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. 

a bigger splash (d luca guadagnino, w david kajganich)

Since arriving in London I’ve seen two films. The contrast between them seems to encapsulate the problems of scale and ambition that British cinema faces. One is Stephen FIngleton’s The Survivalist. A worthy, sturdy piece of filmmaking which seems entrapped by its simplicity, resolutely refusing to lend any kind of global dimension to its post-apocalyptic landscape, no matter how effectively plotted and filmed it is. A film that leaves with you with the feeling of something austere and underwhelming. The other was Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, nominally an Italian film, but more of a pudding, featuring Brits, Americans, Italians a Belgian and, somewhat awkwardly, immigrants from undisclosed African countries. 

For all its imperfections, and there are a few, including the final flawed 20 minutes, A Bigger Splash is an engrossing film, marked by its very ambition as a distinctive piece of filmmaking. The story is essentially simple, four people holed up in an idyllic Italian hideaway, with their various connections and dependencies. The outcomes are not unpredictable, (what else can happen in these circumstances apart from fucking and fighting?), but the storytelling refuses to tow an easy line, constantly kicking against the inevitability of its characters’ destinies. There is a price to pay for this inventiveness. The refugee storyline feels half-baked; there’s a hint of something Haneke-esque to be wrought from their presence on this outpost of Europe, and the one moment where Schoenaerts and Johnson are met by a group of uneasy men has potency, but in the end the strand feels like a red herring. Similarly, the final twenty minutes are a disappointment; this film should not descend into the TV mechanics of a murder enquiry. It has had too much going for it upto then. 

However, these flaws are forgivable within the bigger picture. Luca Guadagnino displays the same delicate touch for the nuances of personal relationships he showed in his previous film, I Am Love. This time he pushes the characters to their limits. No more so than in a show-stopping performance by Ralph Fiennes as Harry, the verbose, larger-than-life record producer. Fiennes is one of those actors whose appeal, from the point of view of a recondite Englishman, is sometimes hard to grasp. Neither Bond-esque nor subtle enough to be a character actor. But here, he steps out of his shadow (or perhaps into it) to deliver a rip-roaring, relentlessly annoying character whose inability to control his particular lust for life leads to scenes of toe-curling embarrassment but also a weird kind of post-middle-age pathos. Why shouldn’t the self-absorbed middle-aged dads dance with the same sense of abandonment as the nubile youngsters? There’s something glorious about Harry’s refusal to bow to the rules of refinement, even if you know spending more than 15 minutes in his unedited company would be a kind of living hell. It’s a remarkable performance, which offers a counter-balance to Swinton’s more glacial Thin White Duke; allowing the two younger characters to tail the older characters like formula 1 drivers looking for the moment they’ll overtake. 

As a portrayal of post-middle aged pre-dementia, Guadagnino’s film cannot be topped. Its characters parachute through the screen with the splendour and abrasiveness which is normally reserved, these days, for 3-D effects. As though the director is reminding us (and even himself, given the film’s iffy ending) that cinema is just as much about character and story as it is about visuals or coherence. That you need to take a risk if you want to achieve anything exceptional. That the straight and narrow are all very well, but they are straight and narrow and they offer scant help of emotional rescue when you are most in need of it. 

this is london [ben judah]

The author has a fascination with his city that goes beyond pure journalism. If you’re of a curious mind, London is a gift. There always have been and always will be corners and cultures to explore. Judah’s thesis would appear to be that in the past 20 years the process of immigration has grown at an exponential rate. There are times when he appears to delight in this, and others when his book, or at least the characters who populate it, would appear to be taking a more ambivalent line. These characters being the immigrants themselves, who are more honest and aware of the racial and cultural conflicts that the multicultural model turns a blind eye to. What Judah’s text does with a great deal of rigour and fidelity (sometimes to the point of near-incoherence) is offer these new Londoners their voice; a voice which the mainstream doesn’t have time for. The Romanian beggars and prostitutes; the Nigerian contract health worker; the Arab princess; these are just some of the London voices which speak through the text. Whilst mainstream drama is still struggling to incorporate the previous generations of Caribbean and Asian immigrants, Judah leaps straight to the next. He roots them out, from Edmonton to Plaistow to Knightsbridge with a journalistic doggedness. These sub-cultures, demi-mondes are the new margin and he pursues this edge even to the point of personal danger. (One of the curiosities or possible inconsistencies of the book is that in the opening pages, Judah seems set on enforcing his presence as the narrator, something that he subsequently, and in the opinion of this reviewer, wisely, downplays. They are the protagonist, he’s the shadowy figure on the edge of their vision, a place which reflects their position in society and perhaps helps to explain why so many open up to him with such apparent honesty.)

