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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IT IS A VERY PLUM PLUM

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

The big problem with The English Patient isn't even its fault: the problem is that Elaine Benes fucking hated it, and nobody who saw that 1997 episode of the sitcom Seinfeld before they caught up with the Oscar-worshiped romantic epic could possibly avoid hearing any echo of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's passionately anguished delivery of her character's rants. "Sex in a tub! That doesn't work!" or the incensed "Quit telling your stupid story about the stupid desert, and just die already! Die!" I will confess that, years and years before I first say the movie in the mid-'00s, I was prepared from that one line to find it unendurably stretched-thin and pokey, on top of already having my knives out from the film that swept the Academy Awards for 1996 when, if the universe were just, Secret & Lies and Fargo would have fought it out for all of the trophies everywhere. Is it any wonder, then, that it met my expectations?

Revisiting the film twice since than has softened me towards it, though I still can't say I love it; of director Anthony Minghella's picture postcard literary adaptations, I would rank it behind The Talented Mr. Ripley in every respect. It is, after all, quite a lot of movie, two hours and 42 minutes' worth, and the more movie you have, the greater the chances that not all of it will work equally well. I've found, generally speaking, that people who like The English Patient but don't adore it tend to cluster into two camps, based around which half of it is better: the "present day" plotline, or the "flashback" plotline, with the tacit implication that it would be better for all concerned if it could have gotten by without necessarily having to spend so much time on both of them. I happen to be a member of the "present day" camp, which is in no small part because I am also a member of the "Juliette Binoche is the best actress of the 1990s, and I really like you, Kristen Scott Thomas, but I'm sorry, just not that much" camp.

As adapted by Minghella from Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient, broadly speaking, tells two love stories that play out during the Second World War, one in the beginning of the war, the other in its waning days. The action radiates backward from an Italian monastery that barely remains standing after years of fighting, currently serving as a field hospital. Here, Québécoise nurse Hana (Binoche) tends to a terribly burned English patient (Ralph Fiennes), who remembers neither his name nor his story. But as he slowly doles out what he does know, to Hana and to David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), another Canadian recuperating in the area, he learn the full version of his history, the one he either does not or cannot access himself. He is, it turns out, the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, and at the time war broke out in the late 1930s, he was mapping the Sahara Desert for the British government, alongside an Englishman named Madox (Julian Wadham). Their expedition is joined by the married Cliftons, Katharine (Scott Thomas) and Geoffrey (Colin Firth), and Almásy and Katharine soon strike up a love affair that ebbs and flows during those tense times in North Africa. Back in 1945, while Hana tends to Almásy and hears his story, she meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh engineer in the British Army, and has a much less torrid, heaving, and sandy affair of her own.

The English Patient is a film of particular bigness, as Minghella splashes all the grandeur of the Sahara and North Africa across his screen in dauntingly orange landscape shots and more domestic scenes that lovingly foreground Stuart Craig's heavily detailed, lived-in production design. And it is also a film of great and subtle intimacy, relying extensively on close-ups of Fiennes and Scott Thomas. This mix is the film's biggest aesthetic strength, putting it somewhere on the spectrum of great psychological epics on the Lawrence of Arabia model, movies that successfully use an enormous canvas to paint a human-sized portrait (there are few of these that are genuinely good than you might hope for). But if I allow my inner Elaine to pipe up, it's also monotonous: there simply isn't much incident to stretch out to 162 minutes. Individually, many of the component scenes of The English Patient are miracles of mythic filmmaking: the sequence in which Almásy carries Katharine from a plane crash to the safety of some distant caves is Epic Cinema 101. But these great moments are separated by longueurs that do absolutely nothing but restate things we already knew, and though Scott Thomas was never better at inhabiting the space in front of the camera with casual sensual force than she was in this production, any movie that consists for seemingly half of its running time of watching two people smolder at each other is a movie that needs to answer some tough questions about its priorities.

That's part of why I prefer the framework with Hana and Kip and David: it feels more consequential, more rooted in historical context, and more driven. None of this is accidental, mind you. An important part of Minghella's strategy in the film is to contrast the relatively straightforward, plain, and tangible "now" story with the heated, highly subjective and abstracted "then" story, which is meant to work as a hazy dream of physical memory and emotional states - it is an impressionistic approach rather than a narrative one, nimbly aided by cinematographer John Seale and composer Gabriel Yared, the most important members of the filmmaking team for helping to construct that kind of detached High Romantic atmosphere of feeling rather than observing. And I admire this. But I would admire 50 minutes of it every bit as much as I admire two hours of it.

The Italian framework, meanwhile, is much less showy, but for my tastes, much more meaningful. While Scott Thomas and Fiennes are stuck playing concepts of erotic psychology, Binoche simply gets to play a human being, and she's better in her role than either of them (Andrews is the best member of the cast every time he opens his mouth, but in a limited part that has been weirdly slashed down from its importance in the source novel). And instead of the heaving visual overstimulation of the Eternal Desert, it takes place in a perfectly realised, deeply physical space, one in which the use of color and framing and slowness do a superb job of evoking the feel of cool, damp air, and the rough texture of ancient brick and stone. If the romantic flashback segments of film are an evocation of the way we remember places and physical sensation, the framework evoke feeling things and being in places right now. And coupled with the more down-to-earth characterisations and performances, I find all of that to be more satisfying.

That all being said, The English Patient is exactly the kind of movie that feels like it ought to have an enormously passionate fanbase - it is an intense, lush experience that hits right in the gut, while the films I will eternally check it against, Fargo and Secrets & Lies, take dead aim at the brain and allow the libido to shrivel up unattended. The English Patient is utterly gorgeous, and it's lusty and sexy in a very literate, classy way - the R-rated Miramax equivalent to the star-studded, posh European superproductions of the 1960s. There's a lot to be said for that, even when the results are the kind of half-baked and over-baked confection that this particular film turns out to be. I do find it all a bit tiring rather than exhilarating, and I can't imagine that's what the filmmakers had in mind, but I absolutely do respect the top-to-bottom commitment to making this movie the most fleshed-out version of itself possible. It's an enormous, indulgent beast, but it's completely honest about it.

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DOWN ONCE MORE TO THE DUNGEON OF MY BLACK DESPAIR

A second review requested by K. Wild, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Like just about anyone born after 1970 who loves musical theater, I had my Phantom of the Opera phase. I'm not sure when or how it ended, exactly, but it was well before December, 2004, when at long last The Phantom of the Opera The Movie bombasted its way into theaters, 18 years after the musical had premiered. And yet I still found myself sitting there opening weekend, duty-bound to see if there was anything in the sprawling concoction heaved up by Joel Schumacher, a filmmaker uniquely devoid of a sense of proportion or fear of being thought tacky, that could make me believe again in the transporting power of the music of the night.

There was not then. There still isn't.

Yet it's not enough to say "The Phantom of the Opera ('04) sucks because The Phantom of the Opera ('86) sucks, and Andrew Lloyd Webber is a farty toot-head". Love or hate the source material, the fact remains that The Phantom of the Opera is nowhere near the movie it could have been, committing one unforced error after another on its way to becoming one of the damned sloppiest major musicals of contemporary times. The cynic might say that the filmmakers knew they had an enormous pre-sold fanbase, and simply didn't need to care about doing a good job; but I legitimately don't want to be that cynical. Schumacher had been invested in this project for years before it was completed - I can't imagine that he just didn't give a shit about the material.

That material, of course, is one of the most popular stage musicals in the history of the medium, adapted from Gaston Leroux's 1910 romantic horror novel, which had been translated into Lord knows how many movies by the time Schumacher's version came along. The basic story is as familiar as it gets: young opera singer-in-training Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum) is able to pinch hit on the night of a grand gala at the Paris Opera (the fictional Opéra Populaire in the musical), when the stormy prima donna Carlotta (Minnie Driver) decides to pitch a hissy fit, and wins an enormous success. What nobody knows is that she has been receiving lessons from an unseen tutor, her "Angel of Music". What even Christine doesn't know is that this is actually a disfigured man living in the catacombs and sewers beneath the opera house, whose inhabitans refer to him in nervous whispers as the Phantom of the Opera (Gerard Butler). When she connects with childhood friend and current patron of the Opéra, Raoul, Victomte de Chagny (Patrick Wilson), she pushes the shadowy Phantom into a jealous rage, and while he plots to have her firmly entrenched as the company's new leading soprano, he also works to fully possess the young woman whom he already has in an enraptured haze.

