COOL, CLEAR WATER

A review requested by Tim Van Autreve, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Director Claude Berri's Manon of the Spring from 1986 is maybe the best kind of sequel. It is greatly deepened in its emotional impact if you've seen Jean de Florette, its predecessor from earlier in 1986 (they were released in France about three months apart), and can fully appreciate the weight of history leaning down on the characters. But it works tremendously well as a standalone narrative (in fact, it does so better than Jean de Florette, which ends on something of a cliffhanger): the backstory is woven into character-building moments so fluidly that it doesn't register that we're having and entirely different film recapped, and having seen the original film, it doesn't register that we're having stuff we already know spit back at us.

This isn't actually all that much of an accident: Manon of the Spring began life as a 1952 film of the same name written and directed by the multi-talented Marcel Pagnol, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. As I understand it, the film was carved down so severely from Pagnol's original vision that he decided to turn it into a novel. And since he was already turning it into a novel, he went ahead and turned into a massive two-volume novel, so he could flesh out the film's backstory in its own full narrative. The hefty The Water of the Hills, or L'eau des collines, since everything is sexier in French (though I admit, I prefer the way Manon of the Spring feels in my mouth compared to Manon des sources) was published in 1963, and it was cyclically re-adapted by Berri and Gérard Brach, and so the overall point is, anyway, that if Manon of the Spring feels like it was worked out to stand on its own two feet, while Jean de Florette has an absence of resolution that gives it a kind of tacked-on feel, that's because that is precisely what happened.

I prefer Jean de Florette even so, but it's not worth being a dick about it: both movies are sort of terrific, much better than it seems like they should be on paper. They are relentlessly commercial 1980s French films - so 1980s French, right from the font used in the opening credits - designed for maximum international appeal in the period setting (the late '20s, approximately) and the casting, and shot by Bruno Nuytten (his last work as a cinematographer, before he shifted to directing) to shamelessly make Provence look as beautiful and tourist-friendly in its endlessly golden, sun-kissed fields and hills as any corner of God's earth ever has. The first time I watched the dyad, I approached with an undiluted suspicion verging on hostility, but it's simply too intelligently written and assembled not to overcome that. This is kind of the Gallic version of peak Merchant Ivory: it really seems like the thing that it is can't help but be awful, and instead it's really great.

Back to Manon itself, since that's the theoretical focus here. Some years ago, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) contrived to block a spring that fed the neighboring property, to force Jean Cadoret, the owner, to sell; his conspiracy ended up getting out of hand and Jean died. Now César and his idiot manchild nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) own the property and use it to grow carnations, with the water from that very same spring. Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), who witnessed the Soubeyrans' treachery, now lives in the countryside as a goatherd, having come to accept her lot in life, though not forgetting the wrong done to her. This situation explodes because of three events: first, Ugolin watches Manon dancing nude in the hills to dry herself off after bathing, and grows obsessed with her. Later, on a trip to town, she overhears a pair of villagers talking about the wrong done to Jean all those years ago, and realises to her horror that the whole community knew about César's villainy, and did nothing to stop him, since he was such a prominent citizen. She'd be without any recourse, except that quite by accident one day, she discovered the small cave housing the spring that provides the village with all its water. Quicker than you can say "karma sucks, bitches", Manon blocks off the spring, forcing the villagers to come to reckoning with the past sins; they presume the dried-up water must be a sign of divine wrath. While this plays out, César grows increasingly obsessed with the idea that his inept, childless nephew is the last member of the line, and he feeds Ugolin's motivation for starting a family, which turns into an increasingly morbid obsession with Manon that, in turn, intensifies her desire to extract vengeance.

The title positions Manon as the protagonist, but in the actual film it's nothing of the sort: this is much more César's story and therefore a study in how past sins nag at the present, whether those are the sins of Jean de Florette's plot, or the history behind even that history. In the scene that most directly sets up the themes and stakes of his arc, he explains to Ugolin that the Soubeyran fortunes were done in by the family's greed and wretchedness in trying to wall out the rest of the world. "Interbreeding! It's bad for rabbits, and it's bad for people" he grouses to nephew, clearly a victim of that interbreeding.

In this context, Manon is an agent of fate more than a character in her own right, and Berri encourages us to think of that by keeping her dialogue and even her action to a minimum for the early parts of the movie. Casting Béart went a great deal of the way towards making that work: her incongruous beauty is absolutely never convincing as a rural shepherd girl, but it helps to make her seem like a nymph more than a person, something that the way she's filmed reinforces: our first glimpse of her is as a quick burst of motion that we can just make out as a human figure before it darts up a tree. When she's finally brought into the film as a proper character, we learn that she's articulate and inordinately intelligent for that place (a legacy from her intellectual father), and her behavior, coupled with Béart's deeply thoughtful expressions - it's not a very speech-dependent role - allows us to appreciate Manon as a fully-formed individual in her own right, and not just a prop for César's downfall and reckoning; but those early scenes cast a long shadow, and there's always a lingering feeling that she's an embodiment of nature's own revenge, and that the villagers' assumption that the blocked-up spring is a spiritual punishment is exactly right.

It is, in all ways, a film about the relationship of the land and the people who live on it, something accomplished especially well in wide shots that present human beings and their habitations as elements in the landscape, and not even the most important among those elements, sometimes. Even the postcard-appropriate photography contributes to this, focusing our attention on the scenery, which is given so much emphasis and liveliness that it becomes a character, if I may run headlong into a cliché. But clichés wouldn't be clichés if they didn't have some truth to them, and the sheer presence of the beautiful earth with its lush foliage and imposing rocky hills has much to do with how Manon of the Spring works at presenting its characters' place in the world.

In fairness, I don't know that anything that happens here could be honestly described as surprising; the film's themes are not new, and while its execution of them is especially handsome and well-tethered to its characters, it's not in any way challenging. If the film were American, I could describe it as "really good Oscarbait", I think you'd know exactly what I had in mind, and how hard that "really good" had to work. But the point is, that work happened: distinctly bourgeois art film sensibilities and all, Manon is smart and persuasive and very, very lovely to look at. It's not daring, but that's true of much of French cinema in the 1980s, and this film and its sibling are clearly among the strongest highlights in that country and decade.

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ICONS OF CINEMA

A review requested by André Robichaud, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The apparent subject of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's second feature, Andrei Rublev, is indicated right in the title: it's a story of the life of the most renowned painter of icons in medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn). Which is not, as film loglines go, a lie - but it is painfully reductive. At a minimum, the film also uses Andrei's life as a surrogate for examining the history of Russia in the first quarter of the 15th Century, during which time the Grand Duchy of Moscow began to wrest control from the Mongol Tatars, thus setting the stage for the country we now refer to as "Russia" to come into existence under one government. It is a story of how Orthodox Christianity was a driving engine of proto-Russian identity, and of the tense relationship between artists driven by their need to communicate spiritual truths, and totalitarian governments who saw no value - or were outright threatened - by those artists. And what do you think, but the Soviet government was leery of the movie, sending Tarkovsky to the editing room twice, shortening a 205-minute version of the film (the one universally available now) to 190 minutes, thence to 186 (the version Tarkovsky officially claimed to prefer), for its solitary screening in 1966; it was this version that was notoriously shown at 4:00 in the morning on the last day of the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

Taking the film as a historical argument about religion, art, and psychology that became yet another one of the many films in the second half of the 20th Century that ran afoul of Communist government censors isn't giving it enough credit either. In its gargantuan, three hour and 25-minute grandeur (whatever Tarkovsky might have said later, I couldn't imagine losing one frame of it), this is the one film, if ever there was such a film, that strikes me as truly being about the whole experience of life. Told in a prologue, eight parts, and a non-narrative epilogue, the film finds a setting to address virtually every facet of the human experience, using its radical narrative structure and mise en scène to express Deep Ideas about the relationship between God and the individual, the individual and society, society and history, history and God, and it does this elliptically, symbolically, and implicitly rather than at any point taking the viewer's hand to say "here's what I think about these very important subjects". It is one of the essential films ever made, and also, perhaps the apotheosis of the great tradition of Russian literature of ideas, using the medium of cinema to explore its profundities in a more glancing, complex manner than even the best prose of the 19th Century could muster.

In order to get at this grand, sprawling content, Tarkovsky and his collaborators - co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky, cinematographer Vadim Yusov, production designer Evgeniy Chernyaev, costumers Maya Abar-Baranovskaya and Lidiya Novi, and the three-person editing team of Tatyana Egorycheva, Lyudmila Feyginova, and Olga Shevkunenko being among the key names to know - worked to the goal, not of fleshing out a narrative (talking about Andrei Rublev in terms of its plot is faintly impossible), but of building a complete, immersive world, which is then filled with symbolic objects rather than events. But they're also actually events. It's hard to describe the feeling of it. The film's opening, for example, is of a man played by Nikolai Glazkov prepping a hot air balloon and launching it just in front of a mob trying to tear him down. After a few moments, he crashes. And that, like, happens.We're not given any reason to doubt the literal truth of what's happening, particularly given its succulent physicality.

