Inherent Vice (2015)

It has me going back because I’m after what Doc is after and none of us know what that is.

We must be getting somewhere.

The camera movement is telling us as much. Slow push-ins over minutes-long conversations imply the truth is just around the corner if only we follow the leads that this guy is giving us. And the leads that follow those leads.

1970 LA is the perfect time and place for a noir. Hippiedom is over. What about it that can be used to sell stuff is being rapidly assimilated into popular culture, whether that be a buzzword like groovy, a fashion choice like shoulder-length hair or a recreational drug like the weed that Doc’s nemesis, LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen, quaffs at the film’s coda. Anything else countercultural is disposable as a creeping paranoia sweeps through the Californian beach communities soon to be demolished and replaced by high-rises.

If anything makes sense, it’s that a stoner would be trying to make sense of his place in a world on the cusp of leaving him behind.

Inherent Vice drips and aches nostalgia. That’s where it starts and that’s where it lands. Everything that happens in between is a magic trick, precision-engineered to entice you into a riddle you think you can solve even though one jigsaw piece is always missing. Then at your wit’s end, you’re abandoned, and you’re Doc, and you might walk out of the cinema but Paul Thomas Anderson has you where he wants you. Turns out you weren’t here to work out whodunit but to spend 150 minutes feeling both warm and sad and not knowing why.

And you can break it down technically, if you like. You can examine the direction, cinematography, costume, music and performances and find it flawless, if you like. But once you add it back up again, there’s always something extra, extra and elusive, that wasn’t on the ingredients list.

It has me going back and back because I don’t know what it is.

Into the Woods (2015)

The thing about musicals is that they’re melodramatic. I’m not their biggest fan but, the way I understand it, the conceit is this: emotional things happen and excitement swells until the characters involved just cannot keep from spontaneously exploding with all of their joy and sadness into song. Which is fine. I mean, it’s weird, but every genre has its rules, so fine.

When they work on stage, the best musicals have big characters brimming with melodrama. This is partly so audiences on the back row can see what’s going on (and partly because the songs have to be justified somehow). On film, you don’t need to be so big. You have to find ways of communicating the brash audacity of a stage show with devices particular to the medium. That’s how Les Miserables (2012) worked; that’s how Sweeney Todd (2007) worked. Both of these films feel like films. Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods feels like a filmed musical, a throwaway money-spinner.

Les Mis was big in that its characters maintained the melodrama of the stage and were then knowingly filmed in portrait-style close-ups to give audiences a perspective they could never have even sitting on the front row in a theatre. That’s really smart.

Sweeney Todd was big in that, in the hands of a gothic auteur, it was drenched in the visual language of a silent movie and injected with pace by a man who knows a few things about cutting.

As with adapting novels, so with adapting musicals. You won’t offend anyone by blandly covering all the angles and making sure the actors read the script and sing the songs. But it takes a bolder attitude to make it a worthwhile endeavor. The wit of Sondheim and his distinctively angular vocal lines will always be a pleasant thing to sit through but that’s where the good time ends. As a film, Into the Woods just feels exhausting and unnecessary.

Under the Skin (2013)

The film opens with a sequence of measured shots, slowly revealing a Kubrickian blackdrop into which colour and shape are birthed over the swirling dissonance of an atonal minimalist score. Reminiscient of 2001, it is a hypnotising draw which expertly settles the brain’s waves into the rhythm of the following 2 hours.

We follow the dispassionate exploits of an alien dressed in a Scarlett Johansson suit whose mission it seems is to ensnare the men of Scotland in a gloopy black honey trap.

The pattern of seduce and destroy is presented in two styles. The first takes the form of a hidden camera documentary in which Johansson crawls the urban kerbs of Scottish cities in her white transit van, soliciting the conversation of unsuspecting members of the public who really were unsuspecting members of the public. It was only once lured into the van that the director Jonathan Glazer briefed the men about the conceit and hired those willing to be a part of the film to take part in the second of the film’s styled scenes in which Johansson takes her victims into a kind of parallel universe and leads them backward into the sticky black abyss where, one assumes, they are either preserved for study by her alien race or just eaten.

