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Another classic that’s experienced multiple cinematic interpretations is WUTHERING HEIGHTS, now visualised by Andrea Arnold, who cut her teeth on Fishtank and Red Road. She’s controversially cast two black actors as Heathcliff, boy and man, as she believes that’s what author Emily Bronte originally intended. Together with her cinematographer Robbie Ryan, Arnold shows the Yorkshire Moors as almost continuously bleak, muddy, boggy, foggy, windswept and rain-soaked. There’s also a primal, earthy, feral quality to the young Cathy and Heathcliff as they roam the landscape, wild and untamed, passionate and brutalised, with Cathy literally licking Heathcliff’s wounds. But – and it’s a big but – some of the actors are miscast and well out of their depth, and the idea of letting much of the dialogue be improvised much simply doesn’t work. When they do speak Bronte’s words – like “He’s more myself than I am” – they are so powerful that you wonder why Arnold didn’t use more of them. So maybe one for the purists to avoid.
You might not already know the director of “cancer comedy” or chemo-com 50/50, Jonathan Levine, unless you were one of the few people who saw The Wackness. But you’ll be only too familiar with his glittering array of stars, Joseph (3rd Rock) Gordon-Levitt as Adam, Seth Rogen as his wise-cracking best friend, Angelica Huston as Adam’s suffocatingly doting mother, and Bryce Dallas Howard as his shallow girlfriend. Devastated when diagnosed with a tumour, given chemotherapy and a 50/50 chance of survival, Adam is forced to confront his own mortality and find out who his real friends are, including his rookie counsellor, played by Anna (Up In The Air) Kendrick. As with his previous film, Levine knits together a seamless, ridiculously hip soundtrack, but it’s the performances of Rogen and Gordon-Levitt that make you laugh despite the challenging subject matter.
Even more bizarre in its premise, and drawing stellar turns from its lead actors, Rachael Harris and Matt O’Leary, NATURAL SELECTION is the hilarious debut feature from Robbie Pickering. Harris plays Linda, the naïve, childless wife of religious zealot Abe, who suddenly has a stroke in the middle of making his latest, secret sperm donation at the clinic. Shocked by this revelation, Linda nevertheless gets it into her head that if she fetches one of Abe’s “offspring” to his sickbed, this might just help him pull through. But when she finds and secures a young man called Raymond (O’Leary) living off little more than his wits and whatever substances he can lay his hands on, the film becomes a charming, odd couple road movie with numerous challenges and temptations along the way. Recommended.
Also focusing on dysfunctional characters in small-town America, TERRI is an offbeat high school comedy with a screenplay by Booker long-listed author Patrick (The Sisters Brothers) deWitt, and directed by Azazel Jacobs. Everyone appears to be messed-up and struggling to fit in with their peers, particularly Terri himself, an overweight teen who comes to school in his pyjamas, cares for his ailing uncle, and cannot quite take the school assistant principal’s well-meaning overtures of friendship seriously. The quite remarkable debut of Jacob Wysocki as Terri, plus John C Reilly’s turn as the principal, raise this above conventional high school fare.
It’s hard to find much light or hope in Liza Johnson’s timely THE RETURN, focusing as it does on a returning US National Guard veteran, Kelli, unflinchingly portrayed by the excellent Linda Cardellini. The homecoming starts off with joyous celebration and relief for Kelli, her husband (Michael Shannon on form as a stoical plumber) and their young daughters. But it soon turns sour as Kelli becomes in turn numbed, traumatised and alienated, encountering other damaged people, and witnessing her own hometown also on the slide.
There’s been a considerable buzz around the romantic comedy/drama LIKE CRAZY, about an English girl (Felicity Jones) studying in LA, who falls headlong in love with an easy-going, attractive American Jacob (Anton Yelchin) to the extent of overstaying her student visa. They embark on a compressed, accelerated romance that feels like the real thing, but when she’s unable to return to the States after finally going home to the UK, the strength and depth of their passion is challenged by the distance between them. Director Drake Doremus almost pulls off the impossible, but by the end it’s hard to care about two rather superficial, self-obsessed individuals.
Mind you, it’s infinitely better than THE DISH AND THE SPOON (above-right), which stars Greta Gerwig as a jilted woman who teams up with a punkish British kid (Olly Alexander). Yes, it has indie DNA running through it, and could be described as mumblecore’s first cousin, but its quirky, self-conscious charm wears very thin, very quickly. One best avoided.
But let’s end this first part of our festival round-up with some encouraging news in the shape of two fine directorial debuts from Brits. THE AWAKENING, from Nick Murphy, is firmly placed post-First World War, when suppressed memories, trauma and a strong belief in the supernatural swirl around the British upper and middle classes. Séances are in vogue and into this world steps renowned sceptic Rebecca Hall, who is hired to solve a chilling mystery haunting a remote boarding school. Undaunted by the austere atmosphere and the strange characters at the empty school who help and hinder her, including Dominic West as the wounded, self-harming History teacher, Imelda Staunton as the matron, and one curious boy, Isaac Hempstead Wright, she pursues her mission… The mood of menace and suspense is hard to maintain, and Murphy will surely make even better films in future, but this is a pretty good start.
Finally, do check out WILD BILL, the all-guns-blazing debut of actor Dexter Fletcher as a director. He’s called on all his mates to make cameo appearances throughout this smart, funny East End crime thriller, yet it’s the imperious performance of Charlie Creed-Miles as the recently-released, deeply flawed felon and hands-off dad that grabs you by the throat and pulls you in. How can he possibly bond with his two young sons, who are respectively working on the Olympic building site next door and being lured into the world of drugs and gangs? If you want more reasons to see it, then you should also know that Fletcher’s co-writer is Danny King, who penned The Burglar Diaries, and has been a petty criminal. Plus young Will (Son of Rambow) Poulter as the teenage son, Dean, delivers one of the outstanding performances of the festival.
Coming next: part two of our round-up, marking your card for the best of the rest of the fare from elsewhere in the world – and documentaries too…