London Film Fest 2011 Day 4 - SHAME - One of the best films of the year

Michael Fassbender (Brandon) and Steve McQueen (Director) at the
photocall for SHAME at the BFI London Film Festival 2011.

SHAME is a movie that is so brutally honest and achingly sympathetic about sex and love addiction that I can't help but believe that someone in the production is or knows someone with the disease, as I do.  It leaves you profoundly thankful that someone had the balls to go where few mainstream film-makers would dare to go, and had the wit, style and empathy to depict highly sexually explicit material without one iota of leeriness or mockery.  

The movie centres on a brother and sister called Brandon and Sissy (Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan).  They have clearly suffered some kind of childhood trauma that has resulted in deeply disturbed attitudes toward sex and love, as well as behaviours of literal self-harm and suicide on the part of Sissy.  Brandon has created a successful, almost pathologically clean life in New York, but secretly feeds his compulsion for sex with whores, cyber-sex, one-night stands and compulsive masturbation. He takes no joy in these activities but is maintaining his dual existence comfortably until Sissy arrives.  She is less a sex than love addict, craving the attention of her brother - a relationship that hints at a dangerously unboundaried sexual tension - then his boss - she uses sex to get what she really wants, which is an approximation of a genuine emotional closeness - and self-harms when she can't get it.

Sissy's arrival and exposure of Brandon's double life leads to a moment of deep shame and purging, and an attempt to have a normal sexual relationship with an office worker. It's a relationship we know is doomed given Brandon's condition - and which precipitates a backlash that culminates in a scene of profoundly explicit sex that is also perhaps the most moving and despairing piece of acting I've seen in quite some time.  Particular credit to DP Sean Bobbitt and director Steve McQueen for capturing Michael Fassbender simulating orgasm in a manner that looks completely desperate, horrific, horrified and pained. One could almost have ended the movie on that scene and perfectly captured the tragedy at its heart.  

It should be clear by now that I am full of admiration for this bold, brave, painful movie.  Fassbender once again displays his complete courage and Steve McQueen his ability to use visuals and silence to create scenes of quiet power. But perhaps the biggest revelation was Carey Mulligan, who takes on an extremely challenging role - exposing herself physically and emotionally - and is utterly convincing.  Admittedly, SHAME is in some respects less pure than HUNGER, given that it plays with a wider cast of characters and a less austere colour palette.  But what it looses in purity and visceral power it makes up in its deep humanity.

SHAME played Toronto, Venice and London 2011. It goes on release in the US on December 2nd; in the  UK on January 13th; in Germany on March 1st and in the Netherlands on March 15th 2012.


For those wishing to seek more information about recovery from sex addiction please use the following link: http://saa-recovery.org.uk/materials/79-leaflets.html. It gives useful information and advice to anyone wanting to learn more, as well as for health professionals.

DRIVE - A Real Hero

I know a lot of guys who mess around with married women, but you're the only one I know who robs a place to pay back the husband. 

From the Hot Pink titles; to the electro-kitsch soundtrack; to Ryan Gosling's silver satin jacket; to the neon lights of Los Angeles, DRIVE is a movie that oozes cool.  It's hero, simply titled "Driver" is so cool, he barely needs to speak, has no discernible back-story, merely exists. As both a stunt- and get-away-driver, he barely breaks a sweat, and even when for a sweet girl (Carey Mulligan) and her son, he barely cracks a smile.  The courtship is so low-key, chaste, Driver's attitude so stoic, at times I even doubted he had been moved at all. And then, when his girl needs a hero, that's exactly what he becomes.  The change comes by stealth, jarring, shocking, and the movie, like its hero (now capitalised) shifts from quirky romance into hard-core ultra-violence.  Driver becomes the man his angelic, virginal girlfriend needs - maybe the man he always wanted to be, and just needed the excuse to become - the violence evidently so close to the surface.  Within what feels like seconds, we have descended into overwhelming violence, no-way-out kind of snowballing craziness.  Driver seems to welcome it.  It seems to be his fate.

DRIVE is another example of director Nicolas Windig Refn's obsession with, and objectification of, men who define themselves through violence.  Again and again - whether Tom Hardy in BRONSON or Mads Mikkelsen in VALHALLA RISING, Refn glories in the image of "hard" men covered in blood and gore.  The objectification is sometimes pretty disturbing, it feels voyeuristic, slippery, fascistic - we are being made complicit in, and enjoying to the point of nervous laughter, heinous violence. This sense of deeply, deeply black humour is heightened by some genius casting in the supporting roles - Albert Brooks playing against type as a sleazy B-movie producer cum mobster - Ron Perlman as a West Coast mafiosi - and Bryan Cranston as the semi-father figure who pimps Driver out for heist jobs.  (Sadly, Mad Men's Christina Hendricks' is underused in a cameo.) The humour also comes from Hossein Amini's tightly written adaptation of James Sallis' novel. But ultimately, given the glossy, seedy, look and feel of the movie, the ultimate praise has to go to Refn, for creating both his most mainstream movie to date, but betraying none of that particular brand of "violence and romantic sexiness" - and Gosling, who with but a flicker of eyes can betray a complexity of emotion beyond most of his generation of actors.  

