The Plight of the Vampire

For most of my film-watching life I have avoided Vampire movies.  I was never ‘bitten’ by the Hammer Horrors or the Universal Studio’s offerings.

During the last ten years, however, I have seen some really engaging ‘vamps’ in films that connected and begun to explore the genre’s roots and development.   If you have never considered such movies as worth watching, please read on; I assure you there are treasures here.   Even if you are already a ‘Vamp fan’ you might find something interesting, though of course I will probably ignore you favourite movie, or seem to undervalue it.

It has been said that every age finds its own vampire themes.   I think that during the last ten years or so movies have explored ‘the plight of the vampire’; what it might be like to be a vampire.    In  Vampires are us  Margot Adler writes  “let us ponder what it would mean to live a truly long life. How would that change one’s view of everything in society?  …What does one value more and what does one value less with along human life?  Would we become bored?  Would we become less compassionate? …Would it increase of decrease  our reverence for the planet?”

But lets start with;

‘In the London Journal, of March, 1732, is a curious, and, of course, credible account of a particular case of vampyrism, which is stated to have occurred at Madreyga, in Hungary. It appears, that upon an examination of the commander-in-chief and magistrates of the place, they positively and unanimously affirmed, that, about five years before, a certain Heyduke, named Arnold Paul, had been heard to say, that, at Cassovia, on the frontiers of the Turkish Servia, he had been tormented by a vampyre, but had found a way to rid himself of the evil, by eating some of the earth out of the vampyre's grave, and rubbing himself with his blood. This precaution, however, did not prevent him from becoming a vampyre himself; for, about twenty or thirty days after his death and burial, many persons complained of having been tormented by him, and a deposition was made, that four persons had been deprived of life by his attacks. To prevent further mischief, the inhabitants having consulted their Hadagni,  took up the body, and found it (as is supposed to be usual in cases of vampyrism) fresh, and entirely free from corruption, and emitting at the mouth, nose, and ears, pure and florid blood. Proof having been thus obtained, they resorted to the accustomed remedy. A stake was driven entirely through the heart and body of Arnold Paul, at which he is reported to have cried out as dreadfully as if he had been alive. This done, they cut off his head, burned his body, and threw the ashes into his grave. The same measures were adopted with the corpses of those persons who had previously died from vampyrism, lest they should, in their turn, become agents upon others who survived them.’

So begins the ‘birth certificate’  of  Dracula in  The Vampyre;   a Tale, by John William Polidori, 1819.     Polidori did not start the vampire legend, but he transformed and focused it.   As I am sure you know, at the time - the summer of 1818 -   he was employed as Lord Byron’s doctor (and/or drug dealer).  In an act of deliberate or subconscious revenge for Byron’s cruel scorn and refusal to recognize any worth in his writings, Polidori  made his vampyre a decadent, womanizing, Byronic aristocratic figure rather than the monsterous, virtually zombie creatures of folklore.    During his long stay at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1916 with Lord Byron, Persse Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her step-sister Claire Clairmont, he had seen at first hand the way Byron used and abused the adoring teenager, Claire,  by whom he fathered a child, Allegra.     Subsequent vampire literature has always been about sex, and the Villa by Lake Geneva must have reeked of sexuality.  

The Vampyre is Byronic, but this story is surely also a critique of the parasitic aristocracy of this time.    That dimension was certainly appreciated in 19th century Ireland, a province continually ‘bled dry’ by the landowning English, an exploitation that included and exacerbated the tragic Irish famine of the 1840’s.    It is no wonder that the Irish writers Sheridan le Fanu and Bram Stoker  were the two writers to revive Polidori’s creation with their own vampiric novel  Carmelita and Dracula.

The Vampyre was one of the two eventual results of Byron’s challenge to Shelley, Mary and the young Polidori to each write a ghost story.  The other was, of course, Mary’s Frankenstein.   Are either of them actually ghost stories?    Well, the Vampyre is certainly one of the ‘undead’  and Frankenstein’s creation’s parts have all been dead, so he is a kind of revenant, but not the revenant of any one human individual.  Neither of them are classic ghosts, but both have an ambiguous connection with ‘the living’ and that is part of their fascination.     I note that in Elizabethan England suicides were buried, or reburied, in unconsecrated ground, often at a cross-roads, and their fate was sealed with a wooden stake though the heart.

 

But in 1845, long before Le Fanu and Stoker’s novels, came Varney the Vampire, a British penny dreadful series that established many of the familiar vampire tropes,  including the fangs and twin  puncture marks, the physical strength and hypnotic charisma.   

As I said earlier I was never engaged by the  blood and boobs, cheap sets and hammy performances of the Hammer franchise.   I simply did not see any of the Universal Studio’s series, which ranged from Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi through  Dracula's Daughter  (1936),  or Son of Dracula  (1943) starringLon Chaney Jr.  through to Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).      I have chosen to never allow the wan light of Twilight to fall on me.    

