What I’ve Been Watching: Mud

Matthew McConaughey, or “Matthew Mahogany” as Mark Kermode prefers to call him, has undergone a rather startling transformation recently. The type normally reserved for teenage boys hanging round radioactive spiders. The actor formerly known for throwaway romantic leads in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and Failure to Launch has started taking on proper acting roles in the form of Killer Joe; The Lincoln Lawyer; and now Mud.

It says a lot for an actor who is prepared to work hard at these smaller projects to try and re-establish his position in the market, rather than settle for a constant flow of paychecks for starring in films opposite Sandra-Bullock-a-likes.

Speaking of female rom-com leads, Reese Weatherspoon also stars in this film. And Michael Shannon, Sarah Paulson and Sam Shepherd. But none of these people play the main role, even McConaughey.

Instead it centers on Ellis and his friend Neckbone (the movie is set in the deep south) as they discover a mysterious, dishevelled man called Mud (Matthew McConaughey) who asks for their help in reuniting him with Juniper (Reese Weatherspoon).

As well as trying to help Mud, Ellis is also dealing with the separation of his parents; the prospect of losing his river houseboat; and trying to get the attention of a girl he likes.

In similar coming-of-age films (Super 8, Narnia, ET: The Extra Terrestrial) the fantastical is used as a way of giving the child protagonists more knowledge/power than the adults around them. However, Mud makes the conscious decision to make the world these boys inhabit a very adult one. This gives the film a startling realism which makes it easy to forget its certificate is only a “12A”.

What is striking is the way each of the character inhabits their own little world, which Ellis can only ever get glimpses of. Can he really trust Mud and his story? Does Juniper really want to get back together with? What are the real reasons for his parents’ divorce? Are his feelings for May Pearl reciprocated? How do Mud and his loner neighbour, Tom (Sam Shepherd) know each other?

The film manages to keep a good balance between characters and plot. In that, while there is a clear place the film wants to get, we are left to come up with our own conclusions about the motives or otherwise of most of the film’s main players.

This lends itself well to the idea that the characters are living, breathing characters and we are just happening to drop in on them at an interesting point in their life. Television shows like The Wire and Friday Night Lights are also experts at giving the impression that the characters live on regardless of whether there’s a camera pointed at them.

Allowing much of the plot to be character driven also allows gives the film a lot more depth and throwaway moments like a group of hitmen holding a prayer meeting for the death of their victim; or some beautiful underwater shots of Neckbone’s uncle (Michael Shannon) diving for oysters.

Overall Mud is a very enjoyable engaging film which manages to tell an engaging story in a well-realised, believable world.

What I’ve Been Watching: The Place Beyond The Pines

In 2010 Blue Valentine changed the direction of two careers. One Ryan Gosling managed to shake off The Notebook with a performance a film with genuine emotional depth. Likewise its director, Derek Cianfrance, seems to have had no problems getting films made, having spent the decade before making documentaries for television.

The two are reunited in The Place Beyond The Pines which tells the stories of two men on opposing sides of the law. Luke (Ryan Gosling) is a young man who works as a motorbike stunt man for a traveling fair. He finds out early in the film he has a one-year old son, and makes the decision to quit his job to try and be make things work with his son’s mother Romina (Eva Mendes).

Luke soon realizes getting together enough money to look after them both is going to be a problem and decides to rob banks to get some cash together. This brings him to the attention of Avery (Bradley Cooper) a young police officer still to prove himself in the force.

If you have seen the film you will know it is difficult to talk about all the directions it pulls in without spoiling the experience if you have yet to see it. The rest of my review will contain no specific plot details, but I will not be offended if you stop reading now.

Still here?

Good, because I was just kidding about the not being offended bit. Glad I know who my real friends are.

Anyway The Place Beyond The Pines is an incredibly ambitious and sprawling film that almost feels like a first-time film. By that I mean Cianfrance seems to have condensed a million and one ideas into 150 minutes of cinema. In that way it reminded me of films like Magnolia or even Badlands, in that although it has great characters, the film seems to be reaching beyond them and serving themes, rather than story or characters.

