Young Adam – One of the Lesser Known Beat Generations Writers Gets a Say

Young Adam (2003) directed by David Mackenzie is based on the novel of the same name by Alexander Trocci, one of the lesser known authors connected with the Beat Generation. The story revolves around Joe (Ewan McGregor) who we are introduced as he works as a deckhand on a barge along with Les (Peter Mullen) and his wife Ella (Tilda Swinton). Les and Joe find the body of a young woman in the river and fish her out, which gains them the kind of quiet and tangential notoriety that you could expect down at the pub after a hard days work. There’s a kind of quiet excitement from Les at being involved in something so obviously outside his ken, the connotation of sex and violence obvious. Joe says nothing, something that turns out to be less surprising as the story unfolds with the split time line of flashbacks that show the relationship between Joe and the dead girl, Cathie (Emily Mortimer).

The first impression you get of the marriage between Les and Ella is that the union is not exactly a happy one. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the barge that travels up and down the Clyde River means there is little or no privacy to be had and Ella seems too hardened and harsh to be anything but beaten down, something which shows itself to be completely wrong the minute Joe and Ella start having an affair. Ella is a force to be reckoned with, she owns the barge and she runs the ship with an iron fist, she is passionate and much stronger than first impressions might lead you to believe. Les gets pushed aside and ends up leaving with nothing but a suitcase in his hand, while Joe slots into place as Ella’s partner.

The thing about this story is that it unfolds in dual time lines, one showing Joe’s relationship with Cathie and his life as a would-be writer, while the other scrupulously follows Joe’s life aboard the barge and his exploits with the women around him. And therein lies the rub, so to speak. There are a couple of really interesting aspects to this movie. The gritty Scottish working-class kitchen-sink realism of the lives portrayed clash and collide with the overt estranged nihilism that brings to mind good old fashioned alienation literature like Camus’ The Stranger. There is obviously a lot going on beneath the surface that we are not all the way privileged to take part of. Joe is not a very likeable character. There is a lot of carnality in this story, Joe not only seduces Ella, he also has a short tryst with her widowed sister, Gwen (Therese Bradley) and the scenes from his relationship with Cathie are definitely not vanilla. There’s vanilla custard involved, though. It all comes together in a murder trial where we, the audience, know that the accused who may be executed for the offense, is innocent. The guilty party is actually in the court room, and the death was an accident, but none of those things are brought to light. Joe is at the center of all this, and I for one was not the least bit surprised at the choices he makes.

There are no visual markers indicating when we’re enjoying a flashback and that is actually enough of break from convention that you have to focus, and it struck me as an odd artistic choice to make. The fact that we are dealing with a morality play blended with an artistic thriller that relies pretty heavily on the mood it manages to set and the intensity of the performances means this is less easy to categorize and that has a certain appeal. It tastes a lot like a Noir thriller at times. The story doesn’t go into overly elaborate explanations or exposition, and in my book, these can be good things.

There is, however, an inherent distance created in the artistic choices made here. Tilda Swinton, Ewan McGregor and Peter Mullen give excellent fine tuned performances, which helps. It won’t make you like any of them any better, but that’s hardly the point. And, oddly enough, I wasn’t terribly impressed while watching this, but I found myself recalling more of it than I expected, which means it does something to stay with you and take on a life off the screen, which actually surprised me a little considering how unassuming the narrative style is. The complete and total lack of sentimentality is appealing, as well as the moral dilemmas that arise. The photography and the score all help with achieving the understated tensions running like deep currents in the narrative. It is certainly worth watching and it lingers with you, which is actually a good thing.

Article first published as Movie Review: Young Adam on Blogcritics.

Winter’s Bone (2010) – It is Life Near the Bone Where It Is Sweetest

The main character of Winter’s Bone (2010), the seventeen-year old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), is as tough as old boot leather. She lives up in the Missouri Ozarks with her mama, who is physically present but mentally absent, her twelve-year old brother Sonny (Isaiah Stone) and her six-year old sister Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson). Her father, Jessup, has been missing for some time and the story begins when Ree gets told that her father has to show up for court or they’re going to lose their house because he put it up to get the bond for the bail money.

