Never Let Me Go (2010)

Directed by Mark Romanek

Written by Alex Garland, Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)

Starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley

Why is it that we’re so engaged by dystopian fantasies?  Why the fascination with a world that has headed off, or will head off, down a different and more problematic route to our own?  After all, there unquestionably is a fascination there – going back through Blade Runner, Nineteen Eighty-Fout, Metropolis, to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and far more points in between than I’ll be going into here*.  And if the surge in popularity of counterfactual novels  (or alternative histories, or uchronia) is anything to go by, it’s an allure that’s growing. 

But why?  Perhaps it’s because we live in uncertain times, and on-screen bleakness and suffering holds up a mirror to threats in the world we live in, much as Hollywood’s golden age of horror in the 30s and 40s coincided with darkness beyond the cinema’s walls.  Perhaps we’ve become used to a world so controlled and understood that any risk posed by events beyond our control seems exaggerated in its size and menace.  Or perhaps we just like to be reminded of how much worse things could be, perhaps it offers a crumb of comfort in showing us that life isn’t all that bad after all. 

Most dystopian and counterfactual stories deal with big, dramatic changes:  the Nazis won the war, Napoleon conquered the world, robots became intelligent, society collapsed under a global nuclear conflict, Kennedy wasn’t killed, Franz Ferdinand wasn’t killed, Hitler was.  However, in reality, it’s just as often small details and lifestyle changes that end up setting history on a different course entirely – changes that might not be noticed at the time, just as the passengers on a train don’t see the points being changed. 

As I’m writing this, physicists at the CERN institute are announcing that they’re a significant step closer to proving the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible flood of energy spread throughout the universe, thought to be responsible for allowing atoms to have the mass they need to exist.  It’s a big day for physics, with a number of others hopefully to come, and gives hope of the answers the project was looking to find.  Yet CERN has had a dramatic and unexpected impact on all of our lives (definitely on your life, you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise):  the software designed for sending data and theories and whatnot back and forth around the globe became the world wide web. 

These changes, slow-burning, little-noticed-at-the-time but ultimately huge, frequently emerge from technological and scientific discoveries, slowly filtering out from the academic community until they leave no-one untouched.  There are few if any counterfactual tales that ask ‘what if Jenner hadn’t discovered the smallpox vaccination?’ or ‘what if Lister hadn’t given the world antiseptic medicine?’, probably with very good reason from a literary point of view, but that doesn’t mean they transformed the world any less entirely. 

The world-changing breakthrough in Never Let Me Go is a medical one too.  But it’s also a discovery that's morally very questionable, one that saves countless lives while harming others.  Most importantly, it’s one viewed solely from the point of view of those who are harmed by it, those whose lives are not transformed for the better but lessened and shortened by the change.  This is where the dystopia exists – not for all those saved, happy and presumably either ignorant of the harm caused to others or choosing to look the other way, but for those who have to live a fractured shadow of a life. 

All of which raises a difficult question – to what extent, if any, should we be allowed to cause suffering in order to save lives?  Never Let Me Go, though raising the question poignantly and from the heart, does not seek to impose answers.  What it does, and does with great panache and elegance, fragile and delicate, is to give a very human dimension to a deeply moral question.  Not all dystopian tales must be universal; sometimes, a brighter future for the many ends up being built on the suffering of the few.

*Not least because there's no shortage of such lists out there; dystopianfilms.com is as good a place to start as any.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Two men of the old west, one of the new.

Directed by John Ford
Written by James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck, Dorothy M. Johnson (novel)
Starring John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin



Look at it; it was once a wilderness, now it's a garden.

There are three genres in cinema that find their roots entirely and exclusively in American soil; the gangster movie, the musical, and the western.  Yet only one of the three seems lodged in a long-distant halcyon age of Hollywood:  the gangster genre is as much about Scorsese as it is about Jimmy Cagney, while musicals have had many distinct ages - the Busby Berkeley-dominated era in the early days of sound, the time of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the 50s and early 60s, the less relentlessly cheerful 70s pictures (such as Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret), more recent musicals like Chicago, Mamma Mia!, not to mention all those Disney animations.  Oh, and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.  Mustn't forget that.

