All is Lost

 

Dir. J C Chandor

How many Robert Redford films feature in your list of favourite films? For myself, I would include The Candidate and Jeremiah Johnson. I retain fond memories of watching him paired off with Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park and The Electric Horseman and Three Days of the Condor also occupies a soft spot although I may need to watch that again and make a re-evaluation, while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, without question, shoots to the top of any such list.

No mention yet, you’ll notice, of All the President’s Men or The Sting, nor have I touched upon The Great Gatsby, The Natural, Indecent Proposal or The Horse Whisperer. Owing to his founding of the Sundance Festival and a broad left, eco-friendly outlook, Redford’s credentials are impeccable but doubts do exist. Doubts arising from a suspicion that that he hasn’t always chosen parts which stretch him very far as an actor and his apparent clinging to leading man roles when the sand in that particular egg timer had long since run through.

I did once forgo a Redford film. The Way We Were was playing at our college Film Society and it was a sell-out. As I approached the door clutching my ticket I was urged to sell it by an anguished female student whose desire to see the film clearly burned more fiercely than mine. I sold my ticket (at face value I hasten to add) and went off to pursue the worthwhile student activity of essay writing or more likely drinking at the Student Union.

Anyway, I digress, the point I’m making is that I wouldn’t have given up my ticket to see a Paul Newman film. But if you share such an ambivalence about Robert Redford, in the case of All is Lost, I urge you to drop it as this is a terrific film.

It is not a spoiler to say that there is no dialogue in the film, nor are there any other characters in the cast. Redford is alone at sea and he has to act to carry this film. And act he does in 106 minutes of gripping drama.

We are not given any back story nor are we allowed any traditional narrative arc. The film opens with the crisis point of a single-manned yacht in the Indian Ocean being dangerously holed by an errant container cast adrift in the ocean shortly after we have heard in voiceover the thoughts of the sailor (referred to as Our Man in the credits) in his final log entry. He says he fought to the end, he refers to “you all” (family?) he apologises and we catch a glimpse of a wedding ring on his finger. And that’s it: no explanation of why he is sailing alone, no information about a start and end point to his journey and no motive given for his solitary voyage. These things don’t matter as this is not Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea battling for one last big fish, this is a film about life and its inevitability.

Most viewers will arrive at this film loaded with baggage. Even when they realise that there will be no interplay between characters they will still have huge expectations of a triumph for the central character who has gained our sympathies; the rule of an uplifting ending for the final reel should be retained. However,  what they will find is skill, resourcefulness and enterprise pitted against relentless adversity. Our Man says he fought to the end which indeed he does and, apart from one despairing bellowed expletive, Redford underplays it all magnificently with nuanced eye movements and stoic opposition to the hand which fate has dealt him. He is not so much Hemingway’s Old Man of the Sea but Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner,

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide wide sea.”

where he is pitted mercilessly against the elements. The storm scenes exemplifying man’s insignificance against the force of nature are particularly breath-taking and the protagonist is thrown about the overturning boat. There is no question here of Redford opting for an easy ride or a camera-friendly, image boosting role; a physically demanding, arduous shoot for a seventy-seven year old actor and a performance which must put him in line for a best actor Oscar. Maybe it is his tilt for the last big fish after all.

Any acclaim for Redford in this film will not be begrudged. He gives a compelling performance of raging against the dying of the light building to a heart-rending conclusion. J C Chandor as director should also receive recognition for a taut and brave film which challenges the conventions of mainstream cinema.

It is time to rejig that list of favourite Robert Redford films and find a space at the top for All is Lost.  

Lore

Dir. Cate Shortland

So here's the deal: you fight a just war, overcome tyranny then rub your hands and congratulate yourself on a job well done. You can assert your moral superiority and claim to have created a new world order. There's a familiar ring to all of this, isn't there?

If only history worked in such straight lines; if only hearts and minds were so pliable. This film amply demonstrates that if war is hell, then so is the aftermath. The Second World War is generally depicted as the good guys versus the evil Nazis with a convenient overlooking of the Allied partnership with Stalinist Russia, a blind eye turned to the Dresden atrocity etc. It's an ambivalence which surrounds the eponymous Lore as she takes on a matriarchal role with regard to her four younger siblings attempting to deliver them safely to their grandmother in Hamburg; a nightmare five hundred mile journey through post-war Germany.

