So, three new genre movies, and all of them seem to celebrate and slightly subvert their genres.
Motherless Brooklyn, adapted, directed and starring Edward Norton, is set in Chinatown’s time but not place: it is the 1950’s noir but in New York. The original novel was set in the 1990’s, and its private-eye hero adopted an old fashioned Chandleresque style, or persona. Norton has taken it back four decades. I am not sure why; maybe he thought the protagonist, who suffers a kind of Tourette’s stress reaction, didn’t need another odd characteristic, that there was enough going on already. For whatever reason, the 1950’s Brooklyn is presented with great style. It was, however, shot by Dick Pope, one of Mike Leigh’s favourite British cinematographers; the female lead is played by the British, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, MBE, and the evocative music comes from another Brit, Daniel Pemberton, with additional work by Thom Yorke. The jazz score was then ‘interpreted’ and played by the great Winton Marsalis and some of his chosen musicians, and I loved it.
I enjoyed this film at all sorts of levels, but I was also always aware of Norton’s earnest social conscience, which sometimes either creep into (or is the main motivation for?) the movie. Alex Baldwin does what he does every well, but he is most recently admired for his ‘Trump’ impersonation, echoed if not exactly duplicated here. I think that one aspect of the plot element centred on him is anachronistic. A community response to what his character is doing might have occurred thirty years later, but not in the 50’s. That’s what I see as the subversion of genre, playing one period while voicing contemporary concerns, but in a way that jars. None the less I am sure this is well worth watching, and Norton’s Directing and acting are admirable.
Then Knives Out. I have been a fan of the writer/director Rain Johnson ever since his 2005 debut Brick, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I understand that they were college friends, and when the adult Gordon-Levitt found it hard to get work in the movies after his teenage years in Third Rock from the Sun, they put this package together. Brick was also noir, shot in black and white with a characteristic speech-set, but it was set out of period, transferred to a 20th century High School, with all the usual adult noir suspects now teenagers. If you don’t know it, I recommend it. Then in 2012 he released Looper, again with his friend Gordon-Levitt, a highly intelligent and entertaining Science Fiction time-travel thriller. I will not comment here now on his Star Wars entry.
Knives Out is his fourth genre movie, an homage to the Agatha Christie ‘big house’ detective puzzle, starring Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Chris Pratt, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis and a host of other stars gathered a la the Orient Express or Death on the Nile, and it is full of wit, style and proper twists. I do not like detective stories when the plot is resolved by some information that is only revealed at the end. Johnson does not cheat. All the clues are there if we can spot and remember them.
And does this also subvert the genre? I think so, in that as with Motherless Brooklyn, not to mention the hits Get Out and Us, there is a social critique played out here, even if it is less blatant and wittier than in Norton's film. You can work it out for yourself, it's not hard to spot. The cinematography and music, by Johnson’s usual crew, Steve Yedin and Rian’s cousin Nathan Johnson, are terrific. I am glad to see that Ana de Armas, who played Joi in Blade Runner 2049, was given a (literally) more substantial role, and Daniel Craig obviously had a lot of fun, especially adopting what we are told by Rian is an accent as ludicrous as any of Poirot’s. I had a lot of fun too.
Then I saw Le Mans 1966, directed by James Mangold (Walk The Line, Copland, Logan and Girl, Interrupted ), written by the Butterworths, Jez and John-Henry, who wrote Live Die Repeat and Fair Game together.
This is the story of how Carrol Shelby, famous builder of the Shelby Cobra marque, and the English mechanic and driver Ken Miles, took a the Ford GT40 they had built to the races, competed against Ferrari, and won. But there was another battle going on, which is echoed in the title. In The USA this film is called Ford vs Ferrari, and I am sure that the Ford Motor Company insisted it was so. This film is about motor racing of course, but also about a battle of corporate and individual egos. Henry Ford II wanted to win not only to boost Ford’s image, but because he had been snubbed by Enrico Ferrari. But he and his execs wanted to win the ‘Ford Way’, which meant battling Shelby and Miles, both of whom were maverick characters, and not at all like the kind of ‘Ford Man’ the suits wanted to identify with. The trouble was that Shelby and Miles were the best, and Ford cars were not, especially when it came to making race cars. So maybe the film’s producers also had a battle with the Big Company that wanted the film to promote their cars, to have ‘Ford’ up there on the billboards, rather than the name of the epic battle of Le Mans, that was - and still is- the 24 hour endurance race. So a compromise was reached. Ford vs Ferrari in the USA, Le Mans 66 elsewhere. So, is the motor racing car genre a little subverted here too? Is there an anti-corporate, even anti-capitalist streak here? Maybe.
Of course if you want to subvert rather than satirise a genre you have to be able to recreate it immaculately, and this film does. It has all the thrills of Rush and Senna. I find it interesting that real life provides the best plots for motor racing movies. It was photographed by Phadon Papamichael, who also filmed Walk The Line for Mangold, and among many other movies, Cool Runnings, Sideways, Knight and Day, and Nebraska. The soundtrack is by Marco Beltrami, and I cannot remember any of it; which is high praise. I agree with the Adam Mars-Jones, long-time film critic of the UK’s Independent newspaper, who says in his great selection of film writings Second Sight (2019) that if we cannot remember the music then the film has done it’s job. I think this movie really does its job.
I heard on Mark Kermode’s BBC review (he is another really good critic) that during the high speed driving sequences the stars were in the cars, using dummy steering wheels, but being driven by real racers alongside them. No CGI here. Maybe that explains their sweat. However it was done it works a treat. It also adds a layer to the scene where Shelby takes Henry Ford II ‘out for a spin’ in one of the new cars. At the end Mr. Ford is seen either laughing or crying in shock, and not quite knowing which. I like driving, and fast, but on a couple of occasions I have also been driven at speeds I knew I could not, or at least dare not, handle myself. 11/10s, or even 12/10s. Of course speed is relative, not only to the Universe as Einstein discovered, but also to the vehicle you are in. I have been driven ‘fast’ in my uncle’s own Shelby Cobra, and in a LandRover by an Army World Rally driver. Both were scary and exhilarating.
Matt Damon and Christian Bale as Sheldon and Miles are terrific, given enough material to flesh out these larger than life characters; Miles was certainly ‘difficult’, and Shelby may have been a brilliant designer but he was also a rather dodgy character. So is Tracy Letts as Mr Ford. Sadly some of the other characters are 2D, but Catriona Balfe, from Overlander, is able to show the real grit of Miles’ wife Mollie. I think it must have required a lot of grit to be Miles’s wife. Shelby, by the way, married seven times. For me this movie, works, and is often scary and exhilarating.
