Review: Inside Llewyn Davis (2014)

Inside Llewyn Davis 
Dirs. Joel and Ethan Coen 
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake


Inside Llewyn Davis is a film that washes over its audience; it has such tenderness that it sinks in slowly, with the same bittersweet melancholy as its songs. It tells the tale of an itinerant folk singer as he wanders through Greenwich Village in the hazy, harsh light of the winter of '61. Llewyn, huddled agains the cold, spends his time looking for a breakthrough, a new record producer, a place to stay, some cash...and so the film meanders, moving in an odd circular pattern as seemingly uncertain as its titular hero. Llewyn hitches a ride to Chicago at one point, along with an eccentric old jazz musician in the form of John Goodman, and his Dean Moriarty-esque valet. It's a quiet nod to the Beat Generation, but the strange collection of travelers vanish as quickly as they appear; anecdotal figures on a road to nowhere. It is the film's ultimate slightness that has made it ripe to be ignored through awards season. Oscar Isaac's un-showy, achingly sad performance does nothing hyperbolic enough to earn him loud praise.

The Coen Brothers have always created worlds for their characters to inhabit; they have a penchant for beautifully heightened artificiality. Here, their choice of colour palette - all pale pastels and browns - is highly evocative of the period, poetic without ever feeling unduly drenched in nostalgia or sign-post reference points. With a taste for authentic mid-century architecture and design, few films set in such an iconic cultural period so comfortably capture the feel of an era without anachronism.

As for Llewyn, he is a knockabout in life's whirlwind, and a screw-up of the highest order; selfish, petulant, sarcastic, and worst of all -- arrogant. He hides behind a shuffling, unassuming persona, but can't completely smother the smug glint in his eye. Yet he remains likable almost in spite of himself; downtrodden in the freezing New York winter, pushing his luck with all his friends, droll in spite of his circumstances. We've all been failures, we've all been screw-ups, and like Llewyn, mostly because we were too blind or self-serving or unlucky to help ourselves. The surprise comes with how much, in all his disheveled glory and self-sabotage, it becomes so easy to sympathise with him.

 Crucially, when he opens his mouth to sing,  you can't help but to be wooed. The fantastic quality of the music is a vital element of the film, and falls into place with the natural talents of those involved, overseen by producer T Bone Burnett. In many ways, Inside Llewyn Davis has the feel of a great song; it takes some time to appreciate all its nuances, but it's easy to love.

It's a film that charts the ambitions, failures, and ultimate frustrations of creative life - of the struggling artists who make up the toiling majority. It does so with lyricism, humour, and tenderness. Llewyn and his yellow cat (s?) become instant iconography in The Coens' body of work. He is representative of the loser in all of us, and of our unshakable belief that the loser contains more brilliance than the world will ever get to know.


                                               Now showing at Broadway Cinema Nottingham

Screen Women: A Discussion on Martin Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street

In this special edition of Christina Newland‘s Screen Women column, she discusses Martin Scorseses’s The Wolf of Wall Street with Kubrick on the Guillotine editor Simran Hans.

Simran Hans: Let’s start off with one of the big questions — the Scorsese question. Do we really need another story like this? And further, do we really need another story like this from Scorsese? The Dissolve’s Tasha Robinson described the film as ”repetitive, redundant [and] grating”, as “very familiar within the course of Martin Scorsese’s work”, arguing that “it didn’t say anything that [we] haven’t heard from him multiple times from him before.”

Christina Newland: Well, the thought did cross my mind while I was watching it — the same ugly male hubris, the same greed and misogyny that you see as a strain through many of his male characters. Ultimately, he’s always been thematically concerned with masculine identity and he’s always been highly critical of the macho culture that men like [Jordan] Belfort come from. Robinson isn’t completely wrong in saying there’s an element of repetition in it, but I think it’s possible that therein lies the point. We, as women particularly, may be exhausted of seeing men like Belfort dominate the narrative viewpoint, but the cold truth of the matter is that, in reality, men like Belfort do dominate the discourse, to the detriment of women.

SH: While I agree that the film is an accurate representation of the dominant male discourse, I don’t think that the fact that something is ‘truthful’ should mean that discourse is exempt from examination. So, let’s examine it a little more closely…

              Read the rest of our discussion on feminism, film criticism, and The Wolf of Wall Street HERE. 

Review: Harlan County, USA (1977)

          Harlan County, USA (1977)

           Dir. Barbara Kopple 

       1974, Kentucky. Brookside coal miners have tried to unionize, and their company, fearing a domino effect, refuses to sign their contract with the union, setting a 10-month strike into motion. Barbara Kopple and her mostly female crew made their Oscar-winning documentary after spending years with the miners, bravely following them to the picket line in spite of threats from company 'scabs'.  As a result, the scenes Kopple and her crew are privy to are riveting; she is knocked sideways in a hail of 'gun thug' bullets, witness to the solidarity as well as the squabbles of the tough-minded coalition of miner's wives, as well as to the inconsolable weeping of the mothers and wives left without the men of their family. It seems prescient that so much of the focus in Harlan County, USA is put upon women; Kopple seems interested in the ways deeply traditional swathes of the US still contained powerful matriarchal figures, women with voices and political agency. 