As with most picaresque tales the greater journey takes place in the head. Lore begins the film showing the influence of her Nazi parents, "The final victory will soon be here," she says to her mother whose return look is more eloquent than any line of dialogue could be. The Nazi brainwashing can not be easily dismissed. A woman in a deserted house weeps before a picture of Hitler and says, "He loved us." Passengers on a train discuss photos of the holocaust and dismiss them as "American lies." Even when the children reach their grandmother's house she urges them to be proud of who they are and stresses that their parents "did nothing wrong." 

But Lore's conviction is shaken by having witnessed the residual waste of war: the rape victims and the suicides. She has seen for herself how the children are rejected by country folk who now do not want to associate with them or what they stood for. Guilt by association or generational endowment. "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge" complains Jeremiah in the Old Testament. But this more than a legacy innocently picked up by the younger generation. Lore has seen the holocaust pictures and has made a link with her father's role in the war. Add to that the fact that the children are being helped by a Jewish boy refugee from the camps and the moral picture is muddied. Muddied even further when they kill an eel fisherman for his boat after luring him with sex. Then it turns out that Thomas, the boy, is not Jewish after all; he is travelling using stolen papers. What horrors and crimes is he hiding about his past? Who are the good guys, if not the young kids?

This is a compelling but disturbing film. Cate Shortland's direction takes us right up to the whole sorry mess where we can almost smell the stench and feel the filth of squalor. How tantalising then, the bathing in the river scenes, the sharing of baths. The exterior shots too demonstrate the ironic beauty of rural Germany. Cleanliness and moral rectitude are surely within reach.

Zero Dark Thirty

 

Dir. Kathryn Bigalow

Two films in one here: the first involves agents of the United States trampling over the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights through torturing detainees, the second, Uncle Sam again, this time invading sovereign territory to carry out an execution. In between times we see real footage of Barack Obama banishing water boarding torture and promising to restore America’s moral authority.

A partial view? Maybe. Several times the audience is reminded that these practices are adopted because three thousand innocent civilians were killed in the Twin Towers attack of nine eleven and a number of other atrocities have continued to take place in London, Islamabad and elsewhere; so millions of dollars and a decade’s work were committed to find the perpetrator. Anyone who has presided over playground fights will be familiar with the justification, they started it but less often cited is Ghandi’s assertion cited: “An eye for an eye turns the whole world blind.”

In war, what actions are justifiable? I write this on the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden and after listening on the radio to a British eye witness to the bombings unequivocally condemning both the motive and the objective of the operation.

None of my first three paragraphs constitute a film review of course unless it was Kathryn Bigelow’s intention to invite audiences to follow such lines of thought. This may well be the case as this is a brutally honest and courageous film. It neither supports the use of torture nor glorifies the so-called War on Terror. The torture scenes are thoroughly degrading for all concerned and although it is true that a vital piece of information is gleaned which leads to the location of Osama Bin Laden, this has to be set against the mountain of information gained which cannot be relied or acted upon. As one frustrated agent says, “We don’t know what we don’t know.”

Likewise, there are no heroics involved in the depiction of the operation to assassinate Bin Laden. It is a methodical, thoroughly professional action where technology is deployed to locate and kill the architect of the mission to kill those three thousand. We are taken on the helicopter night flight through the mountains, we see images through the night vision lenses used by the soldiers and, if the audience I attended with is anything to go by, we are gripped. Or is it revulsion we experience?

The mission is accomplished. This is no spoiler as we all know the story, but we may not have been aware of the killing of other family members or the horror visited upon the children in the house. The human cost is high on both sides: I have supped too full with horrors. Mia, the CIA agent, so convincingly played by Jessica Chastain is dehumanised; she has to overcome her natural distaste for the treatment of the torture victim and she later leads her own abuse of a detainee. In another scene she admits to a female colleague that she doesn’t have a boyfriend and the supplementary question of do you have any friends at all? is left unanswered.