And the western?  As a genre, it's tied inextricably to one period of time - from the mid-1930s to the beginning of the 1960s.  It's tied to one actor, John Wayne.  And it's tied to one director, the peerless John Ford.  Of course, there have been westerns since - and recently indeed, with the likes of Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma.  And certainly, Sergio Leone made a tremendous stab at a one-man revival of the genre, yet even his outstanding work in westerns reflects an outsider trying to reinvigorate a world that had died - like the westerns of the past decade, Leone's are a homage to the classic style, rather than a new direction.

The west changed, and the world changed.  The old ways, of big men with big guns and big horses shooting evil, shallow, one-dimensional Indians and/or bandits just weren't relevant any more.  It had been done, and done to death, in a time when the simplicity of an ever-victorious fight between the good ol' US of A and those who seek to stop them was what so much of the public was after; come the 60s, come a new generation with a new set of priorities and a new politics, that world had gone, and it took the western with it.  And come the 70s, the western makes a rare appearance as something antiheroic, something negative and bleak - take Robert Altman's masterful McCabe and Mrs Miller: it has no time for the proud gunslinger and good-hearted young lady, instead giving us a gambler and a prostitute, running a brothel.  The west is not heroic, the west is not the bold and upstanding and fearless foundation of America.  The west is unpleasant, rough, selfish, grubby.  The west is a place and a time to regret.  This is not the west of John Ford and John Wayne.

And yet, it is.  If you wanted to pin down the end of that era, it's here, the last western that Ford and Wayne made together.  It has all the building blocks of the genre - apart from Wayne as burly sharpshooter in love with The Girl, we've a violent and fearsome bandit (Marvin) and his goons, we've a local marshal who's too weak and drunk and gluttonous to do anything about it, we've a brave outsider (Stewart) riding in to transform the present and the future of the frontier town.  But the blocks aren't stacked the right way, the edifice is falling.  The outsider isn't a heroic frontiersman, he's not a cowboy or a sheriff or an outlaw-come-good.  He's a lawyer and sometime politician.  He can't shoot a gun straight to save his life.  When he finally decides that, as the noble hero, he should confront the bandit, he's wearing an apron.

Meanwhile, Wayne, big, strong John Wayne, seems only to slip further into the shadows.  Nothing stands more clearly for the death of the west than the isolation of his character - at first, the brave hero, the only man who really tries to defend his town, but after Stewart rides in, he finds himself gradually yet completely driven aside.  The gunslinger, the quick, strong, western icon, comes to mean so little in the face of a new world.  As law and order, literacy and politics seep into the life of the little town, the role of the old warrior is reduced to nothing more than a murderer hiding in the shadows.  The man of the old west is beaten; all respect him, but none look to him to lead them any longer.  Stewart, his books and his words, represents the future.  Wayne is isolated.  Wayne is the past.  And, ultimately, Wayne hands over the town - and the west - to Stewart to carry forward.

And, in the end, we have Stewart and The Girl riding across the prairie - not in a stagecoach, not on horseback, but in civilised comfort on the railroad.  The west they're leaving behind, she says, has transformed from wilderness into garden - and it's Stewart that's responsible, it's the encroachment of the world of laws and letters that planted the seeds, the seeds which now blossom outside the window of the carriage.

It was the civilising of the west which gave birth to Hollywood, and Hollywood which gave birth to the story, the legend of that vast, open land.  Eventually, the two had to let go of one another.  It's only right and fitting that it fell to Ford and Wayne to write the last word.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Heaven, as a John Martin landscape

Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Written by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Starring David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey



"When I saw that Archers logo at the start, I knew I'd be watching something special".  The young Martin Scorsese understood when he was on to a good thing - The Archers, those arrows thudding into the target, meant a film written and directed by Powell and Pressburger (and usually shot by the peerless Jack Cardiff), and special isn't the half of it.  Did they ever make a bad film?  Did they ever make a merely-alright film, for that matter?  The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Spy In Black, One of Our Aircraft is Missing, Ill Met By Moonlight, and, of course, A Matter of Life and Death.

