CineMedusa

Movie Reviews

by Mara Math

Mill Valley Film Festival Reviews

by Mara Math

TWO ROYALS RULE: One Queen and One Wild-Card Joker

As the Mill Valley Film Festival wraps up, the two most outstanding films screened this year show that heads of state are where it's at — especially if Peter Morgan has a hand in the script.

The Queen (PG-13)

Who would have thought that a movie about Her Frumpiness could prove one of the most exciting films of the year? Even with the incomparable Helen Mirren starring, few hearts initially leapt at the thought of a film chronicaling the days following Princess Diana's death in 1997 through the eyes of Elizabeth II — especially as, with the stodgy subject still living, one would suspect the script of having to be as bland and unassailable as the face HRH presents to the world. Even with Steven Frears helming, who could have forseen that The Queen would be a tragicomedy of sorts, something of a psychological thriller, and refreshingly witty?

Mirren, who in the late 60s stood, unsuccessfully, as the Workers' Revolutionary Party candidate for election to the leadership of Equity, the actors' union, finds a vein of true sympathy for the sheltered monarch. Elizabeth is quite honestly baffled by the population's profound grief over Diana's death — someone who "wasn't even a Royal, any more, after all!" As the public's discontent burgeons into threateningly anti-monarchist sentiments, over the Palace's disrespect to the departed Diana, to the rescue rides Elizabeth's boyish new prime minister, Tony Blair.

Well-cast as the Prime Minister, Michael Sheen eschews Blair's peCUliAR EMphaSIS in diction as well as his habit of chewing his words, yet nevertheless nails the portrayal. (As his wife, Mary McGrory perfectly captures Cherie Blair's insouciance). Blair's opportunism makes him gleeful and nearly giddy over the Royals's gaffes — no flag at half-mast, no royal funeral, not even a statement from HRH — as he and his aides seize the day, and the public's approval. While his conversion to seeing HRH as true nobility feels a bit facile in the script, Sheen quite nearly carries this off, and it certainly resonates with Blair's more recent fawning desire to please the ruler of the world's most powerful country.

Alex Jennings is the only miscasting, and a serious one. With his blocky body, squarish head and pug nose, a viewer's suspension of disbelief is constantly jolted by the question, "Who's this boffin trying to pass himself off as the Prince of Wales?" This Prince Charles could never have opined that a hideous architectural addition was "like a carbuncle on a beloved uncle's nose." Instead, Frears has Jennings play Charles as a hearty, somewhat baffled sportsman, with a sportsmanlike regard for doing the right thing — the right thing as demanded by ethics, rather than as dictated by protocol. This too provides an unfortunate disjuncture for viewers, since few can be unaware that in reality Charles evinced no such sportsmanship in his behavior toward his child bride. The exasperation and embarrassment that Diana caused the Royal Family is alluded to repeatedly, but aside from the Queen's sigh over "the other one" (Charles' lover Camilla Parker Bowles), there is no mention of Charles' cruelty to Diana. (The peak — or nadir — of such cruelty was surely Charles telling the newspapers that he had never loved Diana, with no thought for how this spiteful revelation might affect their children.)

Elizabeth II's own peculiar mixture of privilege and practicality is never more ably captured than when she puts on her country tweeds to go off "stalking" — replete with glittering silk Hermes scarf. The Queen speeds in her Jeep toward the river she must ford as if all she needs to do is take the river firmly in hand, to make it obey like a recalcitrant child, and proves no more capable of taming the river than the rising swell of the nation's grief for their lost "People's Princess."

Aside from the miscasting of Jenning, film suffers from only one serious flaw: Frear's inexplicable heavy-handeness in forcing Mirren to explicate in words those emotions she has already shown us with great subtlety and grace. (This is a subset of the Bonk Bonk School of Political Art: Bonk! didja get it yet? BONK! BONK!, something one cannot usually ascribe to Frears.) Forcing this indignity on Mirren rather deflates the souffle, and expresses an ungracious lack of faith in both actor and audience.

