Shedding a dim light on old news

Jenny finds Spotlight timid and ponderous

Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy, takes its name from the investigative team from the Boston Globe newspaper who in 2001 eventually exposed dozens of paedophile priests in South Boston. By dint of painstaking detective work they showed that powerful local interests had protected the Catholic Church through a process of mutual collusion. The film suggests that it took the new editor, a Jewish outsider, to pursue a story that the newspaper already had. He is played in the film as a socially awkward man immune to the winks, hints, charity galas, golfing conversations and backslapping of local worthies.

So far, so noble.

But I was puzzled. I have lived in and around journalism for much of my adult life and I've never seen journalists like these: dressed in beige, tidy, nicely spoken, obedient. No swearing? No drinking? The worst they say is ‘Jeez!’ or ‘freaking’. I've never seen a newspaper office like this one where people sit placidly at their desks. Nor have I ever known a daily newspaper office to be uninhabited on a Sunday as this one seems to be.

This is a terribly respectful film, carefully made. It takes itself tremendously seriously. I found the result achingly dull and ponderous. The director does his best to bring life to the script by using West Wing style fast walking shots, plus, inexplicably, a character who is always running from one place to the next for no good reason. There is some annoying mansplaining. 'What's a treatment centre?' asks the lady reporter and one of her gentleman colleagues kindly enlightens her.

Somehow the moment for this film has passed. We know this story. It still shocks but it is familiar. We have seen the same nasty phenomena not just in the Catholic Church but also in the Anglican and other churches where people have protected the organization and themselves, ignoring the victims. We have seen it in Rochdale and Oxford where collusion between police, social workers and the justice system ignored the obvious abuse of hundreds of vulnerable young teenage girls who were blamed for the violence, rapes and threats that they suffered over many years. As a subject it is a topic for actual journalism - urgent, risky, raw, angry and immediate, not a timid film about journalism based on events that happened in the safe past of 15 years ago.

This film is bound to win an Oscar. It's the kind of socially responsible subject that the Academy likes. But in a few years’ time who will remember it? Not many is my guess.

Joe’s heckle

I liked this a bit more than I expected to, Jenny, and a lot more than you did. The trailer features a histrionic outburst by Mark Ruffalo as journalist Michael Rezendes (it coulda bin me, it coulda bin you, it coulda bin any of us) but the film is anything but histrionic. It avoids the sentimentality and simplistic moral judgments that dragon-slayer narratives can slip into. Having led the Spotlight team to success, Walter Robinson (Michael Keaton), facing the uncomfortable discovery that he too, early in his career, was complicit in burying the story, finds triumph overshadowed by guilt. And while the sense of liberation predominates, none of the team is entirely untouched by the negative impact of what they have.

There’s complexity on the other side too. The lawyers who have represented the Church in secret deals with abused families are both interestingly conflicted. The closest we get to evil is those ‘backslapping worthies’, chief among them the smug Cardinal, who considers it appropriate to welcome the Globe’s new Jewish editor with the gift of a Catholic Catechism, while presiding over a systematic cover-up that leaves abusers unpunished and children unprotected. The only paedophile we meet is a defrocked priest interviewed on his doorstep, a pathetic old man who seems to have no conception of the harm he has done, and only just has time to identify himself as a victim of childhood rape before his minder pulls him indoors.

Perhaps what you found dull and ponderous, Jenny, was the quality I registered as restraint. Has the moment for this film passed? The institutional abuse of children under the neglectful eye of those who should be paying attention remains, as you suggest, a live issue, and I agree that this demands actual journalism. And you are right that the Catholic Church is not uniquely culpable. On the other hand, the Church has no rivals in the scale of abuse perpetrated by its employees and the scope of its collusion with them, and it still falls far short of the transparency that should be demanded of it.

But a socially responsible cause is not enough – maybe for the Academy, not for me, not even a cause I care so much about. A more shallow treatment of this story would have invited us simply to gloat over the dead dragon and cheer for the dragon-slayers. This one offered a convincing picture of an elite groomed into accepting the Church’s cosmic sense of entitlement, and a group of journalists who refused to be intimidated.

