MARLEY

Kevin MacDonald (THE EAGLE) returns to the documentary format with this insightful, beautifully edited documentary about Bob Marley. MacDonald inherited this "troubled" project after Scorsese and Demme left, apparently during the editing process, but it's clear that MacDonald was able to go back and shoot extra footage because his voice is occasionally heard interviewing Marley's family and friends. As a result, this is a project very much in the style of TOUCHING THE VOID. MacDonald comes to the material with a clear, curious head, but stays in the background - letting Marley's contemporaries (to whom he has exceptionally good access) speak for themselves.  MacDonald does not flinch from emotionally and politically tough issues - Marley's multiple girlfriends - the difficulty his children had in breaking through the entourage to his get to their father - Marley's political naivete - often playing for the "people" but hijacked by nasty political factions, and African dictators. 

The documentary begins at Nine Mile - up in the verdant hills of Jamaica - far away from the cliched image of Montego Bay.  Marley grew up in rural poverty, doubly cursed by being of illegitimate and mixed race parentage.  An outsider, he becomes fiercely competitive (even with his own children), strongly disciplined about his music, his route to escape. He followed his mother to Trenchtown, the Kingston ghetto, and made his early forays into the music business with the Wailing Wailers - a kind of Motown clean-cut boy band influenced by local ska and mento music. After a brief excursion to the US, following his mother, frustrated at his lack of success, he returns to Jamaica and his musical style and philosophical self-confidence seems to turn on his becoming a Rastafari.  The documentary spends a good amount of time examining what this religion meant to Marley, and why an outsider might have felt drawn to a minority "cult", itself the subject of prejudice, which preached "one love". 

But for me, the movie really became compelling when it got to its final hour, and Marley's final years.  When Marley was such a potent icon that he was being used by politicians. When Jamaican politics descended into gang violence between crypto-Communists and crypto-Fascists.  When Marley ships equipment to Zimbabwe at his own expense to celebrate independence, but sees his audience tear-gassed.   I love that MacDonald manages to open out from a music documentary into a sad documentary about the tragedy of independence - so many former colonies descending into political chaos or tyranny. That for me, is what makes this documentary, and Marley's life and early death, tragic. (So much so that I wasn't the only person crying in the cinema.) This clash between his harsh experiences; his idealism; and the contested politics against which he had to operate. Even the images of Marley over the final credits are problematic.  Is his music an evangelical rallying cry that has touched people across the world, even today? Or has he become another icon exploited by the merchandising men, like Che Guevara - a face on a T-shirt?

MARLEY played Berlin  and SXSW 2012. It is currently on release in the UK, USA and Ireland. It opens in Belgium on May 9th, in the Netherlands on May 10th, in Germany on May 17th, in Portugal on May 24th and in France on June 13th. 

MARLEY has a runtime of 144 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 15 in the UK. 

MONEYBALL - Unloved

Brad Pitt as Oakland A's manager Billy Beane and
Jonah Hill as his statistician sidekick Peter Brand. 

Michael Lewis is the chronicler of our age - the man who takes us inside big money, whether on the trading floors of Wall Street (LIAR'S POKER, THE BIG SHORT) or in the soccer and baseball stadiums of America (THE BLIND SIDE, MONEYBALL).  Lewis is the documentarian who shows us who big money distorts ethics and produces outcomes that are inefficient, even from a financial point of view.  In previous novels he took us insides world we didn't know and showed us their glamour and danger.  Heck, LIAR'S POKER was as big a recruiter for Wall Street, as well, WALL STREET.  

The fundamental problem with MONEYBALL is that his big angle is really not that insightful.  Lewis wants to tell us that when baseball managers buy players, they are distorted and prejudiced by all sorts of extraneous and irrelevant information - how good looking a player's girlfriend is an index of self-confidence is - how good he is at doing one thing when really what you're buying him for is something really different.  As a result, Lewis argues that the managers systematically misprice players - overpaying for "stars" and underpaying or plain ignoring the hidden gems. Yes, that's it.  That's the big idea.  And for those of us who are the 1 percent, that's really not revolutionary.  It's just Ben Graham's concept of value investing applied to sport. 

Still, even without a revolutionary idea, MONEYBALL could still have been a good underdog sports movie, of the type that DODGEBALL satirised so well. There is something genuinely romantic about failed player and down on his luck coach Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) taking his two-bit club, the Oakland Athletics, to baseball's greatest winning streak in history, and a genuine contender for the World Series. And, because he didn't have the money to outbid the Yankees for the best players, he had to do it with smarts - with a geeky kid called Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who believed that stats could pick a holistic team of write-offs and turn them into a great and consistent squad. All this in the face of stiff competition from the conservative old guard, particularly coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the rest of the baseball fraternity.  I was expecting a buddy movie - as the handsome jock and nervous geek unite against the world - an underdog movie - a David versus Goliath feelgood epic.  And who cares if I don't know about baseball? I love cricket so much I can appreciate a game suffused with stats, and that chronicles the triumph of the statos over the jocks. 

But no, MONEYBALL turns out to be an utter damp squib of a movie - unloved, uncared for, without a single voice, a single vision, or any conviction about what it's trying to do.  I guess the problem is literally one of rejected parentage. Originally this was a movie that was going to be directed by Steven Soderbergh (CONTAGION) with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian (the forthcoming GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO).  But then, at the last minute, Soderbergh was axed in favour of Bennett Miller, a relative unknown who hasn't done anything since 2005's CAPOTE, and the script was rewritten by Aaron Sorkin of THE SOCIAL NETWORK fame.  The result is a script and a film that just never finds its groove.  

For the most part the dialogue is flat, and characters ill-fleshed out. There is no charismatic connection between Pitt and Hill.  Pitt does that thing where he thinks he's acting if he constantly eats on screen and squints.  Hill turns out to be utterly uninteresting in a straight, non-comedic role.  Poor Philip Seymour Hoffman barely gets anything to do as the antagonist. We don't feel the stakes. We don't buy Pitt's apparently tragic back story.  His connection with his daughter seems utterly trite. There's  not enough actual gameplay. But then again, I didn't really feel like I knew what the coaches were doing or why certain moneyball tactics were working.  The only flashes of wit and excitement are a couple of scenes where Beane is playing off team's against each other, and another brilliant scene in Boston - scenes that scream Sorkin and jar against the tone of the rest of the film.  One can only imagine what this film might have been with Fincher and Sorkin behind the camera, and maybe Clooney and Gordon-Levitt in front of the camera.  And believe me, you'll be so bored, you'll have plenty of time for such conjecture.

MONEYBALL played Toronto and Tokyo 2011. It was released earlier this year in the US, India, Mexico, Russia, Panama, Iceland, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Japan, Taiwan, France, Israel, the Netherlands and Brazil. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland. It opens on December 2nd in Finland and Lithuania; on December 8th in Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Sweden and Turkey/ It opens on December 16th in Norway; on December 23rd in Estonia; on January 12th in Portugal; on January 27th in Italy; on February 2nd in Germany and Spain and on February 16th in Singapore.