Goodness, but the plotline in The Dawn Treader, the third film in the Chronicles of Narnia series, is suspiciously familiar. Let's see: the story travels to a dark island where we are told evil must be defeated. The place is covered in scowling bad weather, but worse, there's a bewitching Green Mist emanating from it that makes people do bad things and lose the run of themselves. Hmmm.
The Green Mist works by playing tricks on the mind. It makes two of our young heroes start lusting after gold and great wealth. It makes our young female heroine want desperately to be beautiful. And the Green Mist demands its price: we see boatloads of ordinary people being sold off as slaves to keep the whole thing going. A magician advises the kids: "To defeat the darkness that lives there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself." This sounds suspiciously like an economist. What's he really saying here? Stop spending money on your credit card that you don't have? Give up that second house? One wonders if The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a sneaky parable for bankrupt Ireland. They could have called this The Chonicles of Blarnia.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is directed by Michael Apted and the adventure begins with a painting. It hangs on the wall of a house featuring churning emerald seas and a ship in the corner. Next thing there's sea water pouring out of the frame and into the bedroom, and our young heroes are transported into Narnia to be collected by the ship and the waiting Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes). Well, not all our young heroes. Peter and Susan, the older Pevensie children, sit this one out, presumably because they are too old. That leaves us with the youngest siblings. There's Edmund the Just (Skandar Keynes), Lucy the Valiant (Georgie Henley) and a new addition, their cousin, Eustace the Little Shit.
Eustace, played by Will Poulter, livens things up. With everybody being so damned nice and noble, he's an enjoyable brat, all freckled frowning and folded arms with eyebrows shooting skywards in permanent disgust. At home he's a telltale with a peashooter and a stash of stolen sweets under his bed. And he snorts at their make-believe Narnia. "I read books with real information," he tells him. But then he comes up gasping in Narnia waters and faints on board the ship when he meets Tavros, the bi-pedal bull who talks like a Guy Ritchie ruffian.
Things are jolly for a while: there is peace now in Narnia, swordfights for fun on the ship's deck with Reepicheep the talking mouse, and then there's the minor issue of seven missing lords, and their seven magical swords. The film proceeds with a large splash of Patrick O'Brian and adventure on various islands. We get invisible giants, magical doorways, a book of incantations and a pool that turns anything to gold. (Alas, the film didn't fall into it.) And then there's the mandatory evil creature that must be defeated. "Do not let them know your fears or it will become them," the children are warned about the nature of the island's evil. But it's too late. Edmund has already had a thought. "What is that?" someone yells at him when the thing comes out of the water. I yelled: "It's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man!" Only it wasn't. It was a big giant sea beast, but it might as well have been.
What has always been so unconvincing about the Narnia films – apart from their edgeless characters, wearisome Christian moralising and Adam Adamson's flat direction – was watching children swordfight with grown-ups. At least in Harry Potter, it was a given that magic was needed to level the playing field. The children are so largely well-behaved you wonder if maybe they've been drugged. And you can't look to the adults for any anarchy. Ben Barnes, sailing the high seas, is certainly no Russell Crowe. Where Crowe can master and command the screen with a clean-shaven growl, Ben Barnes can grow all sorts of fancy facial hair and still be bland and shiny as a scrubbed deck.
Apted, the solid journeyman director who gave us Bond's The World is Not Enough, steers a vaguely better film than that yawn treader of a second film. It progresses with the functionality of a computer game where one acquires swords. Our heroes need seven. When they had four, I started getting restless and began looking around my feet to see if there were any lying about, just in case I could move things along.
I grasped about, meanwhile, for understanding after watching The Tourist. On the surface, everything seems (badly) right. It's a cheesy, breezy piece of Hitchcock light (just 2% real fat) and stars Angelina Jolie as an imperious criminal's moll who sets Johnny Depp's unsuspecting tourist up as a wrong man while being chased across Venice by Scotland Yard (Paul Bettany) and a gangster billionaire (Steven Berkoff). The issue of incomprehension has little to do with Depp and Jolie's munching of cardboard dialogue, though they're worth a mention: Depp, without baggy pants and eyeliner, seems to have forgotten how to behave normally, while Jolie parades about the place like it's a fashion shoot. She wears so much slap she's starting to look like a parody of herself. Somebody should make a theme park of her red lips.
In North by Northwest, Hitchcock used just one quick zoom to turn the tables and transfer the guilt onto Cary Grant's wrong man. Here, the director faffs for 40 minutes, while the editor is out cold after munching an entire box of Nitrazepam. We get a rooftop chase with Depp in his pyjamas and not a hint of vertigo, while the film's supposed twist is as plain as Johnny Depp's now fat face. The real twist lies in the credits when you learn that the writer/director is one Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the wunderkind who gave us The Lives of Others.
Surely this is a case of mistaken identity? One wonders if the real Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is on the run (on a train, of course) somewhere across Europe, being followed by Russian goons with steely smiles and nice suits. They're convinced he's somebody else. He's trying to explain that he's a talented film director. But no one will listen. Back on the set in Venice, the assistant director has taken over, wearing a big blond wig with a suspicious German accent. "Ya, ya, Mr Depp, tone it down a bit, ya? Just imagine how ze great Ulrich Mühe would do it... Aczion!"
In Somewhere, the new film from Sofia Coppola, Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, a Hollywood A-lister who has tasted and tested too much. We follow him on the Hollywood merry-go-round as he camps out in celebrity haunt Chateau Marmont, drives fast cars, beds a string of women, and is forced to look after his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning). He does fun things for fun's sake. All the while, he wears the face of a man clinically depressed. Hollywood has never looked so ugly.
Coppola's film won the Golden Lion at Venice and sees a radical divestment of her dreamy style. This is an ascetic work – a film of pure behaviour in a manner that reminded me of Gus Van Sant's minimalism. It's a clever move casting Dorff. His is not an A-list face, so he defamiliarises us from celebrity – we see his character as a human being surrounded by sycophants and the effect at times is a comic absurdity. Coppola is pursuing pet themes here: alienation and the moral dissolution that comes when you have whatever you want. At times it's an absorbing watch but the film is not suffused with enough internal mystery. Coppola rattles the can but finds nothing inside. Johnny's epiphany that finally comes is a cliché, like something he is copying out of another movie.
Meanwhile, Mathiue Amalric, one of France's most beguiling actors, studiously avoids cliché in his directorial debut On Tour. He plays a frazzled theatre producer bringing a tour of American burlesque artists across France. It's a scatty, eccentric film, whose female characters are not fleshed out despite their near constant nudity. But the film has a certain spiky joie de vivre, and is anchored by a performance from Amalric that is wiry, bristling, lurching – qualities his director persona lacks.
December 12, 2010
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