There have, however,  been many remarkable vampire films.   I would  include Nosferatu  (1921), and Werner Herzog's  remake Nosferatu the Vampyr (1979),  Carl Dreyer’s 1932  Vampyr,  Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Tony Scott’s  The Hunger (1983), Katherine Bigelow’s  Near Dark (1987), the French  Irma Vep by Olivier Assayas(1996),  Irma who? I hear you ask, be patient I will come back to it; the Russian Night Watch (2004) and  Day Watch (2006),  the Swedish Let the Right One In (2008) by Tomas Alfredson,  the Korean Thirst (2009) Chan-Wook Park, Michael Spierig’s  Daybreakers (2009), Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (2012), the amiable American Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) by Timur Bekmambetov,  and Jim Jarmush’s 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive.

In 1932 the Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer produced Vampyr,  as much an exercise in style as a narrative.   But style can terrify, and Hitchcock deemed this to be ‘the only film worth watching….twice’ and was obviously informed and influenced by its dreamy – almost surreal – images.  Dreyer made three versions of the film, each suitable for dubbing into a different language, with the mouthing following the languages spoken, English, French and German.   Sadly none of the original English prints survived, and again a restoration had to be made.

In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola produced Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Gary Oldman as the Count.   This was the first time a vampire movie impressed  me,  and did so even though it had Keanu Reeves miscast (again?).  Oldman, however, was magnificent,  and the love story shone through the horror.   I also  enjoyed Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) in which Alfie Bass, when confronted by a defensive crucifix, gloats over his hapless victim, telling him in an exaggerated Jewish accent  ‘Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!’

So my favourite vampire movies (and even ten years ago I would not have dreamt of ever writing that phrase!)  include Thirst, by the Korean writer/director Park Chan-wook,  in which a Korean  Catholic priest volunteers to test a cure for a deadly plague (shades of Ebola)  but finds that it infests him with vampirism.   He fiercely resists its effects, but when he infects his girlfriend she relishes her condition, tipping us Teresa Raquin  country - a very bloody landscape.  I think that Neil Jordan’s  Byzantium is so much better than his Interview with a Vampire.   Byzantium  stars Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as mother and daughter, two women caught in time.   This was adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini from her own stage play.   As she also scripted Tamara Drew I wonder if she always had Gemma Arteron in mind?   It is similar to the Swedish Let the Right One In as it explores the devastating consequences of becoming a vampire, dependant on human blood, unable to love ‘normal’ human beings, in fact excluded from ‘normal’ society- and its troublesome bureaucracy -  without the prospect of death to give meaning to life, and having to keep the same company for centuries.

But I also love Irma Vep, (remember, I said I would get back to it), starring the wonderful Maggie Cheung, playing herself, recruited from Hong Kong by a French film maker who is obsessed with her to play a latex clad cat burglar in his remake of the French silent classic Les Vampires.   It was written and directed by Olivier Assayas, who was himself obsessed with Maggie Chueng - who he had never met - and wrote the film for her, even though she spoke no French, and he no English.  After the movie they  lived together for some years, the fulfilment of his (and admittedly my) fantasy.   Maggie, as Maggie, as a stranger in a strange land, trying to work out what the hell is going on, is wonderful and amazingly the film works.  And Irma Vep is of course an anagram of...

And so we come to  Jim Jarmusch’s vampire movie “Only Lovers Left Alive”.   Being a Jarmusch production it is of course different to other  people’s vampire movies.    Surely someone else must have asked Tilda Swinton to play a vampire before, but maybe their script was not as good as this, by Jarmusch, or the director so attractive to the taste of this elegant actor.   She was  the (almost unrecognizable) ‘trailer-trash’  girl Penny in Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers.  Here she plays opposite Tom Hiddleston, as wife and husband, married for a (very) long time.   They are called Eve and Adam, but they are not quite that old, and Eve is much older than Adam. Maybe because they are so comfortable with each other they do not need to live together, each offering the  other the freedom to find their own best place to live, in her case Tangier, in his Detroit.   She collects rare books – some of which must have become very rare since she first found them centuries ago, and he collects and plays musical instruments ancient and modern.    Eve oldest and best friend  is Kit Marlow, and Jarmusch enjoys a few 6^th form jokes about the Marlow/Shakespeare connection.    A more interesting aspect concerns their need for good quality blood,  hard to find in the polluted and disease ridden world.    But the plot is unimportant.  This is a cinematic poem, and what matters is the tone,  one of elegant,  poised beauty, reflecting the isolation and loneliness that being surrounded by short lived humans engenders.    Adam calls them (us)  zombies.   As far as Eve and Adam are concerned  their kind are the only ones (the only lovers) truly alive.    The  production design and music are immaculate, as elegant and beautiful as the leads, whose performances  are effortless.   The scripts occasional indulgences are forgivable.    Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright and Anton Yelchin’s supporting roles are all in tune with this fugue.  The cinema-photographer was Yorisk Le Saux,  who shot Tilda’s 2009 film  I am Love so immaculately.    The editing was in the  hands of  Affonso Goncalves (Beasts of the Southern Wild and Winter’s Bone, two of my favourite films) and the Art Direction by Anja Fromm, who also worked on The Reader and A Dangerous Method.     Jarmusch  is responsible for the atmospheric music.

