Inside Llewyn Davis (2014)

Llewyn Davis is a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1961. Gloriously, and in typical Coen Brother’s style, that’s it. That’s everything.

The film is a vignette of a man frozen in his own endurance against a set of circumstances which really aren’t rewarding his dedication to his art. It is a black comedy of errors that offers no respite to its central character in the way of plot development or hope. It sounds bleak, it is bleak, but it’s also sweet, funny and utterly absorbing.

Oscar Isaac gives a measured performance of give-up glances and hundred-mile stares that invites sympathetic sighs despite Llewyn clearly being the washed-up loser everybody is telling him he is. The supporting cast fill out the world around him with a mixture of dedicated artists (Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver), ageing music business types (F. Murray Abraham) and a very angry ex-lover (Carey Mulligan). All commit themselves to colouring the Coen’s barren world of frustration and sterile ambition.

Talking of colouring the Coen’s world, the film looks beautiful. French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel marinades every scene in the muted browns, greens and blues of old folk album covers enhancing the coldness and melancholy of the film immeasurably.

As Llewyn stumbles from mishap to mishap, he finds his path repeatedly crossed by a series of ginger tabby cats who may or may not be the same animal. Whether they are or not is a tease. As Joel Coen said himself “the film doesn’t really have a plot. That concerned us at one point; that’s why we threw the cat in.”

If anything, the cat(s) are just a parallel to Llewyn, highlighting the randomness of fortune. Some incarnations of the cat are lucky; others (the final one) are very unlucky. Perhaps the key difference between Llewyn and the cat is demonstrated in one of the best sequences in the film where Llewyn journeys on the subway with the cat held carefully over his shoulder. Eyes glazed over, Llewyn stares at the floor. Suddenly we are given a POV of the cat who is looking out of the window at the stations as they whizz by. Excited by the sights, the cat makes a dash for it. Proactive and outward looking, the cat embodies the perfect contrast to Llewyn’s introversion and inertia.

The Coens’ direction is, as always, delicate and purposeful. Long single takes of music performances add a sense of truth and grit which mirror the themes of folk songs in general. There are no cutaways faking a complete performance through a compilation of separate takes – it all happens live (including sound, which was, for the most part, recorded live on set.) Llewyn himself is rarely framed in a shot with others. Even if he is having a conversation with someone sitting on the same park bench, still he is alone.

Apart from staying honest to a range of characters and the wit with which the ear-candy dialogue is constructed, perhaps the biggest achievement of the script is in not painting Llewyn as a consummate victim. We feel sorry for the hard time he is having but his laconic reaction to roadblocks and the sanctity with which he preaches about his art despite being so dependent on his friends lead us to suspect that perhaps Carey Mulligan’s character Jean is right when she says:

“You don’t wanna go anywhere. And that’s why all the same shit is gonna keep happening to you – because you want it to.”

Having us empathise with Llewyn’s melancholia despite his cyclical self-made woe is the key to why Inside Llewyn Davis is such an exquisite film. The look of the film, its period detail and precision direction just amplifies this engagement. A joy.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

The Woody Allen archetype is one of the most lucid cinematic creations of the last 50 years. It is the big screen extension of Allen’s early stand-up career, the neurotic ramblings of which crossed over successfully onto his filmic characters, drawing knowing laughs from the nervous-wreck component in the psyche of everyone who saw them. Often – especially in his early films – Allen would play these characters himself but, even when deciding to remain behind the camera, fast-talking anxiety-ridden anti-heroes still pepper his work.

Plenty of darkness follows these characters through their tribulations and Allen has always laced shades of tragedy through the scripts he writes – his most celebrated style is a kind of gloomy light-heartedness – but nothing of his I’ve seen explores the back story and motivations of his muse with as much mastery and depth as Blue Jasmine.

The film essentially grabs the psychological turmoil of his lead, Jasmine Francis, from the incidental and thrusts it right into the spotlight before examining it at close quarters. Cate Blanchett is compelling as the eponymous character who is forced into taking refuge in the home of her adopted sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), when her life as a New York socialite married to an obscenely wealthy financier (Alec Baldwin) crumbles as a result of her husband’s downfall and disgrace. There is comedy of course, but this rather seeps through the tragedy rather than vice versa.

