Spotlight on a winner of Academy Awards in 2016

Some film-references and an accreting list of comments about Spotlight (2015) :

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
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29 February

* Contains some spoilers *

After some film-references (not to be much explored), an accreting list in not much order of comments about Spotlight (2015) :

Whatever its merits or competitors, if Spotlight (2015) is Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Writing, Original Screenplay, well... !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 1, 2016

* L’enquête (The Clearstream Affair) (2014)
* Mea Maxima Culpa : Silence in the House of God (2012)
* Philadelphia (1993)
* Philomena (2013)
* Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)


* Howard Shore’s score was inventive and employed a range of instrumentalists – however, at one point, it may have inappropriately suggested a positivity (to the progress of the investigation) that was not in keeping with what, at that point, was being investigated

* Dramatizing the telling of a true story – at best, we forgive such dramatic retellings for the voice that they have given to someone whose trust has been abused and his or her own voice silenced ; at worst, why not a dramatic reconstruction (for those whose choice would not be Mea Maxima Culpa (2012)), rather than having to adapt character and content to fit the inflexible standard notions of the elements of a drama ?

* Misdirection A : With the help of the score, in spy-film mood, to suggest that corruption or ill-will on the part of one or more of those higher up at The Boston Globe might have prevented earlier researches into these issues, but then let that dissipate with a curiously thin explanation, covered by newly arrived editor Marty Baron's (Liev Schreiber's) worthy speech about the rewards of having hindsight¹

* In contrary motion, and questions of billing apart, that purposive importing of notions of suspicion and intrigue is at curious odds with no one much, other than Baron, seeming to have a grasp of what about a story makes it in the public interest, and with how both the methods of investigative journalism and yet a lack of knowledge of worldly ways is portrayed

* As a screenplay that is now acclaimed, it is fine that we have three Christmases established : the latter cases give a sense of time and scale, but the first five minutes or so - which make quite sure that we do not miss the decorations - are hardly necessary, even in a linear narrative, to provide a historical perspective or tell what happened in that time-period

* Generally, the film fails too much just to tell², and chooses instead to show, and, at the same time, it tends to have characters talk, or even arrange to meet, when what is said (in legal terms) is solely for the benefit of an audience of supposed lay people : the characters would know not even to spend the considerable time involved to ask for what, answered in terms of principles of client confidentiality or professional legal practice, is bound to be refused

Probably the best total contribution was made by Howard Shore's inventive and versatile score ? The least by journalists bemused by the law.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 1, 2016

* Of course, one cannot judge how this would appear to those who have not practised law (or banking procedures, in L’enquête (The Clearstream Affair), to those not versed in finance), but surely no such journalist would register surprise at the lack of evidence in the courts of settlements made without proceedings having been issued³ : if agreements could not be made between claimant and defendant without everyone knowing what they were, there would be no point to them

* Misdirection B : A little as with Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films, and as part of generating the sense of suspicion that was mentioned above, we hear that someone’s heart had been in the right place after all (except not only that, if someone is asked to do what he has already done, one would imagine that he would simply say so, but also that he has no reason to claim instead that he cannot, which is falsified by having done what he did)

* Spotlight is about an obviously important subject being covered up, but this award-winning screenplay has its infelicities⁴, and, though it is approach that can work in the right place, does just allow significant characters, such as Marty Baron and Eric Macleish, to occupy some twilight part of the film, from where they are engaged when needed, but then sent back off to the wings

* Yet we spend more screen time, ‘on the beat’, with others, whose contributions seem tangential or to lack a corollary⁵, and who and whose professional roles are sometimes sketchily drawn : even if that were how it was, it even seems something of a surprise that the journalists do not write up the story as a team, but that it falls to Mike Rezendes, working on his own (quite apart, in a film about the lawyerly influence on public life, our seeing Baron, without attorneys checking it over, making the decision about what to print)

* As for real intrigue and a committed journalist who is personally laying everything on the line, though, it cannot compete with L’enquête and how, in a film that is more than twenty minutes shorter (this one is, in places, less well paced), it makes its far, far more complicated networks of transactional and interpersonal information at least as digestible - except that the latter is a French-language film, which still wrongly rules it out for this sort of consideration, and so much more !