Is this melting pot. or Babel, a utopia or a dystopia? As mentioned, there are moments, such as the haunting episode with the prostitutes, remembering their murdered colleague, which seem to veer towards the latter. At the same time, the author himself observes that the murder itself is an echo of the Ripper murders; the city’s margins have always been a dangerous place, inhabited by the marginals. Judah is also acute about the issue of gentrification, observing the way in which barrios that the white middle class wouldn’t have touched a decade ago have now been transformed, just as happened to Notting Hill and Bayswater in the 60s/ 70s. The demographic impact of this on communities has been much discussed; the comparison that isn’t made is with the mega-cities, where the very idea of centrality has begun to erode, something that will happen to London, perhaps, allowing for more elasticity in the way it’s structured, with the line between suburb and centre eliding. 

Maybe the centre doesn’t need to hold. Maybe it needs to fragment.  The issue is tangible in the cafe I’m sitting in right now, in a corner of Peckham that hasn’t been transformed. Judah is a bit sniffy about Peckham and its gentrification.However, as I write, there’s the visible image of a racial mix that has integrated, to the degree at least that they come here and drink coffees and eat pricey bread, not just the white middle class emigres but also the 2nd generation Caribbean, Indian, the 1st generation Polish and Eastern Europeans. Maybe this is all a phantasmagoria, the wool pulled over my eyes, but from the seat I’m sat it, it does look as though there might exist the possibility that the city can continue to integrate, recycle, develop, in spite of all that isn’t working, in spite of the avarice and the philistinism. 

Judah never seems to draw any real conclusions about the capital’s ultimate fate, although many of the characters who people his book hold strong opinions, both positive and negative. No matter what London’s future, Judah’s book offers an intrepid, back-door portrayal of his city, a worthy successor to a tradition that banks and skirts Pepys, Defoe, Cobbett, Addison and Steele, Dickens… The list could go on. There is a fine tradition of British writers getting down and dirty in their investigations and This is London is a welcome addition to that club.

sankja [zahar prilepin]

Let me start again. I have tried to write this review about three times and stumbled each time. There is something about Prilepin’s writing that is so effortless and direct that it seems wrong to over-compose. So, in keeping with this spirit, I’m going to bash this out with as little thought as possible.

This is not a bad thing. There are all kinds of ways of writing. Some are tortuous, sinuous, knotty. Others flow like a brook, albeit one whose borders have been artfully tended. And others, as Shelley or Keats, might have said, fall like an apple from a tree. There’s a glorious, pure romanticism to Prilepin’s tale of a young Russian who is so disaffected with his society that he takes up arms against it. It’s a romanticism which is tied to a specifically Russian tradition which the novel itself recognises. At one point, in his reflections, Sankya, the protagonist, says that Russia is condemned to a cycle of state-ism and revolution. In the face of Putin’s moribund society, he opts for revolution. It’s in no way an idealistic or even, perhaps, a political revolution. It’s more of a way of expressing the existence of his identity in the face of a society that doesn’t seem to care if he exists or not. In this, of course, Sankya has much in common with Dostoyevski’s more tortured heroes or, more pertinently, the protagonist of Bely’s radical and neglected novel, Petersburg. 

Sankya’s revolution involves various stages. He goes to Riga to shoot a judge. He goes to Moscow to protest violently. He is beaten up and left for dead. He joins an armed insurrection. And, at one point, he leads the trashing of a Macdonalds. Here is the point where Sankya’s quest for identity through violent revolution tallies with that of a broader, global dissatisfaction. The process that Russia has embraced as it slipped from corrupt Communism to corrupt Capitalism is particular to its historical circumstances. But, in Sankya’s embrace of fatalistic glory instead of a slipshod treadmill, there are echoes not only of a nascent Western resistance to the forces of capital, but even the instinct expressed by young men and women towards Islamic extremism. Better to die for a cause than stagger forward through life like a zombie. It’s here that Prilepin touches a dangerous, romantic nerve which throbs far beyond the borders of mother Russia, the banner that Sankya adopts as the totem of his personal revolt.

With its rat-a-tat prose and driving narrative, each chapter another step in Sankya’s journey towards doom, Prilepin’s novel seems to declare its indisputable significance without really trying. Apparently it has become a cause celebre in Russia, and one can understand why. In contrast to Pelevin’s aesthetic complexities, this is a visceral declaration of war. The novel as blunt political instrument, in a society which flirts with Stalinist repression whilst presenting itself as a new model capitalist state. 