Jasmine is at once a terrifying and immensely sympathetic character, eliciting grimaces from the audience the deeper she digs her holes. On the surface, she has an honest effort at rebuilding her life, working thanklessly as a dentist’s receptionist to support her computer classes which she takes with a view to becoming an interior designer. Nevertheless her neuroses won’t yield and, simply unable to adjust to a life lower down in the socio-economic scale, she aids her own mind’s disintegration with a dependency on Xanax and alcohol which deepens the more face she tries to save. (The exact nuances of a person lonely and depressed and how consummately Allen and Blanchett observe them deserve to be written about at length and in depth and hopefully have been/will be elsewhere.)

In the score, the familiar lounge jazz of many Woody Allen films dovetails between scenes in a way anempathetic to Jasmine’s plight but sometimes coming across as a sigh at the inevitability of her decline.

I see three tones balanced impeccably throughout the film, the first is the drama/tragedy that impels the narrative, second is comedy and third is horror. In a way, Blue Jasmine really is a horror film and the laughs are served up and indulged in as a reaction to the terror of losing one’s mind, catching in the throat as soon as they rise. My favourite scene demonstrates this powerfully. Jasmine sits in a café babysitting her two nephews and begins (as she often does) drunkenly drifting into a monologue as if the boys were not present. They sit open-mouthed as she waxes on about the song ‘Blue Moon’ and her life’s ambitions. Suddenly she is present and advises the boys to be generous when they become wealthy. When they respond “mom said you used to be OK but then you got crazy”, the look on her face is more terrifying than her wide-eyed Galadriel close-up in The Fellowship of the Ring with none of that moment’s surprise factor needed. As she finishes “there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming” the audience’s reaction is a confused mixture of laughter, tears and recoil. That response adequately sums up the film.

July Catch-up Part 1: The Bling Ring & Now You See Me

These two would make a neat double bill on the theme of superficiality. Both deal with appearance and illusion and as such, both leave themselves immediately open to criticism for being somewhat empty and insubstantial films. One of them could actually make a case for being an engaging study of vacuous people; the other, however, is essentially vacuous in and of itself.

The film I’m being fairly positive about is The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s heist drama based on the real-life exploits of a group of affluent teenagers who burgled the unlocked homes of Hollywood’s most fashionable celebrities repeatedly over a year-long period beginning in October 2008.

Considering the goldmine of themes that Coppola has the opportunity to exploit and examine, she has little to say in either support or condemnation of the annoying gang of thing-obsessed youngsters at the heart of her film. The script is saturated with so much “like”s “totally”s and “oh my God”s that there is barely enough room for any dialogue that means anything. We learn little about the motives of the perpetrators, see nothing of their pasts that might shed some light on their characters, in fact see nothing beyond the artifice of their shallow concerns. Coppola refuses to be drawn on whether the bling ring are victims of a society obsessed with fame and shiny objects or simply opportunists looking for expensive stuff and an adrenaline rush.

The direction is stylised for sure, with notable heavy use of slow motion which serves to glorify the great time everyone is having. My favourite shot is a static wide (probably filmed from a helicopter) of a huge Hollywood house which is entered by the two leaders of the group, Rebecca and Marc who rifle through their victims belongings, pack their spoils into bags and exit – all in the space of around 2 minutes.

The cast consist of several solid debut performers, with Katie Chang and Israel Broussard being particularly impressive in their first outing. Inevitably, much of the spotlight falls on Harry Potter megastar Emma Watson but – as in The Perks of Being a Wallflower ­last year – she continues to defy the washed-out-ex-child-actor stereotype posting another accomplished portrayal. Her character Nicki Moore has the arrogant swagger at the film’s core and, although she has little screen time compared to some of the others, her presence is a strong adhesion in the group scenes and pure deadpan in the press interview scenes.