Seen on the opening night of Cambridge Film Festival 2015

Post-script :

In his review, writing for The New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey comes up with other cogent reasons why the film does not work, starting with :

If we sympathise with the heroes of Spotlight, we have delivered some indefinable blow to institutional child abuse, just as anyone who paid to see Twelve Years a Slave (an earlier Best Picture winner) was also purchasing an invisible 'I Hate Racism badge. If we support The Big Short, we have done our bit to avert the next economic collapse, or at least to ensure we can discuss it with authority when it comes. But good intentions are not always synonymous with great film-making.


In The Hollywood Reporter, concluding his review, Todd McCarthy sums up :

In the end, this material can't help but be interesting, even compelling up to a point, but its prosaic presentation suggests that the story's full potential, encompassing deep, disturbing and enduring pain on all sides of the issue, has only begun to be touched.


End-notes

¹ Although one might infer a submerged plot-line about the effects of hierarchy on having the courage of one’s convictions ?

² At the same time, we hear the Spotlight team talking about what they are working on / what they are being asked to postpone doing, but we are not bothered with more than the necessary traces of the substance of what that is, since we would simply gain nothing by knowing : the film can trust its judgement there, but errs elsewhere with this issue of having to have people say what we do need to know.

³ Or (though this question did not arise), equally, to imagine that the judicial system, where cases have settled out of court, will show the settlement reached.

Head Moonbeam : Also gives opportunities for characterization and tension to develop, leading to a bogus impasse ?

Moonbeam : On expenses !

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 5, 2016

⁴ For example, as a matter of tone (whose key does not match), rather than a moment of humour, when the others go down to the basement and, asking what the smell is, they are directed to a dead rat – as if someone would wish to start researching without removing it ? Or why Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) is both asked by Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci) whether his surname is Italian (it does not sound remotely so) and, with some disbelief at the answer, where he is from.

⁵ Such as the retired priest, and just on the door-step, being garrulous about having molested (but, he says, not raped) boys in his flock - before being shut up from within.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Don't mention Beirut ! I mentioned it once, but I think that I got away with it all right...

This is a (short) review of A Most Wanted Man (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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3 September

This is a (short) review of A Most Wanted Man (2014)

Funding apart, there really is little point in having a film set in a country where all the cast speaks English, but they are supposed to sound as if they speak it with the accent of that country.

To that end, Rachel McAdams (who was not identifiable even as a non-German, despite being the love interest in Midnight in Paris (2012)) was alone worth the sole language coach’s fee, whereas Willem Dafoe desperately drifted, but that was better than the respected Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, despite his German name, sounded most often like the best of Richard Burton than any Günther Bachmann.

What was, McAdams apart, the point of this exercise, where Germans such as Nina Hoss (Irna Frey, and who played the lead in Barbara (2012)) were in no way matched by the non-Germans ? One has no doubt that Hoss could have spoken English with less of an accent than the one that the non-Germans were not picking up…

That apart, however nicely the production was put together, more of the same with the script (maybe to be laid at author John Le Carré’s door) : one big dénouement (perhaps predictable) to account for why a man who, under Russian torture (as Günther observes), confesses to crimes and who anyway fits the visual image of the dodgy muslim fundamentalist (until he trims some hair), can prove to be actually more like Prince Myshkin than a jihadist.

Frankly, if that is what one takes from the film, that a man who admits that the non-organization that he heads has no status will not be done over in seeking to protect this Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) and that said Karpov needed some love, then that is not worth the price of the ticket.

Ah, but one forgets the original soundtrack ! As Hamburg is the home of a sailing nation and a commercial centre, accordion slowed down so that sea-shanties became unrecognizable, incorporating the sound of also slowed data-transmissions into composition, and otherwise imitating Arvo Pärt’s procedure of tintinnabulation – all of that must have made it worthwhile after all.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Paul : The distinction of being not just a bore, but a boor

This is a review of Midnight in Paris (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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This is a review of Midnight in Paris (2011)

People have, apparently, likened this film to Manhattan (1979), which they mean in a back-handed way, as saying that Allen has returned to form, but this view is wrong on two counts: Allen may have made occasional recent films (e.g. Match Point (2005)) that do not work (or only work clunkily), but he has never lost his form; and Midnight has almost nothing, opening montage excepted, in common with Manhattan (or, for that matter, Annie Hall (1977), the other chosen point of comparison – why choose two films made more than thirty years ago ?).

