Tuesday, 24 July 2007

Archive transfer - Day one

FILM REVIEW
OUTLAW - written and directed by Nick Love, 2007

As a big fan of Nick Love, I'm always looking forward to new films of his. And I looked forward even more to the idea that the film was going to serve as an indictment of the dire state of the British justice system. So it was quite a let down to see that the resulting film descends into half-formed, slightly-incoherent statements - almost as if the director himself doesn't truly believe in the subject matter, but is assuming his core audience does. Maybe they do, but what we have here is a potentially very important film (and I would argue on some level that it still is) becoming like a whisper in a thunderstorm. Rather than show the vigilantes cleaning up the streets, they are instead set upon underlings of a mute local gangster, with mere lip-service paid to the pre-release hype. It's all very well to moan about the state of the country, but for characters who make big noise about 'standing up and fighting' to instead go through (what feels like) rushed story motions, there is a deflating sense that neither character nor writer is really walking the walk.

That being said, the individual sequences are very good. Nick Love's visual flair is present and correct, and the film is shot through with the kind of energy that only he can muster. It is oddly structured - a curious dream/premonition sequence opens things up, and only the talent of his cast - in particular Sean Bean, Danny Dyer and Lenny James - holds it together in the early stages. Bean's intensity is great, and he really should have been the focus of the film, to give the narrative better drive.What might have also helped is if the director acquired himself a writing partner, someone to rein in his disparate, brilliant ideas into a coherent stories about characters in whom the audience can invest.

Stylish, then, and never boring, but the faux-passion is too much to get past. I don't believe Mr. Love was truly invested in the 'message' of this film, and as such the experience is much more hollow than Charlie Bright or The Football Factory. I read an interview with Mr. Love around the time of The Business' cinematic release, where he said he had an idea centred around a screwed up, rich family. This is the kind of film I'd like to see from him now, for - on the evidence of this - he has truly exhausted the inner-city urban milieu.
** 1/2 out of 5.


The Departed - written by William Monahan, directed by Martin Scorsese. 2006

First things first: this new film by Martin Scorsese is not going to stand up to the scrutiny of time the way his classics such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino have and will continue to do. This is not to say that Scorsese has delivered an artistic disappointment, far from it - The Departed fuses Scorsese's cineliterate panache with a gleeful lack of pretension that is certain to give him the most commercially-succesful film of his career. But where the earlier efforts were films, weighed down with spiritual and/or thematic concerns, concerns which bled onto the storytelling methods and visual technique, The Departed is a movie - the most full-on, story-driven film that Scorsese has made since his last re-make, Cape Fear, in 1991. Does this signal a dumbing down of the sensibilities of a director now so finally expasperated at his inexplicable inability to garner a Best Director Oscar?
Absolutely not, for Scorsese tells stories better than any director in Hollywood. And while the expaseration may be true, this is not a dumbed-down movie. In fact, it may well be the smartest and most engaging film you'll see all year. That it manages to be so while still containing all of Scorsese's staple themes - guilt, redemption, the precariousness of modern masculinity, and the bonds between men - makes it damn near a miraculous piece of work.
As we all know, it borrows its premise from the wonderful 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (and I'll wax lyrical about the comparisons in another blog entry, I'm sure). The Departed follows two young men in the Massecheusetts (sic) State Police - fast-rising, cocky Colin Sullivan (Damon), and wrong-side-of-the-tracks Billy Costigan (DiCaprio). Each is picked to be a covert spy, but for opposite sides of the law. Billy is recruited to be an undercover cop with a mission to infiltrate the ring of Boston kingpin Frank Costello (Nicholson); meanwhile, Costello himself has earmarked Sullivan to be his eyes and eyes in the PD since childhood.
The film spans two tumultuous years in their lives as both begin to wilt and crack under the weight of their daily deceptions. When each side is made aware of the other's existence, the race is on for both young men to find the other first...

