Under The Skin

I am reposting this 2014 revue because this remarkable British movie is showing on Film 4 at 1.50 am Monday morning the 30th January,  and you may not have seen it.  I love it; even if it is one of then most discomforting films I have ever seen. 

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 because; of 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.   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 until afterwards.    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 dehumanise 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 as I have said 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 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 those Glaswegian lads have to tell!  No-one would believe them unless they saw the film.    

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 revered 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.   

Motherless Brooklyn, Knives Out and Le Mans 66.

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.  

So what has 2019 brought me at the movies and on DVD?

As I live in the countryside of Western Ireland, my opportunities to go to the movies are limited, but many of you may be in a similar situation, so I hope this little blog offers you some suggestions to go by.   Those I have already reviewed in this blog are marked ‘See below.’  

I have gone for up to 6 stars to rate them.  Sometimes 5 are not enough. 

So. 

Joker ******  I cannot think of another movie that has taken me a month of reflection, and a second viewing,  before I could be sure of how I thought/felt about it.   The 6 stars say it all.  See below.

Us ******  My second 6* film this year. Brilliant script, direction and ensemble performances, plus a devastating social critique.   See below.  

Rocketman *****  If you are going to make a biopic of Elton the music and showmanship have to be top-drawer, and here they are.  Plus Taron Edgerton’s brilliant impersonation and Elton’s shattering honesty.  See below. 

Leave No Trace *****   I really admired Helen Granic’s  Winter’s Bone (2010) and here she takes similar tropes, father/daughter and living on or beyond the margins, and makes a film that is as tough as Winter’s Bone but much warmer, with another stand-out performance by a young actress, Thomasina MacEnzie, and the ever reliable Ben Foster.     See below.

Yesterday *****   A delightful fantasy, scripted by Richard Curtis and directed by Danny Boyle,  about a singer/song-writer who suddenly finds he is the only person on Earth who knows the Beatles songs.    Ed Sheehan makes a humble cameo as himself.    It doesn’t aim too high, but hits the mark fair and square. 

The Kid Who Would Be King ****  A low key British movie,  written and directed by Joe Cornish (Attack The Block and Ant Man)  about a 21^st century ‘kid’ (played by Andy Serkis’s son, Louis Ashbourne Serkis)  who finds himself locked in battle with the Arthurian witch Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) but aided by her brother Merlin (Patrick Stewart,  enjoying chewing the scenery) and having to use The Sword Excalibur to save everyone.  Simple and effective fun. 

Avengers: Endgame ****.  Well it had to come to a (sort of) end, even if we will still have Avenger movies coming out of Marvel.  But this is the end of the epic, the wrapper-up,  the answer to what happened next after Infinity War, and for me it does the trick.   It is sad at times without being sentimental and, as many have said, it balances the tragic with the comic.  Despite the huge amount of content it still has room to pause, to take a breath, to allow some of its actors space to breath in, to act.      

The Favourite ****  I felt I should have enjoyed Yorgos Lanthimos’s Lobster more than I did, and it took me a while to get into The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but The Favourite won me over straight away.   I must add that my companion that night said that she hated it.    I can understand why.    It seems to be a costume drama about Queen Anne, crowned in 1702 when her brother-in-law William of Orange, died.   Her best friend was Sarah, whose soldier husband, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Anne put in charge of all her forces doing the turbulent and expensive War of the Spanish Succession (1701 - 14).   So far so conventional.  And unoffensive.   However, the relationship between Anne, Sarah and Abigail Hill, a ‘woman of the bedchamber’ who some suspected of seducing Anne moves us into a place where emotional fireworks and ‘bad language’ fly and tears flow as Sarah, (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail (Emma Stone) vie for the love and attention of Queen Anne, (Olivia Coleman),  who Coleman herself described as ‘spoiled, grieving sensitive and cruel. An actor’s dream’.    And she did get an Oscar for playing her, after all.  The cinematography by Robbie Ryan is as unsettling as the story, and the costumes (Sandy Powell) and production design are stunning.   So, not a film for those who like royalty to be portrayed with dignity, but for some of the rest of us an accomplished and moving treat. 

Toy Story 4 *****  A victory lap after the previous three Gold Medal Toy Story winners.  See below.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse ****   Maybe the most inventive Spider-man offering of them all.  Such fun.   See below.