It’s well known that Ree’s father cooks methamphetamine and that he’s been in trouble with the law before. Now that he is missing and the immediate safety of her family is threatened, Ree goes looking for him, asking a lot of uncomfortable questions of some very dangerous people.

Ree is shown right from the start as self-sufficient and strong in the sense that she does what has to be done. In her case that means taking care of her mother and her siblings, chopping wood and hunting squirrel and trying to make ends meet. There are poignant instances where Ree is taking her siblings to school and then looking in through the doors of the classrooms with something like longing in her eyes, showing plainly that she knows what she has to give up for her family.

Ree goes in search of her father, talking to relatives and people her father has had dealings with all over the community. She forms an uneasy alliance with her volatile uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) in trying to get to the truth, though it’s pretty clear right from the get-go that her father is gone for good, if not dead.

One of the more interesting things about this story is that even if the culture is portrayed as predominantly and pretty aggressively patriarchal, the women are given a lot of weight and substance. Most everywhere Ree goes she is greeted at the door by the wives and girlfriends of the men she has to ask questions of, and they are all cast in the same tough-as-nails Cerberus dye. The region’s patriarch Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall) is guarded by his spouse Merab (Dale Dickey), who also delivers an almighty beating to Ree when she won’t stop her investigation.

This is a tale of family, perseverance and doing what has to be done and Ree is undoubtedly a heroine in the most basic and best sense of the word. Jennifer Lawrence gives her portrayal of Ree all the gravitas and subtlety you could hope for, showing both her strength and her weakness, her fear and her deep and abiding sense of loyalty without it ever becoming overly sentimental. This could so easily have tripped into a stereotypical portrayal of degenerate hillbillies and gratuitous poverty porn, but instead each character is shown as doing what they have to do in order to live under extremely harsh conditions. Some manage to rise above their circumstance and some succumb to them. Drugs are in abundance, both as a means of making money and for everyday use and this is presented as a fact of life. The harsh things are snugged up right against the gentle in this tale. The landscape and the color palette shows just how bleak and difficult life is, and it also shows the undeniable haunting beauty of the scarcity of the mountains.

This is a thriller in the best sense of the word. The object is to find out what has happened to Ree’s father, and the viewer is taken along for the ride right up to the inevitable conclusion. What makes this rise above the run of the mill thrillers is that the devil is in the details all the way. The dialogue is sparse, the characters kept true and given context and depth even though they are not explained to death. In amidst of all the violence and danger we are also shown how Ree’s little brother and sister run and play and seem genuinely happy to be together, with no sense that they are deprived of anything essential.

There are visually lyrical moments that underscore the characters themselves without intruding on the story, sometimes in black and white and sometimes in a muted colour scheme that adds to the overall impression created in the narrative. It is gripping and harrowing and reminiscent of true Southern Gothic tales underscored with a sense of almost documentary quality frankness, which makes it well worth watching.

Winter’s Bone (2010) directed by Debra Granik stars Jennifer Lawrence (Ree), Isaiah Stone (Sonny), Ashlee Thompson (Ashlee), John Hawkes (Teardrop), Valerie Richards (Connie), Shelley Waggener (Sonya), Garret Dillahunt (Sheriff Baskin), William White (Blond Milton), Lauren Sweetser (Gail), Dale Dickey (Merab), Sheryl Lee (April), Marideth Sisco (Singer at Party) and Ronnie Hall (Thump Milton). Based on the novel of the same name written by Daniel Woodrell.

Article first published as Movie Review Winter’s Bone on Blogcritics.

Shelter (2010) – Multiple Personalities Or Just A Hill Witch Curse? (Yes, You Read That Right.)