The Last King of Scotland (R)

In one of Vincent D'Onofrio's early vanity pics, The Whole Wide World, neither actor/producer D'Onofrio nor director Dan Ireland (or even original Robert E. Howard memoirist Novalyne Price Ellis) seemed to realize they had limned a perfect portrait of a man who was not just "another quirky writer" but a classic manic-depressive. With The Last King of Scotland, however, one senses that it is with deliberate artistic reserve that director Kevin Macdonald refrains from explicitly labeling the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin as a paranoid schizophrenic. As brilliantly portrayed by Forest Whitaker, Amin displays a schizophrenic's eerily keen intuition and chameleonic abilities to become whatever his listeners need him to be be, and we begin to understand how such a madman could rise to power.

Whitaker, as most people know, was widely considered an Emmy front-runner for his stunning, nuanced turn on "The Shield" as the complex Lt. Jon Kavanuagh; this time around, Whitaker says he is trying to pay no attention to the Oscar-buzz surrounding his even more astounding performance in The Last King of Scotland. Whitaker's Amin, like the real one, is charming, magnetic, even mesmerizing when need be, but also playful and prankish, with a huge belly laugh to match the huge belly (Whitaker put on 65 pounds for the role), sometimes immature, and always, underneath, a soul so wounded by racism, poverty, and military service as to have been twisted into something psychopathic, someone who loved his country while murdering its people. "I didn't approach the character as someone I disliked," Whitaker explained, speaking after the film, "but as someone I didn't understand,"

Based on a novel by Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland recounts the first part of Idi Amin's reign through the eyes of a young white Scottish doctor, a composite of three real-life men involved in the regime. Escaping a narcissistic father who can't resist reminding his son that his own degree was a few shades better, young Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy, "Shameless") grabs his new medical degree and flees Scotland for the randomly-selected Uganda, where he hopes to have adventures while doing good. McAvoy's dazed glaze of happiness as he jolts along in a Ugandan bus, the only non-African, is a wondrous moment. As clearly as if it were written out in subtitles, his face conveys, "I made it! I'm somewhere exotic! And it's fantastic! I'm having an adventure!"

Arriving in Uganda in 1971, just in time for Amin's takeover — and initially Amin's victory is welcomed by the people as "a happy day for us!' — Nicholas doesn't realize how much more of a real adventure he's about to have, the kind that includes real risk. The film has suffered some criticism for framing the story through the eyes of a white Westerner, but it's a vital part of personalizing the love/hate, attraction/repulsion relationship between African and Western worlds.

After an accidental encounter with the new president of Uganda, who has a fetish for all things Scottish, Nicholas is invited into Amin's entourage, er, administration. Officially, he is taken on as Amin's personal physician; his more important unofficial role is as some combination of friend, little brother, 24/7 on-call audience, and Scottish talisman. Amin has fixated on the Scots as the bravest of whites, identifying with their colonial oppression by the British, and in one memorable scene kits himself out in a kilt and has tribal women sing "The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond."

In light of his own family background, Nicholas's idolization of Amin makes perfect sense, Amin playing Good Daddy when he's not being the laddish older brother any young dude might want. Amin promises mutual loyalty and devotion, and slathers the young doctor with little gifts like a convertible sportscar. While at home the elder Dr. Garrigan is always served first, even on Nicholas's graduation night. In Amin Nicholas sees a hero who can publicly proclaim, with his troops in attendance, "I have never eaten until my soldiers have eaten first!"

Seduced by Amin's charisma and hooked by the glamor and power suddenly available to him, Nicholas willfully chooses to maintain his faith in Amin despite the accruing evidence — mounting evidence that eventually includes mounds of bodies. The always-mercurial Amin descends further and further into paranoia, brutality, and outright insanity, literally savaging allies and opponents alike, engaging in wholesale murder: more than 300,000 Ugandans were killed during his reign.

All of this is horrific enough without the extra dollops of melodrama that Macdonald adds in. One shot of a vulture as Nicholas speeds toward finding the butchered body of a loved one would have been more than enough; two such shots are definitely overkill. As Nicholas wakes up the precariousness of his position and the danger to the country and the people he has come, however shallowly, to love, the film takes a peculiar Hitchcockian detour and then recreates a torture scene that seems stolen from A Man Named Horse.