Specifically the theme of violence and the impact it has on its perpetrators and victims. The myth of redemptive violence is something I’ve spoken about before on this blog, and it is obvious the director has an opinion on the way police officers and members of the armed forces are treated as super-human, despite committing acts that actually dehumanise them.

This means the people treated as ‘heroes’ see themselves as quite the opposite and have no outlet to express that imbalance of emotions.

Beyond that the film looks at the impact of poverty, the modern family unit, police corruption, and revenge to create a film which has a clear sense of direction even if it is not obvious until well into the third act.

If there is a flaw it is in this third act which seems to lose the momentum already established in the first two acts. In some ways the last half hour feels more like an epilogue rather than a stand out piece of cinema. Perhaps this is because it is left to the younger members of the cast to carry the movie at this point, and it is difficult for them to compete with standards set by Gosling and Cooper in the previous acts of the film.

Despite this, it is a film easy to recommend. It is of the type Hollywood used to make in its golden era of the 1970s. That is films with weighty characters, weighty stories, weighty themes and a kind of reluctant masculinity. The Place Beyond The Pines may be a little flawed, but I think it’s in a good way.

What I’ve Been Watching: Cloud Atlas

The Wachowskis relationship with Hollywood has been a somewhat complicated one since finishing The Matrix trilogy. Having wrote and produced the moderately successful V For Vendetta, they went on to make Speed Racer which failed to find an audience.

Never ones to shy away from a challenge their latest film is co-directed with Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run), and is an adaptation of the apparently unfilmable* Cloud Atlas, based on the book by David Mitchell**. Like films such as Babel, Magnolia and Crash it adopts a ‘network narrative’. That is, we follow six different sets of characters all around the world who at first seem completely unrelated.

Unlike those films, however, the characters are based in entirely different locations in entirely different time periods (past, present and future). In that way, it’s a little like The Fountain.

Also similar to The Fountain is the fact that the same actors play different characters in each narrative. So Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, and others are depicted in varying levels of prosthetics depending on the time period they find themselves in.

Each of the stories almost occupies a different genre, whether that be a mystery thriller; comedy; sci-fi; or post-apocalyptic Shakespearian romance. What ties them together are the themes of morality, duplicity and the impact an individual can have, even beyond their lifetime.

Despite its philosophical leanings, and in direct contrast to films interested in similar questions like The Fountain and Tree of Life, it is a surprisingly easy film to watch. With a run-in clocking in at almost three hours, this is no mean feat. Like in The Matrix, the Wachowskis show themselves to be experts at fusing frenetic action with musings on the fundamental questions of our existence.

The comparison with The Matrix is especially apt when one realizes that each of the six protagonists are searching for some truth in order to escape the reality they have been fed by those around them.

This is not the only comparison to be made between the stories. One can also consider the differences in personalities between each character a particular actor portrays; the nature of history and whether humanity is progressing, regressing or simply changing; and of course whether there is something bigger guiding us and connecting us.

The many questions that the films begs are its greatest strength and also its greatest weakness. Since, once it ends, it is not clear what we have just witnessed. Is it something profound and important; or merely something that is different for the sake of being so?

This is perhaps why critics are so divided over the piece, it is not a film for which clarity was ever a goal. It is a messy, muddled piece of art which forces the viewer to ponder and work through what they have just witnessed. What could be better?

*I hate the term unfilmable. If you can imagine it, you can film it.

**The author, not the star of Peep Show.

What I’ve Been Watching: Zero Dark Thirty

It’s hard to think of a film more relevant to the past ten years than Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. It begins with a black screen as we hear hysterical reactions to the terrible events of September 11, 2001.

The film then follows the fictional character of Maya (Jessica Chastain) as she and her colleagues spearhead the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. The film blurs the lines between fiction and reality as we are shown real world events such as the London Bombings; Camp Chapman Attack; and (SPOILER ALERT) the eventual finding and killing of “OBL”.

