Showing posts with label James McAvoy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James McAvoy. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I Wanted To Go To The Cinema...

Oh my god, I finally went to the cinema again! It's been weeks since I last watched a film, cinema or no (I've had A Woman Under the Influence on rental for two and a half MONTHS now. Tell me that isn't ridiculous. And, yes, I'm sure it's great, but it sounds like a downer and it's so long and it's Wimbledon fortnight now and... ugh. Excuses abound. I'll watch it eventually.).

Wanted is the kind of film I shouldn't like, really. Comparisons have been made- they're obviously there- with The Matrix, and I hate that film, so it's almost like I'm being hypocritical here. But James McAvoy is no Keanu Reeves, Angelina Jolie is no Carrie-Anne Moss and Morgan Freeman is no Laurence Fishburne (well, it doesn't entirely work like that, but...). Basically, Wanted is frisky, fun and genuinely exciting, and, unlike The Matrix, it almost seems to see its central "philosophy" as a joke. It's certainly much more an interior philosophy than the Wachowskis, by which I mean that it is the characters' choice to believe it, as opposed to being the foundation of a universe. In simpler terms, The Matrix had its head up its arse, and Wanted doesn't.

A film like this lives and dies by its casting. If I don't like the performers, I'm not going to like the characters because what character there is boils down to a couple of talky scenes (and a fair amount of McAvoy voice-over, which for some reason doesn't quite work). But do you really need to know the background of Angelina Jolie's foxy assassin Fox (huh)- which we get in a sombre little interlude- when we see her lying backwards on and firing bullets from the bonnet of a sports car that McAvoy is driving from the passenger seat, or listening to McAvoy's girlfriend whine at him and deciding to help him out (in the nicest way possible)? Wanted is low on character but it applies it in the right places, building to a finale that pales only because it's been preceded by a stunning set-piece involving a high-speed train and a bridge. Director Timur Bekmambetov has honed the high-voltage visual techniques that fell flat in the Russian blockbuster Night Watch and cleverly uses them to increase identification with McAvoy's Wesley Gibson. McAvoy's charisma remains intact in the new Hollywood environment and Jolie is on sizzling form too, taking a blockbuster-break between projects that are cementing her status as a respected performer. I could have lived without repeatedly being told what average losers we all are, but the only lies Wanted is telling its audience is that a bullet trajectory can be curved. B

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Atonement Revisited

When I first saw Atonement, all the way back in September (Britain got it a few months earlier than America and most other countries), I was fresh off having read (and loved) the book- as usual with books that aren't prescribed parts of my course these days, it was only because they were making a film out of it that I read it. Naturally, the issue with watching a film of a book you've read is that you're naturally going to make comparisons- but reading the book so close to watching the film is possibly unadvisable, because it makes you even more prone to paper over the film's omissions (which are often necessary or effective ones) with pages that are still living vivid life in your memory. Characters seem more than they are because the versions the book and film offer up to you are different things- not a problem, perhaps, when watching at a studied distance, but the character of Cecilia, say, who was granted a greater deal of interiority than the film affords her, seemed less rounded and human on a second, more removed viewing than she did initially, because in my head first go round was still the Cecilia from the book.

Trying to make a truly faithful version of a book is always a mistake, really, because, as with plays, the whole thing generally comes off as too stilted, too formal and constrained, because you get the sense that the filmmakers are ignoring any possible artistry in an attempt to portray exactly what the book gives you. Atonement does not have this problem, because Joe Wright, its director, does not let it. This isn't to say, though, that it's not seeking to be faithful to the book in a disadvantageous way- it just goes an entirely different route towards achieving it. We learnt from Pride and Prejudice's famous circuitous long-take around the rural family home that Wright is a director often prone to flashiness- but here, with Atonement, he seems too often to go slightly overboard. He may not be keen to tell us the story, so to speak, but he is intent on showing it to us, and all too often his visual attempts to do so seem overbearing and unsubtle. Grone-inducing visual metaphors like Cecilia (Keira Knightley) diving into the swimming pool cutting sharply to Robbie (James McAvoy) sliding up from under his bath water, or the insistent close-ups of that infamous word that wasn't meant to be seen being typed across our screen, sit uncomfortably alongside the classical style Wright favours for most of the film- most egregious, possibly, is his reversing flashback of Robbie and Cecilia's separation, to not mention his infamous five and a half minute tracking shot around Dunkirk, which seems to serve no other purpose that proving it can be done. Dario Marianelli's score is for the most part delicate and effectively melancholic, but the typewriter sounds that spark up on young Briony's (Saoirse Ronan) appearances- which undoubtably are what won him the Oscar- are jarring and altogether too poundingly insistent. And Christopher Hampton's script is too often as unsubtle as Wright himself- particularly, it has to be said, in the coda, for which I previously placed too much blame on Vanessa Redgrave, but it's really the fault of having what was in the book revealed by a first person narration but is here forced to be revealed in one long, overt speech.

