The girl on the slow train to nowhere

Justin Theroux and Emily Blunt

Given that the book on which this film is based was in the best-seller charts this time last year there is a definite take the money and run feel to the film version. In narrative terms it is full of plot holes, in emotional terms it’s as deep as a puddle; in script terms it could do with a rewrite or two. In short, it feels rushed, like a film cashing in on a hot book.

Full disclosure. I didn’t care for the book. I thought it was one-dimensional and none of the characters was clearly defined to the point where I frequently couldn’t tell which was which. They are not individuated and they all have the same voice.

Most of these faults, plus a few more, are carried into the film which is essentially the story of three women; Rachel (Emily Blunt), Megan (Haley Bennet), and Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Without being too specific their lives are interlinked and Rachel provides the narrative thread as she observes the other two from her commuter train.

One morning Rachel seems something troubling from her carriage. Later we discover one of the other women is missing and Rachel may hold the key to the mystery. Rachel however is an alcoholic and spends her days in a daze as it were, so she is not regarded as reliable.

The story moves as though it were on rails itself. There is no depth, no characterisation, in fact not much of any interest until the mystery is solved. It is a by the numbers thriller with plot points and action beats ticked off with joyless regularity and everyone behaving as they do simply because that’s how characters in movies like this behave.

I felt especially sorry for Emily Blunt, a fine actor who gets to exhibit a series of characteristics without ever getting close to playing a character. She is little more than a walking exposition dump as her voice over tells us what’s going on and how everyone is feeling.

It’s just a thought but maybe now and then director Tate Taylor might have shown us instead of just telling us. This is lazy story telling.

There is no reason to empathise with Rachel apart from common human decency about the fact that bad things keep happening to her. In spite of this she carries on doing illogical things because if she – or anyone else – exhibited a fraction of common sense the film would fall apart. The same can be said of Bennet and Ferguson, they are cyphers not characters. There is no sense of internal life, just mechanical plot points.

The mechanistic nature of the film extends to Taylor’s direction which gives this the feel of a TV movie and, sadly, the cinematography of Charlotte Bruus Christensen. The film seems static and lifeless and when you compare this to her work on The Hunt (2012) or Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) it’s a major disappointment.

One final thought as my mind wandered during this film. It’s a film aimed at women, based on a best-seller written by a woman which was bought by hundreds of thousands of women, and it has been adapted by a women. Why then did I feel that there was a rather nasty judgemental tone to the whole proceedings?

If we consider the three characters here, one is an infertile drunk, another has lost a child and wants no more, while the third stole another woman’s man; they do not conform to generic wife and mother stereotypes. I couldn’t help feeling that the film exists only to judge these women and then punish them for their choices. That, to me, doesn’t seem terribly empowering in this day and age.

Magnificent? These seven are barely competent

Denzel Washington and the rest of the Seven

Director Antoine Fuqua claims to love Westerns; but how could you remake a classic and not claim such a thing. However, if he is a fan, then he doesn’t appear to have learned a lot from the films he has studied.

The Magnificent Seven doesn’t come anywhere close to the hyperbole of the title. It is a pale imitation of the John Sturges 1960 version which is itself based on the superlative Seven Samurai (1954) by Akira Kurosawa. Full disclosure, the Sturges version was the first film I ever saw and I am ridiculously attached to it.

Both the Sturges and the Kurosawa film shared a plot in that a village which is fed up being plundered by rapacious bandits scrapes together as much money as they can afford to hire ronin samurai in the first case, and gunfighters in Sturges’ version. It turns out the money only stretches to seven warriors but they each have their own quixotic reasons for signing on.

In the latest version the bad guy is a rapacious capitalist played by Peter Sarsgaard in a show of cartoon villainy that stops just short of foaming at the mouth. He wants to effectively buy up a small town and as a declaration of intent he shoots a few people, sets fire to their church and says he’ll await their reply.

Their response is for the newly-widowed Haley Bennet to go in search of a hired gun which she finds, conveniently, in the shape of Denzel Washington who is just finishing a job in the next town. The timeline seems odd at this point but it’s one of many such moments so let’s not go into it right now.

Washington puts together a motley crew including gambler Chris Pratt, sharpshooter Ethan Hawke, mountain man Vincent D’Onofrio, and three other characters who in the interests of diversity appear to be a Korean, a Mexican, and a Native American. I say this because we know next to nothing about these three characters who only appear to be there so that Fuqua can claim he’s making a diversity Western.

