"The Party" (2017)

Sally Potter’s recent career trajectory has been quite interesting. Having spent the 1990s and 2000s exploring the varying ways with which personal and group identity affect perception (The Tango Lesson), societal status (Orlando, The Man Who Cried) and interpersonal relationships (Yes), she has since taken a more overtly political shift, using her characters’ multiplicity of lived experiences and points of view to critique the radical chic middle class she grew and blossomed in. After satirizing society of the spectacle values in the bold but ultimately shallow fashion mystery Rage and examining the deleterious effects of politics as escapism in the splendid coming-of-age drama Ginger & Rosa, her latest film continues its predecessor’s dissection of liberal hypocrisies.

Set entirely in a posh London apartment, The Party observes the disintegration of seven privileged elites’ marriages and lives as (presumably Labour) party apparatchik Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) celebrates her access to power with husband Bill (Timothy Spall) and a select group of five friends: Caustic cynic April (Patricia Clarkson), her New Age healer of a soon-to-be-ex-partner Gottfried (Bruno Ganz), cocaine-addled stockbroker Tom (Cillian Murphy), women’s studies professor Martha (Cherry Jones) and her pregnant wife Jinny (Emily Mortimer). The announcement of unpleasant news regarding Bill’s health starts a chain-reaction of revelations and developments that confront these people’s moral and philosophical convictions to the reality of human nature.

As in Blake Edwards’ similarly-titled Hollywood satire, Potter uses the uninvited guest (in this case, Bill’s illness) as the disruptor of established order, exposing behaviours, codes and motivations to scrutiny. What separates Potter’s film from Edwards’ and other similarly-structured plays and films is the direct link she draws between her characters’ egoism and the politics that form the foundation of their lives; guest or host, every guilty party’s outburst is sparked by the pressure their political narcissism exerts on their lives.

The resulting tension between the personal and the political is what infuses the dialogue with its incisiveness; Martha’s justification for allowing a friend to use her apartment for extra-marital trysts (“I thought it better than in your house”) is only slightly funnier than the wronged party’s self-aggrandizing claims of “saving our country from profiteering butchery”. Professional capitalist Tom’s raw-nerved emotionality is informed by a common-man conservatism provides a magnificent foil to both Gottfried’s maddeningly calm pseudo-philosophical platitudes and Bill’s neoliberal bourgeois smugness (“Money bought this house, not fucking ideas!” he retorts to the latter’s intellectual penis-waving). In one of the film’s more bittersweetly funny moments, April piercingly summarizes generational feminist rifts by gently reminding a betrayed Janet that “sisterhood is a very ageing concept.”

Potter, of course, is not critiquing beliefs themselves so much as examining what happens when we demand our politics define our relations to one another and dictate our conduct. No matter how cruel, selfish or arrogant her characters may behave, her style evidences her innate sympathy for them; note how the soft black-and-white cinematography and light-handed camera movements with which she films this verbal internecion resembles 1960s independent cinema. In doing so, she effectively casts the characters’ failings in the ambience in which the ideals behind them were conceived, lending an underlying nostalgic poignancy to every cut and blow they exchange. It’s a subtle touch that exemplifies Potter’s knack for visualizing her protagonists’ feelings through light, colour and shadow.

Running at a grand total of 71 minutes, The Party is a brisk and pleasant watch but no less sharp or fulfilling for it. Without quite reaching the profundity of Ettore Scola’s similarly-themed epic We All Loved Each Other So Much, Potter nevertheless dissects Britain’s ruling political class with the knowing accuracy only a fellow member could achieve.

"Widows"

“Never thought I’d marry a white man – or a criminal”. So bitterly ponders Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis) as she remembers her late husband Harry (Liam Neeson), whose violent death alongside his comrades in a botched robbery of crime lord Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) has exploded the comfortable boundaries her social status once guaranteed. It’s a line that neatly summarizes the film’s themes and perspective thereon, an implicit acknowledgement of whiteness’s symbolic social power that dares to connect it to organized crime’s aspirational role in American cultural history.

