Pick of 2012?

OK, so I have been busy, exercising exit skills from my two parishes, retiring,  moving home and country, and spending the second half of the year living 50 minutes from the nearest cinema.     

So I have not yet seen Argo,  The Master, Rust and Bone, Amour, The Life of Pi. The Hobbit,  7 Psychopaths or Quartet. 

Nor have I seen any of these BFI top films of the year,   Tabu,  Beasts of the Southern Wild,  The Berberian Sound Studio, Moonrise Kingdom,  Beyond the Hills,  Cosmopolis,  Once upon a time in Anatolia, or This is not a film.

On the other hand I have managed to catch (listed in no particular order)

Anna Karenina, The Bourne Legacy,  Brave, Coriolanus, Hope Springs,  Shadow Dancer,  The Hunger Games, Looper,  Skyfall, Prometheus, Pirates -  an Adventure with Scientists,  Chronicle,  Great Expectations, A Dangerous Method, Hugo, The Artist, Puss in Boots,   The Dark Knight Rises,   and  The Avengers Assemble.   

I think all of these have much to commend them, and I have omitted a few others that seem to have had little to commend them.  

And what a varied bunch they are.  

Four literary adaptations;  Tolstoy treated with verve and confidence in Anna Karenina, a first rate Shakespearean Coriolanus,   a workmanlike Great Expectations, an honest and respectful  teen trilogy opener of Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games;  

three sf movies, Chronicles, Looper and Prometheus, each of which revisited old tropes, be they found footage, time travel or the Alien world; 

three children’s movies that also appeal to adults, in Brave, Pirates and Puss in Boots; 

two great action flicks,  Skyfall  hitting the heights and Bourne Legacy offering a new direction and star,  

two films about film-making,  Scorsese’s Hugo, and The Artist – an Oscar wining black and white silent movie!

An intelligent and informed British political thriller,  Shadow Dancer;

a typical – and typically good - British ensemble comedy, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (is that right?);  

an engaging treatment of mature married love – and its difficulties, in Hope Springs,

and two block-buster comic book franchise movies The Dark Knight Rises and Avengers Assemble, each of which honoured their respective heritages.  

I guess you will have seen most of these, but maybe Shadow Dancer deserves special mention.     Concerning  IRA moles run by MI5 in the 1990’s, this is  adapted by Tom Bradby, who was ITN’s News Correspondent in Belfast between 1993 and ‘96,  from his own novel.  It has the same informed darkness as his Red Riding TV trilogy, directed by  James Marsh, who also helms this movie.      This has an outstanding cast, starring Andrea Riseborough, (so brilliant in TV’s  The Devil’s Whore, set during the English Civil War), Clive Owen and Gillian Anderson (who now seems to have made Britain her home again), plus Aiden Gillen  (The Garde),  Domhnall Gleeson, (Anna  Karenina), and Brid Brennan (a stage and tv actor previously used by Marsh in Red Riding).   It rings true to the horrific history of the Troubles, in which everyday Irish domestic life was played out against a constant backdrop of potential violence that could, and did, so easily and unexpectantly explode, and where even family loyalties were often under deadly questioning.       Sadly, this film is still relevant today, as the British government’s involvement with ‘extra-legal’ activities in these years is comes more into the light.     I recommend it.

The observant will notice that I have not commented  A Dangerous Method,  the Freud/Jung story centering on their relationship with each other and with Sabina Spielrein,  starring Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Kiera Knightley.   That is simply because I am still puzzled by it,  questioning its accuracy and therefore its integrity.   The director, David Chronenberg, does not always fill me with confidence, despite his many remarkable films, including Eastern Promises, A History of Violence, eXistenZe, Videodome, The Fly, and Spider.      Must see again.

But please note, in this Olympic year, how many great British movies were released,  plus  those using major British talent in front of the camera, directing, or in the production teams.    Skyfall, of course, and Prometheus,  Anna Karenina, Coriolanus,  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Pirates,  Great Expectations,  Brave, and   Shadow Dancer.

