The Club puts Spotlight in the shade

Jenny admires Pablo Larraín's unsettling meditation on hurt and guilt 

How fascinating it is to compare this Chilean film with the American film Spotlight. The subject is the same: the misbehaviour of priests in the Catholic Church. To me, Spotlight seems to take a woefully self-righteous and one dimensional approach: those terrible priests and all their snaky supporters have to be tracked down and exposed! The good guys - those clever journos - must triumph!

The Club is different. It is set in an impoverished village at the edge of Chile. It is where the world of the living ends and the world of purgatory begins. In an ugly yellow coastal house there are four priests and a nun. The priests have been hidden away because they have committed various misdemeanours, not all of them child abuse. Their dismal lives are made more bearable by decent food, wine and by training their greyhound to win races, the proceeds of which they use to provide more comforts. Three strangers disrupt their routine. First, a fifth priest arrives but he brings in his trail his stalker, a dishevelled homeless man who posts himself outside the house to chant a continuous litany of foul and explicit description of just what this priest did to him. A suicide brings the third stranger, a dapper Jesuit who has come to investigate the death and to assess whether any of the inhabitants of the house will express genuine regret for their past actions.

The film is shot, and I’d love to know how this was achieved, in grimy shades of deep dusty grey tinged with a sandy brown haze, often against the light. The widescreen photography empties the landscape, stripping it of colour and life. Nothing looks clean, nor is it. These people do not feel remorse, they expertly justify their actions with skewed dogma and euphemism. They may feel shame but not guilt. Even the slyly smiling nun, theoretically monitoring their behaviour, for instance how long they spend in the shower (‘long showers are forbidden’) has herself been exiled for cruel behaviour.

It is easy to hate people who abuse their power seeing them in tabloid language as ‘evil beasts’. These priests seem dislikeable, certainly, but they are also forlorn creatures, silent in their unease with themselves, unable to connect even with their fellow ‘prisoners’, one of whom has advanced dementia and who has been there so long that no one can remember why he was sent in the first place. The group don’t care whether they impress their Jesuit interrogator or not. They tell him rudely that he is a Vatican bureaucrat, a nobody; they challenge him to say that he is without sin himself. And of course he cannot.

It has its sardonic moments of black humour which may remind people with long TV memories of Father Ted, an inspired late nineties Irish sitcom with three priests and a housekeeper banished to the fictional Craggy Island in the far West of Ireland. Here too we encounter dementia and foul language, visits from pompous and ineffectual church dignitaries, priests for whom religion provides only a job and a narrative to explain and excuse their actions. And as in Father Ted, the Church protects its own. But the vision The Club offers is darker and more profound. The film is a meditation on how often we hurt others, how little real care we give them, and the difficulty of acknowledging guilt.

The Club is more compelling in its set-up than in its plot. I found the final act especially contrived and unconvincing and if you’re not familiar with Catholic rituals you may be bemused, as I was, by the heavy symbolism. However, unlike Spotlight, this is a film that I continue to ponder; its images don’t fade.

A haunting exploration of loneliness

Jenny applauds Kaufman and Johnson for their 5-star animation Anomalisa

The scene: c1984, Little Angel Children’s Puppet Theatre in Islington, North London, mid performance of something bland such as Meg and Mog

Small son (screaming): I’m not staying here!
Embarrassed mother (me): Shhh!
Small son: I hate those puppets, they’re evil!
Embarrassed mother: Why?
Small son: They come alive and they’ll come and get me!

Yes, well-spotted that son, puppets have a weird, dream-like quality of their own, half way as they are between doll and human and they do so in this strange and brilliant film.

The well-named Michael Stone is in Cincinatti, chosen for its mid-west anonymity. He is an author and motivational speaker whose subject is customer care. I have done my occasional stints as a motivational speaker and I have many times stayed in anonymous hotels just like this one. The whole grisly business of checking in and being taken to your room is shown in real time and made me ache with laughter: the receptionist who has certainly absorbed every word of Michael’s book and is able to recite his welcome incantation with utterly fake empathy and without pausing for breath; the bellhop who explains that this is the bathroom and this is the window with his hand held out for the tip; the dark room (always too dark to read your documents easily except in the overlit bathroom); the shower that is too hot then too cold; the grim view; the long long corridor with identical doors; the key card that only works on the third attempt; the room service where bland food is made to sound enticing by describing the raspberry vinaigrette on the lettuce. Yes, I’ve been there.