Transposing Lynda LaPlante’s 1983 BBC miniseries of the same name to a 2008 Chicago on the verge of the election of one of its most illustrious sons, Steve Rodney McQueen’s Widows turns Veronica’s predicament and consequent leadership of an unlikely all-female gang of robbers into a metaphor for today’s intersecting identity politics. As she enlists working and lower-middle-class fellow widows Alice (Elisabeth Debicki) and Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) to do her bidding, her quest for personal liberation becomes a symbolic reparative crusade against white patriarchy that lays bare previously unexamined privileges she once enjoyed.

Consider her first meeting with the other women at a spa, and the business-like coldness with which she hands them money as if it were a toolset: her pacing is brusque, her expression stony, the imperiousness of her tone somehow amplified by the unmistakeable fear beneath it. Her tough businesswoman persona isn’t an act so much as a defence mechanism triggered by the social past these women reflect back at her. As Jamal Manning himself puts it to her so succinctly: “You’re nothing now. Welcome home.”

These class dynamics power the women’s interactions with a tension that quickly bleeds into peripheral plots surrounding alderman Jack Mulligan’s (Colin Farrell) reluctant efforts to maintain his family’s power in a predominantly black ward and Alice’s sugar-daddy arrangement with a dollar-store Christian Grey (Lukas Haas), to the point of achieving a kind of poetic rhythm as scenes and dialogue echo and build upon each other: when Veronica repeats Manning’s earlier putdown in a rare display of vulnerability after a physical altercation with Alice, their relationship progresses into a newfound solidarity bolstered by inter-class understanding; when Mulligan’s racist father (Robert Duvall) reminds his son their only purpose and duty as politicians is survival, his words evoke a dark reflection of Veronica with the added subtext of racial anxiety.

These touches give Widows a sly playfulness that McQueen’s filmography noticeably lacked until now. Approaching his political subjects with an art student’s eye for corporeality and texture, his previous films studied their pain and physical destruction to occasionally excessive degrees (Shame) but Widows opts to humanize its characters through pointed behavioural details rather than debasement. In doing so, he evidences a hitherto unsuspected talent for black comedy and political humour, best exemplified in a gun show scene during which Alice appeals to a female customer’s class guilt and white female solidarity by pretending to be an impoverished Russian illegal immigrant fleeing abuse (“You’ve always said a gun is a girl’s best friend” her daughter pipes up in a scathing punchline).

It’s perhaps unsurprising that McQueen would show such a canny understanding of our current divisions, but the satirical accuracy with which he anticipates both the hope and painful divisions that would characterize the Obama era comes as an especially welcome contrast to his previous propensity for occasional self-seriousness. Using the fatal police shooting of the Rawlings’ son (in front of a wall plastered with Obama posters no less!) as an instigator to the disaggregation of their marriage and lives, McQueen metaphorizes the 2008 election as an exposure of white patriarchal hegemony’s inherent, destructive fragility.

This is where McQueen’s visual artistry comes into play; from the opening shot of Harry’s playful pre-coital roar match-cutting into the gunfire of his fatal robbery, he visualizes a connection between virile masculine performance and toxic violence with an almost comic book-like panache that expresses his character’s mindset without versing into outright caricature. In a new twist on his familiar long-take conversations, he films Mulligan venting his white masculine anxieties (“have you ever slept with a black guy?”) to his campaign manager (Molly Kunz) from the car hood, both protagonists out of sight, as the camera films the housing projects he’s inherited for half the journey before slowly turning to the right to show his own affluent neighbourhood just as his manager urges him to man up. It’s a highly evocative, undercover journalism-inspired sequence that neatly distils the film’s themes of social determinism, neoliberal hypocrisy and patriarchal fears with a formal elegance and stylistic intelligence many modern such takes sorely lack.