DRIVE played Cannes, where Nicolas Windig Refn won Best Director, and Toronto 2011. It opened on September 16th in the US, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Canada and Poland. It opens today in Greece, Ireland, and the UK. It opens on September 30th in Malaysia and Italy. It opens on October 5th in France; on October 7th in Finland, on October 13th in Hong Kong, on October 21st in Estonia and Norway and on October 27th in Australia. It opens on November 3rd in Russia and Singapore, on November 18th in Sweden, on December 8th in Portugal and on January 26th 2012 in Germany.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 1 - NEVER LET ME GO

NEVER LET ME GO is a patiently paced, melancholy sci-fi movie that looks like a Merchant Ivory film - BLADE-RUNNER meets THE RAILWAY CHILDREN.  As it opens, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are children at a picturesque English boarding school called Hailsham. They are good little children - they accept what their teachers tell them about the dangers of the outside world and the importance of keeping well. They are, and I'm sure everyone knows by now, bred as organ-donors. Indeed, the strength of the film is that this fact is taken as read. Far more interesting to avoid petty suspense and to spend precious cinema time examining the ramifications of that fact.  The children know they are donors but also know that they are human - they feel, love, make art - in short have souls - an idea that is deeply disturbing, indeed repugnant, to the society that has bred them.

The sci-fi/pol theory content of the book and film is softened by its immersion in an emotional drama. Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) fall in love as teenagers, making Ruth (Keira Knightley) resentful and ultimately destructive.  What could be more human than love and jealousy?  And what is more powerful than confronting people with the consequences of their actions?

But, as with many a London Film Fest Opening and Closing Night Gala, this movie is technically well-made (director - Mark Romanek, ONE HOUR PHOTO) and by no means unwatchable, but it's lacks any real spark.  The pace is too lugubrious for me - the emotions too restrained. Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield are superb as Kathy and Tommy but Keira Knightley is utterly flat as Ruth.  I'm not sure how far this is down to Alex Garland's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel - in the novel Ruth has more passion to her, more spark - or whether it's just that Knightley is quite simply outdone by Mulligan.  At any rate, by the time the whole thing limped into a final scene with a clumsy voice-over I was rather bored by it.

NEVER LET ME GO played Telluride and Toronto 2010 and was released in the US last month. It open sin Singapore and the UK on January 20th 2011, and in Belgium, France and Germany in February.

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

"We are all one trade from humility." Marv, WALL STREET.

WALL STREET (1987) - a movie that vocalised the mood of the time; gave birth to the world's greatest greedy capitalist bastard; and sent a population cohort into investment banking - that same cohort that by and large caused the global financial cluster-fuck whose ill effects we are still grappling with. A movie with a simple narrative; strong characters; and an innocence, almost, in retrospect, about what it was doing. Because make no mistake, WALL STREET, exposed something nasty and cut-throat, but oh so tempting, that was taking over corporate America.

Jump forward twenty years, and the world is a very, very different place. No disrespect to my mother, but even she can tell you why the credit crunch happened and has an opinion on the government sponsored bank bail-outs. Economic commentators from Nouriel Roubini to Gillian Tett have made reputations and fortunes explaining this crisis to the Ordinaries who are going to have to pay for it, maybe for the rest of their tax-paying lives. Bankers - their lifestyles, their economic power, their slippery ability to get a bail-out AND a bonus, still, still! - are out in the open. Even hedge fund managers have been exposed. And righteous anger runs forth.

Pity then, poor Oliver Stone, trying to bring a script to screen in a period when reality was over-taking even the most scandalous fictional depiction of high finance. A period, moreover, where every new book release - every new Rolling Stone magazine article - was beating him to the punch in exposing the corruption, greed and excess that led us to this Fall. By the time we got to Cannes 2010, what else was left to say? Was there, in short, an appetite, to see and be dazzled by the titans of finance when we were left in negative equity if we were lucky, and unemployed if we weren't? WALL STREET could surprise us, and tell us something we didn't know. WALL STREET 2 feels like a re-hash.