However much you might want The Bling Ring to be a bit harsh on someone or something, it isn’t a biting satire. It isn’t a eulogy to glamour either. Clearly Sofia Coppola has made a vapid film in order to depict vapid lifestyles – which is almost a get out of jail free card… as such, it’s difficult to praise or criticise the film beyond saying that her approach is probably the right one. It’s about nothing and has nothing to say about characters who live for glitzy nothings. And that probably says everything.

***

Now for Now You See Me which centres on four illusionists/con-artists (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco) whose massive live shows appear to drain the biggest bank vaults of the world and spit the stolen money out into the grateful audience. With the authorities on their tails desperate to prove them as criminals, ‘the Four Horsemen’ – as they dub themselves – put on shows of ever increasing size and ambition. The film is constantly building momentum towards… something… Whatever it is, we never really have it defined for us and by the time the film works itself out, everything ends and a soldered-on denouement offers a tedious explanation, leaving us feeling as empty and unconvinced as a film can.

Riffing on the theme of performance magic and hiring various Christopher Nolan regulars, the film has heavy pretensions of being something like The Prestige – one of the best films there is – but comes nowhere close.

In The Prestige, when Michael Cane says something mysterious about the psychology of magic, it is then backed up by an absorbing array of film trickery and breathtaking narrative misdirection all of which ties plot, character and atmosphere into something approaching the best film of the 00s. In Now You See Me, when Morgan Freeman says something mysterious like “the more you think you see, the easer it’ll be to fool you” or “the closer you think you are, the less you’ll actually see”, what then happens is a few special effects, magic show audiences then say “wow” in an attempt to make the cinema audiences say “wow” and eventually we’re all wowing at how little anything ties together.

Before Midnight (2013)

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) depict two desperately short encounters between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). In the first, the two 23-year-olds meet on a train and end up alighting together for a night wandering around Vienna. 9 years later, they collide once more, this time in Paris where Jesse – now a successful author – is wrapping up a book tour.

In Before Midnight, the couple are finally a couple, Jesse having left his wife some years ago to set up life with Celine in France. The film covers about 12 hours – from midday to midnight – of their final day in Greece, where they have spent an idyllic summer staying with a small circle of friends and family as guests at a fellow writer’s retreat.

The film is stunning. As with its prequels, the characters are round and deep and their interaction effortlessly natural. The script, co-written by Linklater, Delpy and Hawke, is so good it’s almost unbearable. Linklater’s direction is beautifully simple; once again it shows off the charm of the film’s locations and his impeccably measured shots (some of them minutes long) cut between themselves only when absolutely necessary.

I have the feeling – though I’ve never heard it said – that the dialogue in the Before films is found irksome by some people. I’m projecting. I worry that I find it irksome… So often, scripts aiming for earnest interaction fall anodyne – die by the hand of sentimental writers. As such, the natural reaction to such honest conversation onscreen is “I wonder when in the next 30 seconds these characters will betray their author.” In Before Midnight, that never happens.

As a test, I try to insist to myself that no two people in the real world have such curiosity and philosophical insight into their own lives as Jesse and Celine. But I find myself so unable not to believe in them at every moment that I can’t keep this devil’s advocation up. The eb and flow of their conversation together with its awkward punctuations and intricate body language leaves no room to accuse the characters of being works of fiction, despite the fact that they actually are.

As the film climaxes with a passionate hotel room argument, we see each character clearly motivated by everything we have ever learned about them and experienced alongside them over the three films. The way they have grown, matured, deepened and, in certain aspects, actually remained the same over the last 18 years, culminates in a masterpiece of onscreen conflict, during which I was again bowled over by how much I care for Jesse and Celine. I’m in love with these characters (I think a lot of people must be) and I simply beam in their company. Delpy and Hawke have such omniscience about the lovers they have been portraying for nearly two decades that at every moment, they demonstrate complete awareness every thought and feeling expressed in the story of their relationship both on film and away from it. It is such a rich fiction.

After watching each of the first two films, I did not yearn for a sequel, finding myself more than happy taking what Linklater gave us of the saga, confident that the characters would go on existing boldly somewhere in the real world whether or not a new instalment came along. I feel the same about Before Midnight. I admit though that I am not old enough to have been anticipating a Before film for as long as 9 years (I watched all 3 for the first time within days of each other).

