Review: Two Lovers (4/5)

Two Lovers
(James Gray):
Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow,
Isabella Rossellini, Vinessa Shaw
Running time: 100 minutes (15A)

The jury’s been out on Joaquin Phoenix. It’s as if something has been missing. You sense often an actor who is almost great and who has starred in too few great films. Yet he has a demeanour that seems purpose-built for the cinema. There’s his physical presence: graceful yet strong-boned, that round face framed by high forehead and square jaw. He’s sturdy in a way that seems he had to fortify his own defences. For Phoenix, amidst that dark Puerto Rican smoulder, is a guarded soul. His eyes are green yet shine black, as if he were shielding great pits of despair. His mouth is thin and closed. He talks with marbles in his mouth. Sometimes he talks as if he can’t speak. The words are squeezed out as if he can’t quite shape what it is he is feeling. There’s a bit of Brando in his mumbled mystery; a bit of De Niro in his guard. Till now, he’s been pent-up promise.
Excusing I Walk The Line, most of Phoenix’s best work has been with James Gray (The Yards and We Own The Night). They’ve stuck with each other. Now something special is emerging.
There’s a stunning moment in Two Lovers where Gray puts the camera so close to Phoenix that it trembles. Phoenix’s head is quivering and monstrously silent. It glowers dark like a thundercloud about to strike the ground with electricity.
That moment is typical of Two Lovers. It’s a movie potent with melodrama yet always held in restraint. It opens in Brooklyn, with Leonard (Phoenix) throwing himself off a bridge. And then he decides to get back out of the water. Leonard is depressed and nursing a broken heart. He noodles with photography but mostly just helps out at his parents’ dry-cleaning business. He has moved back home, where his folks fearfully smother him (Isabella Rossellini as his mother proves inspired casting: it’s as if she’s channelling the spirit of her own mother, Ingrid Bergman, and that very quiet, noble suffering.)
Leonard’s parents have set him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the forlornly beautiful daughter of a business partner. She sees something she wants to nurture in the guarded Leonard. Meanwhile, outside the apartment, Leonard meets Gwyneth Paltrow but doesn’t have time to run back inside. You wait for her to offer him tips on healthy living. Instead, her Michelle is a cauldron of turmoil. Her blonde smile hides a damaged soul and Paltrow is an unexpected treat: her character doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.
Leonard strikes up a relationship with Sandra but can’t help being drawn to Michelle. Sandra feels a deep need to mother Leonard. Leonard feels a need to nurture Michelle. But Michelle, who is in love with a married man, is like a mythological Siren. She lures Leonard’s drifting heart onto jagged rocks.
The story is inspired by the Dostoevsky short story ‘White Nights’. (Visconti turned it into White Nights in 1957.) And it’s a wise step for Gray. Freed from crime cliché and the notion of trying to ape Francis Ford Coppola, Two Lovers steers him into very different territory. Indeed, it’s a place much closer in spirit to Sophia Coppola and her film Lost in Translation. Gray has found a voice and a gift for steering intimate exchanges. He zones in here on the push and pull of the heart and deeper unconscious motivations. His characters are literally drowning in emotional currents outside their control.
Phoenix’s performance is measured in the way you get to know someone. At first he’s all physical presence: a nervy guy who walks with a tic in his step. And then you begin to sense his bottled heartache. He draws you into his mind. He becomes a tantalising character, someone strange and delicate who lives on after the film.
The dialogue, co-written by Gray and Ric Menello, revels in verbal foreplay. Not snazzy screwball but something tentative and awkward. It delights in the mystery of unsure early love. Gray shoots a scene on a rooftop, where the wind is a sad howl, and the camera watches Leonard and Michelle from behind a wall, to-ing and fro-ing with each other, as if the moments were being eavesdropped. There is something in the lighting, too, the way most of the story is shot in melancholy twilight, that gives it a feeling of in-between. The city of New York feeds into the mood. It becomes a place that offers both expectation and retreat. The film thrums with the ache of broken heart yet shivers with mystery about what’s to come. I suspect it is a film you could really grow to love.
It seems outrageous (and ludicrously unbelievable) that Phoenix has called closing time on his acting career. There are so few actors around who have the gift to signal what lies unspoken and make it sing on a 30ft screen. In Two Lovers, he shows why the movies now really need him.