In short, WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS feels like a movie over-taken by events - a movie without a concrete idea of itself - without a clear idea of what it wants to say and what it wants to be.

But before we get to why it's such a mess - let's lay out its basic structure, post Cannes-2010-edits. (Spoilers follow.)

The movie plays in four acts. The first act sees a crypto-Lehman collapse, when the New York Fed, advised by the heads of her competitor banks, refuse to bail her out. As a consequence, the head of crypto-Lehmans (Frank Langella) tops himself, much to the horror of his mentee, a young energy prop trader called Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf). Jake is prompted to propose to his girlfriend Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan), estranged daughter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), and in doing so, starts meeting Gordon on the sly.  

In Act Two, there is little evidence YET of the fallout from the Lehman collapse - the jewellery still glitters as the money is still there. Jake is corrupted both by Gordon Gekko and his business enemy Bretton James (Josh Brolin), CEO of a crypto-Goldman Sachs. Jake brokers a reunion with Winnie in exchange for Gordon dishing the dirt on who let crypto-Lehmans fail - and uses that info. to screw over Bretton James on a trade. Such is the fucked up value system of Wall Street that James reacts by offering Jake a job. 

In Act Three, the corruption goes further. The systemic financial collapse is in full effect. Crypto-GS is suffering, as is Jake's mother - a nurse turned realtor. Jake's corruption continues - he connives with Gordon to free up Winnie's $100m trust fund, thinking he'll invest it in clean-tech. Gordon, being Gordon, takes the money to London, opens a hedge fund, and makes a cool billion. Winnie, pissed off with Jake for being suckered by her dad, dumps him. 

In Act Four, Jake, not learning, again tries to trade with Gekko - access to his grandson against giving the money back. Gekko being Gekko says no. And then, in what one can only assume to be a tacked on post-Cannes 2010 ending, Gekko has a last minute change of heart, gives back the money, and plays happy family with his kid and grandkid. Meanwhile, Bretton James has been exposed as trading on his own account against the bets of his clients, getting him sacked from crypto-GS and indicted by the SEC.

So what's really going on here? There are four strands to the story. Strand number one is a romance. A guy, with partially good intentions, lies to his girlfriend, is found out, loses her, but is forgiven. This strand really doesn't work. Shia LaBeouf doesn't have the emotional range, and poor Carey Mulligan is given nothing to do by the script other than look tearful. We're meant to think Jake is basically a good kid, but what kind of arsehole tries to trade money for pictures of his unborn child's ultrasound. Horribly misjudged. Utterly unconvincing.

The second strand of the story is a revenge thriller. This could've been great but is crowded out by all the other crap in the film. Revenge part one sees a young trader punk a slippery CEO. This really works, is thrilling and well explained. Revenge part two sees Gekko use Jake to expose Bretton James. This could've worked - it could've been the dramatic heart of the film - but it isn't given a chance. Truly, Josh Brolin's Bretton James - deeply good-looking and even more attractive when dripping with power - is as charismatic as Gekko ever was. But they have no real screen-time together. What we really needed was a show-down scene, but the skinny idiot Jake is always used as the go-between, undermining the power of the whole thing.

The third strand of the story is a coming-of-age drama. This should've been Jake Moore's story. He should've gone through shit and come out of it with self-knowledge - just like Bud Foxx in the original movie. But of course he doesn't, because there are no consequences to what he does. He screws up time and again, but is forgiven. He doesn't even serve time for the original market manipulation in Revenge Part One. Where is the scene with Jake Moore crying in the rain in Central Park? It gets worse. Not only does WALL STREET 2 refuse to let Jake Moore learn from his mistakes, but it even retro-fits Bud Foxx's narrative arc. Rather than serve time, come out and do something useful with his life, we see him in a cameo in the sequel, a self-made billionaire, dripping with hot chicks and as morally vacuous as ever. But it gets even worse than this. Jake Moore and Bud Foxx should've been changed by their experiences in the film, but Gordon Gekko shouldn't have been. Gekko does what he does because he can do no other - that is his tragedy. By tacking on a last minute emotional U-turn, the movie betrays Gekko and assumes the audience are a bunch of idiots who are going to buy it.

The fourth strand of the movie is a fictional recreation of real events. This is where the movie both succeeds and fails most. To its credit, WALL STREET 2 creates some amazing set pieces surrounding the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the creation of the TARP bail-outs. Set in the New York Fed, with a room full of bank CEOs and a crypto-Paulson and Geithner, we get a real sense of the panic and time-pressure involved in taking these momentous decisions typically over the course of a weekend to pre-empt the markets. The slippery reasoning, the desperation, the brutality of the survival instinct - it's all there. Frankly, I would've paid good money just to see Oliver Stone take us through a fictional recreation of these real events, without all the romantic, personal crap in this film. In particular, you have to love Eli Wallach as a crypto-GS founder, with his ruthless survival instinct and enigmatic whistle.

