Somewhere

Mini Reviews

Archipelago (2011)

British director Joanna Hogg returns to the upper-middle-classes for her second film, Archipelago, set on a holiday home in the Scilly Isles.  Patricia (Kate Fahy) welcomes her two grown-up children, Edward and Cynthia (Tom Hiddleston and Lydia Leonard) for an autumnal vacation before Edward is set to travel to Africa to raise awareness about sexual health.  As in her previous film, Unrelated, Hogg’s script bristles with unspoken tensions that slowly rise to the surface.  Cynthia pours scorn on her brother’s “gap year”; the father is mysteriously absent, merely a voice at the other end of the phone, and Edward begins an inappropriate relationship with Rose, the young cook the family has hired to prepare all their meals for them.  It’s a film of repeated uncomfortableness and, in this sense, is very British, although Hogg’s static camera work and avoidance of close-up more often recall her European contemporaries.  One scene, concerning whether the meat is undercooked in a restaurant, is particularly excruciating, a minor masterpiece of escalating embarrassment.  The inclusion of an weather-beaten artist who gives Patricia and Cynthia painting lessons as he teaches Edward about life is the only false note Archipelago strikes, adding unnecessary resolution and solidity to the ideas and feelings the film deals with more complexly elsewhere.  Hogg’s overriding theme – that families know and understand each other much less than tradition would have us believe (Archipelago is a telling title in its image of a group of small islands only loosely connected to one another) – means that it shares much in common with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s masterful Still Walking, itself a call-back to Tokyo Story.  It’s a meticulous, at times frustrating, film but a completely original addition to British cinema.

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)

A pleasing enough romantic comedy, Crazy Stupid Love falls down in trying too hard to be all things to all people.  The movie begins in a restaurant where sad-sack Cal (Steve Carrell) is told by his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore, surprisingly loose), that she wants a divorce.  After hanging out in bars for a few weeks, Cal is taken pity on by lady’s man Jacob (Ryan Gosling, even more fly-poppingly sexual here than in Drive), who teaches him how to woo twenty-something women into bed.  Jacob is undergoing a transformation of his own, however, thanks to Emma Stone’s typically likeable Hannah, a “game changer” with whom he might just be able to settle down with.  There are two decent films here: one is a mostly realistic dissection of two people realising that they might have fallen out of love with one another, and the other is a much more entertaining rom-com about a commitment-phobe finally finding the right girl.  The fact that neither is given much space, and at the expense of an irritating and, in the end, creepy, subplot involving Cal’s son falling in love with his teenage babysitter, means that the film never really escapes middling Sunday afternoon entertainment fare.  Carrell and Moore are constantly tasked with filling in the gaps in a script that, ultimately, doesn’t really seem to care if they patch up their differences, although the film’s refreshing approach to Emily’s infidelity is rarity in this kind of film.  The real draw is the chemistry between Gosling and Stone, and the movies soars whenever they’re together, particularly during a drunken seduction scene that is one of the stand-out sequences of the year, and which the rest of the film fails to live up to.  Talented supporting players Kevin Bacon (as Emily’s work partner-cum-love interest) and Marisa Tomei (as a high-pitched rebound for Cal) are given short shrift in a script that manages to seem both long-winded and vacuous at the same time.  That this is from the writers of the excellent, and much more scabrous, Bad Santa and I Love You, Philip Morris makes this an even bigger disappointment.  Not a disaster, more a series of missed opportunities.

Midnight In Paris (2011)

The most successful Woody Allen film in years, Midnight in Paris is unlikely to win over new fans.  Owen Wilson makes for an affable Woody Allen-alike playing Gill, a struggling writer who, whilst on holiday in Paris with his brittle fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams), finds himself transported to the 1920s and, later, the 1890s on his midnight wanderings through the city.  It’s there that he meets a host of writers, artists and filmmakers including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Dali and, more importantly, the beautiful Adriana (Marion Cotillard).  As much as Allen’s film warns against the danger of nostalgia for the “golden age,” he’s guilty of exactly the same pull towards it as Gill is, and the film represents little more than a series of (mostly pleasing) character impersonations.  If the sections set in the past are fun and good-natured, the contemporary sections are an unmitigated disaster.  Inez is such a horrible creation that her pairing with Gill makes almost no sense, her character snowballing into such outrageous caricature that you wonder how these two people even met each, let alone fell in love and became engaged.  Cotillard, meanwhile, is charm personified as the equally unrealistic Parisian dream girl who falls for Gill’s creative vision.  It’s a pity that these are the two extremes of women that the film chooses to show us, since neither is half as much fun as Penelope Cruz’s wildcat turn in Allen’s much superior recent effort Vicky Cristina Barcelona.  Instead, what should be spun sugar is dragged down by the script’s refusal to entertain its female characters as anything approaching human beings.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