Still, given that this is Macdonald's first feature film (he's made a number of well-received docs including Touching the Void and One Day in September), his missteps are relatively few:

• Those vultures;

• The bad apocalyptic score for the sex scene with Nicholas and one of Amin's wives and, as a coda to the film;

• The intrusion of documentary footage of Amin in prison after the fall of his regime.

Why do directors do this? What can it possibly add? Is it supposed to make us say, "Oooh? Whitaker nailed it, especially by putting on those 65 pounds?" Given the depth and virtuosity of Whitaker's performance, it would be impossible to make us appreciate Whitaker more, and only reminds us of the ways in which actor and portrayed do not look alike. This real-life footage of Amin dents our ability to take Whitaker's brilliant portrayal away with us as an insight into the truth of who Amin was, but Whitaker's is still one of the finest performances of the year.

Catch a Fire (PG-13)

Why will a director insist on ruining an excellent fictional — or fictionalized — experience with a splat of "real life" footage? An even worse example awaits us in Catch a Fire.

Unfortunately, Phillip Noyce's newest film is not an excellent fictionalized experience. Catch a Fire is a surprisingly clumsy biopic from the director of Rabbit Proof Fence, although less surprising when one remembers The Quiet American. A good performance by Derek Luke as South African liberation fighter Patrick Chamusso is not enough to compensate for the heavy-handed editing that definitely does come from the Bonk! Bonk! School of Art, so choppy and repetitive that viewers may want to bring their Dramamine: Noyce apparently doesn't trust the audience to see the parallels between any two story lines and so cuts back and forth a dozen times in 60 seconds. (Didja get it? Didja get it? Didja get it yet?)

Chamusso, initially as apolitical as a black man could be in South Africa, considered himself to "cruising," or doing well, with a position as foreman, a lovely, albeit jealous wife, and two sweet daughters. His wife's jealousy is not without cause, and it is Chamusso's desire to hide his philandering from her that leaves him without an alibi when his workplace is bombed. As suspected terrorists, Chamusso and his wife are brutalized under the direction of Security Branch Colonel Nik Vos (Tim Robbins). It is his wife's pain that ultimately moves Chamusso to become a freedom fighter.

Tim Robbin's eerily courtly torturer is interesting, but has too little screen-time. We see so little of him in part because after the deliberately delivered establishing details in the first half of the film, the pace suddenly triples as soon as Chamusso hooks up with anti-apartheid forces.

The peculiar subplot in which Vos's pacifist daughter ends up having to shoot a black intruder doesn't add an element of complexity or balance, as one can only hope was intended, but is instead somewhere between stupid and disgusting.

There is indeed inspiration to be found in Catch a Fire, but overall the film works best as a parable for the contemporary US war on Iraq: harassment, torture, and unjust imprisonment and torture will turn innocents and passive non-participants into activists/freedom fighters/terrorists.

Noyce inexplicably not only ends the film with documentary footage of the real Patrick Chamusso — but shows actor Derek Luke shaking hands with the man he has portrayed and palling around. Oy.

Cinematographer Style (NR)

A film about film that shows no film, Cinematographer Style was the greatest disappointment in this year's festival. Currently a cinematographer for commercials, Jon Fauer blows a great opportunity here in his first directorial outing.

Fauer has approximately 115 cinematographers introduce themselves by name in approximately 280 seconds. After this whirlwind, Fauer fails to provide any lower thirds (titles) throughout the rest of the film, so viewers have no idea if the subject pontificating at any point was responsible for the look of, say, The New World, or Sleepy Hollow — or for Revenge of the Nerds III.

Fauer also fails to follow up on interesting questions raised by the cinematographers. One, when identifying himself, makes a point of emphasizing that he is "a cinematographer — NOT a DP," a split that would have been worthwhile exploring. Did the subject mean "I'm an artist, not a manager" or "DP is just a la-di-dah term for what I do" or more literally, "I have nothing to do with the lighting, my camera is my only instrument" ? We'll never know.