And let’s name check  some of the leading British actors seen on screen this year and not mentioned above; Judy Dench, Daniel Craig,  Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson,   Ralph Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave,   Emma Thompson, Billy Connelly,  Helena Bonham-Carter, Robbie Coltrane,   Rachel Weitz,  Hugh Grant,  Imelda Staunton,  Trevor Hiddleston, Christopher Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman,  Tom Hardy, Idris Elba, Martin Freeman,  Ian McKellen, Maggie Smith,  Tom Wilkinson, Carey Mulligan….. honestly,   the list just goes on and one.

Apart from those mentioned above I really want to catch up on the following Britflics,

Dreams of a Life, Carol Morley’s requiem for Joyce Vincent 

My Week with Marilyn

Nine Muses, Akomfrahs meditation on immigration – and The Odyssey

Patience, (after Sebal’s The Rings of Saturn)

Shame,

Best Laid Plans,  (Of Mice and Men, but in Nottingham, directed by David Blair, who shot  TV’s The Lakes, The Street, and The Accused, sadly without a Jimmy McGovern script, but with Maxine Peake, who is reason enough for me!)

Trishna,  (Hardy’s Tess, set in India)

Wild Bill 

We Are Poets;  a documentary about the Leed’s project Young Authors   going to Washington  for the Brave New Voices slam-fest

The Angels’ Share,  Ken Loach

Man with the Jazz Guitar, Bio of Ken Sykora,  musician and radio eccentric

In the Dark Half

Now is Good

The Sweeney

Twenty8k

Sinister

Ginger and Rosa, by Sally Potter,

Cockneys vs Zombies,  which is, I am told, exactly what it says on the tin, plus Honor Blackman and Richard Briars.   What’s not to love?

And, just released,  McCullin,  a pictorial biography of Don McCullin, the brave and brilliant war photographer.

Outstanding DVD re-releases of the year? 

Little Big Man

Silent Running

Dark Star

Lawrence of Arabia

Rumble Fish

Pasolini’s  Gospel

Carlos Saura’s Flamenco trilogy,  Blood Wedding,  Carmen, and el Amor Brujo

The DevilsThe Conformist
Bob.

And the BBC’s  Hollow Crown,   terrific Shakespeare, fabulous casting and filming.

So here’s to 2013!  Happy movie going to you all.

Bob

Grace and Danger. Tree of Life and Theology

In Terrence Malick’s  film The Tree of Life we learn of the death of a 19 year old boy, known as RL.   Most of the film in concerned with his elder brother, Jack, and the spiritual crisis he experiences on an anniversary of RL’s death.  But at the beginning of the film we are with his mother, and her immediate response to this tragedy.  She loves God,  and has been taught that ‘those who follow the way of Grace come to no harm.’   She believes that we have to choose between Grace and Nature,  nature ‘red in tooth and claw’.  But her teenage boy was full of Grace, and he has come to harm,  he is dead.

The mother questions God, but God makes no verbal reply.   Instead Malick offers us a visually spectacular 15 minute sequence telling of the creation of the Universe, the formation of planets and the emergence and evolution of life.    Some find this section of the film incomprehensible, or irrelevant.    Having seen and discussed this film many times I offer this, my response to it,  putting these words into the mouth of the Creator.

Your child has died.  He was 19 years old.  This is tragic.  Because you love your child you scream and grieve and weep and rage and question.     You question me, asking

Why?

Did I know?

Where was I?

What do you mean to me?

Let me answer you.

You conceived your child in love, carried him in hope, birthed him in joy and pain.    You were pregnant for nine months.    I waited nine billion years for life to be conceived on planet Earth.   And four billion years more before it could give birth to you, my children, made in my own image.    You too were conceived in love, carried in hope, birthed in joy and pain. 