The Damned United (3/5); Genova (2/5); Tyson (3/5); Traitor (2/5)

The Damned United
(Tom Hooper):
Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall,
Colm Meaney
Running time: 97 minutes (15A)


Here’s a football movie with tattered charm, an homage to the days before champagne boys and plutocrats took over. The Damned United, based on David Peace’s novel, is the story of controversial football manager Brian Clough and his 44 days in charge of Leeds in 1974.
Thankfully, there’s little football: instead it focuses on Clough’s hubristic personality – the ‘cocky northeast twat’ who took Derby County from the bottom of the second division to the top of the first; who fell out with his (equally talented) assistant manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), and who crashed and burned at the unruly Leeds United.
Michael Sheen is in full impersonation mode as Clough. His head smirks and wobbles like a jack-in-the box; his Middlesbrough accent swings like a valley. Sheen is in danger of becoming the Mike Yarwood of his generation, but he’s always watchable. Colm Meaney is in growling form as Don Revie, the former Leeds United manager. And Peter McDonald’s Johnny Giles doesn’t even slip a smile, so no change on that front.
There are some lovely moments: Clough scrubbing the then second-division Derby’s dressing rooms out of respect for Leeds in an FA Cup tie; and later, pacing the backroom floor, too nervous to even watch a game.

Genova
(Michael Winterbottom):
Colin Firth, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Willa Holland, Perla Haney-Jardine
Running time: 94 minutes (15A)

Roberto Rossellini’s beautiful Journey to Italy is the guiding hand behind Michael Winterbottom’s Genova. It opens with an ominous, superbly-controlled nail-biter: Marianne (Hope Davis) is driving with her two daughters Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) and Kelly (Willa Holland). They banter and then the screen goes blank. A car accident takes Marianne’s life. Their father, university lecturer Joe (Colin Firth), has to pick up the pieces. He moves them to Genoa for a year where old pal Barbara (Catherine Keener) helps them settle in.
Winterbottom creates an easy intimacy. He fills his film with moments of escape and dread. Like Journey to Italy, Winterbottom uses the unfamiliar Italian setting to tease out feelings: Mary’s guilt, Kelly’s resentment amidist Joe’s stoical parenting. Small moments become threatening; Genoa’s dark alleyways psychologically menacing. Winterbottom creates a sense that life goes on, but his ending is a contrived, hammed-up version of Rosselini’s.
And Firth doesn’t feel right: there are not enough layers to his character. He finds it much too easy to get on with his life for my liking.

Tyson
(James Toback):
Mike Tyson
Running time: 90 minutes (IFI Club)


Mike Tyson talks about Mike Tyson. The lisping, soft-voiced giant is painfully honest, a former heavyweight boxing champion who today is a heavy-faced man of 42 with sorrowful eyes and perfect teeth. A troubled character emerges from the reputation of a monster. He narrates a journey from bullied, overweight child to petty crime, to juvenile centres and boxing to the world stage. He had a staggering inferiority complex and used boxing to channel his anger.
Director James Toback lets Tyson do the work and helps out with old footage and some irritating split-screen inserts. Tyson speaks with a sense of new-found self-awareness and amazement about his life. “Who would ever think,” he says, “a poor boy from Brooklyn would have a parade thrown for him in Moscow?” He gets cut up and teary-eyed. He used the pain of untreated gonorrhoea to win his first world champion fight. He was a serial cheater. He discusses his rape conviction, the ear-biting and the hundreds of millions he passed through his hands. He reads from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (‘Each man kills the thing he loves’), though I wonder if Wilde’s redemptive ‘The Selfish Giant’ would have been better.