Nor does Fauer look at the demands and culture of cinematography as an occupation. Of those 115 cinematographers, only five are women — and two are never seen again after being introduced. While this is in keeping with the even worse percentages of the ASC roster, which lists only six women among 279 active members, and while women comprised only 3 percent of all cinematographers working on the top 250 films of 2005, this kind of obliviousness is still shameful. After all, even the relatively small chapter of Bay Area Women in Film and Television lists four women DPs.

Worst of all, as mentioned above, Cinematographer Style is a film about film that shows no film. Ninety minutes of taking heads, albeit prettily lit in varying fashions, means a fairly uncinematic film. (In the most interesting bit in the film, one director takes Fauer to task for his uninspired shooting style and gives him an on-the-spot lesson in how to film an interview. While the unnamed interviewees talk about how they achieved a certain "look" for a film — you know, like in the title of this doc? — Fauer does not show even a few seconds of footage, not even one still, from any of the films named.

Cinematographer Style is obviously meant to be Fauer's calling card, and perhaps a point of re-entry for someone who, while making many award-winning commercials, has no credit on any released film since Bonfire of the Vanities in 1990. Directing probably looked easy to Fauer when he was a camera operator, precisely because he very obviously paid so little attention to what it entails. Stop him before he directs again!

Other films of note in the 2006 Mill Valley Film Festival:

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.

Directed by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, Journals is of more ethnographic and less dramatic interest than their first feature, Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner.

Although uneven and often too slow, the film is still compelling as a record of the tipping point for Inuit culture in the first quarter of the 20th century, the time when shamanism and native culture were forced to give way to Christianity. The film is beautifully lensed in the icy reaches of northern Canada, and well acted by Inuit actors, including first-timer Leah Angutimarik as the lead.

Stolen Holidays

begins as an ordinary summer outing for French grandmere Danielle and her two grandchildren, a sulky teen and her young brother. When Danielle dodges and ducks returning the children to either of their divorced parents, it looks at first as though we're in for yet another heartwarming tale of intergenerational bonding, despite the obstacle of an uncaring middle generation. Stolen Holidays takes us somewhere darker, however, and it soon becomes clear that "heartwarming" ain't on the menu: Danielle is more obsessed with exerting control, with living out her fantasy of connection, than with her living, breathing grandchildren. Her internal flight and turmoil are more absorbing to her than the external flight she is taking with the kids. First-time feature director Olivier Peyon has a deft touch, and Bernadette Lafont (Truffaut's Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me), while occasionally bringing to mind some of Gena Rowland's best performances in later years, is marvelous in her own right as Danielle.

Venus.

Peter O'Toole shines as an aging actor and roue in this surprisingly gentle film. While it is widely suspected that the role of Maurice has not presented O'Toole with his greatest challenge, mirroring as it does his own reputation, this does not mean that O'Toole does not turn in an excellent, sensitive performance. And don't mistake "gentle" for "sentimental," either; director Roger Michell (The Mother, Notting Hill) and writer Hanif Kureishi have fashioned a story of intergenerational friendship which is explicitly far from asexual. Just as prostate cancer renders (penetrative hetero) sex an impossibility for the former Casanova, Maurice discovers an attraction to his best friend's beautiful grand-niece. The brash, self-absorbed and materialistic Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) becomes Maurice's muse, Galatea, and lust-object, as well as his friend, an unusual relationship that invigorates him and gives meaning to his waning days. Vanessa Redgrave does an exquisitely nuanced turn as Maurice's long-separated but not truly estranged wife.

Wristcutters, A Love Story

is a dark comedy that never quite fulfills the promise of its highly original premise, based on Etgar Keret's short story "Kneller's Happy Campers." After killing himself over a lost love, Zia awakes in a new world very similar to the old one — except dingier, drabber, more depressing, and populated only by suicides. The roads are barren, jukeboxes play only songs to kill yourself by, and inhabitants are literally unable to smile. Learning that the woman who broke his heart has also ended up in this afterlife, Zia sets off an road journey to find her, accompanied by two new pals... — Shea Whigam as The Mad Russian and the startlingly beautiful Shannyn Sossamon, as The Girl the Big Lug Doesn't Notice. — on a journey that figuratively and nearly literally goes nowhere. Perhaps if "Kneller's" had been a novel rather than a short story, the film would feel more as if it has ended and less as if it has rolled to a stop because writer/director Goran Dukic has run out of ideas.