Every version of Phantom is basically a melodrama; in the case of the legendary 1925 Universal production, it's melodramatic horror, while the musical, with score by Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, and book by Webber and Stilgoe, is a melodramatic romantic triangle that juts out into horror here and there. The movie goes a little bit more in for thrills and chills than the stage version did, owing largely to some new orchestrations that live threateningly in the baseline, but the core is still swoony romance, and that's probably why the film committed one of the two absolutely crushing sins that would have turned it into a failure no matter how great everything else was - and in this Phantom of the Opera, there is nothing whatsoever that deserves to be called "great", except for maybe the costumes designed by Alexandra Byrne. We'll get to the other one in a moment, but let's pause for a moment to contemplate good ol' Gerard Butler, the pretty boy Phantom cast with an eye towards making the disfigured murderer a sex symbol who could compete with the handsome young Wilson (whose subsequent career of shifty, pathetic emblems of self-loathing masculinity makes it incredibly hard to take him seriously here, but that's not the fault of the movie or his performance) and Wilson's ludicrous shoulder-length wig.

Permit me to be blunt, dear reader, in stating directly that Butler's casting doesn't work on any level whatsoever. Madonna's lead performance in Evita, the last film made from a Webber show, wasn't necessarily any better, but at least she makes sense from a metanarrative and marketing perspective. Butler is just wrong. He's too attractive to be remotely plausible as the scarred, angry outcast - and the make-up design is quite ashamed to cover him up with more than a bad rash and a bit of modest scar tissue around the lips, compounding the problem.

"So distorted, deformed, it was hardly a face"

Nor was he nearly enough of a noteworthy heartthrob in 2004 to make up for it by re-making the role into a star vehicle. He's also not tremendously good as an actor, find one emotion per scene and clinging to it like a life raft, resulting in a far plainer Phantom than the material deserves; instead of a tragic Byronic antihero, the character is just a mopey creep.

But the worst of it, and it's not even a close race, is in his singing. It is mind-blowingly bad - it competes only with Pierce Brosnan's cow-giving-birth performance of "S.O.S." in Mamma Mia! for the title of worst vocal performance in a musical in the 2000s. Butler has to bark and bray his way through the musical's signature ballad, "The Music of the Night", leaping for notes that he can only hit through momentum, not through good pitch, and turning the song into an uncomfortable straining ruin. There are certain points - the first time he sings the line "The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside your mind" in "The Phantom of the Opera" is the clearest example - where he drops his AmerBritish accent and lets the Scots flow through him. He sounds, throughout, to be in dreadful pain. And that, infinitely more than his incongruous appearance, is what causes him to jam the brakes on the film and throw the audience out through the windshield.

That is one of the film's primary sins. The other one - the worse one, I'd say, given that I've thought about it constantly in the decade since I saw the film last - is that the sound mixing is the fucking worst. I have seen movies from 1929, where the microphones were hidden in potted plants, that didn't have such brutal shifts in the texture of the soundtrack. Of course, any musical where the songs are prerecorded and the actors lip-sync on set (generally not all that well, in this film) is going to show the seams between the two, but in Phantom of the Opera, it feels like they're singing on a different continent from the action depicted onscreen. Thankfully, it's mostly sung-through, so there's not that much spoken dialogue - though quite a lot more than in the show - but when it arrives it is dramatic and horrible, particularly during the lovers' secret banter in "Masquerade", where a sweet moment is turned into an earache. Or there's the grisly experience of "Stranger Than You Dreamt It", in which Butler sounds like he was delivering all his lines on the back of a truck speeding through a windstorm.

Mind you, just because Butler and the sound mixing are so utterly, unrelievedly vile that I have to separate them out, that doesn't mean that Phantom of the Opera has much of anything to recommend it. It's easier to praise the performances on a moment-by-moment level than any of them across the board: only Wilson is generally solid throughout, along with Miranda Richardson as the curt ballet mistress with A Dark Secret, but her role is too tiny to make a film-saving impact (she's also the only character in this Parisian-set story to speak with a French accent, because Miranda Richardson says "fuck you, I'm doing it"). Rossum's best moments are sublime, playing Christine as the guileless child that most films and stage productions tend to age up into her mid-20s, radiating an innocence that shades deeper into sorrow and fear as the film proceeds; but there are enough rocky patches in her performance that it's not flawless, and while it's a pity her career evaporated until TV saved it in 2011, this is hardly the kind of grand coming out as a leading lady the 18-year-old probably hoped for. She looks sleepy and distracted during the soaring love duet "All I Ask of You"; her singing is never better than satisfactory, and she has an enormous problem with the semi-parodic opera aria "Think of Me". Incidentally, nothing about The Phantom of the Opera indicates that Webber or Hart had even a micron of knowledge about actual opera. Driver goes way broad, and her Italian comic villain is the next best thing to a hate crime; it's also impossible to take her seriously as an actually talented, popular, and world-class diva, a reality that the entire rest of the plot springs from.

The staging is generally indifferent, save for a few scattered shots that prove Schumacher had seen Moulin Rouge! sometime in the three years since its release, and the utterly tacky lift at the start of the garish, over-lit "The Phantom of the Opera" sequence that proves he'd also seen Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and inaccurately assumed that he had earned the right to lick that film's taint, let alone pilfer one of its most famous images. Some moments - a series of high-angle tracking shots during "Prima Donna" the dreamy incoherence that precedes that ghastly Cocteau homage - are clever and lovely; and the way he stages the framing scenes from years in the future as a flickering silent film (albeit with sound) is well-done if not effective. Some parts - the baffling destruction of the fourth wall in "Masquerade" and the anachronistic choreography that pops up in the same number - are irritating and lousy. The vast majority of it, though, is just there, doing nothing in particular but plopping the action onscreen in a way that's a bit brighter, more glittery, and tackier than the stage version.

I don't know if it's the worst Phantom of the Opera that I can imagine - it has no space aliens or dubstep remixes of the songs - but it's surely the worst that could have been made under Webber's personal supervision. What isn't sleepy and tediously literal is messy and inept, shots slamming together rather than cutting neatly, the sets looking garish and flat, the performances drifting aimlessly and in no real relationship to each other. It feels like even an enthusiastically mediocre and hackish adaptation should have been better than this; this is an actively terrible motion picture that every reason to be bland and perfunctory. That's takes some kind of skill, I suppose, but it's not really something you'd want to brag about.

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SHE DIDN'T SAY MUCH, BUT SHE SAID IT LOUD

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

The 1996 feature film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical Evita is, generally speaking, just fine. It's biggest limitation, frankly, is that it's an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical Evita, but that show and preceding concept album was neither man's worst hour, at least. There are alternate universes where they got a much better film Evita, though: one directed by stylistic madman Ken Russell in the late '70s, or even the same exact one we got in our universe, directed by Alan Parker, only it stars Michelle Pfeiffer. And I must confess that I am jealous of the musical lovers in those universes. Because our Evita is just fine... it's just fine.

That being said, adapting Evita into a movie was always going to be a hideous amount of work, and it was perhaps never going to turn out right. The source material isn't a dramatic play with passages of dialogue set to music to demonstrate intensified emotion or particularly important scenes; it's really more of a staged song cycle, much like Webber and Rice's earlier collaboration Jesus Christ Superstar. Compared to the utter dog of a film which that show was turned into in 1973, Evita looks like an uncompromising triumph. But it still leaves the movie with a structure that won't construct, and while Russell made a song cycle into the crazyfucker masterpiece Tommy, as Parker himself did with Pink Floyd: The Wall, both of those movies got to cheat. They both had concepts that not only permitted, but outright demanded a psychedelic treatment, and so both of those films get to turn into florid visual trips hung along the spine provided by an arty rock group's concept album. Now, I'm not saying that there could not be a psychedelic Evita, and if there was, nothing in this world would have kept me from it. But it's no surprise at all that Evita isn't psychedelic in the least.

