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Jesse Plemons plays another reallife whistleblower, cyclist Floyd Landis, in Stephen Frears’ biopic
The Program. Focusing on Lance Armstrong’s rise and fall through triumph, cancer survival, charity work, and extreme drug use to facilitate his sporting victories, this feature comes hot on the heels of Alex Gibney’s superb documentary, The Armstrong Lie (a previous festival favourite). Ben Foster is remarkable as Armstrong, capturing his sculpted eeriness as he very nearly convinces himself of the merits of his actions. Does the end ever justify the means? He’ll quite literally do anything to win, destroy any foe, employ any dodgy quack, cold shoulder any questioning journalist, compromise any team member until he pisses off one too many of them. Chris O’Dowd is suitably dogged as David Walsh, the sports reporter whose initial admiration turns to doubt, which propels him into redeeming his oftmaligned trade his singleminded pursuit precisely mirroring that of Armstrong himself. And it’s all beautifully filmed by Danny Cohen.
Danny Cohen shows he’s no onetrick pony by also making Lenny Abrahamson’s movie Room
look variously claustrophobic, magical, threatening, grimy and joyful. Based on Emma Donoghue’s awardwinning novel and crucially she wrote the screenplay herself before the book was published this captures its unique tone and characters perfectly. Abrahamson creates an entirely plausible world in which to tell the story of a mother and child’s forced incarceration and find out whether they can ever escape ‘Room’ and its effect on them. But this also throws up questions about what it’s like to be institutionalised from birth, and how strong the bonds are between mother and son. There are many extraordinary performances from children in the festival this year, but it’s hard to see how anyone can top the acting from 7-yea-rold Jacob Tremblay as Jack, all wide-eyed naivety, fierce clinging love, bravery and bewilderment. Luckily Brie Larson as Ma matches him toe to toe, giving balance to this powerful tale. I thoroughly recommend reading the novel too.
Another recent and haunting novel, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, has been adapted into a movie by John Crowley, from Nick Hornby’s screenplay. It’s the classic Irish emigration story, but with twists along the way, from the moment Eilis (the radiant Saoirse Ronan), seasick and homesick, steps off the boat, and goes through Ellis Island into New York City. Once there she’s helped by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), and lives in a boarding house with fellow Irish girls, supervised by landlady Julie Walters (scene-stealing and thigh-slappingly funny). Despite her unfulfilling job in a department store, she starts evening classes, and falls in love with another child of immigrant parents, an Italian young man with hopes and dreams of his own. But just when everything seems nearperfect and verging on sentimental, Eilis has to return to Ireland, where another suitor awaits… Worth reading the book, and definitely worth seeing the movie for Walters’ bon mots and Ronan’s breakout role.
There’s zero sentiment in Cary Fukunaga’s (True Detective) Beasts Of No Nation, the brutal story of African child soldiers adapted from Uzodinma Iweala’s novel, but there is another remarkable performance from a very young man. Abraham Attah is jaw-droppingly good as Abu, who is forced to join a squad of vicious young recruits after he flees his village, having witnessed his entire family being murdered. Riveting, bloody, visually stunning, horrific and entirely gripping across more than two hours’ action, this is also worth seeing on the big screen for Idris Elba’s larger-than-life portrayal of corrupt father-figure ‘The Commandant’. Part Fagin and part demagogue, he trains and leads the boys, but becomes intoxicated by his own power, drugs and self-mythologising. The hallucinatory music from Dan Romer only adds to the oppressive, heady atmosphere.
Not many years older than the child soldiers in Beasts, the eponymous King Jack, played by Charlie Plummer, is a feral, awkward, bullied teen who has to look after his younger cousin (Cory Nichols, also superb) one summer weekend in his boring small town. They are initially reluctant companions, then they start to get on, even hanging out and playing truth or dare with the local teen girls, until the boys are hunted down by the town bully. Grittily, but sensitively directed by Felix Thompson, it feels like Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, full of rough charm, with amazing performances from both boys, but with sudden flashes of violence.
There’s a similar mood in Light Years, the debut feature from Esther May Campbell, and following on from her promising short film. Two young sisters and their brother have been left drifting, rootless and listless since their mother (singer Beth Orton) was diagnosed with dementia and taken into care, and their father started to fall apart. They’re all fractured in some way, out of kilter, unbalanced and lost without the heart of the family, and the film ends up being more atmosphere and mood than plot, unstructured and fraying at the edges. But it’s very promising, and as well as the director, it’s probably worth keeping an eye on the youngest actor here, Zamira Fuller, who plays Rose.
Another director who has graduated from shorts to first feature is Chanya Button, with her much-talked-about Brit comedy Burn Burn Burn. Button has certainly lucked out by getting such an amazing cast of supporting character actors, from Julian Rhind-Tutt and Sally Phillips to Matthew Kelly, Jane Asher, Nigel Planer and Alison Steadman, not to mention a scene-stealing Alice Lowe (Sightseers) as a rather unhinged tour guide. But it’s her central trio of Laura Carmichael (Downton Abbey) as wild-child Seph, Chloe Pirrie (The Game) as sad, jilted Alex, and Joe Dempsie as their late friend James, who sustain the darkly comic mood and the rolling laughs. In short, James wants Seph and Alex to scatter his ashes in specific sites around the UK (cue road trip), and play each of his recorded video messages to them when they reach these locations. From Glastonbury to Cardiff, York to Scotland, they fall out, pick up hitchhikers, and gradually learn more about James and themselves. Nice script too from Button’s pal Charlie Covell. Ones to watch.
Alice Lowe was the co-star in High Rise (right) director Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, a festival fave from 2012. And this was the film that propelled Wheatley into the Big League, enabling him to roll his sleeves up and film the ‘unfilmable’ JG Ballard novel, High Rise. Let’s address the positives first: Tom Hiddleston is magnificent, even if it now feels like we’re reaching peak-Hiddleston. He’s strutting, preening, an amoral compass in a sewer of humanity perched in a 1970s ‘futuristic’ tower block with Jeremy Irons living across the top floor and lavish roof gardens with his pampered wife Keeley Hawes and their white horse. It all feels like the last days of Rome crossed with Louis XI, accompanied by orchestral versions of Abba’s SOS. Dystopian doesn’t come near describing this. Elisabeth Moss, Sienna Miller and Luke Evans are fine in largely unpleasant roles. Social cleansing, violence, adultery and excess haunt the hallways. And the film itself is a glorious mess in many ways, but almost two hours of this is not a happy experience. Now he’s got this passion project done, here’s hoping for a return to form for Wheatley next time.
There’s more inter-floor envy and bitterness in David Farr’s debut film, the deliberately schlocky thriller The Ones Below, set in a well-heeled postcode of London. Clemence Poesy and Stephen Campbell-Moore live their blissfully sunny lives in their blissfully sunny upstairs flat and their new neighbours David Morrissey (as a blunt, aggressive businessman) and his obsessively devoted wife Laura Birn are ‘The Ones Below’. The couples bond over the fact that they’re each expecting their first child, until a tragic accident happens and one of them miscarries. Then the dread and schlocky thrills commence, and you’d think that Poesy and Campbell-Moore had never seen any Hitchcock films, as they simply do not spot the signs of impending doom. Luckily the audience does, and is always one step ahead, no doubt peering through their collective fingers.