+++

(Note. In 1993 I read Bely’s Petersburg. We were still at the tail end of the Tory oligarchy which had shaped my whole sentient political life. Unemployment was at 3 million. A degree seemed like more of a hindrance than a help, particularly a degree in english and philosophy. When I came to write my first play, Mickey Valid, Bely’s novel was my model. Mickey, an everyman, decides that the only way to give meaning to his life is through an act of political violence. The play opens with a dialogue between two bullets, the two bullets Mickey will later fire in order to assassinate a member of the royal family. The royal family being the ultimate representation of an alienating societal order. The play had a workshop at the National Studio. In the process, to my mind, it was chopped around and diluted. The original version of the play is lost. I only have the weaker, revised version.  Nothing else happened to Mickey Valid. It sunk into the quicksand. I would not be surprised if one of these days, Prilepin’s hero Sankya acts as a similar inspiration to a writer seeking a model for a figure on the brink of falling off the edge of his society.)

jacob the mutant [mario bellatin]

Jacob the Mutant is a genuinely strange exercise in writing. Bellatin presents the extracts of a lost novel written by Joseph Roth. These fragments are stitched together to tell a weird, cabalistic tale. Jacob lived in a border town on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He has a zoo. He helps people to cross the border. His wife is having an affair. She flees to the States with her lover. Jacob ends up following her. He has a transformation and becomes a late-middle-aged woman, who tries to shut down the town’s multiple dance schools. This is a basic summary of the apparent plot of the missing, fragmented novel. Which the author then rewrites in his own words. The author might be Jacob’s great great grandson. Then again he might not be. The translator adds his version. There is more exegesis. There are explanatory drawings which explain very little. There is also a latent hassidic mysticism to the book, which makes precise if baffling references to aspects of the Torah. In short, this brief book contains a degree of mystification which is impressive. What it all means I have no idea, but if you enjoy being bamboozled, this is a great read. I am looking forward to getting my hands on another of his books: The Uruguayan Book of the Dead. 

the revenant (d. iñárritu; w. iñárritu & mark l smith)

What a curiously hollow film, from Iñárritu. Spectacular, wrapped up with the most gorgeous wrapping paper ever made, but inside, nothing more than a bauble. There’s a moment towards the beginning when you think that there might something going on in the use of subtitled Pawnee and its depiction of the native American Indians. The Rhee chief delivers a forceful speech to the French militiaman about theft and colonialism which hints at a subtext. Perhaps the Mexican will break through the stereotypes and succeed in inveighing the indigenous population with the protagonism they deserve. But the mute, affected Native Indians remain bit-part players who fulfil their expected roles. Glass’ widow speaks words of pantheistic wisdom; the witchdoctor Indian saves his brutalised body with the use of an effective sauna technique, whilst not being smart enough to outwit the drunken French militia; the Rhee plod along towards their destiny with implacable expressions and an iridescent violence. This review is already giving them more focus than the movie. Had it been made fifty or over twenty five years ago, perhaps the “authenticity” might have impressed, a trick Costner pulled off with Dances With Wolves, but in the end this is no more than another gringo Western, with a lame revenge narrative as its motor. The simplicity plays to the market; you don’t have to think too much whilst watching this movie; it’s a visceral ride. Macho film-making at its least subtle, a point consolidated by the cliched sub-Malick flashback scenes of the dreamy moments when Glass and his bride lived an idyllic life full of arcadian beauty. Like the Native population, women are a marginalised element whose presence in the narrative would only get in the way of men doing their thing. All of this is redeemed to a certain extent by the wonder of Lubezki’s camera. Iñárritu’s erstwhile partner, Arriaga, who wrote a much more complex, intriguing Western, must be smiling ironically to himself, like Moctezuma, at the way the gods distribute their favours. 

do something do something do something [joseph riippi]

Riippi’s terse, brutal novel is recounted by three different narrators whose idiosyncratic voices dovetail. A pair of siblings and a disenchanted playwright. The novel is set largely on the East Coast (New York) and the West, (Seattle), with both cities casting their shadow over proceedings. It’s a deliberately fragmentary book, assembled from a clutch of interconnected anecdotes and memories, which get shared around by the three characters. There’s considerable skill in the way the writing will throw out a reference which the reader can’t quite pin down; where did it occur previously, who owned this image before? Into this lattice-work effect the writer stitches scenes of cruelty; a man loses his infant child; a woman recovers from a brutal rape; her brother is in hospital because he cannot control his violent urges. This is dog-end America, a country you probably don’t want to know, where the legacy of 911 generates racism and suspicion. It’s a slender, desperate text which, in spite of its erudition, never has that smug tone which too many US writers cannot avoid. The voices it grants space to feel genuinely on edge, carved out of nightmares which contain no redemption. 

white masks [elias khoury]

