finding neverland: madly subversive

SPOILER ALERT

Finding Neverland is an apparently typical, child-friendly, utterly mainstream movie. It has quality performances (by old favorites Depp and Winslet and Radha Mitchell especially), pretty production values and heart-warming sentiment enough that folks emerge from it using words like "sweet" and "charming", and determining to bring the kids. And it is, indeed, all those things, except utterly mainstream. It is, rather, at its core, fascinatingly subversive.

Its story follows JM Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, the sons of which inspired him to write his masterpiece, Peter Pan. In the film there are four boys, their father is dead from cancer, their mother slowly ailing towards early death while a romantic but unconsummated bond forms between her and the unhappily married Barrie. In truth, there were five boys, their father was very much alive and not pleased to be replaced in his brood's affection by the meddling Barrie. There was no romantic bond between Barrie and the mater; in fact, one of the boys in adulthood said he thought Barrie was completely asexual in every direction (see Birkin, below). In addition, once you've read the ultimate fates of these Lost Boys, "sweet" and "charming" become so overwhelmed by the louring darkness as to become inapplicable.

Andrew Birkin's book JM Barrie and the Lost Boys quotes Robert Boothby, later a Lord of the Realm and a friend at Eton of Michael's, who was Barrie's favorite of the boys: "It was an extraordinary relationship between them -- an unhealthy relationship. I don't mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection. Barrie was always charming to me, but I thought there was something twisted about him... He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie; and when all is said and done, I think Michael and his brothers would have been better off living in poverty than with that odd, morbid little genius." Nico, the youngest of the clan, responds: "I am quite unable to admit that JMB's influence was 'unhealthy': oppressive maybe and over-constant..." In the end, only two of the boys survived into a peaceful old age. One died in the trenches of Flanders in WWI, a second threw himself under a subway train, and the golden Michael, whose classmates lauded him as touched with grace and genius, drowned at 21, another possible suicide.

None of that has anything to do with this movie, though, which sidesteps history almost entirely, as is Hollywood's wont and god-given right. Depp hits just the right levels as Barrie to deliver a man whose secret with children is that he treats them as equals, as ready to learn from them as teach them. The sentiment is underplayed and even the maternal death avoids the quagmire of the maudlin.

The extraordinary thing about it is its message, which is very plainly stated and reinforced throughout: that life is nasty, brutish, short and filled with pain, and the way to be happy is to retreat from reality into a world of dreams. If that sounds sweet, then you haven't thought it through. Every so often this philosophy will shape a brilliant mind which creates a Peter Pan; far more frequently you'll get opium addicts, full-time gamers, or anti-ambitious, layabout film critics. In America today, stillness and introversion are tolerated only on the understanding that these periods of gestation will lead to later flurries of activity which will in turn (and this is crucial) result in the acquisition of wealth. Dreaming for its own sake is still, more than a century past the Victorians, suspicious behaviour just this side of the criminal. Because Barrie is earning a living and the respect of his peers through his dreaming on paper, the message gets an implied sugar-coating, but it doesn't take much scratching to get through the veneer to a radical vision: retreat however you can, escape however you can, and spend your life in dreams.

centurion: titanic amongst the picts

SPOILER ALERT

Centurion is a madly disappointing action film inspired by the disappearance of the legendary Ninth Spanish Legion, a powerful armed command originally led by Julius Caesar himself which disappeared from history, swallowed up without a trace, ostensibly in the wildlands of Britain early in the 2nd century.

The Ninth has an almost unbelievable legacy, beginning with a brilliant run in Gaul, Hispania and Africa, after which Caesar disbanded them into retirement in 46 BC. After his murder, though, Octavian recalled them to duty and they fought beside him against Antony and his Egyptian Queen at the Battle of Actium. Skip ahead seventy years, and the Emperor Claudius sends them north as part of his bid to invade Britain. There they suffer a bad defeat in 61 AD during Boudica's uprising but are still there building a fortress at York in 71. And here they will stay, in what has to be one of the longer and more depressing postings in military history, for half a century. The city as we know it today, in fact, was built with their fortress at its heart. Petergate was one of its main thoroughfares; York Minster is built on the spot where the massive Roman Headquarters squatted.