Perhaps, then, as the years roll by, my fingers will find themselves crossing for a Part Four in 2022. If it does happen, all I can say is that I’ve never had so much trust in a team of actors/writers and director so far into the future. However long Linklater, Delpy and Hawke stick with this project, I trust that it will go on being beautiful every step of the way.

World War Z (2013)

With a troubled stop-start production spanning over 5 years from the initial script stage, through several rewrites, shoots and re-shoots, and finally released last Friday, World War Z is a perfectly OK way to spend 2 hours and a perfectly unnecessary way to spend $200 million on a genre that never needed it.

Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a former U.N employee drafted back into service when a worldwide zombie pandemic causes general mayhem in every corner of the globe. Thankfully, Pitt does the American leading man thing very well and so his performance is one of very few things gluing this messy film together. The blatant cracks discernable in a project with so many writers and producers become less of a problem as the story progresses. We know we’re rooting for Gerry Lane – barely anything else makes sense – so Pitt’s performance is the one straight arrow we can hang onto.

I can live with the directionless narrative. I’m sure some people involved in the film are devastated with how incoherent World War Z’s story is but I’d rather a film aimed for Hollywood thriller formula and missed than put me to sleep with a gentle lead through tension/release/tension/release. What did kill the film for me was any element of the ‘Action’ genre thrown into the mix, which diluted the sense of threat and dread that a good zombie film can imbue.

Big explosions, plane crashes, helicopter shots of citywide inferno, pacey cutting sequences showing swarms of undead braineaters encroaching on Israel. All looked so expensive to make and yet had so little dramatic impact. I remain unconvinced by sprinting zombies whose presence ensures only that their victims have less time to feel terrified and spend more time being eaten than running away.

The film takes an unexpected turn for the better half an hour from the end when, after another expensive-looking set piece involving an exploding grenade on a commercial flight, Gerry Lane finds himself crash landing next door to a World Heath Organization facility in Cardiff – actual Cardiff, in Wales. From my limited research I understand that at this point, the writing credit switches (for the nth time), this time to long-time Joss Whedon collaborator, Drew Goddard, which might explain why the film suddenly seems to tighten up. The maze of corridors in the WHO facility is the perfect playground for the undead.

Not only does Pitt have to sneak past the infested area to retrieve some *important items* but the zombies have slowed down considerably. Described now as ‘inactive’, they amble around with the traditional clumsy sloth of the zombies in classic horror films and, for the first time, we get to have a few clear 10-second close-ups of the creatures. Not surprisingly, this is the scariest sequence of the film. Ridden with tension and wrapped in a lucid goal-orientated narrative, after nearly 2 hours, World War Z actually begins to get… exciting…

And then it ends.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

The Great Gatsby provides Baz Luhrmann with his perfect source material – a tragic love story perpetuated by the delusional glitz and shine of a hopeless idealist. Just like Moulin Rouge. Just like Romeo + Juliet.

Cinegoers who can’t leave F. Scott Fitzgerald at home have a hard time squaring with the blinged up, hyper-reality of Luhrmann’s world and stare aghast as perhaps their favourite novel is given the sugar-injected treatment of his direction. This is how he does film, how he always has. His style is as frivolous and obstreperous as a pop music video but betrays exactly the same flashes of authentic emotion as that throwaway medium. These pangs are what made Moulin Rouge exhilarating and why I looked forward to The Great Gatsby.

Unfortunately, for me, The Great Gatsby doesn’t quite match up to Luhrmann’s 2001 zenith. Ironically, considering the criticisms usually levelled at the Australian filmmaker, I actually think he pays too much reverence to Fitzgerald’s novel and this often nips in the bud any moment that threatens to burst into vibrancy. So characteristic is his style that it can only work when images assault the audience, daring them to keep up with the swift cutting, confusing them into giddy frenzy with a ridiculously number of unnecessary camera angles.

The film does have its moments of pupil-dilating rushes. Gratuitous mile-long crash zooms down the sides of skyscrapers or across the lake from Gatsby’s mansion to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock do raise the dopamine levels; however, the obligation to expose the steady fluency of Fitzgerald’s narrative puts the handbrake on Luhrmann’s usual hyperactivity.