But at the same time, this isn't "about" a hot air balloon crashing - it is about the desire to rise above while being pulled down, and about human overreach ending in disaster, but also the way that life continues on despite individual failures. For it is followed by the first of the film's many horses, a symbol of the greatest importance in Andrei Rublev's universe: horses represent the animal instinct to survive, the life force if we want to be more upbeat about it. And the film, despite being 3.5 hours of suffering in medieval Russia, is perfectly willing to encourage our being upbeat: it is about surviving and finding joy as much as it is about being beaten and bloodied by the onslaught of history. In fact, its final, longest, and best sequence, in which a giant bell is cast over the course of a year is all but explicitly a tribute to the human ability to endure and triumph against all odds including self doubt. It sounds ludicrous, and when I first saw the movie it was as much out of a sense of baffled curiosity why the hell a movie would see fit to end with a lengthy sequence about medieval bell-casting techniques as because I expected for it to be even slightly interesting. But it is gripping: as human drama, while we watch young Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev) find himself suddenly thrust into a position of responsibility and authority that he's not prepared for, and finding the fortitude to survive it; and as cinema, for the film's overall aesthetic reaches its finest expression in this sequence.

That aesthetic deserves plenty of explication, because it is maybe the most important thing about Andrei Rublev. This is, more or less, the spring from which all of "slow cinema" emerges: long takes, frequently so wide that individual humans fall into a blur, with the camera set as restrained, unblinking observer. Watching the film, one starts to feel that each frame is inspired by painting, yet Tarkovsky and Yusov don't take the expected route of basing their style in Andrei's own icon painting - in fact, if there's any specific tradition of art that the film evokes, it's the pageant-like art of medieval France and England, emphasising and exploiting the width of the anamorphic widescreen frame. I'd say that the film is made out of tableaux, if that didn't suggest a certain posed, static quality that's nothing like the unconstrained movement onscreen.

What this all means, in any case, it that the film does greater work than anything else I can name of simultaneously: A) presenting medieval life in full detail, lingering steadily within sets to capture the full texture and rhythm of a centuries-dead world, while B) being so aware of the organic human component of that life that it feels like we've been dropped squarely in the center of a vibrant, tactile, living world. The only film that comes even close to matching this is Ingmar Bergman's earlier The Seventh Seal, which has a much smaller scope focused on a much less naturalistic scenario, and isn't as extraordinary in its reach - Bergman's interest in death and suffering starts and ends in Scandinavian Lutheranism, while Tarkovsky's study of belief in goodness and faith driving a man's life starts in Russian Orthodoxy, but moves beyond theism or any other specific belief system by the end, in its wide-ranging consideration of what gives meaning to human life and why.

The film is at once stately and lively, glacially paced over its 3.5 hours but so quick in its moments that it's preposterous how quickly it moves towards its meditative finale (a reel in full color, studying in wide and close shots the paintings that are Andrei's legacy). It evolves along the way: the first half of the film is full of greatness, but the second half is on an entirely different level, one unmatched by anything else in world cinema: the bell-casting passage, like a preceding sequence that finds the city of Vladimir sacked by Tatars, could be separated from the movie entirely and presented as a self-contained short, and either of those shorts would make a strong claim towards being one of the key texts of artistic cinema. The Tatar sequence, "The Raid", is a particularly extraordinary case study in everything that makes Andrei Rublev a masterpiece: its depiction, in the script, of the individual being affected by faceless collective history is perfectly complimented by the way that wide shots full of activity allow us to simultaneously appreciated specific character beats against the backdrop of crowded tumult and violence (this is also the scene that makes it impossible to issue an unhesitating blanket recommendation for the film: an actual cow is actually set on fire and tears off camera, where I hope it was doused. But still, the movie contains unsimulated bovine torture). The contrasts that the filmmakers are able to pack into individual shots are incredible and deeply moving: a shot of snow and ash falling onto a smoking church - into which, of course, a horse wanders - is one of the highest moments in any film from the 1960s, or ever.

It is entirely possible that one could eventually exhaust Andrei Rublev, but I don't know what that would take. There's simply so much in it, expressed in such dense visuals and under-stressed performances and elliptical thought. And hacking through all that density is among the most rewarding experiences I have ever had in my life of watching films. If cinephilia has a literal holy text, to be referred to and examined in times of joy and stress and sorrow, it is this.

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A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

A review requested by Rachel P, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The broadly-defined genre of Prestige Picture Adaptations of Unassailable Literary Classics is terrifically old and terrifically durable, though it has had specific high and low points over the years. The most recent high, in the English-speaking world, covered most of the 1990s, when the successes of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and Merchant-Ivory's Howards End in 1992 (itself a delayed capitalisation on the same team's A Room with a View, released in 1986) proved enough to trigger a mania for well-heeled adaptations and variations of the things you read in high school, or a least in a freshman year college English class. As with any movie fad, some of the individual efforts were strong and some were clinkers (the hit-to-miss ratio of major Shakespeare adaptations over the decade is fairly dire), but all in all, I'd be inclined to say that it remains my own favorite period of Literary Classics movies ever. And the best film of the bunch is probably the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee from a script by Emma Thompson.

By all means, putting a talent like Lee in place already gave the film a huge leg up: the director's fist wholly English-language film was superficially an enormous shift from his contemporary-set studies of Taiwanese family life, but his brilliance was in figuring out how the story was basically just an extension in different clothing of the same kind of interpersonal dynamics he'd already made his specialty (and would continue to do going forward, ultimately resulting in the scandal of making a pensive family drama out of Hulk). What separates the great costume drama literary adaptations from the drearily mediocre ones is, in most cases, their emotional accessibility: the films that clearly demonstrate how people alive decades or centuries ago were feeling, fleshy people like ourselves are brilliant, whereas the ones that are arch fashion shows set in authentic but sterile re-creations of old locations tend to be the most boring, stultifying movies on God's green earth. Lee was uniquely well-suited to make a film on the right side of that gap.

But while Lee's contribution to the film's success is impossible to diminish, it's hard not to think of this as Emma Thompson's achievement overall. As an actress, she's the best part, or the only genuinely good part, or surely one of the highlights, of virtually every film she was involved in throughout the half-decade preceding this movie, but that's not the real tell. The real tell is that the four movies she acted in under Branagh's direction during their marriage are generally terrific or at least fascinating in their miscalculations, and they are best in some of the same ways that Sense and Sensibility is at its best. He hasn't made anything nearly as good since their divorce, which just so happens to have been finalised about two months before Sense and Sensibility came out. Am I saying that Emma Thompson was the secret genius behind Branagh's best work? No, that's scurrilous gossip-mongering. I am heavily implying it. The really sad thing is that after doing whatever wonderful magical voodoo she did to make this such a great work - in the process, becoming the only person to win both a writing and acting Oscar (she had the latter from Howards End) - Thompson's career basically swan-dived into oblivion.* For this, I feel sad on Thompson's behalf, but even sadder on behalf of myself and everyone else who'd like to know what she might have had up her sleeve next.

The plot of Austen's 1811 isn't as ubiquitous as her 1813 follow-up, Pride and Prejudice, but I pray it's not that unfamiliar (especially since I prefer the earlier book). The ingredients, anyway, are pretty basic: the second wife (Gemma Jones) of the late Mr. Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson), and her three daughters Miss Elinor Dashwood (Thompson), Marianne (Kate Winslet), and Margaret (Emilie François) are horrified to learn that Dashwood's son by a first marriage, John (James Fleet), has been persuaded by his harpyish wife Fanny (Harriet Walter) to ignore the dying man's request and leave the second family penniless. They are able find temporary housing with one of Mrs. Dashwood's cousins, and set themselves to the task of surviving, which for a family of women in the late 18th Century can only mean making suitable marriages. For Elinor, who is stiffly pragmatic ("Sense"), this does not mean the handsomely awkward Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), Fanny Dashwood's brother, for though they strike up a warm relationship, the threat of his disinheritance hangs over his every action. For Marianne, who is ready to burst with passionate, intense emotions ("Sensibility"), this does not mean the boring Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), no matter how smart a match he'd make; she's much more interested in the charming, obviously roguish John Willoughby (Greg Wise). Things play out with Sense and Sensibility becoming more like each other, to the hard-won benefit of virtually all.

As a work of adaptation, Sense and Sensibility is mostly a matter of streamlining Austen's original, giving Ferrars and Brandon a bit more to do, and finding a way to indicate to moderns what the hell all of this is about without it feeling pandering. That goes beyond the simple matter of contextualising a vastly different set of cultural norms about gender roles: Sense and Sensibility is a very financially-obsessed story, even more interested in the economic role of women in Georgian England than with their social roles. And the first triumph of the film is in the way it lays all of this out in neat little moments that feel organically woven into the story, occurring naturally rather than feeling like the movie has to come to a stop to lecture us. For one thing Sense and Sensibility never feels like, is a lecture. In fact, given its basic seriousness, a not-insignificant 131-minute running time, and overwhelming costume and production design (the former by Jenny Beavan and John Bright, the latter by Luciana Arrighi), one of the more impressive things about the movie is that it's quite a lot of fun to watch.

