Oh Carol...I'm in love with you

Rooney Mara (l) and Cate Blanchett in Carol

If the past genuinely is a foreign country then it is one in which Todd Haynes has permanent residency. His majestic new film, Carol, completes a loose trilogy of sorts which began with his Douglas Sirk homages in Far From Heaven and his mini-series Mildred Pierce.

Haynes is a director out of his time; he seems most perfectly at home in the world of the Forties and Fifties. It’s a world in which, cinematically at least, women could be strong but had to pay a price for it as both Julianne Moore and Kate Winslet did in his previous two works.

Carol is set in 1952 and features not one but two strong women. Cate Blanchett is the titular character, a New York socialite whose marriage is foundering as a consequence of the closeness of her relationship with a female friend. Her outraged husband, played by Kyle Chandler, loves her but cannot come to terms with her lifestyle.

A shopping trip to a department store becomes a life-changing event. Carol meets Therese, a photographer working part time in the toy department. Therese is immediately taken by the composure and poise of the sophisticated Carol.

Although she is pursued by not one but two men Therese is not convinced that the conventional life is for her. There is something alluring about Carol and a lunch date quickly turns into a full blown, if initially hesitant, relationship. On a subsequent road trip, Carol and Therese bond emotionally and physically and both reach decisions with irrevocable consequences.

Haynes tells us his story largely in flashback. We begin when Carol and Therese are discovered having drinks in a Manhattan hotel and the story largely emerges through Therese’s reverie. Haynes has a neat artistic device here; in most of the scenes that prompt the reverie Therese is obscured by the fog on a window and other tricks. The idea is that it is only at the end when she realises what has to be done that we and she see clearly.

The cinematography throughout, from Haynes’ frequent collaborator Edward Lachman, is wonderful. It begins, pinched and washed out, as though it was shot on the Eastman stock of the period but as the film develops and the characters are fleshed out the images and the colour palette open out with them.

Rooney Mara is wonderfully enigmatic as Therese, a character described as ‘flung from space’ and Cate Blanchett gives the performance of her career in the title role. I have never been a Blanchett fan, she is too brittle for my taste normally, but there is warmth and maturity about the characterisation here which makes her utterly believable.

The film, it has to be said, is impeccably cast. Kyle Chandler is terrific as Carol’s bewildered husband, as is Sarah Paulson as her dearest friend, lover, and confidante.

Although it is set at a time when a gay love story would have been shocking, this film benefits from its 21^st century perspective. There is no sense of prurience here, there is instead a sense of a love not that dare not speak its name so much as one that simply chooses not to.

Carol is a poignant and compelling story of moods and silences with one of the most satisfying endings I have come across for a while, and all the better for being totally and completely earned. Haynes is not a man who deals in unearned sentiment. In Carol there is a price to be paid but the wonder of the story is that these women are prepared to pay it and thus they avoid victimhood.

And since his next film is about Peggy Lee, I guess Todd Haynes will be sticking around in the past for a little while to come. That can only be good news.

Steve McQueen is fast and furious but ultimately a little sad

McQueen looking thoughtful in Le Mans (1971)

At the height of his fame Steve McQueen – no, not the artist, the real one – was probably the world’s biggest movie star. He was also the world’s coolest human being which, given that his contemporaries included Paul Newman, Lee Marvin, and James Garner, was no mean feat.

Buoyed by the success of Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair, McQueen chose to indulge his real passion; motor racing. The result, Le Mans, released in 1971 was a financial and critical flop which put a serious dent in the careers of almost everyone associated with it. The putative screenwriter Alan Trustman, for example, never worked again even though he was the man who almost more than anyone had made McQueen a star.

The problem with Le Mans was galloping hubris. McQueen wanted to recreate the racing car experience in the hope that audiences would share his adrenaline thrill. The problem was that they didn’t have a script, or at least not one that McQueen liked, and he would abide by no one’s decision but his own. They spent days and days filming race sequences with no story on which to hang them. Big name talent – like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape director John Sturges – came and went and still there was no movie.

In the end, faced with massive overages, the studio stepped in. They insisted that McQueen pick a script, any script, and film something approaching a story. The result, racing sequences apart, was predictably uninspiring. Also, and this is never mentioned in the film, the final film was nowhere near as good as Paul Newman’s racing opus Winning which had been released while McQueen was pratting about in France.

Disappointingly much the same can be said for Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans. Apart from a catchy title this documentary doesn’t really have a raison d’etre, what it has is a million feet of unedited and unseen footage from the original. So directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna have taken this and indulged in a bit of myth-making. There are few real insights – not intentional ones anyway - just lots and lots of cars going round and round with shots of McQueen looking thoughtful and gazing into the middle distance. The result is fine for petrol heads and movie geeks but not much I would suspect for the rest of the audience.