Life itself is my Creation gift to you, and it takes time.   Just as your beloved child grew slowly, cell by cell within your womb, my universe also grew slowly.     I spoke and the Universe sprang into existence, and then particle by particle, photon by photon, atom by atom, element by element, grain by grain, it grew within my womb. 

My womb?     Where else?  There was and is nowhere outside me, beyond me, outwith me, so the only place my universe could be is within me.    That genesis created everything you see and know, and everything you cannot see and will never know.    

Gravity was in my left hand and randomness in my right,  and these tools brought order out of chaos,  and then life out of the inanimate.      I created my Universe to live and to bear life itself, and more – life that is in my own image, the image of love.     Giving, self-giving, compassionate, forgiving love.  Love that cares,  love that hurts and grieves.    Grieves because there is no creation without destruction and no life without death.   That is the story of this Universe.   

Every atom in your body was created in the furnace at the heart of some distant sun.    Hydrogen and helium, the only atoms in that first moment,  had to be remade there, fused together under unimaginable pressure to form oxygen, carbon,  nitrogen, iron, calcium and phosphorus,  potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium.  You need all of these elements to simply be.    These suns burned for billions of years and then they had to die, burn out, explode and seed the interstellar space with these new atoms.    Atoms that gathered under gravity’s gentle push, gathered and clumped, formed dust clouds, then rocks, asteroids and planets.    

How many planets have to form before one can be a cradle for life?    The number would be meaningless to you, as would the trillion of minute actions and reactions needed for these earth-bound atoms to be combined and recombined, to mutate as randomness did its amazing work,  countering entropy by bringing order out of chaos, complexity out of simplicity, forming chemical compounds, amino acids, bacteria,  single and multi-celled beings;  all your ancestors.    Some think that evolution is not miraculous, but that is only because they want miracles to be instantaneous.    My Creation miracle took thirteen billion years, and turned hydrogen and light into love.   Is that not miraculous enough?

You were taught that you must choose between Grace and Nature.   That is a false dichotomy.    You thought that your child could escape the dangers of Nature by choosing Grace.    But Grace needs a natural form to inhabit.   Grace needs the cradle of Nature to find a home in.    And do not presume that you are the only living things capable of Grace.

You are compassionate. You feel the pain of others.  The suffering of others stirs deep feelings, often of anger, in your hearts.   Of course you want a world where there is no suffering.  Sometimes when you see suffering you call it evil and are angry with me.  

How can a loving God allow such suffering?      So they blame me for allowing harmful as well as beneficent bacteria to evolve, or for allowing the movement of tectonic plates to cause earthquakes.   Some would like me to temporarily suspend the laws of gravity when falling objects hurt, or when falling hurts bodies.    Some people seem to want fire that does not burn, water than does not drown.      To eat without killing.   But do you think that if I could have created you, and your beloved children, without suffering and death being part of it, without Nature being as it is, without your Universe being as it is, I would not have done so?   

I also have to live, like you,  with the necessary randomness that makes life possible and unpredictable.    Randomness and gravity, my necessary creative tools,  mean that life is fraught with  danger.   Maybe that danger makes it precious.   Would I not have spared myself the waiting, the dying, the grieving, if I could?   

If you look at Nature and hate it, and me, if you blame me and fear me, reject me for the death and loss and destruction you see in the world,  then before you condemn me, consider this.   It has taken your kind half a million years to learn how to take atoms apart.    How long do you think it would take you to put them back together, to create them, to create enough to make your own Universe,  and to breath life and love into your creation?    How long would it take you to make a Universe in your own image, because you despise this one, made in mine?

You husband is an inventor, proud of the patents for his devices.   I am proud of my devices too.    Your eldest son is an architect.  He knows that form has to follow function. 

Function dictates form.      Otherwise building fall apart.     I am the architect of the Universe, and it also has a function.    Love is that function; to love and to be loved.  

