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The London Film Festival 2015 review from Helen M Jerome begins with the Big Hitters of the event. Note that for all posters featured, click on them for the full-size version. Also, this review is split over three pages.
Red carpets, flashbulbs, flashing smiles, selfies, limos, tuxedos, designer frocks and rocks. The 59th London Film Festival embraced all these while presenting glamorous celebrities and bona fide movie stars, but also subtitled gems, rarities, breakthroughs and hints of those actors and directors who’ll probably be making headlines (and money) in years to come. It’s also a onestopshop to get ahead of your friends and see work that will be released across the coming 12 months. And despite a surfeit of biopics, there’s so much variety it might make your head spin.
Once again, we’ll split our coverage into three parts, with Part One including movies from the US, UK and Australia. So, if it’s in the English language, it’s probably here. Then Part Two will look at all the other releases, the coolest subtitled films from around the globe. And in Part Three we’ll announce our annual, covetable yet virtual DVDfever Awards, and round up the best documentaries.
This was billed as the Year of the Strong Woman at the festival, and with a script by Abi Morgan, and stars including Carey Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff, Romola Garai, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep, it seems entirely fitting that Suffragette was chosen to open it. Directed by Sarah Gavron, this film was years in the making, and its key choice is to foreground an ordinary, working class woman (Mulligan), gradually drawn into the Suffragette cause, much to the anguish of her husband (Ben Whishaw) and anger of her oppressive boss. Outraged by the way her fellowworker (Duff, terrifically mouthy) is treated, and inspired by posher women (Garai, Bonham Carter, plus Streep suitably starry as Suffragette Superstar Mrs Pankhurst), this is very much Mulligan’s journey from mousey bystander to ostracised protester, thrown in prison for taking direct action.
Every actor is superb, the design feels authentic, the millinery topnotch, and they actually managed to film key scenes in Westminster, but the dialogue frequently seems just a bit clunkily modern, which lessens the effect of the drama. Worth seeing for the performances, and the important, relevant story though.
If the subject matter inspires you, you should also seek out Make More Noise, a series of very diverse Suffragette short films made over a century ago, including comic renditions of strident women played by men, the hilarious Tilly Girls, and footage of Emily Davison’s huge funeral procession, which also closes Gavron’s feature.
Closing film Steve Jobs is from festival favourite Danny Boyle, starring another fave rave Michael Fassbender in the title role, and with the expected, quickfire, Howard Hawks-style screenplay from West Wing scribe Aaron Sorkin. So far, so biopic. But structurally, the film’s acts are engineered around key product launches, and the hype and fallout around them starting with the original Macintosh computer in 1984 and ending with the iMac in 1998. Fassbender is dependably focused and driven as Jobs, ignoring naysayers sometimes to his cost, hubristic and almost autistic in his lack of empathy and asocial attitude to staff and family. Co-stars Seth Rogen, Kate Winslet and Jeff Daniels are excellent as his various friends/foes, Steve Wozniak, Joanna Hoffman and John Sculley, respectively, sporting big hair and bigger glasses as they fully embrace their ’80s identities. Frustration and lack of acknowledgment even drives Wozniak to declare “I’m tired of being Ringo, when I know I was John,” and in the face of Jobs’ rampant ego you begin to see his point. Nice one, Sorkin.
To tell the truth, it might have been better if the movie Truth had also been scripted by Aaron Sorkin. Not that Aussie director James Vanderbilt makes a hash of his own screenplay, far from it, but with the political and TV current affairs subject matter being so close to Sorkin’s heart (as seen in The West Wing and The Newsroom), he might have put more light amongst the shade. This is such a recent story that it still resonates, and it’s broadly a biopic about crusading TV journalist Mary Mapes, best known for breaking stories like Abu Ghraib. Vanderbilt’s compatriot, Cate Blanchett, is marvellous (is she ever otherwise?) as Mapes, and her foil is Robert Redford as Dan Rather, effortlessly conveying the trusted gravitas of the 60 Minutes host. But under pressure from deadlines and those with agendas, they make a slip up which goes on air in 2004.
The vultures circle and their careers are in jeopardy. Have they and their whistleblower been stitched up? Will we ever really know? Some fine supporting roles for the likes of Elisabeth Moss, Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, and Stacy Keach, and a promising feature debut for Vanderbilt.