Memories of the subprime mortgage scam

For Joe, The Big Short evokes memories of hard times

The Big Short, directed and co-written by Adam McKay, tells the story of the US subprime mortgage crisis that led to the great global unravelling. As a film about a public scandal, it’s unusual in not putting at its centre a moral crusader – like Erin Brockovich taking on industrial polluters, or the Spotlight Team at the Boston Globe exposing child abuse – perhaps because there were none, all the regulators being either on the take or asleep at the wheel, and any potential whistle-blowers powerless against the capitalist machine.

Instead we follow three separate stories concerning a handful of investors and hedge fund managers who saw where the twenty-first-century housing bubble was heading and set out to make money from the impending crash. As the face-to-camera narrator tells us, they are not an obviously likeable bunch. We do grow to like some of them, though, particularly the eccentric loner, Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who seems as indifferent to the billions his gamble might make for him and his investors as he is to the widespread suffering success will entail, caring only about being right on the maths, and the initially obnoxious Mark Baum (Steve Carell), whose free-floating rage finally finds a worthy target in the corrupt financial system.

The film held me, but I watched it in a state of anxiety. The feeling was subtly different from the pulse-racing sensation induced by car chases and hairsbreadth escapes. I think it was brought on partly by the relentless in-your-face pop-video style. But I think it was mainly because I wanted it to end well for the ‘good guys’, which meant wanting it to end catastrophically for almost everyone else, which I knew it would anyway, having already lived through this movie.

The trip taken by Baum’s team to the Las Vegas suburbs to discover what kind of foundations the property market was resting on struck a particular chord with me. In the spring of 2009, squeezed by circumstances and uncertain of our future, having sold up in Santa Barbara, Leni and I were wondering if we should keep a foothold in the US property market. I was on my way to Norfolk, England, for a one-year job as writer in residence, with accommodation included, but Norfolk was never going to be our home. So we spent a few weeks looking at apartments and condominiums in southern California.

It was an eye-opening experience. We saw ghost-town developments abandoned by the recession. We stood in homes that had been stripped of anything detachable – cookers, boilers, electric sockets – and felt the desperation of the evicted owners. There was one place we liked – a modest, two-bedroom condo, well looked after, in a small town close enough to the Pacific Ocean for sand to blow along the main shopping street. At recession prices we could afford to pay cash at the asking price. We filled in the form to make our offer official and thought that was it, we were committed. ‘Don’t expect a swift response,’ the agent said. ‘It’s owned by the Bank of America, and like all the big banks they’re overwhelmed with foreclosed properties they don’t know what to do with.’ ‘Surely they’ll just say yes then.’ The agent shrugged. ‘Don’t hold your breath is all I’m saying.’ We didn’t. And just as well. Seven years on, and settled in London, we’re still waiting for the Bank of America to get back to us.

Abramson's ROOM is breathtaking

Jenny on a triumphant adaptation of Donaghue's novel

It’s a long time since I have felt scarcely able to breathe during a tense sequence in a film and even longer since I have actually cried, but I did both during Room, Lenny Abramson’s magnificent rendering of Emma Donaghue’s book for which Donaghue also wrote the screenplay.

The subject evokes squeamishness of all sorts because it involves a five year old boy, Jack, and his young mother, ‘Ma’, being imprisoned in a soundproofed garden shed. The boy’s father is her rapist kidnapper. But it is nothing like the grim brutality of Michael, Markus Schleinzer’s German-language film from 2011 where the emphasis was on the hideous nature and crime of the captor. In fact the perpetrator in Room is seen sparingly and the film denies us the satisfaction of enjoying his eventual punishment.

The film cannot capture the voice of the child as the book does so well, but Danny Cohen’s camera sweeps and swoops, gives us oddly revealing close-ups which suggest that this little boy is stable, functioning well inside his small cell, his mother insisting on regular routines: phys ed, meals, crafts, games and stories, hiding the terrible reason for ‘Old Nick’s’ regular nightly visits, during which Jack must sleep in a slatted wardrobe.

Mother and child are like big and little mirrors of each other – the same chalky white faces and long, androgynous hair, varying only in age and experience. A copy of Alice in Wonderland, their only book, suggests the dream-reality of their existence. Ma knows there is another world, Jack only knows Wonderland which, of course, is not Wonderland at all.

