MY WEEK WITH MARILYN - over-hyped

There is a great movie to be made about the conflict between Marilyn Monroe and Sir Lawrence Olivier on the set of THE PRINCE AND THE SHOWGIRL. Unfortunately, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is not it.  That is because the writer, Adrian Hodges (TOM & VIV) and director, Simon Curtis (TV's CRANFORD)  have made a decision to take the sharp edges off the drama at every turn.  Instead of the caustic wit of Colin (son of Kenneth) Clark's memoir, the movie gives us a protagonist in the classic "ingenue" line - very dull, very sweet, and hardly necessary at all as an entry point to the film's real drama.  He falls for Marilyn, she flirts with him, but it's all very tame indeed, if in fact it really happened.  

What we really want to see is Marilyn versus Larry.  The Sexy Film Star, enmeshed in the Method, desperately trying and failing to be a technically great actress, puffed up and doped up by her self-serving entourage (a particularly menacing portrayal of Paula Strasberg) versus the Great Actor, painfully aware that his time has passed, resentful he cannot set the screen alight, and in fear of hysterical women from his experiences with Vivienne Leigh.  When MY WEEK WITH MARILYN catches afire, it's because we're watching Marilyn and Larry bring out each other's insecurities - in those moments, we get a glimpse into their interior lives.  But all too often, this fascinating material is cut short for drippy dating scenes as Marilyn and young Colin skinny dip, or visit Windsor Castle.  I wanted more of the drama - more of the tension as cinema and theatre acting changed era - more of Marilyn and Arthur Miller - more of Larry and Vivienne.

The resulting film is basically shot and scripted like an afternoon movie on the Hallmark channel. And, unfortunately, it is filled with a fair few anonymous performances - from Dominic Cooper as a suffocating manager to Julia Ormond unbelievably mis-cast as Leigh.  Emma Watson is utterly wasted as Colin's parochial love interest, and Eddie Redmayne has nothing more to do than look charming and naive.  In the minor parts, it's only really Judi Dench who stands out - she oozes class as Dame Sybil Thorndike and deserves a sort of Oscar-double-whammy for her performance here and in J.EDGAR.   As for the leads, Kenneth Branagh is stunning - stunning - as Lawrence Olivier - capturing not just his particular intonation and mannerisms, but giving the towering presence in English theatre real pathos.  

All of which brings us Michelle Willams' much hyped performance as Marilyn, the subject of an Oscar campaign from the Weinsteins. Frankly, I was utterly underwhelmed. Yes she gets the breathy, tremulous voice, and yes she can sing the songs and do the moves. And yes, she appears to have put on a bit, if not enough weight.  But she problem is this - she has not got the sexy star quality that Marilyn had, and you simply can't manufacture that.  (Which is not to say she isn't a terrific actress - just look at BLUE VALENTINE).  Too often in this film we see other characters look at Marilyn and gasp in awe and envy at the way she "lights up the screen" or the "magic" she works or the way she's "full of life".  Sadly, the sign of a bad film is when people tell rather than show.  We shouldn't need this commentary.  Williams' should be doing it herself.  And I don't buy the concept that no-one can light up a screen like Marilyn today.  We have instinctive "film stars" now just as we have "technical actresses".  Sadly, I would put Michelle Williams in the latter camp.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN played New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and the AFI Fest 2011.  It opens this weekend in the US and UK. It opens on December 29th in Singapore; on December 30th in Finland; on January 5th in Portugal; on January 13th in Norway and Sweden; and on January 19th in Lebanon and the Netherlands. 

Late review by Sikander - THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE- a schintzy, duplicitous tale

The 80's were brilliant. If you were in charge.

There are echoes of classical themes such as Dr Frankenstein and his monster and Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde in THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE, a portrayal of moral dilemma by director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, Mulholland Falls, Once Were Warriors). Decorated and patriotic soldier Latif Yahia is chosen by Uday Hussein, Saddam’s eldest son, to become his body double. He is reluctant, but a spell in Abu Ghraib soon convinces him that the choice is not his to make.
In order to begin his new life afresh in the Hussein household, he is forced to allow his family to think he has died in battle. Making things even worse, in doing so, the deeply moral Yahia becomes an enabler for the psychotic and paranoid rapist Uday.

