Review: The Wrestler

The Wrestler is a magnificent comeback for both its director Darren Aronofsky and its star Mickey Rourke. Villified by many (although not me) for The Fountain, Aronofsky has not so much bounced back as entirely re-invented himself, while Rourke reignites the screen charisma that marked him out at his early 80s height.

Rourke is The Ram, a professional wrestler, who like his chosen profession has fallen on hard times. Like Rourke, The Ram clearly has talent, clearly has good intentions, but can’t help but fuck up whenever he’s close to being happy. The film charts in a slightly predictable fashion how the ageing hero decides he will no longer wrestle, how he seems to turn his life (love- and family-) around and how he fucks all that up.

But it’s not unrelentingly bleak: there are so many beautiful scenes of real, aching emotion and psychological breakthroughs, particularly with Marisa Tomei (his possible squeeze) and Rachel Evan-Wood (his estranged daughter), while the first time The Ram works on the deli counter at the supermarket will warm even the coldest cockles (Aronofsky displaying a previously untapped lightness of touch).

Like Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight, much will be written about Rourke’s powerhouse performance – and all of it entirely justified. It’s not simply a case of Rourke playing himself, for there is more to The Ram than just a potted history of Rourke’s mistakes. Nevertheless it’s hard not to see The Ram’s journey as enormously therapeutic for Rourke, rehabilitating him into Hollywood.

Two films cast shadows over The Wrestler, namely Rocky and Raging Bull, but for my money, it’s better than both. It has shares a similar gritty 70s attitude with those two, but it’s warmer than Raging Bull but not as sentimental as Rocky.

The conclusion is pleasingly open-ended, the support from Tomei and Evan-Wood outstanding and the score from Clint Mansell is top-notch.

The film is likely to be widely nominated and rewarded by every awards body going

In short, a must-see.
Score: 8.5

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire, directed with characteristic verve by Danny Boyle and written by Simon ‘Full Monty’ Beaufoy, is gathering huge awards season momentum, many critics suggesting, like Little Miss Sunshine ($98m) and Juno ($228m) in the past two years, this could be the little film that makes it big.

It is a fantastically crowd-pleasing film that needs to be seen in a packed cinema, but I fear it may not crossover as easily as Little Miss Sunshine and Juno did. Ultimately, it’s a light (but not lightweight) twenty-something romance that asks much of its male cast, but relatively little of the key female, played by Freida Pinto, who is called upon simply to be beautiful and be in love with Dev Patel’s hero, Jamal.

The film opens with slum-born orphan Jamal being questioned by police for suspected cheating on India’s version of Who wants to be a millionaire – and crucially if he can prove his innocence, he’s just one Q&A away from winning 20 million rupees. Using the structure of the show itself, the film reveals, question-by-question how a boy from the slums of Mumbai could possibly know all the answers by flashing back to his youth, growing up in and trying to escape from the horror of the slums with his brother Salim and the girl of his dreams Latika.

The flashbacks, while vividly shot, edited and exquisitely composed, do not pull their punches: the reality of the Mumbai slums is revealed in all its colourful, awful horror. And it’s these elements that lift Slumdog to awards season contender.

Any sense of unease the audience might feel about a ‘greed is good’ mantra being the film’s ultimate message is smashed by all the shit the hero quite literally crawls through to attain his dream and the fate of his brother. Inevitably, love wins out – at which point, there shouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.

In many ways, Slumdog is closer in spirit to City of God than Little Miss Sunshine or Juno. Its feelgood charm, counterpointed by the reality it depicts, is something Golden Globe, Bafta and Oscar voters will probably warm too as so many other contenders are just too dark for the dark times in which we live.
Score: 8

Review: Waltz With Bashir

Waltz With Bashir is a visually overwhelming, animated documentary. That’s right, the entire film is a doc, only presented in the animated medium, rather than live action. The animation is both the film’s strength and its weakness.

Written and directed by Ari Folman, the film is essentially a therapy session for him, as he tries to remember the massacre (during the 1982 Lebanon war) of Palestinians in Beirut by militant Christian Phalangists, which the Israel Defence Forces (in which Forman served at the time) did nothing to prevent. Unable to remember the event, his mind having apparently blocked out the horror, he sets about contacting his old comrades, and he asks them what they remember. Slowly he pieces it all together in his mind, realisation finally hitting home at the dramatic and chilling conclusion to the film.

Folman’s journey to memory recovery is an unsettling mixture of reality and dream (or nightmare) for both him and the audience, combining both the literary mechanics of Catch 22 with the war is just a bad acid trip attitude of Apocalypse Now. The freedom allowed by opting for animation (most of it by illustrator and artistic director David Polonsky) means that the full extent of the nightmarish memories are realised so vividly that the audience forgets it’s watching an animated film.