The trailer gives away most of the plot, so we will ignore the no-spoiler rule. ‘Old Nick’ loses his job and ‘Ma’ knows that he will probably kill them if he has to sell his house, so she and Jack must escape. Having convinced him that there is no ‘outside’ she now has to do the opposite and teach him to play an appallingly dangerous part in their escape.

The second act is the escape and I have never seen a more thrilling car sequence in the cinema.

The third act is about how Jack and Ma adjust to the ‘real’ world. Here the film is less successful than the book in its hints at Plato’s cave and what is ‘real’ and what is shadows, the necessity of mother and child separation, the need to accept that good-enough parenting is all that most of us can hope for. At the time of watching I accepted that Jack can become a regular little chap with short hair and a cute smile, cheering up his Mummy. But now – I wonder, would such a smooth transition really be possible?

There is so much good work in this film. First, the casting directors Robin Cook and Fiona Weir: how very skilfully they must have found and chosen Jacob Tremblay to play Jack, a thoroughly natural and touching performance. The production designer, Ethan Tobman has done a wonderful job not just in conveying every inch of the squalor of ‘Room’ but also the hideous primness of the family home, all spotless cream carpets and pretentious gilt furniture. Brie Larson just must win an Oscar for her superb performance: in range alone from passionately devoted mother to out of control tigress to abject depressive she outdoes any other actor I have seen this season.

As for Lenny Abramson, I am in awe of his talent for working with actors who give performances of astonishing depth and subtlety: Pat Shortt in Garage, Jack Reynor in What Richard Did and Michael Fassbender in Frank. He seems to be a director preoccupied and fascinated by situations where his protagonists are right up against closely observed physical or psychological limitations – both in the case of Room. After this triumph he will be a hot director. He will be able to take his pick. Bring it on.

More toys for the boys

Jenny on Spectre

When my sons were small, it was forbidden for boys to have proper dolls, though now you can buy baby dolls with convincing male genitalia, which is jolly nice and only fair to girls. Then, boys had to make do with Action Man and Star Wars ‘figures’ as their dolls. Action Man came with multiple enticing outfits and opportunities for dressing and undressing, though alas, ultra-masculine though he was, he did not have anything much under his camouflage pants. Talking to my older son about all of this, he reminded me that he had also been very fond of a certain white James Bond car.

It suddenly came to me watching Spectre that of course Sam Mendes and his crew must all have been small boys at much the same time, and now, how wonderful, they get to play with the action figures for real! This probably accounts for the constant homage to earlier Bond films. Fluffy white cat with sulky expression? Tick. Train? Tick. Villain’s strangely retro Space Age Evil Lair? Tick. Villain’s Nehru jacket? Tick. I’m not sure if we are meant to see these references as giving us a wink of sly humour or whether they are deadly serious. What is certain is that this is a Fanboy tribute of an attentive and loving kind.

This movie is stylish and clever. The pre-credit sequence is set in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead and it is as good as or better than any other film in the Bond canon. It has a long tracking shot of staggering virtuosity and I’m still trying to work out how it was done. The production design is consistently brilliant. Bond survives his ordeals, as ever, without a scratch, so for instance having been tortured by having his skull drilled by Christoph Waltz, with one bound is he free in an immaculate freshly ironed white shirt. Naturally there is no sign of blood, gore, brain damage or the smoke and debris from the massive explosion he has just caused. The final reel, set spectacularly in London, is beautifully made, CGI blending invisibly with the real thing.

My problem is the one I have always had with the Bond franchise. I have no interest whatsoever in guns, bombs, handcuffs, cars, helicopters, planes, trains, explosions, spies, fights, car chases, buildings-demolition, murders, gadgets or action-driven plots. So I dozed off in the second reel and may have missed some nuances in whatever sketchy plot there was.

I did notice that Daniel Craig is not required to do much in the way of acting. All those doubting persons who thought him too short, too blond, too ordinary etc to be JB have certainly been proved wrong in a big way. But fine actor that he is, all he really has to do here is pout, give piercing stares from his lovely blue eyes, make manspreading poses and point a gun. The love scenes are embarrassing. He looks as if he can barely disguise his distaste for them so thank goodness we were spared anything explicit.