Taking each point in turn, there is nothing to be apologetic about in either Whatever Works (2009), perfectly suiting Larry David, or You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), although probably less successful for reasons of plot – Midnight is not a welcome recovery, but simply surpasses them both.

The wide situational and character sweep of Midnight is also nothing like that of Annie or Manhattan, which are arguably more like chamber music than this piece, which, if not a symphony, has clear claims on being a concerto.

In addition, it is not as if Paris has not been the backdrop before, unless people have already forgotten Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and it is common knowledge that Allen is truly American in feeling the French capital’s charm and attraction – just as he does London’s very different pull.


Midnight is not perfect, either, but there are some very good elements to it, some of which look back in the canon: for example, the lead character, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), has definite similarities, not just in mannerisms and pacing, with Kenneth Branagh as fellow writer Lee Simon in Celebrity (1998). Such figures, if not Allen-substitutes per se in the films in which he does not (choose to) cast himself, function in the same pivotal sort of way, and often have the pick of the lines. Taking that further, Lee, as does Gil, finds himself in an exciting new world that he does not know, but it is one of elitism and opportunity – Gil has opportunity, perhaps, but of a different kind..

The film feels very close to Allen’s short stories, and he very casually has Gil enter the world of the 1920s by being offered a lift, when he is lost, by a group of revellers in a vintage Peugeot: nothing overt in this transition, except for the bubbles in the champagne that they insist that Gil join them in drinking, and he is taken he and we know not where.

Thankfully, we can get away from regarding the scenario as magical realism (whatever it may be, though it little matters). For Gil not only gives us the benefit (probably partly because he is tired after an evening of wine-tasting, in which he favoured quantity over quality) of letting us be several steps ahead, but also because, just because of the dramatic irony, we can watch his reactions of disbelief more closely. (As the film goes on, they may, however, do Allen fewer favours : how few even know that Eliot’s initials stand for Thomas Stearns, let alone would blurt out the names ?)

Yes, it is just a given that this travel to the earlier decade happens, and that, although Gil can repeat the experience, he cannot explain it to anyone in his own time. (As is usual, e.g. Lucy first visiting Narnia in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.) Yet it is never just a shared magical assumption about the nature of the world, unless one includes the viewer.

The feel of the era is good, which, when this is not an art-historical recreation, is what matters, but Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) could still have had a chance to shine more with a less functional role (which may have fallen prey to editing): after all, Stein herself was no mere editor or midwife to other’s creations, and was just as much a character as Hemingway and Dalí, in particular, are shown to be. (As to whether she would have called them ‘crazy Surrealists’, one is less sure.)

With Adriana (Marion Cotillard), one is less sure whether it is that she gives Gil attention (which Inez (Rachel McAdams), though she is also sexy, seems less keen to do), as that she can claim Modigliani and Braque as lovers (in this film, at least), that draw him to her company : let alone the t.v. series, Goodnight, Sweetheart dealing with such a theme, it is at the centre of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Allen’s early story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’ (first collected in Side Effects).

As a parable of what one can and cannot have, Paris of the 1920s may be where Gil would have himself be, but he has not foreseen that it might not be everyone’s choice, and he finds himself making other choices for the future instead.

Where the film really does not work is with facts about the contemporary literary and artistic circles, and, if one were the ‘pseudo-intellectual’ whom Gil dubs the very irritating character of Paul (who is of a type whom Allen likes creating, and does so well*), one would have had them to hand in the screening :

Not that it matters, because it may be that all this is Gil’s imagination, and that he is capable of being confused about facts as even Paul (who apparently confounds the figures of Rodin’s wife and mistress, and then insists that the guide is wrong**): if so, then, as with a dream, or as with psychosis (the explanation offered by Inez for Gil’s behaviour and utterances), what he experiences is the product of his will and mind.