Khoury’s novel is a patchwork quilt of a book; a murder mystery with the mystery stripped back as far as possible and the murder itself reduced to the role of an accomplice. Because this isn’t a novel about a murder; it’s a novel about a society, the society within which the murder occurred. Khoury, going against all the rules of the genre, isn’t really interested in the murder; he’s interested in what war and sectarianism can achieve, how they can tear the social fabric asunder. Each of White Mask’s 7 chapters, apart from the first, narrated by the victim’s widow, offers a tangential take on the life and death of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a civil servant who starts to lose his mind after his favourite son is killed fighting. An architect, a blinded soldier; a doctor; a widowed mother, among others, all are granted their opportunity to tell us what they know about Khalil, but more than that, to tell us about themselves and the way their lives have been transformed by the civil war. Thus, voice by voice, chapter by chapter, the writer constructs his quilt, revealing the values and the desperation of his Beirut. 

After reading Khoury’s Yalo, I realised it was one of the few books I’ve come across that offered some kind of insight into what’s occurring now in Syria. You can glean all you want from non-fiction; you can watch documentaries; you can feel informed. But you can’t know what it is to live there, how daily life functions, the compromises that have been forced upon people merely in order to survive. Only literature can begin to achieve that.

Neither Yalo nor White Masks deal with Syria: both are novels that address the dreadful, seemingly endless Lebanese civil war which was part of the backdrop of my own youth. However, without going into the political history of the region, to find parallels between Syrian and Lebanese society is not that much of a stretch. These books might have been written about a war which ended over thirty years ago, but the societies are similar, as is the gruesome nature of the civil wars which both countries have endured. Khoury’s writing retains its immediacy and importance; there are few sources as valuable as his novels for understanding the decades of strife and conflict which continue to afflict the Middle East.

my documents [alejandro zambra]

My Documents is a collection of 15 short stories which are elliptically connected. A character charts the process of giving up cigarettes in one story and then in another another character with a different name talks about the time he used to smoke. This is just one of many latticed connections that hold the book together, lending the text a buoyancy as it unfolds. All the stories are “cotidiano” - low key, domestic, almost Carveresque tales about various individuals finding their way in the curious world of modern Chile. The spectre of Pinochet and the dictatorship hangs over the early part of the book. There’s a great description of an anti-Pinochet slogan mysteriously appearing on a school blackboard, and the teacher’s response to this. However, as in Fuguet’s text, The Movies of my Life, politics lurks below the surface, rather than on it. Much of the book deals with characters who appear subtly but almost invisibly damaged, like the child who repeats his year in school again and again, or the Walter Mitty cousin who’s house-sitting turns into a spiralling series of lies and minor deceptions. These tales are told both dispassionately and compassionately at the same time, if that’s possible; there’s no apparent sentimentality but we end up rooting for the characters the writer focuses on, largely because they are the underdogs and you always root for an underdog, even if their goal is nothing more grandiose than to give up smoking. When I started reading My Documents, it almost felt like an extension of Fuguet’s book; the opening pair of stories appear to be autobiographical and I began to wonder if all Chilean novelists weren’t secretly engaged on writing the same book. But as the stories roll out, the writer’s palette becomes more diverse, the self-referentiality less apparent. As it does so, the book starts to gather steam, taking the reader further and further into its complex Chilean world, until it gets to the final story which is genuinely nightmarish; whilst at the same time redemptive. By the time you finish the book, you feel as though you’ve been in the hands of a skilled operator, who has surgically dissected his society without appearing to have made any cuts at all. 

1606 [james shapiro]

This is Shapiro’s sequel to 1599. Same idea, different year, in the life of the Shake-speare. Once again, Shapiro offers a comprehensive historical resume of the year in question, shaped by plague, the travails of the new king and the Gunpowder Plot, an axis point in British history. 1606 is the year of Lear, Macbeth and Antony & Cleopatra, so there’s no shortage of material for Shapiro to wrestle with. And wrestle with it he does, tracking down every available reference, exercising a prodigious use of contemporary accounts of witchcraft trials, court masques and much more besides. This is where the writer really earns his corn, wading through obscure texts so that you don’t have to in order to construct his portrayal of a precarious time, one where civil war was only a few decades away. The seeds of that war were present in James 1’s reign and Shapiro observes Shakespeare engaging with these conflicts within his texts. As a book, this reader found 1606 slightly less engaging that 1599, which represents a more accessible starting point, (as well as the chronological logic), with the author’s investigations becoming so immersed in the Jacobean world that Shakespeare himself sometimes seemed to slide out of focus. Nevertheless, for anyone with an interest in the three featured plays, or an advanced curiosity in the bard, Shapiro’s scholarship is an essential point of reference.