The cast are generally very good, with Leonardo DiCaprio really shining at times. Since first working with Luhrmann in 1996, DiCaprio has developed into one of America’s brilliant film actors but, even so, I hadn’t expected him to get quite so close to the smile that Fitzgerald describes as ‘one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.’

To my great happiness he also lives up to another of the most important and moving scenes in the novel – his meeting with Daisy at Nick’s house. Here, in my screening, he elicited laughs and moans from a packed audience as he endearingly conveyed the desperate and pathetic frenzy of a man whose reunion with a long-lost love is going achingly unaccording to plan.

Carey Mulligan too achieves something like Daisy Buchanan with the highlight being the look on her face first time she hears that Gatsby is living just across the bay. She is not as cruel as Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanen, who I always imagine having the caprice and cruelty of a femme fatale.

Tobey Maguire’s performance is kind of bland but it doesn’t matter; it reinforces the sense of his character Nick being a spectator to wild times and counterpoints well against the wild people Nick is hanging around with. One thing I’m not on board with is the film’s decision to reinvent Nick as an alcoholic ruin of a man reminiscing about the roaring twenties and writing it down as therapy into a book, the book, The Great Gatsby.

As Maguire reads passages from the book, the text assembles itself on screen before dissolving away. This is Luhrmann admitting that his film lacks Fitzgerald’s brilliant descriptive passages and apologising for it. I’d much rather he didn’t and, instead, got on with showing us his vision. A book is a book. Not better than a film but a different medium altogether. We shouldn’t be read to in a cinema. This is the major problem of the film. Its director acts as if a film (in this case his film) needs to be the definitive version of the original text and is a failure if it loses something in translation.

The book is there for us anytime. Any adaptation is, or should be, its own reflection of the characters and themes and should follow its own integrity.

Although the film suffers because of Baz Luhrmann’s reticence to drop the homage routine, it is probably still the most idiosyncratic of all Great Gatsby’s so far and is surely worth seeing for this reason.

Evil Dead (2013)

It wouldn’t do good to pretend that this film can be thoroughly reviewed by someone who never caught up with the notorious 1981 film but the truth is – like most in the screening I found myself in – I’m too young to remember the original The Evil Dead and too overwhelmed with a long list of past classics to have yet seen everything made before I was born. Just know that I’m ignorant and guiltless, like every 20-something.

Apologies dealt with, I enjoyed 2013 Evil Dead. It is a very well made 5-young-adults-go-to-a-cabin-in-the-woods-and-get-hacked-to-bits-by-demons horror film. Sam Raimi obviously saw fit to trust debut feature-length director Fede Alvarez with the reboot of his franchise and Alvarez delivers a spectacularly gory effort with absurd amounts of blood and plenty of opportunities for audiences to laugh at the sight of themselves jumping out of their collective skin.

The editors have the pacing of the scares measured to a science, beginning with innocuous loud noise transitions, progressing to faux tension builds, finally reaching genuine jumps before descending into all out gore at the halfway point and not letting up until everyone’s dead and buried (or are they?). All of this wraps at 91 minutes, a very sensible length and one that you suspect could have been stretched to a pointless 2 hours by most inexperienced directors. Raimi’s original clocked in at a similar 85 minutes and it was perhaps his genre-savvy guidance that prevented the remake from yawning on too far past this marker.

If there is one problem with the film, and it is a fairly big one, it is that Evil Dead offers nothing new to the horror genre or any of its subgenres. It employs the grotesque mutilation realism of a splatter, the soft-loud dynamics of a jump scare flick, the supernatural back-story of a chiller and the faintly ridiculous demon voice of a possession film, but has no unique identity of its own.

This is probably best explained by the fact that this IS a remake, attempting to recreate and pay homage to the spirit of a 32-year-old movie. The thing is: no genre ‘moves with the times’ as fast as horror. And nothing stubbornly holds onto the fears and phobias of a particular era than a remake. Feeling particularly out of date is the sweary male/female voice of the demon as it speaks through the possessed characters. A trope such as this is rooted in the 70s/80s and has suffered too many The Exorcist parodies to be really effective in 2013 as anything other than bait for teenage sniggers.