I really liked the film. It is slow but it is involving. Johansson’s performance succeeds in the same way David Bowie’s had to in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Her job is to demonstrate a range of ‘emotion’ through blank glances and the stilted misunderstood movements of her alien’s new human shell. Subtler than a silent movie, the measure of her success is how clearly she conveys the alien’s progression from ruthless efficiency through sympathy and towards eventual depression with very little acting tools allowed.

The direction is beautiful, never losing the measured purpose of the opening sequence. Scotland feels desolate and inviting. It’s a cold film and your engagement with it will creep up on you; that’s how it functions. By giving you a limited ‘way in’, the connection you eventually make with the film is a firm one.

August: Osage County

 August: Osage County has a lot going for it. It has a lot of what a great film needs – rich characters, excellent performances and a well-constructed narrative. Despite this, it is a play, not a film.

Firstly, praise. Everyone on screen does a fantastic job, especially Meryl Streep whose turn as the family’s poisonous matriarch is definitely as Oscar-worthy as Cate Blanchett’s Blue Jasmine (one or the other should win it). The writing is solid. The dialogue rises from a cast of characters so well drawn that the story feels multi-protagonist despite it being clear that Julia Roberts’ Barbara has the most defined arch. As with the best stories, it isn’t forced. The drama, darkness and comedy all leak incidentally out of the narrative which comes simply because the family of characters bump, bounce and clash naturally.

The best scenes are those that jump out as being obviously written for stage. Simmering emotions in claustrophobic rooms make for dialogue that just fizzes. 2 hours went by with my engagement unbroken because the combination of great writing and great acting hold the thing together like gaffa tape.

However.

The things that are great about the film don’t belong on film. They don’t utilise in any way what film can do.

That great edict ‘show don’t tell’ applies just as much in the cinema as it does on the stage. But what changes from medium to medium is what can be shown. On the stage, dialogue is king. What is said and what is not said is what makes a great play. I’ve no doubt that August: Osage County is a great play because what I just saw at the cinema was a great play… but not a film.

When putting a play on film, certain things need changing to make it work in the new medium. What Osage County needed in its adaptation was to make room for a film director to bring something cinematic to proceedings. One simple thing a film can do, for example, is extreme close-ups; audiences can see large emotional shifts in small facial gestures, something that simply can’t travel 10 rows when watching a play in a theatre. In that case, why not replace some of the hefty dialogue with some carefully judged close-ups, or a smart cutaway, or a tracking shot or just something cinematic? Anything would do.

Plays do their ‘showing’ in dialogue, films do theirs in visuals.

The failure is not the direction; it is the adaptation. It feels as if nothing has been adapted. The director is given nothing to do. I can only assume that there’s something intrinsic about the play that Tracy Letts wanted to preserve and couldn’t bring himself to lose in the translation. It may well be that changing what is intrinsic about it for the cinema would ruin its essence. But in that case, why put it on film?

Probably money?

By virtue of the medium, cinema can reach a wide audience cheaply in no time at all – you travel miles to see a play in a specific theatre in a specific city whereas films pretty much come to you wherever you are. Maybe its producers thought that slapping August: Osage County onto the big screen as it is would stick like magic. Or maybe they thought it would just make a tonne of money.

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.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Comparing two films that both make use of the same source material can get in the way of judging each on its own merit. However, I think in the case of everyone’s favourite red and blue webslinger, a little look back at Spider-Man (2002) only helps make this new film’s merits clearer to see.

This is because the two adaptations are satisfyingly unique in their independent ways. Sam Raimi’s original feels much closer in tone to the comic book material whereas this new version moves away from fantasy, instead attempting to anchor itself more in the real world. With the 2002 film only ten years old, a complete re-telling of the same story requires justification and thankfully the new direction taken by The Amazing Spider-Man is just about distinct enough to make a solid case for its existence.

Andrew Garfield is fantastic in the leading role. His portrayal of Peter Parker helps to establish the film’s style right from the off and draws a firm line under his predecessor. Everything about Tobey Maguire’s Parker screamed “VICTIM!” – he was skinny, shaky-voiced, socially nowhere. Even the bus driver hated him. His transformation from utter loser to muscular masquerader was such an epic zero-to-hero dream that it lifted the character into the make-believe realm. Garfield’s Peter Parker however is a much more realistic geek – ok, he gets picked on, but he doesn’t pity himself and actually seems fairly comfortable with his photographer-nerd status. After the transformation, he is more amused by his new powers than burdened and never quite overcomes his awkwardness despite them – he still skateboards and he still studies, he just does these things on the roof now.