So this is not your normal vampire movie.  The closest to it might be Tony Scott’s 1983 The Hunger,  with Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and  Susan Sarandon,  but this is really a far remove from any Tony Scott movie, thank goodness.    It is as Jarmusch as you can get, and if that pleases you, so be it.  It certainly pleased me, and gives me a high point to end my little review of this rejuvenated genre, an injection of fresh blood, dry humour,  elegant insouciance and fine actors quietly enjoying themselves and pleasuring their audience. 

I will consider the important sexual politics of the genre in a later article , but at least you may find something in the above to while away an evening  - or a vampire  weekend. 

The National Theatre's Frankenstein

I now know why Danny Bole was invited to direct the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony.     Whoever did so had seen his production of Frankenstein at the National Theatre in 2011.    I had to wait over three years to see it being rebroadcast in a local cinema, (well, by local I mean 50 miles away).    Having seen it I checked out the team Boyle used for both, and saw that he worked with the same Set Designer, Mark Tildesley,   Costume Designer, Suttirat Anne Larlarb, and Director of Movement, Toby Sedgewick.      If you saw the Olympics you might have some idea how well they used the National Theatre’s resources and the  magnificent Laurence Olivier stage,  with its rising, falling, revolving  centre.   I saw the two episodes of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials there  a few years ago, which was terrific – but this production was something else.    

And it  had Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch on board.   Cumberbatch had  already played a ‘high achieving sociopath’  Sherlock Holmes in the 2010 BBC series.   At the National he played another ‘high achieving sociopath’, the driven genius Victor Frankenstein.  At least he played him on alternate nights,  as Miller and Cumberbatch swapped the roles of the scientist and his unloved creation.    This adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel  was written by Nick Dear and broadcast live to cinemas in March 2011.   More than a quarter of a million people, in over thirty countries, saw the original cinematic event.   I think the delay in rebroadcasting it was due to a lack of agreement about which version to use; the one with Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature, or Benedict Cumberbatch.    Both actors had been praised in both roles, but for the rebroadcast it was Cumberbatch.    

He was a revelation .    I had hugely enjoyed his Sherlock,  been quietly surprised by his casting as Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, and remembered him from a few earlier TV shows and films, but nothing had prepared me for his performance as the Creature.    First of all his physicality.   The long opening sequence shows the Creature learning how to move, crawl, stand and walk, how to wrest control of his new body.     Cumberbatch is almost naked, and his writhing, rising and falling reveal his remarkable physique.   His power does not come from massive muscles, but from spun steel cords.   And this was not simply an actor thrashing about in free form,  it seems plain that every contorting bruising, muscle stretching movement was choreographed by the actor and Toby Sedgewick.   Later in the play we see Cumberbatch’s  remarkable grace, agility and athleticism as he leaps, bounds, climbs, spins, gestures and wrestles with his creator.    At one point, a real coup de theatre, the Creature is hidden on stage, lying on his back, completely covered, until he leaps, springs, levitates into sight faster than any  Vertical Takeoff fighter plane.   No wonder the actors swapped roles; to perform this every night would have been exhausting.    

Jonny Lee Miller playing another modern Sherlock in the current American series,  has impressed me, and his  playing of Victor Frankenstein was impressive.    We clearly see who the real monster is,  and it is Victor’s  lack of humanity that monsterises his unloved creation.  But I can see why the actors vied for their embodiment of the creature to be the one broadcast.    The Creature, not Frankenstein, is the main event.   

The rest of the cast are simply very good; Karl Johnson is de Lacey, the impoverish – and blinded – professor who educates the creature, and Naomie Harris is Frankenstein’s ill-fated fiancé, Elizabeth.  But the evening belongs to the two stars, Danny Boyle and the other directors.  

The script is sometimes a little bathetic, sometimes unintentionally funny, and sometimes it has lines I could only call banal, but no matter.   I have waited three years for this; and it was better than I could imagine.  But if I could have imagined such a production I would be Danny Boyle.   I am glad Danny Boyle is Danny Boyle, and that the National Theatre shares its riches with the world.  

Don’t tell them your name, Pike! The Gone Girl.

Well, actually Rosamund Pike has been telling us her name for a least a dozen years now, and shouting her versatility out loud.  From here on it will be really well known.   She was the Bond Girl Miranda  Frost in her debut film Die Another Day, (2002), then  Austen’s Jane Bennett in  Pride and Prejudice, (2004),   in Made in Dagenham, Barney’s Version and An Education, (all released in 2010), then she moved from Bond to Johnny English,  Reborn (in 2011),  to America for Jack Reacher in 2012, and  home to an Ealing comedy (well, as near to an Ealing comedy as we get nowadays) in The World’s End, 2013.    But her performance in David Fischer’s latest, Gone Girl, is really something else.  May she  follow in the footsteps of Emily Blunt, the other Brit currently wowing Hollywood. 

