Beale Street talks and sends a powerful message

It was Rihanna who found love in a hopeless place and that may well be an accurate summary of where the two protagonists of If Beale Street Could Talk find themselves. Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016) is stunning; if I see a better film this year I will count myself fortunate. The fact that this film has nowhere near the same amount of Oscar love is one of those baffling cases which can only be explained by the fact that people do stupid things sometimes.

The film is based on James Baldwin’s book of the same name and Jenkins, who wrote the script, is bold enough to incorporate large chunks of Baldwin’s original in the narration and even the dialogue of some of the characters. This elevates the screenplay with a fierce intelligence which, coupled with the use of documentary footage and images, ground the film in reality. This is a story which is hard to dismiss, even if you wanted to.

Set in New York in the 1970s it is a love story between two young black people; Tish (Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James). It is a picture book romance undone by the vicious bigotry of one New York policeman who falsifies evidence against Fonny on a rape charge. The allegations are false but Fonny is mostly guilty of being a young black man. Tish however, with the support of her formidable family, is determined to prove his innocence and get him out.

The flashback/flash forward style of storytelling gives the film an almost fairy-tale quality.

Tish’s inherent goodness and determination can be felt in almost every frame, Jenkins also focuses on Fonny as an artist. He creates beautiful pieces out of wood and James Laxton’s camera lingers on his craft. In any other film Tish and Fonny would rise above but not here, bad things do happen to good people and it becomes a question of how they deal with it

There is a lovely scene in which Fonny encourages a sceptical Tish to indulge in the fantasy of renting a loft in the Village. It’s a touching moment in which we, and they, are invited to consider the possibilities of other circumstances. Instead the film acknowledges the difficulties of their lives; Brian Tyree Henry has a chilling speech about what can be done to a young black man in one of the film’s most powerful sequences. But acknowledgement does not mean acceptance. The families rally round, they will live within the system and try to use it to fund the case.

The performances are universally marvellous, especially from Layne and James, but the stand out is Regina King who is simply magnificent as Tish’s mother. Her confrontation with Fonny’s accuser is chilling and intensely moving.

If Beale Street Could Talk is visually stunning. Although set in the 1970s we do not have the usual grimy washed out palette. Instead Jenkins and his Moonlight cinematographer James Laxton paint pictures in romantic reds, deep greens, and other lush, saturated tones. This is like an urban version of a Douglas Sirk film and the richness of the colour scheme evokes the fundamental richness of this relationship.

By the time we reach the end of Tish and Fonny’s journey we have been through an emotional wringer. The ending should be tragic, and to a certain extent it is, but there is always love and perhaps the place isn’t so hopeless after all.

Alita: Battle Angel tackles the uncanny valley

It seems bizarre that for a man who is undoubtedly one of the great cinema directors, James Cameron’s output is so limited. From Piranha II in 1981 to the present day he has directed only eight films. They have, almost without exception, been phenomenally successful but even so, it’s a niggardly amount.

The truth is that Cameron is a man with a life beyond cinema. His twin passions seem to be exploring the frontiers of our planet and doing the same for the frontiers of technology. The not entirely unintended consequence of all this is that he has changed the face of cinema in the process.

Directing seems like a distraction and Alita: Battle Angel seems like an ideal exemplar of his career. He actually started developing the idea with Guillermo Del Toro almost 20 years ago. The idea was that he would direct a film with an empowered heroine that his then 9-year-old daughter could watch. She’s now in her mid-20s and Cameron has moved out of the director’s chair in favour of Robert Rodriguez, but as producer he still has a clear and abiding influence on the final product,

Based on a hit manga series, Alita is set in the 26^th century some 300 years after an event known as The Fall in which all of the sky cities in which we live fell to the ground following a Martian invasion attempt. There is only one sky city left, Zalem, where the elite live; the rest of us live in Iron City a dystopian community that exists in the shadow of Zalem. The inhabitants of Iron City make a living by picking through the scraps that are literally dumped from the sky.

Doctor Ido (Christopher Waltz) spends his days scavenging the techno-scrap for material he can use to repair and repurpose his human-cyborg hybrid patients. One day he finds what appears to be a functioning android head which he grafts onto a cyborg body; this is Alita (Rosa Salazar).

Alita remembers nothing of her past and the Gepetto-like Ido tries to protect her. However she keeps getting mental flashbacks suggesting she was some kind of robot warrior. It is only when the corrupt Vector (Mahershala Ali), who runs the brutal Motorball sports franchise, comes for her that Alita discovers her true and deadly purpose.

I confess I enjoyed Alita more than I expected to. I went initially out of curiosity to see what Cameron’s tech looked like but got caught up in the energy and excitement of what is a better than average action movie. Cameron has done a tremendous job of world building; Iron City seems real and a place where people could and do live, unlike Wakanda or the communities of Ready Player One (2018).

Some have criticised the film for giving Alita big manga-style eyes, an unusual complaint in a film where most characters are half-human, half-machine. A guy with a bulldozer for a butt is okay but a big-eyed girl is weird? Whatever.

