A Most Wanted Man (2014)

There are spies like James Bond – dashing, virile, sexy, with a hint of a death wish – and there are spies dreamt up by John le Carré: quiet, dark, withdrawn office-dwellers whose everyday heroism might manifest in the capture of a terrorist, or the triumph over a bureaucratic tangle. le Carré’s spies are, of course, considerably more realistic, and they prowl through A Most Wanted Man as firmly ordinary people doing truly extraordinary jobs. But, once the several layers of slick politicking and brinkmanship has been peeled away, the film’s central plot device feels almost too simple: an unexpected shimmer of light that feels out of place within the cold, sombre greys of a world lived in the shadows.

Anton Corbijn’s film shifts the focus in le Carré’s novel onto Günther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the head of a small espionage unit that must struggle to put forth its more radical notions on national security in the face of opposition and disdain from bigger, more hawkish agencies like the police. Everyone in the security forces sits up and takes notice when Chechen refugee Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) illegally enters Hamburg: Günther and his team resolve to monitor him for any terrorist links, the police just want to get him under detention, and American diplomatic attache Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright) is poised to make peace – or war – between the two camps. The situation is complicated when Issa contacts sympathetic immigration lawyer Annabel (Rachel McAdams) to lay claim to his father’s misbegotten fortune, kept within the vaults of Tommy Brue’s (Willem Dafoe) bank.

Narratives are never straightforward in le Carré’s novels, but A Most Wanted Man boasts a particularly dense and impenetrable plot – or so it seems, until everything clicks into place and it turns out that the story was almost stupefyingly simple after all. In other words, the film appears smarter than it really is, as doubt is first cast onto Issa’s motives and, later, his money. Günther is at the centre of it all – or is he? – orchestrating a surveillance operation that expands into an engagement and entrapment initiative that drags an apparently reluctant Annabel into the mix. The final act slowly unspools into something not quite worthy of its build-up: the apparently pragmatic spy, whose heart should long ago have hardened to his work and the people who surround him, is tripped up by the way people cynically operate, weighing pros and cons rather than gratitude and favours.

Fortunately, the plot really isn’t the point of A Most Wanted Man. As a study of character and relationships, it’s considerably more assured and successful. Günther, in particular, is a fascinating creation: a perfectly human, chain-smoking anti-hero toiling and skulking amidst secrets and lies, living in darkness so that others may live in the light. Corbijn paints a picture of espionage that’s at once gritty and strangely romantic, and it comes ever more sharply into focus even as its plot slowly unravels. Günther’s relationships with the women in his life are also fascinating: he shares an intimate shorthand with his deputy Irna (Nina Hoss), and a grudging suspicion of Martha borne of his past failures in the field.

The cast, led by the late and sure-to-be-sorely-missed Hoffman, is excellent, even though so many Americans have oddly been called upon to play Germans who speak entirely in English (with Germanic accents). It’s a strange choice, and some fare better at it than others (McAdams tries really hard, bless her), but it fades into the background whenever Hoffman is onscreen. A true master of his craft, Hoffman slips into the dark corners of his character to find Günther’s odd brand of humanity: a strength and conviction that should have been worn down years ago. Wright serves as a formidable ally – or adversary; her scenes with Hoffman crackle with meaning and menace, and she comfortably walks the line that allows her final scene to work as chillingly as it does.

There’s no doubt that the title of the film is meant to apply to the character of Issa: a man who is wanted, by many agencies, and for many things. But it’s arguably another sleight-of-hand move in a film filled with many small twists – the biggest and most unexpected of which is the fact that it’s actually a love letter to a certain kind of spy. In many ways, Hoffman’s Günther is that most wanted man: the wounded veteran of several wars waged in dirty, dark alleys carved out of secrets, lies and death, who somehow still sees the point of the lonely, difficult work he does. It’s a shame that the film which surrounds him doesn’t turn out to be quite as inspiring or fascinating.

Basically: Smart and searching, but better when driven by character than by plot.

The Fault In Our Stars (2014)

These days, young-adult fiction is everywhere: dystopian stories of moody youths undergoing strife, war and heartache, as in The Hunger Games or Divergent, are dominating the bestseller lists and popping up in cineplexes. What’s so unusual about The Fault In Our Stars, an adaptation of John Green’s best-selling novel, is that it locates the dystopia and war within the bodies of its teenage protagonists. These kids aren’t battling an evil regime or fascist overlords; they’re struggling to survive against the merciless onslaught of cancer. Green’s book is a bit of an odd beast: touching but manipulative, genuine and fake, all at the same time. The resulting film, being hugely faithful to its source material, thus manages to pull off the same curious trick of overwhelming and underwhelming the viewer, often in the same breath.