The thing that it has as a story surrogate relates, broadly and with dubious accuracy, the life of Eva Perón née Duarte (Madonna), born illegitimately in 1919 in rural Argentina. It tracks her laser-like focus on sleeping her way into modest radio stardom, which put her in position to meet Colonel Juan Perón (Jonathan Pryce, who looks about as much like a "Juan" as I do like an "Ichiro") at a charity gala in 1944. They married, and she threw herself into a fiery populist campaign to get him elected president in 1946. Together they (mostly she) were extravagantly beloved by the people of Argentina, until her stunningly premature death from cancer in 1952 rocketed her to the position that she still occupies of secular saint.

Fleshing that sketch out is where things get a bit rocky because, well, the film really doesn't (I'll plead ignorance as to whether the show does: I've never seen Evita staged, and I'm familiar only with the 1976 concept album that would be considerably re-worked for its 1978 theatrical debut). Parker does what he can with that favorite trick of silent filmmakers, the Zooming Newspaper Headline, but the almost totally sung-through story offers very little room for context or historical depth, and while that might play in the concert-like surroundings of live theater, the trappings of prestige cinema are too concrete, and Parker's directing too drably normal to survive such an abstract storytelling register. Evita doesn't end up feeling like a movie, but a series of music videos stitched together by montages. And, frequently interrupted by montages: one of the small number of brash stylistic tricks that Parker trots out, and probably shouldn't have, is to use impressionistic flashbacks and flashforwards to pep up what would otherwise be static moments of characters just standing there singing for a few minutes, and while I admire the effort, it doesn't land. We came for "Don't Cry for Me Argentina". We did not come to see "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" turned into a repository of footage we just watched, like, 40 minutes ago.

The music videos have the merit of being inordinately handsome, at least; with production design by Brian Morris and cinematography by Darius Khondji (who received his solitary Oscar nomination to date for this film), Evita looks lush and costly, but not at the cost of being stuffy and lifeless. It's a film of much grandeur, with no subtlety about it whatsoever, but it feels Big and Epic and Important in a way that very little Oscarbait actually manages to do. And within that framework, Parker's staging of individual moments - when he and editor Gerry Hambling can be bothered to let the action play out in chronological order, at least - certainly manages to be sure-footed and impeccably dramatic: the quick flow of the story through the flippant "Good Night and Thank You", or the jagged visual rhythm in "And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out)" even manage to make a virtue of the ragged holes in the story's chronology.

Inasmuch as Evita was going to be primarily naturalistic, then, Parker's treatment of it is as good as it was likely to be. That's still limited by the story structure, and by the songs: though the rock music he relies on is a weird and sometimes unpleasant fit for a story of '1940s Argentina, Webber hadn't yet hit the wall of insipid mediocrity by the time of Evita, but Rice in the '70s was outright deranged, and the lyrics in Evita are baffling as often as not. Nothing matches the swirling vortex of madness found in the loopiest passages in Jesus Christ Superstar - the man who perpetrated "Like a jaded, jaded, faded, jaded, jaded mandarin" set that bar far too high to jump over it again - but there's plenty of choice "what the fuck were you thinking" moments, in places like "I came from the people, they need to adore me / So Christian Dior me..." in the aptly named "Rainbow High" or "Although she's dressed up to the nines / At sixes and sevens with you" from the iconic "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" itself. The film's solitary new song, "You Must Love Me" - specially designed for the purposes of being a hit Madonna single - doesn't quite come out unscathed (the word "must" connotes "are commanded to" too strongly for the line's primary meaning of "I guess you love me, huh" to naturally flow out), but the Rice of '96 is sufficiently calmed down that Evita manages the rare - maybe unprecedented - feat among stage-to-film musical adaptations of having its original, awards-courting composition be the standout number.

All that was baked in, though, and would have been a problem with any adaptation. But this particular Evita could still have done better with a better cast, and with no other changes been a considerably stronger film. Pryce's crisp British aura was a poor fit for Juan Perón, and he's not believable as a dictator, but the role isn't all that big. The male lead is actually Antonio Banderas as Ché "Not Guevara, Alan Parker Didn't Like That", the mysterious figure who drifts in and out of Evita's life as a host of different characters, always probing her conscience and snottily passing asides to the camera that clarify that for all her goodwill and charm, Eva had some massive limitations as a human being. What with the benevolent dictatorship and all. Though Evita is petrified to death of actually engaging with specific politics, so any attempts to actually analyse the Peróns' effect on Argentina is doomed to die in infancy. But anyway, Banderas is excellent in a role that lacks any interiority and specifically forbids an actor from faking it. It's all attitude and rolling the lines around as he sings them, and he's got that down cold.

But then there is the matter of the superstar albatross around the film's neck. It's easy to see why Madonna identified with the role and wanted it; it's easy to see why the studio wanted her. But she's just not good. The demands of the role tax her range considerably, and the dramatic flourishes all tend to flatten out (her "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" is a particular flat spot, in exactly the place that movie needs to put all its chips on a big showstopping rouser); she hits the notes, but frequently it audibly costs her to do that. That's bad enough, but she is a terrible actress, analysing the words in her songs like a pop singer and not the lead in a work of musical theater, and so her emphases are close but rarely exactly right. Her body language, meanwhile, is utterly helpless; she uses her arms to vaguely indicated and stress thoughts, like a malfunctioning audio-animatronic version of Mussolini. The only time she seems to understand what emotions should be foregrounded on her face is during Eva's sickness, when she adopts a saggy, weary look that almost manages to sell the pathos of the sequence, but without a strong foundation preceding it, it's hard to care.

Evita is so single-mindedly focused on Eva herself that no production, no matter how great all the constituent elements were, could survive the kind of stiff, wholly artificial and forced performance that Madonna gives. And of course, many of the constituent elements here are not great. There are enough individually good parts that I really wish I could fake it and give it a pass - Khondji was in excellent form when he shot this, which counts for an awful lot - but nope. Evita minus Evita is a washed-out slog, and all the lovely settings and handsome staging in the world can't compensate for that.

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WILD WOMAN

To begin with, Wild is a great deal better than 2007’s Into the Wild, its most direct antecedent in the “people finding themselves by dropping out and trekking through nature, meeting several people along the way who give symbolic life lessons, and ‘Wild’ is in the title” genre. And really, that’s all I needed to declare it a success, so the rest is gravy. Which is just as well, since for every single thing Wild gets right - and that is not an unimpressive list - it gets something else wrong.

Based on the life and memoirs of Cheryl Strayed, played by Reese Witherspoon in the movie (it was the first project made by her new production company), Wild tells the story of the three months in that woman’s life during which she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from the southern to the northern border of the United States. This trip, at least as it’s described in Nick Hornby’s screenplay, was a self-conscious attempt to reboot a life that had gone tremendously wrong since the death of her mother (Laura Dern, in flashbacks that amount to more of an extended cameo than a proper “supporting” role): heroin, sex with every random man who asked, a failed marriage, grinding poverty. And to the surprise of nobody watching - they made the movie, after all, and it’s not being marketed as a severe piece of icy art cinema that involves death and hopelessness - that’s exactly what proved to happen, though only through a great deal of trial and error and being generally miserable for long stretches of the hike.

That, more than anything, is what puts Wild head and shoulders above Into the Wild: it is much freer in admitting that Cheryl entered her grand quest blindly and a bit stupidly, and the task of discovering what her priorities and emotional needs were was an extension of the more immediate task of figuring out how to survive the experience she’s committed herself to. Which even manages to make the film more inspirational than it would have been without the cold splash of reality, since it does such a fine job in the first third of making it really clear just how fucking hard hiking the entire length of the PCT could be, and how much untapped self-reliance Cheryl need to find in order to cope with it.