David Fincher must have known that Rosamund was in Terry Johnson’s 2003 play Hitchcock Blonde, as the actress auditioning to be the body-double for Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower scene.    Rosamund also plays a naked shower scene in Gone Girl, and has said that she  ‘is intrigued by characters like the icy blondes who seduce and deceive in Hitchcock’s films- women who are compelled by their power as objects of desire.’ (an interview in W Magazine).   

The influence of Hitch on Fischer is well documented, (just Google ‘Fincher and Hitchcock’ and enjoy the links)  and can be seen here in the film’s theme and in particular shots - not just the naked shower scene (which actually plays a knowing joke on Psycho fans).     Fischer says that  he learnt from the Master that ‘as a director, film is about how you dole out information so that the audience stays with you when they’re supposed to stay with you, behind you when they’re supposed to stay behind you, and ahead of you when they are supposed to stay ahead of you.’ (Fincher quoted on IMDB).   Gone Girl is very good at doling out information, in truly Hitchcockian style, but how reliable is the information?   Much of it comes in flashbacks, and well into its running time the whole film turns on a swivel, just as in Psycho and Vertigo.  Gillian Flynn, who adapted her novel for the screen,  is also a keen Hitchcock fan.  In her novel she even puts to use the name Madeleine Elster, taken from Vertigo.

Ben Affleck is the Gone Girl’s husband.   She has gone, but has she joined the departed?    And if so did he have  any part in her departure?     Affleck plays the ambiguity well,  and there is a running theme about public performance and private feelings.    The voracious American media want to stage their own trial – and his performance as the anxious husband does not convince them.    But does it convince us?

This is a slow burning psychological thriller, and as Fischer says about Flynn’s source novel, when you peel back the layers and get to the kernel, you think, Wow, I feel queasy for a whole different set of reasons I thought I would’.   He has also said that he wanted to put onscreen “disturbing ideas about very disturbed people and their facades of normalcy, (people who are) irredeemable and yet intensely human”.    He has certainly succeeded in that, keeping the audience on edge, uncertain about what it knows and does not know,  what is truth and what is illusion, who is the victim and who the villain.  

These ‘disturbing’ themes are amplified by the grey/green colour palette of Fischer’s usual DP Jeff Cronenweth, and the music from his collaborators on The Social Network, Trent Rezzno and Atticus Ross.   Among the cast Neil Patrick Harris takes a step up from a busy TV and voice-over career (Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs),  as do Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens and Tyler Perry (a busy writer, producer and actor who is given an opportunity to play it big here and takes it).  Fischer has always looked for new talent.    Se7en was made in the same year as The Usual Suspects, catapulting Kevin Spacey to stardom and was a big break for Gwyneth Paltrow,   Fight Club took Helena Bonham-Carter to Hollywood,  The Social Network unleashed (sic) Jesse Eisenberg and  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made Rooney Mara a star.    

At one level this can be seen as a film about sin, not just the ‘breaking the 10 Commandments’  kind, but sin as a falling short of who we truly are.  Failing to be authentic - and the consequences of that failure.  Hell is not just living with other people, it is sometimes living with ourselves.    If you are willing to be entertained – and disturbed – I recommend this film; for Ben Affleck’s  best performance for (too) many years; for being what I think is Fischer’s most interesting film to date; and for Rosamund Pike achievement in fully inhabiting – and developing – the Hitchcock Blonde for the 21^st century.   

(Sorry for the joke in the title, which must be a total blank for my non-British readers.    You see there was this TV comedy series about the Home Guard, and they captured a German Officer, who asked Captain Mainwaring......oh, never mind.)

On the edge of my seat for the Edge of Tomorrow

Within minutes of this film starting I was on its side.  Why?

It is about an alien invasion of Earth, but not of the USA;  this time it’s  Europe. 

A multinational force has been fighting these aliens, led by – an Irish General.

And Tom Cruise was playing a cowardly, malingering, mendacious American Officer,  Major Cage, a PR man who wanted to stay as far away from the action as possible.

When Cage was demoted and sent to the front lines to be insulted and demeaned by Master Sergeant Bill Pullman I cheered up even more.    And I was always aware that Emily Blunt was just waiting to make her entrance.  

OK, so I knew that the premise of this movie was the Video Game conceit that when you die you get another life, and can use whatever you learnt before you died to help you survive this time,  and the next -  that is was essentially Groundhog Day meets Halo, but the pace and wit of the movie, and the way it expected the audience to keep their wits about them, rather than being led gently by the hand through any difficult transitions,  all encouraged me.   And then Emily did arrive - and she was magnificent.   Sgt Rita was the real warrior.   OK, so the aliens were very similar to the robots of The Matrix 2, and the warriors wore exo-skeletons that reminded me of Ripley in her Waldo suit in Aliens, in fact Emily Blunt’s character has a lot of the later Ripley about her, but no harm in that, and this movie played its frequent and witty references and tropes without becoming a parody, unlike, for instance, Cruise’s last SF effort, Oblivion, which just seemed like a mix and match script written by people who might have read SF but had never written any of it; utterly lacking in originality.     I even enjoyed the timing of the release, enacting an invasion of Europe on screen to save it from terror and destruction, so close to the commemoration of the original D. Day.