But it's also in its attempt to chronicle a period that WALL STREET 2 fails. And this is perhaps nobody's fault - insofar as the screenwriters were trying to hit a moving target. Still, all that aside, I can't help but think that the screenwriters made a fundamental mistake in trying to anchor their story in a long-term vendetta between Bretton James and Gordon Gekko that's basically about exposing insider trading. The whole point of the current crisis is that it wasn't by and large about illegal trades. Kerviel, Madoff etc are not actually the point. The real point is that these bankers weren't actually doing anything wrong, legally speaking. They were acting in a loosely regulated system, with perverse incentives, enabled by cheap central bank credit, and they ran riot. If this story were about a single rogue trader we simply wouldn't be in the global meltdown we're in. So to try to pin it on something personal, something basically quite petty, like trading on one's own account, is to basically miss the point.

Just as the genius of WALL STREET is best seen in the seminal keynote speech by Gordon Gekko, the failures of WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS are best expressed in the new keynote speech by Gordon Gekko. The big speech - far from being prescient and persuasive as in the first film - sounds old-hat and banal in the second. There are no witty one-liners - no startling sucker-punches. I can't remember a single line that stood out. In fact, the best one-liner that sums up the current situation comes from the FIRST movie, and is quoted at the head of this review. There is no feeling that we are seeing fundamental truths exposed and taboos broken. Worst of all, as if in embarrassment at the poverty of the content, Stone directs the scene like a kid with ADD. It's all jump cuts and shifting camera angles - hardly a sentence is completed. Poor, poor, poor.

In fact, Stone's direction in general is pretty poor. There are too many editing visual tricks - especially in the many mobile phone conversations - and cheap effects. Take for example a scene in which the camera rapidly moves down the length of a sky scraper as we here the sound effect of a ball in a roulette wheel - supposedly to symbolise the market crash. Crude. And perhaps most unforgivable is that Stone breaks the fourth wall. By that, I don't mean that he has the characters speaking to the audience face-on. But he does something stylistically as jarring. He acknowledges, within the world of the film, just how iconic the original movie has become. In other words, he induldges in cameos that serve no purpose other than to show how desperate celebrities are to be associated with the world of WALL STREET. So we get Warren Buffett, Graydon Carter, Jim Cramer, Nouriel Roubini, and a host of CNBC anchors playing along, winking at the audience, and worst of all, that Bud Foxx redux. This all smacks of not taking the project, and the audience, seriously.

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS is on global release.

London Film Fest Day 7 - AN EDUCATION

AN EDUCATION is a British coming-of-age drama set in the swinging sixties, based on the memoirs of the British journalist Lynn Barber. It's essentially the story of an intelligent young girl swapping a place at Oxford (and a conventional life) with her dream of being an urban sophisticate, in the arms of charming man (Peter Sarsgaard). As I was attending another screening, Our Gmunden Correspondent took my ticket. Here are his thoughts:

"Just a few thoughts on An Education.

Yes it was nice. The film is a fine period drama on the clash of bourgeois and bohemian life in the early sixties, expressed in the ambivalent experiences of young Jenny, coming of age. There is everything a good film needs to have, a perfect script, great set design, catchy music, and, above all, impeccable performances of a dream cast (even if it sometimes felt a bit overacted, meaning that the actors seemed more to enjoy themselves in showing off their great talent and skill than actually embodying a persona; but good, no doubt). It is entertaining and a pleasure to watch and to listen to. If that's what we are looking for in a film, mission accomplished, all good. If we are setting higher standards, want to see revelations and revolutions in filmmaking, it seems like a little etude, do everything you are expected to do and you will get a good movie, which is not more than the sum of its parts, rather less even. It would be worth looking the flick just to hear the actors talk, devour the great sets and sounds, and accomplish the perfect editing, yet there is something missing. It lacks the subtlety of showing the inbetweens of lifestyles, that there is grey zone between good and bad, between the deeds society demands and the pleasures the individual needs. To cut it short: Watch it, enjoy it, don't think about it too much. Full stop."

AN EDUCATION played Sundance 2009 where John de Boorman won the Cinematography Award and Lone Scherfih won the Audience Award. It also played Berlin, Sydney, Brisbane, Toronto and Helsinki 2009. It is currently on release in New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Israel. It opens next week in the UK. It opens in February 2010 in the Netherlands and Germany and opens in April in Norway.