Traitor
(Jeffrey Nachmanoff):
Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Said Taghmaoui, Jeff Daniels, Neal McDonough
Running time: 114 minutes (15A)

I was beginning to get nervous that Hollywood would smarten its politics under Obama and stop producing daft al-Qaeda-style terror thrillers. No fear. Jeffrey Nachmanoff, writer of The Day The Earth Wet Its Pants (AKA The Day After Tomorrow) is responsible for this silly affair. It stars Don Cheadle as a seemingly troubled Muslim and Sudanese-American. He’s also a former US Special Forces soldier who joins a terrorist cell in Yemen, blows up an embassy in France and finds an FBI agent in the shape of Guy Pearce (snoozing) on his tail.
Traitor is crisply shot, with handhelds to give it that rough-and-ready sun-kissed feel. But the plot (a plan to blow up 50 buses across the US at the same time) is stapled together and the dialogue written as if to fill the gaps.
Cheadle’s despondent face is always worth watching, but this is beneath him. He does solitary in a Yemeni prison and emerges blinking into the light with a sculpted beard. The movie has ham-fisted liberal intentions and lectures at all available opportunities the value of mutual religious respect.

Review: Il Divo (5/5)

Il Divo
(Paolo Sorrentino):
Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Piera Degli Esposti, Paolo Graziosi, Giulio Bosetti
Running time: 110 minutes (15A)

The Italian director Paolo Sorrentino has arrived. His new film Il Divo is a pyroclastic surge of brilliance: a political biopic that spills hot all over the screen with a flaming, bravura audacity. It’s a film imbued with such mystery and wonder, you would think Pasolini had returned for a study, perhaps, of the Holy Ghost. Instead, Il Divo’s subject is about something even more mysterious and less tangible – the controversial seven-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Here’s a politician who would not just slip one over the Holy Spirit, but send Machiavelli sobbing into his goblet.
Andreotti, played here by Toni Servillo, is part Montgomery Burns, part Nosferatu: a hobbled, small man with heavy-lidded eyes and the deceptive hands-clasped demeanour of a saint. The film covers the period from his seventh election as prime minister in 1992 and takes us up to the trial where he fought allegations of Mafia connections. In between, it’s a stew of intrigue, suicides, murders and all manner of political dark arts. Andreotti has his hand in all of it and none of it. In one of the film’s many unexplained, tantalising sequences, the politician sits in a state car while the door handles won’t work. Torrential rain pours down. Police officers struggle to pry the door open, while the prime minister sits inside oblivious. In Il Divo, as in real life, Andreotti is a figure nobody can get at. Unlike the Hollywood biopic, Paolo Sorrentino has made a film about Andreotti’s very unknowableness.
The film’s title comes from an expression used to describe Julius Caesar – Divo Giulio, or divine Julius. And Sorrentino conjures something of the dissolute Roman empire among his modern-day Italian senators. It’s a gilded world of stately buildings and corrupt, balding, grey men. This is the kind of environment that would sink a lesser filmmaker with dead weight. But Sorrentino, who also wrote the screenplay, invests everything with such arresting vitality, playfulness and wit that the picture hums with life. He introduces Andreotti’s inner faction like they were Reservoir Dogs: the camera swoons over their slow-mo swagger while their nicknames such as The Lemon or The Shark slink onto the screen.
Sometimes you wonder if Sorrentino is the bastard child of Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellino. He marries Fellini’s unrestrained exuberance with Scorsese’s flair for gangster poetry and inspirational soundtrack. Certainly, this is the most exciting use of music since last year’s There Will Be Blood. Even the story’s inter-titles cannot sit still – they come at you in blood red from upside down (to accompany a hanging man) or slip out from the backs of buildings. (Sorrentino, meanwhile, is happy to acknowledge his debt to Scorsese with a recurring motif of Andreotti’s fizzing glass of painkillers; it’s a shot borrowed from Taxi Driver.) And yet, Sorrentino’s dynamic restlessness is very much his own.
Before we meet Andreotti, the film fires your adrenalin with a cross-cutting series of assassinations sliced together with an angular guitar track. Men are gunned down and a car falls slowly from the sky with strange poetry. The sequence make you want to dance. Later, you watch a man fall from a tall building all the way down onto the camera. The sequence makes you want to dive for cover.
And then there is a moment that is divine: a long take with a roaming camera that worms its way through a private party at the finance minister’s house. It enters a room, glides past tribal drummers and dancing women, glides into another room, where Andreotti sits like an emperor with his wife, a line of men queuing up to meet him, and a gallery of people standing in a sort of awe. Andreotti leaves swarmed by security, and the camera, still travelling, circles back into the other room, following the back of the finance minister who enters with his hands in the air, dancing. Wow. Everything about this world is contained within this one shot: the power, the secrecy, the decadence, and Andreotti’s almost saintly aloofness. He’s there and yet he’s not there.
Il Divo makes Sorrentino’s previous films look like a dry run. Those movies showed a fascination for men entombed in silence within a world of Mafia vice. Yet both The Consequences of Love (which starred Servillo) and The Family Friend were almost needlessly baroque. Here, form and content lock together in perfect unison. The camera swoops, sweeps and swirls through this ornate universe, soaking up the corridors of power. It travels towards Andreotti restlessly from a hundred different angles. It examines the pores in his face. Yet we come away knowing nothing about him while suspecting everything. It’s a remarkable performance from Toni Servillo. His face is a granite slab; his ears like something that went wrong in pottery class. He builds into his character a limitless fascination, a man whose body language evokes a kind of virtue yet whose inscrutable mind is as cunning as The Prince.
Like its subject, Il Divo is an elusive animal. It creates its own storytelling rules, and is imbued with something most great films have – the quality of strangeness.
A masterpiece.