Don’t go to see this film looking for adrenalin charged adventure or jingoistic marauding. Both sides in the War on Terror are deluded. Think rather of the opinion delivered to Gulliver in Brobdingag:

“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Think how little cause over the intervening years Swift would have had to revise that opinion and then weep for humanity.

The Sessions

 

Directed by Ben Lewin

So this is the premise: a polio victim in his thirties, who spends most of his time in an iron lung, engages a sex surrogate to enable him to lose his virginity. The situation therefore is ripe for prurience, smuttiness and downright voyeurism. Except that this film doesn’t stray anywhere near those areas. Is it a sexy film then? No, it is not. It deals with sex in an adult and honest fashion: it is charming, funny and, if the woman behind me in the cinema is anything to go by, a tear-jerker.

Within seconds of appearing on screen, Helen Hunt as Cheryl, the sex surrogate, is completely convincing. The difference between sex surrogacy and prostitution is quickly established and she goes about her work with professional efficiency and care. The role calls for numerous nude scenes and her character has to be completely at home with her own body; a point made quite clearly by the scene in which she prepares for the ritual of conversion to the Jewish faith, itself a neat parallel to the process through which she led the disabled Mark. Using a mirror she enables him to see, and delight in, his own body for the first time in years.

It’s a process which the audience too must undergo. Liberal attitudes aside, the expectation must be that lying prone with a misshapen body, Mark can have little chance of physical or emotional fulfilment. Yet by the end of the film he has loved and been loved by three beautiful women. But that is not to belittle the complex interactions between characters which take place.

Cheryl’s husband is completely at ease with her profession; it does after all allow him to stay at home as house husband, and it is not until he opens a letter containing a poem from Mark to Cheryl that he feels threatened. Against all of the rules, the relationship between Mark and Cheryl has become personal; a state of affairs which Hunt demonstrates with a brilliantly understated performance. Consequently, the relationship between Cheryl and her husband becomes ambiguous: is she happy as she says or is there some truth in her confession that she has allowed things to become complicated?

Equally brilliant is the performance of William H Macy as Father Brendan. Constantly defying stereotypes (we are a long way from Bing Crosby and Richard Chamberlain playing fanciable priests here) he ranges from prayer leader, counsellor, friend and regular guy drinking beer. That he sanctions, even applauds, the act of sex outside of marriage must have great implications for his own celibacy but this is only hinted at with the merest of facial expressions and this is not the focus of the film. Rather it is his engaging interplay with John Hawkes playing Mark. 

Two thirds of the way through the film I did wonder how it was all going to end. It actually ends as a celebration of love rather than sex, but there are no spoilers in this review. The ending is achieved without over-sentimentality or any trace of glibness. It is thought-provoking and heart-warming in the best sense. But how this is achieved is for you to go and see for yourself.

All I would say is that this is the best film I’ve seen for ages. 

McCullin

 

Dir. David Morris and Jacqui Morris

The sixties and seventies were a good time to go to war says Don McCullin in this documentary film: Vietnam, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, and the Congo spring immediately to mind but it is when he recounts his second visit to Lebanon that viewers might finally feel that they have supped too full with horror.

What raises this film above a cataloguing of human misery is the quality of the photographs shown and Harold Evans’ finely judged commentary; but most of all it is McCullin’s own contribution which is measured and restrained throughout.

Although he is shown sifting through some of his archive, for the most part he is simply shot speaking from the corner of a room by a window. He remains calm even though he tells of unimaginable human depravity, retaining a dignity and integrity despite what he had witnessed first-hand.

Nor does he ever hide behind the excuse of a photographer just doing his job; there are countless examples of McCullin going to work with his human conscience very much to the fore. He refused to photograph a public execution in Vietnam describing it as murder, and he put down his camera in order to help an elderly Turkish woman in Cyprus as she struggled to escape from the oncoming Greek soldiers. His sympathy for the victims of warfare and his attitude is immovable: “it is the poor people in warfare who suffer the most.”

How saddening it is then to learn that McCullin was excluded from the group of photographers authorised to go to the Falklands Conflict. It seems that his brand of honesty was not required, the media messages from the Falklands would be carefully controlled and there would no place for his kind of truth.