Atonement's productional credentials are generally faultless- impeccably-created sets, good costume work, ecetera- but ultimately the whole thing does feel a bit empty because there is barely an actual character to identify with. Robbie and Cecilia, even moreso than they were in the novel, are less humans than idealized romantic fiction, and, while that is the point that McEwan ultimately makes, he also invested time and energy into the pairing, using their perspectives to eschew the possibility of making them into ciphers for Briony's atonement. It's harder to pull off different perspectives on film without being overly explicit, and, even while spending most time with Briony, Wright refrains from actually entering any of the characters heads, and this means that the film loses any chance to understand either Robbie or Cecilia, leaving both McAvoy and Knightley asea amid clipped British accents and creaseless formal clothing. Obviously Briony is more of a rounded character, but here it's more a case of the actors letting the side down- Romola Garai is easily the best here, redemptive and haunted as her eighteen year-old Briony struggles with nurse training and contacting her estranged sister, but Saoirse Ronan, much-praised as the younger incarnation of Briony, works too hard to try pull off the adult-acting aspect of her character, which, in one of the novel's clearest ironies, is all a fallacy anyway. Ronan is good at portraying Briony's slightly lofty attitudes, but she's a tad too vacant, lacking any edge in her clearly-meant-to-be-meaningful stares out of the window, and not nearly as good at underlining the empathic moments of Briony as Garai is. And Redgrave, stuck as she is with that expositionary coda, works like a trooper to inject some emotion into her face as Wright holds steady on her close-up, but, not only is she undermined by an understandable but still foolish choice to have her basically look like an overgrown Ronan (same hair cut, swamping dress), there's just little she can do to make the words seem less deadeningly unrealistic than they are.

Atonement works, maybe, as the sweeping period romance that you feel the Academy probably took it for, but as the more subtle depiction of the devastating effect of falsehoods and misunderstandings the book proves itself to be, the film fails. There's no real sense of tragedy in Robbie and Cecilia's separation because they're never relatable, sympathetic characters. Indeed, the film's best moments belong entirely to Garai, as she depicts the tragedy she unknowingly did to herself- rather lamely sitting by a French soldier's bedside, unsure whether to go along with his delirious 'remembrances' of her; but especially in the film's coup-d'etat, Briony's confrontation with Robbie and Cecilia. Nathaniel highlighted this line reading in his recent awards, but it bears repeating for just how perfectly Garai captures Briony's wretched regret, her pathetic apology coming out as if she knows how redundant it will seem. It's a superb performance in a film that doesn't seem to want one, more concerned with the tragic romance and directorial flashiness than telling the story that McEwan told. C+

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Atonement: The Film

It's been almost an entire month since I last made an entry here... but I finally saw Atonement and I felt it necessary to add my two cents. Look for more frequent entries once I get back yo uni and get the internet connected there (about three weeks, I'm guessing).