The film that will get Cate Blanchett another Academy Award and BAFTA, however, is Todd Haynes‘ new masterpiece, Carol. Not exactly a biopic, but certainly a very personal story from the pen of crime novelist Patricia Highsmith, this charts the extraordinary romance between a high society married woman (Blanchett) and a shop girl (Rooney Mara) in the oppressive 1950s. Colours and emotions are heightened throughout, and particularly in the opening Christmas sequence where a chance glance across a New York department store ensures Carol and Therese are immediately and irrevocably drawn to each other. “What a strange girl you are, flung out of space,” exclaims Carol on their first lunch date together, and Mara conveys just the right amount of doe-eyed adoration as Therese, the aspiring photographer, as she falls under the older woman’s glamorous spell. Phyllis Nagy‘s script hits just the right note too. Mara channels early Audrey Hepburn; Blanchett is variously forward and alluring, yet guarded and tentative, with another great foil in the shape of the always dependable.
Sarah Paulson as her old flame, Abby. Cold, snowy landscapes and disdainful male partners force Therese and Carol further towards each other, the latter giddy and girlish despite her sophistication. Sleek lines, and period colour palettes of rich reds, greens and browns are reminiscent of Edward Hopper, especially when they haunt motels and diners. Might Todd Haynes be as Oscar worthy as his star?
Perhaps Carol’s only serious competition, especially for the BAFTA Best Actress award, comes from National Treasure Maggie Smith in another biopic, The Lady In The Van, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Based on another National Treasure, Alan Bennett’s account of Miss Shepherd, an elderly woman who parked her vehicle in his Camden driveway and never left, this story initially graced the National Theatre stage, but comes to life more fully here. One reason is the clever device of Alex Jennings as Bennett times two. He is both Bennett “the writer” and Bennett “the liver”, and they converse and argue with each other, as he’s hamstrung by not wanting to offend, even though Miss Shepherd (Smith) is cantankerous, ungrateful, smelly, judgemental and (according to snooty neighbours) bringing down the price of their North London properties. Smith has a ball as the mysterious traveller, hoarding things, dispensing pithy putdowns and generally making her host’s life a misery especially since he’s also trying to look after his own mother up North. Stay to the end to see Alan Bennett himself make a cameo appearance, but you can also play ‘spot-the-History-Boys-star’ throughout, as Hytner has gathered up pretty much every living actor who graced his earlier film of a Bennett play. Frances de la Tour? Yes! James Corden and Dominic Cooper? For sure! But also look out for Russell Tovey, Stephen Campbell Moore, Jamie Parker, Samuel Anderson, Sacha Dhawan and Samuel Barnett…
Unsurprisingly there’s more delicious dialogue, rather more Howard Hawks than Alan Bennett, in Jay Roach’s biopic Trumbo, written by John McNamara. Like Suffragette, it’s about another set of individuals punished for their beliefs, but set some three decades later in conservative, capitalist Hollywood. It centres on Dalton Trumbo, the highly successful screenwriter robustly played by Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), working day and night, cigarette-holder always in use under his ‘tache, typewriter perched over the bathtub, insistent jazzy soundtrack swirling in the background. Trumbo is a man of principles, but he also has a family to support, so his life is thrown into chaos when he’s blacklisted by the film industry for refusing to testify against his peers. It’s the height of the Cold War and Trumbo’s fellow ‘commie’ Edward G Robinson sees his acting roles dry up overnight and is forced to compromise. Trumbo and the rest of the ‘Hollywood 10’ find there’s suddenly no work, much to the glee of Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, beautifully channelled by Helen Mirren, assisted by everchanging millinery and snappy oneliners. Only hack producers like John Goodman, in another scenestealing role, will take him on. But only at the cheapest rates and with no credit. So when Trumbo writes Roman Holiday and other awardwinning hit movies, the likes of Hedda are floundering as they seek to find who penned them. Could Cranston add an Academy Award to his four Emmys for Breaking Bad?
The ambitious, but flawed biopic Black Mass from Scott Cooper boasts Johnny Depp as notorious south Boston crime boss James ‘Whitey’ Bulger. And he’s all bad hair, bad teeth and casually bossy brutality, but somehow Depp still doesn’t seem quite right as a man who made the city and its cops bend to his will for decades, leaving a bloody trail of victims in his wake. And maybe this feels like a cover version of previous gangster flicks precisely because Whitey himself is treading in the welltrodden and wellfilmed footsteps of his criminal predecessors. Benedict Cumberbatch makes a good fist of playing Whitey’s brother, Billy, who chooses to rule the city a different way, by becoming state senator. In the middle are bent lawmen like John Connolly, the Bulgers’ boyhood friend, deftly played by Joel Edgerton, who happily gets rid of incriminating evidence or inconvenient witnesses on Whitey’s behalf, until he can’t cover his tracks any longer. Meanwhile whistleblowers and informants gather, notably Jesse Plemons as Kevin Weeks, all blank face and seething bitterness.