This Universe has become aware, and has learnt to love.   It took thirteen thousand million years for you to learn this, in your tiny corner, but in all that time my Universe has not fallen apart.    It is well made.    And just as your child grew from its conception as a single cell, with no interference from you, save sustenance, my Universe grew from a single moment, just one event, and grew to what it is, with no interference from me, save sustenance.  As it is, it was from the beginning.

O yes, I know some believe I could create this Universe and all living things in days, not billions of years,  and  make you out of mud in an instant.   They wonder why I did not make a Universe in which there was no suffering.   Maybe I could have done so.   It would be a different Universe.   And in such a Universe would you be truly human?   Would you have your capacity for costly love, for compassion, for Grace.   Would you be made in my image?   Would you be so intimately connected to the whole of creation?      And could I be truly incarnate?    At One with you?   

Your beloved son has died, and you grieve.  How many of my beloved have I seen die?     If you believe that I love, then you know that I grieve for your boy too, and for every living thing.     You live today in the shadow of his death.   Because I gave you the capacity to choose love and Grace I had to also give you the capacity to turn away from them.   So I too live in the shadow of death.   The death of the Cross, of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of the Gulags and the Killing Fields.    I live in the darkness cast by the fear that lives in the heart of every child, every woman, every man subjected to abuse, to violence, to hatred.     These are not my actions, but yours.

You grieve for what you value.     So add this to the value of your boy.  In him his elder  brother, Jack, found me.   Found the love and trust and forgiveness and Grace – and the creativity – that are my image.   For RL, his brother, your child and mine, lived and lives in love.   All who live in love live in me.  And I live in them.    In all eternity.    

Because you love your child you grieve and weep and rage and question, asking

Why?  

Because there is no other way.

Did I know?  

Yes.

Where was I?  

With you.  Within you.

What do you mean to me?  

Everything.

Angelmaker

Angelmaker.  A novel crying out to be filmed.

Nick Harkaway’s  debut novel, The Gone Away World,  blew me away.   Once I had opened it I read nothing else until I reached the end.   The Gone Away World was witty, erudite, moving, fantastical and demanding.    Sadly, I cannot imagine how it could be filmed.  CGI has an amazing capacity to put visual wonders on the screen,  but the crucial action in this  novel has to take place in our heads, as we come to terms with the philosophical conundrum at its heart.  If you have read it you know why; if you haven’t, give it a try.  

When I  finished Harkaway’s first novel  I started waiting impatiently for his second.   Now it has arrived.   It is called Angelmaker and it is just as witty, erudite, moving, fantastical and demanding as its predecessor, but this time the narrative is imminently filmable.    

Joe, a peaceable giant of a clockmaker, is reluctantly recruited by a sprightly nonagenarian  ex-spy into a battle to save the world – or maybe the universe.  As the forces of Law are out of order he has to use not only the technical skills inherited from his grandfather to find and defuse a machine, designed to save humankind but in danger of destroying it,  but also the goodwill of the London underworld his father once ruled to fight the forces of darkness.   On the way he discovers that his dark side isn’t so dark, and that he has earned the love of a good, albeit unconventional, woman.    

Nick Harkaway is one of David Cornwell’s sons.   Cornwell, of course, writes as John le Carre.    Nick’s genes or nurture have given him the ability to write well, research deeply, and create fully realized characters.   But Angelmaker shows another aspect of the Cornwell line.   There is righteous indignation here.     In le Carre’s  spy novels there ran a deep current of outrage,  a disillusionment at the way good men and women were used in that war and then betrayed by the State, or misled into  believing that the cause they spied and fought for was just and moral.    That disillusionment was perhaps written out most starkly in The Secret Pilgrim.   When the Cold War ground to a halt le Carre lacked a subject that engaged this moral passion.  He wrote some competent thrillers, The Night Manager, Single & Single, et cetera, but it was not until The Constant Gardener that he blazed again.       Angelmaker is not a campaigning book in the way of  The Constant Gardner and The Mission Song, but there are still glimmers here of le Carre’s  sharp indignant edge.  