These audiovisual highlighting of individual expressions and the politics that inform them make Widows feel alive in every frame, accentuated by McQueen’s use of reflections and motivated camera moves to express his characters’ fractured identities and teleguided social trajectories. None of that life, however, would come to be without the actors’ superb work: always a magnetic presence even in mediocre material, Viola Davis’s ability to convey an intricate network of feelings with the smallest shifts reaches a pinnacle untouched since Antwone Fisher. There’s a scene early in the film where Veronica talks to her driver (Garrett Hedlund) who offers to leave her employment due to her inability to keep affording his services. Look at Davis’s face; her face is a mask of sincere gratitude and sadness, yet there’s also a spark of grim inspiration behind them as she finds a solution that could help them both – at great potential cost to him. Not many actors can convey so much with so little.

Davis’s commanding performance is superbly complemented by her partners-in-crime – Elizabeth Debicki in particular stands out as an abused woman taking gradual ownership of herself – but it’s the small roles that make Widows’ denizens feel truly lived in. Be it Robert Duvall’s resentful patriarch struggling for what little power he has left, Adepero Oduye’s complex embodiment of capitalist identity politics (“I am an empowered female minority business owner!”) or Jon Bernthal’s chillingly casual abuser, every bit part is like a snapshot of a fully-lived life, isolating feelings and experiences in a precise here and now that better enhance their greater social relevance.

Widows is not without its flaws; the screenplay, credited to Steve Rodney McQueen and Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, wraps subplots around each other in a way that occasionally suffocates individual characters (such as Jacki Weaver’s abusive mother and Brian Tyree Henry’s Jamal Manning, whose motivations are only explored on a surface level) and stunt certain plot developments. Still, McQueen’s perfect attunement to his characters’ emotions and movement coupled with his and Flynn’s political acumen make this socially perceptive thriller one of this year’s essential viewings.

"Bohemian Rhapsody"

Who was Freddie Mercury? To the general public, he was a larger-than-life rock icon, a pioneering musical genius whose sexually fluid showmanship transcended boundaries and set a standard of showmanship never since surpassed. To those who knew him, he was a man of many contradictions, as shy as he was extravagant, as selfish as he was kind, a flamboyant figure whose hedonistic excesses were matched by his coyness regarding his private life.

All biopics, to one degree or another, have to answer such a question but the unique sociocultural complexities of Freddie Mercury’s identity make it particularly essential to Bohemian Rhapsody’s central thesis. He was a queer Parsi immigrant who resisted any such categorization as strongly as his music did; how did his relationship with his own identity affect his art? How did his music, in turn, express the truth of who he was – if at all?

Bohemian Rhapsody tentatively touches on these questions but fails to probe them beyond a surface level. Instead, it moves through his life as if it were a series of questions on an exam sheet, each answer technically correct but unedifying and uninformative beyond the simple assertion of facts and summaries.

Early scenes of Mercury’s life with his family show him at odds with his tradition-minded father (“good words, good deeds, good thoughts”) who disapprovingly notes his adoption of “Freddie” as an anglicized alternative to his birth name Farrokh, implying a rejection of his heritage. This accusation of assimilation is reflected in the third act when a jilted ex-manager (and ex-lover) disparages him as remaining at heart a “scared P*** boy” – also echoing a loutish audience member’s racial slur during the band’s first performance. Mercury’s own feelings about his ethnic identity, cultural heritage and sense of belonging, however, remain elusive; twice he voices his vision of Queen as belonging to those who don’t belong anywhere, but the screenplay seems curiously uninterested in digging any deeper. In lieu of conflict, we simply get a half familiar all-too-quickly-resolved arc of a queer man coming out to his conservative father and finally earning his approval.