The female interest of 2002 Spider-Man was MJ, a one-dimensional damsel in distress who screamed a lot and looked pretty – and pretty ineffective when the bad guy showed up. She was the hero’s trophy and little more. In this film, the object of Peter’s affections is somewhat less objectified. Gwen Stacey is Peter’s brainy classmate and head intern at Oscorp. As well as screaming a lot less than MJ, she also plays quite a major part in the final battle. The presence of a more substantial and better-rounded female character is welcome in a film trying to move clear of the adolescent wish-fulfilment that characterised the old Spider-Man.

Half the battle of taking a comic book story and revising it in the modern fashion is achieved with a script grounded in the grit of modern lexicon. Cutting clichés and throwing in the odd reference to a current trend in technology goes a long way to reining a superhero back down to earth. The new Spider-Man definitely heads in the right direction. Uncle Ben’s famous “with great power comes great responsibility” line is dropped in favour of a more convincing speech peppered with the same sentiment but packaged in a less cheesy manner. Similarly, 2002 Peter’s long, embarrassingly slushy speech to MJ about the way she makes him feel bears no relation to the stuttering ums and erms of 2012 Peter’s attempt to ask Gwen out. It’s much sweeter this way and has a far better sounding ring of truth to it

The ‘Fantasy vs. Reality’ dichotomy between the two films is also manifest in their direction. In Spider-Man, Raimi’s camera is a character in itself; the dutch angles, ambitious tracking and montages of overlaid shots all conjure the fantastical sense that the camera can and so will go anywhere it chooses. On the other hand, The Amazing Spider-Man’s director, Marc Webb organises his film in a much more functional manner. The cameras are set up to capture the action as unobtrusively as possible, leaving the actors to tell the story. Although Webb’s directorial prints are generally invisible, one thing did catch the eye: use of shallow focus to move between objects/people in the foreground and background – an increasingly rare find in modern blockbusters – which works especially well in the final shot. Even the lighting of the two films is distinct. Raimi’s film is lit thoroughly, seemingly with all angles covered so as to leave as little shadow as possible, giving it a simplistic and stark look with bright primary colours highlighted. Conversely, The Amazing Spider-Man does not concern itself with making each shot look like a drawing. Its selective approach to photography lets shadow take care of itself, providing a more natural look.

Finally onto the music, which draws a conclusive line between the two films and demonstrates very clearly how they sit in relation to each other. The 2002 film was scored by Danny Elfman, the go-to composer for comic book adaptations of the last 20 years (see Hulk, Hellboy, Tim Burton’s Batman films etc). Elfman employs strong themes and character motifs in the style of Hollywood’s golden age. This is perfect for the bold good vs. evil fables that all the big superhero comics present. The music for Spider-Man is some of my favourite of his work, a score often overlooked in favour of the sweeping gothic melodrama of his collaborations with Burton.

Nevertheless, having someone like Elfman score the new Spider-Man would contradict and confuse the style that the film is going for. Instead, James Horner is brought in and provides a much less attention-grabbing accompaniment to the story. While there are clear repeated themes, Horner has approached this film with an ear to colour the visuals without intruding on the action. An unnoticed score is a step in the right direction if realism is the aim. What helps tie in even more strongly to the real world is the use of pop music dropped in during time-lapse montages – particularly when Peter is testing out his newfound powers while skateboarding. It contextualises the film in the present day and infers the kind of music that the on-screen characters might listen to.

Altogether, The Amazing Spider-Man does just enough to make a resurrection of a recently abandoned franchise seem reasonable. In no way is it as radical a revision as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films are to the Batman story although it would definitely benefit from a similarly stronger push away from its source material now that the hero has been introduced. The real test for Marvel and co. will be the inevitable follow up.

The Hunger Games (2012)

In a dystopian future society where the rich live luxuriously in ‘The Capitol’ and the poor are divided into exclusive districts and forced to live feudally, 24 children are chosen at random every year and let loose in an enclosed arena where they are cajoled into mortal combat until only one remains. Based on a novel for young adults written by Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games follows sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen who is selected to compete in the 74^th of these annual televised contests.