Fighting with My Family ****   Stephen Merchant’s account of the true story of an English wrestling family, and their hopes to break into the uS scene.   See below. \

You Were Never Really Here****. Lynne Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix combine in a brutal yet moving (sort of) thriller.   See below.

Destroyer****  Nicole Kidman on absolute top form, shedding all dignity as a broken down cop and in flashback her younger self.  See below.

Blinded by the Light ***  Another British film, co-written and directed by Grinder Chadha, the British born Kenyan Asian who gave us Bend it Like Beckham, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, and Bhaji On the Beach.   The film and its young, 1980’s British Asian hero,  are inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s music.    Funny, pertinent, and blessed by The Boss. 

All Is True ***  Kenneth Branagh has directed many Shakespearian plays on stage and film, but Ben Elton’s original screenplay he plays the Bard himself, retired to his home and (largely previously ignored) family in Stratford, where his wife (Judi Dench)  and daughters give him a hard time.   Ian McKellen turns up as The  Earl of Southampton, and also gives him a hard time, but this is classically a comedy, not a tragedy, so all ends well.  Charming.

First Man ***   Josh Singer wrote First Man, and previously a lot of The West Wing’s episodes, as well as The Post and Spotlight, so we know where he is coming from.    Damien  Chazelle wrote and directed Whiplash and La La Land,  so we know his ‘beat’.    Then we have Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, as strong, silent and emotionally unobtainable as he can be, and Claire Foy as his wife, paying the personal price of such heroism, as so many women did.    I admired this movie more than I enjoyed it.    

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. ***   A subtle and philosophical examination of the human condition as it faces the existential threat of candy coloured aliens who....oh, no; it’s just hugely inventive fun with a great American and British voice cast that includes the amazing Tiffany Haddish.  Maybe it should be ****. 

The Red Sea Diving Resort *** Gideon Raff wrote the Israeli TV series  P.O.W. and the American version of it, Homeland.    He also wrote and directed this, which is  based on the true story of how Israeli Mossad agents set up the titular base as a cover to rescue imprisoned Ethiopian Beta Jews in the late 1970’s.   Chris Evans, Greg Kinnear and Ben Kingsley lent it their acting support.  This film did not get a positive critical reception, but I enjoyed it.   Sadly, the rescued Ethiopian’s  reception in Israel,  and the ongoing immigration rules that apply to other Ethiopian Jews there,  have not been as welcoming as some had hoped.     

Ad Astra **  Sadly I was underwhelmed by this movie.   

Alita: Battle Angel **. Underwhelmed by this one too, but at least it was never trying to be portentous, unlike Ad Astra. 

Captain Marvel *  Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, Annette Bening and  Ben Mendelsohn are all brilliant actors, utterly wasted here.   I have written elsewhere (A Quiet Place) about the potential dangers of people directing their own scripts,  but I would have expected Disney and Marvel to have licked this into shape.   They did not.  

The Lion King   I really enjoyed Jon Fever’s version of The Jungle Book,  but maybe that was because of the performance of the only non-CGI character, Neel Sethi’s Mowgli.   I could find nothing engaging about his seemingly similar venture, despite an equally starry voice cast.   

And on DVD I caught up with: 

Green Book ****  Joker came out of the Hangover stable, which seems to have wrong-footed some critics.   Green Book was directed  by Peter Farrelly of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary fame, and written by Brian Currie, who wrote Armageddon and Con Air, so many expectations might also have been up-ended by this offering as it does a thoughtful  and quietly moving account of the true-ish story of the journey made by the famous black pianist Dr. Don Shirley and his driver (and unofficial body-guard)  Tony ‘the Lip’ Vallelonga through the Southern States in the 1950s, with Don playing to white audiences.  But this sensitive and moving film was co-authored by Tony’s son Nick Vallelonga, and the lead actors are Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, both of whom provide committed performances.  

Best Film of the year?  The Oscars said so, but many disagreed.   I think there were at least three other nominations I would have gone for, but hey, fourth is good. 

The Breadwinner ****  I love the Irish movie Song of the Sea, a Celtic folk tale beautifully animated in the 2 dimensional style of the Book of Kells (see also The Secret of Kells by the same company.)  The Breadwinner comes out of the same stable, but is set in Afghanistan in 2001, where a young girl has to pretend to be a boy in order to support her family when her father is carted off to jail by the Taliban.  The style is very different, the quality and ability to move an audience are the same.    

