general release

Paddington 

(seen 14 December 2014)

A charming film based on the much loved character created in Michael Bond’s children’s books about a bear from ‘darkest Peru’ with a penchant for marmalade and an ineradicable belief that he will be welcomed in London.

The film is well made with the progress of the Brown family from mild dysfunction to warm happiness neither implausible nor too sentimental (though entirely predictable). The pro-tolerance and pro-immigration message could hardly be missed by any adult with the remotest sensitivity – the idea of stolen jobs and benefits fraud could not possibly get a hearing in this world, and the villainy is entirely fairy-tale like, though grounded in a warped sense of entitlement to fame. The picture of Lodon is of course rather too glowing and anodyne – but it reflects an aspiration towards good-heartedness which is exemplary in these rather too mean-minded times.

The cast is excellent, the adults taking themselves seriously so that their foolishnesses and failings will not be seen as condescending to children in the audience, with occasional flashes of self-mockery which older people will pick up as rather sly. Paddington himself is engagingly presented in visual terms and beautifully voiced by Ben Whishaw.

Much comment has arisen because the British Film Board issued a PG certificate (the first level of restriction) on account of levels of fear and violence and ‘innuendo’. This seems to be laughable. Was the innuendo that Mr Brown (the charming Hugh Bonneville) made a throwaway remark that being dressed as a tea lady was ‘strangely liberating’? Was Nicole Kidman so terrifying? – Her character was hardly as bad as a pantomime villain who on the stage can often terrify children by talking directly to them. She said in an interview that she would not take her children to see the film as it was too frightening, but perhaps there would be more dismay in seeing one's own mother performing a 'bad' character than in seeing an actress not personally known by the child viewer.  A storm in a teacup – or perhaps in a marmalade jar.

Interstellar 

(seen 3 December 2014)

Christopher Nolan’s new film is a science fiction epic which has inevitably drawn comparisons with ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, since it deals with large issues about the fate of humanity in relation to space exploration.

Where the older film took the longer view, famously starting with ‘The Dawn of Man’, and intimating that another form of life was kick starting new developments in the human story, in ‘Interstellar’ the motivation for exploration is the gradual desertification and impoverishment of the planet Earth. If somewhere else is not found, humanity will soon cease to exist. Luckily, probes have been sent out and some have sent back encouraging signals, and the ex-pilot Cooper, frustrated with the farming life and led by apparently mysterious promptings to a hidden research institute, is persuaded to lead the follow-up mission and prepare for mass migration.

We are not really in Kubrick territory, for a number of reasons. For one thing, the science is somewhat laboriously explained, with much talk of wormholes, black holes and the effects of relativity to account for various events portrayed. In the heat of the moment of watching, this may pass, but on reflection it is clear that the exposition is clunky and it may still be begging some questions. This leads to another feature, namely that human motivations, dynamics and tensions are far more significant in this film than in Kubrick’s. Cooper’s back story informs much of his behaviour on the mission, and the fate of those he leaves behind is also crucial. There is also, despite the usual muddle of human affairs, more human self-sufficiency than ‘2001’ allows. Where Kubrick’s film wore its scientific credentials so lightly that they contributed to the general sense of bafflement and excitement, here everything is explained. This is used to some advantage in that the research needed to effect the final migration is still incomplete and needs further work (not to say a Eureka moment); but it renders the atmosphere far more pedestrian than the minimal explanations provided by Kubrick.

On its own terms ‘Interstellar’ is often spectacular to watch, with actions in space and events on other planets that are well-imagined and excitingly presented. Whether the depiction of a black hole and an event horizon can be plausible (and whether anyone can survive such a close look at them) remains to be seen – this is perhaps the greatest hostage to fortune that the film allows itself in visual terms. Otherwise, the future sophistication of the spacecraft seems sensibly grounded in modern knowledge. There are still massive thruster rockets, but also nicely imagined instrument panels and intriguingly constructed robot computers which remain mercifully unflappable, though alas not entirely immune from having sentimental moments built around them.

