People often complain there aren’t many movies about women’s issues. This week there are five newly arrived in town, ranging from Oscar possibilities to potboiler nonsense. Meanwhile, Johnny Depp has another misfire and Turkish films get their own festival.
Here’s the list:
Two Days, One Night: 4 stars
Still Alice: 3 ½
The Boy Next Door: 2
Cake: 3
Felix and Meira: 2 ½
Half of a Yellow Sun: 2 ½
Mortdecai: 1 ½
Turkish Film Festival: --
Strange Magic: --
TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT: Working class dramas are rare enough in the movies; ones as truthful and affecting as this one are more than uncommon. And watching an actor as superb as Marion Cotillard give such a nuanced performance in one, well it’s almost unheard of. The Oscar winner has justifiably been nominated again for this portrait of a desperate woman trying to save her job and her self-esteem.
She’s an employee at a solar energy plant in Belgium where offshore competition is forcing some cost-cutting. Either she goes, or the others lose their annual bonus. They voted to send her away but the boss is allowing a re-vote and she has one weekend to convince some of them to change their mind. As she visits them one by one she encounters some support and even tears but a lot of self-interest and a bit of stonewalling. Each is a mini-drama in itself and tension builds. We also gradually come to understand why she was the target in the first place. Cotillard and the Dardenne Brothers directing her have fashioned a powerful portrait. No histrionics, but a predicament anybody who’s seen or been involved in downsizing can feel for. The ending is not what Hollywood would do but is satisfying anyway. (International Village) 4 out of 5
STILL ALICE: Julianne Moore also elevates her new drama with a subtle and nuanced performance and she’s also Oscar-nominated for it, having already won a Golden Globe. She makes us understand and actually feel what it must be like to struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease as it starts taking away identity. She plays a linguistics professor at Columbia University so what she’s losing is most everything through which she defined herself. At first it’s just small lapses of memory. Later on, in a very strong scene, it’s her dignity. She can’t find the bathroom door and wets herself as she stands there lost and confused.
The film doesn’t show all the effects of the disease. It’s not grim like Amour or even as moving as Julie Christie’s decline in Away From Her. But it shows enough and step by step tells us the facts, takes us along for the MRI and the Cat Scan and explains that the early-onset Alzheimer’s she has is rare but genetic. Her two daughters, one played by Kristen Stewart, may get it too. Her husband (Alec Baldwin) is supportive although in a soap-ish turn he is up for an out-of-town promotion. These melodramatic bits insert some TV disease-of-the-week flavor but for most of the way the focus is squarely where it belongs: on one woman’s fear at her mind slipping away. One plot turn pays off nicely. She records a video message to herself advising suicide and when she watches it much later with the disease far advanced, we see two dramatically different sides of her. It a small example of the brilliance of Moore’s acting. (5th Avenue) 3 ½ out of 5
THE BOY NEXT DOOR: This one is not at all on the same level. It’s the kind of silly junk about women we get too often from Hollywood. The fact that a woman wrote it and Jennifer Lopez co-produced it doesn’t excuse anything. She’s a victim in this story, increasingly in danger because she was sort of attracted to a hunky 19-year-old guy (Ryan Guzman) who moved in next door and succumbed when he came on to her with a no-stopping persistence. She’ll regret that.
She’s a high school teacher of classic literature, if you can imagine that. Her lips are always shinny with fresh lip gloss and when that guy, who can quote by heart from the Iliad, joins her class you know scandal and worse are on the way. The problem is, it’s all so phony that you never get involved. Well, maybe in a campy way. “It got pretty wet here,” the guy says in a dazzling bit of double entendre. She dumped her husband for cheating and now has this guy coming on to her. The plot develops like Single White Female and other old films about psychos gradually revealed and ends in a violent showdown in a burning barn. It’s less fun than that sounds. (Scotiabank and many suburban theatres) 2 out of 5
CAKE: There’s no gloss on Jennifer Aniston’s lips here, or any makeup at all. Just scars on her cheeks, chin and arms from an unexplained accident and a bitter vein of anger and self-pity in her mind. She covers it with a stinging acerbic wit that unfortunately gets her kicked out of the chronic pain therapy circle she attends. Then the story takes a weird turn and forgoes much of its credibility. She’s haunted by the suicide of another woman in the circle and to understand it, inserts herself into the life of the woman’s husband (Sam Worthington). She also visits the highway bridge where it happened and has recurring visions in which the woman (Anna Kendrick) taunts her and urges that she kill herself too.