The Handmaiden ****  Some may have found the violence in Park Chan-Wook’s films Oldboy and Sympathy For Mr Vengeance hard to swallow.   I did.  But I enjoyed Thirst, his take on vampirism and Zola’s novel Therese Raquin,  plus Lady Vengeance and his delightful I’m a Cyborg.    The Handmaiden is his version of Sarah Water’s Victorian lesbian love-story Fingersmith, transplanted by Park to the 1930’s Korea.    This is a complex and very erotic movie, brilliantly staged, filmed and performed.   As it happens it was written by Sen-kyeong Jeong who also co-wrote Lady Vengeance, Thirst and I’m a Cyborg.   

Shadow ***. I usually enjoy Zhang Yimou movies, and really like the historical Hero and The House of Flying Daggers,  as well as his earlier, more conventional, productions set in the 20th century,  such as Red Sorghum,  Qiu Ju and Raise the Red Lantern.   In Shadow he returns to China’s early history and wuxia martial arts, but makes what is for him a unique use of colour.   Always known as a colourist, having initially trained as a cinematographer, in this film he uses black and a million shades of grey, with only the most sparse flesh tones and blood reds.   Narratively complex and visually stunning. 

Annihilation.***  Alex Garland adapted and directed Jeff  Vandermere’s dystopian novel and used Rob Hardy, his cinematographer from Ex Machina,  to shoot it.  His lead players are Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez, a mixed-skilled team chosen to explore the strange, mysterious and expanding zone, the Shimmer,  that surrounds the site where some kind of alien life-form (crash?) landed and seems to be changing the DNA of all life forms around it.   The movie is as strange and mysterious as the Shimmer itself.   The fact that the team are all women is very welcome.  When they ask ‘Why didn’t you send any men in?’ they are answered ‘We did. None of them came back.’   None except (maybe) Kane (Oscar Isaac),  the Special Ops husband of Lena, the Natalie Portman character.   This was shot in England for Netflix by a very British team, including  Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, who scored Ex Machina.  Some of the male actors are also British, including Benedict Wong, David Gyasi and Josh Danford.   I do not have Netflix (I am afeared of sitting in front of my TV 20/7 if nor 24/7) so I saw this on DVD.    I think I might watch again.   

I know Your Name***(*).  A rather beautiful Japanese anime, concerning two contemporary teenagers who live miles apart but dream of being each other, and set out to find their dream partners.   There are plenty of philosophical twists to this; not all of which I followed on first viewing, but again, I think it deserves  a second. 

The Assassin.***. Korean, gorgeous, somewhat impenetrable.   See below. 

You Were Never Really Here****. Lynne Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix combine in a brutal yet moving (sort of) thriller.    See below.

Destroyer **** Nicole Kidman on absolutely top form as a broken down cop, and in flashback, her younger self.  See below. 

The Making of Monsters.

Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. 

‘Whatever does not kill you simply makes you stranger,’  said Heath Ledger’s  Joker in The Dark Knight .    Now we have another and very strange Joker to consider.   

I saw the new movie Joker as soon as it came out and I have been thinking about it ever since.   Meanwhile the movie has taken $1 billion  (£750 million) world wide.   Whatever else it might be Joker is a runaway, record breaking, Box Office success.    It won the Golden Globe at the 2019 Venice film Festival but critically it has proved to be a deeply divisive film. 

I guess that most people who wanted to see this movie have already done so,  and therefor this is not so much a review addressing the question ‘should you go and see it?’  as a response to share with those who have already done so,  a response to some of the questions it raises.    I am, if it is relevant, an ordained minister in the Anglican Church, and trained counsellor and psycho-therapist,  a Child Protection and Safeguarding professional, and of course a film fan and blogger .   I write about movies for my own non-commercial benefit.  Writing helps me think, to seek answers, to ask ‘what does this movie, any movie,  mean to me, and why?’ 

‘Why’ is important, especially when a film such as Joker evokes such visceral responses in so many people.  It has not just been negatively criticised but actually condemned by many.  Some professional critics have said that they ‘hated’ it.    That’s pretty visceral.     

