"Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens"

In today’s film culture, where the influence of Star Wars is felt in every mainstream action/adventure film to the point where it’s almost invisible, making a balanced and level-headed assessment of a film like The Force Awakens is an almost herculean task. From the perspective of a critic who also happens to be a lifelong fan of the saga, the need to remain lucid and alert is doubly imperative: No matter how crushingly bad the prequels may have been, standards must remain sufficiently high to avoid mistaking mere mediocrity for quality. And as important as the tie-in merchandising may have been in shaping our childhood imagination, their existence demonstrates that the Star Wars saga is now a corporate brand as well as a story – a brand now owned by the Walt Disney Company, arguably one of the most powerful entities on the planet. Decades of pop-cultural osmosis and omnipresent merchandising combined with the current consumerization of nostalgia have imprinted the same message within our minds: The next Star Wars film will be good. The next Star Wars film must be good.

The underlying fear behind the hype was that all the hopes and fantasies we have projected onto the saga’s title would once again find themselves invalidated. Worse still were the silent, insidious questions traveling across our collective unconscious that this fear represented: Could it be that Star Wars never was as good as we made it out to be? Or that these films were the near-miraculous product of a specific concoction of inspiration, luck, creative restrictions and contemporary cultural influences that just happened to come at the right time in history? In other words, could it be that our generation and the generations to come will simply have to accept that they will never get “their” Star Wars?

The Force Awakens opens enough new avenues to make an affirmative answer seem possible, but its reluctance to venture outside its forebears’ towering shadow leaves the question open. As many critics and bloggers have pointed out, J. J. Abrams’s directorial career has so far consisted entirely of reviving stories he and his target audience grew up watching. In the span of almost ten years, he has directed five theatrical features, three of which are modern cinematic updates of popular 1960s TV shows. Even Super 8, his only film not based on pre-existing intellectual property, is a faithful-to-a-fault copy of the boyhood adventure fantasies produced by Spielberg and his movie-brat friends in the 1980s.

Abrams is thus, for better and for worse, the emblem of contemporary geek culture; the poster child of a once-marginalized identity built around popular entertainment marketed towards children and teenagers, now in complete creative control of Hollywood’s hottest properties. That The Force Awakens is his best film so far is particularly fitting, so illustrative is it of both the strengths and limitations of our elevation of childhood nostalgia to cultural godhood. It understands the narrative mechanics and economic-but-efficient characterization that made the original trilogy work so well, but works so hard to get them right that it struggles to find a voice that is entirely its own. Like a talented but star-struck apprentice fearful of deviating from the template set by his master, Abrams recycles narrative devices, settings, plot beats and visual cues from the original trilogy with just enough changes to suggest paths to eventual self-sufficiency.

The very first shot following the introductory crawl – the underbelly of a gigantic Star Destroyer gradually obscuring the stars as it crosses the frame’s verticality – looks like A New Hope’s iconic opening shot seen from a different angle, minus the rebel ship. The plot revolves around a cute little droid (BB-8, who looks like a metallic football with a revolving head) hunted on a desert planet by evil space fascists for the vital data it’s tasked with bringing to the heroes’ headquarters, only to come across an orphan dreaming of a better life. With the help of a fugitive, they escape the planet on board the seemingly decrepit old freighter Millennium Falcon and become involved in a race against time to destroy the villains’ devastating superweapon, as the orphan gradually learns the ways of the Force.

The reason the plot to A New Hope resonated so strongly within audiences worldwide is that it somehow managed to unite the elements of what Joseph Campbell called “the monomyth” that speak most directly to that mysterious part of the human mind that knows neither cultural nor temporal boundaries, only the limitless capacity for imagination. To see it imitated in its own sequel is disappointing but not altogether surprising – at best, Abrams and his co-writers – which include Star Wars veteran Lawrence Kasdan – use these glory days reminders to ensure the torch is passed along smoothly to the new generation of characters.

Indeed, most of the film’s strongest points derive from moments in which the past meets the present for one last dance before taking its final bow and making way for the future. Many of these moments are supplied by Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, who takes on the role of veteran-from-past-war-in-charge-of-mentoring-the-heroes previously assumed by Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whatever frustration Mr. Ford himself may have with critics, audiences and filmmakers continually bringing his career back to the two characters that made him a star, his performance makes it very easy to understand why this keeps happening: Their very existence is a miracle for which he is largely responsible. He not only manages to cobble together the disparate pieces of pop culture from which these characters are made, he infuses them with nonchalant lifelike charm that feels almost unintentional. His acting in The Force Awakens illustrates that gift perfectly: With only a few words and glances, Han Solo isn’t just brought back to life – he steps back into our imaginations with the weight and shadow of a long unseen life spent running away from broken dreams and personal failures.

Chief among these failures is Han’s wayward son Ben – better known under the moniker Kylo Ren – whose desertion of his familial and political unit in favour of the evil First Order virtually drives the entire plot. It’s an ingenious reversal of the Luke-Vader dynamic that cumulates plot and character beats from all three original films, culminating in a scene that crystallizes all the film’s reference points and cardinal directions in one lightsaber stroke. Like A New Hope, it involves the battle-worn mentor getting killed by a primary villain to whom he has a personal connection. Like The Empire Strikes Back, it takes place on a beautifully-shot horizontal platform overlooking a chasm. And like Return Of The Jedi, it’s cross-cut with a space battle over the very station in which these dramatic personal events are unfolding.

This is the scene in which the callbacks to the original trilogy are given meaning and purpose. The death of Han Solo doesn’t just represent a dramatic narrative game-changer; as administrated by Kylo Ren, it’s an act of cathartic release – one that, given Abrams and his co-writers’ choices, seems outright necessary to allow the franchise to grow autonomously.

Kylo Ren, you see, is The Force Awakens’ most innovative creation. When we are first introduced to him, see his tall black-cloaked figure and hear that deep metallic voice coming from beneath the faceless mask, we are given every reason to dismiss him as a poor Darth Vader imitation – just another reminder of a perfect villain the franchise may never surpass. But the more we get to see of him, the more it becomes apparent that that is exactly the point. Kylo Ren has gone through an as-of-yet undefined journey to the dark side not unlike Anakin Skywalker’s, except that he is still learning the ropes. Behind the mask hides a scared, unbalanced and uncertain young man who has latched onto an idealized vision of his illustrious grandfather to compensate for his own perceived lack of identity. Put simply, Kylo Ren is – for want of a better word – a fanboy. A dark reflection of the generation Abrams represents: Gifted, privileged and passionate, but lacking in maturity and perspective.

Because this messy bag of hormones is also the film’s foremost antagonist, he is arguably the most difficult character to get right: He has to be simultaneously cruel and pathetic, uncertain all while projecting an aura of confidence, convincing as a threat even as his efforts to be threatening are discernible. That Adam Driver succeeds at walking that line is one of the film’s unqualified successes; correcting Hayden Christensen’s blandly petulant Anakin, he turns his character’s post-adolescent self-pity into a destructive, unstable weapon. His Kylo is a spoiled moody teenager with power and authority far above his understanding, all at the service of an ideology that thrives on dominance for its own sake.