Article first published as Movie Review: Shelter(2010) on Blogcritics.

Shelter opens on the forensic psychiatrist Cara Harding (Julianne Moore) who seems to have a special interest in multiple personality disorder.. Her evaluation of a criminal who has obviously pleaded insanity sends the gentleman in question to the electric chair. Subsequent conversations between her and her father Dr. Harding (Jeffrey DeMunn) quickly reveal that debunking presumed sufferers from multiple personality disorder is something of a speciality of Cara’s. She is yet to be proven wrong in her estimations. That’s where David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) comes into the equation.

Dr Harding presents Cara with this interesting patient, a young man in a wheelchair who has been found on the street, lost and without any recollection as to how he wound up where he was. What starts as an interesting battle of intellects between Cara and her father quickly turns into something else when David starts switching personalities. His alters, Adam and Wesley, make appearances and Cara is starting to have to question her iron-clad beliefs and assumptions.

So far so good. I am actually with the story up to this point. Multiple personality disorder is a very much discussed phenomena and it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked, but it makes for great entertainment in this kind of setting. The problem here is that this is where this story veers off into the supernatural. People start dying in gruesome, horrendous and very specific ways while Cara investigates the various alters of David only to find that they all existed, and that the young man is not so much disturbed, as possessed.

Okay, fine. I’ll roll with it. So he is possessed and not disturbed. It isn’t until we wind up in the mountains with a bunch of shaggy-looking mountain people and an old hag with the ability to suck a persons soul out and then put it back in that the atmospheric scenery and all-in-all pretty solid performances no longer outweigh the frank silliness of the basic plot. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that makes this too hard to swallow, but I think it’s in part the fact that we started out on fairly solid ground with sharp-witted dialogue and an intriguing concept and suddenly find ourselves in a stereotypical back-water village in the hills that seems to belong in a Tales from the Crypt episode.

David turns out to be a priest whom the mountain witch “Granny” (Joyce Feurring) has put a curse on so that he now has to provide “shelter” for all those souls that have lost their faith in god. That’s the reason why so many different personalities are living in that one body. Then, for whatever reason, David starts going after the various members of Cara’s family and some of her acquaintances as well. It ends up becoming a battle for the souls, with Cara’s daughter, Sammy (Brooklynn Proulx) as the main damsel-in-distress.

There’s a definite risk with making a movie that has a slight case of multiple personality disorder itself. It’s a mystery and a crime story and a thriller and a horror flick all in one, and it switches between these different language codes in a way that could have worked, could have been clever. The performances are strong throughout, Julianne Moore delivers, as does Jeffrey DeMunn as her father and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the various incarnations of whoever is in David’s body at the moment. The problem is more that this devolves into a fairly trite horror movie, nothing particularly original about it, and the twist at the very end isn’t surprising, or even mildly upsetting, at least not to this viewer who saw it coming a mile away.

It fails at going into some of the basic archetypal fears that could have made it truly frightening, like the inherent instability of the human psyche, something we rely no being more writ in stone than it really is, and opt s instead for a vague kind of religious gloss of the old fire-and-brimstone variety, which, again, would have been fine, if it had any kind of lead-in other than the gruesome deaths of the people occupying the preacher’s body. Even the Witch Of The Hills is an archetype that could have been unsettling, but here she isn’t even set up in opposition with the basic Christian morality she is supposed to act in contrast to. Instead it all comes down to having faith in a standard issue Christian god, especially when the chips are down, because if you don’t a rogue damned and hill-witch cursed preacher is going to come and kill you. See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t keep any of the promises it made in the opening. This movie is quite simply not as clever as it would like to be. I wouldn’t waste my time with this one.

Shelter (2010) directed by Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein stars Julianne Moore (Cara Harding), Jonathen Rhys Meyers (David/Adam/Wesley), Jeffrey DeMunn (Dr. Harding), Frances Conroy (Mrs. Bernburg), Nathan Corddry (Stephen Harding), Brooklynn Proulx (Sammy), Brian Anthony Wilson (Virgil), Joyce Feurring (Granny Holler Witch), Steven Rishard (Detective Danton), Charles Techman (Monty Hughes) and John Peakes (Dr. Charles Foster).