Peter Bradshaw’s judgement in The Guardian is at the less severe end of the critical spectrum.   He simply called it ‘the  year’s biggest disappointment.... solemn but shallow’.    But others  have cut more deeply, some believing that the movie makers did not understand mental illnesses at all, and therefor misrepresented and insulted those who actually suffer from them.    Two British doctors wrote that  ‘Whether intentionally or not, Arthur comes across as a hysterically laughing super-villain, stereotypically “mad” to the untrained eye; a murderous clown laughing alone on a bus.’   (Annabel Driscoll and Mina Husain in The Guardian, 31/10/19).     

At least one senior American Police Officer  feared it would incite ‘copy-cat violence’, promptingWarner Bros  to release a statement pointing out that ‘neither the fictional character Joker, nor the film, is an endorsement of real-world violence of any kind’.       Jeff Yang at CNN  worried that Joker provides ‘an insidious validation of the white-male resentment that helped bring President Donald Trump to power’, and also accused it of racism.   There was also the suggestion that the movie somehow validated not only ‘Trumpism’  but also possible ‘incel’ violence.   Joaquin Phoenix’s performance has been called  showy and self-indulgent.    

So is it shallow, stereotyping, ignorant, dangerous, racist and indulgent? 

I said that Joker’s  effect was sometimes visceral, and it seems that some critics have cast around to find  ‘objective’ justifications for their ‘subjective’ negative gut feelings.     In response to those already mentioned I want to point out that when Arthur is ‘laughing on a bus’  he is neither alone nor yet a killer; he has simply been trying to amuse a child on the crowded bus until the boy’s mother turns on him, triggering the laughter that is Arthur’s stress response.    I also seem to be looking through a different lens to Jess Yang.   I see  Joker as a condemnation of Trumpism rather than an appeal to it.   Nor do I think Yang’s  examples of negative racist portrayals stand up.    The people of colour in the film include Arthur’s Mental Health Worker,  a prison Psychiatrist and an Arkham Asylum clerk, all of whom want to help him, and his single-parent neighbor who - in fact or fantasy - offers him sympathy when his mother is ill.   

On the plus critical side another of the Guardian’s  film critics, Christina Newland,  saw Joker as a cautionary tale showing how  ‘society's ignorance of those who are less fortunate will create a person like the Joker,’ and that  ‘Phoenix is astonishing as a mentally ill geek who becomes the killer-clown Joker’   in a ‘rare comic-book movie that expresses what's happening in the real world.’   

I think this is certainly a film that deserves a second viewing, and when I did go to see it again I paid attention to the soundtrack.   It has often been said that nothing we see on the screen is there by accident, and that is also true of the sound track.    Some of the Joker’s music is an ironic comment on Arthur Fleck’s miserable condition, and some of it is not ironic, but illustrative. 

We start with the jolly Temptation Rag (Claude Bolling), and then Here comes the King, he is second to none  (Steve Karmen),  followed by If You’re Happy and You Know it, Jimmy Durante’sSmile, and the perky Spanish Flea.    The turn comes, perhaps with The Main Ingredient singing  Ok, so your heart is broken, you sit around moping ,cryin’ and cryin’. You say you’re even thinkin’ about dyin’. 

 And then we hear - though not in this precise order; 

I started a joke which started the whole world crying
But I didn't see that the joke was on me oh no
I started to cry which started the whole world laughing
Oh If I'd only seen that the joke was on me.   (The Bee Gees)

People are strange.  (The Doors.)

I'll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves

(Cream)

Just wait until they hate it

But I ain’t even tripping

I’m pushing when I’m kicking. (Ubansteps)

It’s my life and I’ll do what I want.

It’s my mind and I’ll think what I want. (The Animals)

Worn like a mask of self-hate
Confronts and then dies
Don’t walk away. (Joy Division).

You took me by surprise
I didn't realize that you were laughing

'cause you're doin' it to me
(Laughing) it ain't the way it should be
You took away everything I had, you put the hurt on me.

(The Guess Who). 

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. (Pink Floyd) 

And perhaps most acutely; 

No one knows what it's like
To be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes

I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free

No one knows what its like
To feel these feelings
Like I do
And I blame you
No one bites back as hard
On their anger
None of my pain and woe
Can show through

No one knows what its like
To be mistreated, to be defeated
Behind blue eyes.   (The Who). 