Equally saddening was to watch how a change of ownership effectively brought to an end the fine reputation for photo-journalism held by the Sunday Times. Evans pulls no punches: this was a direct result of the Print Unions’ actions, and passing into the hands of the Murdoch empire meant the end for Evans’ editorship as well as McCullin’s association with the newspaper.

At the time of writing this review Syrians are killing Syrians, a terrorist kidnap in Algeria has reached a bloody resolution and tensions are rising on the Indo-Pakistan border. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. The world desperately needs images of the pity of war.

The final few minutes show McCullin wandering through a snow covered English countryside taking landscape photographs. That he has seen unspeakable horrors is not in dispute at this stage of the film but his reputation as a photographer and his status as a humane practitioner are confirmed. He looks like a man at peace and no one deserves such peace more than he. 

My favourite Beatle was John. I’m not applying any kind of retrospective wisdom here in an attempt to garner some cool in much the same way that some people take smug pride in saying that they always preferred the Stones, or God help us, the Kinks to the Beatles. No, I’m eschewing cooldom, I’m a fifty-four year old teacher who has been put out to grass, and I have no choice in the matter. The cool choice now may well be George anyway; the silent good looking one who emerged from the madness of Beatlemania to write some great songs and remain grounded enough to found Hand Made Films. No, my choice was John for more prosaic reasons. When the Beatles were dominating the charts with a series of number one hits in the early sixties, I was yet to reach my teenage years. I was six in 1962 and I chose John as my favourite Beatle because we shared the same name. Simple.

Ours wasn’t a house which was geared to take on board the full impact of the rock and roll revolution. As far as playing music was concerned, we had a gramophone, a stately piece of furniture which sat in the room we called the parlour and would later become the sitting room. I don’t recall the radio function of the gramophone ever being used as it had been superseded by a transistor placed in the kitchen, and the record playing facility was only occasionally employed to give long playing recordings of South Pacific and the Sound of Music an airing. There was a collection of 78s; discs which had the solidity of dinner plates and which dropped from the spindle to the turntable with the sound of a tree being felled. There were no rock and roll gems amidst this collection unless you count Eddie Calvert and his Golden Trumpet or Bing Crosby crooning about a white Christmas. So, musically, the Beatles were, in George Harrison’s words, about to save Britain from boredom, but as far as our house was concerned the ruling passion was still ennui and musical tastes were governed by Sing Something Simple played over the kitchen transistor on a Sunday evening.

In fact, in our northern outpost city, the whole sixties revolution seemed to pass us by. It was like a giant party taking place in next door’s house and we could only witness it by wiping away condensation and then peering through the window. Philip Larkin famously said that sexual intercourse didn’t exist until the Beatles first LP. From a personal point of view, my thanks are extended to Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story in 1971. Shit! I can see you counting on your fingers, doing your sums and looking doubtful. Okay, what about Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks in 1974?

Not that the Beatles could be ignored of course. News of the Fab Four phenomenon (try saying that when you’re pissed) was brought to us by the Daily Mirror. The Beatle hits were included in the Junior Choice play list on a Saturday morning sitting snugly alongside the Laughing Policeman and the Ugly Duckling , and we were allowed to stay up late to watch them on the Royal Variety Performance. Or rather we weren’t allowed to watch because as the evening wore on, it was deemed to be too late and we were duly packed off to bed. Our daily newspaper didn’t let us down though, the inestimable red-topped organ (another image with which to play) told of the Beatles’ performance the next day and particular mention was made of the quip about rattling your jewellery in the posh seats; John Lennon’s quip.

And then they changed, the Beatles I mean. Their hair grew even longer, they stopped writing songs about wanting to hold girls’ hands and they made films which were surrealistic to the point of being incomprehensible. The Daily Mirror could no longer portray them as cheeky chappies from next door: their involvement in the drug culture, their anti-establishment comments, their weirdness meant that they were now exploited by the press for their shock value. And I didn’t get them any more. To my regret, Hymns Ancient and Modern retained a stronger influence than Sergeant Pepper.

I stayed with John though, retaining an affinity with the rebellious vocalist on Twist and Shout. I didn’t like his new wife or his publicity-seeking-staying-in-bed-for-a-week-antics, but there did seem to be a vulnerable figure there somewhere, still shouting for help.