And now I’m a little concerned for Daniel. In my other life as a career coach I have worked with people who have got all the money, fame and fancy titles that they ever dreamed of, yet their lives feel empty. He has let slip that he does not want to make another Bond and I can see why. He must want to get back to something that will show off his depth and range and not just his gymbod. But that is going to be so difficult when the world, and not least Ms Broccoli, will press hard for him to go on being Bond.

As for me, these exciting super-hero boy-films are not my cup of tea. Give me a nice slow French family melodrama with terrible subtitles any day.

History as hovis commercial

Jenny on Suffragette

I made myself go to this film.

I find myself at odds with what so many of the critics have to say about it. Since they are almost all men perhaps they're afraid of being seen not to like it for fear of being dubbed sexist or unsympathetic to the Cause.

I thought it was good acting applied to bad history. The film suggests the following – all exaggerations, sloppily thought through, or just plain wrong

All male persons are total bastards or just feeble wimps

All women are heroines

The acts of terrorism by the militant branch of the Suffragettes were justified

Emily Davison's reckless and heroic act resulted in women getting the vote

The Suffragette movement resulted in getting universal suffrage for women (hmm, only 16 years later so there’s a bit of a time lag, and since it's entirely set in 1912 the film overlooks the impact of WW1)

A working class woman could rise to a position of influence in a movement run by aristocrats and upper middle class women

It was always winter

It was always raining

There was always smog and every room was smoky

People only ever lit their rooms with candles and paraffin lamps

You can get away with lumpen extras and terrible CGI in a period film especially if you film on available light in dark, smoky wintery rooms and against whatever light there is

If you have fussy hand held camera work and equally fussy editing that makes up for a very boring script

Brendan Gleeson will be condemned to playing policemen until he is too old to be plausible in the part.

It reminded me of Vera Drake, another period film shot in grey, dark green and sepia with a working class heroine, and which I also disliked for its utter lack of plausibility and specious stereotyping.

I thought by far the best bit was the brutal horror of the force feeding scene and the acknowledgement that women could not be allowed to die because of the political embarrassment it would cause. The film does succeed in making the point that so many men hate and fear women - interesting that one of the trailers was for the film about Malala, so the issue is still with us.

Joe’s heckle

Oh, Jenny, I liked it so much more than you did! Of course I’m sympathetic to the cause of female suffrage (aren’t we all?) but that wouldn’t be enough to persuade me. I’m actually quite resistant to the sentimental treatment of modish causes. Pride bothered me, much as I enjoyed it, because it felt too easy to have our tears jerked over the destruction of South Wales mining communities in a nostalgic kind of way, when, as a society, we’d let it happen and had just installed an ultra-Thatcherite government to do more of the same.  

I’m probably less concerned about historical accuracy than you are. I could have tolerated the historical distortions in The Imitation Game if they’d made the story more rather than less internally coherent. To take just one example, it made no sense that the rest of the code-breakers were so resistant to Turing’s machine, even to the point of violence (in observance of the Hollywood convention that drama is not occurring unless things are getting smashed) when they clearly all understood the enormous odds against solving the problem with nothing but pencil and paper.

At a human level, I found the story told in Suffragette fairly compelling. If there were inaccurate period details I didn’t spot them. I think you may be right on the unlikely rise of the working class heroine through the ranks of the movement. I didn’t register it in class terms, though, but rather as an issue of pace and scope – a bit too much happening too quickly to too few characters. Perhaps the film erred here on the side of dramatic economy, with Maud serving as survivor of sexual abuse, oppressed female worker, powerless mother, suffragette recruit, potential government agent, torture victim, and witness to the final horror. This filled out her role at the cost of making the suffragette organisation feel under-populated.

I don’t think the film suggested that Emily Davison’s death led directly to female suffrage. Maud is clearly traumatised by it. Helen Bonham Carter’s character, Edith Ellyn (also fictional, I now see) seems deeply despondent. They both react as if to a defeat. Maud’s last words to Edith are to the effect that they must go on (with the struggle). The upswing in mood comes only right at the end, with the funeral presented as publicity coup, which is immediately followed by the actual dates of legislation. Films about historic struggles tend to simplify the causes of victory. This one struck me as being less guilty than most.