I liked the way Cruise slowly becomes a hero  not by becoming a killing machine but by being prepared to die, time after time until his goal is reached.   I like the way his character became likeable by not trying to be likeable.   I also liked the way Emily Blunt became impressive without trying to be impressive.   I remember that when I saw her in The Adjustment Bureau and saw her dance I  assumed she had trained before becoming an actor.   But then, when I discovered that she had no previous experience as a dancer, I was even more impressed by her physical authority.   The same goes here.   She completes her choreographed moves with grace and power. 

Despite the inevitable reiterations of the day of invasion, the battle that has to be repeated until  Cage and Rita get it right,  I was kept on the edge of my seat.  And I laughed a lot.  Not at the movie, but with the movie.  At one stage I was even tempted to cheer, and felt a similar frisson in the audience around me.   In fact I was so satisfied that I even forgave its Spielbergian ending.    Spielberg always gives us what we want.  He just makes us wait for it, and then delivers it in ways we did not expect, as when ET and Peter take flight in his bicycle.

So congratulations to  Doug Liman, who directed it using the skills he honed during the Bourne franchise; to  Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the labyrinthine The Usual Suspects, and Jez Butterworth, who wrote this and Fair Game with McQuarrie;  to  Dion Beeb who filmed this and had previously shot Collateral and Chicago;  and perhaps most of all to James Herbert, who edited it with daring and precision  (just the characteristics displayed, as it happens, by Emily Blunt, and Rita, the warrior).     Herbert edited both the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, and the two of the terrible films he has edited, Sweeney and Gangster Squad, were not bad because of the editing.  No blame there.

I am dismayed by the poor viewing figures for Edge of Tomorrow.  It deserved much better, but maybe sank in the wake of Oblivion and maybe asked a little too much of one of its target audiences.  But you are an intelligent and discerning readership and watchership, so  get the DVD and enjoy yourselves.

Under The Skin

How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

I love thee because Jonathan Glazer and Walter Campbell have adapted Michael Faber’s 2000 novel in ways that make it less explicit and   more mysterious and a-literal.   You are a true movie, not a filmed novel.

I love thee because  you are beautiful and terrible,  evoking curiosity, horror and pity.  And do so honestly. 

I love thee for your audacity, courage, technical brilliance and unending commitment to the task.

I love thee because you are saying important things.  You are about an alien and concerned with alienization.    Alienization is a compelling, tragic and horribly topical subject.

I love thee because  you persuaded Scarlett Johansson to undertake what is surely her most demanding role, ever, and made it work, wonderfully.

I love thee because here a film-star’s glamour is discounted.   Human beauty is about truth, not artifice.

I love thee because you are your own thing.

I love thee because you approach what Alfred Hitchcock called ‘pure cinema’.  Everything you have to say to us you show to us by throwing coloured shadows on a wall.

I love thee because your score is entirely uncommercial.   It is organically essential to the film.

I love thee because you are a humane movie.    You move me deeply. 

And this is not just an intellectual or emotional effect, it offers the possibility of my moving on, myself, of becoming more human. 

Let me be more explicit. 

This movie is made of images, not words.   Most science fiction movies demand exposition.    Long long ago in a Galaxy far away…..even The Man Who Fell to Earth,  the film I was most immediately reminded of, explains where and why ‘Thomas Newman’ came from.   Under The Skin  tells us nothing about its protagonist’s origins or motivation.   All we know is that  she is alien.    But even the alien’s gender  is only a persona.  We have no idea about ‘its’ real gender, if it has any.   We observe what ‘she’ does, but are given no explanations as to why. ‘She’ appears to be preying on young men, but we do not know their actual eventual fate.

This film is beautiful and terrible,  evoking curiosity, horror and pity.   It never use clichéd cinematic devices to confound or enlighten us, or tricks to shock us.   The horror is implicit.  It never plays for our sympathy, or colludes and flatters us with irony,  and yet I was deeply moved.  

A lot of the film takes place as ‘Laura’ (she does use this name at least once) cruises Glasgow in a van, stopping to talk to young men.    Many of these encounters were ‘for real’.  The van was unmarked and stuffed with hidden mini-cameras that kept recording.    A lot of these men had no idea they were being chatted up by a Hollywood Superstar.    At times there were 9 mini-cameras running simultaneously,  giving the cinematographer Daniel Landin,  the Editor Paul Watts and the Director hundreds of hours of material to work with, and on.     They  used much of this  cinema verity material, but also  sometimes overlaid and montaged it in ways that are beautiful and  truly – and here’s a too often misused word – iconic.   This is technically innovative and brilliant.