Mystery Train: Calling Elvis

Article first published as Movie Review Mystery Train Calling Elvis on Blogcritics.

Mystery Train (1989) written and directed by Jim Jarmusch consists of three parts. It takes place in a curiously de-populated Memphis where the ghost of Elvis Presley is ever-present.
The segments are ”Far from Yokohama”, ”A Ghost” and ”Lost in Space”.

In ”Far from Yokohama” two Japanese tourists Jun (Masaoshi Nagase) and Mitsuko (Youki Kudoh) come to Memphis to see Graceland and Sun Studio. They are there to pay homage to Elvis and Carl Perkins. Through a series of circumstance they wind up at a run down hotel.

The hotel is the common denominator of all three stories, by the way. The Night Clerk (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) and the Bellboy (Cinqué Lee) feature in all three stories. The same scene replays three times from three different perspectives. The same song plays on the radio, the same DJ (Tom Waits) gives the same patter and the same gun shot is heard three times.

The second instalment ”The Ghost” follows the Italian widow Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi) who gets held over in Memphis with the casket containing her dead husband. She gets accosted in a diner by a man (Tom Noonan) who tells her a story about how he picked up a hitchhiker outside of Memphis who turns out to be the ghost of Elvis. Luisa also winds up at the hotel, sharing a room with Dee Dee (Elizabeth Bracco) who has jus left her boyfriend, Johnny, ironically nicknamed Elvis (Joe Strummer).

The third instalment ”Lost in Space” has three friends, Johnny ”Elvis” (Joe Strummer), Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) and Charlie the Barber (Steve Buscemi). Johnny has just lost his job and his girlfriend, Dee Dee from the previous segment. He is getting drunk in a bar with Will waving a gun around. As we all know alcohol and firearms are a really bad combination and Johnny winds up shooting a clerk at a liquor store. The three guys wind up at the hotel where Will knows the Night Clerk. They hide out in a completely wrecked room at the hotel.

Of course the ghost of Elvis actually makes an appearance in one of the stories, appropriately the instalment called “The ghost”, but even with that he is still all over the story, in his music and in the discussions between the characters. There are portraits of the singer in the hotel rooms, there are references to his music in the dialogue. You can’t help thinking that the various musicians in the cast feel the same way. Even if they don’t like Elvis they still have to find a way to relate to his music and his iconic status.

The funny thing about Jarmusch-movies is that you watch and enjoy and laugh and wince and then afterwards you try to reconstruct what they are actually about, and that’s when you realize how unusual his style really is. There is more interest in the characters moods and the atmosphere of the narrative than any hard core plot driven piece – and I like that. I like the way you tend to amble along with the characters and make small and big observations and then part company, not necessarily resolving anything, but just taking part in a piece of their story.

The movie is off-beat, atmospheric, random and has a lot of downtrodden charm. A lot of the almost animistic atmosphere is due to the lovely photography by Robby Müller, who also shot Wim Wenders’ Kings Of The Road, Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly as well as other Jarmusch movies.

You have to be in the mood for this kind of thing, the odd and different pacing and the loosely held together narrative. If you are this works really well.

Mystery Train (1989), written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, Masatoshi Nagase (Jun), Youki Kudoh (Mitsuko), Scremin’ Kay Hawkins (Night Clerk), Cinqué Lee (Bellboy), Nicoletta Braschi (Luisa), Elizabeth Bracco (Dee Dee), Tom Noonan (Man in Arcade Diner), Joe Strummer(Johnny ”Elvis”), Rick Aviles (Will Robinsson), Steve Buscemi (Charlie the Barber), Tom Waits (Radio D.J.).