Credit due there to Thompson, to Lee, to damn near everybody. This is as lively as costume dramas get, thanks in large part to an exceptional cast: only Grant feels like a let-down of the major characters, and that's more because his "I'm so hapless and awkward, but unbearably cute" shtick was already wearing thin by the time this movie came out, rather than because it's a bad fit for the character. In fact, he's perfectly fine in the role. But "perfectly fine" doesn't help one to stand-out in this crowd. The best of the lot are unmistakably and necessarily Thompson and Winslet (though I am also much partial to Imelda Staunton in a modestly-sized role), whose huge age gap helps to fuel the gulf of understanding between two sisters who love each other very much and still can't fathom how the other lives. Winslet impresses me more, mostly because of context unavailable at the time (this was only her third movie role): she's a great actress but not an infallible one, and her future career tends to show that her biggest liability is when she's playing period roles. She tends to choke off her natural prickly energy and tendency to dart in unexpected directions in favor of playing dully literal notions of old-fashioned attitudes. That's exactly what she's not doing her: her Marianne is a tricky, mercurial person, not a prop for dresses, not a desperate attempt to hide a modern way of building character underneath a one-note stiffness (two shortcomings obviously present in her Titanic performance). Not that Thompson is a slouch; she's just not a revelation. Still, her emotional striptease in allowing us to see with exquisite slowness and deliberation what Sense has cost her character is impressive and important, and if the film's narrative works largely because of her smart excisions and clarifications, its emotional arc depends to a great degree on her gradations of feeling.

The aesthetic framework for these characters is crisp and unshowy: in terms of visuals, Lee and cinematographer Michael Coulter are mostly interested in drawing us into the film's reality by treating it with invisible naturalism, and for a film of such plush design, it's surprisingly casual in its style. The most dramatic thing that happens is the subtle way that the two sisters are framed: Elinor appears within boxes and against straight lines, while Marianne is likely to show up in open frames with more lighting and messiness in the set decoration. That's lovely as a grace note, but it's not something the film actively insists we notice; part of Lee's mechanism of bringing the material to life in a highly accessible way is to avoid putting any kind of spin on it - the contrast between this and his later period film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with its painterly images and self-conscious grandeur, to match its bold-strokes emotions and stylised narrative, is immediately obvious. Sense and Sensibility is much more about fine details, and the quiet style Lee brings to it is exactly what's needed for those details to catch our attention in their own time and not because the film wants to assault us. Though it is ultimately a tribute to Sensibility, it's a movie made with much good Sense, and that's exactly why it's so much more effective than almost all of the other films of its type and of its time.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CALIFORNIA IS FOR EARTHQUAKES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: we all know that San Andreas brings back the noble and intensely cliché-happy formula of the all-American disaster picture. What is perhaps a bit surprising is just how far back in history this particular lineage can be traced.

The greatest of all city theme songs, "San Francisco" ("...open your golden gate / You let nobody wait outside your door") feels like something that should have simply come into being spontaneously, not turned out as the result of something so crude as songwriters writing it. But that's exactly what happened: before it became one of the official songs of one of the world's great cities, it was written by Bronislaw Kaper, Walter Jurmann, and Gus Kahn as the theme for 1936's San Francisco, one of MGM's biggest productions that year, headlined by its A-listers Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. It's common for even non-musical Hollywood production of that era to sport a big song (and with MacDonald in one of the lead roles, San Francisco can't help but start to drift into the world of the musical), but rare indeed for that song to be used in such a structural way as we see here: over the course of the movie, "San Francisco" starts out off as a brash declaration from the rough-and-tumble underclass of the Barbary Coast, the most long-lived outpost of the city's birth in Old West lawlessness, it gradually shifts into an audible signifier of the characters' humble, honorable pasts as they attempt to disguise and redefine themselves, and it finally ends the film in the same way it's been used for eight decades since: as an anthem for the pride and resourcefulness of the people of a city that survived and rebuilt in the face of one of the most destructive natural disasters in North American history, the earthquake of April, 1906.

For that is exactly the subject San Francisco takes for itself. Not the earthquake itself, precisely, though the very first thing Anita Loos's screenplay does it to remind us via a title card that at 5:12 in the morning on 18 April, the city was devastated by a major quake, and the second thing it does is to portentously roll back the clock to the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day, 1906. Thus the first three-quarters of the movie (which comes in just shy of two hours) take on a grim cast, as the reasonably conventional romantic drama that makes up the bulk of the drama clicks by without ever quite letting us forget that we're only months - weeks - days - from the onset of horror. But the movie is only about the earthquake symptomatically; its deeper concern is with the rugged survival instinct of its characters, the kind of people who'd set up shop in what was, in 1906, just s 57-year-old city and still very aware of its rough, brutal roots. The film is enormously guilty of making Sweeping Proclamations about the kind of people who live in a given place, but it's still one of the best combined tributes to and criticisms of the character of a community. You needn't go any further into the future than 10 months later to find Fox's In Old Chicago, a movie that's almost a carbon copy of San Francisco in its plot structure and characterisations, to see what this looks like when it's not going right. This picture might be corny as all hell and its depiction San Francisco might be clichéd, essentialist, and reductive, but it has the goods.

As is already clear, I suspect, the film's basic shape is identical to disaster movies for decades to come: we get to know the characters, we get (hopefully) invested in their hopes and dreams, and we are as wrenched as they are by the slashing interruption of death and destruction across the smooth development of a conventional series of dramatic and melodramatic plot beats. And for as much as the movie hangs a sign reading "mind the earthquake" around the movie right at the start, it's genuinely startling and confusing when the world finally starts to move - having seen the film twice, I managed to be caught completely off-guard even the second time. Before that all happens, though, we get a loving recreation of the Barbary Coast of decades ago, in which "Blackie" Norton (Gable) is the owner of the Paradise, one of the Coast's most beloved and glamorously tacky clubs. The film kicks off when he hires Mary Blake (MacDonald), a classically trained singer from Colorado who has been in San Francisco for several fruitless weeks, trying to make her fortune in California like so many hopefuls before and after. Mary's exquisite voice is too rich and big for the Paradise, and she's aggressively courted for a job by Jack Burley (Jack Holt), a member of San Francisco high society and manager of the Tivoli opera house. Complicating things, while Blackie and Burley feud over Mary's career, they're both falling deeply in love with her, and her attraction to Blackie gets in the way of her own best judgment for her career and her dignity. Complicating things even more, Blackie has been tapped by the rest of the Barbary Coast business owners to run for the city's board of supervisors, a position he takes not to help secure their crooked interests, but to help reform and rebuild the coast. And he thus makes a major political enemy in the form of none other than Jack Burley. While all of this swirls around, Blackie's childhood best friend, Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy) tries to act as his conscience, but at least tries to make sure that Blackie can't drag Mary down into the mud with him.

The film benefits from a director with as tight a control of characterisation as Loos, and from director W.S. Van Dyke, one of those studio workhorses who has been almost entirely lost to history, but who could always be counted on for a drum-tight treatment of whatever story or genre was handed to him (his film with the longest shelf-life is undoubtedly The Thin Man, a crackerjack sophisticated comedy that resembles San Francisco only in that it is fearlessly well-paced and has a great central pair of performances). Having been gifted with a handsome reconstruction of 1906 San Francisco thanks to all of MGM's considerable resources, the filmmakers smartly fail to linger on it for the sake of sheer period spectacle, one of the most common mistakes of that studio's most prestigious film in that decade. Instead, the focus in on character and performance, with the result that the central trio of Gable, MacDonald, and Tracy are in great form: even stalled in the "beaming, moralistic Catholic" mode that he dealt with somewhat often at this point of his career, Tracy is up to some of his best work of the decade, while MacDonald is as good here as any anything she ever made outside of her defining collaborations with Ernst Lubitsch.

But Gable is the stand-out, given a tole that plays to every single one of his strengths, minimises his weaknesses, and guided by direction that encourages him to own the nastiness of his character rather than use his huge charisma to paper over it. Temperamentally and functionally, Blackie is a pure stock character, and there's nothing Gable can to do to fully eradicate that fact, but he does deepen it considerably. The actor and character mix sharp business acumen, borderline thuggish emotional bullying of Mary and Father Tim, and a goofy, sweet little boy attitude to love and the possibility of making the world a better place. He is a deeply enthusiastic figure, above all things, which makes his passions all the more moving (the way he cheerily snaps off the phrase "art-tistic achievement" is as good a line reading as any in Gable's career), and his blindly self-serving cruelty all the more horrifying, since we can so easily understand why his victims can be carried along with his pettiness.

Gable's performance is the thematic spine of San Francisco: the combination of can-do will and unsophisticated roughness that the film posits as the defining characteristics of the city's people. He makes such a life force on screen, in fact, that the movie can't quite cope with it: Loos's script, perhaps owing to jitters about glamorising bad boy behavior in the early Production Code era, obsessively ventriloquises Christian morality that it doesn't fully believe in, harping on Blackie's sinfulness and the danger he poses to Mary's very soul. But it feels very much not of a piece with the rest of the film, and the harder it tries to veer towards religion (which it does most strenuously in the final scene), the more inauthentic it feels. Doing good and being good isn't the film's true purpose: moral and spiritual ambiguity are where it's far more compelling and where it makes its strongest impact.