We know the Legion is no longer in existence by 161 because Marcus Aurelius ordered a sort of official inventory of the Roman military and our boys are nowhere listed. Evidence as to their mysterious end is scant, compelling and contradictory: some theorize the Ninth wound up in Judea or Persia, but the most alluring myth, the one which will not release its grip on our collective cultural imagination, is that the nemesis of the Ninth was Britain itself, with its gloomy climes, untamed Picts, and Gordian Knot of tangled forest and swamplands.

The mystery has inspired other filmmakers and writers. A few years ago the Ninth made an appearance in a loose and fantastical restructuring of events called the Last Legion: with a great cast (John Hannah, Colin Firth, Kevin McKidd) and an engaging plotline describing the Roman origins of King Arthur, it's quality fare for kids but has nothing really to do with history.

As for Centurion, director Neil Marshall wrote the script, and that's always a warning sign. It flashes me back like a bad acid trip to that debacle of badly-written, masturbatory self-indulgence called Titanic (I spit the word; I do not speak it). And, although nowhere near as bad (what could be?), this one suffers from a similar inherent structural deformity, the Titanic Malady, if you will, which sets in when there's nobody standing by to tell the director/writer that his script is no damn good.

In the closing credits, Marshall thanks Walter Hill and Xenopohon for inspiration, implying that he was trying to make something like the Warriors, a comic book movie that Hill made in 1979, and one which has aged remarkably well. It takes Xenophon's Anabasis, one of the great adventure stories of all time, and resets it in a sort of timeless New York in which rival gangs divide the city. One gang, caught far behind enemy lines after a peace-conference gone horribly wrong, has to fight and sneak its way back to safety in its own territory. The result is golden, a classic for all time. Marshall takes the same story: the remnants of the Ninth are caught in wild Pictish territory, without weapons or hope and pursued by vengeance-driven berserker Picts (including one gorgeous, mute, woad-covered, unstoppable warrior-girl who was raped and mutilated in her childhood by Romans. She is unstoppable, that is, until she is inevitably stopped in that misogynist, Beautiful-Girl-Killed-In-Lingering-Swoony-Embrace shot that Hollywood loves so passionately). It's an adventure/fantasy, and therefore not much is to be expected of it, but even by those lowered expectations, the promised adventure never manifests into anything much.

First off, the lighting is wrong: flat, metallic light that looks nothing like anything I've ever seen in Britain. The colours are wrong. The film is full of good, very good and wonderful actors, all of them playing nobodies. They each have qualities which delineate them, one from another, but only in the broadest strokes, because character has been sacrificed to action, a choice which is only valid when well-executed, and this one is not. Michael Fassbender, a man so talent-crammed that I was beginning to fear him as a sort of demigod, fails here because he's playing a non-character who stands at the epicenter of a story peopled exclusively by non-characters. There is one powerful performance: Dominic West's. He busts the screen wide open with sheer strength of charisma as the well-loved and ill-fated Roman General Titus Flavius Virilus. Once he's dead, there's nothing but chase scenes, not very well filmed, and plot "twists" (they've lifted the Butch Cassidy cliff-jump scene straight, even down to the "Who ARE those guys?" brand of wonderments), not anything ingenious. The ethics are simple and never tested (do we desert the fellow who's too wounded to swim? Whoa! He got shot by the bad guys in the nick of time, so we don't have to explore our own moral ambiguity!), the good guys being unequivocally good and the bad guys cold and heartless. The violence is unrealistic; the sound is pumped way up and the cuts are, as usual these days, too quick to allow the fighting to feel life-like, which seems to be the point.