Abandon – Not Much of a Play on Word, as Titles Go

Article first published as Movie Review: Abandon – Not Much of a Play on Words, As Titles Go on Blogcritics.

Abandon (2002) is directed by Stephen Gaghan and stars Katie Holmes (Katie), Benjamin Bratt (Wade Handler), Charlie Hunnam (Embry), Zooey Deschael (Samantha), Fred Ward (Lieutenant Bill Stayton), Gabriel Mann (Harrison Hobart), Gabrielle Union (Amanda) and Melanie Lynskey (Mousy Julie).

The young college student Katie (Katie Holmes) is under a lot of pressure. She is working hard to complete her thesis while interviewing for prestigious jobs for when school is finished. Meanwhile her wealthy former boyfriend, Embry, went missing over two years ago and the police are taking a renewed interest in the case.

I am not going to say the story isn’t flawed, but it has enough going for it that it is worth seeing, provided that you are in the mood for a pretty close character study with a convoluted psychology and a haunted atmosphere. The pacing is slow and the timeline is broken enough that you get given the interesting points of Katie and Embry’s relationship interspersed as we go along.

Katie (Katie Holmes) is strung taught and nervous and you can pretty much sense the tension under the cool exterior even if she is just sitting in front of her computer working on her interminable thesis in the smallest possible cubicle in a deserted corner of the stacks of the library. She understands her own situation well enough to seek professional help in the form of a therapist.

When detective Wade (Benjamin Bratt) shows up and starts asking questions about Embry the past obviously gets stirred up for Katie, who subsequently begins seeing Embry everywhere. There are hints of The Inferno, in the books stacks, in Embry’s play, and in a way it makes sense to see this as a labyrinthine nightmarish hallucination of Katie’s from beginning to end. You could take that comparison all the way to Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) if you like, though this is nowhere as strong, or as alarming.

Still, that noir atmosphere, the beautiful cinematography and the haunting music definitely makes this something closer to a study in a fracturing psyche than an actual thriller, despite there being a body count. Also, the pacing is not disciplined enough for it to be particularly scary.

Mousey Julie (Melanie Lynskey) actually gives the very best description of Katie within the story. She describes the coltish frailty of Katie and how men in her path just want to take care of her and make it all better. There is just something about Katie, apart from her beauty.

Detective Wade falls for her, as well as her therapist and her best friend Harrison (Gabriel Mann) and the talent scout for the prestigious firm in New York she interviews for, but Embry is the only one she has truly loved in return. Embry’s eccentricities and spoiled rich boy behaviour grades slowly into the sadistic as the flashbacks fade and the present day asserts itself, even if both timelines are introduced simultaneously. There is definitely something wrong about all this, and the viewer senses that early on.

The question is mostly just how big the wrong is, and who has the preferential right of interpretation on reality. I’m not giving the ending away, though. That would spoil the game. The dialogue is smart, the students actually really study and the characters are fleshed out enough that they don’t seem like cartoon cut-outs.

But the suspense is actually the weakest part of this movie. We are given an ending that attempts to explain and also foretell what is going to happen next with Katie, but personally I think that’s probably the least interesting part of the story.

This is the first film Stephen Gaghan wrote and directed, so it can be interesting for that reason alone. Still, good performances, nicely structured visuals and a clever score means this has something to recommend it, even if you might not feel all the way satisfied once it’s over.

Mule

Kathryn Who?

Kathryn who?

Back in the day, when I was a younger brute, I wrote a academic essay about Kathryn Bigelow.

It was preceded by a couple of papers, mostly dealing with dystopic themes in Strange Days, female action directors and things of that nature.

The huge, big essay was all about the nature of the vampire myth in Near Dark. It also dealt with concepts found in Bigelow’s work, such as genre, gender, conventions thereof and stylistic traits.

Oh, yeah, I went through all that.