Driver, best known for his work on Lena Dunham’s NYC dramedy show Girls, is an ideal fit for so relevant and complex a character. His gawky college-student face provides the perfect mask for the millennial confusion, resentment and self-absorption Kylo represents. In that respect, his eerily grateful act of patricide – the film’s indisputable high point – represents the culmination of our generation’s gradual acceptance of the fallibilities and inadequacies of our childhood hero creators, and the necessity to move on with their blessing (notice the reluctant compliance expressed by Ford’s body language in his dying moments).

The other big step in a new direction is John Boyega’s Finn. Of all the story’s arcs, his may be the most interesting because it’s one we’ve never seen in any Star Wars audiovisual media before: A non-violent Stormtrooper who, for reasons unknown even to him, has somehow resisted lifelong conditioning to unquestioning obedience and deserts everything he has ever known at the first opportunity, just so he won’t have to kill any more innocent people. This introduces opportunities to study the perceived naturalness of violence and aggression – which the Sith and their far-right politics consider self-evident – that demand to be exploited. Boyega himself is easily the best of the three new leads, a naturally likeable everyman that doubles as a uniting force between actors, creating spontaneous chemistry with every person he shares the screen with. As orphaned heroine Rey, Daisy Ridley’s relative inexperience sometimes sticks out, but she nonetheless acquits herself with spunk and stamina.

A pity that so many other new characters exist mainly to set themselves up for later installments, as though they were in a pilot for a TV show – you can probably blame Abrams’s TV roots for that. Gwendoline Christie cuts an imposing figure as the stormtroopers’ steely Captain Phasma, but only appears in all of three scenes to end up as a punchline for yet another New Hope call-back joke. Despite being the most seasoned actor of the new main cast, Oscar Isaac’s role amounts to little more than an extended Top Gun cameo. And while Andy Serkis does imbibe him with foreboding omniscience, Supreme Leader Snoke remains as generic a threat as the MCU’s Thanos.

As a director, J. J. Abrams has always come across as a competent technician that also happened to be a studious enough follower of better filmmakers to fool some critics into thinking him an auteur. Here, however, he is in his element. Refraining from his usual tendency to flash up expository scenes to hide their unengaging nature, he gives his characters enough leeway to express themselves in a way that isn’t constrained by plot mechanics or the need for spectacle. In scenes such as the climactic lightsaber duel between Kylo and Rey, he even uses his more familiar flash-and-slash style to effectively turn his screenplay’s implicit stage directions into concrete visual storytelling: Contrasting with the original trilogy’s slow-burning Kurosawan face-offs as well as the prequels’ theatrical acrobatics, Abrams films his characters’ fight in mobile, heavily-cut shots that follow their movements and match their mutual status as novices: It’s a clumsy, unevenly-focused affair with virtually no choreography to speak of – and it works beautifully.

To be sure, the film is not entirely exempt from issues common to modern blockbuster filmmaking: The rushed pace doesn’t find its proper rhythm until the second act, the political background is not well defined (apparently, a recently-restored Republic still needs a Resistance movement to face enemies that threaten its power) and the disappointingly uneventful destruction of an entire solar system proves once more that excessive build-up – in this case, a few shots of terrified civilians facing their imminent doom – tends to nullify rather than magnify emotional impact.

Still, Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens contains enough spark and soul to reinvigorate even the most cynical viewer’s faith in modern mythmaking. As much a mirror to our present culture’s psyche as its predecessor was an antidote to 70s malaise, it calls upon us – and upon its own creators – to grow as both storytellers and audiences. May the sequels demonstrate that we have listened.

"Much Loved"

Banned in its native Morocco due to its uncommonly frank depiction of sex and prostitution, Much Loved premiered at Cannes scented with scandal and bearing the mark of artistic victimhood – shaping it up to be the kind of film western critics feel so honour-bound to champion in the name of freedom and social progress that they tend to overlook its eventual shortcomings. Happily, this particular film, while perhaps not breaking as much ground stylistically as it does thematically, deserves most of its plaudits.

The story revolves around a trio of prostitutes and their daily struggle for survival in a patriarchal world that preys upon their bodies while simultaneously punishing their services with judgment, violence and disdain. Soukaina (Halima Karaouane) is a romantic both on and off-duty, simpering love messages to a sugar daddy on the phone one minute, answering the door to her homeless boyfriend the next. Semi-closeted lesbian Randa (Asmaa Lazrak) dreams of reuniting with her absentee father in Spain. Serving as the group’s “big sister” figure is iron-tempered Noha (Loubna Abidar), whose authoritarian attitude is partly due to the strain her breadwinning efforts cause on the very family they’re supposed to be helping, with her toddler son never seeing his mother, her own mother displaying open shame and resentment, and her sister threatening to follow the same path.

Every other night, their elderly driver Saïd (Abdellah Didane) takes them to parties attended by Moroccan businessmen and Saudi oil sheiks. There, they entertain their opulent hosts by dancing, twerking to hip-hop music, stripping, snorting cocaine on each other’s bodies and otherwise performing the kind of acts that would almost certainly warrant brutal corporal punishment in their guests’ country. When they’re not performing or having intercourse with them, they sit down and discuss sex, global economics and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it’s all a big joke and they’re not even really in on it. Whenever one of the women dares to voice a genuine heartfelt opinion, their clients respond by either insulting them or turning the situation into another joke about how ridiculous it all is.

Such is the absurdity of these women’s situation: They provide a clearly much-wanted service, yet are derided and degraded even as they provide it, by the very men who demand it and benefit from it. At every turn, their clients remind them of their social position. In one particularly startling moment, a Saudi drops a precious gem in a swimming pool, promising it as a reward for the first girl to find it – all just to watch the underprivileged sex workers jump in fully clothed and compete for what amounts to an insignificant speck of his immense wealth.

Little wonder then that the very first thing we hear over the introductory black screen is an animated conversation between our protagonists about last night’s johns’ performances and their own personal tastes in men. Although they rarely do it to their faces, they turn their clients’ sexual objectification and mockery back on them and use it to strengthen their sisterly bond. Yet even this only further illustrates how sex and the abstract idea of romance serve as the inescapable constants around which their entire lives seem to revolve. Even outside the nightclubs and mansions where they work, they put on performances, selling the illusion of love or happiness to themselves almost as much as others. Only in each other’s company, in stolen little moments as simple as watching a Bollywood movie and imitating its dances or sharing a meal with a crossdressing gay streetwalker friend, can they truly be themselves.

All this is fairly quick and easy to understand once the first twenty minutes or so have passed, which can lend a slight air of redundancy to subsequent scenes in which the women dreams of escape through a rich, respectful Prince Charming, or receive verbal abuse from spurned prospective clients at a nightclub. Twice following a particularly harsh episode do we get close shots of Noha in a car seat looking tired and pensive, intermingled with long lateral tracking shots of Marrakech streets from the car window’s perspective, as sad violin and piano music plays on the soundtrack. It works effectively the first time as a silent reminder of the greater context in which these events occur, but its reappearance only creates the uncomfortable sensation of being pressured for sympathy.