Harkaway has included agents of the State in the cast of Angelmaker, and his hero comes to see that despite their protestations ‘the end does not justify the means.  The end never comes, the means just carry on.’   As we now know, the means justified or ignored by the highest powers include lies, rendition, torture and murder.  

So there is a beating moral heart to Angelmaker, but there is also a lot of fun in this  picaresque, almost Dickensian, 21^st century Steam-Punk fantasy, crammed full of juicy dialogue delivered by male and female characters who leap off the page and would surely leap off the screen if embodied by some of our fine British character actors.    It is a Casting Director’s dream.     So I hope that some literate film-maker is looking hard at Angelmaker.   Do read it, see if you agree, and if you do, why not start a whispering campaign? 

Angelmaker  by Nick Harkaway is published by William Heinemann.  London.

Bob Vernon.

Hope Springs

Directed by David Frankel, written by Vanessa Taylor, with Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones and Steve Carrell.   99 minutes. 

I first saw Meryl Streep,  before her film career started,  in a TV programme  about Joe Papp’s Central Park production of  The Taming of The Shrew.    As Katherine she leapt off the screen.     My wife and I asked each other who is this woman?    We soon found out.   Since then she has often played or impersonated  well known fictional characters or well known real people fictionalised, from The French Lieutenant’s Woman, through Sophie’s Choice, to Karen Blixen and Karen Silkwood,  Lindi Chamberlain in A Cry in The Dark, in The Devil  Wears Prada and The  Iron Lady .   So it is unusual to see her playing a suburban housewife in a simple domestic romantic comedy.    It is also unusual to see a film carried by two actors in their sixties.       It is very unusual for late middle-aged sex to be portrayed on screen.    And when did we see Steve Carrel in a non-comic role?     Hope Springs is an unusual film because it displays all four distinguishing marks.   I think it is a quietly distinguished film – and thoroughly enjoyable.  

Kay and Arnold  (Streep and Jones) have been married for 31 years.   They met at University where he taught and she studied accountancy.     They have two grown up children and live a middle-income suburban life.  They have slept in separate bedrooms   for four years since Arnold hurt his back and found the single bed more comfortable.    Kay doesn’t mind that too much, as he snores.  They have not had sex for four years.   Kay does mind that.   It is not the sex she misses most but the intimacy; the simple physical evidence of still being loved by the man she loves.    So one day she invests in a week of ‘intensive couples therapy’ with Dr Feld, (Carrell).   

Arnold tells her she can go,  on her own.   When he does join her he grumbles and expostulates and pours scorn on the Doctor and his processes and  intimacy ‘exercises’.     But eventually they do begin to talk.   Watching Meryl Streep’s character listening to Arnold when he reluctantly shares his own sexual fantasies is a lesson in understated reactive comic acting.    Watching Tommy Lee Jones’s character as he slowly realizes what is at stake - his marriage -  and moves beyond his fear and anger into attempted courtship is a lesson in  emotional truthfulness.   Arnold is a strong, determined, tired man who has worked  hard for 30 years to support his married life.  Now he has to realize how precious that marriage is to him and summon up the energy to save it.   

Watching the two of them as they fumble and fail, fumble and fail again, until eventually they fumble and fail better, is a subtle, funny, charming and sometimes moving experience.    Only one episode on their emotional and sexual odyssey seemed to me misjudged.   Of course ultimately there is both sexual and marital healing.   But somehow, thankfully,  that resolution  never felt inevitable.    

I wonder if any couples will find watching this evidence that ‘the truth will set you free’  encourages their own intimate truth telling.   It is not about sex, but affection and intimacy.   Maybe it will, because it seems to be a very honest film, with truthful acting,  carefully written,  photographed, edited, scored, designed, dressed and directed.   I don’t expect any Oscar nominations for this film, but I don’t expect to see any better acting this year either.    And how nice it is to see Elizabeth Shue back on screen,  albeit  in a very minor role.   And Steve Carrell being straight.   At 99 minutes Hope Springs never outstayed its welcome.