You felt that the film justified acts of terrorism. I thought it was more ambiguous. Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) has a persuasive moment when he tells Maud how close the bombing of Lloyd-George’s country house came to killing the housekeeper. When Edith is criticised for leading impressionable young women into violent criminal behaviour, it seemed to me we were invited to make the connection with the grooming methods of today’s ISIS recruiters.

I assume Steed fell into the bastard category for you. I found him more complicated. The class issue is interestingly touched on when he tries to persuade Maud that she is being exploited by privileged women with much less to lose. His appeal to some kind of class solidarity here felt like more than just a “good cop” routine.

His ministerial boss (Samuel West) was more one-dimensional, as was Maud’s employer – another character burdened, you could argue, with too much social weight, representing both cruel overseer and unrestrained abuser. Her husband Sonny (Ben Wishaw), on the other hand, though he gives up their child for adoption while she’s on the run, is certainly no brute, and not exactly a wimp either, just a decent man of his time, trapped within socially determined limits. The women of the neighbourhood who ostracise the family play their own role in this desperate outcome.   

Confident, stylish and funny

Jenny on The Diary of a Teenage Girl 

The scene is a classroom on the first day of term in a college of further education where as a very young graduate many decades ago I have been hired to teach teenage students. I am bemused to be sent outside, along with all the girls in the class, while the head of the college addresses the boys. Why? One of the boys kindly explains a few days later. ‘It was about wanking, Miss, he says. ‘Sir told us we had to be polite and keep our hands out of our pockets.’

Ah, those were the days. Teenage boys were assumed to be in dire need of rules to rein them in, while girls were sweet little virginal persons with no sexual feelings who needed protection from the overheated male herd. As a teenage girl myself in the very recent past, I knew all too well how untrue this was, but assumed that I was somehow unique.

The Diary of Teenage Girl knows better. Minnie is a 15 year old who records her sexual adventures on a tape recorder in San Francisco, 1976. She gets into a highly inappropriate relationship with her mother’s layabout lover, she has jack-rabbiting sex with a boy from her school class, she experiments with drugs, she experiments with a girlfriend - and she is without shame or guilt. Minnie’s self-absorbed mother (Kirsten Wiig) has little time for proper parenting, her pompous stepfather is mostly absent and her father long gone, so Minnie longs for love, longs to be touched, longs to be noticed and to be special to someone. She aspires to be a cartoonist, and wonderfully authentic teenage-style hand drawn animations appear at frequent intervals in the film.

The most brilliant thing about this brilliant, confident, stylish and funny film is the way it captures the voice of a 15 year old girl. Minnie is not ‘mature’ or ‘old for her years’, she is exactly what so many 15 year old girls are: articulate but in a recognisably teenage way, full of bravado yet insecure, capable of massive misjudgements yet possessing a moral core that you know will never be compromised – and she has no idea how beautiful she is.

The contrast between this film and the smoothly sanitized teen films of Hollywood, some of whose trailers preceded our viewing, is comic indeed. Minnie is not well dressed – she wears terrible flares throughout. She badly needs a new haircut. But she is not a Lolita temptress-cum-victim. Nor is she the intense outsider of Blue is the Warmest Color or the Troubled Teen of Andrea Arnold’s excellent Fish Tank. The film does not condone or condemn. Somehow we know that Minnie’s passion is her drawing and that when her fan letter to a real life graphic artist (Aline Kominsky) is warmly answered, this is all the encouragement she needs. Although set safely in the past, the film is of course about contemporary themes and this may be mightily uncomfortable for some viewers.

The performances are terrific. Bel Powley, a British 23 year old plays Minnie with an intensity and naturalness that is electrifying. The Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård plays the boyfriend so flawlessly that you can see exactly why Minnie could be entranced by him, as well as exactly why she eventually realises that the guy is a creep. The film is shot in soft, sludgy tones that capture perfectly the foggy sun and shabby exteriors of 1970s San Francisco as well as the full-on ghastliness of 1970s fashion, smoking, make-up and décor – the decade that never knew it had not an iota of taste.

The movie has an 18 Certificate but I do hope that clever teenage girls exactly like our heroine will somehow find a way to see it. Its ultimate messages are: Girls, you need to love yourselves first. When you do this, everything else follows. And by the way, it’s OK to like sex. 