The other great strength of the film is Witherspoon, giving a fearlessly physical performance, pretty easily the best work of her career. The process-oriented nature of Hornby’s script robs the character of some nuance and leaves the film a bit thinner of a psychological portrait than it apparently fancies itself, but within the limits thus established by the writing, Witherspoon is very nearly perfect: channeling Cheryl’s rage at setbacks and her small pride in triumphs with unforced clarity; she captures the wearying monotony of walking and walking and walking with a beleaguered heaviness that does all the work of suggesting the passage of time that the film, obliged with keeping itself under two hours, doesn’t have the luxury to depict. And when the script moves away from depicting the act of hiking, Witherspoon does lovely work coming to life in the more intimate, character-focused moments, giving exactly the right energy to Hornby’s sardonic humor and quiet desperation.

So okay, that’s the good part. The bad part is possibly also due to Hornby, for the film’s structure is a bit dire; it’s absolutely due to Jean-Marc Vallée, directing with as clumsy a hand as this scenario can manage to survive (which isn’t the worst he could do, you understand: the film still survives, after all). Three prestige dramas in - The Young Victoria and Dallas Buyers Club are his babies also - I’m not entirely sure what it is that Vallée gets wrong about filmmaking, since it doesn’t seem to be the same thing every time. But in the case of Wild, it’s an enervating mixture of lead-footed obviousness and arch, artsy, pretentious-ass bullshit. A good portion of the film is given over to flashbacks to Cheryl's tragic and then dissolute life, and they are ushered into the film with the sophisticated grace of a rhinoceros driving a go-kart. Ham-handed visual links, foggy narrative cues, and pensive close-ups to Witherspoon's sad, shocked face, and then we're off into jagged montages of split-second shots of images from Cheryl's memory. It's hard to say if it's more hokey or annoying. And if there's no worse editing in the film than the flashback intros, it's not for want of trying: editors Martin Pensa and Vallée himself (under the pseudonym John Mac McMurphy) take undue joy in chopping the film all to hell, cutting together innocuous scenes of Cheryl walking or setting up her tent or sorting her supplies into a ratty series of jump cuts that require only "Yakety Sax" instead of Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" as the underscore to complete the effect (and boy, points for originality on picking that song as the repeating motif). It's acutely distracting, and coupled with the strained artiness of the symbolic flashbacks, the film's entire aesthetic feels like a half-assed attempt at doing a '60s European art film, so half-assed that it's closer to being a parody.

And as for the repeated use of a fox with its head adorably cocked to the side as the most symbolic symbol of them all: I don't know if that's on Hornby, or Vallée, or producer/spirit-guide Witherspoon, or anyone else involved, but shame on everyone who had the chance to say, "you guys, this is the worst idea", and didn't.

But let's go ahead and retrench to positivity for the wrap-up, because all things considered, Wild is a pretty fine, moving example of Oscarbait going more or less right. The story is terrific, and Witherspoon embodies it with vigor and gritty commitment, and the fact that the visuals used to express the story are kind of a shambles is... well, it's a fact, but there are worse facts to contend with.

7/10

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WINDOWS TO THE LACK OF A SOUL

The impressive thing about Big Eyes, the most sedate film directed by Tim Burton in over a decade, maybe even two, is how many different ways its creative team came up with to interpret one script, written by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski. I count at least five totally different movies jockeying for attention in this apparently simple biopic of Margaret Keane, a painter whose husband took credit for her series of sad children with enormous eyes, and made a marketing empire out of her kitschy art in the 1960s, before they divorced and she sued him to regain credit for the central focus of her adult life.

1) Amy Adams, playing Margaret, is in full on "give me a motherfucking Oscar already" mode, trembling her voice and filling her eyes with doubt and fear, emphasising the domestic tragedy of the piece and bringing a dolorous tone of suffering found nowhere else in the film.

2) As Walter Keane, the emotionally abusive, domineering husband, Christoph Waltz is channeling the bad guy in a Bob Clampett Bugs Bunny cartoon, like he made all of his acting decisions immediately upon learning that he got to be in a Tim Burton film and didn't change his mind even after finding out what an uncharacteristic Burton film this would be.

3) Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel favors a poppy look of bright, oversaturated colors and soft focus, a cheery aesthetic that could equally serve as an ironic indictment of the era's design mentality or a sumptuous revival of it, more a remake of Burton's signature film, Edward Scissorhands, than an engagement with the actual story being told now.

4) Burton's regular composer, Danny Elfman, tosses out his usual motifs for some jazzy riffs, slinky and smoky, the adult underbelly to the 1950s and '60s that the rest of the movie cares nothing about and can't use.

5) And then Tim Burton himself, who doesn't bother to unite any of these into a unified whole, because he's far too busy trying to decide whether to take the screenplay up on its undeveloped offers to explore the question of whether or not Margaret Keane's artwork is too kitschy to be of any value, or if the fact that it has been loved and purchased by so many, including Burton himself, over the decades is proof that it matters (the latter point raised in a film-opening quote from Andy Warhol, one of the shabbier appeals to authority in recent cinema). The emphasis on the otherwise pointless characters of a snooty gallery owner played by Jason Schwartzman and an angry New York critic played by Terence Stamp (this is the first-ever team-up, and probably the last, between Burton and Stamp? That offends me on levels I didn't know I had to be offended on), and the fact that they're probably the most realised and consistent performances in the film, certainly suggests that the director had a guilty feeling that he should probably be a little more willing to regard Keane's output as tacky crap, but simply couldn't bring himself to go there. 20 years ago, in his all-time smallest film Ed Wood (also written by Alexander & Karaszewski), Burton effortlessly treated his subject's life with love and affection while also admitting, right up front, that the art Wood so passionately produced at all costs was objectively horrible. Big Eyes spends an absurd amount of its running time trying to make up its mind whether to do the same with Keane, and ends up punting.

And none of these five movies are in any way interested in the screenplay's other underdeveloped strains, investigating consumerism in America in the 1960s, the value held by art in post-WWII culture, or the sexist nature of a country that was starting to turn progressive in lumpy, inconsistent ways while all that was going on, and one woman's attempt to etch out a personality and life entirely her own a few years before society was willing to let her do that. The last of these would seem to be the only sane approach to take this material, and yet Big Eyes doesn't seem any more interested in the sociopolitical ramifications of its story than in any of the other half-dozen approaches at its fingertips: costume-driven re-enactment of Beat-era San Francisco, domestic drama, living cartoon about cartoony art, or a perfunctory, terribly-executed wacky courtroom movie, in its final act.

With nobody involved agreeing on a tone, Big Eyes offers a way in for just about everybody, but it never coheres into a thing that anybody could really regard as successful or meaningful. There's a lack of commitment to the ideas raised by the scenario and the emotional rigor brought in by Adams's performance (she's alone in trying to make this have some deep emotional meaning, or to show the human cost of Walter's cruelty and the human appeal of Margaret's paintings; it's not clear that the film benefits from this exertion in any way, but it's worth pointing out), but there's an equally frustrating refusal to just dive in and let the aesthetics, the world-building, and the sense of mania - the warped, "what kind of world goes this nuts for kitschy art?" comedy - that provide the film with whatever meager energy it's able to generate for a scene at a time.

It is, all told, profoundly undernourished and indifferently conceived: not Burton's worst film, of course (a title I imagine to be unassailable while copies of Alice in Wonderland remain undestroyed), but almost certainly his dullest and most pointless. Life flickers around in the performances - Waltz's nutso turn is vigorous, whatever else it is - and in the bright candy colors and the occasional scene where the basic, profound weirdness of Keane's paintings is allowed to hold focus beyond the muddled human drama surrounding them. Mostly, though, it's an enervating waste of talent with confused ideas and no points of interest beyond the most barbaric level of "that happened, huh".

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2014: In which our study of one hundred years of Hollywood filmmaking ends as it began, with a well-heeled amateur directing a dubiously effective adaptation of a hot literary property

The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn't even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that's what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of the screenwriting process and WGA arbitration that led to a title card proclaiming this adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's book to be by "Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson" would be fascinating in its own right, though I would not want those four men to be responsible for writing it. Because if their combined skills couldn't do any better than this for poor Zamperini...