It seems that everyone apart from Michael has an identical face in this world and their voices, man woman or child, are spoken by the same actor, Tom Noonan. That is until he meets a breathless fan who is coming to his session the following day. Lisa is a naïve, sweetly spoken young woman disfigured by a facial scar. Jennifer Jason Leigh voices this part with astonishing depth. Lisa and Michael have a one night affair.

Why puppets for this extraordinary riff on the loneliness and pointlessness of human existence? Why as a director put yourself through three whole years where the stop-action animators were doing well to produce a mere 2 seconds a day and at a total cost of $10m? Because clearly nothing else would do. The puppets have a foreshortened, stumpy appearance, their skin vulnerably fuzzy, their eyes full of pain. They make it plain that our belief in free will is an illusion: we are puppets.

The heart of the film is the sex scene. Could human actors reproduce the painful awkwardness of sex with a new lover when for instance, you accidentally bang your head on the headboard, say ‘sorry’ too much or get overcome by shyness? Or convey the experience of intoxicating and illusory connection when biology does its bit? Probably not. I have never seen a movie scene like this: funny, so tastefully done, touching and oddly erotic where I had to keep reminding myself, ‘these are puppets!’

Disaffected middle-aged fatalists are nothing new in American cinema and fiction but Michael is a special case, a man out of time and place. David Thewlis, who voices Michael, has a slow, downbeat Mancunian accent but his character is living in LA. His marriage is failing. He doesn’t believe his own advice any more. He is making a living by trudging through his life, peddling the lie that customer service brings happiness. The literal nightmare of the film is his dream where, running up that dark corridor, his puppet mask falls off, revealing a terrifying cardboard skull beneath.

This is an animated film with no talking animals or jolly ending. Yes, that small son was absolutely right, puppets do have a quality of strange otherness that in this case will haunt you long after you have emerged, blinking, into ‘reality’.

Shimmeringly shallow

Jenny gives Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash 4 stars

I really enjoyed this film. It made me recall so many holidays which start with high hopes of relaxation and sun in new and properly hot locations, interesting local food, carefree sex. As it goes on, all the tensions kick in because of course you take yourself and your familiar problems on holiday, and then it ends in too much wine, sunburn and maybe a little melodrama on the last night because without any of the normal routines to distract you, you are face to face with all the relationship tangles you came away to forget. Fortunately none of my actual holidays ended quite like the one in this film did.

The film cheekily takes its title from David Hockney’s swimming pool painting of gloriously sybaritic California in the sixties. It will remind you of the many movies you have seen where a swimming pool represents depths of desire and the wish to let yourself go. If you are old enough, or film-buff enough, you will remember La Piscine, the 1969 Jacques Deray film of which this is a remake. Tilda Swinton plays a Bowie-like rock star Marianne, recovering from throat surgery so she can only speak in a rasping whisper. Her boyfriend, Matthias Schoenaerts, is a photographer and film director who is recovering from alcoholism and a suicide attempt. They are having a lovely time in their Garden of Eden on the Italian island of Pantelleria when, Pow! In comes the uninvited ghastly supercharged motormouth serpent, a former lover of Marianne, bringing with him a sulky pouting girl (Dakota Johnson) who may or may not be his daughter and who may or may not be a teenager and who certainly represents the forbidden apple. Ralph Fiennes plays the manipulative intruder, Harry, a record producer whose phenomenal piece of Dad Dancing to a Rolling Stones record is a laugh out loud piece of utterly inspired comedy. Forget his Mr Lugubrious of so many period films and plays. Here he is loud, brash, often naked, all unrelenting manic Ups without any of the Downs.

I suspect that the director wants his film to seem as deep as the pool which figures so largely in the plot. It may be. The trouble is that his characters are so very narcissistic. None is what they seem. All are seduced by the tinsel of appearance: they work in film or photography or rock music. They all behave badly. The adults have experienced fame, money and the world’s adoration, yet they are voids inside. The film suggests that they have either never achieved what they wanted or are past their best. But it seems that the director simply cannot help himself: he adores the very things that the film implies are so empty: Tilda’s exquisite wardrobe is by Dior, her face with its chalky skin and androgynous sharp planes, her slim boyish body - all are made for the camera. Matthias Schoenaerts smoulders handsomely as the lover; Dakota Johnson as the maybe-daughter is enticing in her sheer youthfulness.

