Read all about it - News of the World is another Hanks triumph

 

Tom Hanks is the closest thing we have these days to a Golden Age of Hollywood style movie star. In fact, the actor to whom he is most often compared is James Stewart, the very quintessence of Golden Age stardom. The archetypal everyman, the paragon of decency who could be relied upon to do the right thing. Except in one memorable run of roles where he couldn’t.

Stewart reinvented himself with a series of Westerns with Anthony Mann in the Fifties in which he had a memorable run of dark and troubled characters. From Winchester 73 (1950) to The Man from Laramie (1955), he played a series of roles that were the very antithesis of his ‘good neighbour Sam’ typecasting. They are marvellous films which helped to cement Stewarts reputation as one of the greatest screen actors ever.

The demise of the Western has created a lacuna in Tom Hanks’s career. I know there are few cowboys more famous than Sheriff Woody in the Toy Story franchise, but he has missed out on the chance to make a proper Western until now.

As it happens News of the World shows us a different aspect of Hanks’ stardom just as Anthony Mann did for James Stewart. If his character is not as dark and troubled as Stewart was in his westerns, he is at least haunted by his actions and his past.

Directed memorably by Paul Greengrass, News of the World is the story of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) who travels across Texas in 1870 eking out a living by giving public readings of newspapers to remote towns where the locals are eager for news. These are anxious times, the Civil War has just ended, the telegraph has not yet arrived, so in that sense Hanks is a metaphor for progress. In this age of manifest destiny his news, generally about the progress of the railroad, is life or death for these small towns.

 Hanks comes across a young German immigrant Johanna (Helena Zengel) whose parents and family have been killed by a Kiowa raiding party. When no one in town will take her in, Hanks realises he will have to do the decent thing and ferry her cross country to find what remains of her extended family. The journey is frequently hazardous but eventually a bond forms between these two who are each harried by what they have seen or done in their past.

 For long stretches of the film there is not a lot happening but the characters and performances of Hanks and the excellent Zengel create a companionable mood full of nuance and meaning. You begin to suspect that each might be the other’s salvation. It is only in the final act when the story reveals itself that these moments of nuance resolve into genuinely affecting drama.

 This is a very different film from Paul Greengrass’s usual work. The man who gave us the anxious kineticism of the Jason Bourne movies seems perfectly at home with the formalism of the classic Western. He has an eye for a frame and his ciematographer Dariusz Wolski captures it perfectly.

 In the midst of all of this there is Hanks, a man who stopped acting a long time ago in favour of simply being. As he does in most of his recent roles, Hanks inhabits the picture with a grace and subtlety that defies description. Like James Stewart he makes it look effortless and, like Stewart, he doesn’t get anything like the credit he deserves.

 A word too for newcomer Helena Zengel whose adamantine performance gradually reveals a vulnerable interior without a trace of unearned sentiment, and praise too for a wonderful soaring score from James Newton Howard. Someone else who makes it look too easy and probably won’t get the Oscar he deserves.

 In troubled times News of the World is a comfort as well as an inspiration. It reminds us of the blessings and virtues of fresh starts which, hopefully, we will all get to have in a short time.

Mank is a film whose time has come

 Mank is ostensibly the story behind the writing of Citizen Kane (1941), regarded in some quarters as the greatest film ever made. If it does not quite deliver what it promises, it succeeds surprisingly on a whole new layer of meaning.

David Fincher’s film, based on a script by his late father Jack, was supposed to have been made at the end of last century, after the success of Fincher’s The Game (1997). The plan was apparently scuppered because Fincher wanted to shoot in black and white, but no one wanted to take on the financial risk.

Mank now duly appears, in black and white courtesy of Netflix, and it has been worth the wait. Although the events on screen are almost a century old, they have a contemporary resonance and a feeling of being, as we used to say about Warner’s crime melodramas, ‘ripped from today’s headlines’.

The film is notionally about who wrote Citizen Kane. Was it maverick screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz or wunderkind director Orson Welles? This is irrelevant. If you are interested, you know already if you are not you probably don’t care. What this film is really about is media manipulation, the influence of mass media, fake news, and emotional truth. Much more interesting and relevant than a disputed screen credit.