Hazel (Shailene Woodley) has been living with – or dying of – terminal cancer for years. Her concerned parents (Mike Trammell: under-used; and Laura Dern: wonderfully sympathetic) fuss around her constantly, wanting her to live what life is left to her after the treatments and exhaustion have taken their toll. And so Hazel attends a support group for kids stricken with cancer. One day, she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a charming, sweet kid whose remission came at the price of a leg. They share an immediate connection, one that deepens as they bond over Hazel’s favourite book: An Imperial Affliction, penned by reclusive author Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe). Knowing how much it means to Hazel, Augustus resolves to get her the answers she seeks about the novel – even if they have to travel all the way to Amsterdam to get them.

If that sounds like a recipe for melodrama, that’s because it is. There’s plenty of that in store, of course, because these kids are dealing with the worst and most traumatic of experiences, at a time when they should be healthy and carefree. But the film, as did the novel, does a pretty good job of maintaining a spark of cheeky life amidst all the doom and gloom. Hazel and Augustus trade banter as easily as they do insults, and the affection that grows between them is as entertaining as it is affecting. Woodley and Elgort share a gentle chemistry that works very well, whether they’re in the throes of first love or battling through the trenches of disease side by side. Their friendship with Isaac (Nat Wolff), the boy who loses his sight to eye cancer and his girlfriend to her self-absorption, is wonderfully bittersweet too – together, the trio ride the lows of Isaac’s depression, and the highs of his tiny moment of vengeance.

But, for everything that feels raw and real in the film, The Fault In Our Stars also comes across as overly plotted. Hazel and Augustus are designed specifically to break your heart and swell your tear ducts, which is why their relationship can sometimes feel painstakingly constructed. They are, quite literally, made for each other, which weighs down rather than frees the story in which they find themselves. Their interactions with the troubled, prickly Van Houten also lose some impact in the move away from the page, where his words, ideas and general depravity can take fuller form. In the film, Dafoe ensures that Van Houten remains tough to like, but the character’s rougher edges are sanded away in a half-hearted bid for redemption.

Ultimately, the film – which lifts entire lines and scenes wholesale from Green’s text – triumphs and suffers where the book does. The relationship between Hazel and Augustus, when stripped to its core, is a heart-breaking/warming account of a soul-deep connection that matters all the more for its tragic brevity. There’s a lot of welcome, saddening depth in the film, too, about the everyday heroism of children being forced to live on the brink of death everyday. But this is also a deliberately manipulative tale, one that hinges on an awkward twist (present in both book and film) that practically dares you not to care and cry about what’s going on. It’s an effective tactic, for the most part, but one that doesn’t earn so much as exhaust its audiences’ affections.

Basically: A very faithful adaptation of an affecting but troubled novel.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Over the last twenty years, writer-director-auteur Wes Anderson has built something quite odd in Hollywood. We don’t just mean his deeply unique music-box films, which are themselves ornate, unusual and thoroughly offbeat by commercial standards. Rather, it’s the repertory company he’s established within the confines of the Hollywood system: a revolving troupe of actors who are more than happy to keep returning to help him achieve his singular vision in film after quirky film. He’s reached his zenith with The Grand Budapest Hotel, an unmistakably Andersonian re-imagination of old-world Europe – with all its romanticised cultural mores and traditions – on the cusp of a devastating war.

In the late 1960s, an Author (played by Tom Wilkinson in the present and Jude Law in the past) visits the fading Grand Budapest Hotel – an establishment gone completely to seed, with a limited rota of guests. There, he meets Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the Hotel’s eccentric owner, and is regaled by tales of the Hotel’s glory days. As a young, impressionable lobby boy (Tony Revolori), Zero becomes the apprentice of the legendary M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), a flamboyantly devoted concierge of the old school whose involvement with his elderly, female clientele – specifically Madame D. (Tilda Swinton) – will soon kick off an adventure of epic proportions. Mixed in with a disputed will, a stolen painting, a jailbreak and an encroaching military presence is a healthy nostalgia for a world that, perhaps, never really existed at all.

Anderson’s critics have long complained of the deliberate archness of his stories and characters – they’re so meticulously constructed and so resolutely strange that it’s hard to connect with them on any kind of true emotional  level. Ironically, it’s only his stop-motion animation feature, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, that managed to elude such criticisms, largely because the family of foxes at the heart of the tale were so recognisably human.

He again performs a quiet magic of that order with The Grand Budapest Hotel, a sugar-light confection on the surface, but one with a darker, more historically grounded undertow. Much of the film unfolds in the key of a carnival: zippy, fresh and chirpy. But within his fictional Eastern European state of Zubrowka, Anderson conjures up the chilling spectre of Nazism – even if the swastika has been replaced with a pair of lightning bolts and the officers are given a more human face in the form of Inspector Henckels (Edward Norton).