In a dream, it is just as much we who are in the dream, creating the people whom we meet, be they Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or Papa Hemingway (obviously not then called that, but that is how Gil relates to the man whom he has met). One curiosity is that, except for the party to which Gil is first taken, everyone is dressed much more casually than photographs show was usual at that time. Another is that, when it comes to Buñuel, Allen has made him a rather sullen character, and with no suggestion, around the table, that Dalí and he are – or are to be – film-makers together (in Un Chien Andalou (1929). Largely as a private joke, because few might know the reference, Allen has Gil give Buñuel the essential details of the plot of The Exterminating Angel (1962) (which are also supposed to be dealt with in a scene within L’Age d’Or), but Buñuel rebuff him with very unreceptive questions about why that would or would not happen – as if he has not got a Surrealist bone in his body.

This does not seem to suggest that we believe that Gil is dreaming, even if what he experiences is a deep wish on his part, but rather that too much licence has been taken with showing this period, probably in an attempt not to confront an audience with the truth, that the free and easy Surrealists and other artists of the time were to be found in suit and tie.



End-notes


* E.g. Alan Alda as Lester in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). (Alda is also in Everyone Says.)


** However, it seems that Rodin did nothing as bourgeois as intending that either woman – let alone any of the others ! – could contemporaneously claim to be married to him: it was only after knowing Rose Beuret for 53 years that, in 1917, the year in which they both died (she just two weeks afterwards), they married.

By then, Camille Claudel, the other woman, had already been confined to a psychiatric unit for more than twenty years, following a breakdown when Rodin and she split up in 1898, and died there in 1943.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

About time for another Curtis film ?

This is a critique of About Time (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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13 September (revised, in case too hard on Curtis, 16 September [revisions in bold-face])

* NB Pretty spoilery *

This is a critique of About Time (2013)

It is inevitable that a film that features time travel will remind of other such films that do, such as Back to the Future (1985), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), or Dimensions (2011) (a truly independent production, set in Cambridge), and also invoke the likes of Lola Rennt (1998) (in English, Run Lola Run) and Sliding Doors (1998).

Those films have an internal logic, and they tend to try to keep to it. With About Time (2013), Richard Curtis is either cavalier with that logic, or just careless. A writer and director who introduces the sight-gag of a discovered off-stage band, which is not only worthy of Woody Allen, but definitely taken from one of his films (probably Bananas (1971)), shows that he does not hesitate to use something that does not chime with character or mood to get a laugh.

One can therefore use either theory to explain why the logic that Curtis chose to employ is handily overlooked (or ignored). Admittedly, some of the audience will not notice, but, with a very artificial piece of stage-machinery, one is running the risk of not undermining the others’ enjoyment, if it creaks so noisily.

Our protagonist Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) has a maybe older sister (he is 21, but her age seemed unclear) called Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) whose life has become unnecessarily burdened, so he reckons on taking her back to when she picked up that burden. Apart from the fact that nothing has suggested that the male-only gift of doing so (by clenching one’s hands in the dark and thinking of that moment) allows passengers on one’s coat-tails, there is no obvious reason why Tim needs to take an older Kit Kat to that point : at his leisure, he could have gone back on his own, and contrived to distract her from the undesired encounter.

As it is, the first re-take is disastrous, and then the whole thing proves to have been so, because Tim’s baby has changed sex, the reason for which, relating to the chance nature of the moment of conception, Tim’s father then explains (though not, as becomes telling later, how he knows). ‘Remedying’ the change to the past that has already made is not explained, but the model of time travel that has been shown before (as when Tim regrets not giving a girl a New Year's kiss, or humorously wishes to rescue the opening night of Harry’s play) seems to have been that, when one revisited the past, what stemmed from it no longer exists, almost as if the new version of events has been recorded over it.

If that were not so, Tim would be able to pick and choose between different versions of events, and not have to shoo the extravagance of a band away when things have gone well. He would also not have to re-live the intervening time, which we see him do to seductive effect. Then again, when he goes back to just before midnight on New Year's Day, he simply returns from that moment and goes back to see his father...

So maybe Kit Kat and he would not both have had to re-live the time that had passed from New Year’s Eve, if one way of approaching this 'gift', then, may be to change a variable, and see what happens, another to do the same, but travel forward to the same point in the future in the expectation that nothing has changed.