Because this is an adolescent boy fantasy, there is the de rigeur Beautiful Woman Living As Witch And Outcast across whom they stumble in the course of their wanderings. I understand the appeal of the trope, but I begin to long for a witch who is old, or homely, or lesbian, not spending her life waiting for this man, or at least not wearing lip-gloss. It is never fully explained, either, how Quintus Dias (Fassbender) knows how to speak flawless Pictish, or how the witchy-Pict girl knows how to speak flawless Latin (although she claims it's due to the proximity of the Roman fort, she also claims she keeps up the witchy facade to keep the Romans away, and that it's always worked). Dias was captured by the Picts, but apparently only for a week or so before he escaped, and I doubt anyone took the time to teach him his letters while he was chained to the rack. This is the kind of detail that clues you in to the fact that it's an adolescent fantasy instead of a true stab at bringing a particular time and place to life (as in, say, Jeremiah Johnson, in which language barriers are respected).

Since the thing is filmed with good to wonderful actors, and since only a single stab at humour comes off, I have to lay the fault at the editor's doorstep, after the scriptwriter takes a second drubbing, that is. (The only joke I remember working is when they make it at last to the Romans and one of the non-character soldiers says, "THIS is Hadrian's great plan? A WALL?")

Still, not to worry. There's another film in the works: the Eagle, due out this year and based on the classic novel the Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe which began the resurgence of the Legion's popularity. It'll have Jamie Bell and Mark Strong and will focus on a son of a legionnaire trying to solve the mystery and find the Ninth's totemic bronze eagle.

things i've been watching: january 2011

Valhalla Rising: (2009. dir: Nicolas Winding Refn) Gorgeous, slow, inscrutable, mesmerizing Viking movie about a one-eyed, invincible bad-ass who sees visions of the future. Early on someone asks him (rhetorically, since he does not speak), "Who are you?" At which I laughed and thought, "Viking Movie, One-Eyed Badassed Seer of Visions... He's Odin!" Turns out I was wrong. He's just your run-of-the-mill invincible, visionary warrior, which, granted, is rather wonderful if you're not expecting gods. That said, the film has so sober an air of its own importance that it feels (although I know from interviews it is not) like propaganda for Forn Sidr. When One-Eye makes his sacrifice in the end, it feels Arthurian, like the great hero is promising to return in Denmark's greatest hour of need.

I want to say the film is redolent of a Malickian nature-mysticism, but without Malick's joie-de-vivre and clarity of purpose. There's an immensity to it, however, built largely of silence and a thick, well-used soundscape. The music is a drum-heavy brand of doom-rock, and just right. The violence is well photographed, slow and unflinching but also unromanticized, not slicked-up as is the custom amongst unscrupulous editors these days. When One-Eye eviscerates a fellow, you can practically smell the meat, feel the steam as the hot innards hit the cool Northern air.

Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye is, as always, a force of nature. He proved in King Arthur that he's one of those rare actors whose charisma communicates itself even in long shot. Now he's proved it communicates itself even when he's mute and sporting only one eye. Amazing man.


Fool's Gold: (2008. dir: Andy Tennant) There are three things a romantic comedy needs in order to engage properly: chemistry between its leads, believable but credibly overcome obstacles to their love, and a plotline (ie: the pursuit of the Earl Williams news-story in His Girl Friday) on which they can focus while they're falling in love, or rather while they're working out their differences, because in this genre love generally happens at first sight and often, as in this one, before the film begins.

Fool's Gold gets a bad rap, which flummoxes me. In this age overstuffed with shallow and unremarkable love stories, McConaughey and Hudson not only share an extraordinary chemistry, they also have in common a spot-on sense of comic timing and the kind of affable, un-vain carriage of their considerable physical charms which allows us to love rather than envy them. The script, although it often dives headlong into silliness, presents a fully credible emotional journey from personality-crossed young love into mature acceptance. The low comedy (and there is that) is carried off with a good-natured heartiness so that three-stooges moments (like when she borrows a golf club from an old man on a park bench with which to hit her lover/nemesis in the head) are actually funny instead of just absurd or offensive. My boyfriend was making dinner while I watched, and whenever I laughed he'd say what'd I miss? and I kept having to say, "It's all in the timing. It wouldn't be funny if I told it," and that's unquestionably a tribute to some damn fine acting and some damn fine editing. The other thing it has is the treasure-hunting story, a rollicking good one, one the writers obviously enjoyed writing.