As a result, the film hits upon quite a few bittersweet grace notes, emotional connections that are often lost in the tumult of oddities that make up a typical Anderson film. Here, the larger-than-life Gustave isn’t merely a bundle of quirks and tics: scratch beneath his fey, heavily-perfumed exterior, and you’ll find a man with a heart full of honour and humour. He may be, strictly speaking, a gigolo profiting from the loneliness of elderly ladies, but he genuinely believes that he’s giving them the courtly companionship and love they all deserve. The relationship between Gustave and Zero is also wonderfully crafted: an unusual father-son bond forged amidst their hijinks and capers.

The cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel is, of course, delightful. Fiennes, a brand new addition to Anderson’s troupe, delivers the funniest, warmest performance of his dignified career, demonstrating a comic flair so sharp that it practically slices its way off the screen. Revolori makes a charming cinematic debut as the poker-faced Zero, striking up a sweet chemistry with Saoirse Ronan, who plays his brave and bold love interest Agatha. The rest of Anderson’s repertory company gleefully pop up throughout the film: Adrien Brody as Madame D’s villainous son; Willem Dafoe as his ominous henchman; Jason Schwartzman as Gustave’s incompetent successor, a generation or two down the line – to name but a few.

As is now par for the course in an Anderson film, the production design on The Grand Budapest Hotel is outstanding and incredibly inventive. With his trademark hand-crafted visual effects (hotels and funiculars rendered in model form), Anderson lends a quaint, creaky charm to the entire film. It would be easy to get completely distracted by his snow-washed vision of a bygone era, if not for the fact that his characters – who plummet down ski slopes or dash across moonlit rooftops – are such fun to be around.

It’s easy to complain about some of the film’s failings, most of which are characteristic of Anderson’s entire oeuvre anyway. It’s so decidely odd that it’s sometimes hard to view it as anything but a curio. At points, the film drags a little, quite unable to maintain a consistently swift, sure rhythm. But those are minor points in what feels like quite a major work. The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson at his most assured and accessible: it’s a film that compromises none of its creator’s unique movie-making ideas and values and, in fact, goes quite a long way in communicating them to a far wider audience.

Basically: As quaint and quirky as the rest of Anderson’s films, but made considerably more accessible with lashings of rich emotion and sublime comedy.

Out Of The Furnace (2013)

It’s hard to decide just what to make of Out Of The Furnace, a potboiler of a drama that grapples with the complexities of family, war, violence, rage and vengeance – stewed together in an uneasy blend that works, more or less, but never really takes off. That the cast is so unreservedly excellent makes it even tougher to dismiss Out Of The Furnace as an awkwardly-scripted curio. They’re so good – even with shakily-developed characters and dialogue – that the film often comes off as better than it is.

Russell Baze (Christian Bale) is a loving brother and filial son who works hard at the local steel mill to bring home the bacon for his girlfriend Lena (Zoe Saldana). He just wants his war-shattered brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) to get his act together instead of pissing away money he doesn’t have on gambling and drinking. When tragedy strikes, Russell must pick up the pieces of his life again – only to discover that his brother has had an unfortunate run-in with ultra-creepy thug Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), and the authorities are unlikely to be much help in finding out what really happened.

The story is interesting, but the script somewhat less so – apart from Rodney, the characters are sketched in broad strokes and archetypes, and points are driven home with little care for subtlety. We’re treated to numerous instances of Russell’s innate goodness: he spruces up the house while Rodney is getting roughed up in yet another illegal brawl, and studiously avoids shooting a deer when he goes hunting with his uncle Gerald (Sam Shepard).  There aren’t a whole lot of grey areas, either, when it comes to Harlan: he’s mean and vicious without the hint of even a lost or broken soul to add some complexity to his character.

And yet, Out Of The Furnace remains fascinating because director Scott Cooper has assembled a truly astounding cast. Bale sinks completely into his role, somehow making it believable that Russell’s final-act resolve is not wildly out of character. Meanwhile, Affleck has some riveting moments as the boy broken by the demons living within him. Harrelson, for all that his character is ridiculously overblown, snarls his way through the film – menacing and cowing even the likes of Willem Dafoe, who plays a small-time crook trying his best (and failing) to protect Rodney. Saldana’s reaction to Russell when he returns to her, after time spent far away, is heartbreaking, and Forest Whitaker has a small role as a cop trying to keep Russell from going off the rails in search of Rodney. Collectively, the ensemble make the clunky dialogue and odd genre changes work.

This makes for a strange but compelling drama – a film that limps and shuffles along as it shifts from brotherly conflict to a brutal game of cat-and-mouse, all of it underscored by a soundtrack of extreme despair. There are good ideas and performances on display, but these often get snowed under by a script that doesn’t give its characters room to grow and live. As a result, Out Of The Furnace frequently feels under-cooked, although its cast does a pretty good job of turning up the heat just enough to keep viewers hooked.