Gable, then, is one of the two reasons that San Francisco is more than an enjoyably polished studio picture; the earthquake itself is the other. It's not, maybe, the best effects work that could have been scrounged up, even in '36: the shaking sets feel an awful lot like shaking sets. But the sequence is a triumph of sound design (for which the film won its only Oscar, out of six nominations, including Best Picture) and even more of editing, which was overseen by John Hoffman for this sequence only. It's openly indebted to the Soviet montage theories of the late silent period, cutting between images with a frenzy that's impressive in the 2010s, and incomparably brutal and disorienting by the standards of the '30s. The savage chaos of the earthquake, the suddenness with which violence can strike, are both impressively communicated by this sequence; it is one of the triumphs of spectacular filmmaking in its entire generation. Even more so, given that it manages to achieve something that has evaded disaster movies since as long as they've existed (and this was by no means the first, though the genre began to take its most complete form beginning in the '30s): it depicts its disaster in an engrossing, spectacular way, while also making sure that we're not just exulting in mass death. The earthquake in San Francisco is utterly horrifying, showing how quickly and painfully human life could be snuffed out, and spending a great deal of time in the smoking, ruined aftermath, with Gable's glib Blackie turned into a shocked, dazed shell of a man as he moves through the devastation. It's closer to a horror movie than an action film, while also being as humane as any disaster picture on record. The passage of years would make onscreen devastation look more and more impressive and realistic with every new fad for the frequently-resurgent genre, but they'd tend to double-down on bland characters stuck in tired formulas (San Francisco is formulaic, but not bland), and this is one of those rare cases in which one of the earliest examples of a style is also among the very best.

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BLANDERELLA

The unbridled imaginations at Disney have managed to do it again, creating a fantasy beyond belief. With its new live-action Cinderella, the studio has managed to do the impossible, and portray a version of the classic fairy tale heroine who's even more of an insipid doormat that the one in its 1950 animated classic. For all that the animated Cinderella is probably the blandest and most inactive of Disney's princesses, there are still flickers of activity here and there. At the end of the film, after her vile stepmother has cruelly figured out one last trick to keep Cinderella from her happy destiny, she's got that moment where she waits till exactly the right moment to whip out her back-up glass shoe as Ilene Woods delivers the line "You see, I have the other slipper" with exactly the right amount of smugness that the addendum, "did you hear that, bitch?" can be plainly detected. That's more autonomy than Lily James's noble martyr is ever permitted by Chris Weitz's script. This Cinderella doesn't even cry inconsolably when she's locked in an attic; she simply dances in happy little circles and resigns herself to the belief that, anyway, at least she gets to be alone with her pleasant memories now. I mean, what the actual fuck.

There's the debate to be had about the social implications this all has, but frankly think that's a higher-order conversation than Cinderella deserves. This is a straightforward dramatic problem, it is. Make a protagonist who's so all-fired passive as this Cinderella for the 21st Century, and you end up with a story full of frustrating anti-moments: scene after scene of a terrifyingly skinny girl beatifically permitting herself to tremble her chin for a moment before she recalls her mother's (Hayley Atwell) dying admonishment to be nice Cinderella, good Cinderella, and to always retrench to her fantastic visions of life as it could be, not as it is. And so she allows herself to soak up abuse from horrible people without a murmur of complaint; she doesn't even complain in the privacy of her drafty garret to her little CGI mice friends, who are the most transfixingly awful mix of not-quite-right compositing and not-quite-realistic design, and generally feel like something that, were this a David Cronenberg or Catherine Breillat film, would be our first clue that our heroine was suffering from schizophrenia. I'm honestly not confident that it's not true of this Cinderella; the relentlessly upbeat tone and bright colors feel like they could imply some irony, even though they turn out not to. And the talking-to-mice bit feels soldered in artlessly to what mostly tries to be a fairly realistic fairy tale.

Having such a bauble of a lead turns out to be just about right. Cinderella makes no claims on depth or complexity; unlike Disney's last cartoon brought to life, Maleficent, this isn't even minutely interested in challenging or re-conceiving the original animated feature it occasionally nods too. It's not even really a remake; the shared elements between the films are commonalities between all Cinderellas, for the most part, and there are no design elements carried over. One song from the original film makes the briefest cameo during the movie, and two others are covered in the end credits, but that's just about as far as it goes. And so we get the ominous line in the credits that this is based on the Charles Perrault fairy tale, and on "Disney's Cinderella properties". If we are to have brand extensions, it's nice for them to at least be honest about it.

The result, unsurprisingly, is about as straightforward as an adaptation of the story could possibly be. Weitz's primary concession to modern tastes is to give Cinderella and her prince (Richard Madden) a meet-cute out in the woods, so that it's not such a regressive fable of finding one's soulmates based on purely physical criterion. Beyond that, the only real draw - above and beyond "come see something wherein you already know exactly what will happen and how", which I'm sorry to say is certainly the film's biggest selling point - comes in the form of seeing how Disney's money has been used to flesh out this version of the story with the most opulent Dante Ferretti production design and Sandy Powell costumes. And those things are, I concede, quite marvelous: the costumes especially are spectacle of the first order, and when they are garish and campy, it seems absolutely clear that the film knows and loves this about them. Director Kenneth Branagh, making what might very well be the most impersonal movie of his career, does a satisfactory enough job framing this sumptuously (it's easy to believe this is the same man who brought Thor's Asgard to the screen), if not with too much energy; the ball scenes are disappointingly small in execution, which seems like a particularly odd missed opportunity. But at least he puts a lot of pep and effectively florid touches in the magical transformation scenes.

With James being pinioned by the script and her corsets, and Madden being just plain dull, there's not much to anchor this tour of a stylish fantasyland, but at least the film is blessed with two wildly overqualified villains. Following in the tradition of Glenn Close and Angelina Jolie in doing a great job bringing a brilliant Disney villain to physical life, Cate Blanchett's stepmother, Lady Tremaine, is the obvious highlight of the movie, with enough depth and nuance to her portrayal of an unrepentant abuser that I'd have given just about anything to see a movie about her, instead. Making the most out of a handful of lines that imply the shape of a backstory without coloring it in, she suggests the hopeless competition with a saintly dead wife and mother, and the lifelong frustration with her own dull-minded daughters that might explain the character's savagery without trying to excuse it. It makes for a wicked stepmother who is unmistakably human, and thus far more threatening than somebody whose evil is simply innate, because she's so easy to believe in a real-world setting. The same is actually mostly true of the secondary bad guy, Stellan Skarsgård's scheming politician who comes across, in the actor's quiet, unmelodramatic performance, as a sensible pragmatist and not a sneering monster.

Between them, they give Cinderella enough of a backbone that it feels, by the end, like there was something at risk in all this, which is far more than the banal lovers can claim. And they justify the film in a slightly more concrete way than "you can tell that it was expensive!" does. Neither the design nor the villains are actually enough to make it worthwhile, but they're enough to keep it from being completely frivolous. And for something that could not possibly telegraph any more strongly its solitary desire to sell toys and dresses to little girls to not be completely frivolous is at least kind of impressive.

5/10

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CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: THIS LOVELY NIGHT WAS ONLY A FANTASY

The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella is, to begin with, an absurd anachronism. For anyone in the English-speaking world to try to put over an overlong spectacle-driven megamusical in 1976 was psychotic - the last hit film on that model was the five-year-old Fiddler on the Roof, and that was itself clearly already an aberration, two years after the very visible implosion of Paint Your Wagon and Hello, Dolly! - and The Slipper and the Rose didn't even have the advantage of being an adaptation of an established show. Though the cinematography is pure mid-'70s, everything else about the film is unreservedly old-fashioned. This is, in honesty, the primary locus of its charm: the clear sense, even some four decades after its creation, that this is all a bit hokey and warmly conservative, and it simply doesn't care what we think about that. It's too busy putting on a show in the most enormous, sloppy, ridiculous way. It is the movie version of a St. Bernard that just lumbers right on over and clambers up on your lap to lick your face.

The updated version of the classic fairy tale, written by brothers Robert M. Sherman and Richard B. Sherman, with some polishing done by Bryan Forbes - the former pair provided the film's soundtrack, the latter its direction - takes place in the 18th Century in a particularly British Ruritanian kingdom by the name of Euphrania. Here, the sturdy but easily rattled king (Michael Hordern) is busily trying to marry off his sole child, Prince Edward (Richard Chamberlain), but Edward has a rather snide disdain for the looks of the (presumably inbred) princesses his father has been sending him off to visit, and roughly declares that he'd rather marry for love than political convenience. This baffles or offends the whole court: his father and mother (Lally Bowers) have been tremendously happy in their arranged marriage, and, they, along with the Lord Chamberlain (Kenneth More) and the batty queen mother (Dame Edith Evans, in the last of her screen roles released during her life) loudly try to sing him down. The only person on his side is his valet and best friend, John (Christopher Gable), who knows the same pain: he's in love with a woman far above his station, whom he can never marry.

You know, the basic meat and potatoes of the Cinderella fairy tale.

After 19 minutes and two songs, we do finally meet Cinderella (Gemma Craven), returning from her father's funeral to learn that her stepmother (Margaret Lockwood, in her own final screen role, though she'd live another 14 years) and gorgeous but cruel stepsisters (Rosalind Ayres and Sherrie Hewson) are exploiting the letter of the dead man's will, though by no means the spirit, to rob Cinderella of her birthright and leave her at the status of unpaid housekeeper. This happens just before the king irritably announces a ball which is to find every woman of the nobility lining up to be thrown at the prince in a last-ditch effort to make him interested in anybody besides John. And the rest you know: Cinderella is aided by a curious woman (Annette Crosbie) who uses magic to help the girl in her chores, and eventually to attend the ball herself. She and the prince fall in love, she runs away, he hunts through the kingdom for her, we all leave happy.