Mankiewicz has been commissioned by Welles to write his script by RKO studios which has ceded full control to the young director, a remarkable concession for his debut film. But the fictionalised story of media baron William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) is making waves and Mank is racing against time to finish it before the studio caves on the promise to Welles.

A man and his typewriter is not much of a ticking clock scenario. We need more so the film cuts back and forth to 30s Hollywood to discover the source of Mank’s enmity against Hearst.

The story centres on the 1934 race for Governor of California in which the socialist writer Upton Sinclair and his End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign is running against the Republican candidate. The establishment, here represented by Hearst and MGM boss Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), is threatened, especially the movie studios. They set out to successfully crush Sinclair with fake news broadcast by Hearst’s radio stations and fake newsreels made by MGM and shown in their cinemas.

For all his gadfly behaviour and drunken antics, Mankiewicz is indulged in his dissolution by both Hearst and Mayer who have kept him on the payroll. Mank is a passive participant so the suggestion is that Citizen Kane will be his revenge on Hearst and Mayer for treating him as their court jester.

The problem facing Fincher with Mank is the same as the problem facing Welles with Kane. How do you get the audience to want to spend two hours in the company of an unpleasant egotist? Welles handles it brilliantly with multiple perspectives to pin down a mercurial man. Fincher has flashbacks and a much less complex character.

Mank very consciously imitates the look and sound of Citizen Kane, right down to the phantom cue dots to indicate the change of a non-existent reel. However, Citizen Kane was fresh and exciting, we had never seen its like before. Mank is a pastiche, especially in terms of the sound and the music which, while intended to evoke the original, only remind you how much better it is.

As you would expect in its wander through Depression-era Hollywood the film has more Easter eggs than a poultry farm. There is a certain geek level one upmanship to be gained by identifying the faces in the crowd.

In the foreground Gary Oldman is great in the title role and a nuanced turn from Amanda Seyfried helps to rehabilitate Hearst’s paramour Marion Davies. Some of the support is excellent too especially Ferdinand Kingsley as the perceptive Irving Thalberg, Sam Troughton as Welles’s ally John Houseman, and Tuppence Middleton as ‘Poor Sarah’ Mankiewicz, a woman for whom the phrase ‘long suffering’ might have been coined.

Tom Burke has the distinctive Wellesian timbre down to the note, but otherwise he isn’t required to do much. Unlike Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz is the star of this one and he enjoys his moment in the spotlight.

 

 

It's not you Borat...it's us

The former Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said that a week was a long time in politics. The last twelve months have also shown us that a year can feel like an eternity. So, what chance then of revisiting something fourteen years on and finding something fresh to say?

Kudos to Sacha Baron Cohen for at least trying in his latest Amazon offering Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, a sequel of sorts to his 2006 film Borat. Sadly, it seems that the effort is beyond him, but I also have to say that this is not entirely his fault. The world has moved on in fourteen years and not always for the better.

For those who have not seen either film Baron Cohen’s comic creation Borat Sagdiyev is Kazakhstan’s fourth most famous TV journalist. In the first film he comes to America to make a documentary on the country, this time round he is back trying to apologise. Specifically, he is delivering a bribe on behalf of his President to repair the damage done to his country’s reputation and encourage US leader ‘McDonald Trump’ to let him into his dictator’s club.

When the initial plan goes awry Borat comes up with an alternative. He will offer his 15-year-old daughter, Tutar, (Maria Bakalova) as an inducement to US Vide-President Mike Pence.

The problem facing the film is apparent right from the start. First time round Borat was a foreign nobody trading on the kindness – or at least tolerance – of strangers. But the first film was a huge international hit and now everyone knows Borat. The scene at the start where he is mobbed by fans is funny, especially since it is the mirror of the start of the first film, but it shows what he is up against.

Borat has to resort to pranking people who have never heard of him and they tend to be duller, less interesting, and – ironically - less deserving of humiliation. More to be pitied than scorned as my mother used to say. For their part, all of them seem to tolerate his antics with a weary ‘what fresh hell is this’ expression.

Similarly, what was shocking first time round seems normalised now. With a Chief Eexcutive who mocks the disabled and refuses to condemn QAnon the everyday bar is set pretty high, so the anti-Semitic baker, the borderline pervy cosmetic surgeon, and the conspiracy nuts just aren’t going to cut it. Baron Cohen is no longer a satirist, in these circumstances he has become a documentarian.