I yield to no one in my admiration of McQueen. I grew up watching his films. He was one of the heroes of my childhood and early youth but even then I always suspected that behind that cool reserve lay not very much. That appears to have been the case. Audiences loved McQueen but none quite so much as he loved himself and that self-regard led to a deep insecurity. In the end he appears to have needed to be loved and told how great he was and, of course, his indecision was final.

Clarke and McKenna seem to have caught the bug. McQueen gets a free pass on the womanising, the abusive relationships, the bullying of staff, almost killing a co-star, and ending the career of a promising driver. Yet when his then wife Neile Adams admits to a spot of romantic retaliation we are told that poor Steve was devastated. It’s a very one-eyed approach that ignores all of the contradictions of McQueen’s life.

I said that there were no intentional insights, but for me the real story of the film is happening in the background. As you’d expect there are lots of archive images of McQueen in his pomp and invariably, just at the corner of the frame, is a sad-looking small boy. This is Chad, his son, who appears to be desperately seeking his father’s approval but can never quite get to be centre stage

In this film we see Chad McQueen again. A full grown man so desperate to follow in his father’s footsteps that he has suffered devastating injuries from a crash in the sort of race his father used to do. Almost forty years on, he’s still going ‘Look at me, Dad’, and that for me was the bittersweet takeaway from this film.

Not exactly a premium Bond

When you start with the worst Bond song ever as a precursor to the worst title sequence in Bond movie history, the omens are not good. The fact that the song is called ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’ only makes it more ominous.

It would be nice to say that the problems with Spectre stem only from Sam Smith and a misguided credits sequence but my issues with this film go far deeper.

Over the years the Bond series has been a byword for the sort of industrial movie-making that Hollywood can do so well. Yes, I appreciate that these are effectively independent films made by Eon but the argument still applies. A new one comes down the conveyor belt round about this time every two years and there is a massive industry which has become dependent on it making that date.

Even in the best-run industrial operations the production line comes a cropper from time to time and that’s what’s happened here for my money. Spectre has every sign of a film made under pressure to hit a world-wide release date. The process shots in the opening helicopter fight look very dodgy, the plot has holes you could drive an Aston Martin through, and there’s an air of desperation about the whole thing. No one appears to be quite in control of what’s going on.

The result is a film which is at best ordinary and at worst dull and mechanical. That it follows on from Skyfall only makes things more acute. Skyfall is the most successful Bond film ever but I suspect that a lot of that success was down to relief that it wasn’t Quantum of Solace, for my money the worst film ever.

Once you get past Skyfall’s halo effect, it wasn’t actually all that. The plot was simply a succession of increasingly improbable death traps from which Bond escaped with increasing ease, until we get to the end with a bit of emotional heft thrown in with the death of a major character.

Spectre is much the same but without the imagination of Skyfall. Just as Quantum of Solace was a continuation of Casino Royale, this is a continuation of sorts from Skyfall. The problem is there isn’t enough story for two films so it is relentlessly padded with material we have seen before.

Originality is always going to be an issue in a franchise with 20-odd entries but this seems unnecessarily cannibalistic. The problem for me is that it only reminded me of how much better they had been done in the past. The opening fiesta scene comes from Thunderball, the train fight – pointless as it turns out - is from either From Russia with Love or Live and Let Die, the Alpine clinic stuff has been seen in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and so on.

The other, more disturbing, aspect of this is the return of old-fashioned retro sexism to Bond. Of course Fleming created him as a fantasy for 50s and 60s men and, in context, the sexism in the original novels is explainable. It should have been kicked into touch by now but instead, as we saw in Skyfall, we have Bond effectively forcing himself on women and two female characters who are little more than plot points; not very convincing ones either. Lea Seydoux seems to exist simply to be in peril and whoever wrote her scenes should be ashamed.

None of this would be necessary with a decent script in the first place but despite four credited screenwriters Spectre still looks less than camera-ready and a couple more passes wouldn’t have hurt. The notion of making Craig’s four films into an informal quartet doesn’t work. Christopher Waltz is the author of all of Bond’s pain apparently. How does that work then? It’s a decent line but in the absence of a compelling master plan he is not so much evil genius as evil project manager.

Waltz phones it in with a generic evil mastermind performance but to be honest all of the cast look pretty unengaged. Craig’s comments in the round of media interviews to promote the film tend to reinforce that.

On the whole Spectre is humourless, charmless, and unimaginative. It has one good moment when Bond goes all Jack Carter on a security guard to remind him of the inadvisability of taking on a trained killer in hand to hand combat. Moments like these are few and far between unfortunately.

James Bond’s biggest battle is not against any evil genius, it is rather to remain relevant. Fleming’s concept of ‘thrilling cities’, has been successfully appropriated by the Mission: Impossible franchise and Jason Bourne has cornered the market in gritty adventure. So where does 007 go from here?

In Goldeneye, the first of the ‘modern’ Bonds, Judi Dench accused Bond of being a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. She may have been right after all because without an injection of fresh blood and imagination the franchise may be on the road to extinction.