Such a flimsy summary of the film's premise really doesn't do justice to William Monahan's script, which has taken a taut Cantonese film, drowning in tension, and beefed it up so that every character (save the muddle that is Vera Farmiga's police psychiatrist, dating Sullivan, counselling Billy) has quirks, mannerisms, and the suggestion of a third dimension so lacking in most Hollywood films. By adding the element of an ingrained Catholicism of the Boston Irish, Monahan promotes The Departed from the 'competent thriller' that was its source material, to something approaching a modern tragedy. Indeed, issues of morality abound, and while not every decision a character makes has clear-cut reasoning, you never doubt the authenticity of the moments.
This is as much to do with the acting as it is the writing. Damon plays superbly against type as a cocky, near-weasel-like detective who is slwoly realising he has been in over his head since the day Jack Nicholson's crime lord first picked him out in a convenience store. Nicholson has never been more enjoyable as a completely racist, misogynistic, thoroughly evil gangland kingpin - such is the glee with which he spouts his (presumably oft-improvised) dialogue that he recalls his performance in such signature films as One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, or The Shining. (Indeed, the film is so dismissive of the current constraints of Hollywood's liberal, PC brigade, that it at times seems a harkback to the glorious decade in which directors like Scorsese, Coppola, DePalma, Friedkin and Cimino thought big, shot bigger and didn't give a damn about studios or box office).
The supporting cast is, by and large, superb - special mention must go to Alec Baldwin, who - while clearly resurrecting his Glengarry Glen Ross persona - nevertheless continues to prove that he is still one of the most reliable of supporting players in America. British acting living legend Ray Winstone also cuts a memorably fearsome figure as Costello's right hand man, Mr French; although his accent is a little hit and miss, Winstone's gruff delivery and undoubted natural hardness make you believe him. As mentioned, Vera Farmiga is a bit lost in the field of Y chromosomes (not uncommon for a Scorsese film), but I'll chose to blame one of two flaws in the script - that being that Monahan has amalgamated, essentially, THREE female characters from the original film into one, multi-functional, and very questionable female presence in the film. As noted, Scorsese doesn't often get women right in his films, and one of the ways he tries to compensate for this is to make them the sort of 'moral anchor' in the film. Farmiga serves this role, but at times you do get the feeling that she is there to dampen any fears of homoeroticism.
But, thesping wise, this film belongs to Leonardo DiCaprio, who has finally found a Scorsese role that plays perfectly to his physical appearance and acting strengths. In Gangs of New York he lacked the requisite presence to hang in there with the might of Daniel Day-Lewis; and while I found his performance in The Aviator completely worthy of the Oscar he didn't win (damn you, Jamie Foxx), I can see why some took issue with his portraying of Howard Hughes. Here, DiCaprio gets to make use of his natural, near-infuriating boyishness, and he has just the right amount of presence now to play young buck in the crime outfit, dominated by heavyweights like Nicholson and Winstone. And, throughout the film, his Billy Costigan is on a downward slope to paranoia and breakdown, a decline that DiCaprio charts with a subtlety that so few of his contemporaries can manage. If this wasn't such a pulpy, commercially-minded film, he would be a shoo-in for many, many nominations, and might yet surprise me by acquiring them.

But, as with any Scorsese film, the discussion will always centre around him. Not even Steven Spielberg works under the weight of expectation that Scorsese does; and it's a testament to the fact that Coppola has made nothing by rubbish for the last twenty-odd years, and DePalma too, has lost his way, that film lovers still get passionate about his work. I can't imagine too many devotees being disappointed by this film. After two Oscar hunting films, he has finally said, F*** it, and threw his considerable talents behind a balls-to-the-wall thriller that is by turns, Scrosese-esque and Hitchockian, with bags of mass appeal. Spielberg could have made a 4-star movie of this; David Fincher could have done the script proud. But only Scorsese could walk the commercial and artistic line so deftly, so brilliantly, and leave his peers and pretenders standing.
The Departed is the film of the year, no question. And film lovers everywhere should rejoice at having Martin Scorsese back at the top of his game.
*****

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