Zamperini, played here by Jack O'Connell in what is the highest-profile title of his big "look at me!" coming-out year as a new actor to watch, was an Olympic medalist in 1936 at Berlin, who set a handful of records during his career as a runner. He joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, survived one emergency landing and one crash into the ocean, floated for 47 days with two other men (one of whom died along the way), and spent two years in Japanese POW camps, including a lengthy stretch under the cruel ministrations of notorious war criminal Watanabe Mutsuhiro, "The Bird" (Japanese rock star Miyavi). After the war's end, Zamperini struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder which only started to recede when he converted to evangelical Christianity thanks to the preaching of Billy Graham, and his newly reinvigorated religion led him back to Japan, in order to offer his forgiveness to all the guards that had abused him during his time as a prisoner. After a lifetime as an inspirational figure, he was one of the runners carrying the Olympic torch near the end of its journey to Nagano, Japan for the 1998 Winter Olympics. And after all that, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 97.

That's a hell of a lot of living, and choices had to be made about what to focus on. But Unbroken finds the whole mess of writers making the very worst ones, alongside director Angelina Jolie, movie star, humanitarian, and most importantly for our present needs, helmer of the rather dreadful 2011 Bosnian War romance In the Land of Blood and Honey. Unbroken is certainly the better of her two films as director, though it's not much of an achievement, and more than it teaches us anything about the nobility of the human spirit or inner strength or anything else, the film teaches us that not every actor can automatically make the leap to directing, and that simply because one has the clout and access and moral fervor to make movies, that doesn't mean that one has the talent.

The film does not want to be a decade-spanning biopic, which is a thoroughly respectable impulse. In theory, then, it focuses all its energy on Zamperini’s time during the war, taking place across three narrative chunks: the failure of his first bomber under a barrage of enemy fire, done as a little mini-thriller to open the film, the crash of his second bomber and the 47 days floating on a pair of life-rafts, a much longer stretch of narrative, and at last his two years as a prisoner of war being singled out for his Olympic fame to receive the nastiest abuse at the hands of his captors. Good enough, but there are two gaping problems, entirely unrelated, and they collaborate to make what could have been a nerve-wracking study of desperate survival into the most tedious drudgery. For one thing, though it attempts to not be a stock biopic, this is exactly what Unbroken ends up transforming into, thanks to its self-destructive over-reliance on flashbacks. They start early, and they start heavy: during that same assault that opens the movie, while focusing on Zamperini’s stressed-out face, the film snaps its fingers and BOOM we’re in his childhood, watching a potted history of his early passion for racing as a way of funneling all his rage against the racist bullies maltreating him into something active and construction, on to his Olympic glory. I will say about this that C.J. Valleroy, playing Zamperini as a child, is inspired casting: he’s a dead ringer of O’Connell and has the acting chops to sell the character.

On the other hand, this is a terrible, terrible digression, right off the bat: teasing us with story momentum and stakes that are instantly shelved in favor of a capsule biography that speeds by too fast to do much more than communicate information artlessly. And this is information we’ll receive later through dialogue, anyway. Of all the ways in which it beggars believe that the Coens were supposedly the last screenwriters to take a whack at this script, the puffy flashback structure (they’re threaded all through the first two chunks, drying up for the most part after he’s captured by the Japanese) is the one that seems most obviously dysfunctional and beneath the talents and accumulated wisdom of any of the credited writers.

This bone-headed mismanagement of structure rears its head in a different and maybe even uglier form at the very end: the main action concludes with the V-J Day, and the rest of Zamperini’s life story is told in the form of title cards with photographs of the actual people involved, as well as some footage from 1998 of the man trotting along with the Olympic torch. Standard biopic procedure, but the enormous volume of the closing text, spinning out for minute after minute, is indescribably crude: besides being an admission that there was a whole lot more story to tell, it strongly implies that the untold story was the more important bit, and that the material the film was able to cover was maybe not done in an efficient way.

No, make that definitely not done in an efficient way. The other gaping problem is that Unbroken, for a whole hour of its running time, is nothing but a repetitive catalogue of suffering, all done with a bloodlessly refined classiness that keeps cozily within the limits of a PG-13 rating. So it’s not just torture porn, it’s torture porn with no cumshot. Never has the endless suffering of a man who refuses to give in to his tormenters felt so goddamn boring: Jolie and her team never switch things up in any way, or structure things to feel like the stakes and tension are rising: you could isolate all the scenes for that second hour and re-arrange them any way you wanted, and the film would basically flow the exact same way: the Bird wanted to hurt Zamperini in some creative way, did it, Zamperini stayed strong.

What the film lacks is any insight into the mind of the sufferer or the torturer: after its last good scene, in which Zamperini and fellow survivor Phil (Domhnall Gleeson) are stripped in the jungle and force to the ground, where they expect to be executed and Zamperini breaks down, there’s not a single beat of the movie that focuses on the psychological impact any of this has. We are done spending time inside Zamperini’s head, where the first hour and its litany of flashbacks was so eager to position us: from here on, it’s just watching brutality. The only connective tissue between Jolie’s two films as a director thus far is an overweening interest in violence, shot with a clinical detachment that removes the human-scale cost of that violence; it’s not a lovely trend, and though absolutely nothing about Jolie’s very public private life suggests that she’s full of bloodlust, her directorial style has a nasty way of lingering on suffering for no reason other than the joy of lingering. The idea is that this is an inspiration testament to human endurance - “If I can take it, I can make it” chants Zamperini with poster-reader sincerity - but despite the clear evidence that plenty of viewers have walked away from it duly inspired, I don’t see a molecule of that in the film’s eager, documentarian interest in capturing all the nuances of how prisoners get beaten.

Jolie’s not incapable of making good cinema: the entirety of the raft sequence is generally great, a more severe, realistic version of Life of Pi with noticeably crummier CGI, or a three-handed successor to All Is Lost. If we think of Unbroken as three films stitched together (something the writing and editing and visual styles all encourage us to do), this one is above reproach, one of the best sustained passages of filmmaking of the (anemic, to be sure) 2014 prestige movie season.. But the ghastly structure of the first filmlet and the just plain ghastliness of the third hold the whole thing back.

The film is, on top of everything else, slackly made: the editing by William Goldenberg and Tim Squyres, is satisfactorily functional without being clever, surprising, or insightful, and the cinematography is a bit over-attractive when it’s not blandly reducing everything to a generic mixture of nostalgically-tinged brownish-greens. For living legend Roger Deakins to have overseen this tremendously uninteresting-looking film is even more shocking than thinking that his regular directors the Coens could have helped effect the script: it’s basically just a third-tier knockoff of John Schwartzman’s style executed without Schwartzman’s conviction, and with no complexity to the lighting. I can think of a handful of individual frames that really worked tremendously well, some despite themselves (the idea to visually represent Zamperini as a Christ figure was a terrible one, but Deakins executes it beautifully), but this is as thoroughly routine as anything he’s shot in over a decade. It’s heartbreakingly adequate. So to is the score by Alexandre Desplat, which is far less surprising - it’s a rare year that goes by without him producing at least slightly treacly, schlocky score, and after surprisingly dodging that bullet in The Imitation Game, he was due.

It is unfair and inappropriate to ask Unbroken to stand in as the sacrificial lamb for an entire movie year, as I have sort of done by making it the finale to this series. If anything, it feels like the embodiment of the movie year 15 years ago or so (it has been eleven years since Seabiscuit, also adapted from a Hillenbrand book, and the aesthetic similarities between this film and that are hard to ignore: they have virtually identical color schemes, for one). This kind of pseudo-inspirational Oscarbait-by-numbers filmmaking is almost quaint in 2014. And yet its dogged commitment to making something that tells us exactly what to feel in its pushy score and its dabbled images, to shamelessly courting emotions even though it’s sort of really bad in a lot of ways - well that is Hollywood, is it not, and even if Unbroken seems fated to be a (possibly Oscar-nominated) footnote in cinema history, it is exactly the sort of thing that the American film industry has always made to prove how damn-ass dignified and serious and artistic it can be. The firmly mediocre polish and surface-level thematic messaging that go into this film are, for better or worse - worse, definitely worse - the life’s blood of Hollywood filmmaking, now and forever.