There is discomfort, too, in the opulent party scenes. Director Nabil Ayouch films his actresses with a hand-held camera, tracking their sensual movements and the delight of their patrons as a fellow partygoer would. It adds an extra touch of immersion, yes, but is it not also merging with the clients’ gaze? And in doing so, is it not unconsciously endorsing it? Questions that Ayouch does not satisfactorily explore, which means that the viewers are not challenged or interrogated on their way of looking at these women’s bodies in such scenes, as they were so brilliantly in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers.

Still, these occasional lapses into banality do not undercut the patent empathy Ayouch displays for these women, nor do they deny them their humanity. Much Loved’s best moments occur in temporary openings through the surface of seemingly commonplace scenes: Randa’s immobile tenseness as her first female client to put her hands on her, controls her and guides her to her bed; the scene in which pregnant newcomer Hlima (Sara Elhamdi Elalaoui) negotiates payment in money and vegetables with a poor middle-aged vendor after sex – the closest thing to a consensual, equal rapport between merchant and customer in the entire film – or the dinner date scene during which the camera captures all the skepticism, feigned interest, resignation, acceptance and false hope contained within a single facial expression of Loubna Abidar’s, as her character listens to her wealthy French client recite empty declarations of love.

In moments such as these, we get miraculous glimpses of seemingly new emotions and states of being that are far more disturbing and important revelations than a client’s repressed homosexuality or a dirty cop’s depravity. We penetrate strange and unfamiliar territory where people lose their masks and expose themselves to our scrutiny when we least expect it.

Rough around the edges and not always apt at dodging familiarity, Much Loved is nonetheless a frank and compassionate tableau of female friendship and sisterhood whose occasional hiccups are redeemed by first-class acting, with special mention to Loubna Abidar’s revelatory turn as Noha. It deserves to be seen not because of its ban or its subject, but because of its humanity.

"Hope And Glory"

 « War as seen through the eyes of a child » is a favourite theme of both journalists and filmmakers. It’s a reliable, sometimes facile way to get the audience emotionally invested in your story and more susceptible to agreeing with whatever you have to say about it. After all, what could bring out the inherent brutality and absurdity of war more powerfully than the perspective of an innocent, impressionable child? Blissfully unaware of the political complexities that lead to war, a child experiences its horrific consequences firsthand; from that point on, they may choose to accept and endure them for what they are, or instead cope – as children often do – by simply integrating it into their daily routine and turning potential trauma into just another game.

Hope And Glory lies firmly in the latter camp, and its unabashed nostalgia for this dark and violent period of British history is at the root of its most affecting moments. Based on writer/director John Boorman’s own childhood experience of the Blitz, it takes full and complete advantage of its protagonist’s youth to colour every moment of happiness and hardship with equal fondness. Any consequent softening of the pain of war is tempered by Boorman’s tenderly accurate understanding of boyhood cruelty and imagination. Through the eyes of 10 year-old Bill Rowan, Nazi bombings and the subsequent enlistment of all military-aged males turn a peaceful London suburb into a vast playground in which both adult and childhood fears and desires that were either hidden or sublimated become more apparent, even if he presently lacks the maturity to fully understand them.

This puts an interesting spin on the expected pre-teen rites of passage: Scenes such as Bill’s initiation into a gang of miniature bomb site scavengers – which involves a hammer and a live bullet – strip what we think of as “typical” childhood group behaviour of its social codes to reveal the violent power dynamics these codes sanction and sublimate. A slightly older girl becomes a temporary sideshow curiosity after losing her mother in an air raid, only to then be coerced into showing her genitals in order to be accepted into the gang. It may seem like typical kid stuff, but viewers familiar with John Boorman’s work will notice a pattern: as he did before in Hell In The Pacific, Deliverance, Excalibur and most infamously in Zardoz, Boorman is studying people’s adaptation to the collapse or endangerment of societal structures. In each case, the plot is driven by a Hobbesian narrative that assumes violence to be man’s natural state, although the degree to which Boorman accepts and endorses that premise varies from film to film. Outside of its autobiographical nature, what makes Hope And Glory an especially notable entry in that saga is the demographic feminization caused by the call-up. With his neighbourhood depleted of its adult male population, Bill finds himself surrounded by female characters – particularly his mother and two sisters – to which the scavengers and his ex-womanizer of a grandfather provide a counter-example. Nowhere is this experience better exemplified than in the clothes shop scene, in which the camera pans out and sideways as Bill’s mother (Sarah Miles) and a friend make their way across rows of clothes racks and progressively undress while discussing their lack of sex life until Bill emerges from the rack behind them; after a brief bust shot of the two women, we cut to a lateral tracking medium shot that allows us to follow Bill at his eye-level and partake in his exploration of female figures and undergarments.

In that respect, Hope And Glory mirrors Zardoz’s juxtaposition of a castrating matriarchy with the toxically virile “Brutals” manipulated into doing its dirty work, and corrects that film’s misogyny all while identifying its source. Instead of regurgitating adolescent clichés without giving them any flesh, Boorman opens his audience’s eyes to the myriad of ways pre-teen boys see the world and tune it to their dreams.

The entirety of the film’s events, including those depicted in scenes that do not adopt Bill’s point of view or from which he is absent, are seen through that same semi-subjective filter. Like A Christmas Story, nostalgia is woven right into the film reel itself, except that Boorman – who, unlike Bob Clark, is telling his own story – doesn’t use it to sugarcoat his own memories, but rather to underline the meaningfulness of moments and feelings that, in the face of the existential threat posed by war, seem deceptively insignificant: A drunk grandfather humiliating his wife by toasting his old flames, only to get increasingly tearful as he struggles to remember a name; an older sister smuggling her stationed Canadian boyfriend through her siblings’ window to have sex; wistful conversations between a married mother and her husband’s best friend that reveal old, fully-preserved love that will never be consummated… Bill may not fully understand all of these things but he bears witness to them nonetheless, passively accepting them as though somehow aware of how important they are.

1987 was quite a year for war films. Not only did it see the release of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Full Metal Jacket, it saw no less than three major films revolving about children – or, more specifically, boys – experiencing different facets of the Second World War: Empire Of The Sun, Au Revoir Les Enfants and Hope And Glory. Of these three, the last two were based on their respective filmmaker’s personal memories. Hope And Glory does not quite reach the same emotional impact as Spielberg and Malle’s films, perhaps because the same acquiescent lucidity on his own nostalgia that makes his film so distinct paradoxically prevents Boorman from completely renewing the familiar boyhood tropes with which he peppers his story. Nevertheless, the acumen with which he portrays his rapport with the opposite sex as well as the source of his fascination with man’s psychological and physical violence rises it well above most cinematic childhood portraits.