Or, you know, not that. The film gave away the game by waiting so long to introduce its nominal protagonist: this version of the story is, weirdly, more interested with family-friendly court intrigue and the annoyances of dynastic politics than it is with fairy tale princesses. And so, after the ball is over, there's almost a solid hour of movie left that decides, inexplicably, to roll a whole theme of class bigotry into the story, and send Cinderella into willing exile so that Edward will marry for the best good of the kingdom. And all this realpolitik is, I want to point out, in the context of a story that also witnesses a magical woman turn ballet dancing mice into horses

It's different, anyway. And mostly, it's different in ways that demonstrate just how little actually happens in Charles Perrault's Cinderella that qualifies as drama. Even with its puffy opening sequence, the main part of The Slipper and the Rose still only gets us to about 80 minutes or so, out of an indefensibly indulgent 143 minute running time (the original U.S. release of this British production cut that down by 16 minutes: two songs - two of the better songs, actually - and some cute but largely irrelevant business for the fairy godmother). It's fascinatingly wrong-headed: this isn't a case of too much story stapled to a slender frame, it's a case of even the added story proving insufficient to hoist the running time up, so the filmmakers kept adding new wrinkles out of nowhere. It doesn't feel like a 143-minute film that got there through a lack of discipline and trimming; it feels like they wanted it to be 143 minutes, and kept adding acts till it got there.

That being said, for that first hour and twenty minutes, The Slipper and the Rose is a genuinely charming and likable variant on the well-told tale. The focus on the sullen prince and the desperate king is a weird shift, absolutely, but it draws attention away from how thoroughly dull Cinderella is in the source material and every traditional adaptation thereof. Some of the individual tweaks are even clever: e.g. the expanded role for the fairy godmother as a general helper sets up the mid-film twist that she's used up too much magic on Cinderella's behalf, and has to borrow more than her share to set up her goddaughter for the ball; hence the otherwise arbitrary midnight cutoff, which represents all the extra magic she was able to scrounge up. And any depiction in any Cinderella story of the stepsisters as attractive and fashionable helps to cushion the material's deeply broken notions of femininity.

Mostly, though, what works is the filmmaking itself, rather than the storytelling. Bryan Forbes was a better director than this project deserved, frankly, and he puts a lot more care into it than it needed. The film has an odd but totally effective addiction to wide shots: Forbes and cinematographer and Tony Imi use the full scale of the anamorphic frame to present crowd shots and big interior spaces, adding a distinct sense of grandeur and scale to the film; mixed with the '70s-style naturalism of the lighting and focus, it's physically present in a way that belies the general '60s superproduction tenor of most of what's going on otherwise. By stressing wide shots and using close-ups only as very conscious punction, the filmmakers emphasise the world of the story, rather like the script's attention to politicking over fairytale lovemaking. And the design team certainly built up a world worth emphasising: Raymond Simm's sets are plausible enough that the fantasy and fluffiness don't float away into the ether, but it's Julie Harris's costumes that really dominate the film. They rush right up to the edge of gaudy: the ball scenes resembling nothing as much as the carefully choreographed dancing of a display case of brightly-iced cupcakes. But that same sugar-sweet fanciness is entirely beguiling at the level of glossy fable; and this is, after all, Cinderella.

Beyond the look of the thing, the film enjoys a pretty terrific cast; with a blank role to play, Craven can't do much, but it's not her film. This movie belongs entirely to the grown-ups: the icy but still human Lockwood, the sputtering, lovable Hordern, the calm and stern Bowers, and chiefly and above all Evans, who plays the most generic role imaginable - the old lady has no idea what's going on, har har - but does so with the most infectious possible brio. It's caricature at it's absolute best, and Evans's performance is the most effortless kind of scene-stealing.

Really, the performances and style are so good that even with the leaden final hour, The Slipper and the Rose could still sparkle; the only thing holding it down to the level of generally charming trifle that's far more boring than it has any cause to be is, I hate to say, the songs by the Sherman brothers. So many delectable scores for Disney came out of those two minds! And yet the 12 songs here are pretty much just one banality after another: perfectly serviceable tunes matched to lyrics that are infinitely clever and proud of their twisty wordplay, without being actually funny; the love ballads are at least a touch more concrete than the prattle-heavy comic numbers, but they're also a bit treacly. Either way, the songs come off as a bit strained and brittle, and they're derivative in obvious ways from the Shermans' earlier, better-known, and just plain stronger songs: it doesn't help that the odd "well, let's go ahead and talk about the class struggle" tune "Position and Positioning" steals its choreography straight from "Step In Time" from Mary Poppins, in case anybody had made it that far into the film without flashing back to the Shermans' most iconic musical.

Snip out the songs, though, and The Slipper and the Rose is a cutely off-kilter riff on a familiar story, with just enough peculiar fascination with the unexplored ramifications of that story to feel like its own thing. Obviously, "snip out the songs" is about as bad a thing as anybody could say about a feature-length musical; but the vivid craftsmanship and thoroughly delightful character acting is enough to make a surprisingly enjoyable experience out of the film, even as it fails what theoretically ought to be its most basic test.

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THE LOVE OF GOD

A review requested by Bryan L, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

To begin with, it's a biopic - and does any genre so reliably connote "this is a well-polished and achingly handsome lump of Serious Art that's not terribly artistic and even less entertaining" than the biopic? And not just any biopic - it's part of maybe the most diabolically prestigious and inert subgenre, the biopic of an important classical musician, which has produced such ever-forgettable lead weights as The Great Waltz (Johann Strauss) and A Song to Remember (Frédéric Chopin), and has stretched all the way into the 21st Century with the likes of Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. Besides, it's a powerfully murky biopic: the incredibly famous title character isn't actually the subject or the protagonist, but in deference to his fame, the movie keeps ceding huge chunks of attention to him that leave it damned confusing what the actual story is that the filmmakers aimed to tell.

And yet, Amadeus is one of the best American films of the 1980s. So it just goes to show, never prejudge.

The 1984 film is based on the 1979 play by Peter Shaffer, who did a rather thorough job of re-imagining the material for its journey into cinemas, but either way, the core is the same: the relationship of composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), between Mozart's 1781 arrival in Vienna, where Salieri served as artistic director for the Italian operas of the Hapsburg court, and the former's death in that city in 1791, at the age of 35. It is an enormously fictionalised version of that story, though it should be pointed out that the single biggest lie that Amadeus has popularised - that a jealous Salieri murdered Mozart with poison - is one that the film very specifically and as a key element of its plot doesn't depict (it also doesn't, technically, indicate that Salieri was a mediocre hack, only that he perceived himself as such relative to Mozart. And so these two unfair characterisations of Salieri - the talentless murderer - are the film's great popular legacies through no fault of its own).

So disinterested is Shaffer in actual sober history, in fact, that to call Amadeus a biography, in either medium, is something of an inaccuracy. It's more of a psychological fable told using real historical figures to give it an imposing weight; that, and to celebrate in front of the widest available audience the peerless sophistication and beauty of Mozart's music, lengthy passages of which are played all throughout the rather long movie as Shaffer hands enormous blocks of dialogue to Abraham to elucidate using only somewhat dumbed-down musicology exactly what it is about Mozart that should cause all of us to regard him as one of the half-dozen greatest composers of music in the history of European culture.

And that's a great and worthy goal, one that Amadeus only slightly muffs by handing off all of its music cues to the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, who generally leans on an annoying tendency to rush through the music like he's terrified of losing his dinner reservation. But ultimately, "provide a showcase for Mozart's Greatest Hits" isn't remotely the reason that Amadeus is great drama and great cinema (many a tepid workaday biopic has also been a splendid Greatest Hits showcase).

For that, we turn instead to the excellent performances and cutting characterisations in the script, as well as the vivid and fleshy production overseen by director Miloš Forman, in what I will happily identify as his best work in English. The film is not the first nor the last, but among the most successful of all attempts to revivify a culture dead for 200 years using sharp contemporary style; the vast majority of costume dramas have a marked tendency to look poised, stuffed, and mounted, but in the hands of Forman, who came of age in the raw, direct naturalism of the Czech New Wave, 18th Century Vienna is full of sarcasm and ass-kissing and bitterness and flustered movement just like the contemporary world. It's a period film that was shot as though it took place in modern-day Los Angeles; Forman and cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček (who'd worked with the director, on and off, from the beginning of both their careers) don't both with painterly lighting or compositions, in some desperate attempt to ape Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (which perfected that style and has never been remotely equaled); they dive right in and capture the color, line, and texture of the dressed-up Prague locations, and of Theodor Pištěk's costumes (rather more fanciful than accurate) with the same intention to find the blunt reality of things that served them as young Czechs attempting to tear holes in the fabric of Communism.