5/10

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2014
-Darren Aronofsky's distinctly non-traditional Noah is the biggest hit in an unexpected surge of religious and Bible-themed movies
-The government of North Korea and President of the United States Barack Obama both take a keen interest in the release pattern of innocuous dudebro comedy The Interview
-Guardians of the Galaxy is the only film to break $300 million during one of the financially weakest summers of the modern era

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2014
-Crabby old icon Jean-Luc Godard says Goodbye to Language with the help of avant-garde 3-D
-Australia's Jennifer Kent makes the scariest pop-up book in history the center of her directorial debut, The Babadook
-Lisandro Alonso's Jauja, an oblique philosophical drama, is among the better-received of the year's Argentine-Danish co-productions

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EVER READ CRYPTONOMICON? YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT INSTEAD.

There are two ways, I think, that one could go about making a story of Alan Turing and his key role in inventing the computer as a means of cracking a Nazi code during the Second World War. One way would be to go all-in on the psychological aspect, and take it for granted that Turing's closeted homosexuality was haunting him and driving him in his quest to uncover the secrets of his nation’s enemies, thus making his eventual punishment by the British government for his "gross indecency" even more ironically cruel. The other would be to discard personal matters altogether, and make a purely process-driven story, in which Turing and his colleagues are nothing but the human vessels for acts of research and insight, and the act of breaking the code is itself the protagonist, with all the people reduced to the status of window dressing.

The actual Turing biopic that exists in the world, The Imitation Game, tries to combine these methods in a hybrid that does not work much at all. It comes alive only when it most fully commits to being a war-era thriller about cryptography, dying another in a long line of tiny deaths when it alights on Turing's personality and especially his sexuality, which is handled in the most bone-headed, tasteless way. From the winking innuendos that keep elbowing those of us in the know (winking innuendos are a problem for the film: an even worse one is when Turing makes an offhand comment about the trickiness of using cyanide, and the part of me that knows how he died vomited a little bit in my mouth), to the outlandishly tin-eared way homosexuality finally pulled into the story proper, and finally to a cascade of "and then this happened" title cards near the end where, long after I assumed the movie couldn't do anything to make me more irritable, it commits its final act of trivialising the personal and political facts of its story that some registers as the worst moment of a film that only has two or three actively good ones.

So anyway, Alan Turing. Played here by Benedict Cumberbatch, straitjacketed into playing a much worse character than I think he should have been able to by a screenplay that pre-populates the character with a suffocating array of tics and ill-considered traits and bad focal choices - Graham Moore's script, adapted from Andrew Hodges's book Alan Turing: The Enimga, portrays him as possessed by a kind of sketch comedy reduction of Asperger syndrome down to the most barbaric "he's a dick! and he talks in clipped, dickish sentences about things nobody else cares about!" cluster of cheap clichés.The best thing I can say about the characterisation is that it neatly captures the peremptory, unlikable hardness of a brilliant mind more concerned with committing acts of genius than engaging with the world of humans. Which isn’t an uninteresting concept, though the film’s treatment of fumbles pretty badly.

Plainly, The Imitation Game fancies itself a descent into the closed-off interior world of a man who has gone to great lengths to disguise his actual personality. I expect it supposes that it has done a fine job of making Turing a sympathetic, tragic figure who just wanted to be known and understood. That’s certainly the implication of the demented line “Sometimes it’s the people no-one imagines anything of who do the things that no-one can imagine”, a tactical nuclear strike at the heart of English grammar that Moore loves so much, he includes it three motherfucking times. Well, sometimes it’s not that nobody imagines things of people, sometimes it’s just that people are tetchy and off-putting, and that’s far closer to the film’s depiction of Turing, with all his alienating tics that would feel better suited to a broad comedy than such a teary-eyed Serious Drama with all the hushed production design and costuming and stately lighting. Or the obnoxious way that Turing’s sexuality is pulled in as an “aha!” moment. I would like very much to be able to get over the film’s repellent use of Turing’s sexuality. But damn it, I guess I’m just not going to. Maybe it would be easier if the film’s very last beats didn’t leave such an ugly taste of “then he killed himself, but it’s okay, because the Queen pardoned him a half century later”.

So, while very little works in the film’s decision to make itself a biopic of Alan Turing rather than, say, a caper film about the team that broke the German Enigma machine, there are bits and pieces of The Imitation Game that are okay, or better. Alexandre Desplat has broken whatever curse he’s been laboring under, where for every good score he composes in a year, he has to pair it with a lousy one - this makes three times in 2014 (after The Grand Budapest Hotel and Godzilla) that Desplat’s music has augmented and deepened the film in crafty, enjoyable, even somewhat complex ways. It’s a mixture of mechanistic and romantic elements that do a much better job of exploring Turing’s headspace than the script or acting do.

In the face of a full roster of very talented people doing rather disposable things - Matthew Goode is all irritable reaction shots, Mark Strong is barely permitted more than a cameo (though it’s an amusing one), Charles Dance is stranded in a stock “priggish bureaucrat” role - Keira Knightley emerges as a deeply necessary and rewarding shot of human energy into the biopic-by-numbers feel of it all. Uniquely among the cast, she seems to have concluded that The Imitation Game would be better off as a comedy of manners than a bone-dry docudrama, and plays Joan Clarke, female genius in a world of condescending patriarchal men, with a distinctly spirited tang, almost more like an American’s parody of Brits and their stiff upper lips than an actual English actor playing an English character. There’s an ironic, play full twist to her line readings that gooses the film and makes it both meaningfully entertaining and aware of human emotions when she crops up onscreen.

And every so often, the techno-thriller this isn’t pokes its head up, and director Morten Tyldum suddenly shocks us by inserting a moment of well-paced, involving cinema into his creaky museum piece. The moment where Turing has an insight into the character string that will allow him to reliable break Enigma codes and rushes to implement it is absolutely tight and enthralling, not just an improvement over the dozing aesthetic of the rest of the film, but one of the best pieces of process-oriented filmmaking in 2014; it’s immediately followed by a discussion of war strategy and morality that’s equally strong and equally out-of-place in the film’s overall scheme.

Because, on the whole The Imitation Game isn’t just bland mediocrity, it’s actually lousy. Its agonisingly shallow, de-historical depiction of Turing as psychological agent never stops being annoying; its embalmed visuals make WWII England look like a diorama rather than a living place; its editing is actively shoddy, mashing frames together without caring in the slightest if they flow or if the performances within them feel continuous. It’s not just awards-bait filmmaking at its most trivially prestigious, but at its most stylistically flat as well. It’s not entirely without value, but not remotely enough to bother with it as a whole.

5/10

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A GREAT SUCKING FORCE FROM WHICH NO LIGHT CAN ESCAPE

There's no value in the critic pointing out that a new film doesn't matter because an old film got there first. But there's also no real value in a new film trying to cover material that won't ever be improved upon. The thing is, Errol Morris already made A Brief History of Time, and there's simply not much about the life and work of Stephen Hawking that the 80-minute documentary left on the table. That is to say, not unless you actually want to teach dense physics and mathematics to a general audience in film form, in which case there's plenty that Morris overlooked. But that's certainly not the gap that the new Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything is interested in bridging, and so we return to the question of, for serious, why? Why, after 23 years, make a film on this topic that is in every way more shallow and superficial and totally disinterested in the actual meaning of Hawking's work than a perfectly fine documentary by one of the very small number of superstar documentarians? Morris managed in the opening ten minutes of his movie to draw more elegant connections between Hawking's life, physical condition, and mental gymnastics than Theory director James Marsh and writer Anthony McCarten are able to whip up in two hours, using almost exactly the same anecdotes.

Really, though, that's a second-order problem with the movie. The larger problem with The Theory of Everything is generic: it does absolutely nothing to nudge the biopic formula from its most tediously standard form. The only way this could feel more boilerplate is if it took place in the form of flashbacks immediately before Hawking was set to receive some kind of lifetime achievement award (and it does, in fact, end with such an event). Otherwise we have yet another difficult genius with yet another suffering wife, and the film's interest in said genius beyond "he's so important and famous!" could not possibly be more superficial. Its interest in said wife is even less: considering that the film was adapted by Anthony McCarten from the second of Jane Hawking's two memoirs about life with her ex-husband, it's downright befuddling that its version of Jane (played by Felicity Jones) is so marginalised at every turn, given no interiority whatsoever other than a generic Christianity to contrast with her husband's agnosticism, and treated more as the woman-shaped object who looks fretfully on as Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) strains and falls and has cutting insights into the structure of the universe. I have never been terribly bowled over by Jones before, but this doesn't even count: there are actresses in this world who could force the film to respect their act of character creation and insist on Jane as an important anchor for this movie, but there aren't more than two scenes in the entire movie that support that kind of work, and a great many that actively deny it.