"Bridge Of Spies"

There’s a very good reason Steven Spielberg’s name has become a metonym for Hollywood itself: Aside from being a visual storyteller of unmatched influence, he embodies and perpetuates Hollywood’s uniquely American liberalism more authoritatively than any other director alive. Characterized by unwavering faith in the fundamental goodness of the nation’s institutions and founding principles, this left-of-center patriotism has been the staple of such rightly-cherished political films as Seven Days In May, 12 Angry Men and Three Days Of The Condor.

Having previously studied the practical application of these values in 2012’s splendid Lincoln, Spielberg continues his probe of current political issues through historical parallels in Bridge Of Spies. Through the remarkable true story of lawyer-turned-diplomat James B. Donovan’s role in the defense of convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel and his later exchange with two American captives, Spielberg likens our present Islamist-inspired climate of fear to Cold War-era existential anxiety, and argues the case for integrating empathy and due process in our response.

Spielberg is arguably Hollywood’s most idealistic living filmmaker and Bridge Of Spies reflects that idealism to a fault in a typically classical style that occasionally slips into emotional shortcuts and easy roleplaying even as it continues Lincoln’s approving exposé of backdoor politics at the service of freedom.

The first half of the film, which sees Donovan and his family tossed in the center of a geopolitical storm most of them only understand in broad simplistic terms, keeps itself content with meeting audience expectations without exploring the personal ramifications of its protagonist’s actions or his relationship to his country’s state of mind beyond a few clever ideas: A beautifully-edited sequence in which the trial’s opening ceremony transitions to a classroom reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before watching a propaganda cartoon warning of Soviet attacks; Donovan’s youngest son following the cartoon’s instructions when his own countrymen take shots at his house… These elements aside, the Donovan family never truly deviates from Rockwellian patriarchal archetypes. Amy Ryan in particular is given little else to do but play the concerned housewife fearing for her family’s safety and reputation, a role so trite and common it’s virtually invisible.

Most of this section follows Donovan as he develops a respectful rapport with his client and argues for him to be treated as an honourable enemy combatant with every right and privilege granted by the Constitution despite him not being an American citizen. Tom Hanks plays Donovan as a living personification of America’s liberal conscience, a privilege earned from decades spent as the face of his country’s populist spirit and one he exercises with the kind of natural ease Henry Fonda used to display. As if to counter Hanks’s comforting familiarity, Spielberg cast little-known stage, TV and arthouse veteran Mark Rylance as Rudolf Abel, a move that proves most judicious but is ultimately one of the film’s missed opportunities; Abel’s character and his interactions with Donovan are merely adequate when they could have been fascinating. A quiet, unassuming bespectacled little nobody whose average looks and demure bearing make him an ideal spy, Abel is too ostentatiously mysterious to be feel authentic. His persistent calm in the face of probable death and near-universal hatred is treated as an occasion for one of the film’s many cutesy recurring lines – “would it help?” is his invariable response whenever Donovan asks him if he’s afraid – and Rylance is allowed few opportunities to show any cracks in that façade. His most prominent one – a monologue in which he recounts a childhood story about a friend of his father’s who kept standing up in the face of multiple beatings – is mostly there to valorize the protagonist via obvious symbolism (and get a dramatic callback at the film’s climax) rather than humanize him a little further.

Routine though most of it may be, the film’s first half does contain its share of surprises and typically Spielbergian masterstrokes: The opening scene, which sees Abel dodging FBI agents while on his way to pick up a microfilm-loaded nickel, brings to mind some of the period’s finest thrillers. The trial itself is completely skipped over in favour of behind-the-scenes negotiations and narrative setups for Francis Gary Powers’ fateful mission over Sverdlovsk¹.

But it is not until Tom Hanks is once again sent off to rescue one of the boys trapped behind enemy lines as he did 17 years ago in Saving Private Ryan that the story truly comes alive, as Donovan jumps from hoop to hoop, assisted by CIA handlers that don’t seem especially keen on trusting him with the job, never quite sure of exactly whom he is talking to. Determined to save both Powers and an unfortunate economics student caught on the wrong side of the newly-built Berlin Wall, Donovan bends all the rules established for him by all sides of the conflict to bring everyone back home safely.

It’s easy to see why James B. Donovan’s story appealed to Spielberg so much. Like Oskar Schindler, Frank Abagnale Jr. and Abraham Lincoln before him, Donovan is a historical figure that conveniently fits a certain kind of American liberal mythology: A charismatic, resourceful hero using rhetorical prowess and sheer audacity to outwit a system and solve conflicts non-violently. The inevitable simplification that results from such a reading is compensated for by Hanks’s innate trustworthiness and a politically astute screenplay – credited to Matt Charman and the Coen Brothers – that navigates Donovan through a diplomatic maze filled with verbal traps and political stumbling blocks, where everything, even events as random as a mugging, seems to be purposefully staged and set up to serve an agenda. Watching Donovan flush out these agendas and turn them to his advantage, all without pretending to be more sophisticated or knowledgeable than he really is, is one of the film’s chief pleasures. The little Coenesque touches, such as a comically awkward meeting with Abel’s “family” that ends with his “wife” bursting into tears, do a nice job of gently reinforcing the unfamiliar nature of Donovan’s experience.

If it had taken more chances with its characters and refrained from the occasional bout of audience manipulation, Bridge Of Spies could have been a truly thought-provoking political thriller. Thanks to Spielberg’s steady hand and the Charman/Coen Brothers team’s clever pacing, it avoids most of the pomposity associated with Oscar season period piece. Entertaining though it may be, those of us who appreciated Lincoln and the underrated Munich cannot help but miss Tony Kushner’s insight and wonder why Spielberg did not team up with him again.

¹A city now known as Yekaterinburg.

"Knight Of Cups"

This review has been moved to http://vulturehound.co.uk/2016/05/where-did-i-go-wrong-knight-of-cups-film-review/

"Cabin In The Sky"

To watch Golden Age Hollywood films is to unconsciously assimilate the notion of whiteness as the default. So white are the majority of these films’ casts that the appearance of any black person, be it a tertiary role or a silent extra, comes almost as a shock, a brief reminder of an entire segment of the American population’s existence – and of their general absence in their own country’s audiovisual stories.

Arguably worse still is the stereotypical, subservient nature of most parts black performers did get in mainstream Hollywood features.  For all intents and purposes, those were still written, directed and produced by white men in a legally segregated era. As such, screen depictions of black people dating from that period naturally invite caution within the progressive-minded viewer: How accurate can they be? How efficiently can their performers mine them for genuine human truth that rises above the limits imposed by racist writing?

Films like Cabin In The Sky, a 1943 adaptation of the 1940 musical of the same name with an all-black cast, are most illustrative of that problem. Its simple, cartoonish characterization of issues frequently associated with the black working class (gambling, organized crime and sexual promiscuity vs. monogamy and religious piety) causes discomfort, as does Eddie “Rochester” Anderson’s bumbling performance as Little Joe Jackson, a simple-minded illiterate sinner struggling to stay on the righteous path after a long period of gambling and infidelity. There is hardly a single Post-Reconstruction Southern Black Stereotype box that is not ticked. It’s difficult not to see the story’s vision of Christianity as a means to keep poor Black people content with their life, rather than a sustaining force of spiritual sustenance and resilience in the face of systemic oppression.