Everyone likes Kate Hudson, and that's as it should be, but I don't quite understand why people as a rule don't like McConaughey. Look: Dazed and Confused, Lone Star, A Time To Kill, Frailty, Newton Boys, Reign of Fire, Tropic Thunder? That's an interesting resume. Sure, he's got some probable dogs in there (who's going to watch Failure to Launch to find out if it's actually as bad as they say? a braver human than I), but do me a favor and give the surfer-boy another chance, will you?


the Skeleton Key: (2005. dir: Iain Softley)

And speaking of Kate Hudson...

This is a reconsideration. I reviewed this movie already, back in 2008, one of the first on this blog, in fact, and I short-changed it. It moved too slowly for my taste then, but once you know the ending (a great ending), the second viewing is completely enjoyable, and the script is a very fine venture. Plus, the acting is first-tier among the foursome of leads (Kate Hudson, Gena Rowlands, Peter Sarsgaard, John Hurt), the atmosphere of Terrebonne Parish saturates the film until you can feel the sultry virtually coating your skin, and it's that rare beast, a hoodoo picture which has a genuine feel to the hoodoo. The sound of it is full and haunting: scratchy old blues and voodoo records, menacing thumpings and scratchings and thunderstorms. It's still a little slow, but it makes up for it in a thousand other ways.

twilight eclipse: bloodlust and milquetoast

If you're looking for great cinema, or great story-telling, you don't look to Twilight: Eclipse. That's not what it's for.

Straight off the top: I'm obviously not of the demographic at which it was very specifically and, I might add, masterfully, aimed. As a piece of marketing to grab that romantic young girl, it is an admirable work of art and I sweep my hat off to it. Kristen Stewart in the lead is Everygirl: not pretty, but strangely engaging to look at. She never wears anything provocative or sexy, even when her friends do. All the beautiful boys fall madly in love with her, but it's HER they're loving, not any surface appearance. It very cleverly figures out a way to get her into the arms of both her vampire-love and her werewolf-love, once in the same tent, that is simultaneously innocent and exciting. Her vampire-love is so gallant that he will not sleep with her, even when she offers, although he makes it clear it is not from lack of passion.

Adolescent boys: if you want to know what an adolescent girl's perfect fantasy is, study this film. There's a lot of long, earnest conversation and long, soul-searching gazes, lots of churning, unfulfilled desires. Both her loves are simultaneously blood-lustingly dangerous and milquetoast safe, and both entirely focused on her. Indeed, her vampire-love seems to have no particular life when she's not in the room. He's got vampire roommates, I mean, but he seems to snap into focus only when she walks into view.

There is no tiresome delving into the social problems of modern teenagers. All exploration is into, around, and emerging from the heroine's somnambulistic romance-extraordinaire, as if the rest of the world existed only as adjunct and support to that single, all-important cathexis. In that sense, it reminds me a bit of an old Neil Jordan fantasy called the Company of Wolves, which was a strange, dreamlike amalgam of lycanthropic fairy tales, all taking place in the mind of a feverish girl sloughing off her girlish skin to step into womanhood. It was flawed (too slow and episodic and with one disastrous piece of casting), but in truly unique ways. Twilight, on the other hand, is admirable in that its flaws are only flaws if viewed from outside the intended perspective: that is, the perspective of the adolescent girl simultaneously eager to step into her womanhood and afraid of the gravity of the step.

(The down side is that girls learning how to live their loves from this mythology are going to be slammed hard up against some harsh realities when they find out that real boys are nothing like these polite super-boyfriends. But that's another problem for another generation, and I'm not even going to step into that morass. Anyway, when did Hollywood ever bother with such niceties as worrying about the psychological development of an audience?)

