Just trying some things out for… possible future use:
Archive for January, 2011
Review: Another Year
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
Directed by Mike Leigh.
Starring Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, and Peter Wight.
Another Year, from Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake director Mike Leigh, centers around one blissfully happy family, Tom (Jim Broadbent), Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and their son Joe (Oliver Maltman), and a handful of profoundly unhappy satellites — chief among them Mary (Lesley Manville), a divorced, forty-something co-worker of Gerri’s, desperately lonely and unable to meet a man up to her inordinately high standards.
True to life, Mary finds Ken (Peter Wight), another friend of the happy couple’s, whose brand of loneliness is nearly identical to her own, “weird” and pushes away his (admittedly ungentlemanly) advances, steadfast in her belief that she could do better…  and, in fact, setting her sights on Tom and Gerri’s thirty-something son, in the process. Mary’s one-sided flirtation with Joe becomes complicated by the introduction of a new girlfriend, Katie (Karina Fernandez), but… as the title would lead you to believe, the film ends more or less where it began. The film has no climax, and few confrontations; those few that occur are largely by Tom, and he’s quickly glanced into submission, presumably out of some sense of propriety. The sad irony, of course, being that in some cases, tough love is the greater love that you can give someone you honestly consider a friend.
While it may be open to interpretation, and this is certainly colored by my own experience (as are all films), I felt some measure of quiet condemnation of Tom and Gerri’s relative inaction to their friends’ loneliness. They may not be responsible for their misery, but you can’t help feeling that the couple takes some satisfaction in surrounding themselves with the desperately unhappy, or that they could, just possibly, make a little more of an effort to help them. Judging from other reviews, that may just be my reading of it, having had a few spots of crushing loneliness myself, on a few occasions in my life (yes, I know, poor me), but in one early, telling sequence where Mary is invited over for dinner, she inquires about whether anyone else was going to be there, and Tom replies, “We want you all to ourselves.”
Tom, Mary, and Joe in Another Year
That is the real beauty of Another Year (and, indeed, all of Leigh’s films that I’ve seen): thanks to its flawless cast (largely consistent of Mike Leigh regulars), the characters are just so utterly real, that you love them, ache for them, become cross with them and tire of them like real people. Over the course of Another Year, Mary’s numbing misery of loneliness slowly and surely eat away at her, and you die a little each time. Ultimately, Another Year is a bit of a downer. But, you know, that’s how life is sometimes.
Another Year was released last fall in the UK and a few other countries. It is currently in limited release here in the States and will find its way to Australia later this month.
Review: Vera Drake
Thursday, January 20th, 2011
(Originally published in Gapers Block on October 29, 2004. Vera Drake is now available on video and On Demand through Amazon, as well as on video through Netflix. I’ll be posting a review of Leigh’s latest film, Another Year, later today.)
Directed by Mike Leigh.
Starring Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis, Peter Wight, Eddie Marsan, Adrian Scarborough and Daniel Mays.
In Topsy-Turvy director Mike Leigh’s new drama, Vera Drake, Imelda Staunton (Sense & Sensibility, Shakespeare in Love) stars as the title character, a wonderfully cheerful, caring wife and mother of two grown children who works as a housekeeper for a few wealthy families in post-World War II England. Vera helps care for a few of her neighbors and her elderly mother as well, out of the kindness of her heart, and whenever a problem arises, Vera puts on a kettle — because a cup of tea fixes everything. Leigh takes his time setting up what a remarkably kind woman Vera is, but he drives home this point one time too many when her brother-in-law comments to her husband, Stan, that “she’s got a heart of gold, that woman.” It may seem to be an insignificant moment of excess, but it is still somewhat significant considering Vera performs illicit abortions for women who can’t afford or wouldn’t be allowed a legal one.
In contrast to Vera’s impoverished clientele, Susan (Sally Hawkins), the daughter of one of Vera’s wealthy employers, is raped by a suitor and becomes pregnant. Going through the legal channels, she procures her abortion for the sum of 150 guineas. By comparison, Lily (Ruth Sheen), the woman who puts those in need of help in touch with Vera, charges two guineas for Vera’s services. Vera is unaware of this, however; her own motivations are entirely charitable. While Susan is required to submit to a rather demeaning psychological exam, her ordeal is a simple one, on the whole. At the time, British law only permitted abortions when they were deemed liable to endanger the health of the mother, so Vera’s clients — including a woman with seven children already and a woman who didn’t want her husband to know she had cheated on him — would most likely not been granted one, even if they could afford one.
Vera administers the abortions by pumping soapy water (with a small amount of disinfectant, presumably for sterilization) into the woman’s vagina through a rubber syringe until they feel full. After a day or two, they feel a pain, they go to the bathroom, and it all comes out. She does this for a number of women in the first half of the film, and all of them presumably turn out fine. (We are told later on in the film that this was considered the safest method by other back-alley abortionists. In any case, she’s not scraping the women’ insides with a coat-hanger.) Eventually, however, one of Vera’s clients has complications and is taken to the hospital — the first of her clients to have any problems, to her knowledge, in her twenty or so years of administering them. While the girl’s mother initially claims that her daughter is having a miscarriage, the doctors realize the truth of the matter and call the police.
Staunton’s performance has already won her the Coppa Volpi for the Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, and it is certainly riveting. Vera’s two main modes in the film are cheerful benevolence, as she is in almost the entire first half, and tearful remorse, as she is in almost the entire second half. During the first hour, this constancy makes the role seem almost one-note, but with one absolutely heart-wrenching shot, spotlighting Vera’s face as it transitions from the former to the latter as she realizes why the police have shown up at their home, Staunton masterfully demonstrates that trick lost on most Hollywood actors: subtlety.
Mike Leigh also shows an admirable amount of restraint, considering the film takes on such a hot-button issue. In one of the few times the film addresses the morality or immorality of abortion, Vera’s disapproving son Sid (Daniel Mays) trots out the baby-killing argument, but this line of conversation is … er, aborted … before it collapses into a series of all the tired, cliché arguments from either side of the issue. Vera never denies that what she did was illegal — and, of course, few people would argue that it should be legal for people who are not registered medical practitioners to give abortions.
It’s not really the morality of abortion in general that the film is really tackling, which I was tremendously grateful for, having always felt that the mainline arguments by pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike are utterly full of shit. What Vera Drake addresses is a much more practical subject: the morality of a society that only allows safe abortions to be accessible to the rich. Neither didactic nor melodramatic, Leigh has managed to create as objective a treatment of the subject as I can imagine. As such, Vera Drake is an effective condemnation of such a society — and, if that wasn’t enough, it’s just a damn fine movie.
Vera Drake is playing at the Landmark Century and the Century 12/CinéArts 6 in Evanston.
Trailer Watch: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Friday, January 14th, 2011
I’ve always had a fascination with the beginnings of things: the origins of the universe, the origins of humans, the origins of art… So cave paintings have always been really fascinating to me. And so the upcoming 3D documentary about the Chauvet Cave in southern France certainly grabbed my attention. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, brings the audience along with Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Grizzly Man) as the filmmaker and a two-man crew explore the cave, intercut with interviews with scientists and historians.
The use of 3D is genius, because in these paintings, the artists would often incorporate the form of the walls into their paintings — a bulge in the rock could turn into part of a rhinoceros, for instance. That extra dimension is lost in photographs of the paintings, so 3D is the closest thing to actually seeing them in person.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and is set for release this spring. Time will tell, but I don’t expect it to be widely distributed; the number of art-house theaters with 3D projectors can’t be that great. (via The Playlist)