The clearest indications about Freddie Mercury’s inner struggles come from conversations with his long-suffering ex-girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) during which they talk about the adulation of the crowd. They frame his excessive partying, poor choice in friends as manifestations of a need for love and validation directly connected with struggles over his sexuality and self-presentation. Mercury’s life, the film suggests, was defined by an ongoing quest to be his own person and to figure out who that person was. That’s not a bad perspective to take but it requires a certain willingness to take risks in cutting through Freddie’s self-image and examining his insecurities – risks that director Bryan Singer is unwilling to take.

As a band, Queen were bold, innovative and risqué. They blurred lines between genres, experimented throughout their career while remaining distinctly mainstream, and exuded – largely through Freddie’s songs and stage performances – a titillating sexual energy that was naughty, playful and brash but never crude. A director truly in touch with that energy would have connected it to Freddie’s unapologetic individuality and used it to illuminate the secret feelings that animated it but Singer instead plays things disappointingly safe, mainly using Queen’s music as bland illustrations of selected “making-of” scenes that tell us very little about how these songs actually came about or what drove them. Freddie’s passion for music and art are only glanced at, taken for granted as if they sprang ready-made from his mouth. Even his famously lavish, drug-fuelled parties are a shockingly tame affair, devoid of any danger or sensuousness, as if someone had recut The Wolf Of Wall Street for pensioners.

Only intermittently does the film match its subject’s personality, in montages where Queen’s music comes to life in voicing the nuances of Freddie’s sexuality (ironically, with two songs he didn’t write). One sees a performances of “Another One Bites The Dust” interspersed with Freddie being guided by Svengali-esque manager/lover Paul Prenter (Allen Leech) into the gay leather sex club Mineshaft, culminating in a frontal shot of him entering a dark room at the top before a cut to black segues into a press conference during which he starts exhibiting HIV symptoms. Strongly reminiscent of Cruising, this sequence is as evocative as it is problematic in its tonal implications, using the song’s unmistakeable beat to strong erotic effect while also questioning the feelings behind Mercury’s iconic sexual expression. Another cheeky flourish involves Freddie talking to Mary on a payphone as a trucker invitingly walks in a men’s restroom as “Fat Bottomed Girls” climaxes to the lyric “Get on your bikes and ride!”. While arguably misrepresentative, these montages nevertheless show a flair and musical understanding that’s missing from the rest of the film, probably attributable to late-stage replacement Dexter Fletcher.

That a mediocrity like Singer ended up helming a biopic about one of pop music’s great geniuses would only be shocking if the surviving band members’ understandable protectiveness of Mercury’s legacy wasn’t common knowledge. The choice to use the 1985 Live Aid concert, widely seen as the band’s finest live performance and the moment that propelled them back to the top after a brief dip, is quite revealing in that respect: It allows screenwriters Anthony McCarten (already responsible for the equally over-reverent The Theory Of Everything and Darkest Hour) and Peter Morgan to evacuate any of the real pain that might come with dealing with Mercury’s flaws or his struggle with AIDS and instead package his experience into a ready-made, one-size-fits-all tale of redemption and triumph.

This lack of honesty makes the task of Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek all the more unenviable, and his success in doing so feels almost miraculous. While he lacks some of Mercury’s swagger, he underlines his vulnerability and sense of displacement with a subtle precision that lends his scenes insight that’s often missing from the dialogue. His best moments involve small tonal shifts in his voice and body movements that clues us in on the fear beneath Freddie’s exterior cockiness, whether he’s criticizing his bandmates or phoning Mary with a glass of champagne to combat loneliness. Moments such as those hint at the film Bohemian Rhapsody could have been were it more interested in taking a closer look at Freddie’s inner life than in hitting biographical checkpoints.

It was perhaps a fool’s errand to expect any Hollywood film to shine light on the complexities of Freddie Mercury’s life, art and identity, particularly at a time when things are more commodified than they ever were before, but his genius deserved much better than the audiovisual equivalent of an authorized biography. Neither real life nor fantasy, this Bohemian Rhapsody remains resolutely stuck far too safely in the middle, too afraid of harming its subject’s image to illuminate it in any significant way.