This unsentimental way of film interiors and exteriors alike with a kind of blank-faced present-ness is perfectly matched by the two most important performances, Abraham's and Hulce's - the cast as a whole is wildly inconsistent, ranging from Jeffrey Jones's marvelously and perfectly unfocused Emperor Joseph II, to Elizabeth Berridge's whingey, breathy take on Mozart's wife, but it's essentially a two-hander with a lot of people standing on the sidelines cheering. It's not always subtle acting that's going on: theater actor Hulce's only meaningfully visible film role to that point was in the low-brow comedy Animal House, and he brings a lot of that exact energy to his manic, filthy Mozart, with an unavoidably irritating laugh. Abraham is a bit more nuanced, mostly because the character he's playing is a facile liar, who does his level best to seem pleasant when he is scheming and wrathful. What matters about both of them, mostly, is their resolute modernism: the very conscious layering of psychology and the small physical gestures (Abraham's performance as an old man recounting the story to an increasingly horrified priest is full of some absurdly wonderful facial expressions and gestures - his inward-looking smugness on "Everybody liked me. I liked myself" is my favorite beat in the entire film) that speak to fussy stage-trained acting, and that fills this very old-fashioned mise en scène with very hard contemporary attitude that goes beyond such things as the evocation of punk rockers in Hulce's wigs. It is a study of 20th Century attitudes towards jealousy and faith that places 20th Century men, incongruously but effectively, into 1780s Vienna and does not comment on it.

But in that very lack of commentary, Amadeus comes alive. It's not the kind costume drama that brings a long-dead place back to life; while the film's Vienna is persuasive, and Twyla Tharp's staging of several Mozart operas winningly looks back the poshest stagecraft of a long-dead era, and the film-long obsession with food of the Viennese upper classes (which serves more as a character detail for Salieri than a piece of world-building) is lavish, if not always totally appetizing, it would be difficult to argue for Amadeus the merit of scrupulous historical accuracy. The dialogue doesn't support that; the general indifference to verifiable facts in the matter of its subjects' lives certainly doesn't support that. The film triumphs above all things as a character study, played by two remarkably fine actors in peak form, providing a chance for its very modern audience to reflect on very recognisable feelings of envy towards people we know damn good and well to be more capable than ourselves, "fairness" be damned; the period trappings are, as much as they are anything, a way of heightening those feelings by making them seem weird and fresh.

Or even more simply: the thing Amadeus primarily depicts, biopically-speaking, is the writing of operas - a dramatic form in which strong emotions are presented in a heavily artificial matrix of absurd plot and florid singing. And because of that artifice, the emotions are more immediately accessible. And that's basically the exact same thing Amadeus is doing: the mechanism of the artifice is different, but the intensity, lack of subtlety, and thus the accessibility, they're all the same. It's a prose opera. Form and content meet and seamlessly blend. Terrific stuff.

N.B. I: To prove that I can be at least a little bit critical, take a gander at that tagline. "The man... The music... The madness... The murder... The motion picture". Is that not literally the worst copy in the history of film advertising?

N.B. II: There exists a director's cut; it is far easier to see the film in that format now than its original theatrical version. I prefer the older, shorter cut; the extended version overexplains things that were perfectly clear without being laboriously spelled out, and it badly affects the flow of a 160-minute film that starts to feel puffy at three hours. One might say, of the theatrical cut, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall".

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: OPEN UP AND LET THE DEVIL IN

In the 2010s, one of the most interesting new directorial voices anywhere in the English-speaking world has been that of Great Britain’s Ben Wheatley. Without having produced any clear-cut unambiguous masterpieces in in the handful of features and short contribution to the horror anthology The ABCs of Death (one of the lonely few segments of that film that’s worth any damn at all - it is, in fact, my favorite) that make up his career since 2009, Wheatley has eked out a position as an extremely satisfying manipulator of genres and tones, finding pawky humor in the grotesque and maddeningly tense horror in the mundane and suburban. It’s a little premature to claim that I’d be willing to follow him anywhere, but I haven’t been let down yet.

So with all that in mind, it’s a little bit disappointing that the first of Wheatley’s films to put in an appearance on this blog, A Field in England, finds the director producing his first movie that I haven’t loved on the spot. Not because he seems to relaxed whatever internal pressure led to the creation of his first three, enormously idiosyncratic movies - the film, his fourth feature,his fourth, is arguably his most ambitious yet, artistically and narratively. If nothing else, the attempt to mount a period movie set during the Civil War (the 17th Century one in England, not the 19th Century one in America) with only six actors and costumes that look like the most talented mom in middle school put them together for the spring play - and to succeed so fully in that attempt that after the opening scene finishes instructing us how to watch the movie, there’s never another moment when it feels inauthentic or fake - would earn so many moxie points that it would be hard to entirely dislike the film.

The simple beginning to an obtuse, psychologically-driven narrative finds bullying military man Commander Trower (Julian Barratt) relying on an apprentice alchemist and diviner named Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) to find a missing outlaw. During battle, which he watches from the fringes (and if it feels like this is an excuse for us to hear the fighting without seeing it, sure, but it works at establishing the film’s off-kilter tone right at the start), Whitehead is able to escape, meeting up with a pair of deserters, Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and Friend (Richard Glover), and a freeman, Cutler (Ryan Pope), all leaving the field of battle; their attempt to find an ale house a little way back into the country leads them quickly astray, and right into the path of O’Neil (Michael Smiley), an Irish thief, and the exact same outlaw Whitehead had been assigned to hunt down. O’Neil has a much more intriguing possibility than ale and whores; he claims to know of a treasure hidden in a nearby field, and he’s not going to give up the chance to have a trained diviner help him find it.

It would be simple and clean to suggest that the film takes its turn when the group eats a stew made of wild mushrooms that prove to be hallucinogenic, and it’s certainly at this point that the film most fully reveals itself as a psychological drama with overtones of cosmic, religious terror. But that would be selling the opening act short. At all points, A Field in England delights in presenting the viewer with a world sufficiently disorienting, between the weird emptiness of its setting, the stylised mix of modernism and olde-tymey dialogue in Amy Jump’s script (Wheatley’s regular writer and thus the co-author of his distinctive, odd tones), and the metallic cinematography by Laurie Rose, in a full range of soft greys that never quite commit to full white and only rarely to black. The film looks and sounds like a dream in a rather more direct sense than most “this is a dream” films usually do: the images stubbornly refuse to link up properly even though there’s no obvious discontinuity in the cutting, and objects and concepts suddenly appear in the story as though they were already there and we were supposed to have noticed them before. It looks, and sounds, deeply uncanny, long before the magic mushrooms enter the picture.

The film's general direction, with its generally increasing pileup of suggestions that the field is a version of Hell or at least Purgatory, and the equivalence of O'Neil with the actual devil (first as a joke, increasingly not), rather neatly marries two kinds of content: that is, having unexpectedly chosen to dive into the 1640s, Wheatley and Jump proceed to tell a story with moral concerns that feel period-appropriate, and even with a certain period-correct lack of polish and convincing illusion. If 17th Century Englishmen had access to digital cameras, but nothing else of contemporary technology, A Field in England has the distinct feel of something they might have made, and that's exceptionally cool. Also, this is what helps the film to hang together as much as it does, for as long as it does. For in honesty, while all of the individual parts work terrifically, from the nervous, rough performances to the cinematography to everything, the unified whole feels vaguely aimless and less than totally satisfying. The impression one gets - I got, at least - is that Wheatley and dompany didn't really have a feature's worth of different ideas, and so A Field in England ends up being a somewhat drawn-out affair that is punctuated, whenever it starts to flag really badly, with one of its more aggressively outré gestures.

I won't quite go so far as to say it's boring or pointless, though those words do rear their heads. What A Field in England does offer, by the bucketload, is a pervasive sense of unease, an almost physical sense of things being entirely and perversely not right with the film, as you're watching it. The combination of costume drama, religious allegory, and psychological horror that largely go to making up the movie matches with that unease beautifully, and the increasing fragmentation of the narrative into events that barely make sense on their own and don't seem to flow naturally from what went before proves to be a well-motivated and totally effective choice, and not just aimless messiness. It works as an experience, whatever else it does. But it's the first Wheatley film which I left feeling no clear sense of why - of what that experience was meant to do besides unsettle me mightily. It succeeded, and that's no little thing, but compared to the suggestive themes and social insight of the director and writer's previous work, I'm a little bit annoyed that it's the only thing.

7/10

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POETRY, LOVERS

Once upon a time (the rumor goes), two sisters both loved and lusted after important 18th Century German author/critic Friedrich Schiller (Florian Stetter), and it's at this point that we perhaps tense up a little bit in regards to Beloved Sisters, recalling all of the other person that find Long-Dead Important Artist Better-Known By Academics Than Everyday People getting in over his or her head in soap-opera-ey romantic travails. There are good films and even great ones to be found in this genre (Jane Campion's Bright Star, which like Beloved Sisters is more interested in the woman who loves the artist than the artist himself, here steps forward), but there are a lot of bad ones. Nor is the track record for costume dramas of late so strong that hearing about somebody making a new one automatically fills our hearts with hope and joy for the cinematic brilliance about to unfold. While "cinematic brilliance" is far more than Beloved Sisters can honestly claim to offer, it's a much better version of its genre and its scenario than the average, and even more impressively, at 171 minutes long (a 138-minute version also exists, but isn't apparently being shown outside of Germany), and 171 minutes that are moreover not remotely justified by the amount of content of its plot, it still moves by with enough passion and drive that even I, who finds fault with the running time of every movie that breaks an hour and a half, can't honestly claim that I felt the length or thought that the movie ever allowed itself to be boring.

