iPad Round-Up 2 - THE CONSIPIRATOR

Yet another thumpingly pedestrian issues-film from Robert Redford.  The movie takes the form of an historic court-room drama, with James McAvoy playing the lawyer defending Robin Wright's Mary Surrat of conspiracy to murder President Lincoln (she was Booth's landlady and her son has mysteriously fled.)  This being a Redford film, the politics are naively simple and oppositional: McAvoy's lawyer is the champion of all things good - liberty, the constitution and the right to a fair trial even in the wake of an appalling political crime.  Kevin Kline's war minister represents the forces of evil:  putting ends before means, willing to sacrifice right to expediency, with a contemporary relevance in that Surrat was denied a civilian trial before her peers, and tried under military law. 

The issues are fascinating, the casting top notch, Newton Thomas Sigel's cinematography is superb, and the dilemmas at the movie's heart are clearly highly relevant today.  The problem is that it feels like a college debate rather than a movie.  Movies must entertain. If they educate and provoke as well, then all to the good. But no-one ever learned anything while their eyes were rolling to the back of their head in boredom.  Castigat ridendo mores. Moliere knew this. Redford apparently does not  He needs to treat his subject matter with a little less respect and his audiences with a little more.  

THE CONSPIRATOR played Toronto 2010 and opened in summer 2011 in the USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, Ireland, the UK, Portugal, Australia, Turkey, Kuwait and Germany. It opened last month in Singapore. It goes on release in Belgium on November 16th and in Spain on December 2nd. It is available to rent and own.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 12 - BERNIE

“It’s not as bad as people say; he only shot her four times, not five.”

Bernie Tiede was a good, god-fearing man, who went out of his way to please.  His patient, caring manner was an asset as a funeral director, and his willingness to throw himself into small-town life made him beloved by his fellow residents of Carthage, Texas.  So much so, that when it was revealed that Bernie had shot Marjorie Nugent, four times in the back, none of the townsfolk believed him guilty. Oh, they knew he shot her dead, for sure.  But they figured that someone as mean-spirited as Marjorie must have incited Bernie to take leave of his senses for a moment.  Tragically for Bernie, prosecuting attorney Danny Buck, knew full well that despite a full confession, four bullets in the back, and Bernie’s ample use of Marjorie’s money, he wasn’t going to get a conviction. And so, he got the trial moved a mere 44 miles away to Saint Augustine.

The wonderful thing about Richard Linklater’s new fictionalized retelling of Bernie’s true story, is that he allows us to fall in love with Carthage, its quirky inhabitants, and with Bernie himself. So that by the end of the movie, even though we’re sitting in an urban art-house cinema, we too can’t quite believe that any humane jury would convict Bernie, and sit fearful that those no-good inbred St Augustinians won’t do him right.   Because this movie isn’t so much a character-driven crime drama as a Coen Brothers style love-letter to small-town Southern life.   We luxuriate in the broad accents, marvel at the cast-iron certainty of the town gossips as they declare that Bernie FOR A FACT was or wasn’t this or that, and laugh at their incomprehension of Austin hippies.  It’s hard to think of any recent use of faux-documentary talking heads that was as successful and hilarious as Linklaters use of  the Carthage townsfolk – narrating, commenting on, and judging the story at each twist and turn. 

Because I warmed so much to these people, and started to identify so strongly with them, the movie turned from what could’ve been a real downer into effectively a rather heart-warming experience. On one level this was a movie about really nasty aspects of human nature – a man so wanting to be liked that he wills himself into an emotional prison, and a woman delighting in his pain.  But rather than being brought down by the depiction of a bizarrely, horribly, sado-masochistic relationship (emotionally, not sexually, that is!), I left the cinema positively full of faith in humanity. Because Carthage was a small town where ordinary townsfolk new just what was what, and a good guy was  a good guy, even if blighted by a sudden act of rage.