It is difficult to believe that the Harlan County seen through Kopple's lens existed in the mid-1970's, the era that begot disco. This is the land that time forgot, where children are washed in tin buckets and indoor plumbing is a hope for the future, where daddy almost invariably died as a result of working in the coal mine, and where families live in company-owned housing, awful little shantytowns of abject poverty. The chasm between working-class New Yorkers and these rural Southerners is evidenced through a conversation between a striking miner and a NYPD officer on his beat.  Two American blue-collar workers, perhaps, but a vast gulf lies between their expectations and quality of life. The policeman's face slackens as he realises just how little money and medical care his Southern compatriot receives; it is a telling moment in a film full of them. As is explained, deadly accidents are frequently the result of unsafe conditions and poor regulatory practices; the conservative Southern power conglomerate that runs things is simply disinterested in reform. 

 The strike recalls another in the 1930's that had long been a part of collective Kentucky memory; where their county earned the name 'Bloody Harlan' for the violent picket line clashes, executions, and evictions that happened periodically over several years. Through plaintive protest song and story, Kopple creates a portrait of these careworn and weary people, unchanged in their exploitation for the better part of half a century. Their adamant and unwavering determination to improve their lives and the lives of their children is clear; one elderly woman with a gaze of steel tells the camera, 'They can shoot me - but they can't shoot the union out of me.' This, of course, is no idle remark; the mining company and the police are clearly colluding, ignoring violence and gunshots from the company thugs and throwing miners in prison for obstructing the road. 

  As the strike continues, the threats of violence escalate. Much of the time, the dogged coalition of miner's wives prove to be the hardiest and most principled of the bunch; they are the ones left widowed by the ravages of black lung and many other cruel occupational hazards. When a mining company president is asked about the behavior of the women, his response is galling. He chuckles smugly, and gives his patronising reply: 'I wouldn't like it if it was my wife. I wouldn't like to think this is the conduct of our American women.'

 Kopple shows precisely what sort of conduct American women resort to when they have been oppressed, impoverished, and beset by tragedy for too long; and that conduct is commendable. Eventually, Brookside Mining Company will capitulate - but not before even more tragedy must beset the workers.  The film is in no way even-keeled; it stresses that the workers are the inevitably noble downtrodden. But it convinces its audience with pathos, power, and insight, revealing an immoral and profiteering system that must be struggled against, sometimes at enormous cost. 

Brief Thoughts: Frank Capra's It Happened One Night

            It Happened One Night (1934)
             Dir. Frank Capra
          Starring: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, 

    Squeaking past in the last year of Pre-Code Hollywood, It Happened One Night is all the more charming for the little innuendos it was allowed to contain, not to mention its half-dressed movie stars. Made at Columbia, (a minor studio at that time), the film went on to be a commercial and critical success, sweeping every major Oscar category in a manner that wasn't done again until 1975, with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Capra's longstanding attitudes seep through; his dislike of airs and graces, of the wealthy's 'lack of humility', and there's certainly some Depression-era joy in seeing the prim socialite played by Colbert being brought low. She is forced to hitchhike, wear the same clothes for much of the film; sleep in the hay, eat only raw carrots. Gable is incorrigible and handsome as a newspaperman playing at being a gentleman; smoking in bed wearing a wry grin on his face. There is a lovely moment in the hay where he offhandedly insults Colbert and tears sparkle on her beautiful gamine face; it is a stymied moment of resistance to the increasing attraction between the two, emotion flowering in soft-focus close ups. Too charming for words, really.

Review: 12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave
 Dir. Steve McQueen
Starring: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, Brad Pitt, Benedict Cumberbatch

It is difficult to know where to begin with the historical baggage of 12 Years a Slave. It is that rare thing; a film about a historical moment that feels urgent; a vital cinematic account of a hideous era, and the voice of a past no one yearns to recall. McQueen adapted the true story of Solomon Northup, an educated black free man from New York, who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Thus, McQueen worked from an honest, firsthand portrait of the horrors of slavery, and he does his utmost to serve the sickening reality of the situation, including a serious and requisite restraint of overly decorative stylistic flourishes. Here, where the subject matter and the performances are central, the camera works to be self-effacing; humbled to capture the objective brutality Solomon witnesses and is subject to. Some critics feel differently, suggesting a certain trivial artfulness in McQueen's approach, but I find his camera to be mostly subdued, his use of crane shots and long takes melding into the flow of the narrative. Much is conveyed in sideways glances and looks; the shocked admiration on a young slave's face as he sees Solomon's finely-dressed family, being served by a white shop owner. Frequently, brief, elementary guilt or compassion will register on culpable white faces, only to be waved away again as a persistently buzzing fly might. A long medium close-up on Ejiofor's face allows us to read into it what we will, a wounded but still prideful gaze into the middle distance that speaks volumes more than one could hope to say out loud. 