Bob Vernon.

Anna Karenina; a tract for our times

'Anna Karenina’ Directed by Joe Wright, Screenplay by Tom Stoppard from the novel by Leo Tolstoy. 12A. 130 mins.

President Obama is asking his voters a profound question. Do they want a society where the winner takes, and keeps, all? Or do they want a society that recognizes and respects the needs and dignity of all it's members? This is an ethical question because it is about the ultimate value of our fellow human beings. Some believe that any society that gets its ultimate values wrong contains the seeds of its own destruction. Its values are not ‘real’, but artificial. Tolstoy lived in a society that depended on serf labour. He saw the ethical falsity of that. Maybe that is why he condemned the theatre as vanity. His society was the real charade, a farce masking a tragedy, elegant but ugly, where highly defined hierarchies and etiquettes decorously dressed moral sewers.

It is ironic that Anna Karenina has been filmed for theatrical screening at least four times. I suggest that Joe Wright’s film is the best by far. After Atonement and Jane Eyre we may take it for granted that his films will be carefully cast, beautifully photographed and scored and skillfully directed. We know that Tom Stoppard’s uses the theatre to pursue truth in philosophy, science, politics, and personal relationships.

So when they film most of the action in this adaptation within a theatre they are making a point. Some have found this metaphor alienating. That may be part of the intent. This is an artificial false society, portrayed as such. Even choreography is used subversively. Servants dance in circles to meet their master's every whim. At the Society Balls the aristocratic dancers employ elaborate gestures, intertwining their hands and arms gracefully, but with no true contact, no genuine intimacy.

It is on this stage that Anna (Kiera Knightley) meets and falls passionately in love with Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). I think Knightley outdoes Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh in her portrayal of a woman driven mad by passion. Jude Law plays her upright husband in a way that invites our sympathy. Matthew Macfadyen, as her brother, Oblonsky, accepts his own promiscuity with a resigned but cheerful bonhomie. Domhnall Gleeson plays Levin, an earnest young landowner seeking, like Tolstoy, a just way to order his life and estates.

At the end of the film his new wife, Kitty (Alicia Vikander), washes a dying man’s body. In this action she gives those earlier ball-room movements true grace, a compassionate intimacy that strikes her husband dumb with wonder. He has just learnt, from one of his workers, that it is not reason that teaches us how to live, but love. He rushes home to share this revelation with his wife, but Kitty's actions are enacting what Levin has been seeking. What she is doing is socially unacceptable and absolutely right.

At one level Karenina is about the marriage contract, love and adultery, but it is also about the social contract imposed by the rich and powerful on the poor and powerless. As much as any cuckolded spouse or betrayed wife they too are being shafted. Those in power are faithful to nothing except their own desires and interests.

Is anybody watching? asks Count Vronsky nervously, as Anne initiates adulterous lovemaking in the woods. And she looks upwards. She knows God is watching. But the church offered no critique to these hedonistic Tzarist aristos. Today the Russian Orthodox Church offers no protest as the Riot Pussies’ criticism of Putin is condemned as blasphemy. In our own Western ethical and economic crisis our churches too seem muted or compromised. What does it say now, in a world were wealth is ever flowing upwards, with conspicuous consumption mocking those compelled to live on an unliveable 'living' wage, and in a Britain where a government run by old Etonians is making the poorest pay for the folly of the richest, the 1% who run or ruin our world. Our so called 'celebrity' culture offers the proletariat junk food, junk television and Mac-jobs, and offers the individuals, but never the bottom 40% as a whole, the false promise of escape through the lottery, the X factor, or Big Brother. When oh when did that last term lose it's literary and political meaning? Spin, Orwell, spin, alongside Tolstoy and Kafka.

Anna Karenina is surely a tract for our own times.