I suspect he may be aware of this since the film, which comes perilously close in places to running out of unscripted material, relies heavily on a scripted narrative between Borat and Tutar. This turns out to be its saving grace because newcomer Bakalova is the best thing in the film by some distance bringing an injection of much-needed energy and fun in places.

Of course, she features in the most talked about scene in which she interviews Trump confidante Rudy Giuliani. It is sleazy, creepy, and spectacularly ill-judged on his part but at the same time, given the people he clings to, more sad than shocking.

Technically the film is a great example of what can be done, even in the most difficult circumstances, with a little creativity and imagination. Frustratingly the last ten minutes shows a sharpness and comic invention which is missing from the rest of the film as Borat reimagines one of his greatest hits.  Some more of this incisiveness and less punching down might have made for a better film.

For me, in the end Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, misses more often than it hits but, as it says at the top, I think that’s down to us and not him.

 

Sorkin's magnificent seven shine in courtroom drama

 

If you had to pick a defining sequence for Aaron Sorkin’s work it would probably be the first eight minutes of the first episode of The Newsroom (2012). It’s the bit in which right-of-centre news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is lobbed a softball question at a college debate about why America is the greatest country in the world.

There is an interminable pause before he launches into an impassioned rant about what is wrong with the current state of affairs in his country and how different it used to be – ‘we made war on poverty, not the poor’, is a personal highlight. America is not the greatest country in the world, he says, but it sure as hell used to be.

This Damascene moment for McAvoy sets the tone for the series and crystallises Sorkin’s work. His reverence for the Greatest Generation knows no limits, it can be seen in this speech as well as in his biggest hit The West Wing (1999) which harks back to Kennedy’s Camelot. He can always find a moment in the past in which America was better. Which is why it is so shocking to see him come up empty handed in the comparison stakes with The Trial of the Chicago 7.

 Sorkin looks back at 1968 and he can find nothing but similarities with contemporary America, in a film which seems like one long cry of despair. There is rioting in the streets, people of colour are being shot and killed, the country seems poised on the brink of open revolt as a whole section of society decides it has had enough. This manifests itself in the titular trial with a series of egregious abuses of the legal system – defendants bound and gagged in a US courtroom, for example - which are played out on television every night.

This is dark, angry, ferocious stuff from Sorkin and this new bleak edge suits him. There isn’t that honeyed retrospection to save us here; this is where we were, he seems to be saying, and this is where we are again.

The Chicago 7, although for part of the trial there were eight of them, were a disparate group of radicals, activists, and protesters ranging from a Boy Scout leader to one of the founders of the Black Panthers. They were brought before the court on trumped up charges surrounding protests at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1968 and faced sentences of 10 years in jail if convicted. The government is determined to get a conviction and the borderline corrupt but completely incompetent judge seems determined to do all he can to help.

Sorkin’s storytelling is superb. He weaves the narrative back and forth from the Convention to the trial with a deftness which makes the story completely compelling. He is telling a tale with at least a dozen principal characters and he does justice to them all.

Juggling all these stories is hard enough but Sorkin gives us nuance and insight too. The two clowns, as characterised by the establishment, were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. But as played by Sacha Baron Cohen, Hoffman is a provocateur but a thoughtful one, Rubin (Jeremy Strong) meanwhile turns out to be a gentle romantic to provide some much needed light relief. Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), who appears to be something of a stuffed shirt ends up giving the film its powerful moments.

There are showier performances too. Mark Rylance is superb as the gadfly lawyer William Kunstler, and Frank Langella is shockingly hateful as the judge. There is also a memorable cameo from Michael Keaton who is in that fortunate career purple patch where each new role is better than the one that preceded. He is plainly enjoying himself.

But even for all these wonderful individual moments this is first and foremost an ensemble piece and it is the craft of Sorkin’s direction, as well as his writing, that holds the film together. Those of us old enough to remember the trial recall the verdict but Sorkin still manages to develop a degree of suspense.

There is some doubt about whether the Oscars will take place this year. I am fairly certain of two things; the first is that the Academy Awards will go ahead in some form, the second is that, so far, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is the film to beat.