This is a movie about alienation.   At one point a TV clip of Tommy Cooper is used  wittily, letting us glimpse how alien we must be to an alien.   The broad Glaswegian accents used by the males do the same for most English speakers.   But this film goes much deeper than that, and this is where its horror and power lie.   Outside the cinema we do not have to be aliens to dehumanize and even demonize human beings.     How can anyone behead another human being unless they have first discounted their humanity?    We might also ask how can anyone target an explosive drone or drop a bomb from 30,000 feet without doing the same thing.     It is a truism that modern warfare is too often conducted like a video-game.  

But alienation can be countered with empathy.  During the film  'Laura'  picks up a man suffering from neurofibromatosis,  the facial disfigurement often called Elephant Man disease.    The actor playing this role is Adam Pearson, a sufferer of this affliction, so no prosthesis was needed.   It may be that to alien eyes he looked much like everybody else, but this encounter is pivotal to the plot.   Empathy may be essential for our humanity, but it also dangerous – especially to those who feel it.

I wonder what film maker’s  pitch was to Ms Johansson.  

We’re making this movie, and we want you to  play an alien in human disguise, cruising Glasgow, picking up unsuspecting members of the public,  whose accents will probably be impenetrable to you, and  improvising your responses to them.  You will take some of your ‘pick-ups’  home and strip in front of them.  You will be naked for a lot of the movie, but your nakedness will not be glamorized or flattering.  In fact you may be the most un-erotic femme fatal of all time.  You will have hardly any other dialogue.   In fact you will say nothing that tells us anything about what you are or why you here.  There will be changes within you, but nothing will be said or happen to illustrate them explicitly.   Oh, and we do not expect to make a lot of money.   In fact we will probably divide audiences and  critics sharply.

But maybe Ms Johansson remembered Jonathan Glazer’s previous film Birth, which pivots on a scene where Nicole Kidman’s character is in the audience at a concert.   The  camera rests on her face for three or four minutes,  during which time there is  neither action nor words, but as we watch we see her heart and mind change.    There is a similar subtle transformation in this movie and Scarlett, like Nicole, rises to the challenge.   Her performance is understated, subtle and effective as never before, not even in Lost in Translation.    And yet for much of the film we see nothing behind her eyes.   When there is a change within her it is minutely signaled, yet has the impact of a Diva’s aria.

In this film a Hollywood actress’s glamour is discounted.   She is literally stripped bare and  shown exactly as she is.   She is transformed by being revealed as a woman, not a star.   Not just as a woman, but as the woman she is.   What courage this must have taken, fully aware  that these images would no doubt be later misused and abused by others in ways over which she has no control.   At a time when naked or sexually explicit selfies are embarrassing many celebrities there is a strong message here.

This film reminds me of many other great movies, including of course The Man Who Fell to Earth, but also Repulsion,   2001 and The Tree of Life,  and Vertigo, yet it is utterly unique.    

That said,  in many ways this is a contemporary Hitchcock movie.  The psychological use of colour matches Hitch’s, and it comes close to what he called ‘pure cinema’,  with images and actions telling the story, rather than dialogue.   Hitch first worked in silent movies first, and  Glazer has worked in advertising, creating the arresting images of the white horses melding with the surf for Guinness and irrupting paint fountains for Sony Bravia.   I am sure this film would work just as well with no dialogue, just its images and soundtrack.    The opening credits echo Saul Bass’s for Vertigo, and there are other links to that movie, in which  Kim Novak played two women, one of whom appeared to be dead, the other being a fake.   Scarlett also plays two women here, one of whom we presume to be dead, the other we know to be a fake.    Two women, one body.  Both films are about duplicity.    Under the Skin even used (temporary) duplicity in its making, as it invited men to talk to a woman they never suspected was an actress, never mind her being Scarlett Johansson.   I don’t know if or what they were paid, but what a story they have to tell now!   

The soundtrack for Under the Skin  also reminded me of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo,  as it accompanied the psychological state of the characters.    This similarity is  not in its orchestration, but in the ways Mica Levi’s score uses acoustic,  electronic and electronically distorted natural sounds  that act directly on our nervous system and echo the intuitive, almost subconscious, ways in which the images also invade us.   

Making Under the Skin relied on Scarlett Johansson’s ability to improvise in real conversations.   Hitch did not allow improvisation, he already had the script and movie completed in his head before he began to shoot it, but he did give the actors he trusted room to play their characters according to their instincts.  He told Kim Novak  I will tell you what to wear, where to stand and what to say, but how you do these things is up to you.  That is why I contracted you.

Under The Skin is Hitchcockian in many ways, but Hitchcock never approached the seriousness or courage of this movie, and never showed such compassion.  Do not be misled by the word compassion.  It does not mean sentimentality.  This is a very hard movie to watch.    I have often said that movies can help humanize us by allowing us to step into another person’s shoes for a mile or an hour.  Sometimes those shoes hurt.  