It’s a gimmicky and relatively light view of dealing with grief. The visions do economically get across the turbulence inside her mind but her actions aren’t always probable. They seem imagined; not real. In contrast, her bitchy relations with her patient housekeeper (Adriana Barraza) and their drive to Tijuana to buy drugs are totally believable. Inside these mixed elements, Aniston gives a fine performance as an annoying woman, imperious and driven by bitterness but looking for a reason to change. The ending is ambiguous (maybe) and sudden. (International Village and Coquitlam) 3 out of 5
FÉLIX AND MEIRA: Both the Toronto and Whistler film festivals gave big awards to this Quebec film. I don’t know what they were on about. It’s a small film with a familiar story distinguished largely by the entry it affords us into a closed community. Meira lives in Montreal’s Hassidic community but wants free of the tight rules it imposes on her. She’s told it’s her duty to have children. She says some women have “four, six, sometimes 14.” She takes birth control pills. She listens to forbidden R & B music and in one scene watches a video of Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing gospel.
Then she meets Felix and though she’s married and forbidden to look men into their eyes she strikes up a companionship with the neighborhood loner. The film shows their relationship grow into something more but is slow and somewhat muddled doing it. And it takes a serious mistep when it has Felix dress up as a Hassidic himself to learn more. The scene is absurd and should have been caught by director Maxime Giroux. He got to know the community because he lived nearby. But then that’s also why he managed to stage scenes that come off as real with many intimate details.
Israeli actress Hadas Yaron is luminous and endearing as Meira. In her last movie, made in Israel, she was also Hassidic, a young woman under pressure to marry, for the good of the colony. Its storyline was more compelling. (Cinematheque) 2 ½ out of 5
Also at the Cinemathque …
HALF OF A YELLOW SUN: Two years ago when Chiwetel Ejiofor wowed the Toronto Film Festival in 12 Years a Slave, he also appeared there in this film. It’s finally re-surfaced and it’s clear why it had disappeared so long. The story is engaging and important but it’s got problems in how it’s told.
The time is the 1960s in Nigeria when part of the country split off and declared independence under the name Biafra. That led to a bloody civil war. The film follows the effect on a professional-class family who have to leave their bright, modern urban homes and are forced to relocate to a refugee camp. Ejiofor and his wife (Thandie Newton) are both academics. Her sister runs a factory the family owns and sleeps with an English novelist. It’s hard to follow why they’re uprooted though. The director and the author of the source novel are both Nigerian and while it’s fascinating to see a story about Africa told by Africans, it seems they’ve not felt it necessary to explain everything. The story is jagged, not always flowing, but the scenes of military violence are harrowing. (Cinematheque) 2 ½ out of 5
MORTDECAI: Johnny Depp channels the great English comedian Terry-Thomas to no great effect. He’s got the upper class twit manner and even a gap in his front teeth but comes off as an embarrassing pretender with a silly moustache. Mind you he’s got little to work with here; few jokes that work, a lot of frantic running around and an art heist plot that makes little sense and never does resolve itself completely.
Depp is a penniless art dealer in England who considers himself witty and debonair. His wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) disagrees. When a priceless Goya painting goes missing, an agent (Ewan McGregor) from the British secret service Mi5 asks for his help finding it (and incidentally makes moves on his wife). For the rest of the movie sex play and international crime criss-cross so that we can get lots of double entendres, car chases and gun play. When the action gets to Los Angeles and Jeff Goldblum enters, we’re forced to recall how much better The Grand Budapest Hotel was at combining elements like this. Here there’s little wit and few laughs, a lot of empty dialog and a lot of vomiting. But we do get Depp running around at one point with his pants fallen down around his ankles. Kind of like his career in his recent films.(International Village and suburban theatres)1 ½ out of 5
TURKISH FILM FESTIVAL: It was a few years ago at the Vancouver International Film Festival that I saw a stunning movie called Bliss. That started me watching out for films from Turkey whether they’re totally home grown, like the current Winter Sleep, or hybrids made with and/or about countries like Germany.
I’ve seen some wonderful, often intense films about the human condition from there and that’s why this new festival is something to check out. It’s only on through the weekend at the VanCity Theatre and according to a story in the Georgia Straight it tries to bridge the gap between the art house we tend see over here and the middle range film people over there favor. Tonight’s opening film, called Coming Soon, is from a comedy specialist and deals with a DVD pirate trying to go straight.
Sivas is about dogfighting in Anatolia (the same region as Winter Sleep) and Turkish Passport is a documentary about diplomats who saved Jews during the Nazi years. The Butterfly’s Dream celebrates the art of poetry through the story of two amateurs.
You can read about all the films at http://www.vtff.ca/
STRANGE MAGIC: When Disney bought George Lucas’s Star Wars empire, they also got this animated feature about goblins, elves and fairies. Lucas wrote the story, Oscar-winner Gary Rydstrom directed it and the voices of Evan Rachel Wood, Kristin Chenoweth, Alan Cumming and Maya Rudolph are in it but Disney seems reluctant to push it. There were no previews locally for instance; probably a bad sign. The story has a princess trying to rescue her sister from an evil insect. It’s accompanied by a batch of favorite tunes chosen by Lucas himself by the likes of Elvis Presley, Deep Purple, The Troggs and many others. The reviews in the US have not been kind. (International Village and suburban theatres)