The images that remain with me are these; naked, shivering black bodies lined up and presented for inspection; a body suspended by lynching rope, with nary a toe balanced on the earth to keep from expiring; a cut-crystal decanter lurching through a room and landing with the force of a dumbbell on an innocent skull.  12 Years a Slave is a brutally affecting, devastating film. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a poignant and subtle actor; his silence and his gaze mirroring his and our internal disgust. Michael Fassbender is simply too terrible, an appalling and real representation of the ignorant hubris and essential inhumanity of the slave-owning class. 

    This is a nearly impossible comparison to make, but briefly: I wrote not too long ago that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained - a B-movie slavery revenge Western - allows for some catharsis for its audience against the evils of slavery, in seeing those individuals punished. The brilliant, painful honesty of 12 Years is in is refusal to allow us such catharsis or relief; it is a relief that was, and remains, impossible. The uncompromising nature of McQueen's vision refuses us any semblance of a Hollywood narrative in terms of evasion of violence, or revenge, or a genuine sense that the cruelty will end. Solomon may have escaped, and McQueen gives us his survival, but we are left in no doubt of the extreme rarity of his escape, or of the precariousness of his existence for the rest of his free life. 

    What we are left with is the hopeless and terrible certainty of the suffering majority, of their endless toil, their ignominious deaths, and worst of all - of the legitimacy of the whole damnable system.  As I left the cinema, I felt an overpowering helplessness. There is no way to fix, solve, or change the past, or the shameful, murderous legal legitimacy of chattel slavery for over a century. Too often has it been whitewashed, avoided, or softened, and its political and socioeconomic legacy exists in the United States today, whether the nation can acknowledge it or not. 150 years on, McQueen has created a work of astounding power, simplicity, and savagery. It makes us pause to remember and to mourn for the holocaust that was American slavery - to feel the helpless shame and anger - and to know that there is nothing to be done. 

Showing now at the Broadway Cinema

Review: American Hustle (2014)

        American Hustle 
       Dir. David O. Russell 
       Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner

    David O. Russell has had a unique identity from the early stages of his work, whatever amalgamation of styles he has borrowed. From Three Kings, his Iraq War treasure-hunting drama with considerable political undertones, to the performance-strong The Fighter, he has been a well- respected American director in his own right. As such, at this stage in his career, it is difficult to understand why he has regressed to the stature of big-budget amateur imitation - but it is exactly what he has done with American Hustle. The story tells of a New Jersey conman (Bale) who looks to run the biggest con of all on a corrupt mayor (Jeremy Renner). With his partner-in-crime (Adams), a firecracker ex-wife (Lawrence), and some shady individuals involved, it inevitably spirals out of control - sort of.

 It is genuinely surprising how poor the result of this 70's cultural-criminal odyssey is, particularly the cringe-worthy performances from otherwise reliably good actors. The script weakens even Adams and Bale, who wonderfully brought to life their respective roles in The Fighter under the same direction. Bradley Cooper is particularly unbelievable as a sad-sack cop who aspires for glory and success, but is generally as dull as dishwater to watch.

   For a movie so taken with its own glitzy, fancy-dress production values, it remains terribly unexciting. If one can look past the embarrassing artificiality of the era's hairstyles and costumes, and the obvious choice of signpost rock music, there is still a painfully contrived story-line and dialogue, with characters constantly soliloquizing on their ambitions for success. It must be said (at the risk of sounding spiteful), it's as if Russell had never seen a Scorsese movie, but instead had asked a child to watch one for him and report back the stylistic details.

 So obnoxious is its excessive, clumsy mess of chest hair and poly-blend that one wonders if it is Russell's crass attempt at the kind of postmodern nostalgia machine that always draws in large audiences. Regardless, the film occasionally shows brief sparks of hope. In a nightclub scene featuring Robert De Niro, the tension ratchets up, allowing for a powerhouse Adams/Lawrence run-in that reveals both the actors' innate talents and Russell's obvious capacity for good Hollywood storytelling. Unfortunately, that's precisely what's in short supply here. It gains some momentum as the crosses and double-crosses increase, but ultimately not enough to save it from the cinematic doldrums. As a Goodfellas and Boogie Nights obsessive, I should have been primed to love American Hustle, but it is a weak pastiche of the aforementioned films. It isn't even multi-layered enough to cut it as parody.

New Empress Magazine: The Long Goodbye (Blu-Ray Review)

                                      Posted here at New Empress Magazine.