As Matt  Zoller Seitz has written of this film,  on the site that still bears Roger Ebert’s name and seeks to continue his critical tradition, saying

"Here is an experience that's nothing like yours, and here are some images and sounds and situations that capture the essence of what the experience felt like; watch the movie for a couple of hours, and when it's over, go home and think about what you saw and what it did to you."  

That is what I  have done, and been doing, and I think I will continue to do for some time.    Sometimes a movie inhabits us, gets truly under our skin.   In this case I think that is a good thing.   

A rewarding Walk Among the Tombstones.

The Hebrew Bible allows the offended to take ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’ but that is intended to be the limit of just recompense.  We may only take an eye for an eye, only a tooth for a tooth.   

One definition of the word ‘taken’  in the Oxford Reference Dictionary is  ‘to have sexual intercourse with’.   When I saw Liam Neeson’s 2009 film  Taken I felt that I had been taken, in the most unwelcome way.  I could use a shorter, blunter,  word.   I also felt taken advantage of, taken in, taken down, and if it came to taking or leaving it I was sure what my choice would be.   Taken sickened me not because of its depiction of violence, but for its approval of it.    I have written at length  about my severe discomfort at the way modern cinema promotes vengeance as a morally justified activity, and gives it’s protagonists unlimited license to maim and kill anyone who gets in the way of exacting such vengeance.  (See Taken for a ride, below).   Taken, produced and co-written by Luc Besson, directed by Pierre Morel, starring Neeson as Brian Mills, the ex-CIA agent trying to rescue his teenage daughter from Middle Eastern kidnappers, epitomised this genre, and was so well made – thanks to Morel – that it became very popular.  I was not pleased with Neeson for lending his presence and credibility to it, or saying such lines as this internet favourite quote

 I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it.  I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.

I wonder how many misguided teenage boys have learnt those line and growled  them into their bedroom mirrors, thinking they were the quintessence of manliness?    And these words came out of  the mouth of the man who once played Schindler!    One NY Times critic asked The conundrum posed by “Taken” is as old as cinema itself. Do stars degrade themselves when they take a role in trash, or does their very presence?   This appeared to be a rhetorical question.     I understand that Taken 2 was in some ways less meretricious.  It was also, of course, less popular. 

And so I rejoice at the release of Neeson’s latest film, A Walk among the Tombstones.

It is adapted from one of  Laurence Bloch’s 'Matthew Scudder' novels.  There have been over a dozen books featuring this New York Private Eye (unlicensed),  an alcoholic ex-cop.    The tone of the books could be judged by the titles.  The first two, back in the 1970’s, were  The Sins of the Fathers and In the Midst of Death.  The titles that followed contained the words or phrases Murder, Stab, Die, Cutting Edge, Eight Million Ways To Die, Boneyard, Slaughter House, Dead Men,  Everybody Dies,  and Hope to Die.   But these dark books are also credited with depth and nuance.  They are not Micky Spillane celebrations of violence and misogyny.    Matt Scudder  has the kind of integrity once found in Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, both of whom are name-checked (somewhat clumsily) in A Walk Among the Tombstones.

In 1986 Oliver Stone co-scripted and produced Eight Million Ways To Die,  directed by Hal Ashby,  with Jeff Bridges playing Matt  Stutter.  I did not see it, but apparently it did not work well. In the New York Times Walter Goodman asked  How did ''Eight Million Ways to Die'' commit suicide?

But A Walk Among The Tombstones works much better.   It had Frank Scott at the helm, and he also adapted the novel for the screen.   Scott has an impressive record,  having written  or adapted Little Man Tate, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, The Interpreter,  The Wolverine and Minority Report.   This is first full length movie, although  he was 2^nd unit director (uncredited) for the Minority Report .   But combining script-writer and director works well here, giving us an evenness of tone  and a cohesion of plot. 

The villains, played by David Harbour and Adam David Thompson, are clearly insane, but theirs is a cold implacable madness rather than scenery-chewing eyeball-rolling and they are all the more frightening for that.  The plot revolves around  their sadistic murders of women,  but these killings are mainly off screen, showing us instead the terrified vulnerability of the victims  and are in no way exploitive.   

The gradual disclosures of plot and character are well paced, and in the inevitable and shockingly violent finale Scott bravely cuts into the action with sequences reiterating the AA’s 12 steps, the road to Scutter’s recovery and his spiritual discipline.    This has troubled some reviewers, but in the Bloch novels the AA plays an important and recurring role, and Scott has been true to his source.   The climax is for Scutter as much spiritual – challenging his values -  as physical.   Neeson is so well cast here.    His Scutter is tough but vulnerable,   humane but world-weary.  When a killer has him at gun-point and asks Why aren’t you afraid?  he answers  I don’t know.  Maybe it doesn’t matter much to me whether I live or die,  and I for one believed him.