The consistency of the partnership was astonishing, and it's a dreadful shame that for so long (although happily no longer) their films were largely ignored, shoved to one side, all because of the controversy over Powell's brilliant but disturbing Peeping Tom.  It's true that that picture (telling the story of a murderer who gets his kicks filming the last, anguished expressions of his victims) was bleak, troubling, and not at all what was expected of such a scion of the British establishment - and also a superbly directed and constructed movie, which shouldn't be forgotten - but nothing should have been allowed to overshadow the career of one of this country's finest filmmakers, nor of his Hungarian associate.  The eventual rehabilitation of Powell and Pressburger, led by Scorsese and Robert De Niro, was long overdue and very much deserved.

And in the middle of their partnership, we find A Matter of Life and Death.  There's a clear difference between this picture and most of their output, thrillers with a strong psychological edge (such as The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Spy in Black).  Instead, we have a beautiful film, romantic, funny, elegant, inventive, charming.  David Niven couldn't be better suited to the part - I mean, seriously, upper-middle-class RAF hero, writes poetry, romantic lead, who else are you going to cast? - and everything else that's wonderful about the picture grows from there.  Everything else that's wonderful, by the way, being an awful lot - particularly the cinematography.  The contrast between the black and white, clean, elegant style of heaven and the bright, rich colours of earth is striking and works perfectly; heaven is graceful, earth is passionate.  Both are gorgeous.

There's really nothing about this film that isn't delightful.  But it's important to recognise that there's more to the movie than just being lovely from start to finish - it is very inventive, a superbly crafted and unique drama, involving and engaging and always sure to keep you hoping for Niven, Livesey and Hunter to succeed, and to suggest that it's no more than a wonderfully charming romance is missing the point completely.  It is wonderfully charming, it is romantic, but it's also powerful, innovative, and artful.  Frankly, it's a masterpiece.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Jeff Bridges.  I like Jeff Bridges.  Look at him, isn't he lovely?

Directed by Scott Cooper
Written by Scott Cooper, Thomas Cobb (novel)
Starring Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell




I like Jeff Bridges.  Doesn't everyone like Jeff Bridges?  There's something comforting about his name appearing in the titles of a film, and more so as he gets older, as he grows into a fine vintage of bearded gentility.  There always was something about The Dude that suited Bridges, easy-going, charming, likeable; as the man says in The Big Lebowski, 'he fits right in there'.  Jeff Bridges, an actor who fits right in.

Anyway, there's a point to all this, and it's not really anything to do with The Big Lebowski.  It's a lot more to do a question of balance.  See, on the one hand, I look at this film Crazy Heart, I've heard some good things about it, not sure if I'd really be interested, but hey, Jeff Bridges.  I like Jeff Bridges.  Doesn't everyone like Jeff Bridges?  On the other hand, here's a film that threatens to be full to the brim of country music (and it carries out said threat with ruthless efficiency), and that's not something likely to endear a picture to me.  That said, the country music's largely performed by Bridges himself, so... well, that just confuses the issue, doesn't it?

And in the end, I have to say that I'm rather glad I did see it.  It's a simple, straightforward picture - one of the long history of little American Indie* flicks, where someone in difficulties meets people, not a lot happens, and their life ends up a bit better.  But it really is a fine example of the genre: very nicely put together, endearing, charming, believable.  There's little more important in a film of this nature than the characters being sympathetic, being people you can relate to and who you want to succeed; after all, the film is all about the people in it, no big flashes or bangs, no giant robots and things that go whoooosh.  The characters need to be the kind of folks that you'd side with, that you'd help out if you happened upon them.  What does Crazy Heart have to offer?  Jeff Bridges.  Of course you'd side with Jeff Bridges.  Of course you'd help him out.  Of course you want things to work out well for him.

There's really not a great deal to the film, but it's all the better for that.  There are only a few characters - Maggie Gyllenhaal as the nice girl, Robert Duvall as the old friend, Paul Herman as the sensible and considerate agent, Colin Farrell as the, um, other old friend - and they're all likeable and hope-for-the-best as well.  Simple, straightforward.  Nice.  Charming.  The kind of movie that it's really hard to dislike, and a lovely way to spend a hundred minutes of a Sunday evening.

Now, if they could only have found a way to do it without quite so much country music...



