The Big Sick is a real tonic

Romantic comedies always have happy endings; it’s in the rules. It doesn’t matter whether the couple meet cute or meet angry – another rule – they always end up together. In that sense, since we know the destination, romcoms have to stand or fall on how well they chart the journey.

The Big Sick is based on the true-life romance of Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon who co-wrote the script which has been shepherded into production by Judd Apatow, the current king of comedy. Our heroes, Kumail, played by Nanjiani (above left), and Emily, played by Zoe Kazan (above right), meet cute at a comedy club where Nanjiani is performing. Their relationship develops promisingly until she develops a rare condition that puts her in a coma; he is then left at a loss.

I know it’s kind of a big plot twist but this,for me, is the weakest part of the movie. The film is heavily promoted as being their real-life romance and it is very difficult to pick up a newspaper or magazine without Nanjiani and a happily recovered Gordon telling their story. So now we know the destination and we also have a fair idea of the journey. Since we know that she must come out of the coma and they have to end up together this poses a problem for the dramatic construction.

With Emily missing for most of the second act and a good part of the third, the film really becomes about Kumail’s relationship with the two sets of parents; his own and hers. The relationship with Emily’s folks – lovely performances from Ray Romano and Holly Hunter – is more traditionally prickly romcom material.

It’s his relationship with his own parents – again great work from Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff – which is the more interesting. They are traditional Pakistanis who have made a success of life in America but they still want to raise their family in traditional Pakistani values, especially in arranged marriages. This is the cue for an endless succession of family dinners with prospective suitors which again can’t go anywhere because we know how it must end.

Although it is possibly the most interesting part of the story, this relationship is curiously unexamined. It is the one storyline which remains unresolved and, curiously, it’s the one story where I really wanted to know how it turned out.

The Big Sick is a classic millennial movie- the best gag in it is an Uber gag -   and since I was born closer to the last millennium than this one then perhaps it’s not for me. That said, like 500 Days of Summer (2009) it is smartly written and very well played and gets under your skin in the best way.

The worst you can say about The Big Sick is that, for me, it felt a little undercooked in places. However, it is a film of enormous charm and you will leave the cinema feeling better than you went in which has to count for something in this day and age.

Dunkirk is a glorious victory for old-fashioned movie making

Given his fondness for bloated extravagance in his storytelling- his last four films have come in at 2 and a half hours minimum - it is surprising that Christopher Nolan confines himself to 106 minutes in Dunkirk. It’s even more surprising, considering his similar tendency for massive exposition dumps, that the dialogue in the film is completely minimal.

The narrative is set up in three lines in a title card and then we are into it. Characters speak only when they have something vital to say because one imagines this is not the sort of scenario that lends itself to banter. The result is a magnificent, visually driven film with scarcely a wasted frame.

The economy of the storytelling is admirable. We don’t need to know about the British Expeditionary Force or The Phoney War, or anything of the sort. This is World War Two seen as a ticking clock narrative; there are 400,000 men on the beaches of Dunkirk in northern France, can they be evacuated before they are slaughtered or captured? That’s it – tick, tick, tick.

We open with a group of young British soldiers which is very quickly reduced to one, archetypally called Tommy (Fionn Whitehead). Within a couple of minutes, we are on the beach, under attack, and for the next 100 minutes on the edge of our seats.

In narrative terms Dunkirk is an exercise in pure cinema. The gift of the film maker is the ability to play with time and Nolan does that by crafting three separate storylines. There is one on The Mole, an artificial jetty from which the soldiers are being evacuated, one from a little ship coming to aid the evacuation, and one from a couple of Spitfire pilots (Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden) doing their best to provide air cover. This is an elemental story of land, sea, and air.

Nolan’s conceit is that the story on the Mole lasts for a week, the one on the boat lasts for a day, and the airborne story lasts for an hour. We however see them all enmesh and finally come together in the space of 106 minutes. This involves Nolan’s favourite editor, Lee Smith, using parallel editing techniques which call to mind Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903).

The result is a sensory disorientation which echoes the fragmentary and shattering experience of combat. The sound design also plays its part with a low-level soundtrack suggesting constant menace which means the threat is as surprising as it is ever-present. On the other hand, the sound mix does make it hard to hear some of the dialogue; not that anyone ever says anything crucial.

The approach to character is similarly random. We follow the characters we follow simply because they are there, their stories intersect as their lives intersect and we pick up the threads. The randomness of the approach means that not only do characters not have back stories, some don’t even have names – Cillian Murphy, for example, is credited as ‘Shivering Soldier’.

This lack of detail actually makes you more involved with the characters, it is easier to empathise with them when all you consider is the purity and the enormity of the threat they are facing. There is none of the stereotypical chirpy Cockney banter of Fifties British war films, none of the noble Dunkirk spirit; these are terrified young men who are prepared to do whatever it takes to survive and get home.