And so we get a cheery tale of how one man can overcome physical limitations to achieve intellectual greatness, though The Theory of Everything, expansive title of no, has only very little interest in what Hawking's work actually means or implies. It is no more about science than Pollock was about painting or Julie & Julia was about cooking, and less than A Beautiful Mind was about mathematics. Stephen Hawking is interesting to the film solely as the emblem the filmmakers could hold up of an inspiring figure who just Wouldn't Give Up, not when he was given two years to live (50 years later and Hawking still with us, that estimate seems somewhat pessimistic), not when he... no, it's pretty much just the first thing. Among its other sins as a work of writing, The Theory of Everything seems to be of the opinion that radical scientific insight comes all at once and you get it right the first time, and so it's just down to being inspiring as you struggle against your deteriorating body to deliver those flawless pearls of cosmological wisdom.

The film oscillates between superficial treatments of science and corny moments of "you can do it!" kitten-hanging-from-a-branch bromides - among the latter I would include the desperately tawdry scene where Hawking imagines himself rising from his chair to pick up a woman's pen, while Jóhann Jóhannsson's music shamelessly soars and weeps on the soundtrack; the worst single thing in the film, especially coming hard as it does upon a mechanical "tell us all your thoughts on God" Q&A - and it serves primarily to reduce the work of an enormously important scientist and thinker to the background for a deeply uninteresting story about a marriage that the filmmakers can't persuade themselves or us to care about. Not while leaving Jane as such a bland stock type.

Compounding its flatness as a drama, it's pretty slackly made: director James Marsh, who really is so much better when he sticks to documentaries, relies on boxy frames throughout that make this feel like an unusually polished BBC production, while he and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme go all-in on a weird program of exaggerated color timing that leaves entire scenes feeling tinted - that blue bar where they met, that bright yellow day at Oxford when Stephen was fucking around not studying, things like that. It's like watching one of Steven Soderbergh's color-driven narratives from around the turn of the 2000s with all the discipline and purpose stripped out of it. Plus, everything is delicately faded out and softened, all of it look nostalgic and waxy, like a soap commercial about academics. There's cross-cutting that makes several obnoxious, obvious comparisons like the one where Stephen is just like another kid Jane has to take care of! or the one where Jane thinks about having an affair while Stephen is getting sick! And this is far preferable to the film's exhausting over-reliance on montages to gallop through its fuzzy chronology, a hacky trick that I'd though we had, as a culture, mocked out of existence.

Redmayne is pretty great, I have to give him that. It's perhaps an obvious part and he plays it obviously, but the physical mechanics of showing the progression of Hawking's ALS are mapped out with exacting precision, and it's an impressive work of corralling physical gimmickry into character building, if nothing else. It's not the best imaginable performance of Hawking that could be given (according to most who have seen it - I have not - it adds nothing that Benedict Cumberbatch didn't already do in the 2004 television movie Hawking), it's more than this rickety display of shallow humanism requires. Otherwise, there's barely anything here at all: nothing but the most uninspired, paint-by-numbers storytelling and filmmaking technique imaginable in a genre where those pitfalls gape more dangerously than in any other.

5/10

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HOW MANY FOXES WOULD A FOXCATCHER CATCH?

First point: Foxcatcher is, I am certainly, exactly the film director Bennett Miller wanted it to be. It is too precise, too focused, and too consistent for anything else to be the case. Second point: that's not really much of an excuse.

A true story of psychological gamesmanship between one of the more peculiar members of the du Pont family and a pair of Olympic wrestling medalist brothers, Foxcatcher is a film that ends in tragedy, and Jesus Christ, is it ever eager to foreshadow that fact. The film is drenched in funereal sobriety; not one single frame of one single scene accidentally perks up enough to admit anything but an oppressive sense of fatalism. This is true of the performances, which are hushed and mournful. It is true of the screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, which never passes up an opportunity to sadly point at some signifier of out-of-control class-based privilege and remind us that, you guys, the rich think of poor people as disposable objects. It is true in almost hilariously over-the-top ways of cinematography, by Grieg Fraser, who I have taken to thinking of one of the great new talents in his field across a handful of top-notch projects in the last few years, and at a technical level, what he's up to in Foxcatcher is hard to fault. Everything might be lit like the inside of a centuries-old mausoleum, but it would be impossible to do a better job of it. Still, the whole thing is so weepingly earnest that it could almost be silly, if it wasn't so inert and suffocating.

The more important of the brothers, for the purposes of drama, is Mark Schulz (Channing Tatum), who has labored his whole wrestling career under the shadow of older sibling Dave (Mark Ruffalo), even after their twin Olympic triumphs. When we meet them, in the mid-'80s, they've both sunk into obscurity, living and training in Wisconsin. And it is here that Mark is found by the agents of John Eleuthère du Pont (Steve Carell), who has decided that the best way to leave his mark on the world and throw off the spectre of his dismissive mother (Vanessa Redgrave, in what amounts to a cameo), is to personally oversee the training of a new U.S. wrestling team that can compete and win in the 1988 Olympics, proving American can-do dominance to the whole world (the film does not clarify - among the many, many things it does not clarify - that in 1984, the Communist world sat out the American-hosted Olympics, and thus everybody who won left Los Angeles with something of an asterisk following their name). Mark is to be the centerpiece of that team. Eventually, after completely seducing Mark, du Pont succeeds in dragging along Dave and his family as well, all in the name of his warped quest to say "fuck you" to Mommy, hiding his intentions behind a patriotic veneer. And eventually, his patrician, patronising treatment of the Schulzes, and everyone else poorer than he is (which describes virtually every human being alive), leads to... murder. Not a spoiler. The spirit of pointless, brutal death lies over the whole goddamn movie, as suffocatingly as it lay over Miller's fiction debut, Capote. Only in that case, the murder is how things started, and so the pall it cast at least made some kind of tonal sense. Nine-tenths of Foxcatcher is chilly and grim just for the sake of chilliness and grimness.

The point of all this, as presented by the film, is "something something American exceptionalism, blahblah class war". Oh, it's easy to figure out what the film meant to say: there are too many American flags clogging up all the sets for it to be secret for more than a few scenes that the film is setting its eyes on showy, insubstantial patriotism. And from the distant, alien performance Carell gives beneath a grotesque cake of latex that makes him look like a lizard, and which he permits to do almost all of the acting on his behalf, it's clear that the film wants us to be thinking about the distance between the super-wealthy and the rest of humanity, who a literally impossible for those super-wealthy to understand as members of the same species. But it being obvious what the themes are meant to be does not, in any way, mean that the film is actually doing the work of exploring those themes. As handsomely, and fussily, as the film's assembly no doubt is, it's all very shallow. One does not experience the film's message on either an intellectual or emotional level; one puzzles it out. The monotonously bleak tone certainly doesn't help the film connect, either: it's as dry as dry can be, as engaging as tax instructions and just about as intellectually stimulating.

The performances by Tatum and Ruffalo do, in fairness, threaten to bring a living humanity to the proceedings. Tatum's alternately needy and resentful approach to his father-exploiter figure is striking enough, making flexible use of the actor's chiseled features (made meatier through some modest prosthetics), and offering a hint of genuinely wounded self-awareness beneath his glossy magazine looks, that he even draws something vivid and intense out of Carell, who is otherwise playing up all the stiffest, weirdest parts of du Pont in his odd neck angles and sniffy accent, and feeling more like a collection of notes than a character. Ruffalo, in by far the smallest of the three lead roles, makes up an entire performance out of grace notes; his delicate approaches to his brother, his twitchy discomfort at having to read out a few lines of hagiography about du Pont and his wrestling program, the way he talks gently but commandingly to his benefactor, like a dumb child. Between them, these two actors manage to make entire scenes of Foxcatcher feel like a human story worth the telling, even as every element of the directing, writing, cinematography, set design, and audio mix are insistently trying to embalm the scenario and lock it in a vacuum-sealed glass case.