One nostalgic trick that does hold up is the use of prosthetic special effects, which are terrific. Making notes immediately after leaving the cinema, I wrote “this is one of the few CG-heavy films that won’t alienate you with sheer unbelievability.” Well, I’m happy to report that the makers of Evil Dead painstakingly created the bloody set pieces for real, which is brilliant. I assumed that some particularly horrific moments could only have been achieved by computers. In fact, the reverse is true. Happily, the only way to achieve utterly believable special effects continues to be through the use of the ancient method of models and prosthetics.

Ultimately, Evil Dead is notable only for its high quality production values. It has all the component parts of a classic 20^th century horror and is definitely worth a watch. Unfortunately for its legacy, the recipe was already perfected many years ago and many of the ingredients have far passed their sell by date.

Dark Skies (2013)

When trailers put you off virtually everything, the great thing about resigning yourself to anything is that sometimes something advertised as average tosh might turn out to be genuinely interesting. Step forward Dark Skies whose tag ‘from the producers of Insidious and Sinister’ promises a jumpfest of cheap scares with nothing too substantial in terms of narrative or theme. When the trailer is intercut with title cards that read: “When they come for you… there’s nowhere… you can… hide” alarm bells really start ringing. But like I said, being resigned to having “nowhere to hide” from the prospect of an awful film is a sweet state when the film actually turns out to be quite good.

The horror genre really is something special. When done well, nothing packs a greater punch in the cinema. The best horror films have always spoken in metaphors, exploiting the fears of each passing age and inviting audiences to mock themselves or – even better – shock themselves into recognising what their fears actually are and how their behaviour shapes itself in reaction to those fears.

Dark Skies targets a very traditional subject for its attention, one that stretches way back to The Exorcist (1973) and probably further – paedophobia; that is, fear of children, but more specifically in this case, fear of the maturation of children – fear of encroaching adolescence. Broadly speaking, Dark Skies’ central theme is family and the fear of anything that can undermine the institution of the family. Marital turbulence, unemployment, financial insecurity, house insecurity – all feature in the lives of the doom laden Barrett family. However, all are outstripped by what is by far the biggest concern of parents Daniel and Lacy: the world outside the boundaries of the home and the influences that could be invading and shaping the development of their growing boys, Jesse and Sammy.

The genius of the film is that we empathise at all times with the young couple and never suspect them for the perpetrators of their own nightmare. They are presented as an extraordinarily ordinary middle-American man-and-wife with the hope, dreams, trials and troubles of any family in the developed world. The film does not attack them for over-parenting but instead implicitly hints at a culture, accepted as ordinary, which obsesses over the safety of children – a culture which may be inadvertently damaging the futures of young people by anesthetising their environments.

The invasion of the Barrett home by extra-terrestrials I believe to be a metaphor for Daniel and Lacy’s fear of the influences on their children of things beyond their control. The feared abduction of their children is tantamount to their terror that Jesse and Sammy might one day fly the nest and leave home. The Barretts refuse to accept that their eldest, Jesse’s, new set of interests are a natural side-effect of hitting 13 years of age and instead lash out at his older friend Ratner who is assisting in their son’s exploration of violent computer games and pornography. In fact, Jesse’s one fumbling foray into the world of girls results in no harm, merely light relief and, eventually, an innocent kiss. His night time bike ride home after the incident is gloriously underscored with “Days” by The Drums and stands out sweetly from anything else in the film.

Meanwhile, the domestic-centric view of the world held by his mother Lacy is highlighted in a scene where hundreds of birds all converge on the house in a mass mistake of migration. As the supernatural expert Edwin Pollard, who she later consults, explains, “it isn’t what you want to hear but your case is nothing special”. In fact, many families are invaded by what Pollard terms “the Grays” and most cases end in child abduction. Hmm… He also adds (as a brilliant side note) that there have been rare cases reported where the abductees are eventually returned to their families (which I’m thinking is simply the grown-up child visiting from university during the holidays).