In fact the film is insanely brilliant to watch – and therein lies its weakness: the visuals are so strong, the story can’t quite match them. Nevertheless, this is very definitely worth the price of admission - and could be seen as a companion piece to Persepolis.
Score: 7.5

Review: Body of Lies

Body of Lies is a curiously mixed bag of a ‘current’ thriller from Ridley Scott. Set in the tangled web of America’s war of terror in the Middle East, the film is strangely distant from its protagonists and antagonists, divesting the film of any strong emotional core.

Opening like Spooks on steroids with a botched raid on a terrorist safehouse in Manchester, action soon centres on Leonardo DiCaprio’s CIA agent, run on an almost entirely virtual basis by a complacent, corpulent Russell Crowe. DiCaprio’s agent is torn between loyalty to the CIA and to his opposite number in the Jordanian investigation bureau (a great turn by Mark Strong), and by his own growing moral concerns about how America chooses to take the fight to the terrorists – and yet he is no innocent.

There is marked mirroring, as characters up and down the chain of command use each other: Crowe using DiCaprio, DiCaprio using Strong, and Strong using DiCaprio, etc. Inevitably, DiCaprio gets in above his head. If the finale is welcome, while not entirely right in the light of the realistic bent of the film, the ensuing coda brings us back down to earth.

Ridley’s bravura visuals are present throughout, but that oft-mentioned failing of his – an inability to tell a story – remains evident here too. The story is too complex (although that could be taken as being simply realistic), set in too many theatres of operation, with too much spy jargon getting in the way of progressing the story.

The overall politics of the piece are uncomfortable as well: while America comes in for a load of criticism in its handling of the Middle East ‘situation’ (to quote DiCaprio’s character), the Middle East and all its people are painted as potential terrorists, their funders and sympathisers.

Nevertheless, there are many scenes to enjoy, notably when there’s hardware involved or the delicately etched budding relationship between DiCaprio and the Iranian nurse he takes a shine too – and the reaction of her sister and neighbours.

Ultimately Body of Lies is a more action-packed, less overtly left-wing version of Syriana – and joins the growing list of war on terror movies that have flopped at the US box office.
Score: 6.5

Review: Quantum of Solace

Bond is back – but he’s not back in style I’m afraid (well apart from the Tom Ford-supplied wardrobe). While its opening weekend figures are higher than Casino Royale in every territory, including a whopping $25m three-day total in the UK, Quantum of Solace trails behind its predecessor as a film.

There are a number of essential problems, not least a leaden plot, a damp squib of an ending and an awful theme from Jack White. The all-too Bourne-esque fight scenes are just that, and while the prologue is bravely teased out (cross-cut, with no sound, between closing helicopter shot and extreme fast-cut car-to-car action), it’s not a patch on the inventive opening to Casino.

Some bold decisions were taken with the script. Conceptually they are intriguing, but they’ve been poorly developed and realised. Judi Dench’s M is now Bond’s moral compass and effectively the only woman he has anything close to a relationship with. The laughably awful Gemma Arterton makes for the flimsiest of Bond girls that the current James has seduced, while Olga Kurylenko as the vengeful Camille is interesting but doesn’t have quite enough to do (or is it simply the creative team trying to be realistic?).

Bond’s mission of revenge is hollow – he learns no lesson from it. His target, eco-magnate Dominic Greene is played by Mathieu Amalric without any charm – and seems a rather flimsy, light-weight villain (but, as the plot reveals, he is only a small cog in a very large wheel).

Having said all that, there is still much to enjoy. While the fight scenes are Bourne-esque, Bond still has to suffer (indeed Daniel Craig must have done himself an infinite number of injuries), adding realism, while the anti-US undercurrent of Casino is developed to become a strong sentiment running throughout Quantum.

The Tosca sequence (in counterpoint to the opening) is artfully staged and edited together, and concludes with a satisfying punch (and one of a number of passing nods to previous Bonds).

Bond is also called on to do some actual spying and detection work rather than just killing everyone in sight while searching for the McGuffin.

And let it be said: Daniel Craig is Bond, he absolutely owns the role. Two more Bond movies with this level of performance and physical commitment and he will be pushing Connery for the title of best Bond.

And yet the two-part conclusion to his Quantum mission is thoroughly unsatisfying. Many have said this film feels like the second part of a trilogy – and I’d agree with that.

Ultimately this is a disappointing affair: the creative team could have done so much better. But Bond is Bond, and, like the films of David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman, it’s hard to measure the film other than by its own established yardstick.
Score: 6