Lynne Ramsay’s return to cinema after a long absence during which her intended third project – The Lovely Bones – was yanked away from her and handed to Peter Jackson, is a daring adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s modern classic.  Tilda Swinton plays Eva Khatchadourian, a successful travel writer whom we first as a young woman meet crowd surfing on a sea of people, covered in the crushed tomatoes of La Tomatina festival.  Cut to the present day and she’s living in a poky one-bedroom, the tomatoes replaced by red paint daubed across her front porch that, in turn, transforms in flashback to sirens and blood.  The bestselling book on which Ramsay’s film is based will be familiar to many, the story of how an unsympathetic, upper middle-class woman gives birth to a child she neither loves nor wants.  Years later, Kevin becomes an inscrutable monster, responsible for a Columbine-style slaying at his high school, and Eva is left to question if it was her initial inability to love Kevin that led to his actions, or if they are somehow “unanswerable,” the fruit of something more innate.  Although Ramsay drops the novel’s epistolary form, this is still very much first-person cinema, and if the film successfully conveys the claustrophobia of its protagonist, it can’t quite replicate the same internality as Shriver’s unreliable narrator.  Visual cues point to The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby, both films in which childhood evil is ascribed a demonic inheritance, but which – through Ramsay’s eye rather than Eva’s – come across as hysterical rather than introspective.  It’s this psychological insularity that the film lacks, but which it recovers from by the time Kevin has become a teenager played by the magnificently creepy, sensual Ezra Miller.  By the time Kevin has killed his younger sister’s guinea pig and taken up archery, questions as to his motivation and the old nature/nurture debate pretty much go out of the window.  As the flashbacks become lengthier, Ramsay’s film loses the experimental edge that makes some of its present day sequence so visceral, but gains real narrative momentum as it builds to its grim ending.  Miller’s psychotic Kevin grips like a vice, and the terse scenes between him and Eva – in which their battle of wills feels less one-sided – are captivating, complicated by both actors’ refusal to play to audience expectations of what the “bad seed” or “neglectful mother” stereotypes should be.  The film, like the book, ends ambiguously (although it’s sure to incite opinions on both ends of the spectrum), and if it doesn’t quite have the psychological detail of Shriver’s text, it’s still horrifying, individual work from one of British cinema’s most individual of voices.

Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn (2011)

As an ardent fan of Hergé’s work, I was expecting to loathe Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the Tintin stories, especially when I learnt that it was in motion capture, and that it was amalgamating two very separate adventures, The Crab with the Golden Claws and The Secret of the Unicorn.  Sometimes lowered expectations are a viewer’s best friend, because Spielberg’s film is an absolutely joy.  When Tintin (Jamie Bell) discovers a model ship called The Unicorn at a flea market, he takes it home only to discover that his model is coveted by several powerful men for the secrets it contains within.  Kidnapped by the villainous Sakharin (Daniel Craig), and placed on a trawler headed for Bagghar, Tintin meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), direct descendent of the original sailor that first sailed on The Unicorn.  Together they head off on a treasure hunt of Indiana Jones-sized proportions, as they make their way across Morocco to find three parts to a key, each hidden in a model Unicorn, that leads to buried treasure.  Much has been made of how jarring the motion capture is, lacking the charm of Hergé’s original.  It’s true that adding light and shadow to the characters rather alters the colour palette of the original stories, but this is still recognisably Tintin.  Since the character has always been something of a curious blank slate, the motion capture effect (although not as impressive as that used in The Rise of the Planet of the Apes) isn’t nearly as distracting as you’d think it would be.  The script, by Stephen Moffatt, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, is witty and, whilst hewing close to the spirit of the original, never feels too referential.  It’s littered with references to previous adventures, from the newspaper clippings in Tintin’s study to the smart way it weaves in Haddock’s introduction story from Crab with the Golden Claws into The Secret of the Unicorn (which takes place entirely on home turf in the comic strip).  It also makes good use of some of the more well-known supporting characters, including Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Thomson and Thompson, and an inspired cameo from opera singer Bianca Castafiore (one can only hope that The Castafiore Emerald gets the big screen treatment at some point).  The action sequences, too, are breathtaking, and this is by far the most fun I’ve had watching one of Spielberg’s films since Catch Me If You Can.  If one particular extended car chase through the streets of Bagghar feels designed to work as a level in the inevitable computer game, its sheer ingenuity is hugely impressive.  My overwhelming impression, however, is just how pleasing the whole enterprise is.  Its pacing, the humour and madcap action are perfectly akin to Hergé’s works and Spielberg has thankfully refused to modernise the stories.  Aside from a few neat hat tips to Tintin’s asexuality – he’s very particular about not having visitors after bedtime! – it’s traditional in the best sense, privileging solid storytelling and characters over one-liners, cynicism and pop culture references.  The actors, too, are across the board fantastic.  Many will adore Serkis’ good-natured booze hound, but for me the real performance to take home is that of Jamie Bell, so perfectly does he capture Tintin’s blind optimism and spirit of adventure.  It’s rare to find a performance this perfectly calibrated to its genre (the only other one that springs to mind, oddly enough, is Nicole Kidman’s in the uneven Australia), but as soon as you hear the phrase “Great snakes!” leave his lips, you realise that any need to worry about Spielberg’s delightful adaptation can be swiftly brushed aside.  Unadulterated pleasure.

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