The mise-en-scene is suitably dark and brooding, with vast, rich landscapes (where is that? Someplace on the Washington coast?) and unconvincing but enjoyable CGI wolves. I watched it because the trailer showed that full-speed, howling battle-clash of a line of wolves smashing up against a line of vampires. I'm a sucker for a thing like that, and I enjoyed it, but the thing I enjoyed most was that someone, presumably a fully grown adult, is so wholly in touch with her inner teenager that she can write a thing like this from the heart, which I suppose is why it's so vastly successful.

What it is not, of course, is an action film, nor is it a horror film. It's one thing: a Girl-Fantasy, and if you look for anything else in it you will gnash your teeth in disappointment.

seven great sex scenes and one runner-up

RUNNER-UP: Viggo Mortensen and Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder





It's not a sex scene, per se: more a series of post-coital cuddles, but so intimately shot as to feel utterly convincing. This remake of Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder is, incidentally, a vastly underrated thriller, with great work from all three leads (Michael Douglas is the mad-as-hell husband), also and especially from David Suchet as the investigating detective. In fact, if you can watch it with the alternate ending intact, it qualifies as a great film. In the theatrical version, it still ranks among the very good.


NUMBER SEVEN: Ashley Judd and Viggo Mortensen in the Passion of Darkly Noon





This is a hard one to find. Philip Ridley is one of those cinematic enigmas. He made an underground (deep, deep underground) splash with the Reflecting Skin in 1990, a movie as strange and dark and compelling as you would imagine once you know it begins with an exploding toad. He followed it five years later with Passion, in which a young man (Brendan Fraser) raised in repressive religious surroundings escapes from a murderous mob and takes refuge with the free-spirited Judd and her mute boyfriend (Mortensen). It's no less strange than Skin (someone could probably write a thesis on that floating shoe) but has a fuller sense of depth and wholeness. Early on, the extraordinarily sensuous pairing of Judd and Mortensen enjoys an extraordinarily sensuous night of bliss which easily makes the list.


NUMBER SIX: Jude Law and Rachel Weisz in Enemy at the Gates







It's the worst part of the siege of Stalingrad. Law is a sniper who has become a hero of the Soviet struggle against the Nazis. Weisz is a Jewish intellectual who has thrown her lot in with the snipers. They sleep huddled in their uniforms along stone hallways in the rubble that was once a great city. Madly in love but with no opportunity for privacy, the two make love half-clad, almost silent, and surrounded by their comrades.


NUMBER FIVE: Clooney and Lopez in Out of Sight



It can't be an accident that two of these seven movies listed were edited by Anne V Coates. Her use of lightning-cuts to move smoothly back and forth in time gives the encounter a more engaging shape and allows us intimately into the heads of the characters. Again, this isn't the full-monty-last-tango-in-paris kind of sex scene, kind of wrapping up just when they get horizontal, but it's fantastically sexy. The movie itself, which was correctly lauded as a small masterpiece of action cinema (and probably led directly to those Soderbergh/Clooney Oceans yawners) is at heart a love story, and a marvellously well-realized one.


NUMBER FOUR: Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance in Intimacy



This is not just one sex scene but several, each communicating a different set of dynamics, often without spoken explanation. It's an electrifying accomplishment for two actors, requiring what must have been a near-total lack of vanity and some awesome, uberhuman discipline of concentration.


NUMBER THREE: Diana Glenn and Alex O'Loughlin in the Oyster Farmer





The scene on the dock. You'll know it. It's got great camera-work.


NUMBER TWO: Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello in a History of Violence



The one on the staircase, not the one in the bed.

Cronenberg gives us an interesting contrast here. The movie follows the journey of a happy, apparently well-adjusted family from denial of their own darkness into a forced exploration of their joint personal shadow. The first sex scene, performed in their daughter's bedroom with Bello dressed in her old cheerleaders' outfit, is saccharinely embarrassing. Only later, once the trickster darkness has invaded their home in the shape of the husband's past, do they find a truer expression of passion.