Outwardly persuaded but inwardly unmoved

Joe on Inside Out

I sometimes think, Jenny, that I haven’t given animated films the attention they deserve. Not having children, I’ve missed out on classics such Chicken Run and Toy Story, which adult friends have praised for their wit, psychological subtlety and narrative sophistication. If I’d managed to achieve even the lowly status of weekend dad, I might have kept abreast of this burgeoning creative field. As it is I’m pretty much a cartoon virgin.

I’m afraid Inside Out didn’t do much to win me over. It gave me a lot to think about. It also gave me a lot of time to think about it in, while the ramshackle story rattled along. I realise I’m not the target audience, but I was left puzzled as to who the target audience might be.

It took me back to Everyman (which we reviewed last week). The anonymous author of that medieval allegory was interested only in moral issues, so the component parts of the human character are divided according to whether they’ll help him or not on his final journey to judgement. In the Inside Out version of the human psyche, all the internal characters are equally useful, equally valued. That certainly appealed to the secular humanist in me.

And how interesting that they are all emotions. It set me thinking about an Enlightenment version in which Reason would be precariously enthroned above rebellious characters such as Feeling and Fancy, who would be quelled only when it was revealed that they were secretly in league with Madness. The Romantic sequel would show Reason, quailing in the face of a tsunami of the Sublime, rescued by Imagination, her sails billowing triumphantly. By the mid-twentieth century, I suppose we’d have been watching poor battered Ego, squashed between a lordly Superego and a lewd and scabrous Id. That one would need an 18-certificate.

These thoughts left me more favourably inclined towards Inside Out, whose ideas of how the mind works are at least based on research, not guesswork or wishful thinking or patriarchal models passed down from antiquity. And so far as it has an ideology, it’s an ideology I can get behind, which values self-acceptance and suggests that bad feelings are better processed than punished. 

But allegory is a form with preachy tendencies. 150 years after Everyman, John Bunyan flagged up the message of Pilgrim’s Progress with characters called Timorous and Mr Worldly Wiseman. He didn’t want his readers to forget for a moment that the story was just there to sugar the pill. Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t the most exciting yarn, but it’s better than a sermon.

Inside Out is in this tradition. It’s better than a lecture. Bunyan showed us Pilgrim’s journey towards the Celestial City. Pixar takes us, in the company of Joy and Sadness and a half-forgotten imaginary friend, through the memory bank into the depths of the unconscious. It’s a story of danger and adventure and breath-taking escapes. But you’re never allowed to forget that this inside journey is just a metaphor for the day-to-day conflicts of family life. It struck me that, for a film that presents the human experience as a negotiation among emotions, Inside Out imposes on its viewers a surprisingly cognitive experience. 

Jenny’s heckle

No one can touch Pixar in their fabulous technical competence and their ability to tell a story. They can play to adults and to children simultaneously. Toy Story will appeal to any adult who remembers the pain of growing up and to any child who knows that their beloved toys are real. The characters are realised in depth and the plotting grips, whatever your age.

When I took my then seven year old granddaughter to WALL-E, she watched a touching love story. I watched a searing satire about our casual self-indulgence and the brutal destruction of our planet. Every time I see some tragically obese person sweatily trying to ease themselves into a seat on the bus I see those ranks of cheerfully fat people in WALL-E who can no longer walk and need to be transported everywhere by mechanical means on their new planet. I would put this movie on my top ten list of most brilliant ever.

But like you, I was disappointed with Inside Out. It’s ambitious. It reflects current neuroscience in basing the plot on evidence that the limbic system, the seat of our emotions, trumps the prefrontal cortex, the source of our self-flattering designation of our species as homo sapiens. It is accurate in plumping for one version of what these emotions are: anger, disgust, fear, joy and sadness. It is sophisticated in showing that some sadness is inevitable (though odd in suggesting that rationality never prevails, in spite of the fact that in the story this is what eventually happens). 

Pixar maybe got gripped by the science and forgot the need to tell the story. Their homunculi—the five emotions—seem only superficially developed. The human characters seem notional. The plot droops in the middle. Technically, of course, it’s just brilliant. The best bit to me was the final credits, superbly handled, reminding those of us who are parents that the challenge is lifelong, you just cannot get it right, those darned kids will always be one step ahead of where you think they ought to be.