There is a film score of widely varying dynamic, from quiet to overwhelming, and this is well judged especially on the occasions where the crashing chords are followed by the total silence of space. In a suitably configured cinema the seats are shaking with the spacecraft when the camera is ‘inside’ it, making the contrast with anything seen to be happening across the vacuum of space even more pronounced. However, there are occasional problems with this soundscape – on at least two occasions it was really hard to catch the dialogue when important things were being said, not because there was too much else happening but because the words (spoken under emotional stress) simply became blurred.

There are also some problems with the general narrative setting. While the concerns and foibles of the main characters invest them with human interest, they are (while on earth) surrounded either by technicians doing what technicians always do, quite facelessly, or else by other farmers who are just being farmers. The ecological threat remains impersonal and unfocussed when only Cooper’s family appear to have breathing problems because of the dust, while other children appear completely impassive in open pick-up trucks with the dust swirling around them; and the one punch thrown seems to leave no bruise.

The most queasy moment of interaction between a major and a minor character in the film occurs early when current teaching methods for the farm children are shown to be highly questionable – but this is the only hint that suffering humanity might be reacting with anything other than stoic fortitude to the threat of universal starvation. The nobility of the major enterprise of the film is compromised only by surmountable fallibility which is far less problematic than anything posed by HAL in ‘2001’.

Interestingly there are two acts of sabotage, but whereas one is borne of desperation and provides a plot twist that is maybe predictable but nonetheless plausible, the other seems merely a device to intensify a dramatic crisis. It might be argued that no-one in the world as it is conceived in the film could think it justified; it is merely melodramatic and it appears to have no consequence other than distracting a character who needs to be somewhere else for the denouement to occur. But there again, it occurs just after the non-bruising punch, in a section where we perhaps need to be most distracted from the science in order to keep believing in the story.

The Imitation Game 

(seen 15 November 2014)

A film about the cryptographer Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) also starring Keira Knightley, Rory Kinnear, and others.

Note - there are spoilers in these comments

The film is a well-made period piece showing how Turing, socially inept, not to say dysfunctional, but with a keen mathematical mind, developed a computing machine that could analyse ciphered messages in an attempt to decipher them. Unfortunately the German ‘Enigma’ machine was so constructed to have 159 million million permutations, and the deciphering code was changed every day; even the machine could not work fast enough to decipher anything before the code changed. It was not until the decryption team realised that they need only look for words which might be common in all messages, that the decryption could be guaranteed – the common words being ‘Heil Hitler’. The dilemma then was to manage the knowledge gained so that the Germans did not suspect that their coding method had been cracked, which meant allowing many German attacks to go unchallenged. Nonetheless it was considered that the decryptions shortened the war significantly and saved many lives.

Turing was a homosexual, and in the early 1950s he was charged with indecent assault of a man after a break-in at his house led Manchester police to track down a man who had slept with him and then thought to burgle the house. Turing was given the option of a prison sentence or a course in hormone treatment, described as chemical castration. He chose the medication, but its side effects led to depression and suicide. His important war work was virtually unknown for many years (due no doubt to the shroudings of the Official Secrets Act), but now he is recognised as a major factor in the development of modern computers, and he received a posthumous pardon in 2013 – of little comfort to anyone I should have thought.

The film is well acted with what looks like a sure sense of period, but it is not entirely satisfactory. The drama is heightened by classic narrative devices to earn our sympathy or outrage – for example, Joan Clark (Keira Knightley) is the only woman to have replied successfully to the crossword puzzle competition, but inevitably when she appears for the next test an officious young man directs her to the secretaries’ rooms. Naturally she then completes the next test in under six minutes after Turing has admitted that it could not be done in less than eight (the time he took). Typical biopic stuff. Then on the night of the breakthrough the first German action to be decrypted involves an attack on a convoy which just happens to be guarded by a brother of the youngest member of the team – but they must logically decide not to warn them. While the ethical dilemma surrounding their knowledge must always have been painfully acute, this episode looked like dramatic licence rather than a genuine event.