Aside from its excellent web of symbology, for me the film succeeds in building a claustrophobic atmosphere of tenebrous inevitability in which one always feels a storm is just around the corner. In fact, it was this heavy sense of doom that hooked me onto what I’ve explained I believe the film to be about. I linked together the moments of dialogue and the set pieces that it seemed were contributing to the moodiness of the piece and all of a sudden it all became clear.

Now there is plenty about Dark Skies that might convince you that all of this subtext is a happy coincidence or a result of my reading too much into things. After all, the film does aim to be a jumpy ‘boo!’ horror film and, without the padeophobic slant, it is a very silly and very average scarefest in line with the Paranormal Activity fare of the world. Its scary moments aren’t particularly blood-freezing and it would be dishonest to pretend that the film doesn’t fail somewhat on that basis. But it would also be dishonest of me to pretend that I don’t fully believe that its makers really did intend to create a biting satire on society’s exaltation of the nuclear family and its attitude of protecting the perfection of the 2-parents-2-children paradigm at all costs.

‘Cos I’m convinced they did mean it and I liked the message and I liked the film.

Compliance (2012)

First screened at Sundance over a year ago, Compliance only made it to UK screens last Friday and is unlikely to linger thereon far past next Friday before sliding off onto DVD. Based on a series of real-life incidents across America, it depicts the ordeal of a fast food restaurant employee (Dreama Walker) when she is accused of stealing by the ‘policeman’ who rings her place of work.

Sandra (Ann Dowd) is the manager of the restaurant taking directions from the man we find out very quickly is a prank caller. She and her staff are, at every step, convinced to carry out the ‘police procedures’ dictated by the caller whose demands become increasingly disturbing as the ordeal continues.

It begins in a typically indie-serious manner with a series of still life shots (a shopping trolley, a stack of boxes, some pans) underscored by a driving cello ostinato. As the characters are introduced and the situation set up, it has the awkward feel of a sort of GCSE Psychology educational drama made to teach students how conformity works. Maybe this is because I knew what was coming but so does everyone – the film’s plot is detailed in its synopsis.

One major gripe of a great number of people who have seen the film is how unrealistic it seems that everyone at the restaurant complies with the caller, with no proof that he is a genuine officer of the law, to the extent that the innocent girl, Becky, is thoroughly humiliated and plainly abused.

Director Craig Zobel of course can, and does, hide behind the true story that inspired his film. Speaking on Radio 5live, he explained its partly negative reception at Sundance last year:

‘Everyone’s reactions, when they hear these stories is, “well I would never do that, I would never listen, I would know it was a fake” yet it happens all the time… there are certain people that are not comfortable imagining themselves ever being in that place and reject that idea.’

Fair enough, these things do happen, and this particular event actually did. Earlier in the interview, Zobel demonstrates his familiarity with Stanley Milgram’s conformity experiments which illustrate that it is indeed horrific the things humans will do if an authority figure tells them to. But when viewing a film, obviously people are going to get angry and mistrustful if their engagement with the story isn’t sufficient enough for them to suffer the same lack of moral judgement as the characters on screen do.

It would be an incredible feat to pull this off – the best bet might have been to attempt to fool the audience into believing that the caller was a real policeman, which would necessitate less of a giveaway title than Compliance and more secrecy in the media. But here’s the real problem – the media can’t describe the film in any other way than revealing the caller to be a prankster because the film is made in such a way that its only focus, only point of interest is how people respond to a fake authority figure. Like I said, it feels too much like an educational film and while watching it, I constantly pictured the director nodding sagely mouthing the words “it can happen”. OK Craig Zobel, yes it can, but while you treat your characters like dummies whose only purpose is to illustrate a textbook case, the message isn’t really hitting home.