AND THE BEST SEX SCENE EVER:

Diane Lane and Olivier Martinez in Unfaithful





There's not a boring one in it, but the best is the first, in which Lane's character thinks back on her encounter with her lover as she rides home on the train. Largely due to her near-perfect performance (she ought to have had her Oscar; it was stolen from her by a beautiful woman wearing a fake nose), and largely to some of the most stunning editing I've ever seen (again, by Anne V Coates), watching this in the cinema felt more like actually having sex than watching a movie. Even on DVD, the immediacy of the flesh is so tangible as to be nearly unbearable. Aside from all that, the whole film is breathtaking, a real stunner from that problematical Eminence Terrible Adrian Lyne.

merry christmas, mr lawrence: sleeping with the enemy

This is no Christmas movie (its greatest flaw may be its title, along with its awkward freeze-frame ending). It is, rather, an extraordinary Japanese film from 1983 about British soldiers in a WWII Japanese POW camp. Written by director Nagisa Oshima but based on a novel by Laurens van der Post, it uses both Japanese and British actors and makes heavy use of both languages. Among other things, it is a study of two cultures at odds, and an examination of what defines the Perfect Warrior in each.

Oshima, a veteran of the mid-century Asian "New Wave", makes the bold decision to use not seasoned actors but renowned musicians in two of his three lead roles: David Bowie, who had by that time honed his chops both on film (most notably in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 the Man Who Fell to Earth) and Broadway (as the twisted John Merrick in the Elephant Man), is the charismatic prisoner Jack Celliers, and Japanese superstar Ryuichi Sakamoto is the haunted camp commandant, Captain Yonoi. Sakamoto takes on the difficult task of speaking the bulk of his lines in English: it seems he has learned them phonetically, and they find no easy egress. Each English word sounds painstakingly, even painfully, extracted, which might under different circumstances backfire, but in this case serves to lend a vulnerable boyishness as a sort of anguished backlighting to his beautiful, mask-like face.

I'd forgotten how unusual this movie is. I saw it for Bowie when I was a kid, but walked out of the theatre half in love with Tom Conti, who is bloody marvellous as the affable and canny Colonel Lawrence, a man who finds himself caught in the middle of no small drama due largely to his facility with the Japanese language but also to his considerable heart. Two scenes stand out as examples of breathtaking acting: in the first, he is condemned to die for the smuggling of a radio, a crime he did not commit and which nobody truly believes he committed. In the second, he tells an abortive story about a woman he knew in passing in Singapore, a story which he ends up not telling at all, but in a way as real as any moment I've ever seen onscreen. Conti made Reuben, Reuben the same year, for which he was Oscar-nominated, and that's too bad, because in retrospect I think this is both the better film and the more impressive performance. Except for a few forays onto the old Hollywood backlot (American Dreamer, the Quick and the Dead) he's mostly stayed across the pond to work in theatre and television (although I understand he's showing up in Julie Taymor's Tempest). And I do miss him.

Meanwhile, Sakamoto's magnificent score lends an otherworldly, ethereal air to the already surreal camp-life, an air which is accentuated in the editing-room by heavy use of slow fades to black and an unhurried pace. The camera-work is lovely and unobtrusive: one particular favorite is a slow zoom from the back of a very formal Japanese military courtroom towards Yonoi, one of its presiding officers, as he first lays eyes on the prisoner who will transform his life into something unrecognizable.

And there's another thing: the numinous sheen of Van der Post's wonderful thought process shines through the lovely space Oshima has opened up for it. The culmination of all these disparate, beautiful elements -- musical, philosophical, photographic, -- is in an important work of art. Like that classic novel you feel you should read, and put off, and when you delve in at last it winds up haunting you.