We need to fast forward to December 1980. In an entirely predictable career move, (working class grammar school boy demonstrates vocational need to “put something back”) I had completed a Post Graduate Certificate in Education and I had taken up a post to teach English in a boys’ school in the south of England. The training had been ineffectual at best, although a drama lecturer who insisted on a practical rather than a theoretical approach was an honourable exception, and most of our lectures and seminars took place in the pedagogical safety of an ivory tower unencumbered by pragmatic experience of the real world of education. This was years before computers would be commonplace in schools, interactive whiteboards were a fantasy of Dan Dare proportions and although VHS was beginning to poke its nose through the door, it was still engaged in a life or death struggle with Betamax. No, in order for technology to provide a variety of experience in the classroom, the teacher would have to march in carrying a record player. We did have a tutorial where such an approach was suggested and this in itself was sufficient to convince me that I would never teach a lesson where I encouraged pupils to look at the interesting word play in She’s Leaving Home (“What did she hope the note would say?”) or the ambiguities in The Sound of Silence (How can silence have a sound?”) This was five years after Anarchy in the U.K. for God’s sake.

But on the morning of 9th December 1980, I altered my lesson plans. In the time honoured tradition of giving the fresh-faced probationary teacher the sink groups I taught the bottom set in the third year. I also taught some of these boys for “Extra English”, a timetabling brainwave to deal with the fact that they didn’t study a second foreign language, and some of these lads turned up a third time because they didn’t study French. The most benighted of the boys suffered me for seven lessons a week others had me for five lessons whilst the lucky minority had only three lessons but the overall effect was mutual fear and loathing in the cause of English; the civilising subject. Most of my lessons were a disaster and I could see my worthily chosen new career disappearing down the exit marked pan.

Kenneth, Kevin and Devon weren’t interested in simple, compound and complex sentences; they were more interested in “reccing.”

“Wrecking?”

“Yes sir, reccing.” The activities they got up to at night on the recreation ground, the Rec. Cheung was more interested in how loud he could fart in class and it was left to Simon to show that some of the pupils were amenable and would make their best effort. It was Simon I asked to read James Reeves’ poem, Slowly aloud to the class.

Slowly

Slowly the tide creeps up the sand,

Slowly the shadows cross the land,

Slowly the cart-horse pulls his mile,

Slowly the old man mounts the stile.

Slowly the hand moves round the clock,

Slowly the dew dries on the dock.

Slow is the snail – but slowest of all

The green moss spreads on the old brick wall.

And gamely he set off to read in the face of mounting derision as I suddenly  remembered that Simon was the boy in the class with a pronounced lisp.

I was once confronted by the considerable arms folded presence of Kenneth’s mum at Parents’ Evening. Mustering all of my new professionalism I mentally blanked out images of the housemaid with the sweeping brush in the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

“Kenneth needs to work on aspects of grammar,” I told her, “verb endings and the use of the definite article.” She listened politely until I, suddenly aware of my own monumental pomposity, stopped speaking. There was a moment’s further pause before Kenneth’s mum spoke,

“If dat boy give you any trouble, you hit dat boy.”

Corporal punishment had not yet finished its miserable life-cycle in English schools but the thought of adding to the general mayhem of most of these classes with the added excitement of physical beatings was not one I was prepared to entertain. Progress, if it was to be made, lay in a different direction.

It wasn’t until it dawned on me that I wasn’t actually expected to teach these lads anything but simply keep them quiet that the breakthrough occurred. There was no point in banging on about sentence construction until there was a desire or a need to actually construct a sentence. That’s when we started to discuss Caribbean backgrounds and Sikh traditions, that’s when we had a weekly kickabout with a football in what was a traditional rugby and hockey playing school. And that’s when I felt confident enough to change my lesson plans on the morning of December 9th, 1980.

On that morning I did march into the classroom with a record player and I played some Beatles music and we talked about how, on the previous evening on a New York street the writer of All You Need is Love, Give Peace a Chance and Imagine had been murdered. And after that lesson and the ones that followed, the boys in that class knew that their English teacher had had a life before teaching, and in fact, he had once been a teenager himself when he’d allayed some of the doubts and insecurities of those years by using a by turns witty and caustic, cruel and sympathetic, Liverpudlian as a touchstone in an increasingly perplexing world.