Finally the later story surrounding Turing’s arrest is treated almost as a framing device to allow a sympathetic detective (Rory Kinnear) to learn more about Turing’s war service, with some classic homophobic comments reserved for his superiors and colleagues. The ghastliness of the proceedings is hardly touched on, and the full awfulness of the treatment only hinted at in a painful scene between Turing and Clark which is too generic to ‘declining genius’ movies to be much more than mawkish. The whole issue of the period’s homophobia is really not adequately addressed; rather it is decorously alluded to in keeping with the generally decorous period charm.

Given these reservations, the cast do well with their material and Cumberbatch gives a performance both touching to the audience’s eyes and irritating to all the people who had to deal with him. His insecurity and social bafflement is believable; the school scenes showing the young teenager trying to cope with his world and his first serious emotional loss are all very well, but perhaps somewhat formulaic in ‘explaining’ this development. The friend did not look nearly as ill as he turned out to be – though maybe that is a misconception of his illness on my part.

Mr Turner 

(seen 4 November 2014)

Note - there are spoilers in these comments

An excellent film directed by Mike Leigh with an extraordinary performance by Timothy Spall as Turner. How quite such a curmudgeonly and awkward a character as Turner evidently was can be made the engrossing subject of a long film is almost a mystery. Of course the brilliance and popularity of his works provides a hook to audience interest. On the other hand, his behaviour towards people around him – especially a cast off mistress and daughters, he both denying their existence when any talk of family ties is introduced by anyone else in his life, and being inarticulate in their presence, and his housekeeper, whose humanity he seems quite unaware of – is by any standard reprehensible. Yet Spall shows a man cripplingly unable to express himself except through paint, and at times his pent-up emotion is almost painful to witness.

Visually the film is superb, lingering on sunsets and coastal scenes such as must have inspired Turner, with a close attention to period detail in costume and setting. The language spoken is also remarkable, as the screenplay attempts to avoid any anachronistic vocabulary, and indeed relies on extremely old-fashioned idioms and formalities. The cast usually bring this off successfully though on occasion an awkward stiltedness is evident. This is largely the fruit of Leigh’s working methods, whereby the cast inhabit their characters and the turns of phrase appropriate to them in intensive improvisation and rehearsal before a scripted scene if finally fixed, and it puts most ‘historical’ films in the shade for verisimilitude. Not only does this spoken formality remind us that conversation was conducted differently then, but it also entails different posture, different ways of paying attention to others, different conventions of offering and accepting refreshment, and all this is subtly evoked in the film, and is brilliantly used to point up occasions when one or another character fails in social decorum – from the boorishness of Turner himself, to the importunity of Haydon, to the self-satisfied and pompous river of words poured out by the young John Ruskin in his parents’ drawing room.

Ida 

(seen 7 October 2014)

Note there are spoilers in these comments

A beautifully made Polish film, in black and white, set in 1962. Ida, a young girl brought up in a convent and about to take her vows as a nun, is contacted at last by her aunt, who has rebuffed previous efforts by the convent to engage her interest in her niece. The Mother Superior insists that Ida should spend some time with her aunt before taking her final vows, so somewhat unwillingly she travels to her aunt’s apartment.

The film explores themes of family history and loyalty, the catastrophic irruption of the Nazi regime in the recent past, and the stultifying present regime with its material decay and its willed forgetfulness of what has happened only a generation before, in quiet but powerful scenes of interaction between Ida and her aunt, and between them and the people they meet.

The film is exquisitely shot in black and white, with beautifully composed scenes of the nuns and postulants repairing a crucifix and then erecting it in their garden in the snow; with scenes of driving in the countryside, and of the exhumation and reburial of Ida’s parents’ remains. The performances of the two actresses are excellent – Ida, luminous and either appalled or intrigued by the new world around her; her aunt cynical, abrasive, affectionate, and deeply wounded.