It’s not really diverse if they are only there, literally, to make up the numbers is it? I would imagine each of those characters has an interesting story but we never hear of it, in fact we never hear about anyone’s reasons or motivations. Unlike the earlier versions there’s no sense of atonement or honour redeemed by any of them.

This is a by-the-numbers movie. After the first fight in which Washington and his men take over the town, the stage is set for a finale in which Sarsgaard hires a small army, hundreds of men, to take the town back.

The Magnificent Seven is one of those movies where impossible odds don’t matter. Each one of the seven has a weapon that can’t miss, each of the bad guys couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. Wounds that would be mortal to anyone else are shrugged off by the good guys who appear borderline invulnerable. Despite all this the action scenes are very dull. It’s all about violence, there is no sense of action or excitement.

In terms of influences the film borrows one Steve McQueen gag and the James Coburn knife-fight from Sturges, and the fortification of the town from Kurosawa. Nonetheless Fuqua’s direction is heavy-handed. He lacks the elegance of Kurosawa or indeed the crisp efficiency of the underrated Sturges. This is the video-game school of directing; how many corpses can you pile up in the shortest possible time.

The one other steal from Sturges is Elmer Bernstein’s classic theme. It is used only once, thankfully, and even then in a fairly muted manner suggesting it’s slightly embarrassed to be there, as well it might be.

Julieta - a welcome return to form from one of the masters of cinema

Emma Suarez as the older Julieta

Pedro Almodovar’s recent output has been, to be kind, a little patchy. The consolation is that even a sub-par Almodovar is more interesting than a lot of directors’ best joined-up film making. But when the Spanish maestro hits top form, as he does with Julieta, the results are spectacular.

This is without doubt one of the films of the year. And, like a cinematic version of the first cuckoo of spring, hopefully marks the end of a lacklustre summer and heralds a much more interesting, on paper at least, autumn.

Julieta is a rich and layered story of love and loss, of grief and guilt, and of the fundamental triumph of hope. It is an intelligent and thoughtful film which is not afraid to take its time, or to provide you with moments to simply appreciate the characters and their situation. Undercut with this however is a sense of foreboding, brilliantly manifest through the music of Alberto Iglesias.

We meet Julieta first as a woman in her middle years, played by Emma Suarez, preparing to leave Madrid for a new life in Portugal with her lover. A chance encounter with a young woman on the street changes her plans and her life. The young woman is a friend of Julieta’s daughter Antia, who has been missing for twelve years; she reveals that she met Antia recently on holiday.

The shock discovery prompts Julieta to change her plans and confront her life. As she sits down to compose a long letter to her missing daughter the film moves into flashback with Adriana Ugarte taking over as the younger Julieta.

As she tells her story we realise that this is a woman whose every opportunity for happiness has been compromised by circumstance. Her story starts with meeting Antia’s father on a train; he is one of two men she meets on that journey and her encounters with these men defines her entire life from that point. Every meeting, every relationship is shaded with loss and sadness from here on.

Given that we are told that Antia is missing we are inclined to see this film as a mystery. Almodovar encourages us to do this with overtones of Hitchcock; the structure and that soundtrack call to mind echoes of Vertigo, another missing person classic. There are shades of Rebecca too and Almodovar also has one of the characters refer to himself as being like an obsessive out of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

But fundamentally the mystery here is Julieta. What happened to turn the vibrant young woman into the haunted heroine of her later years? The transformation between the two characters incidentally is a stunning coup de cinema and a welcome piece of simple invention after months of emotionless CGI.

Almodovar directs the film superbly. He wrote the script himself from three Alice Munro short stories which are seamlessly joined here. Narratively the film works wonderfully; there is one final surprising plot twist which should really have been revealed earlier but it is just about forgivable under the circumstances.

His gift for creating mood is undiminished. Few directors use setting and production design to illustrate a character’s internal life as well as Almodovar does. It is less hysterical here than in films such as Volver but, if we consider this as late-stage Almodovar, then the film maker has emerged in his maturity as a rival to Bergman in his analysis of the human condition.

The casting is perfect. Other directors might have taken one actor and aged her up or down as the story demands. Almodovor correctly shuns this artifice. Ugarte as the younger Julieta and Suarez as the older woman are plainly two versions of the same character. Both actors are pitch perfect; it is not difficult to see the younger woman in Suarez’s performance and vice versa. It’s also wonderful to see the return of Almodovar favourite Rossy de Palma as a Mrs Danvers style housekeeper who adds to the Hitchcockian subtext.

From start to finish Julieta is a joy which should be celebrated as a return to form of a masterly director and is one of those rare must-see movies.