As I said before, the novel Atonement (which, let's be honest, I only read because they were making a film out of it) was so beautiful and heartbreaking I wasn't even sure if I could sit through seeing it on-screen. But what the film left on me was a rather dull feeling of indifference: sure, it was moving, well-made, superbly acted- but it didn't make me feel as much as it should have. When it got to the portion of the film where Robbie (James McAvoy) is trudging his way across a war-strewn France, I kept thinking 'I hope they've cut it down, I hope they've cut it down'- which they had, and that didn't fit with me- it's not that I hated that part, it's that it was SO difficult to read and deal with that I didn't want to have to deal with it again. But, the problem is, Atonement NEEDS that, and it NEEDS the difficulty of Briony's (Romola Garai at this point) work as a nurse dealing with horrifically injured soldiers, because that's what makes the shattering ending work all the more. But Atonement, at this point, feels truncated, and I just felt my emotions drifting away, wishing this was the book instead, and wishing I could cry again when the ending came.

I can't be harsh on the film- all the acting (besides, surprisingly, Vanessa Redgrave- her coda doesn't work at all) is superb, particularly McAvoy and Garai. The costume and make-up work is exemplary (I loved how Redgrave looked almost exactly like Saoirse Ronan and Garai, with the same hair-cut and a dress that looked too big- as if she'd never moved past her childhood crime, which, of course, she hadn't), the direction is strong and the music beautiful. But it's not the masterpiece I so desperately wanted it to be, and that's why my words are more negative that my grade of B+ implies.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Starter for Ten and Borat

[Starter for Ten (Tom Vaughan, 2006/7): I read a critique of Starter for Ten almost immediatly having watched it which advised "Great for Americans; avoid if you're a Brit though" and continued to savage the film for not being the next Trainspotting or A Clockwork Orange. This interesting perspective has one good idea and one bad: perhaps Dudley Nicholls' story paints England as a bit too picturesque, a bit too unchallenging- nothing serious ever invades the lives of these supposedly realistic characters, but then, nothing was ever meant to. To go onto the bad idea of this argument: Starter for Ten was never intending to be a serious look at British life, it was simply content to be a slightly Americanized, predictable cross between a coming-of-age story and a romantic triangle. And on these bases, it's hard to deny that Starter for Ten is successful. James McAvoy, that young Scottish star who seems to have appeared from nowhere to take the world by storm, is effortlessly charming as Brian Jackson, a young man who braves Bristol University in 1985, young in experience but eager to learn. An afectionado of British tv quiz University Challenge, he immediatly seizes the opportunity to get on the team, and there meets the beautiful Alice (Alice Eve), a girl who he immediatly falls for and who may or may not feel the same. Into the frame, however, comes Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a headtrong political student who sagely comments on Brian's life whenever she sees him, but who is not above being charmed by his unconventional approach. Starter for Ten unfolds in a straight, easy-to-follow trajection; it's so predictable that Vaughan might as well have had characters holding up arrows to point the way. But the three leads are almost unexpectedly charming: Alice Eve and Rebecca Hall provide obvious counterpoints to each other, but both have their own expressive qualities that should serve them well in the future. When the film comes to its obvious conclusion, its hard to keep a smile from brimming on your face, because, predictable or no, the best conclusion has come. Grade: B-]

[Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006): The hyperbole surrounding the critical and audience sensation of 2006 became so great that my desire to see it faded to nothing between the weeks of its release and my eventual trip to see it. Said trip was taken with my younger sister, who had already seen (and liked) it, but was happy to sit through it again so she could see Pan's Labyrinth with me afterwards. Said trip was also for the 11:00am showing, which meant, unsurprisingly, that the cinema was rather bare: a few people dotted around and two teenage groups huddled at the back row. Unstandably the laughter that these people could possibly illicit wasn't exactly going to be racuous, but I got even less than I expected, and it was not hard to see why. Forget what you've heard: Borat isn't funny. Oh, I won't deny that occasionally I chuckled, but surely this is damning next to praise like "so funny it'll burst half the blood vessels in your face" (Empire). Worse still are all the claims that Borat is an incisive cultural commentary: it's not. It's just a selectively edited trip around America, occasionally encountering bigoted people who are surprisingly fluid with their opinions, but the film doesn't use this to actually say anything. So there are bigoted people in America- there are bigoted people everywhere! And in the sections in which Borat isn't encountering these people, he's embarassing perfectly acceptable human beings in the name of comedy which is rarely even funny. For Borat's main claim is that it's a comedy- the problem being, it's not funny. Grade: C]