The film itself holds a mirror up to the post-9/11 period; and lets the audience make decisions about whether the actions of the CIA were justified. In particular the opening act of the film shows the torturing of detainees to try and get information that might help them find key members of Al Qaeda.

Much has been said about the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty. Although it should be pointed out everyone seems to agree the CIA did use techniques banned by the “United Nations Convention Against Torture”. Therefore the inclusion of such scenes seems justified.

What people, such as Senator John McCain, disagree with is whether any useful information was gained for such controversial and illegal techniques. The film implies there was. What that means is that the viewer is left to decide whether torture that gets results is justified; rather than making the oft-repeated argument that not only is torture wrong, but it also leads to false testimony.

What the film, and the debate surrounding this issue, does show is how difficult it is to create a piece of work that really does leave it up to the viewer to judge. By making this narrative choice, Bigelow has opened herself up to criticism from those who are against torture, regardless of whether the detainee may know something vital to national security.

The rest of the film sees a director who knows precisely how to create tension in her film, despite the obvious problem that the audience already knows how it’s all going to end. In particular the final act of the film where (SPOILER ALERT AGAIN!) we see the raid on Bin Laden’s home is a fantastic piece of action cinema. As a side note, its place in the movie and use of night-vision will remind viewers of the equally tense final scene of Silence of the Lambs.

When all is said and done, Zero Dark Thirty is a perfect antedate to other American films of revenge like Taken or Kill Bill as one character tries to ‘make amends’ for a great wrong committed against them.

The film shows us revenge is an ugly, nasty thing that never brings the best out of us, and leaves us worn out as we wonder “was it all really worth it?”

What I’ve Been Watching: Django Unchained

In many ways Tarantino’s latest movie, Django Unchained does for slavery what Inglorious Basterds did for World War 2. In fact by watching both Lincoln and Django Unchained; followed by Saving Private Ryan and Inglorious Basterds, you’d get a fairly accurate picture of the place of these historic events in the American psyche.

Slavery, as seen by Tarantino, is a place perfect for revenge. And the more Tarantino releases movies, the more we can see this the primary motivation for so many of his characters in so many of his works. It is as if Tarantino hunts through culture and history to find the most perfect protagonists with the best reasons for violent revenge. Whether that be brides against their true love’s killers; Jews against Nazis; or slaves against their masters.

The question about the extent to which Tarantino really cares about these types of victims or just sees them as useful fodder for the types of films he wants to make is an interesting one. In Django Unchained we see Jamie Foxx playing the titular character, set free by a bounty hunter played by Christopher Waltz.

Django is often featured on horseback; the sight is not only shocking to the films’ characters; but also new to us as an audience. Black people, as a general rule, don’t feature in Westerns, and certainly not riding through town on horseback. Is Tarantino trying to redress the balance, or simply making that choice because it’s such a memorable shot?

On the podcast this month, we discussed Django Unchained, and Steve made the point he never really looks forwards to Tarantino’s movies, but once he’s there he really quite enjoys them. I suspect it’s a feeling quite a lot of people can relate to.

Tarantino is great at creating set pieces, and there are many, many tense, funny, and surprising scenes in Django Unchained. However, it’s difficult to love his characters; they’re rarely the type of people you could imagine as your friends. They are largely comic, broadly drawn, and very predictable. As a result there is a detachment from his world that we may not notice from scene to scene; but which we may find difficult to articulate.

If I was to describe it I would simply that Tarantino’s movies are less than the sum of their parts.

Obviously this is something I feel with Django Unchained which has some absolutely brilliant set pieces involving sheriffs; dining room tables; and mobs in ill-fitting white hoods; but which failed to arouse the kind of emotional attachment to make it a really great film.

My challenge for Tarantino’s next movie is to create a truly complex character I actually care about, and whose motivation goes beyond that of revenge. I’d recommend watching some Scorsese to see how that’s done.