This leads neatly to the second big problem of the film: with the characters, especially Becky, often looking and behaving robotically, it invites accusations of exploitation. Because we aren’t invested in the verisimilitude of events (even if we do accept that they really happened), as the film progresses and the central actress loses more and more clothes, there rises a creeping suspicion that the film is starting to play to the male gaze. Zobel doesn’t help himself by moving the camera behind a storage cabinet while Becky removes particular items of clothing. Rather than protecting the actress’ modesty with an artsy tracking shot, this moment comes across more as a tease. The ‘you can see this, but you can’t see that’ attitude is a big moment of discomfort. If the film was serious about depicting a real event/tackling a serious issue, surely the way to confront something is to represent it clinically, entirely. The way the director handled this moment reeked of exploitation.

If you’re going to make an exploitation film, fine; it isn’t a crime, there are some sleazy merits to doing so. If you’re going to make a serious issue docudrama, then do that instead. I’m sure there are some rare genius instances where the two can be combined but in this case, they most definitely shouldn’t be.

To pay Zobel his due, his writing, especially for ‘Officer Daniels’ (Pat Healy), does at times display a good understanding of the psychology behind coercion and conformity. I believe he has a thorough apprehension of the subject and even good intentions. The trouble is, he is much too impressed with the knowledge on a theoretical level and seems to delight in imparting the shocking news that human beings are far too enamoured with anybody who wears a uniform to think clearly. What he needed to do was force us to see it through good characterisation, without clouding the issue with suspicious exploitative moments.

Side Effects (2013)

All artists – directors especially – run the risk of becoming too precious with their output. Reticent to send out into the world something that doesn’t exactly embody their style/outlook or fully display their talents, they can find the gaps between pieces of work starting to increase. Years soon pass with no new releases. Eventually, if the one film every six (or more) years isn’t gold dust, it can just about finish a perfectionist off.

Steven Soderbergh, it seems, experiences no such creative block. Side Effects is his 5^th film in 2 years and it isn’t bad either. If nothing else, Soderbergh deserves credit for the solid consistency of his work and the drive and ambition with which he dives into each new project.

This said, there is often a feeling of slight disappointment upon leaving most of Soderbergh’s recent films. They seem to promise something special and original before settling into one of many well constructed but well-worn narrative paths about halfway through.

The Side Effects trailer invites one to expect a scathing attack on the pharmaceutical industry and a story that perhaps focuses on the negative consequences of prescribing brain chemistry-altering drugs to depressed individuals. The film does begin with this set up but somewhere along the way abandons any serious agenda in favour of the twists and turns of a traditional thriller. It gives the impression of being through composed from start to finish, with writer Scott Z. Burns unable to follow through on his original idea so juicing it up with one shocking revelation after another for his own amusement.

Acting is typically dependable from stars such as Jude Law, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Channing Tatum. The screenplay is a little hammy and much of the dialogue doesn’t ring true but the cracks are capably papered over by the cast. Given what seems like the fewest lines and handed the arguably easy task of looking distraught for much of the film, Rooney Mara gives the most believable performance. She plays Emily, a woman prescribed ‘Ablixa’, a trial antidepressant with some undesirable side effects. As a tragedy unfolds, Emily’s doctor Jonathan (Jude Law) faces charges of negligence and the motives of everyone involved are gradually untangled (then re-tangled and finally re-untangled).

The thing that holds Side Effects together once its narrative begins to slip is Steven Soderbergh’s workmanship as a director and editor. The film is well put together by a man who knows how to tell a story. This makes it enjoyable long after you realise that the controversial issue-based drama you were sold isn’t quite what is being delivered to your eyes and ears.

Whatever genre it begins in, the film ends up as a sort of neo-noir with yellow (not black) washing out all else in the colour palette. I quite like this. Soderbergh did the same thing with Contagion, using some sort of filter throughout the film to jaundice almost every shot. It makes the film look ill and is very effective although not necessarily appealing to the eye. Its phlegmy aesthetic is just one of I’m sure many little tricks the director uses to give the film its shape and consistency.

Side Effects may not be the film you were expecting to see, but it is a good watch. Although the themes it touches upon may provoke an afternoon on Wikipedia, the film itself doesn’t clarify or engage in such debates as “how to treat depression” or “who benefits from prescribing certain medications – the patient or the pharmaceuticals?” It simply exploits this subject matter to fuel a thriller – albeit an enjoyable one.