Mostly though, I remember people saying “Kathryn who?” when I told them what I was working on. Bigelow, I would say. Bi-ge-low. Strange Days? No? Blue Steel? Point Break? And usually at Point Break people would say “oh, that Keanu Reeves movie, with the surfing and stuff?”

Yes, that movie. That movie with Keanu Reeves in a wetsuit, yes. And then people would say something along the lines of her movies being bad, or they would comment on the fact that she was a female action director and why would a woman want to do the same thing as a male director anyway – and right about there is where I would start feeling my aneurism tick a countdown right up to the big ka-boom.

It’s true that her movies have this unsettling quality, something along the lines of those murky morals I like so much. Yes, there is always a precedent for everything. And yes, there is more to her movies than big guns and Keanu Reeves in a wetsuit.

The most subtle wranglers of genre convention leave the viewer with that slightly askew feeling that there was something going on there that they didn’t really catch. Bigelow does that. She will give you bad guys so interesting that they themselves forget to be bad. She will give you good guys with enough blood on their hands and such objectionable habits that they could easily cross the line.

The casting choices are always just as interesting. The way she cherry picked the vampires in Near Dark from the crew of Aliens, for instance. Or, Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero in Strange Days. It’s just… yeah, interesting.

Personally I think K-19: The Widowmaker is not the most successful movie she’s directed, but looking at the controversy surrounding it, I can see that unsettled feeling was at work there too. For all the things said about it, it was still an American movie about a Russian submarine. As a result directors and producers of K-19 were allowed inside the Russian naval base at the Kola Peninsula as the first Western civilians ever. You can’t tell me that’s not something. I don’t know what, exactly, but something. And it’s a skilfully directed movie about submarine warfare. Directed by a woman.

Strong female characters always abound in Bigelow’s movies, whether it is Vita (Louise LeCavalier) kicking Lenny Nero’s ass, or Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) wearing a lacy bra under her crisply ironed police uniform. The women are not victims, unless they are victims of their circumstance, like the Christenson’s in The Weight of Water. There is really no need to debate that strength, it seems to be pretty much a given, and that’s not something you can say lightly, especially in the action genre.

And now there’s The Hurt Locker. And a whole lot of controversy – is it or isn’t it like that? War? Is it supposed to be like that, look like that? I seem to recall that line of thinking and questioning around another war movie, Apocalypse Now. And there’s controversy on weather the movie should have won at all with Avatar out there. The Oscars aren’t just a popularity contest, people. It’s not just about how many tickets you’ve sold and how much money you’ve made.

Not that that’s not a part of it, sure.

But there is more to it. Thankfully.

So – 6 Oscars, 72 wins and 46 nominations.

Forgive my smirk, I can’t help but feeling a little vindicated.
Where have you been? Is all I can say.
And now I won’t have to answer that “Kathryn who?” anymore.
And it’s Ms. Bigelow to you heathens if you’re only just now joining the party.

Mule

The Dead Girl

The Dead Girl (2007) directed by Karen Moncrieff stars Toni Collette as Arden, Piper Laurie as Arden’s mother, Giovanni Ribisi (Rudy), Rose Byrne (Leah), James Franco (Derek), Bruce Davidson (Leah’s father), Mary Steenburgen (Leah’s mother), Brittany Murphy (Krista) Josh Brolin (Tarlow), Kerry Washington (Rosetta), Marcia Gay Harden (Melora).

This is a very complicated and carefully told story that unfolds in five chapters. It starts when Arden finds the body of a dead girl in a field in the rural landscape where she lives with her mother. Arden tells the police and becomes a local celebrity which leads to her being asked out on a date by Rudy who works in a grocery store. Arden is played beautifully as someone who is caught in a stifling and cruel relationship with her ailing mother. She breaks free from that and leaves with Rudy.

The next chapter shows Leah, the morgue attendant who is living with the pain of a missing sister, and the effects of that. The story here is about how the various family members are trying to deal with having had the older daughter gone missing without any resolution. They don’t know if she is alive or dead and they don’t know what happened to her. Leah, who is deeply depressed, just wants it all to be over. Through a series of circumstance she believes the dead girl is her sister and that almost frees her until she finds out she was wrong.