This predicament is about as nuanced and complex as Tamahori’s kitsch study in 1980’s opulence and corrupt dictatorship gets. Full of marble and gold plating, disco balls, it boasts an impressive soundtrack, including Depeche mode’s excellent “Personal Jesus”. There are obvious nods to De Palma’s Scarface in the machine guns, Cuban cigars, decadence and overactive thyroid glands which abound. Violent and unsubtle, it is nevertheless fun to watch (partly because of the aforementioned bold production values) and the main cast are convincing.

The mercurial Dominic Cooper plays both lead characters very well, switching between both contrasting personalities with ease. I’ll admit to a slight man-crush on our leading man, and Cooper is at his best, a charismatic uber-mensch in one breath and a spineless, Oedipal and repellent sociopath the next. This is Cooper in Band of Brothers, AN EDUCATION, and THE HISTORY BOYS, not TAMARA DREWE or MAMMA MIA. Revel in it.Ludivine Sagnier has smouldered since THE SWIMMING POOL and does not disappoint as Uday’s Lebanese mistress Sarrab. Sadly, the love affair between her and Yahia spoils an otherwise crisp and on-message story, but then it wouldn’t be the first time that a romantic sub-plotline has spoilt a film.

THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE is hardly a contemplative analysis of Iraq’s descent from the educated, professional and middle-class country it was in the 1970’s, a leader amongst Arab nations, to the pariah state it became after the first Gulf war, however there is a subtle point to be made in Yahia’s principled, everyman who feels feisance to his country but revulsion at the family which have styled themselves as it’s benevolent master whilst defiling it.Consider this movie an amuse bouche for Charles Ferguson’s excellent investigation into the failing of Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath NO END IN SIGHT, and the equally impressive documentary THE FOG OF WAR.

THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE played Sundance, Berlin and Toronto 2011. It opened earlier this year in the US, UK, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ireland, Malta, Iceland and the Netherlands.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

Once THE WIRE re-up was over, life seemed pretty empty. So empty that I submitted to a Buffy Re-Up, courtesy of two friends of mine who are super-fans of all things Joss Whedon. I was intially sceptical. Vampires? Teen angst? Lo-rent make-up effects? Seriously? However, I'm half way through series 2 and I have to say I'm really starting to enjoy Joss Whedon's wonderfully witty use of the English language - the energy and plasticity of it. I got that same sense of playfulness as I watched CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER. What gave it away? Characters uttering dead-pan cool witticisms rather than screaming when a big bad man blows up shit. The tone was anachronistically, inappropriately US-teen-cool for a movie supposedly set during World War Two. 

And then it all clicked! Joss Whedon had been given the script penned by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (the NARNIA movies). According to IMDBpro he is meant to have done a light re-write to tie it in to the wider Marvel universe, and in particular THE AVENGERS movie that he's directing. But I suspect that Whedon did more than just tie up some narrative threads. Because when this movie is at its most entertaining, and its most emotionally real, it simply DRIPS Joss Whedon.  You can see the impact of Whedon on the success of the final film. It works best in the first two thirds, where it really is all about character and relationships. It works least in the final third when it descends into a pretty much super-hero-movie-by-numbers final battle scene....

But anyway, enough of my current Whedon-kick and on with the normal review. CAPTAIN AMERICA is the latest feature-length incarnation of the comic book hero created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in the 1940s - a deliberately patriotic and wholesome character designed to boost morale during World War Two. The superhero is really Steve Rogers - a physically un-prepossessing but morally upstanding young man desperate to enlist and fight the Nazis. Dr Abraham Erskine, a German-Jewish refugee and Papa Stark use a serum and some Vita-Rays (TM) - to turn Rogers into a buff super-soldier. 

Interestingly, rather than kicking Nazi ass immediately, the lone super-soldier takes a side-turn, and is consigned to marketing war bonds - a parody of his future super-hero status, and highly reminiscent of the subtlety and post-modernity of Alan Moore's WATCHMEN. After this false start, Captain America start to fight in earnest, under the direction of Colonel Chester Phillips and his attractive protégée, Peggy Carter, not to mention Papa Stark. Captain America also has a bunch of mere mortal side-kicks, including his best friend Bucky, but rounded out with a Japanese-American, an African-American, an Irish-American, a Frenchman and a Brit. This isn't so much tub-thumping jingoism, then, as the United Nations. I would love to know from anyone who has read the comics whether this rainbow-nation of do-gooders is, as I suspect, a highly modern and politically correct re-write.