Review: Duplicity (3.5/5); Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2/5); Lesbain Vampire Killders (1/5)

Duplicity
(Tony Gilroy):
Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti
Running time: 125 minutes (12A)

Julia Roberts is effervescent, sultry and fabulous in Tony Gilroy’s follow-up to Michael Clayton. With her big wide lips, she looks like she is going to snack on Clive Owen’s grizzled head. Thankfully, his prickly smooth demeanour proves a capable defence. After the corporate-is-evil tone of Michael Clayton, Gilroy’s second film seems positively light-hearted. It filters screwball comedy into espionage thriller into a satire of corporate culture that borders on being glib. Owen and Roberts play former spies and lovers now working for a corporate boss (Paul Giamatti) who wants to bring down his alpha male opposition, a multinational run by Tom Wilkinson. The plot is multilayered to keep you guessing who is spying on who and Roberts and Owen work up genuine heat. Are they deceiving each other? Or is it all play? Indeed, are they being played? The ending, which includes a mind-numbing explanation, keeps spilling like it’s a mess nobody knows how to clean up. Entertaining, though.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop
(Steve Carr):
Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O’Donnell, Peter Gerety, Bobby Cannavale
Running time: 87 minutes (PG)


Comedian Kevin James is shaped like a beach ball. His schtick in Mall Cop is to get laughs from the unexpected slapstick he throws on screen for a man of his weight. He plays Paul Blart, a hypoglycaemic mall cop who takes his job much too seriously. He’s a classic schlub: stuffs his face full of pie due to low self-esteem and has a habit of making a fool of himself. He patrols the mall on a Segway and falls for a pixie-faced girl (Jayma Mays) who runs a hair-extensions store. When the mall is taken hostage by a gang of criminals, he goes from zero to hero and earns a chance to win the girl. James, who starred in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, is a genial presence – an overweight everyman. He holds our attention for the full 87 minutes. But the script, co-written by James, is barren and barely funny, and the plotting is ramshackle. It follows the recent trend of dove-tailing comedy into ironic ’80s action movie territory with lazy results.

