Unstoppable, the new film from Tony Scott, is about a giant unmanned locomotive that is, well, unstoppable. That this is a lie we all know because the film stars Denzel Washington. Now, try telling Denzel he's going to star in a film in which the train he is supposed to stop cannot be halted. He'd lift his jaw in the air and start nodding at you while smiling, only his eyes wouldn't be smiling at all and then he'd stop smiling just as quick and start talking down to you. "Now, now. I'll tell you what we're going to do. Alright? I'll tell you. We're going to stop the train. Stop it dead. Bam!" And he'd smack his hands together and then he'd smile at you again and everyone would let out their breath.
To be fair, the title is likely the doing of Tony Scott. He's the kind of director who can't take a piss without having two helicopters hovering overhead, and a Swat team and a brace of ambulances parked outside just in case he missed the pot. Denzel would be there too, shaking his head, saying, "I ain't cleaning up that mess." But then he would.
Unstoppable is 'based' on a real event and it is classic Scott: a careering juggernaut of loud silliness, old-fashioned in its thrills, and decisive in its delivery of them. The film works up a piston-pumping, steam-chugging head of fury, with the unmanned locomotive lugging a few carriages of molten phenol in its half-mile train. Predictably, school children are travelling in the opposite direction, while behind them in another cargo train travel Denzel's engineer Frank Barnes, and his rookie train conductor Will Colsen (Chris Pine). "We're not just talking about a train here. We're talking about a missile, the size of the Chrysler building!" says yardmaster Connie (Rosario Dawson).
Unstoppable is set in blue-collar Pennsylvania and is full of big-boned rail workers who race in jeeps after the train or hang from helicopters. These are the type of old-schoolers who can't keep their women, and the central lesson from Unstoppable is that the only way to the heart of a woman who won't pay you attention – Will's young wife, Frank's two daughters – is to risk dying. Some men might agree with this. It must be why our heroes ignore company orders, decouple their train in a lay-by and race it backwards at full speed towards the runaway engine. This also allows Denzel to achieve a neat feat: just like The Taking of Pelham 123, where he began the film as a nerdy desk controller only to end up wielding a gun again at the end, here, he starts the film travelling one way, only to end up as the film's hero travelling in another.
Films about trains are as old as cinema itself. The Lumiere brothers in 1896 screened The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station and audiences, who had never seen a film before, fled their chairs in terror, thinking the train coming towards them was going to run them over. Today, Scott has to do everything he can to enliven audiences. There are flashes of docu-style camera amidst his hyper-style, but he mainly relies on running commentary throughout the film from TV news commentators, who appear regularly almost like characters. This helps to give the effect it is happening live.
I would imagine rolling TV news is exactly what people are trying to dodge when they go to see escapist popcorn. And though the infection of the movies with this kind of thing is nothing new, Scott really overdoes it. In one scene, the locomotive ploughs through a horse transporter stuck on the line and we watch it smithereened with maximum damage and multiple cameras. But then the TV news starts to replay it and we have to keep watching it over and over again and the film begins to feel like a sports event. Worse, it uses the news commentators to explain to the audience what is happening in the film when, in all honesty, a chimpanzee could explain it to you – big train, fast, make stop, ooo-ooo aaah-aaah-aaaah-aaaaah!! You'll leave the cinema muttering at such insults. But people on the street will be wondering why you are covered in oil, your hair is windswept and your eyes watering.
You will be unmoved, however, watching The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final installment in the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy. It should have been called The Girl Who Doesn't Kick the Hornet's Nest, because there's no sting in the tale. There isn't even a buzz. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) slinks into the background with a sour puss, and with all those Scandinavian secrets and lies to resolve, and all that book to get in, the film flatlines for 147 minutes with hardly a jolt of life. They really should start putting defibrillators in cinemas.
George Clooney, meanwhile, stars in The American, U2 photographer Anton Corbijn's follow-up to his accomplished debut Control. This is the story of an assassin hiding out in Castel del Monte, a cobbled town of warren streets in Italy's Abruzzo where the clouds come down to meet the surrounding hills. That the film is interested in this kind of detail is telling: I saw the trailer the other night and it was cut to pretend the film was a fast and flashy Hollywood assassin thriller. Don't be misled. The American is brooding and icy, an existentialist European-style arthouse thriller pared down to bare bones.
With The Hunter and The Limits of Control, both Raffi Pitts and Jim Jarmusch this year have given us their own take on this niche genre. But Corbijn has the edge, displaying clarity and control with a remarkable eye for beauty. It helps, too, that he has Clooney in the lead.
This is a film about observation. Clooney's Mr Butterfly has fled an attempt on his life in Sweden. He lives on the edge in a town so quiet, footsteps ring in the air. He senses he is being watched; sleeps with a gun. His paranoia is conveyed with Hitchcockian rigour: suspicion is conveyed through mood and glance; information is strictly withheld.
Mr Butterfly is building a sniper's gun for a client. He walks, he drives, he makes, he hardly talks. When he does, each line of dialogue is carved to carry just the right amount of weight – often with a beguiling frog-faced priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) who senses the man needs absolution. The lineage here is Bresson and Antonioni, process and emotional isolation. But Corbijn is becoming his own man with a precision that is deeply satisfying. Every shot and gesture is perfectly measured, while the film's final shot is breathtaking. With truly original material, Corbijn could be startling.
The film gives Clooney what he needs: inner turmoil and beautiful women – the client is a mysterious brunette (Thekla Reuten), while Clara (Violante Placido) is a prostitute with whom he has an affair. The moment where she gives herself to him, where the transaction ceases to be a transaction, is captured with acute sensitivity. Clooney's Mr Butterfly recalls Alain Delon in Le Samurai. But Clooney's character belongs to himself. He is tantalising to watch – stone-eyed and saturnine, a man of discipline struggling with a great interior dilemma. When you add this to Up In The Air and Michael Clayton, Clooney is doing career-defining work. Like Cary Grant, he is creating characters with troubled interiors that disturb the smoothness of his persona. He is the consummate movie star.
Gérard Depardieu used to be the consummate movie star. Now he's gone all Brando, heaving huge weight about the place under that enormous nose. He stars in Jack Becker's My Afternoons With Margueritte, a sentimental bedfellow to Becker's previous film Conversations With My Gardener. File this under middle-brow French drama with appropriate clichés – an encounter between a bourgeois retiree and a working-class handyman. Let us marvel at the things they can teach each other!
Depardieu plays bumbling buffoon Germain who is in tune with nature but the butt of café jokes and he cannot escape memories of a troubled childhood. Meanwhile, Margueritte (played by 96-year-old Gisele Casadesus) is a retired scientist who reads Camus to him in the park. Depardieu can't but help make Germain more intelligent than the film wants him to be. And like Conversations, you gnash your teeth at the set-up, only for Becker's gentle insistence to win you over.
November 28, 2010
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