And yet, director Vincente Minnelli’s efforts to stay true to the African-American spiritual traditions that inspired the play’s original (white) creators are palpable throughout the film: An early gospel number in the church starts with the camera slowly panning left to right from a children’s choir to the adults next to them, then upwards as the song builds up in intensity, following the spread of an (unheard) rumour from person to person, pausing for each solo number, until it reaches Little Joe’s wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) on the backrow. After a wide shot of the congregation singing the chorus, we cut to a close-up of the radiant Waters repeating it one last time with almost tearful fervor. In only three shots, Minnelli has succinctly conveyed the kind of ecstatic communion non-churchgoers such as me can never truly understand.

As Petunia, Ethel Waters is one of the pillars of the film’s success. Just as she would do nine years later as Berenice Sadie Brown in Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of The Member Of The Wedding, she transcends racial stereotypes with what can only be described as pure, unaffected soul, built by a lifetime of love, hardship and endurance. When Petunia convinces God to give Joe another chance after his backsliding leads to a near-fatal encounter with a local small-time gangster, you have no trouble believing her prayer was “the most powerful piece of praying [they] heard up there in a long time”. The unfalsifiable heart she bestows upon Petunia expertly counters – and corrects – Rochester’s stereotyped antics, and brings much-needed depth to the story.

The film’s premise and narration are so strikingly similar to Jack Chick’s fundamentalist tracts – particularly the patronizing “adapted for black audiences” ones – that I’m almost positive it helped inspire them: Stereotypical characters, one man’s soul becoming the object of a high-stakes competition between angels and pantomime demons, a happy ending in which the sinner gets saved, presumably never to be tempted by evil again…

However, there are many artistic and narrative decisions that, while perhaps not entirely subversive, make Cabin In The Sky slightly more complex than your average Chick tract. For one thing, the border between the righteous and the sinners isn’t as fixed or solid as it initially seems: The demons’ plan to corrupt Joe with an unexpected lottery win and the seductive powers of his old flame Georgia Brown (Lena Horne) initially backfire when Joe overcomes Georgia’s advances and decides to use the money to buy Petunia all the things she wanted but couldn’t afford. Evil only gains its advantage back when Petunia catches the two together at just that moment, draws the wrong conclusion and kicks Joe out before giving him time to explain himself. By the film’s climax, Petunia has reduced herself to provoking her husband by crashing his party, trading barbs with his mistress and fraternizing with the man who tried to kill him, all to get him back. And after the ensuing fight kills them both, Petunia is still granted a place in heaven due to her prayer for divine intervention (in the form of tornado stock-footage borrowed from The Wizard Of Oz), whereas Joe gets off on a technicality when Georgia converts to Christianity off-screen and donates all the money he gave her to the church!

Such a scenario would be unthinkable in a Chick tract, or indeed in any fundamentalist work of fiction, in which the “saved” remain in a state of perfect grace from which they never budge and the “unsaved” can only hope to join them or perish in Hell. In Cabin In The Sky, the struggle between God (represented by an angel dressed like a Union general) and Satan (represented by his ambitious son, Lucifer Jr.) for the soul of man resembles a competition between two rival companies for an important client’s money; a competition in which both parties are willing to circumvent laws and exploit loopholes to get their way.

This playful, at times almost irreverent attitude towards religion is reflected in the musical numbers. As would become characteristic of his style, Minnelli shoots them in long tracking shots that pan away from his actors and back again, drawing the viewer deeper into the song and allowing more complete action within them. Suspended in the unity of movement and time, the viewer experiences the characters’ dancing and singing as extensions of their natural corporal expression rather than interruptions thereof, which makes the small disturbances at the end of their numbers – such as Joe breaking his walking stick in the final notes of the title song or Petunia’s odd clapping and tapping (accompanied by Joe’s shocked “Petunia!”) at the conclusion of “Taking A Chance On Love” – all the more remarkable. Little jolts of unexpected spontaneity such as these that elevate Cabin In The Sky from its regressive elements.

The very casting of Lena Horne as Georgia Brown functions in a similar way; being a 1940s single black woman who is sexually confident, independent and expressive, the plot naturally treats her as an almost literal puppet whose every action follows Lucifer Jr.’s instructions. Yet in spite of this structural misogyny, Horne’s natural sexiness blooms in every frame; far from denying, subverting or downplaying it, Minnelli’s direction exalts and exacerbates her to a state of impossible glamour. All of these choices, which include Lucifer Jr. making a passing reference to the ongoing Second World War (and possibly what little Americans knew of Nazi atrocities?) – “The whole trouble is I’m stuck with a bunch of B-idea men; all the A-boys is over there in Europe!” – demonstrate surprising political consciousness on the part of Minnelli and his team. So much of the story’s fundamentally puritan substance is undermined at every turn that the all-just-a-dream ending, while initially disappointing, comes across, in hindsight, as an inevitability.

Equally amazing is how perfectly these smuggled moments of audacity coexist with Minnelli’s masterful and sincere visual translation of the ideas and sentiments behind old-time gospel. Nowhere is it exemplified with more gusto than in the wonderfully spooky start of Joe’s near-death experience, in which a giant shadow darkens the room before reducing itself to reveal the shape of Lucifer Jr. against the wall, all while the curtains on Joe’s window billow in a silent wind. In moment such as this, which strangely recalls Reverend A. W. Nix’s classic hellfire-and-brimstone singing sermon “Black Diamond Express Train To Hell”, the songs and tales that founded Black American Christianity come alive with wit and imagination that no fundamentalist cartoon could ever hope to match.

Cabin In The Sky was Vincente Minnelli’s first feature-length film, with an uncredited Busby Berkeley directing John William Sublett’s performance of “Shine” near the film’s climax. Boasting an impressive cast of black singers and musicians that included Louis Armstrong – whose musical number was sadly deleted, reducing his part to a mere cameo – and Duke Ellington, it earned well beyond its humble $679,000 budget, gathering a total of $1,953,000 at the box-office. Modern audiences may understandably be put off by its dated racial and gender politics, but keen observers will likely appreciate its ability to achieve small moments of transcendental humanity that temporarily break through the segregation era’s sociocultural barriers.

"A Most Violent Year"

From the increasing reverence that has characterized mainstream media outlets’ reception of each new J. C. Chandor film, you’d think he was one of contemporary American cinema’s greatest artists. After Margin Call’s Oscar-nominated screenplay wowed enough critics with its sympathetic insider’s perspective on a broken financial system to make them overlook its formal inadequacies, All Is Lost’s novel blend of humanism (symbolized by the ingenious casting of all-American liberal icon Robert Redford) and vaguely Herzogian nihilism proved Chandor to possess an indisputable degree of talent that doesn’t always rise above his given objectives. An assessment that his most recent film, 2014’s A Most Violent Year, confirms even as it evidences continued progress in the visual implementation of his ideas.