Lesbian Vampire Killers
(Phil Claydon):
James Corden, Mathew Horne,
Paul McGann, Emer Kenny, Lucy
Gaskell
Running time: 88 minutes (16)

If I had a stake, I’d hammer it into the empty heads of the makers of this dire, hammier-than-a-hogfarm C-movie. It’s a sexploitation flick travelling under the mantle of a spoof horror and stars James Corden and Mathew Horne from BBC’s Gavin and Stacey. This hapless duo play a hapless pair who find themselves in a country town overrun by lesbian vampires. They get stuck into killing them with the sort of gusto that wouldn’t take a film academic to work out the male-frustration subtext. It represents the worst of British trash culture: Nuts magazine on screen. I’m sure director Phil Claydon tried his best, but he can’t get beyond a Girls Aloud video: women with fanned hair in hot pants, high heels and fangs. One scene offers us an up-skirt shot before the camera rides up to a pouting mouth that begins to suck a lollipop. Claydon makes ’60s sexploitation mogul Russ Meyer look like an arthouse genius.
The script mangles Shaun of the Dead and Hammer Horror with TV’s The League of Gentlemen and Peep Show without one moment of bite. I can guarantee genuine horror, though – a moment of skin-crawling dread about five minutes into the movie when you’ll realise you should have paid attention to this review.

Marley & Me
(David Frankel):
Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Eric Dane,
Alan Arkin, Kathleen Turner.
Running time: 110 minutes (PG)

Settling for less is more. That’s the message of Marley & Me, the new comedy-of-sorts and part-time tearjerker starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. Early on, a conversation takes place between two old buddies. There’s Owen Wilson’s John Grogan, a retired stoner-turned-journalist who married Jennifer (Jennifer Aniston), moved to Miami and is taking his first baby steps, in his late 20s, into adulthood. And there’s Sebastian (Eric Dane), a ladykiller who remains resolutely single. John worries about his wife’s ticking biological clock and her plans for the spare bedroom. But Sebastian has the right kind of advice. “Get her a dog,” he says. “You’ve got a kid, you’re a dad – you’re not you anymore. You get a dog, you’re the master.”
Marley & Me spends the rest of the time, in an insipid, mildly comic fashion, turning this advice on its head. John becomes a dad and the film goes to Defcon Four life-lessons alert. Meanwhile, Marley, the neurotic puppy, grows into a 100lb psychotic nightmare. He really is an arsehole. He is the kind of dog ordinary folk would happily, and I say happily, have put down. But John abides.
The film is an adaptation from John Grogan’s bestselling book and is directed with the anodyne hand of David Frankel, the director of The Devil Wears Prada. He gives us a film of two halves. The first is comic caper, where Marley earns his bad credentials. The soundtrack blares Ben Folds’ ‘We’re Rocking the Suburbs’ and John settles into married life. Marley, meanwhile, is eating the suburbs. He seems to possess the ability to chew through steel and concrete. He doesn’t do sit or rollover. He just tears the house apart, rips arms out of sockets and blinds off windows, barks the infant awake and knocks over the toddler.
John takes Marley to Ms Kornblut, an unforgiving dog trainer played by Kathleen Turner. Turner, who spent the 1980s growling at Michael Douglas, has now been reduced to growling at dogs. She no longer looks the svelte siren and has even lost some of that bark. Marley hasn’t a clue who she is. Clearly he has not watched The War of the Roses. We know this by the way he hungrily mounts her leg.
Dog slapstick gets tiring, although sometimes it breaks a smile on your face. Frankel offers us the clichéd image of a dog with his tongue flapping out a car window. Only for Marley then to climb out the window while the car drives down the freeway.
Owen Wilson, who can’t be rushed into anything, spends the film as a perennially chasing blur. He sprinkles the movie with that magnetic laconic charm. His eyes twinkle like he’s in on a joke. His lazy Texan drawl suggests a stoner who has just awoken to find himself starring in a movie. Perhaps that explains why he always seems to be on the back foot. This plays nicely here into a character who is busy catching up with his wife’s expectations.
In many respects, he reminds you of Seth Rogen’s Ben from Knocked Up, although he’s not quite as hopeless or, for that matter, as dramatically interesting. Indeed, Marley & Me plays like the dull younger brother of Knocked Up, and follows Judd Apatow’s template: it charms us with comedy and then, when it knows it has us, steers us into raw, real life.
Even Aniston, who up to this point showed little sign of interior life, begins to stir. The film comes awake. The couple has trouble conceiving. They experience a miscarriage. After child number two, Jennifer gets post-natal depression. John sits in his car in the driveway after work and wonders where it all went wrong.
By the end of it, John, as predicted by Sebastian, is not himself any more. He’s a more spiritual man. This is painfully demonstrated in a scene years later, where John bumps into Sebastian and the best friends no longer have anything to say. John evidently has been brainwashed by his wife, dog and three kids, while big-shot New York Times journalist Sebastian is a walking vacuum. (This scene will have singles ripping out the seats in front of them and smug marrieds beaming I-told-you-so’s.)
Like Knocked Up, Marley & Me wants to take the life lived ordinary and eulogise it. But while Apatow’s film injected a savage humour into the piquancy of real life, David Frankel churns through this material like he was making vanilla ice cream. And it’s lazy – when Marley grows old (by now we’re supposed to love him), Frankel presses the big red button marked ‘tearjerker’. It’s all terribly nice, by which I mean terribly bland. Settling for less is still settling for less.