Copyright © 2006 Mara Math

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Featured Review

THE GROUND TRUTH

"I was middle-aged when it occurred to me that I had never known my father, as he really was, as he would have been, without that terrible war. Young, he was optimistic and robust, played football, played cricket and billiards for his country, walked and--what he enjoyed most--danced at all the dances for miles around, thought nothing of walking ten miles to a dance, dancing all night, walking back. again. The war had killed that young man and left a sombre, irascible man, soon to become a semi-invalid, and then a very ill man. If I had ever met that young Alfred Tayler, would I have recognized him?"
Doris Lessing, The Roads of London

The war which irretrievably altered Doris Lessing's father was "The Great War," World War I, but it could have been any of the wars since, as definitively shown by The Ground Truth: After the Killing Stops.

Patricia Foulkrod's brilliant documentary delineates the high cost not only to individuals but to society of turning young men, and now young women, into killers. Physical wounds, amputations, systemic poisoning are the least of it; even more detrimental to our collective social health are the poisoned minds, subterranean rage, profound grief, the guilt, depression and terrible confusion that young soldiers bring back, which in turn create fertile ground for drug addiction, violence, and suicide. As one former soldier says, "You don't turn in your feelings with your duffel bag."

Foulkrod follows her ten primary subjects in fairly linear fashion, from their enlistment stories--most come from poor or working-class backgrounds, and bought the tinsel-bright promises of professional training and, in one case, "no combat"--through their war experiences and into civilian life. With footage shot by a former soldier, Foulkrud scores a coup with astonishing inside scenes of soldiers being "broken" in training camp. Seeing this dehumanization in vérité as opposed to narrative, the impact is all the stronger, and the maxim quoted by one subject feels correct in the marrow: "If you've been a good soldier, you 'll be a bad civilian."

The obscene con job done on these enlistees doesn't stop at sign-up. During and following service, they are conned out of medical and psychological treatment , dishonorably discharged for specious reasons, cheated of their pensions--altogether, abandoned while drowning. (Waving, DOD insists, they're waving!) "We are ghosts in society," says another interview subject. And indeed the veterans in extremis are treated like ghosts, a phenomenon to be ignored or a terror to be exorcized and banished.

"Psychological injury is this war's Agent Orange," says one ex-soldier, and it's an apt metaphor: widespread, profoundly damaging, sometimes fatal, and not only not acknowledged but actively denied by DOD, which has taken to labeling those suffering from PSTD as having "personality disorders." (The film tell us that technological advances in riflery mean that a contemporary soldier is four times more likely to hit his target, which suggests that an equivalently larger number of soldiers may suffer the impact of having killed.)

Sean Hulze, who, like the other interviewees, has become an anti-war activist, describes the most recent of the truly vile stratagems the DOD employs to dispossess those for whom it should be providing: If a soldier acknowledges having any symptoms of PTSD, s/he is kept in country rather than allowed any respite via leave, transfer, or discharge. Foulrod's expose of the vicious hypocrisy behind the "support our troops" mantra is worth the price of the ticket alone.

The Ground Truth is that rare documentary that uses no filler. Unlike most documentaries with multiple subjects, where one or two emerge as "stars" among the interviews, the ones you're always relieved to see back on the screen, every person interviewed here has something valuable--and often quotable--to say.

The perhaps too-well publicized release of The Ground Truth on DVD scheduled for next week has kept many would-be viewers away from the theaters where the doc has had limited release, but if you can catch it soon, it's well worth seeing on the big screen: not for the cinematography, which is simple and workmanlike, sometimes simplistic, and not for any smug Michael Moore-brand ain't-we-so-cool audience stroking, but for the raw, heartbreaking honesty of these young veterans. Folkrud obviously opposes the invasion of Iraq, but doesn't embroil the film in political argument, leaving the soldiers' truth-telling stark and unexplicated in its indictment. This may be the best anti-war film ever made, as no political scrim of any red or blue shade can obscure the terrible damage done to our own, and our own country, in making war.

Review Archives

• Capsule Reviews - October, 2006

• San Francisco International Film Festival Reviews - 2006

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