All of which tells you that native East Texan, Richard Linklater, is pretty much in love with Carthage, and doesn’t really make much attempt to give a balanced view of Bernie. Or maybe he does, but the truth really is that Bernie was a good guy, despite the slightly suspect love of the high life that Marjorie bought him. By now, I’m so complicit in the “free Bernie” campaign I can’t even tell. All I know is that Linklater somehow managed to capture both the black humour and the tragedy at the core of Bernie’s need to please.  I laughed a lot, I was fascinated, and I won’t soon forget the tale. Massive praise also to all three leads.  Jack Black gives a more modulated performance than is typical in his mainstream films, as the gregarious, needy Bernie. Shirley Maclaine as mean old Marjorie is just an acting masterclass. Look at the scene where she listens to Bernie sing a duet in a theatrical rehearsal, imagining him singing a love song to her. Her face shows a cynical old woman melting.  And finally, you have to hand it to Matthew McConaughey, an actor who is brilliant in inverse proportion to his screentime.  Banality in mediocre rom-coms turns into piquant cameos – first in TROPIC THUNDER, and now as the fame-hungry prosecutor Danny Buckland. 

BERNIE played Los Angeles and London 2011.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 10 - GUILTY - Guest review by George Ghon

Philippe Torreton stars in Vincent Garenq's docudrama, GUILTY.

This review has been provided by George Ghon, stylist, writer, editor and friend of the blog. 

Early one morning in 2001, when it was still dark, the police came knocking on the door of Alain Marécaux, a successful bailiff. Without much explanation they searched the house, separated him from his wife and three children and put him in custody. What followed was a biased police interrogation; information embargo; and no contact with the world outside the prison walls - a nightmare trip for Mr Marécaux, who was accused of child molestation, a crime he always strictly denied committing. Asserting his innocence, and the conspicuous lack of hard evidence supporting the arrest, did not stop the legal machine from rolling in the wrong direction, in turn causing one of the biggest judicial errors in French history. 

Director Vincent Garenq turned the true story, based on Alain Marécaux’ memoirs, into a docu-drama that stays close to the facts, but provides a subjective angle on the case, following the lead actor (Philippe Torreton) from start to end. Information is dispensed only scarcely, making the claustrophobic lack of it a viewing experience, too. Garenq puts us through the same process of indignation that Marécaux must have gone through at the time of his arrest. ‘I wanted to keep the anger that I felt when I read the book’ the director said during a Q&A session. He didn’t make an objective study of the Outreau affair that Marécaux was part of, but zoomed in on his take of it, and shows the disastrous implications that the judicial system can have on the citizen’s life when it steers off its correct path. 

After going through several suicide attempts, a body wrecking hunger strike, and desperately appealing to the justice minister himself, Marécaux was eventually acquitted in 2004, but the case left a stain on a nation that prouds itself being built on the republican values liberté, égalité & fraternité. In 2006, a special parliamentary enquiry looked into the case, after president Jacques Chirac called the affair a ‘judicial disaster’, but the commission hardly acknowledged any erroneous behaviour within the judiciary corps. In 2009, finally, the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature issued a reprimand for the judge Burgaud, a minor penalty, which he, in turn, appealed. The case reveals how stubbornly one-directional the bureaucracy apparatus can work in so called advanced western democracies. Not one of all the magistrates involved in the case dared to reassess the initial judgement lacking any solid evidence in a fleeting spell of individual brain activity. Besides, it wasn’t only laziness or intellectual inertia that caused the magistrates to lose their objective eye. 

Europe was shocked by the Dutroux case in Belgium, where girls got abducted, sexually abused in a dungeon, later drugged and eventually killed. The general policy, quite understandably, was to go hard on child molesters. Police officers, magistrates, psychologists, prosecutors and judges became biased, so much so that they evidently lost their sense of good judgement. All this shows the Janus-faced correlation between a moral codex, of what we deem to be right or wrong, and the judiciary system in a civil state, which is based on equal rights. The former is necessarily subjective and demands an individual assessment of the situation according to the values of the society we live in. The latter, however, needs to be unambiguously bound to the law. In other words, it requires the inhuman objectivity of a system that does not deem an individual guilty before proof of his wrongdoing has been found in order to safeguard the pole of humanity where the European flag is hoisted. 

Garenq’s GUILTY is an eye opener for Europeans who tend to proud themselves for their moral superiority. It also staggeringly unveils how an all too human emotion that abhors child molestation can bias a supposedly fair legal framework and torques the objectivity of the law. 

GUILTY opened in France in September and played Toronto and London. It was released earlier this year in France.