All three of J. C. Chandor’s feature films share a common attempt at examining the myth of American individualism by pitting its representatives against the unseen and uncontrollable forces of an all-powerful system. In each case, the individual in question’s own hubris is largely responsible for bringing them in the heart of the storm. In A Most Violent Year, that person is Abel Morales, owner of a growing oil supply business only a million and a half dollars away from being truly independent. Conscientious, scrupulous and earnest to a fault, his commitment to being a late 20^th-century model of the American Dream is exactly what keeps holding him back from responding effectively to the mysterious assaults and hijackings of his truck drivers. As played by Oscar Isaac, he recalls Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone from The Godfather, calmly doing his utmost to play by the rules in a system that demands he break them to survive and prosper.

A most appropriate model that’s one of many Chandor conjures in the hope of aligning his film with the great American crime dramas of the 1970s: Godfather-esque interiors lit with heavy yellow or beige colours – including a restaurant scene that plays out like a cross between the first movie’s restaurant scene and the meeting of the Five Families, a cold and inhospitable New York reminiscent of Serpico, a late car chase whose tightening spaces and dirty industrial areas evokes The French Connection until a combination of dark tunnels and red lights turn it into a nightmare… There’s a myriad of visual and structural callbacks that suggest an ambition on Chandor’s part to align his story with many other films that used organized street crime narratives – often based on true stories – to interrogate American identity. The last notable film of such a kind was Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers, which tried to create a modern Jewish tragedy by linking assimilation to crime as a means to secure a rite of passage into adulthood. Although pertinent at times, it yielded mixed results.

A Most Violent Year, whose gently pressuring Hasidic landlords serve a purpose similar to that of the orthodox patriarchs in Holly Rollers, does a better job of laying out its characters’ conflicting desires but similarly falls short of its lofty ambitions. The blame goes partly to Chandor’s unsteady, occasionally shallow direction; he’s certainly grown more adventurous since Margin Call, but he’s retained his penchant for making his composition and framing choices speak over his actors rather than in concordance with them. Scenes of Abel’s wife Anna (the ever talented Jessica Chastain) pressuring him to conform to the image of a traditional American patriarch – armed, ready to use violence and get his hands dirty to protect his family/property – have the workings of classic American gangster tragedy (think White Heat or Mystic River) but, good as his actors’ performances may individually be, Chandor seems to have trouble bringing out their driving impulses in a truly significant way. When the climax sees Anna use an unsuspected last-resort measure to pull her husband out of trouble, the effect should be one of shocking triple revelations – of her actions, of herself and of the couple’s marriage; what we get instead amounts, emotionally speaking, to little more than a deus ex machina.

J. C. Chandor is evidently an intelligent and thoughtful filmmaker who knows and understands his references. As always, he directs his actors very well – even though many here, such as David Oyelowo as a sympathetic but inflexible D. A., are underused – and scenes such as Abel’s discussion with the sister of a fugitive truck driver prove that he can succeed at taking his audience and characters to the exact emotional places they need to be. But it’s perhaps quite telling that his only effective dissection of the myth of rugged American individualism so far has been a metaphorical one, whose spaces diminished as the stakes increased.

"SPECTRE"

 

Three years ago, Skyfall accomplished a miracle. Coming on the heels of the troubled mess that was Quantum Of Solace, it successfully followed through on the promises made by Casino Royale and reinvigorated a franchise that seemed at a dead end. In and of itself, this was already a praiseworthy achievement, but Skyfall did more than that: It managed to hit every single required note with perfect accuracy all while managing to be more than just a James Bond film. In the hands of Sam Mendes, and with the recruitment of John Logan to the Purvis-Wade screenwriting team, Skyfall became a genuinely moving tragedy of revenge, contrition and transition, bolstered by an absolutely stellar oedipal duel courtesy of Judi Dench and Javier Bardem.

Lightning rarely strikes twice in a row, so to expect SPECTRE to match, let alone surpass Skyfall’s near-perfection was almost bound to yield disappointment. It is therefore a testament to Mendes and his creative team’s strong committed grasp on their material that SPECTRE’s ability to surprise and draw us in its ever-expanding universe is hindered neither by its screenplay’s occasional lapses in judgment nor by its intermittently uneven pacing. Not content with letting Skyfall’s argument for James Bond’s continued cultural relevance stand alone, SPECTRE expands on that idea’s connection to a somewhat naive nostalgia for a “cleaner”, up-close-and-personal approach to espionage and defense in reaction to today’s murky, depersonalized system of drones and mass surveillance.

In his scathing review of the film, the estimable Bob Chipman pointed out how SPECTRE’s central plot – a shadowy international crime syndicate using surveillance culture to infiltrate the government and hijack international intelligence and defense systems for its own ends – is almost identical to the HYDRA scheme that served as Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s critique of post-9/11 defense and espionage policies, which it linked to the American Superhero genre’s inherent temptation towards authoritarianism. This, along with the Craig-era Bond saga’s perceived dependence upon current successful franchises as sources of inspiration, is an entirely valid and reasonable criticism. I would argue, however, that the long history and wide-ranging cultural influence of the James Bond saga not only gives SPECTRE’s use of these plot elements more resonance, it justifies it as a logical development in Bond’s prolonged enterprise of re-adaptation and renewal. Old-school purists may understandably long for the escapist extravaganzas of the Connery-Lazenby-Moore years, but I find Craig-era Bond’s constant confrontation with changing cultural and geopolitical realities to be one of the rebooted franchise’s most fascinating aspects.

Part of that confrontation involves Bond’s archetypically masculine characteristics, which are here half-glamourized, half-identified as toxic, without that identification ever quite turning into outright criticism. The slick walking liquor ad model of yesteryear has evolved into a casual alcoholic whose response to his leading lady turning down his advances is to spend the night in a drunken stupor until he stumbles upon an important discovery. His predatory sexuality, once treated with chortling “boys-will-be-boys” indulgence, becomes acknowledged for what it is in a memorable seduction scene where Bond corners the woman he deliberately widowed against a mirrored wall and begins kissing and caressing her like a sensuous boa constrictor, as her half-closed eyes and intonations waver between intimidation and lust without letting us know which one she’s settling on.

Of course, this is James Bond, so all of these scenes are scripted, staged and shot in such a way that he never stops being cool and charismatic while doing all these things but the difference with Goldfinger and Thunderball’s light-hearted treatment of scenes that come across today as little more than rape is quite palpable. Key to this delicate balance of glamour and distance is Daniel Craig’s performance. At this point, he embodies James Bond as a distinct, fully-rounded character with as little visible effort as breathing, yet you cannot help but marvel at how easy he makes it look. Moving in every frame like a bulked-up panther surveying its domain, he imbues every gesture, smile and glance with an underlying sense of danger. In fight scenes, his controlled savagery suggests violence to be less of a grim unpleasant necessity than it is an opportunity to bring out pent-up issues whose alternative means of expression he has trained himself to forget. With Craig’s justifiable weariness with the role now being common knowledge, concerns over any negative impact on his performance appear without merit; if anything, his fatigue seems to have come in handy for his more comical moments, in which Bond uses his legendary wit to express annoyance at unexpected setbacks. Every line and facial movement is perfectly-timed deadpan. The contrast with the less-sophisticated boyish brute of Casino Royale is remarkable, and one of the unqualified triumphs of the rebooted franchise: in spite of its missteps and troubles, not only has James Bond himself retained a consistent identity whose development remains steady and unfettered, so has the world he evolves in.