The third chapter deals with a woman whose husband goes away on long road trips and the infected, seriously twisted relationship between husband (Nick Searcy) eventually leads to the wife discovering a storage locker where her absentee husband keeps trophies in the form of bloody clothes and jewellery and things of that nature. The wife (Mary Beth Hurt) understands that her husband is a killer and she has to deal with that knowledge somehow.

The fourth chapter shows the mother of the dead girl, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) trying to understand what happened to her daughter, finding out where she lived, that she worked as a prostitute and that she has a daughter. She works through all this and decides to take care of her granddaughter.

The last chapter shows the dead girl herself, Krista, and her last day. She comes across as a damaged soul in a lot of ways, but she is also stronger than you would think at a first glance, and the viewer gets to see some of that too.

It’s so rare to see a film that actually features women in this way. We’re talking beautiful talent, skilled work and honed dialogue showing actual women as opposed to Barbie dolls, with hard choices to make portrayed with all the depth and fullness that these wonderful ladies are capable of. That alone makes this worth watching. In some ways they are all victims and they all rise above, change their lives and move through the world as best they can.

It’s told in inverted order and without sentimentalism. It’s absolutely fascinating and gut-clenching to watch a performance like Mary Beth Hurts and seeing her make the wrong choice, seeing how poisoned her thinking is from what must be a long and deeply infected relationship. It is a movie about human interaction and all the ways in which women can get caught in bad circumstance just as much as it is a movie about a murder.

Complex, intelligent and completely engrossing without any kind of moral soapbox action this movie gives the manifold leading ladies a chance to show their skills.

How did this movie not win more awards?

Mule

The Prestige – Illusions are everything

The Prestige (2006) is directed by Christopher Nolan and stars Hugh Jackman, Christopher Bale, Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine and also has a wonderfully obscure David Bowie in the role of Tesla.

The two young magicians Robert Angier (Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Bale) start out as friends and colleagues working the magic circle of late nineteen century London under the watchful eye of the experienced Cutter (Caine). One night an illusion goes horribly wrong and Angier’s wife dies on stage. Angier and Borden become bitter enemies and rivals stopping at almost nothing to sabotage each other’s acts and lives.

The setting is frankly sumptuous. It’s a dream London where even the nasty bits look gorgeous. This could have been a price of baroque gothic if it hadn’t been for the stellar performances of the main cast. One of the best tricks to get away with a movie like this is to get actors who will commit to their roles. Angier and Borden are set up as opposites in almost every respect, including social backgrounds, but they share one overriding passion – magic. Or, perhaps more correctly, illusions.

The basic premise for watching a magician is what the poet Coleridge termed “the willing suspension of disbelief”. We all know there is no such thing as magic. Still, the illusionists job is to sow the tiniest little doubt and make us go Oooooh. This might take hours and hours of practice and any number of tricks and trapdoors and slight of hand. For me the biggest parallel is of course self-referential. Illusions and movies are the same thing. Keep that in mind when the veteran actor Caine talks of magic and it will all make beautiful sense – all the way to the end.

The McGuffin of the plot is the magic trick Borden uses in his act that Angier tries to replicate. Angier goes so far as to hire the scientist Tesla played by Bowie. And here you really have to let the suspension of disbelief get to work, but frankly I don’t mind. Especially not when Bowie as Tesla delivers the brilliant line “Exact science, Mr Angier, is not an exact science.” What Angier forgets is how deeply obsessed illusionists get – and Borden is no exception to that rule.

It’s difficult to speak of the actual plot of the movie without giving away the ending. And the beginning. And, actually, some of the middle bits… Suffice to say you can watch it twice and enjoy it twice. And it’s beautiful and masterly. Movies and illusions. Same thing. This one definitely makes you go Oooooh.

Mule