Although it is ostensibly the story of young soldiers there are some grown-ups in the cast too. Kenneth Branagh as the commander on The Mole and Mark Rylance as a weekend sailor doing his duty make fine buttresses to support the rest of the story. In the air Tom Hardy’s Spitfire pilot is a largely mute witness to the drama unfolding below, in many way he is the eyes and ears of the audience.

Famously Nolan shoots on film rather than digital and the effects are instantly apparent. Working on his favoured wide screen format he and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema construct sequence after sequence of lush, rich images. The benefits of Smith’s editing technique come into play here too because Nolan can hold shots longer than normal giving the eye the chance to roam around van Hoytema’s meticulously composed frame. The consequence is moments that make the heart stop and others that make the heart swell. The sequence towards the end which marries a ‘dead’ Spitfire with shades of Elgar’s Nimrod is a genuine thing of beauty.

It goes without saying that you should see Dunkirk. I should also add that you should see it in the biggest format and on the biggest screen you can find. Nolan is offering a genuine epic to affect all of the senses and this exercise in pure cinema deserves to be seen at its very best.

War for the Planet of the Apes is first-class filmmaking

Intelligence is a rare quality in a summer blockbuster so it is a delight to watch War for the Planet of the Apes and be most impressed by its ideas and its thoughtfulness. Despite what the trailers might have you believe this is a lot less action-packed and a lot more cerebral than I was expecting.

Not that it drags. It’s a carefully-staged, beautifully constructed and extremely considered piece of film making by Matt Reeves who, as a writer and director, goes from strength to strength with every project.

War for the Planet of the Apes is a film that looks back and looks forward at the same time. In terms of its influences it looks back to classic Hollywood films; the opening section is from Platoon (1986), the mid-section references The Searchers, (1956) and the final section touches on Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957) – a film incidentally written by the man who wrote the book which kicked off the Planet of the Apes franchise almost 50 years ago. There’s even, just to maintain its epic qualities, a nod to The Ten Commandments (1956) in the coda.

The mid-section is the most interesting. The film is set two years after Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his tribe have been fighting a guerrilla war. They have settled in the forests and left the cities to the humans. But one military faction led by The Colonel (Woody Harrelson) is intent on hunting them down.

After their initial tragic encounter, Caesar, just like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, sets off on an implacable quest for vengeance against The Colonel. This is Caesar as a warrior who has seen too many battles, he is weary and empty. He has looked into the abyss and, to paraphrase Blake, become what he beheld. There is more than a hint of the sort of character Charlton Heston – who was Taylor in the 1968 film – used to play in films like The War Lord (1965), El Cid (1961) and The Ten Commandments.

If Caesar is Ethan Edwards then Harrelson is Colonel Kurtz, a man who has gone native with disastrous consequences. It has to be said though that Caesar is the more individuated character, Harrelson is a little one-dimensional.

This mid-section also contains, for me, the film’s only mis-step with the addition of a new character called – ironically - Bad Ape and played by Steve Zahn. Bad Ape seems to be there as comic relief in a film that doesn’t really need it. Rather like Hank Worden as Mose Harper in The Searchers; it’s my favourite film but even I struggle to justify Worden’s inclusion other than as a member of the John Ford stock company.

War for the Planet of the Apes doesn’t really need this kind of sentiment, especially when they also have a sick child and an orphaned baby chimpanzee. To be honest I thought the character of Bad Ape was an irritation and a distraction from the bigger themes.

The triumph of the original series of Apes movies was their elliptical nature; the last one took us to the point where the first one became possible. The same thing happens in War for the Planet of the Apes. Reeves works very hard to set up the world that makes the 1968 film possible. By the end of this film we understand how humans de-evolved, where Nova comes from, the origins of the Alpha Omega cult, even the geography of the 1968 world including the Forbidden Zone.

All of this is testament to the sure-footed and meticulous way that Matt Reeves has made his film. He is a confident and single-minded director, not afraid to expect his audience to empathise with a simian lead character when it ponders the nature of humanity. Similarly Michael Seresin’s beautifully nuanced cinematography captures a world which is on the brink of retreating completely from the 21^st century.

None of this would work however without Andy Serkis’s stunning performance as Caesar. On the one hand you marvel at how far motion capture has come even over the three films, but the technology would be meaningless without the delicacy and subtlety of his performance. I think you can make a case for a Best Actor Oscar nomination here but if not that, then surely a special Academy Award to acknowledge his contribution to his craft.

One final plea. Can we stop here please? I know there is a talk from Reeves of a fourth film but there is an elegance about this trilogy. By the time we reach the end of this film George Taylor and his crew are already 50 years into their journey, and we know what happens when they land. Do we really need any more?