The beloved sisters are Charlotte von Lengefeld (Henritte Confurius), barely out of her teens, and the indifferently-married Caroline von Beulwitz (Hanna Herzsprung), whose wealthy and uninteresting husband (Andreas Pietschmann) is almost solely responsible for keeping the von Lengefeld family fiscally solvent. It's a drearily typical arrangement that is imbalanced when Charlotte, packed off to the city to find a marriageable (and rich! can't forget rich!) man of her own, bumps into the already-legendary young author Schiller mostly by accident. This begins a flirty friendship-type situation that quickly comes to envelope Caroline herself - there's a surprisingly sexy moment early on involving a cold, wet, and naked Schiller that gets things kicked off nicely, if they weren't quite there to begin with - and it takes very little time before the sisters agree to share Friedrich as their soulful new lover. For his part, the writer only slightly, but very distinctly, prefers Caroline, which goes from being a minor problem to kind of a big one after he marries Charlotte, and even moreso as he starts to become Charlotte's literary mentor. And from here things descend into a rather disappointingly rote litany of jealousies and tragic detachments from family and loved ones.

On its way to that point, though, Beloved Sisters has some surprises to dole out. The shape of the thing is distinctly familiar - a years-spanning collection of incidents from the life of Famous Men and Their Women - but the ingredients are presented with unusual intelligence; writer-director Dominik Graf isn't afraid of the intellectual life of 1880s and 1890s Germany, and he explores issues of philosophy, politics, and literature with a collector's eye for details and illuminating anecdotes. He's even more interested in how that life worked for women slightly on the outside of it rather than celebrated writers on the inside, and though there's a bit of chilly academia in its dissection of gender politics, it's hard to think of another recent feminist-ish costume drama that's so free of "we moderns are the best!" pandering, to such good effect. I suspect that one's innate fascination with 18th Century continental aesthetics drives the degree of affection one could possibly have for all of this; if the name "Friedrich Schiller" already makes your eyes glaze over, the very long beginning and middle of Beloved Sisters would probably be a pretty rough sit. As a pretentious ass who hates everything new, I confess, reader: I dug it.

The messy realism in the sets and lighting do the film credit as a snapshot of life some two and a quarter centuries into the past, and the rest of the work in this vein is done by Herzsprung and Confurius, breathing an beautifully loose-limbed reality into their characters and, most crucially the "I would do anything for you intimacy" between the sisters (as Schiller, Stetter is... fine, just fine. Better than a shrug, but nowhere near the level of his co-leading ladies). Nothing in the film quite shakes the slightly over-prestigey trappings of the genre and subject matter, but damn me if Beloved Sisters doesn't have quite a healthy serving of the erratic human vitality that's precisely what ordinarily goes missing from films like this.

That is, right up until it doesn't. It's never perfect - the music by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem throughout, I can only describe as "loopy" - but it gets increasingly imperfect as it goes along, and when it eventually explodes in a mess of jealous and angry self-deprivation, the film starts to lose air at a precipitous rate. And there's a lot of it left when that happens. It still flickers to life at points, and Confurius remains a tightly-wound, exciting screen presence, but sadly, Herzsprung goes off the cliff when the story does (she certainly gets the less dynamic material to play, the further long history marches). And there's always a certain prurient interest in stories about how Great Men could be involved in soap operas like the rest of us, though Beloved Sisters isn't tawdry enough to work all that well as a melodrama. The film never quit tips into being actively bad, at any rate, but it's hard to deny that the last hour isn't nearly as engaging, smart, or unique as the first two. A two-thirds success rate isn't so bad as all that, but with a running time like this, that leaves plenty of deadwood to go around.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

In the finest tradition of British filmmaking, Belle is more or less single-handedly saved by its actors. It's not that there's anything precisely wrong with Amma Asante's script - which is credited to Misan Sagay because of a whole WGA arbitration thing that makes a bit of sense until you step back to ask the fateful question, "Wait, so why is the Writers Guild of America weighing in on the credits of an entirely British production?" - nor with Asante's direction. Both are perfectly sturdy, capably harnessed into producing a fact-based costume drama of politics and domestic life in the 18th Century that strikes all the notes which such a genre film ought to strike to appeal to the sorts of people who care about them. Belle does, perhaps, put its political context a bit more front-and-center than the great majority of such films would ever even daydream about doing. And it has a tendency to do this in the form of dialogue which finds every last character announcing rather unambiguously articulated - indeed, over-articulated - opinions on the status of race relations in the England of 1781. Think of it as an episode of Crashterpiece Theatre.

But then this very traditional and maybe a little inflexible costume drama gets populated by a murderer's row of the best and brightest actors the British Isles have to offer, and something almost like a miracle happens, and the thing starts to crackle with life and personality. Matthew Goode starts things off with a part that can't even hit the five-minute mark before he departs, leaving nothing but the sense that all movies are better when they've had some Matthew Goode happen to them; then come Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Penelope Wilton, and Miranda Richardson to hold things down on the endlessly reliable workhorse end of things, while Canadian import Sarah Gadon, Tom Felton (playing what amounts to a periwigged Draco Malfoy), James Norton, and Sam Reid are the more-or-less fresh new faces who all do an excellent job holding their own (Gadon and Norton particularly). And dominating all of them with the screen-controlling authority of a natural-born goddess is Gugu Mbatha-Raw, in the breakthrough role that wrote all the checks which would later be cashed by Beyond the Lights.

It's her film, and not just because she's playing the titular Belle - that is Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, illegitimate mixed-race daughter of the late Captain Sir John Lindsay (Goode), placed into the protection of his uncle William Murray, Earl of Mansfield (Wilkinson) and his wife Elizabeth (Watson). Plenty of rising stars have struck out with this kind of made-to-order star vehicle, or been lucky to hit a single. Mbatha-Raw knocks the hide off the ball with her first at-bat: though she's better in just about every way in Beyond the Lights (which offers her a much fuller, more sophisticated role to play), there's nothing about this performance that doesn't suggest an actor in full command of her voice, her body, her face, and the knowledge of how to control all three of those things for maximum effectiveness in front of the movie camera. She manages to give the film nuance about its themes it didn't even know it wanted: while racism is something that rather blandly inhabits the film, rather than something the film wants to investigate (it adopts the drearily common attitude of congratulating itself for being more progressive than people who died 200 years ago, and letting that stand in for social commentary), Mbatha-Raw is interested in more complexity than that, and provides it. In her shocked expressions and line deliveries clicking from sullen acceptance to cold rage, she evokes a non-white woman whose childhood and adolescence have made her aware on an intellectual level would hold racist thoughts towards people who look like her, but is only becoming aware as an adult what that actually entails in the outside world. It's not a reading the script actively precludes, but it's not one it leans on either, and thank God for Mbatha-Raw for ferreting it out and making it the basis for a more interesting take on the character.

Without that performance in the center, Belle would be a great deal less interesting, a sort of soporifically soporific parade of slightly too crisp costumes on nicely lived-in sets with Wilkinson's tartness and Richardson's fire-spitting the most actively enjoyable elements. It's not as wildly generic as something like The Duchess; the notion of putting a study of social mores surrounding race and illegitimacy (there's a fun thread teasing out which actually bothers the characters more) into 18th Century dress is certainly original, and the organic way that a by-the-numbers drama about a woman of independent financial means but many other social limitations gradually and almost invisibly involves into a legal drama gives the film more of a unique personality still. The story is unquestionably worth the telling, even with Asante/Sagay's forthright fictionalisation of all the historical details to make Dido a bit more central in situations she probably had little access to (her wealth in the film is a fiction, for one thing; and the film curiously misrepresents the painting of Dido and her friend and foster-sister that has done as much as anything else to secure her place in history). That's all just to give it a bit more of a dramatic shape, after all, and it needs such a shape to avoid fizzling into nothing much whatsoever.

So, not offensive overall, but it's definitely most worthwhile as a delivery system for one of the most fascinating and potent new stars of the '10s. Mbatha-Raw is on fire here: it's a star-is-born turn of the sort that Hollywood myths used to be made out of, and it's that, rather than anything inherent to the movie, that will make it worth returning to in years to come.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: COMING TO AMERICA

Marion Cotillard can do anything, anyway. Whatever else one walks away from The Immigrant certain of, one can be certain of that. As the recipient of the first-ever leading female character (co-)written and directed by James Gray, specialist in portraits of New York masculinity in moments of self-doubt, Cotillard has been handed a role with a definite whiff of the worst clichés of women in sinewy, masculine stories. She is a whore, and if I were tasked with deciding what precious metal her heart was made out of, well, I think I might have a good guess. Gray's script, written alongside Ric Menello (who did not live to see the film's 2013 Cannes premiere), adds enough particularising details that Ewa Cybulska, this particular model of that ancient narrative type, isn't quite a stock figure, but there's still a constant danger of the script regressing back towards the mean of Noble Woman of Almost Saintly Mien, Constantly Ground Down by the Cruelty of Men, and it only sometimes manages to avoid this fate.

But throw that character at Cotillard, and sweet Jesus, she will find the rock solid humanity beneath the concepts and the stock behavior, and that is the character you end up getting as you watch the movie. Even as the native French speaker, in her first English leading role, has to adopt a Polish accent on the character's behalf (and to speak a handful of scenes in Polish; I can't vouch for how well she does that, but the accent is spot-on), which surely must have taken a little bit of her attention at all times. The Immigrant is a fine movie in its own right, if a little over-cheered from some quarters (particularly the cinematography, which finds Darius Khondji doing a fine but hardly groundbreaking job copying Gordon Willis's work in the flashback sequences of The Godfather, Part II), satisfying in the tragically inevitable way it moves towards its denouement, handsomely appointed by costume designer Patricia Norris and production designer Happy Massee to resemble a fever dream of the first two and a half decades of 20th Century America. Cotillard, though, pushes it in the direction of greatness; as far as her tour of the 2014 U.S. film landscape, I'm still a Two Days, One Night voter, but good grief, talk about an embarrassment of riches.