That said, Tim tries changing several weeks' worth of dynamic between Kit Kat's friend Charlotte and him - the humour of the situation, i.e. that he still does not win her love, is allowed (and used) to gloss over the fact that going to Charlotte's room partway through her stay at his parents' house is hardly going to leave everything else unchanged.

For just seeing Tim not being natural because he knows things about Mary (Rachel McAdams), e.g. that she is a fan of Kate Moss (or even her name), that she knows that she has not told him proves how difficult that would be just for an hour or two. The time travel becomes a sort of alibi where, because one knows too much from what happened the time before, it tends to sound dodgy, like an excuse.

Yet the bigger sin against Curtis’ own logic is when Tim decides that he will have a different person do something important for him, and tries several friends in the role : for him to have done so, he would, again, have had to go right back to when he first asked the original person, and that, too, would impossibly unravel too much else, quite probably that exact baby’s conception (again).


That said, Curtis does not, after all, seem to mean us to take the time travel that literally, because the end of the film shifts into a more ‘preachy’ mode of using it reflectively, to go back over and cherish each moment / count one’s blessings, and seems to want to turn what went before more into a fable, if not downright disown it.

Indeed, Tim’s closing voice-over makes one think that a documentary about awareness has been tacked on, invoking the wisdom of some celebrated homily. (The quiet lyric of a Nick Cave song in the soundtrack even begins ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’.) It feels as though Curtis is using the medium of this film to try to pass on a weighty Socratic message about living a good life – and dying well – even if he may be out of his league…

With Richard Curtis, the similarities to his other films do not hide : Hugh Grant running across Notting Hill in that self-titled film is echoed here by Tim, there is a wedding and a funeral (of sorts), and we have the awkwardness of the main character, as if no Curtis leading man can be anything other than acutely and Britishly self-conscious. (The difference being that running a bookshop maybe requires less tact, discretion, charm than being a successful barrister.)

Without the self-consciousness, there would be little need for the family secret that Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) passes on to him - with it, blurting out to Mary’s parents about their sex-life would be so commonplace that Tim would ever and exhaustingly be clenching his fists to undo things. Again, to the extent that the film works through humour, the comedic effect is put before stable characters.

Thus, if one of his friends is to be believed, Tim is sexually experienced, but he behaves like a virgin, and, in the summer following his twenty-first, has a crush on Kit Kat’s friend Charlotte (Margot Robbie), calling her ‘my first love’. The friend may just be being embarrassing, but, when Tim is counting his blessings and how he has been served that day, the price of his sandwich order rises from around £4.40 (when he is in a rush) to some £6.20 (stopping to appreciate the woman’s smile), and there have been other reasons already to doubt this scripting.

However, unless you credit that counsel at the Criminal Bar are just like actors and can throw themselves into their brief (we also see Tim with modest quantities of paperwork, and never working into the night to master his brief), Tim has hardly the best foundation for good court advocacy, to the extent that it requires some thinking on one’s feet. (Quite apart from the fact that, at Tim’s age, he would at best be newly called to The Bar, if not in pupillage.)

Talking, for a moment, of Tim’s parents, one must feel sorry for the role that Lindsay Duncan is given of a tea-making, picnicking mother who is somewhat gauchely forthright, for, although Tim clearly takes much of his character from her, a highly urbane Nighy is given a much more fleshed-out part, and steals – or comes close to stealing – the important scenes between Gleeson and him.

The cast is good, and gives of its best, with McAdams, Gleeson, Robbie and Joshua McGuire (as Rory) standing out, but ‘the depth’ of the writing does let them down : Nighy is the only one who feels rounded, whereas Gleeson’s utterances too often make one just cringe, and enough others are stock (Curtis) characters.

Tim’s mother has been mentioned, but there is also the uncle (nicely played, though, by Richard Cordery), the playwright Harry (likewise Tom Hollander), the clumsy friend Jay (with no stereotypical suggestion, one can be sure, of inbreeding)… Tim goes back in time just to be with his father, who is reading Dickens, and Nighy reads a passage to Gleeson.

Maybe an attempt at Dickens with time travel is a bit, overall, what About Time feels like – no disrespect to the novelist !


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)