A shame that the same development cannot be observed on SPECTRE’s female characters; as the series’ portrayal of Bond has grown in complexity, its portrayal of Bond girls has been slowly but distinctly regressing ever since Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd blew the competition out of the water. Competently played by Léa Seydoux, Madeleine Swann is an especially frustrating example: Set up as an intelligent, independent woman trying to escape her father’s criminal shadow, Madeleine is systematically robbed of agency and spends most of her time on screen following Bond from place to place, getting kidnapped and getting rescued, with her rare active moments feeling like lazy token efforts to maintain a shallow illusion of empowerment. Moneypenny, whose relationship with Bond in Skyfall was one of equals specialized in different domains, only gets a few nicely-written moments in the first half hour before getting sidelined – a waste of perfectly good Naomie Harris.

And then there’s the twist. Just like Star Trek Into Darkness, the creative team has seen fit to bring back the series’ most iconic villain and disguise his return by lying to the public despite every sign (including the film’s own title!) contradicting them. Unlike Star Trek Into Darkness, the archenemy’s reintroduction makes a certain kind of sense within the series’ narrative arc and is executed functionally well. It’s some of the specifics involved that make this return a botched one. While the idea of making Ernst Stavro Blofeld a childhood friend of Bond’s may be corny on paper, it isn't an inherently bad idea. His position as chief mastermind behind the events of Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace makes sense but the retconning of Skyfall’s Raoul Silva as a SPECTRE agent completely contradicts the latter’s lack of grand vision and purely personal motive, which were precisely what made him such a unique and compelling Bond villain. Worse, the framing of these events as Bond’s punishment for hijacking his father’s affection, aside from unintentionally evoking Austin Powers In Goldmember, makes Blofeld look more like a petty teenager than a criminal mastermind with a tragic background. To Christoph Waltz’s credit, his off-kilter charm – kept in check here, unlike in Big Eyes – considerably downplays the fundamental silliness of his character’s motivation.

In a lesser action-adventure, these problems would derail the entire film, undermining all the goodwill amassed by the first two acts. In SPECTRE, they are, at worst, like irksome little flies interrupting a pleasant outside meal. For all its flaws, the screenplay¹ builds Bond and the MI6 team with care and skill, picking them where they left off in Skyfall and working further on their comradeship and differences. Ben Whishaw’s Q in particular gets to shine as Bond’s reluctant accomplice, with many of the film’s funniest moments resulting from the two men’s conflictual chemistry. Filling in Judi Dench’s prestigious shoes, Ralph Fiennes draws most of his strength from his horn-bucking with Andrew Scott’s wonderfully smug bureaucrat Denbigh.

Conducting this cast with dexterous confidence is Sam Mendes, whose contribution to the maturation of the James Bond franchise cannot be overstated. He doesn’t just bring out the absolute best in his actors. He doesn’t just put the story back on track whenever its mistakes threaten to derail it. He creates a veritable, tangible new world of flesh, blood, light and colour for the James Bond universe to dwell in. As photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema, car chases, train fights and pre-coital embraces take on a hot, visceral character that sublimates Bond’s impulses like no other film in the series’ history has before. As staged by Mendes, they offer an exhilarating multiplicity of styles, moods and visual ideas. Consider the pre-credits sequence, which opens with an impeccably-executed Touch Of Evil-esque tracking shot, follows on with a short series of stunts worthy of Buster Keaton, then climaxes to an exceptionally intense fight scene on a low-altitude helicopter. In this sequence, as in every action scene, Mendes’s command of perspective, composition, space and timing is on full display; whether Bond is driving a decomposing plane down a snowy slope or throwing every available projectile on the seemingly indomitable Mr. Hinx (a mostly silent, twinkle-eyed Dave Bautista), the camera always knows exactly what to put in and out of the frame and for how long. Even among the good Marvel movies, there is not a single action scene that can compare with anything shot by Sam Mendes featuring Daniel Craig.

If nothing else, SPECTRE is remarkable proof of how resilient the creative team behind the James Bond reboot has shown itself to be and how well its efforts have paid off. Not as accomplished as the franchise’s finest pieces – From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Licence To Kill, GoldenEye, Casino Royale and Skyfall – but executed with inspiring aplomb, it continues to carve an interesting and promising path for a cultural icon whose staying power appears inexhaustible.

¹Credited to four writers: The Purvis-Wade-Logan trio behind Skyfall and franchise newcomer Jez Butterworth.

"Margin Call"

Making films about the financial world presents the especially tricky challenge of investing viewers into a world where rich men in expensive suits engage with money as an immaterial, almost non-existent entity, in a difficultly decipherable financial jargon whose purpose appears to be the translation of nothingness into wide-ranging real-world results. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street circumvented the problem by using this world of abstractions as a stage for a fairly routine Greek tragedy. Martin Scorsese’s more successful Wolf Of Wall Street took a more outrageous route, using his unparalleled musicality to connect the toxic masculine impulse for instant sexual gratification to the entitlement culture that plagues capitalism.

J. C. Chandor’s feature-length début Margin Call takes a more sober approach altogether, retaining Wall Street’s tragic codes but applying them to a decidedly more relevant aspect of Wall Street culture; namely, the knowledge that, no matter what they do, somebody, somewhere is going to be negatively affected by their calculations and speculations. When promising young risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) gets entrusted with sensitive data by his just-fired boss Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the disturbing reality of what his work entails hits home in more ways than one. Caught in the impossible dilemma of saving either their already-embattled firm or the economy, he and his coworkers effectively come across as modern Greek gods, conscientiously measuring and juggling the fates of untold millions with barely any acknowledgment that they exist, all from the comfort of their steel-and-glass Olympus.

It is certainly an impressive pantheon that Chandor has assembled: Between Quinto’s wide-eyed Sullivan and his friend Seth (Penn Badgley), Paul Bettany’s pragmatic head trader Will Emerson acts as a cynical Hermes, mentoring his less experienced juniors and conveying bad news to both characters and viewers alike. Towering above them like a falsely benevolent Zeus is Jeremy Irons as CEO John Tuld, who expertly sugarcoats his self-serving greed with the bearing of a genial old uncle. Standing out as this colourful group’s voice of conscience is sales head Sam Rogers, through whom Kevin Spacey subverts the ruthless shark-toothed persona he built throughout his career playing similarly-positioned men with a weary and understated performance that blends in quietly until explicitly called upon to take the spotlight.