Jesse Plemons plays another reallife whistleblower, cyclist Floyd Landis, in Stephen Frears’ biopicThe 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.
Branden Kramer is to be applauded for filming his thriller, Ratter, in innovative fashion. There are a few peripheral characters and storylines, but basically the entire plot centres around one female student who has recently moved into the biggest, nicest student apartment in New York. The twist is, Kramer films the entire movie via all the electronic and surveillance technology around her. As she uses her laptop for Skyping or fitness workouts, it’s filming her. Her iPhone is shooting from within her handbag. CCTV captures her. Has her password been hacked though? And is someone getting into her apartment when she’s not there? Or infinitely more disturbingly… when she is there asleep? It doesn’t always work, but the concept is strong. Beware though, it could still make you paranoid.
We’ve loved Terence Davies in the past, especially for his Terence Rattigan adaptation, The Deep Blue Sea, The House of Mirth, and Of Time And The City, his love song for his hometown Liverpool. And we’ll love him again. But we have to admit we didn’t make it all the way through his period Scottish drama, Sunset Song. Adapted from the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel of the same name, it starts out promisingly enough, with the likes of Peter Mullan as the bullying, abusive patriarch making his mark (literally), and enough rural fate, faith and farming to fill a milking pail. But when the focus shifts solely to the central character of Mullan’s thwarted daughter, Chris Guthrie, played by Agyness Deyn, she simply cannot sustain our interest across the two-hour-plus film. The landscape is stunning. Brilliant character and supporting actors surround Deyn, but although Davies might have thought that casting a pretty blank canvas in their midst would work, it simply doesn’t.
Lily Tomlin is the Grandma in Paul Weitz’s gentle, generation-gap comedy, an irascible, happy, hippy academic who doesn’t quite know what to do when her granddaughter, Sage, turns up broke and pregnant on her doorstep. It’s filmed at a measured, sometimes uneven, endearingly clunky pace, much like Tomlin’s ancient automobile. But it’s worth watching for her perfect timing, plus the scenestealing turns by Sam Elliott as Tomlin’s old lover, Karl, and Marcia Gay Harden as Sage’s businesswoman mother, Judy, the polar opposite of Tomlin’s character.
Director and screenwriter Josh Mond made James White because his own mother had died in similar circumstances to the matriarch, played here by Cynthia Nixon , and indeed Nixon had also lost her own mother not long before agreeing to take part. This isn’t an easy watch, but it’s heartfelt and blisteringly honest and real, at times almost too real. It starts apparently as a film about a hedonistic and none-too-likeable New Yorker, James White (Christopher Abbott), attending his father’s wake. He scoots off on a Mexican vacation for more hedonism, until he gets a call from his mother to come home, as her cancer is spreading while her dementia is also taking over. Things fall apart, he goes into freefall while he’s trying to be her carer, yet somehow also becomes his better self. Mond’s movie manages to be poignant, but unsentimental, much like the central mother-son relationship. It’s also worth noting that Mond’s DoP M átyás Erdély was also the cinematographer on one of the festival’s standout films, Son Of Saul (reviewed in Part Two of our roundup).
In Aussie director Ariel Kleiman’s debut feature Partisan, Vincent Cassel has gone feral and set up his own commune/harem, consisting purely of single mothers and their young and impressionable offspring. It all seems idyllic until you realise that he’s actually built a cult of followers he’s teaching to go outside their walls and shoot to order. His keenest disciple is 11-year-old Alexander, who hangs on his every word, carries out his murderous missions, and seeks his approval until he sees through him and tries to escape his hold. Cassel is as brilliant and menacing as ever, and there’s a palpable sense of unease throughout. Promising.
Another debut director from Australia, Simon Stone based The Daughter on his own theatrical adaptation of Ibsen’s play, The Wild Duck. He’s managed to recruit a pretty amazing cast for it too, with Sam Neill as nature-loving ex-con grandfather Walter, Geoffrey Rush as his rich nemesis Henry, and their respective sons Oliver (Ewen Leslie) and Christian (Paul Schneider) reuniting long after their boyhood friendship, for Henry’s impending second wedding. Poised between them all is Oliver’s daughter, Hedvig (newcomer Odessa Young), the light of his and his wife Charlotte’s (Miranda Otto) life. Resentment simmers just below the surface and there’s a secret buried deep in their shared pasts which might come back to haunt them… (and knowing that Ibsen is the source, it’s a safe bet to say that nothing in the past is ever safely hidden). Another highly promising debut.
COMING SOON: Part Two of our London Film Festival review includes all the best from the rest of the world…