Review: Bronson (3/5)

Bronson
(Nicolas Winding Refn):
Tom Hardy, Hugh Ross, Juliet Oldfield.
Running time: 92 minutes (18)

This biopic from Pusher trilogy director Nicolas Winding Refn is a study of Charles Bronson – not the Hollywood star of Death Wish, but the tabloid star famous for being Britain’s ‘most violent prisoner’. Bronson was sent down in 1974 for armed robbery and has spent virtually every year since in solitary confinement. So in a sense, Refn is working within a vacuum. He makes good with what he’s got but it’s not enough. The film thrives off a primal madness. Tom Hardy’s Bronson is a beefcake brawler and snarling menace. He takes hostages in prison and makes rooftop protests. But most of the time, he just pummels prison guards. The film develops an amusing motif of Bronson stripping naked in readiness for violence, a suggestion his aggression is perverse, almost sexual. Hardy is terrific. He threatens us to engage with him, switching between mock theatrical soliloquy and all-out nutter. The cinematographer is Larry Smith, who shot Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and he brings a Kubrickian sense of space with languorous and immaculate tracking shots. There is one aplomb sequence within an asylum that highlights just how close to sanity Bronson really is. Refn takes his cues from Andrew Dominik’s Chopper and makes another case for a charming sociopath. It’s packed with stylistic violence, but is devoid of dramatic conflict. Bronson seems to drift through time, as unknowable as a cipher.

Review: Hush (2/5)

Hush
(Mark Tonderai):
William Ash, Christine Bottomley, Andreas Wisniewski.
Running time: 91 minutes (16)

This low-budget British chiller plays like cat and mouse but in reverse: the mouse here is reluctantly chasing the cat. It opens with a moment of abject horror: we’re stuck in a car in the rain at night with a pair of rowing Mancunians and you realise there is no escape. Up ahead, the back door of an articulated truck momentarily lifts open and Zakes (William Ash) thinks he sees a woman tied up. The couple go to a petrol station where the domestic row spills out. It’s almost a relief, then, when Beth (Christine Bottomley) goes missing and the truck pulls away.
First-time writer/director Mark Tonderai opts for shaky, hand-held, kitchen-sink horror. The actors aren’t up to much and the plot is full of contrivances. It works up an unseen terror and then blows it with some silly, grisly gross-out. But it just about wriggles free, because you keep wondering what Zakes is going to do next. He gives chase, steals a car, gets arrested for murder, escapes and still goes after the demon truck driver. Said demon truck driver wears his hoodie up all the time so he must be anti-social. When out of the truck cab, he walks very, very slowly, as if he were weighing up in his mind the problems of bank securitisation and credit pyramids. This gives our hero time to escape various hairy predicaments.
It’s a good location for horror: the concrete soulless hinterland of Britain’s motorways and rest areas. Meanwhile, Tonderai gives a twist to the old madonna/whore genre expectation: it turns out Beth is cheating on Zakes but he doesn’t find out till much later when he reads a lewd phone text. Will he still do the honourable thing?