Steve Rogers' journey to becoming Captain America makes for a fascinating origins story. Chris Evans (FANTASTIC FOUR) gives a fine and convincing performance as the sensitive young man fiercely opposed to bullies, and he is ably supported by Tommy Lee Jones, Stanley Tucci, Haley Atwell and Dominic Cooper as Phillips, Erskine, Carter and Stark respectively. Stanley Tucci's Erskine has a wonderful comic interchange early on with Rogers over a bottle of schnapps that quickly and efficiently establishes a bond that pays off a few scenes later. It's a shame no comparable emotional bond was created between Rogers and best friend Bucky (Gossip Girl's Sebastian Stan). 

I loved the sepia-tinted 1940s production design, the costumes, the hair, and the sheer atmosphere of it all. And whoever CGI-morphed Chris Evans head onto a short, weedy body deserves much credit because the work is utterly seamless. I also loved the make-up that transforms Hugo Weaving's mad Nazi into the evil head of Hydra, Red Skull - intent on using the power of the Norse Gods to unleash war on the entire earth. In fact, just for the nostalgic look of the film - half Indiana Jones - half Watchmen flashback - this is probably my favourite superhero film of the summer, alongside the X-MEN movie. It turned out to be, rather to my surprise, a wonderfully well-made, beautifully-imagined, and Whedon-witty movie.

That said, the movie does have its faults. The Bucky storyline doesn't pay off in the way it should. The final third is dull. Peggy Carter has the beginnings of a great character - a feisty, bright woman. But what's she there fore apart from to look good? Stark builds shit; Phillips commands shit; everyone else fights shit; but Carter just pouts. I mean, what is this agent really meant to be doing? Is she a scientist? A military mind? What? Poor writing.  Similarly, the politically correct side-kicks are fine, but where is the moral clarity that should come with a fight against the Nazis. Oh but I forget. We're not really fighting the Nazis are we - but some weird ambiguous generally evil guy, who's harder to get a grip on, or care about. Speaking of which, I really do wonder at director Joe Johnston's (THE WOLFMAN, JURASSIC PARK III) indulgence in allowing Hugo Weabing to do the entire film with a German accent that sounds uncannily like Werner Herzog. It was so pitch perfect that is seriously took me out of the movie in every scene - undercutting the serious subject-matter and high emotional stakes.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER is on release in Canada, Italy, Poland, the US, Iceland, the Philippines, Argentina, Australia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, Armenia, Brazil, Colombia, Estonia, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Taiwan and the UK. It opens next weekend in Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Portugal and Spain. It opens on August 12th in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It opens on August 17th in Belgium, France, Germany and Finland. It opens on September 1st in Greece, the UAE and Turkey. It opens in Japan on October 15th.

TAMARA DREWE - who?

Stephen Frears has an odd body of work. He started off with spiky costume drama (DANGEROUS LIASONS), moved to equally spiky contemporary British drama (DIRTY PRETTY THINGS) but then segued into what can only be described as English heritage drama, with the banal MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS and the over-hyped TV drama THE QUEEN. His latest flick - an adaptation of Posy Simmonds Grauniad strip, continues his run of diminishing returns. It's a movie that, for all its lush location work and occasional stabs at spiky social commentary, is dangerously structurally imbalanced.

As far as I can tell, the problems stem from the source material - you can read it all online at the newspaper's site in about an hour. It's apparently based on Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, but other than the fact that the central character is sexy and has three lovers, there are very few parallels. Not least because Tamara Drewe simply doesn't hold the centre of our attention in the way any eponymous heroine should.  In the strip, the centre of the story isn't Tamara Drewe at all - but Beth Hardiman, wife of an Ian Rankin-type crime novelist called Nicholas. She's fat, cheated-upon, taken-for-granted and generally quite bitchy. Essentially, she's as much as fault as her lecherous, narcissistic husband for the pitiful state of their marriage, insofar as she enables his shitty behaviour. She likes that he's dependent on her, and smothers him with baked goods and motherly attentions, rather than being his wife. The Hardimans are classic English middle-class yuppies, who've made money, buy a nice run-down farm in the country, and then fill it with Cath Kidston and Waitrose shopping, much to the ire of the locals who are bid out from the local housing market. (I aspire to being such a "banker-wanker"). The farm also serves as a writer's retreat, which suits them both just fine. Nicholas gets fawning acolytes - Beth has more people to mother and feel indispensable for. So basically, the two protagonists at the heart of the strip are pretty unlikeable, but at least you get what makes them tick.