By far the most gratifying thing about this film doing so well at the box office is the sheer number of people that are coming into contact with a narrative that throws light on the ugly side of current social phenomena and illustrates clearly and simply how hegemony works.

Like the best dystopias, Panem – where The Hunger Games is set – has carefully designed hierarchical structures which are maintained with a delicate balancing act. Demonstrating the clockwork involved in the working of a fictional society and having an emotional character-based drama unfolding at the same time is the author’s own balancing act. In fact, as long as neither overpowers the other, each inextricably boosts the effect of the other. For example, we can’t be moved to concern by Katniss’ plight if we don’t know how trammelled by violent controlling measures she and her fellow poverty-stricken district-dwellers are. Equally, we can’t be expected to get our head around the intricate details of Panem unless we see how its system shapes the life of a human being living at its centre.

The targets of Collins’ barbed satire are entwined in a tight cluster which probably contains as many of the viewers’ interpretations as the author’s own intentions. Those that seem most clear however revolve around reality TV, particularly reality TV as a means of spellbinding large swathes of populations into becoming obsessed with false narratives and a false hope of escaping a life of drudgery, thereby ironically easing the pressure of a life of drudgery, leading to an extension of the drudge itself. Also explored is the widespread cultural sentimentality that results from said false narratives, and how it begins to seep into real life.

The desensitising effect that this sick-sweet sentimentality leads to is of particular importance to The Hunger Games, specifically an indifference to violence, ‘The Games’ itself being a competition in which children kill each other.

The viewers of the contest are the wealthy minority who live within the capitol and bet with glee on the eventual winner. The costume design and palette of The Capitol’s citizens contribute magnificently to the idea of ‘the spectacle’ (ps. Read this if you want, yes, all of it) that encompasses their lives. Their lurid face paint and extravagant dress is ridiculous and terrifying in equal measure; the same could be said for their exploitation of children, with the emphasis on the terrifying.

All of this probably applies to the novel too, I wouldn’t know, haven’t read it, will now. My point is, the narrative is solid and, as Collins herself co-wrote the screenplay, the film tells her story well. With the most important thing taken care of, the only hurdles that could possibly hinder its success are exclusively down to the makers’ cinematic skill – how it is shot, how it is acted, how it is paced, how it is scored.

And most importantly: how it is edited. Because thankfully, everything else works nicely – particularly the acting (Jennifer Lawrence does a very good job). It is the editing that lets it down in my opinion – and I’d rather call it censorship. That is because, for a film that relies on a brutal and violent situation to engage and appal us, The Hunger Games is remarkably devoid of violence. In fact I don’t recall seeing a single drop of blood from start to finish. Was this a clever self-referential comment on the theme? Were we intentionally shielded from gore to stop us reacting in a human way, so that maybe we might see how anesthetised we already are to violence? To warn us how close we are to becoming like The Capitol’s citizens ourselves?

Well apparently not. Because while the version shown in British cinemas is fairly anodyne, this was not always the case. The original cut of the film submitted for classification was given a ‘15’ rating. Eager for it to be able to reach as large an audience as possible, the studio asked for advice from the BBFC on what changes could be made to downgrade it to a ‘12a’ rating. This included shortening the length of some particularly violent shots and digitally removing blood splashes from wounds and weapons.

So this is not the typical censorship we hear about where a single-minded director has their vision undermined by a country’s film board snipping out the bits it considers too nasty for its citizens. This is the makers and distributors of a film actively self-censoring their own work for marketing purposes.

But is there a less cynical motivation behind the cut? The original novel has been demonstrably popular with older children/young teens, with many of its readers falling between the ages of 11 and 14. It could be argued then that the self-censorship isn’t money-grubbing but actually makes the film available for the audience that enjoyed the book.

I suppose that makes some sense but the problem for me was that I wanted the shock and horror to really hit home. I wanted the promise of the little chill that ran through me when I first heard the film’s synopsis to be fully delivered. And the fact that a more brutal version exists and is shown in other countries is a bit of a let down.