things i've been watching december 2010

Whiteout: (2009. dir: Dominic Sena) It was a good idea. The personnel on a base in Antarctica are about to clear out for the winter when a body is found, and suddenly there's a murderer to be caught in the small margin before the first bad storm hits. The script, alas, is for the most part halt and lame. It's not a complete waste of space because the acting is so good: Kate Beckinsale, Tom Skerritt, Alex O'Loughlin and Columbus Short pull it up by its bootstraps into a watchable piece, but you'll be half an hour ahead of these slow-poke characters in solving the various bends of the mystery, and the climactic fight scene, fought in a blinding snowstorm, is ridiculously unsatisfying to watch. It's a pretty movie, though, with Aurora Australis and miles of glacial wasteland, not to mention both Beckinsale and O'Loughlin stripping down to their skivvies in gratuitous displays of fleshly pulchritude. One of my favorite things about it is that there are flirtations and attractions, but the usually de rigeur love story fails to manifest, which means that Beckinsale's character is allowed to be a strong, gorgeous woman and still stand alone. Bravo for that.



the Pumpkin Eater: (1964. dir: Jack Clayton) The bad thing about a Harold Pinter script, especially in those early days, is the length of time two people, usually husband and wife, spend avoiding one another's questions. It makes me long for a Lillian Hellman play, in which everyone says exactly what they mean all the time, but with no less toxin, acid and vitriol. The GREAT thing, however, about the old Pinter scripts is that random character who will show up in a single scene with a single monologue and steal the show. There's a beauty in this one, a sly, brutal speech delivered in a beauty parlor to -- or, rather, AT -- Anne Bancroft while she's trapped beneath a hair-dryer. Pinter also likes to give us a boorish brute who repeats a single, strange speech over and over (see Christopher Walken in the Comfort of Strangers and his obsession with his father's moustache): in this, it's the unredoubtable James Mason, having a great deal of vicious fun playing a weak, cuckolded bully. One of the great shots of the era has to be the crooked, extreme close-up of his face, or, rather, one eye and his snarling mouth, as he pours the acrimonious venom into our heroine's ear that he hopes will destroy her marriage.

It's a slow film. We spend a lot of time following Bancroft as she walks around in a fog of depression, revisiting the decisions which have led into her current fugue state. The intelligence of her acting makes it worth the effort. It feels a little outdated: these days it's hard to imagine a liberal, upper-middle-class, bohemian woman who's bourne seven children to three husbands, and the abortion issue, which at the time must have been shocking, inevitably feels overly-dramatic in a time when a generation of adults have grown up knowing it's a legal option. In any case, there are always the eternal problems as well (adultery, for instance, and keeping the romance in a house full of kids). These are unreservedly addressed by Pinter, a man who doesn't flinch from the squalid side of domestic bliss, and the ending has a resonance of truth to it. Family is, first and foremost and even when it seems like nothing else, a grounding influence.


Iron Man 2: (2010. dir: Jon Favreau) The joy of the first Iron Man movie was in spending time with Robert Downey Jr, an actor of such massive talent that he can speak a line which is simultaneously hilariously funny and achingly poignant, make it sound completely improvised, and do that over and over for an entire film. There are exactly two compelling characters in this sequel: the hero (Downey) and the villain (Mickey Rourke's full-blown, bigger-than-life, Russkie-talking bad-ass who we really want to get to know better and don't get the chance). Every other character in it is nothing but clutter. Strip them away, along with the subplots, the girl issues, the superhero issues, the government issues, strip it all down to just these two fellows... THEN you're talking some big possibilities for a fine action film. (And leave in the robot assistants. Although the one from the last movie was funnier.)

It's a nice ensemble that Favreau has assembled, and with one notable exception the fault for the yawner characters doesn't lie with the actors. The exception, horrifyingly, is Sam Rockwell, who seems to have stumbled past his expiration date as far as being funny is concerned and, like a teen idol doing revival shows in his fifties, become a mockery of his previous, genuinely funny self. I first was troubled by it in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but because only Alan Rickman was consistently funny there, I figured it was a directorial problem and let it go. Now I'm worried. Rockwell still makes the grade with dramatic roles (see Moon, for God's sake, if you haven't already), but I was mortified at how badly acted AND painfully unfunny his Justin Hammer was.

If you decide to watch Iron Man 2 anyway, in all its forlorn dilapidation, make sure you stay through the credits, as there's a potentially exciting development which shows up late. Of course, that happened last time, too, and look what we got.