performance as the mercurial Amin. However a trope has been set: he will swing from overbearing to jocular in the space of a moment. His very unpredictability becomes predictable. The Scottish doctor, played by James McAvoy, is a harder part to pull off. Here is a man who is complicit in the mechanisms of a dictatorship. His ignorance is hardly excused by his callowness. Yet at the same time he is also the romantic lead, a dashing model of globalised youth. The contradictions within the character are pertinent. McAvoy’s performance has flashes where it captures these contradictions, yet the film is reluctant to undercut its hero with too severe an examination, and his eventual sadistic torture operates as a kind of atonement. His Scottish charm lets him off the hook, and those who he could turn to for advice or support are caricatures, none more so than McBurney’s villainous-seeming Englishman, whose two-dimensional role in the film seems to be entirely to act as a foil for McAvoy’s boyish charm.

The Last King of Scotland has all the ingredients of an exhilarating film. One of the most ruthless rites of passage narratives you could ever come across. Charismatic characters, moral contradiction, sex, exoticism, violence and ‘based on a true story’. For all this, it remains something of a haggis of a movie; flavoursome but stodgy, spicy but safe. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climactic party scene, where Garrigan sleeps with Amin’s wife. The action is ‘heightened’ by a montage scene of topless African nubiles, dreamlike images of Amin entering the doctor’s consciousness, burning flames. Perhaps this is a wilful homage to seventies Bond movies, but if so, one wonders, why?

At the end of the movie, Amin berates Garrigan for playing the white tourist in exotic Africa. It’s a valid point which has been waiting to be made. There does seem a danger that a Western film set in Africa will echo this voyeurism. The Last King of Scotland tries to steer clear of the worst excesses of Amin’s rule, but it is still trading on the notion of the dark continent, where unspeakable things will inevitably happen, to be re-presented for Western consumption and entertainment. At the end of the movie the chastened Garrigan flies out on a plane; we go with him, little the wiser about the continent we’ve been invited to visit in his company for an hour or so.

frost/nixon

You can imagine the writer of this play, Peter Morgan, digging out the Frost tapes and realising that he had literary gold dust all over his fingers. (A bit like Herzog and Grizzly Man). One of the keys to creating a hit play is to come up with an idea so good that you know there's no excuse for not making it work.

So Morgan had the idea, now he just had to make a play out of it. This is where the problems start.

Has ever a more lop-sided piece of theatre been created? Probably, but all the same - the first hour of this piece, which runs at one hour forty without an interval, is a turgid lecture, riven with exposition, two dimensional characterisation (the US army advisor who assists Nixon; the 'hippie' journalist, Reston etc) and caricature. Sheen plays Frost with bravado but the script offers no scope for subtlety, Langella tries to open up Nixon but is reduced to strange alcoholic leg-twitching. The piece contains one moment of drama which seems contrived and has no resonance.

Somehow the play lurches to the money. Then, miraculously, it comes together. The gold dust sparkles, the writer transcribes the tapes, we know what they mean, and we are impressed by our own insight and grateful to the writer for permitting us to be so clever. But we are not, I would suggest, moved, nor much the wiser about the human condition, or even the faults of Nixon himself. We now know that he was afflicted by hubris, but have no idea what lead him to lie, to cheat, to hoist himself on his own petard.

Frost/ Nixon isn't really a play. It's a clever idea masquerading as a documentary, recycling an interview. As though to prove the point the design helps us along - when the action switches to 70's New York, there's some footage of 70's New York. When Reston mentions a silver cadillac, there's one on screen for us. The TV sets are there for a reason: when Langella's Nixon is finally wrong-footed by Frost, it's up there for all of us to see, but they tend to obscure as much as they reveal. The play does something similar: we leave the theatre thinking we know the whole story, only to realise a few breaths later that we have barely scratched the surface.

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Note 1: For Morgan's account of how he came to write the play, see this article. The show will transfer to Broadway in February and the feature film is in development.

Note 2: Backstage gossip: Langella is a method actor. He drove the director mad by refusing to give a proper performance until the show opened, which may explain the brittleness of his on-stage relationship with Sheen. He is known to improvise lines from the interview which are scripted verbatim, causing Sheen to improvise back. He finds it hard to get out of character, prowling his two dressing rooms with presidential wrath.