The film playing on the TV in Arthur’s apartment 1937  Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers’ “Shall We Dance”.   The musical number playing is called “Slap That Bass” and contains the words “The world is in a mess,  with politics and taxes and people grinding axes, there’s no happiness.”   Arthur dances to it.   He has the gun he has been given in his hand.  He does not know it is loaded until it goes off. 

I think the film is, to a great extent,   a ‘song and dance’ act.   Six, seven or eight times Arthur dances, and each dance expresses something different and pushes the story or the mood onwards. 

The dance critic of The New York Times,  Gia Kourlas, wrote that Joker, ‘seems less a linear tale than a sequence of dances knitted together with dialogue.  In the end, Arthur, though handcuffed, has a song in his head and a spring to his step.  As he disappears down a pristine white hallway, he uses what mobility he has -  his shoulders, which creep up and down to Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life.”   In any case, the last dance is one of liberation.   As long as he can move, he’s free. And Mr. Phoenix knows how to move. His dancing is no joke.’ 

When Arthur the Clown dances in celebration  on a steep flight of steps to “Rock ’n’ Roll Part 2,”we may remember  how dangerous the persona of Gary Glitter was, and I remind myself that most abusers were themselves abused a children.  That is a thought we might want to push away, but should not.   It is not an excuse for abuse, but it may offer an explanation. 

 I also noticed that the colour scheme of the movie is  purple, barn red,  orange, dirty browns and bluey greens.   This reflects that of The Dark Knight, especially in the scenes involving Heath Ledger’s Joker.    I am  great admirer of The Dark Knight,  (see A Ray of Light in The Dark Knight on my blog) and see Joker as an entirely appropriate companion piece to it.   It is not a ‘prequel’, but  an ‘origins’ story suggesting how someone like the Joker from A Killing Joke and/or The Dark Knight could have become what he was.    

 It is worth recalling that  The Dark Knight’s Joker could not, would not, explain his scars.  He offered two explanations,  both of them terrible, but maybe the truth was even more terrible.  Working as a priest and counselor I learnt that some of those who most need our care and compassion cannot tell us the truth about the causes of their pain, anger or despair.    They cannot bring themselves to say it,  to  remember, to re-member it,  and to describe what actually happened to them.   Victims of abuse are therefor often the least reliable witnesses to their own abuse.    We sometimes think they are lying, making it up.  And sometimes they are.  Their lies are easier for them to share than their truth.  

  

And sometimes (too often)their behavior makes them unappealing.   They can be withdrawn, aggressive, even violent, unpredictable, unreliable,  suspicious and of course utterly ungrateful for any attempts we might make to help them.   How could we possibly help them when we really have no idea what they have suffered?  And they are not going to tell us.   How could they trust us when their trust has already been destroyed.   The worst abuse is always the abuse of trust.    So we never learn how Heath’s Joker got his scars.  

He did, however,  seem to be a figure of disconcerting charisma,  intelligent and sly,  somehow glamorous and  fascinating.  Even his laugh seemed somehow a kind of joie de vivre.   We  might say that there was a kind of tragic, nihilistic heroism about that Joker.   

The Joker in The Dark Knight says he is there to ‘introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!’  Nothing that happens to Arthur Fleck is fair.  So why not relish chaos?   

Some critics, its seems,  wanted  Arthur Fleck’s Joker to be heroic, but there is nothing heroic about Arthur.   He may start off  as a sympathetic character, but as the co-writer and Director Todd Phillips has said   “You want to root for this guy until you can’t root for him any longer.”   Arthur fleck does some terrible things.   There are no excuses.    This is not a movie about redemption.   It is about damnation.   It is about the ‘banality of evil.’

Arthur tells his Social Worker, you don’t listen, do you?  I don’t think you ever really listened to me. You just ask the same questions every week. “How’s your job? Are you having any negative thoughts?” All I have are negative thoughts. But you don’t listen. Anyway, I said, for my whole life, I didn’t know if I even really existed. But I do, and people are starting to notice.

And when he does actually get invited onto The Murray Franklin Show Murray asks  Do you have a problem with Thomas Wayne?
Arthur says Yes, I do. Have you seen what it’s like out there, Murray? Do you ever actually leave the studio? Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody’s civil anymore! Nobody thinks what it’s like to be the other guy. You think men like Thomas Wayne ever think what it’s like to be someone like me? To be somebody but themselves? They don’t. They think that we’ll just sit down and take it like good little boys! That we won’t werewolf and go wild!   