Guadagnino has said that he does not see himself in the Italian film making tradition http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/a-bigger-splash/interview-luca-guadagnino-tilda-swinton-ralph-fiennes/but I think he may be fooling himself. When I saw L’Avventura as a naïve young filmgoer I was instantly enraptured while simultaneously accepting that I didn’t understand a single frame of it and had no idea what was going on. More recently, watching Paolo Sorrentino’s film A Great Beauty, and finding it stupendously boring, I realised I was seeing something in the Italian tradition that did not work at all for me. But A Bigger Splash has the swooping zooms and pans, languorous enigmatic sex and tortured, reflected close-ups that all Italian films need, with wonderful performances to match.

This film is operatically melodramatic, a lush, slightly bonkers, over the top psychodrama about self-involved, beautiful people with too little to do that ends in tragedy. And do you care? Probably not but you’ll have a good time watching.

Joe’s spoiler

I seem to remember one of DH Lawrence's wacky ideas was that for every murderer there's a murderee. Harry is a perfect murderee. The dance, as you say, Jenny, was superb. The fight in the pool was also, in its own very different way, brilliantly done. Viewed from directly above, unsettlingly lit from below the water line, and with a sound track so subtle that I thought at first I was hearing noises from an adjacent screen, it leads to what must be the finest swimming pool death since Amanda Redmond did for Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.

I’m not sure the effect in the end is as shallow as you suggest. Marianne is fully aware of the moral significance of what she’s doing (is there an actor in the business whose eyes give away as much as Tilda Swinton’s?) when she suggests that refugees who have recently landed on the local beach may be to blame for Harry’s death.

Elemental perfection

Jenny gives Grímur Hákonarson's Rams 5 stars

Don’t be misled. This is not a documentary film about sheep farming in Iceland, even though the talented director, Grímur Hákonarson, has in fact made documentary films. And the ‘Rams’ of the title are really the two bitterly warring and ageing brothers who have not spoken for 40 years, not their rival prize rams, though the actual rams are important enough to have their own credits.

It’s a long time since I have seen a film which has lived on in my mind in quite the way this one has. First there is the bone-dry black humour which flicks in seconds to appalled pity at the human cost of this estrangement. There is a sequence where the older brother, Kiddi, is unceremoniously dumped in a bath, much like one of his sheep. When Gummi needs to communicate with Kiddi, he does a dog-like bark which summons Kiddi’s collie dog (give that dog, Panda, a prize for best animal performance), stuffs a piece of paper in the dog’s mouth and awaits the answer, which duly arrives, a little wet with dog drool.

The crisis in the film is the diagnosis of scrapie in Kiddi’s prize ram. Scrapie is an incurable and highly infectious sheep disease so all the sheep in the valley must be slaughtered. Although there will be compensation, it feels like the end of everything that their family has passionately developed over generations of sheep breeding and the end of a way of life which has endured for a thousand years.

These brothers, who live unspeaking within a few meters of each other, have no computers or mobile phones. They are isolated in the far north of a country which is already the most sparsely populated in Europe. Their handknitted sweaters are full of unrepaired holes, their unkempt beards and hair as bushy as the fleece on their beloved sheep. Their simple houses, diets and clothing remain free of female influence. As Gummi remarks flatly, any women in the area have long since fled. A tough bachelor life is the only option.

Now, as the plot unfolds, maybe they can save at least some part of this heritage, but to do it, they must cooperate. The final sequence has the impact of biblical myth, Cain and Abel must reconcile or die, wrestling the harsh climate in this icy, treeless landscape. The closing moments are unbearably poignant: elemental in their underlining of the message that although we are alone, our fates are inextricably linked with those we love – or once loved.

Everything about this film has a kind of perfection: the backstory is merely hinted at and you may need to watch carefully to catch the family photograph telling of a happier time in the past. The cinematography moves seamlessly from vast empty vistas to close-ups of craggy faces, or of a piece of wood being painstakingly whittled. The production design tells you that these men live in poverty but without a shred of aspiration for anything else – they accept their lot. The music is spare and disciplined. As for the acting, it is magnificent. I believed all of them to be the people they play.

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.