Of course I understand the idea that cutting away before actual physical savagery can be more psychologically terrifying than not doing so. Memorably, the oft-referenced Psycho shower scene has plenty of shots showing the fatal knife thrusts but none of actual contact with the victim’s skin. I just don’t think such an approach works for The Hunger Games and it isn’t supposed to either, as the existence of the original cut testifies to. When the most important things about a social satire are child cruelty and a failure to react negatively to child cruelty, it seems obvious that we need to be given a chance to abhor such a numb society by seeing clearly on our silver screens what The Capitol’s citizens see on their TV screens. I would argue that the young teenagers who can handle the book won’t be too traumatised by a more explicit film. So why not keep the blood and let the 12-year-olds sneak in, as they always do anyway? Either that or have showings of the uncut version late at night.

All of this is just a small detraction from what is essentially a good film, especially as it updates the dystopia genre for the digital age and might well lead new people to works such as Brazil or Nineteen Eighty-Four. Every generation needs to be served a lucid vision of a society it is at risk of sleepwalking into and, for 2012, The Hunger Games will do nicely enough.

Wuthering Heights (2011)

Heathcliff. His name is the landscape and in Andrea Arnold’s adaptation, so is he – lying in muck or wind-raked grass, letting the rain beat him in the face.

Emily Brontë’s classic has rarely been treated right on small or big screens. Sold mostly as Jane Austen-style period drama (2009 TV Serial) or softened romance (1939 film), anyone smitten with the novel will tell you a film adaptation needs a strong dose of realism if it is to be anywhere near as affecting. Arnold is the first director to realise this, immediately elevating her film above all other Wuthering Heights made so far.

Apparently found on the streets of Liverpool, Heathcliff is adopted by Mr. Earnshaw and brought home to live with his family in the North Yorkshire moors. The book obscures Heathcliff’s origins although Brontë describes him as ‘gypsy’, something which no adaptation has yet taken on board. In this film, he is black, a feasible choice well followed through and one that reinforces the scorn set against him by Earnshaw’s son Hindley.

Close-ups of moths, dust, hair, beetles and clouds ground the story in earthy Yorkshire. Importantly though, this is a subjective realism – Heathcliff’s. The story follows him as if it were his story, with all the other characters appearing incidentally. This agenda is most clearly set out at the point where young Heathcliff leaves the moors after overhearing part of Cathy’s conversation with her maid. It is probably the most quoted dialogue of the book:

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now*; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

The * is the point at which the hidden Heathcliff leaves for 3 years, returning only after amassing a great fortune. He never hears the following:

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind.

And in this film, neither do we. The camera follows Heathcliff out into the night as Cathy’s voice trails away.

This approach works very well indeed; the intimacy we acquire with the character promises an exciting final third. This is because, although Heathcliff is obviously a quiet and stoic character, what binds you to the book is the moments when he explodes out of his shell with the kind of melodrama only an introvert can hit. Unfortunately, at the film’s climax, these moments are either too tame or unconvincing. The unremarkable acting might have been hidden better by avoiding the proclamations of love lifted from the novel. These only highlighted the lack of passion in delivery.

However, there are good performances for the majority of the film. Especially noteworthy are the child actors who play young Cathy and Heathcliff; they manage to evoke the slow-growing sensuality between the young couple believably. All too often, other adaptations give a few shots of a boy and girl playing together before the young adults take over, suddenly emerging with a fully-fledged sexuality unearned by the previous scenes. This film does it properly, building the relationship from the roots of friendship, unashamedly showing the youngsters innocently aroused by horse rides or playfights in the mud, becoming slowly and naturally acquainted with their own adolescence.

The camerawork is well considered, hand-held a lot of the time (sometimes annoyingly so) but reining it in to simple mid-shots in all the right places. The establishing shots really capture the Yorkshire moors well – the best I’ve seen. My favourites are the wide shots of the Heights during strong gales where the camera seems to wuther with the wind (I can only think they achieved this by tying it to a tree somehow). Intelligent musical choice too – not to have any. Perfect. No story deserves a blank score more. If any future adaptation does manage to keep the story intimate, the setting isolate, and the characters believable, with music underscoring events, I will be more than impressed.

Overall, this is the best Wuthering Heights film so far. It isn’t perfect – the climax needed to be far more moving – but its realism and character development is second to none, so it is definitely the one that fans of the novel should go for.

The Rum Diary (2011)

Of the reviews I have read so far, the most common criticisms levelled at The Rum Diary are: it’s not funny enough, it’s a bit dull, there isn’t a plot, it’s too long.