The manga look worked for me and it is a good way of getting over the uncanny valley, our discomfort at artificial characters that look too real. There are actually two Alitas; the first does have that whole uncanny valley vibe, but by the time Alita 2.0 appears she seems much more ‘human’ and therefore acceptable. It’s an incremental approach to the uncanny valley and, for me, it works.

The story is very exciting. Rodriguez and his crew are in their element in the Rollerball-inspired action scenes. This is his most disciplined turn as a director and he obviously benefits from having Cameron, a much bigger beast in the Hollywood jungle, in charge.

Alita herself is a motion capture creation but Salazar does well to give her a personality. Cameron has come up with a new motion capture rig which has two cameras rather than one on the head boom. This really makes the action more immersive and less like watching a video game from a distance.

The big weakness is that there’s a bit too much going on in Alita. It’s pretty obvious that this is at least designed to create a sequel, if not a franchise, and I feel a lot of the detail could be left for later movies. It does make for a fairly breathless storytelling experience where it occasionally needs to take a minute or two to breathe.

With all of the action going on it’s a marvel that Rodriguez gets any performances of note but Salazar and Waltz are good, as is Ali. Jennifer Connelly suffers most; hers is potentially the most interesting character in the human ensemble but there’s not much left on screen which is a shame. She is extremely underused.

In the end I enjoyed Alita: Battle Angel much more than I thought I would and I look forward to seeing what happens next – providing it doesn’t take James Cameron another 19 years!

McCarthy is a powerhouse in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

One of the joys of Can You Ever Forgive Me is the sheer misanthropic delight which Melissa McCarthy brings to what is, so far, the role of her career. It’s almost a Hollywood trope that ‘difficult women’ need to be either contextualised or excused; not in this movie which is based on a real-life difficult woman.

Within the first few minutes we discover McCarthy alone and friendless and making no concessions to anyone regardless of consequence; even the love of her life left because she was just too damn hard to get along with. McCarthy is plainly still scarred by the loss but feels no compunction to change or even attempt to be the woman her ex might want her to be.

It is a gloriously unrepentant performance and while words like ‘brave’ or ‘bold’ are invariably bandied about when big stars do this stuff; the truth is that it is acting, real, joined-up, acting in which McCarthy honours the character and is true to her nature.

The story is set in 1991 and the difficult woman in question is Lee Israel, a once modestly successful author whose showbiz autobiographies have become unfashionable. She struggles to pay the rent, can’t get a meeting with her own agent, and spends her days drinking in a local gay bar. It is there that she meets Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), a minor figure on the Manhattan literary scene who is now dealing drugs on a part-time basis.

They spend the day drinking and a wary relationship begins to form through their mutual hatred of the literary set and fondness for alcohol.

Desperate for cash Lee is forced to sell her prized possession, a letter from Fanny Brice - the subject of her biggest success -  to stave off eviction and pay vet bills for her ailing cat. It's a chastening exerience but a chance remark from the buyer launches her on a new, illicit, career.

Lee begins to forge letters from famous people and sells them to gullible collectors who are more concerned with the status of the author than their content. Jack becomes an accomplice and they cut a lucrative swathe through the literati until the FBI take an interest.

Apart from being the funniest woman of her generation I have always felt Melissa McCarthy was a much better actress than she was given credit for. People don’t realise how hard it is to be that funny or the sacrifices it often requires. Here she takes her sharp wit and superb timing and turns it inward to create a bitter, frustrated, angry woman who is furious that her work has been ignored. Unusually for a writer, trust me, Lee doesn’t mind being personally overlooked it’s the fact that her work is no longer fashionable that burns her, for Lee it’s about the work not the celebrity.

Richard E. Grant is equally good as her partner in crime. Jack Hock is a piece of societal flotsam who is suffering the curse of the gilded classes; where once he was bright and brilliant, now he’s getting old and embarrassing. Where Lee doesn’t care about anyone else, Jack still wants to feel part of things and this may be his last chance to cling on.

Actor-turned-director Marielle Heller makes an impressive debut with a script by Nicole Holofcener which crackles with some tremendous dialogue and some genuinely poignant insights. Even the faux concern of the title, attributed to Dorothy Parker, is a barb.

The film makes a lot of demands on McCarthy and Grant who are obliged to park their egos at the door. This is a script which does not once nod or wink at the audience to tell us, deep down, these are nice people; they are unrepentantly unpleasant, and both stars embrace those qualities with alacrity.

McCarthy and Grant have both been Oscar-nominated, as has Holofcener for the screenplay. In one of those bizarre Hollywood stories Holofcener was due to direct a version of this film starring Julianne Moore and Chris O’Dowd. For me, Moore’s slightly ascetic approach is the very opposite of McCarthy and I cannot imagine her in this role. As it turns out there were personality differences between Holofcener and Moore and that version was scrapped.

We can only be grateful that the project had legs and eventually found its way to the screen in a form which deserves every success. The performances are marvellous, the film makes some trenchant points about the nature of art and how we value and commodify it, and I suspect Lee Israel would be delighted to see that she remains difficult to the last.