His performance, while not the film’s best (that honour belongs to Bettany), does a more consistent job of bringing a human face to the people behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis than most of the film does. Chandor displays a good eye for composition and colour that lends an almost dreamlike quality to the long night during which the world economy’s fate is sealed. The particular emphasis he places on the blue screens and dark shadows that permeate the firm’s offices is so efficient it almost distracts from the uneven staging and editing, the latter of which is particularly disconcerting during the many dialogue scenes. Often the shots answer each other with a drab monotony that undermines the dialogue’s electric potential, and rarely engage with the environment in any meaningful way. Half the time, it looks more like an exceptionally well-lit and well-acted (save a typically wooden Demi Moore) TV movie with occasional cinematic flourishes, the best being a montage during which soundbites of Emerson knowingly selling junk to unsuspecting buyers is played over sped-up footage of busy trading offices interspersed with exterior shots of New York City.

This disappointing lack of kinesis undermines Margin Call’s moments of human insight, best exemplified when Dale movingly contrasts idealized capitalist philanthropy with the system’s reality by wistfully recalling a bridge he helped build and the estimated thousands of years of life its users saved from being “wasted in a fucking car”. There are many such monologues and speeches scattered across the film in which each character defends their conception of capitalism and finance. Unfortunately, their written qualities only further expose the film’s visual shortcomings. Chandor, the son of an investment banker, knows how to convey the situation’s direness without dumbing anything down, but his style lacks the necessary spark to truly share his insider’s gaze with his audience. We remain, despite occasional breakthroughs, stuck on the other side of the shop’s window, watching helplessly as owners stab customers and each other in the back with varying degrees of consent.

"The Martian"

Ridley Scott’s career has been a long, bumpy and sometimes frustrating one, continually demonstrating firm discipline worthy of such master artisans as Michael Curtiz or Robert Wise but rarely tuning it to the consistent personal vision achieved by artists like John Ford or David Lean. A classical yet versatile filmmaker, Scott reaches greatness in sporadic bursts, like a cinematic Halley’s Comet that would otherwise be visible only through a telescope.

The Martian is one of the comet's brightest appearances. Not great so much as exceptional in its balance of craftsmanship and heart, it surpasses above-average crowd-pleasing fare like Apollo 13 by making its own impeccable show of remarkable expertise across the board – acting, direction, cinematography, editing, score – a note-perfect reflection of the solidary ingenuity displayed by the screenplay’s characters. That sounds ridiculously self-evident; of course the entire cast and crew need to be on their A-game for the movie to work, otherwise why even bother? Thing is, inventiveness, competence and teamwork are at the forefront of the story’s main themes. In the hands of a competent but mostly unimaginative director like Ron Howard, these themes are illustrated to produce agreeable sentiment. In the hands of someone like Ridley Scott on the top of his form, these ideas become part of the film’s formal and dramatic structure, and function as its very lifeblood, the electricity that keeps its pace steady and regular.

It says something about easy melodrama’s hold on modern visual storytelling when it is noteworthy that characters that are experienced scientists react to occupational hazards and unexpected setbacks with professional self-control¹. When a violent dust storm causes botanist Mark Watney (a never-better Matt Damon) to get knocked out of sight by a satellite dish during an emergency planetary evacuation, the expected last-ditch attempt to find him despite warnings of its futility takes place but without the requisite screaming and bickering. They know he is most likely dead and that circumstances cannot permit them to risk any more lives. All the shock, regret and self-blame is expressed by the actors’ faces and bodies. Likewise, the rescue operations that take place on Earth upon news of his survival keep conventional interpersonal drama to a minimum.

Not that The Martian diverges from mainstream storytelling and dramatic techniques by any means; it simply works harmoniously with its characters to make those techniques matter. There is not a minute of screen-time that does not fill its clearly-defined purpose, not one scene that lasts longer or shorter than it should, and yet the film manages to be more than a simple well-oiled machine. Characters are given enough space within their parameters to rise above their functions and archetypes without disrupting the balance. Watney himself matches his Boy Scout resourcefulness with self-deprecating humour that, in one of Drew Goddard’s screenplay’s more astute touches, is conveyed mostly through video logs ostensibly recorded for whichever rescue team ends up finding him in case of failure. Its true narrative purpose – to explain his actions to the audience and keep them informed on his state of mind – is a refreshing and justified take on the hackneyed old voiceover narration trope that never feels forced, yet unfortunately resists fully exploring the struggle against loneliness that this constant self-accounting implies.

Indeed, the futuristic Robinson Crusoe setting could have provided ample ground to examine our current digital generation’s impulse to monitor and report our every emotion and activity, but The Martian only scratches the surface, choosing instead to lionize science and technology as forces of unity with impressive parallel montages and match-cuts between NASA, Watney and the rest of his expedition, though the resulting connections don’t feel as deep as they did in Interstellar.

What ground Goddard’s screenplay does cover in the e-communication terrain, however, skillfully illuminates modern-day science geek culture: Using sometimes profane humour to neutralize or divert the painful and scary nature of his situations as well as make his scientific work approachable in spite of the technobabble, Watney is the kind of scientist you could very well picture as a Cracked contributor. More than simple American action hero glibness, his attitude evidences the underlying fear most heroes only hint at by bringing it to a more familiar level. This is where Matt Damon’s everyman persona – slightly overshadowed as of late by his off-screen outspokenness – truly shines; a naturally earnest actor, he delivers laughs whose unhappy roots only make them more potent. Think of his famous “Alice Jardine” monologue in Saving Private Ryan, stretched, diced and scattered across two hours of film. Only an actor of his heart-on-sleeve candor could excavate so deeply into such seemingly self-explanatory humour.

In a way, the aesthetic and storytelling choices found in The Martian constitute a response to the implicit paeans to rugged agnostic individualism of such films as 127 Hours, Captain Phillips and Gravity. To the up-close-and-personal realism and acoustic invasiveness that dominate the current trend of survival cinema, Ridley Scott replies with bright colours, inclusive framing and – one of the film’s most delightful surprises – a disco soundtrack. Even Mars itself is filmed with wide sweeping landscape pans and shots that emphasize grandeur and majesty rather than hostility and isolation.

All of these choices beautifully underline the script’s optimistic emphasis on teamwork – teamwork that briefly but noticeably includes God, both in symbolic and referential form (“We’ll take all the help we can get” says Sean Bean’s flight director to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s multi-religious mission director). In doing so, Scott and Goddard also subvert the solipsistic temptation inherent in both the survival subgenre and the use of video logs as a narrative device.

Although this ongoing theme of cooperation is slightly undermined by China’s late entry to the rescue via an uncharacteristically lazy setup – two leading Chinese scientists decide to intervene upon seeing news of one of NASA’s setbacks on TV – that fails to translate blatant market pandering to natural plot development, any suspicious aftertaste is offset by the script’s subsequent compromise of having nerdy young astrodynamicist Rich Purnell (a scene-stealing Donald Glover) come up with the plan that brings about the climax.

Directed with savoir-faire acquired from years of experience, written with unaffected passion for both the science and its characters, and supported by a dynamic cast, The Martian marks one of Ridley Scott’s highlights and a welcome addition to what might become a science-fiction resurgence.

¹Even the excellent Gravity was criticized for what many understandably perceived to be Dr. Stone’s excessive lack of calm and need for reassurance.