At the end, when, far far too late,  he might actually get real help the Arkham Psychiatrist asks: What’s so funny?
Arthur: I was just thinking of a joke.

Psychiatrist: Do you want to tell it to me?
[pause]
Arthur: You wouldn’t get it.

I think some critics didn’t get it either.   For me this is a film about the making of monsters through carelessness.  In Child Protection and Safeguarding circles it is called abusive neglect.    I see this movie showing  what happens when individuals, and the societies we form together,  simply do not care about the most vulnerable in our societies.    We neglect them, and ignore the consequences.   Carelessness can be evil.    Evil and banal. 

Arthur is prone to burst into uncontrollable laughter  at inappropriate moments, particularly when under stress or in pain.    He is often under stress or in pain.  He is on seven kinds of medication.  He is profoundly vulnerable - woundable.  And  he is wounded; stomped on physically in the alleyways and on the Subway,  abused by the neglect of the system that is meant to protect him.  When his mental health worker tells him that the City of Gotham is closing down the support system that provides him with counseling and his prescribed drugs she tells him  ‘Those in charge don’t give a shit about people like you.   And the truth is they don’t give a shit about people like me either.’    Neither the cared for nor the carers.   I see that truth. 

Arthur has tried;  caring for his mother,  clowning in a children’s hospital.  He wants to be a Stand-up Comic,  to get people laughing,  to make them happy.  He dreams (literally dreams) of being on Murray’s late night chat show.    But  ‘madness, as you know, is like gravity.  All it takes is a little push’ said Heath Ledger’s Joker to Batman.   Arthur is pushed and pushed and pushed.   It seems he always has been.     “I haven’t been happy one minute of my entire fucking life,” he tells his mother.  Gradually, and sometimes abruptly, his dreams and hopes have been ground down or dashed.  As well as being abused on the streets, at work and on television, he was, he learns, abused during his unremembered childhood.    I thought my life was a tragedy,  he tells his mother, and maybe he had tried to redeem it, to rescue it, to use it to help others, but now I realize it is a comedy.   

Another clown lent him a gun, ‘for safety’s sake’, but when it drops out of Arthur’s costume while he’s entertaining children in a hospital ward as he sings ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It, ’   Arthur loses his job.   Maybe giving people guns is not the best way to keep them safe.   Maybe ignoring the vulnerable is not the best way to keep them, or any of us,  safe.   

Is this movie  dangerous?   Yes it is, as Keith Mayer said in The Times.   ‘It is profoundly and acutely dangerous in the same way that any film that kicks so conspicuously against orthodoxies is dangerous’.  

As for Phoenix’s  ‘showy and indulgent’ performance, I have to say that at times he moved me to tears, especially when his eyes filled with pain or fear as he laughed or forced a smile.   I might add that losing 52 pounds for a movie role is not ‘indulgent’.    Arthur’s gaunt body is part of the performance of art.   You might compare it with his portrayal of Joe in Lynne Ramsay’s recent ‘You Were Never Really Here’.

I am moved by the movie.    I think it speaks to it’s time, and repeating a warning that so often, too often,  needs repeating.   Back in the early 90’s Josephine Hart was succinct when she wrote  ‘Damaged people damage people,’  in her novel Damage.  If we damage people, or do not look after those who are already damaged, then they (we) are indeed likely to end up damaging other people.    Some  of these victims may even become symbolic figures, or  populist political leaders,  appealing to other damaged, disenfranchised and despairing folk.    Arthur Fleck’s tragic descent into madness and violence is not excused by the  treatment he has received, but it is a reflection on it, and one I think we need to take seriously.    

Chauncey K. Robinson wrote in The People’s World, that this is  ‘ultimately an in-your-face examination of a broken system that creates its own monsters.’    I am not surprised that it has provoked powerful and diverse responses.    

I believe that ‘the least, the last, and the lost’ are - or should - be the true focus of our compassion.    The scriptures tell me  clearly that God is on their side.   So as a counselor, psycho-therapist and priest I think Joker is a truthful, brave, passionate, compassionate and compelling movie,  centred around a performance that maybe only Joaquin Phoenix could craft and deliver.   That is my ‘visceral and thoughtful’ response.