The Immigrant opens slight prior to Ewa's arrival at Ellis Island in 1921, and she is already besieged: her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) is quarantined with a lung disease, and Ewa runs the risk of being deported right back to her war-ravaged home, when her plight catches the eye of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), a seeming do-gooder who bribes an immigration officer to look the other way while he smuggles her into New York. Here, he sets her up in a pathetic little burlesque show he's running, a front for pimping out all of his "actresses" for the benefit of the seedy clientele. While not prostituting her, Bruno falls in love with the fragile, confused woman, who sneaks out when she can to track down her relatives already in America, to beg them for shelter and help rescuing Magda from whatever holding pen she's stuck in. The relatives end up selling her out to the police, but she manages to make another ally in the form of Emil (Jeremy Renner), something of a rival to Bruno, and one who has the distinct advantage of not lying to the women he's attracted to in the hopes of luring them into a life of whoredom. Ewa falls for him and he for her, and this goes very, very badly when the mercurial, jealous Bruno finds out about it.

There's a lot to be said for melodrama that is open and proud about being melodramatic, and it's nicely clever of The Immigrant to tell a story that could, with only modest censorship, have been filmed in the time period when it takes place. There's also a lot more to be said for melodrama that's really good at being a melodrama, and this is maybe not entirely the case with this film. It's nothing on Gray, who directs with a stately slowness that allows the story to burble up and find its level without any modernist or post-modernist touches, and who collaborates with Khondji on some rather fine compositions that understand the value of deep staging like not nearly enough movies do - it gives it a theatrical staging that pairs well with both the tone of the material and the actual content of the story.

But the film stumbles, rather needlessly, on its characters who aren't Ewa. Phoenix has been the leading man in both of Gray's last two films, so it's no surprise he was conscripted to do that job again here, but he's simply not that great at fleshing out a character who gets more complexity than Ewa, though less time for development. There's a lot of the actor's characteristic fuzzy mumbling and emptiness that don't pay off in this film whatsoever. He and Renner suffer from different specific iterations of almost exactly the same problem: they feel contemporary, too much like 21st Century actors trying to put on 1920s attitudes and speech and behavioral rhythms like a coat that doesn't fit right. Renner's work is more baldly modern, while Phoenix simply misses the mark on using newer acting technique to evoke old-fashioned life. But these are gradations. In both cases, the men are thoroughly outmatched by Cotillard and the script alike, and it harms everything: the reality of the movie suffers, especially since it's predicated on fusty atmospherics that present a stagey kind of life and storytelling; the roiling passion of the melodrama suffers more, since Ewa never apparently occupies the same plane of existence as either of her suitors.

The visuals are too confident, and the rock of Cotillard too immobile, for that kind of shortcoming to turn it into a failed experience. By the same token, The Immigrant is very much the sort of familiar-in-most-ways filmmaking and storytelling that needs everything to fire on all cylinders, so that we can declare that it is the brilliant execution that matters, not the lack of originality. When some of the most important cylinders are jammed up, that defense doesn't work so well. For what it is - a golden-toned melodrama about an innocent being tarnished and then redeemed in the Big City - The Immigrant is a lovely piece of work. But that's all that it is, and with as much of it that goes spectacularly right, it feels like there should be more.

7/10

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HOUSE OF PAINT

One doesn't get to use the word "exquisite" enough to describe movies, so it gives me great pleasure to declare that Mr. Turner is exactly that. It is, to begin with, stupefyingly beautiful: not another movie in 2014, not another movie since The Tree of Life, in fact, has made me literally stop breathing because I was so flabbergasted by the sheer gorgeousness of so many individual frames - basically every single establishing shot, of which the film indulges itself in many.

By an incomprehensible margin the best of the year’s biopics of a famous British man, Mr. Turner’s title subject is J.M.W. Turner, revolutionary landscape painter of the first half of the 19th Century. Which explains, to begin with, why the film is so god-damned beautiful: cinematographer Dick Pope has here made it his mission to re-create not just the lighting of the paintings of Turner and his contemporaries, but the texture of them as well. My vocabulary deserts me, but this is not a movie that feels like a movie. There’s a chalky, musty quality to its images that goes deeper than that (it is, I think, a film that could only look the way it does thanks to the latitude of digital cinematography, and so for the first time in my whole love, may I say: thank God for digital cameras). It’s not so much a film that recreates the look of period-appropriate paintings, Barry Lyndon-style (it has the wrong aspect ratio, to begin with), but it finds a cinematic equivalent to the play of light and color and curve. It is maybe the most unprecedented work of cinematography I have seen in 2014.

Which is rewarding in and of itself, but Mr. Turner is not a Dick Pope film, but a Mike Leigh film, and like all Mike Leigh films it is driven by characters, not imagery. Which is even more impressive, given how easy it would be for the imagery to drive this film of all films. Instead, the painterly cinematography serves to make the film an extension of the perspective and mind’s eye of Turner, played by Timothy Spall in an absolutely sublime performance: the best work of his career, the best acting by a man or woman in the English language in 2014, whatever hyperbole you want to throw out there. It can stand up to it.

The film is effectively structureless: picking up during the 1820s, in Turner’s early 50s, when he was already established as a major painter, and following till his death in 1851, with no real plot arc to speak of, and often only the fuzziest connection between scenes that sketch out the general content of Turner’s life without providing some rigid unifying schema. The resulting biopic thus does something that biopics usually do not: it resembles, to a meaningful degree, a human life (within the 2014 movie ecosystem, it’s “this happened, and oh now it’s two years later and this is happening instead” flow of moments that express a man without trying to stuff him into movie character boxes makes it a surprisingly ideal pairing with Boyhood). Freed from generic straitjackets, Spall is able to make a more complex and nuanced character than any real-life figure in a movie in recent memory, all within a very limited range of tricks. Spall’s Turner is piggish, sharp, and unpleasant; he communicates mostly in grunts and snorts, with the actor finding a seemingly limitless variety of ways to go “hunh” and have it mean something vastly different every time. But at the same time, even as the movie forthrightly allows him a host of character flaws (everything from free-for-all rudeness to his bored raping of his housekeeper) and Spall makes not the slightest play for our affections, the film has no difficulty in showing the sensitivity and keyed-up awareness of other people that makes a man a gifted artist. It is, as a whole, one of the most nuanced depictions of a human being that the movies have provided in some time, and Mr. Turner would be essential cinema if it did nothing else.

But it does much else! While Turner is the film's vessel and chief focal point, it wouldn't be a Mike Leigh picture if there wasn't a goodly amount of attention paid to the society around him, and the director's best film since 1999's Topsy-Turvy turns out to be an excellent companion piece for it, addressing the mores of early Victorian England while that film did the same for late Victorian England. And to the question of whether a viewer in 2014 should care about Victorian England at all, I can only adopt a confused look and say that, whatever, I happen to, so there.

The point being, Mr. Turner beautifully captures the pace and ideals and behavior of an era, filling every scene with an outsanding cast made from Leigh regulars and others, all of them creating vivid characters in even the smallest appearances. It's the sort of film wherein, every time somebody other than its protagonist acts or speaks, we are left with the strong impression that they all have full, busy lives, as worthy of exploration as Turner's own, and it's only a matter of keeping things manageable that this particular film has selected only one human being as its subject.

Leigh's way of framing all this humanity is wonderful: they are crammed into Suzie Davies's fussy, organic sets in compositions fraught with meaning, whether to reveal social standing, or evoke states of calm, loneliness, busy panic, and everything else. The lessons of fine art have been utilised well in the construction of the film's images: they are psychologically acute on top of being beautiful. And thus we arrive at the construction of a living, functioning world which we are permitted to view in sliced-out moments, some of them impossibly minor (Turner's father, played by Paul Jesson, buying paint supplies), some of them massive (an exhibit featuring all of the important painters in England at the time, a lengthy chain of events that I suppose qualifies as the film's signature sequence), all of them equally captivating and important feeling.

By focusing on individual incidents and beats rather than anything like an overarching plot, Mr. Turner's depiction of life has a chance to feel fuller and more authentic than anything else like it in years. Without any causal linkages, adjacent scenes comment on each other to present a version of the title character who can be likable and then infuriating in the blink of an eye, who experiences sad moments, triumphant moments, moments when he amuses us and moments when he infuriates us, all in a flow that feels natural and rhythmic even though, if one tried to work out how each scene feeds into the next, it would probably feel rather arbitrary. Leigh's directorial naturalism sells it; the visual splendour gives it a certain richness and cinematic brightness that adds just enough pageantry to it that it can't be pegged as a generic exercise in living history; and Spall serves as the immovable bedrock of this sprawling study of life at a certain time and place, while also being its most fascinating single element. I can't pretend that it's perfect - for one thing, it repeats itself narratively and thematically, especially as it gets closer to the end and focuses with increasing closeness on Turner's relationship to the twice-widowed Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey, the standout among the great supporting cast) - but it's as close as it needs to be, and it's certainly the highlight of the 2014 year-end prestige glut.

10/10

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