Why, thirty years on, this meditation on the influence of John Lennon? Simply because art can do that, art can jerk you out of the ordinariness of life and catapult you back to significant times, times when the world looked a lot different. It can also cast a light up to the present time, a mirror held up to nature and all that.

Thirty years on the fire in this English teacher’s belly has been well and truly dampened. A tribute this to the whole edifice of educational progress: the national curriculum, the countless government strategies, league tables, target-setting, the relentless push for accountability and the reduction of English into a single, measurable entity; the whole stultifying bundle. And ultimately, the flames of passion died in the face of mental illness.

I moved to Yorkshire in 1990; twenty miles south east of Bradford. My brother in law lived a similar distance to the north west of Bradford and he suggested meeting up for a curry at the Kashmir restaurant and a film at what was then the National Museum of Film, Television and Photography. I forget the first film we saw, it was possibly The Mission, but the outing must have been a success as it became a regular fixture, so much so that it is now a monthly event, and one of our most easily kept New Year’s resolutions is to watch at least twelve films during the course of the year at what is now snappily re-branded as the National Media Museum.

January saw us get off to a cracking start with Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy, featuring the early life of John Lennon and the formation of a group which would eventually become the Beatles. Owing to our idiosyncratic planning methods, not all of our film choices can be described as good. Some of them fall a long way short of good and we plod our weary way home with only the consolation of a top notch curry as consolation. The evening of Nowhere Boy though was one of those evenings when all of the elements fall together into a very satisfactory whole.

The film opens with the highly recognisable chord from the beginning of A Hard Day’s Night and holds the attention from thereon. Aaron Johnson captures the cheek and the rebelliousness of the young Lennon as well as his cruelty, vulnerability and latent musical genius. Equally compelling are the performances of Kristin Scott Thomas as the tightly buttoned Aunt Mimi and Ann Marie Duff as Julia, Lennon’s real mother. The former excellently presents the frigid woman bound by duty finding difficulty in responding with any warmth to her wayward charge, whereas frigid would be the last adjective to apply to Duff’s performance. Watching the oedipal relationship between John and his mother is often a queasy task as she smothers him in kisses, dances lasciviously in a coffee bar and informs him candidly that rock and roll really means sex. But the audience’s unease at these scenes will only replicate similar feelings from earlier in the film where John and his Uncle George are seen lying on a bed and sharing the contents of a hip flask. “He was more than an uncle to me,” says the young John after the death of Uncle George and we are left to ponder the full implications of this cry.

The tragic death of Julia follows that of George and we see Lennon caught in a Freudian nightmare. No wonder music offers a way out.

And it was music which played in my head as I made my way out and drove gingerly on the ice-bound M62. Two things bothered me on the way home apart from the treacherous conditions. Firstly, there was the song, Woman. Not one used in the film but one of the songs I had played in those lessons in the classroom. As part of the Double Fantasy album it reached the top of the charts in the U.K undeniably assisted by an outpouring of grief by the record buying public. But as an expression of love which is “written in the stars” it is flabby; floundering around in confessions of thoughtlessness and regret for causing sorrow or pain, and whilst Lennon’s references to the “little child inside the man” are particularly pertinent in relation to Nowhere Boy, retrospectively, the song does not really stand comparison with McCartney’s, Maybe I’m Amazed released by the oft-derided Wings. Here, being left inarticulate when faced with trying to express the extent of love reaches a paradoxical zenith: fast, powerful and compulsive, the song, for me, is redolent of a seventies student bed-sit and a love affair which despite its pitiful outcome left me amazed.

What profit is there after all in measuring the Beatles against the Stones, or indeed Lennon against McCartney? But as the signs for the M621, Beeston and Leeds slipped slowly by in the dark I couldn’t help realising that here, in comparing these two songs, my favourite Beatle came off second best.

And the second things which concerned me, returning as a flickering image in the memory, was the thought of whatever became of those boys in the classroom of the upstairs corridor of Hitchin Boys’ School: Kenneth, Kevin and Devon, nowhere boys who would now be in their mid-forties?