*I'm not particularly comfortable with that word, but it serves a purpose here.

Love Is The Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998)

Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon - the artist, not the philosopher-scientist.

Directed by John Maybury

Written by John Maybury

Starring Derek Jacobi, Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton

Call it what you will: divine intervention, sudden happenstance, the random element; a chance development drops in and entirely changes the direction of the plot. Banal Michael Caine vehicle Blue Ice gives us a large piece of, well, blue ice plummeting from the sky – as per the urban myth –and on to an invitingly shady character. Rather more credibly, Janet Leigh was doing just fine, set to build a new life with all that stolen money, until she happened upon the wrong motel. Robert Rodgriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s grammatically flawed From Dusk Till Dawn shifts from heist movie to action-horror with an unexpected stop amongst a den of vampires. The Toy Story world is transformed by the out-of-the-blue arrival of a shiny new Buzz Lightyear action figure (who then himself bursts unexpected into the try-your-luck world of the three-eyed alien toys).  

The new story dropping on to the old through means beyond anyone’s control crops up, rather literally, in John Maybury’s Love Is The Devil. Whether there’s actually any truth in the tale of small-time criminal George Dyer falling through a skylight into Francis Bacon’s studio is a secret that the two men took to their graves – not that it matters. It’s a fine tale, and were it ever to emerge that they met on a night out or bumped into one another while out shopping, we may be wiser but also a tad disapponted. And Maybury’s certainly not too concerned with such historical questions: his Dyer plunges from the heavens, his Bacon (Jacobi) invites the visitor to bed, and from there the erstwhile burglar rapidly slips over into being the artist’s lover, model, muse.

It’s the rise and fall of this relationship about which the picture revolves, as simple, working class Dyer (Craig) tries to adapt to his new life, the new world he occupies, Bacon’s world, the artist’s fame and friends and wants and demands. Tries, and fails. Bacon needs Dyer, artistically and physically, yet he’s irritated by a man so unlike himself or those he normally spends his time with; the artist grows tired of his muse, but cannot let him go – so ends up funding his collapse into alcoholism and despair, whilst the art, inspired by and often depicting Dyer, reaches extraordinary new heights.  

And Jacobi’s performance is every bit as towering; indeed, it rather holds the film together in places, for whenever we move beyond the boundaries of Dyer and Bacon’s storm, the fire dies and the picture slows to a drab, staid, predictable progress. The artist’s circle of friends are a muddle of by-numbers stereotypes, straight from the cinema’s big book of extroverted homosexuals – while Dyer’s equivalent, if rather smaller, cluster of acquaintances are all Cockney ne’erdowells, a little bit dodgy, and blimey mister they don’t rightly trust these toffs, folk who aren’t like us, who’ll just use you and throw you away. Had they been on screen a little longer, I’m sure one of them would’ve started selling eels.  

Maybury could easily have found himself also slipping up over the presentation of the picture. After all, his subject was a figurative, abstract painter, one indelibly associated with dramatic and vivid bursts of colour; it’s only natural for the director to bring a comparable artistic sensibility to the movie. However, there’s a fine line between an expressionist touch and outright pretentiousness, and after all, Maybury has not the same talent in that area as Bacon had. There’s a risk of the director ending up looking as though he's simply trying to imitate Bacon, and although he managed to stay on the right side of that rather fine line, it wasn’t by much.  

Perhaps he was able to do so because the picture as a whole is lifted by Jacobi’s performance. And I really can’t stress this enough – the performance was exceptional, powerful, magnificent; ably supported by a typically effective and engaging display by Craig, but it remains the veteran’s turn as Bacon that stands out, that carries the film from worthy mediocrity to something far more impressive.

 

In recent weeks, I’ve seen a film – Tomas Alfredson’s superb Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – in which an outstanding cast built upon the lustre of an otherwise very fine picture, and another – Franklin J. Schaffner’s frankly embarrassing The Boys From Brazil – in which the outstanding cast didn’t and couldn’t rescue a shockingly poor film. Love Is The Devil falls between these two stools, a reasonable enough movie made far better by its cast. In that respect, it’s definitely worth watching; in that respect, it could never be a masterpiece.