Basically: A slow burn that never really catches fire, but it’s compelling viewing nonetheless.

Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007)

Singapore is, inexplicably, obsessed with Mr Bean. The television series has had phenomenal success here, and is not only re-aired on telly at every opportunity, but apparently still sells bucketloads of videos and DVDs despite the frequency with which it appears on free-to-air channels. All of which might explain why Mr Bean’s Holiday has premiered here almost a full week before it hit screens in even the UK – the geographical and cultural home of star Rowan Atkinson and the Bean franchise. Perhaps there’s something to be said for going with the flow and debuting the movie where it’s likely to get a moderately good reception… especially since this is the second Bean movie, after a decade’s break, and not one anticipated to be a hit. As if the curse of sequel-itis wasn’t quite enough to consign it to the bottom of critics’ lists this year, one can’t help but feel that there’s a whiff of desperation about the whole enterprise. Certainly Atkinson hasn’t had much success or attained a similar worldwide appeal in any other field, be it television or the movies, in the decade since Bean stormed across cinema screens all over the globe.

That, at least, explains Atkinson’s return to the character he can’t quite escape. This time, Bean (Atkinson) is removed from his comfort zone and propelled in the direction of France – more’s the pity for a nation of unsuspecting Frenchmen! Trusty new video camera in hand, Bean blunders across the country, getting lost and choking down seafood in Paris, accidentally abducting young Russian boy Stepan (Max Baldry) from his perplexed father (Karel Roden), and still struggling to make it to Cannes even after he’s lost his passport, tickets, money, everything. Along the way, and because he’s the ridiculously accident-prone Bean, he busks to make some cash, stumbles into a movie set lorded over by egocentric actor/director Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe) and meets aspiring French actress Sabine (Emma de Caunes)… all with cringingly hilarious results. Well, for the most part, anyway.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of Bean, and who hasn’t!, you’ll know more or less what to expect… and also whether there’s any chance you’d enjoy this movie at all. MBH, aside from glaring omissions such as the absence of Bean’s hapless, much-put-upon teddy bear companion, is like a greatest-hits compilation of the TV series: the gleeful silliness of the series is retained, as is Atkinson’s rubbery-faced, game-for-anything schtick. Bean remains a clueless, child-like dunce who is as offputting as he is curiously charming – as long as you’re not the one who has to suffer his oddities. Certainly the jokes and humour employed here do not in any way approach the erudition of other, criminally lesser-known Atkinson works like the Blackadder series. But there are still many laughs to be had along the way, even if all the jokes feel somewhat well-worn and a bit overly familiar. Take the French restaurant scene – we’ve seen Bean uncomfortably out of place in the realm of posh dining before, as he struggles mightily to dispose of the haute cuisine that disagrees with him. More of that here, except it’s not raw meat but still-living oysters and unwieldy crustaceans. Bean busking is also something we’ve seen before… but it’s taken to new heights of silliness in MBH, as Bean and Stepan play out a dramatic death scene in the high-camp style of a Greek tragedy – shrieky soundtrack included.

There was even a little inventiveness involved in telling the story, which suggests that screenwriters Robin Driscoll, Simon McBurney and Hamish McColl weren’t simply coasting for their cheques… which they could easily have done. While most of the scenes play out as self-contained little Bean-like storylines and skits (Bean trekking across Paris in a straight line, getting Stepan’s father to film him getting on the Cannes-bound train), there’s actually a larger story here. It’s not a particularly serious one, of course, but it’s entertaining enough: Bean, unable to communicate with either Stepan (who only speaks Russian) or Sabine (who thinks he is Russian), nevertheless manages to upstage the egomaniacal Carson with a hilarious video-edit substitution for the latter’s portentous, pretentious indie film. Logically it doesn’t make much sense at all, but it nevertheless plays out amusingly – particularly one scene in which Carson gravely intones that one will remember the great moments of one history, juxtaposed against Bean made up as a Nazi general, goose-stepping ridiculously across the screen.

I guess when it comes down to it, there’s not much that can be said one way or the other to condemn or praise this movie. If you’re open to Bean’s particular kind of low-brow humour, as cheerfully in-your-face as it is, you’ll find something to like in this amiable film. If you were never able to stomach Atkinson’s artistic betrayal in selling out to the masses, you’re not likely to find anything here that changes your mind about this franchise. Atkinson, as always, remains thoroughly, admirably committed to his character… but again, your enjoying his performance is a matter of whether you ever found Bean amusing in the first place.

Hardly a movie that had to be made, MBH is nevertheless charming enough and funny enough, that it’s not a complete travesty in the larger scheme of things. That doesn’t in any way make it a must-see, of course. But if you do get around to catching it, here’s hoping you won’t be completely bummed out and will actually find some things to enjoy about the movie.