Scott has cut the gum-shoe’s girlfriend, who in the novel is a prostitute, from the script,  but kept Scutter’s  teenage side-kick TJ, a smart homeless black kid,  played by Brian “Astro” Bradley, who wants to be a PI himself.   When TJ first appeared I wondered what this familiar and sentimental trope was doing in so tough a movie, but his inclusion is justified when he plays a crucial part in the plot.   The gritty photography by Mihai Malaimare Jn.  and music by Carlos Rafael Rivera  (both relatively newcomers to Hollywood) complement the style beautifully, showing once again that noir does not have to be shot in black and white and scored with jazz.     Dan Stevens, Eric Nelsen and Olafur Darri Olafsson provide solid acting support, helped by believable lines of dialogue.     It has been said that Emily Blunt brings out the best in good actors (see Looper, The Adjustment Bureau and Edge of Tomorrow),   and maybe Liam Neeson has the same gift.

This is not a perfect movie, it spends a little too much time on inessentials, sometimes lapses towards sentimentality, and may tell us more than we need to know about its villains,   but at its heart is Matt Scutter.    He is a thinking man with a soul, and this is a thinking movie with a soul.     I think it gave Neeson his best script for 20 years, since the days of Schindler's List, Rob Roy and Michael Collins.  I would very much like to see more films with him embodying the role.    Mr. Neelson; all is (almost) forgiven. 

Angelina Jolie; the interior designer.

Angelina Jolie is magnificent as Maleficent, and her work redeems an otherwise middling movie.

This film is built round the back-story of the fairy queen Maleficent, done wrong by an all too human and insufficiently humane man.   We see  how she was not only betrayed but also mutilated by the ‘man who would be king’,  the one who had given her what he said was the ‘kiss of true love’ on her sixteenth birthday.  It was not only her physical form that was misshapen (by fairy standards) by him, but also her heart.    She later curses his child, the newborn princess,  to become a sleeping beauty at the age of sixteen, only allowed thereafter to be freed by a ‘kiss of true love’.

The original story comes from Perrault’s collection of fairy tales, and shares in the cruelty of these classics; a very unDisney attitude that many psychiatrists, led by Bruno Bettleheim,  saw as therapeutic and helpful for young children.   The depiction of wicked step-mothers can be seen as allowing the child – and parent – to implicitly admit to each other that no parents are perfect, and that they will not always be kind and good and harmless.    Maleficent, who adopts a kind of parental role here, is certainly not kind,  good or harmless.   She is damaged, and damaged people damage people.    But she also  becomes a kind of surrogate mother, and this unexpected relationship….well, you may not have seen the film, so no spoiler here.

I was disappointed by the script, originally by Linda Woolveton  which, even after many (reported) rewrites, is still banal, and by the second rate direction.   This latter may be forgivable as it is Robert Stromberg’s first stab at directing after a long and successful career as an artist and production designer in films including Frankenstein Unbound (1990), The Age of Innocence (1993), Cast Away (2000), Solaris (2002), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004, which also starred Angelina), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), There will Be Blood and The Golden Compass (2007), The Road (2009) and The Life of Pi (2012) – and that really is an impressive portfolio – though I would have liked to see more influence from Pan’s Labyrinth.  The direction is not as imaginative as the design – save again for that of Maleficent herself.

So the film stands and falls with Angelina.  She is supported by Sharlo Copley (Area 9) as the betraying villain, Elle Fanning  as the princess, Sam Riley (Brighton Rock)  as Maleficent’s ‘familiar’,  and a largely British cast in secondary roles.   They all do ok.   But the poster tells it all.   This film is all about Angelina Jolie, and for me her performance is more than sufficient.

Maleficent  takes a 1950’s Disney classic and makes it a 21^st century feminist statement.     It speaks to the female condition in a male dominated world, (male-ificent?).   It adapts an ancient tale and gives it modern relevance, reminding us of things we know about today’s world that we may wish we did not know; about the way men can mistreat women, and some mothers mutilate their daughters.  Angelina’s personal crusades against sexual violence and rape as  a weapon of war lend this film credence – and have now made her an Honorary Dame. 

She holds the screen with a nuanced performance that seems almost inappropriate in a fairy tale, a genre that has never needed to be strong on characterisation.  Fairy tales are not Shakespearian, their psychology has never been about the exploration of individual characters, but of representative figures.   This film is truthful about the human condition  almost entirely becauses Angelina makes it so.  

 Maleficent’s transformation from good fairy to bad fairy is utterly believable – and even forgivable - because Angelina makes it so.  Despite its many failings the film is relevant, moving and truly disturbing, because Angelina makes it so.

I can absolutely see why Angelina was so keen to play this part, and I am glad she did.   The exterior design of her character is more than matched by the interior design of the person, and Angelina is the interior designer.  

One other thing we learn from Maleficent is that all CGI can do to her beauty is mar it.    In Beowulf CGI turned Ray Winstone into a buffed up Sean Bean, but nothing could make Angelina more wonderous  as she emerged from her underground lake to seduce Beowulf, not in Grendel’s mother’s natural form as a dragon,  but in the form of a golden woman, the essence of glamour - a word that is intimately connected with gold.   As Maleficent her cheekbones are as sharp as her cut glass English accent.   It is a terrible beauty, but it is not more beautiful than that of the original actress.