There's a good version of this story: one with this exact cast and script, frankly, kitted out with more freedom to play up the pathetic absurdities, to let the characters live and breath rather than grimly march through their pre-ordained tragedy. There's a version withonly a handful of tweaks that's genuinely about the predation of the thoughtless rich, rather than one that blankly states "the rich are inhuman" and then proves it by encouraging Carell to play John du Pont as a taxidermied heron. There's a version where the tragedy feels like it grows out of the character relationships, rather than plonked down arbitrarily on a movie that has laid the groundwork for it only by being so damned mirthless. Foxcatcher is, in fact, just about the most tedious version of its story that I can imagine. It is a finely detailed as a dusty-covered oil painting, and every bit as static and lifeless

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1944: In which the effect of war on the folks back home is examined in perhaps more detail than is called for

"This is a story of the Unconquerable Fortress: the American Home...1943"

You know Mrs. Miniver, yes? Let's talk about it like you don't: Mrs. Miniver is a film about British Fortitude on the Home Front during The War. It strike a massive chord with wartime audiences, ending up the highest-grossing film of 1942, winning six Oscars when that was a huge number (it was the second-largest Oscar haul in history at the time), and generally staking a claim to the Zeitgeist in a way that few movies throughout the '40s ever did.

The reasoning must have seemed painfully obvious: if a film about Brits - an American-made film, but still - could make that big of a splash in the United States, surely a film about Americans would make an even bigger splash. And it so happened that the mind in which this painfully obvious thought manifested itself was that of superproducer David O. Selznick, who hadn't made a film since the massive one-two punch of Gone with the Wind and Rebecca in '39 and '40, and who was even before those films accustomed to making the most sprawling, high-cost, only-in-Hollywood spectacles that a single mogul could oversee. So when the American Miniver finally revealed itself, it was in the form of the mammoth Since You Went Away, a lugubrious Selznick megaproduction whose depiction of a year in the life of an American family nervously waiting on a father and husband gone off to war stretches out over nearly three hours. Most films, in the transition from novel to screen, are compelled to cut out details to fit; Since You Went Away, it's my understanding, was actually expanded from Margaret Buell Wilder's book, on account of there not being enough material for the grandiose homefront epic Selznick wanted.

Well, he got it alright: Since You Went Away makes an absolute monolith out of the tale of the Hiltons, whose life is interrupted when Tim Hilton, a man old enough not to have to go to war at all, reports for duty on January 12, 1943. This leaves his wife Anne (Claudette Colbert) nobly, statuesquey holding down the fort as their daughters - high school senior Jane (Jennifer Jones) and young teen Bridget (Shirley Temple) - try to wrap their heads around the new reality of everyday life. A lodger is taken in, Col. William Smollett (Monty Woolley), Tim and Anne's good friend Lt. Tony Willett (Joseph Cotten) comes around as often as he can to flirt with Anne, and Smollett's grandson Bill (Robert Walker) starts to take a more than friendly - and reciprocated - interest in Jane. On the finges, Anne's best frenemy Emily Hawkins (Agnes Moorehead) says snitty, catty things about the war, and housekeeper Fidelia (Hattie McDaniel, in a thankless role even by the standards of her career) is sassy and black.

It's a sprawling "watch as life is lived" tale with nothing that even resembles a narrative throughline, and that certainly doesn't help with the running time one little bit. But the bigger culprit in making sure that you feel every damn one of the film's 172 minutes - if you skip the five minutes of overture, intermission, and exit music - is its exhausting redundancy. By the end of the first hour, Since You Went Away has explored every idea it has about the stability and inner strength of the Ones Left Behind. By the end of the second hour, it's used up all the tricks it has available to stretch out those ideas a bit longer. That leaves nearly a full hour of meanspirited stubbornness, as the movie simply refuses to fucking end, pulling out ridiculous nonsense in an attempt to drag the thing out for no reason than so we can all compliment Selznick on the enormous size of his producer-cock. "Think we can't come up with any more random shit for Anne to do? Well, now she works at a shipyard, and she mentors a Polish-Jewish immigrant. LICK IT."

There's little doubt that the film's highlight is Colbert, whose confidence and anti-romanticism keep the film level and grounded, always bringing things back to the domestic sphere with intimacy and straightforward plainness. Whether it's deflecting, gently, Tony's overly eager advances or expressing private annoyance with Smollett in a wholly ungracious, feminine fashion, Colbert is smoothly, appealingly human at all turns, and she even manages to earn the film's bombastically mawkish finale. To the degree that Since You Went Away has anything to say about human beings, in 1943 or otherwise, it's because Colbert forces it to: her exhaustion and patience and always present but not always vocal patriotism are the exact embodiment of what people in America during the war might have been at the most sincere, not at their most idealised.

But man, the thing around her is a rattletrap mess. Cotten, faced with a character whose motivation never budges from "you want to have sex with a woman married to a man you adore, knowing full well that under no circumstances will she say yes", simply folds up after he snags a few easy laughs in the first hour; Temple, in one of her first more-or-less "grown-up" roles, plays things a bit too manic and eager for comfort. The less said about Jennifer Jones, the better; at least, I wish that were the case, but given the way that whole segments of the movie are conceded to her entirely - five years after the film opened, she'd be Mrs. David O. Selznick, and who knew when that began to grow - it's not possible. She gets a far more dynamic arc than Colbert ever does, and plenty of admiring scenes and frames, for back in '44, she was the New Thing, though a new thing who never exactly took off to the box office stratosphere as a real proper movie star. I will confess that I do not like her in anything, finding there to be something awfully insincere and faked about her emotions and physical bearing; she always strike me as someone terribly annoyed at having to be involved with movies, something she does not apparently regard as worthy of her dignity. This is not her worst performance: if nothing else, she's able to fire off a lot of innocent enthusiasm for Bill, all the more impressive since she and Walker, married at the start of production, separated and began divorce proceedings before it was complete. She disguises this complete, as Walker absolutely does not. Still, that gets us so far, and the rest of the way is all bright, cloying squeakiness and a frenzied attempt to be girlish.

Like Gone with the Wind before it, the film had a rotating cast of directors - John Cromwell ended up with the credit - which leaves it with little distinct personality other than Selznick's own. There are some graceful moments, including the lovely tracking shot that opens the film, a concise experiment in visual exposition, and some dramatic shots of injured soldiers, but in the main, the images are as snug and conventional as the family life Selznick wants to portray. This isn't a flaw, maybe: the Hilton home is cozy and well-appointed, simple and normal, and the visuals reflect that. But there's not much variety, and after three hours, that lack of variety starts to wear. Besides, the one-size-fits-all style means that the film tends to be awfully emotionally inert, with only Max Steiner's horribly insistent score, with its obvious musical riffs (here a military march, there a Christmas carol, and invention nowhere to be found), doing much to suggest that the events we see might have some emotion attached to them.

Colbert is too good, and the script (though bloated) too full of lovely details about small town American life in the '40s to reject it outright, but my God, is it wearisome. Above all things, the film yearns, aches, pleads to be thought of as a Serious, Deep, and Beautiful depiction of life, and Deserving of Respect, Admiration, and Awards. Basically, it's topically sensitive and dramatically stuffy Oscarbait: blunt proof of that particular style's long life ages before you might naturally think of it having made its dully prestigious presence known in the world.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1944
-Bing Crosby headlines the smash hit about singing Catholics, Going My Way
-Alfred Hitchcock makes the one-location wartime thriller Lifeboat
-Judy Garland introduces the melancholy holiday standard "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" in MGM's Meet Me in St. Louis, directed by Vincente Minnelli

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1944
-Sergei Eisenstein releases Ivan the Terrible, Part I, inaugurating the project that would consume the rest of his career
-Ingmar Bergman arrives on the scene in Sweden, writing the script for Alf Sjöberg's Torment
-Laurence Olivier directs and stars in the grandly theatrical Henry V, a masterpiece of Shakespearean cinema doubling as a wartime morale-booster

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