The mistake is to go into this film expecting Fear and Loathing in Puerto Rico. The trailer doesn’t help the matter by presenting, in order, the only drink/drug/sex related scenes that do exist, which isn’t many. Unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s later rides, this is not particularly ‘crazy’ and it’s not jam-packed with his trademark acerbic irreverence either.

This is because The Rum Diary was written when Thompson was 22. Full of ambition and idealism, he was struggling to find the unique voice that experience would later bestow. The explosion of impressionist fact/fiction ramblings known as Gonzo Journalism was still some ten years down the line. The dilemma Thompson faced at this time is summed up by a line that appears early on: “I don’t know how to write like me yet”. That’s the point I think many critics are missing.

Like Kerouac before him, Hunter S. Thompson documented his cross-country wanderings using a series of thinly veiled characters as his own alter ego. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, this was Raoul Duke – a disillusioned madman on a non-stop gorge of hallucinogenic mayhem. In The Rum Diary, he is cast as a somewhat naïve journalist, Paul Kemp, newly employed by the editor of a decaying newspaper in Puerto Rico. While he has the penchant for trouble common to all of Thompson’s monikers, Kemp is young and lucid. He is not yet as purposeful and self-assured as Raoul Duke and, as such, doesn’t yet know where to channel his curiosity. The film sees him courted by greedy businessman, falling in love with one of their fiancés, and generally getting embroiled in various rum-fuelled distractions with his newspaper colleagues. Laced into the journey is a creeping epiphany about the injustice and greed of business politics which helps Kemp realise who ‘the bastards’ are and how to use his typewriter to bring them down.

Depp as Paul Kemp - 2011

Terry Gilliam was the perfect director to render Fear and Loathing for the screen, his magical realism sensibility colliding wonderfully with Thompson’s truth-bending LSD road trip. And Bruce Robinson is similarly apposite a choice to bring Thompson’s work into the realm of cinema. His 1986 film Withnail and I is one of the best ever made, deftly bringing to life the discordant friendship between an alcoholic actor and a panicky writer, both poverty-stricken and – more importantly – both outsiders, rejected by a society they despise and adore in equal measure. Depp screened Withnail for Thompson before his death and Thompson liked it. After 19 years away from the director’s chair, Robinson has made a solid return to it. As with Withnail, the directing itself isn’t especially visionary, it just tells the story well, allowing the screenplay (which he also wrote) to shine.

I haven’t read the book, but – even if The Rum Diary was simply an imagined biography of Thompson’s early life – the film does a good job of conjuring how a pre-Gonzo Thompson would behave.  The clipped mumblings of half-imagined observation that those familiar with him will recognise seep through less than 3 times throughout the film, giving the sense that his unique style is still gestating. The first time it happens is particularly striking – half an hour must have passed when finally it appears, as a non-diegetic narration over a sequence of shots showing tourists bowling. His contempt for their sheltered experience of the island is obvious. It also contains one of the rare moments of extended reality in the film, a bowling ball hurtling towards a triangle of rum bottles and smashing through in slow motion.

Depp as Raoul Duke - 1998

Johnny Depp gives as faithful a performance as he did in Fear and Loathing, perfectly toning down the eccentricity of middle-aged Thompson to the more tentative younger man. Like many, I discovered Depp in my teens, finding some sort of redemption in his portrayal of bold misfits. While taking so much from these characters at the time, it is easy to look back on the exaggerated gestures of Jack Sparrow and Willy Wonka and dismiss him as a man who pulls silly faces for children. It shouldn’t be easy because he is a brilliant actor. I think my doubts were based on his performances in Alice in Wonderland and The Tourist – two recent roles in which he didn’t deliver. The Rum Diary re-convinced me of his skill and subtlety.

For all my defending of the film, of course there are flaws. Most have mentioned the length issue, which is fair enough – it is indeed half an hour too long. And no, it doesn’t live up to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But that film documents notorious Thompson, the Gonzo wrecking-ball of truth and illusion, the champion of chaos and liberty. The Rum Diary charts the unremarkable early years of a soon-to-be literary genius, which can never be as captivating as the era of the genius in bloom. The thing is, Robinson and Depp don’t try to make Fear and Loathing in Puerto Rico. What they have made is a solid document of the seeds of Gonzo Journalism, perhaps of most interest to those who already know and admire the Raoul Duke that Paul Kemp would eventually become.