And so the story goes, until Tamara Drewe turns up in hot pants, newly beautified by a nose job, baring all in her self-referential newspaper column. She decides to move into her late mother's house at Winnard's Farm, and write a novel - just like that. In the strip, we read her columns, but never read drafts of her book. We're meant to think she's not much cop at writing, but there's really not much else there. I have no idea what makes the girl tick - and maybe that's deliberate - maybe she's just meant to be a sex object - but that seems a weird authorial choice. Shouldn't we care about, and understand, the eponymous heroine of the strip? Anyways, following Hardy, Tamara has three potential suitors. First up is local gardener, Andy Cobb - earnest, nice, dull - presumably in the Gabriel Oak mould. We have no real understanding why he should be so interested in Tamara or vice versa - they seem entirely unsuited. But maybe I'm wrong - as neither is fleshed out as a character, who knows? Second is minor rock star, Ben aka Sergeant Troy. Except that he's not really a love-rat, and actually an okay guy, and basically, Tamara's never really at risk from him. Third up is Nicholas Hardiman - old, oleaginous author - who is never really at risk from Tamara in the way that Boldwood was at risk from Bathsheba. Yes, after a few quick shags he wants to finally leave Beth, but there's no subterranean violence. And without that deep sexual tension the motive of the plot can't be sexual violence - rather a couple of bored teenage chavs who send a few prank emails, and a herd of bored cows. Deus ex machina have never been as bizarre - okay - maybe Hardy's stampede, and then that odd scene of puncturing sheep's bellies - but the final strips - with two acts of violence that have no build-up, no foreboding atmosphere in the preceding columns - just seem random and insufficiently dealt with.

And so, now, we get the movie. This is, in essence, a very faithful adaptation. All the key characters are locations are there. The houses and farms look exactly like the script, and all of the better, spikier one-liners are kept in. The underlying tension between impoverished locals and wealthy second-home-owners is still there. And the most authentic part of the script - the insecurity and narcissism of writing - and the jealousy between writers - is translated wholesale. But screen-writer Moira Buffini has made several improvements - in particular, several of the characters are more convincingly drawn. Roger Allam's Nicholas Hardiman is far more sinister and slippery and real than in the strip and Tamsin Greig's Beth is less bitchy and more put-upon - in her portrayal of Beth you can see a million failed marriages where the wife has simply lost the ability to conceive of herself alone. Moira Buffini also does a good job in beefing up the role of writers-retreat-ee Glen McGreavey (Bill Camp). In the strip, he's just a contra-Nicholas - an academic, writing obscure books that no-one reads, utterly appreciative of Beth's nurturing - whereas Nicholas writes commercially successful nonsense and takes Beth for granted. In the movie, Glen becomes perhaps the most interesting character of all - standing for integrity and appreciation, but ultimately becoming just as slippery as Nicholas himself. Moreover, he proves once and for all that Beth is a co-dependent - looking for someone to mother and be used by, even when Nicholas is out of the picture.

But the biggest breakthrough - for better and worse - is in the characters of teenage chavs Jody (Jessica Barden) and Casey (Charlotte Christie). In the strip, they serve as a counter-point to the middle class angst at the farm and as a means to the Hardy-esque email that triggers Tamara's affair with Nicholas. They are bored, smoke in bus shelters, and are utterly obsessed with celebrity. But in the movie, partly because of the higher proportion of screen-time they get, and partly because of the quite superb performance by Jessica Barden, they completely steal the show. The angst of being stuck in a small town, knowing that nothing will ever happen unless you back yourself, and then realising that in the real world there are consequences - now that's an interesting story. Jody's journey from fantasist to realist is superbly essayed and deeply engaging.

Now here comes the problem with the movie. Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) and Andy Cobb (Luke Evans) are as thinly sketched in the movie as in the strip. But Jody is far, far more interesting. And so, you end up with a movie wherein the supposed heroine is almost irrelevant, and certainly not the centre of the viewer's attention. No amount of witty one-liners, or glossy location photography, can offset that fundamental structural weakness.

Additional tags: Ben Davis, Mick Audsley, Leo Davis, Bill Camp, Luke Evans, Tamsin Greig, Jessica Barden, Charlotte Christie, James Naughtie, John Bett, Josie Taylor, Bronagh Gallagher, Zahra Ahmadi

TAMARA DREW played Cannes 2010 and plays Toronto 2010. It was released in France in July and is currently on release in the UK. It is released next week in Belgium, in the USA on October 8th and in Germany on December 30th.

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.