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.  

On This Day: December 5th 1830

Christina Rossetti was born in London

Bitter for Sweet                                 



Summer is gone with all its roses,
  Its sun and perfumes and sweet flowers,
  Its warm air and refreshing showers:
    And even Autumn closes.

Yea, Autumn’s chilly self is going,
  And Winter comes which is yet colder,
  Each day the hoar-frost waxes bolder
    And the last buds cease blowing.

Christina Rossetti

It’s that time of year again: officially winter by the calendar and the weather forecasts are mentioning the S word. Expect traffic havoc, the country grinding to a halt and politicians making great play of a £50 energy bill giveaway. (£50 from average rises of £120 is still a £70 rise, right?)

So, anyway, Christina Rossetti is giving us a good dose of pathetic fallacy; ascribing human emotions and sympathies to nature. Except that in this poem there is no explicit mention of human emotion, just the relentless march of the year: Summer is gone, Autumn closes followed by the colder winter. The feelings of doom and gloom you have to add for yourself, but that’s not too difficult, is it?

On This Day…October 5th 1995

 Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature

 

 The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark

 (in memory of David Hammond)


The door was open and the house was dark
Wherefore I called his name, although I knew
The answer this time would be silence

That kept me standing listening while it grew
Backwards and down and out into the street
Where as I'd entered (I remember now)

The streetlamps too were out.
I felt, for the first time there and then, a stranger,
Intruder almost, wanting to take flight

Yet well aware that here there was no danger,
Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming
Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

On an overgrown airfield in late summer.

Seamus Heaney

 1939 – 2013

 

 

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Seamus Heaney described poetry as “the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable.”


I once went to a reading of Seamus Heaney's which was a complete disaster from an organisational point of view. Despite being a ticketed event, the organisers seemed surprised by the number of people who had turned up. They seemed equally surprised that a crowded room in midsummer would generate heat. The giant fans which were turned on were noisy affairs drowning out the poet's voice, a neat precursor to a fault in the sound system. Heaney was offered a hand held microphone which was fine until he wanted to turn the page of the book he was holding in the other hand. Enough for some poets I know to throw something of a hissy fit but not our man. Not only did he genially contend with all of these mishaps but he somehow, rode all the problems and carried on to give a reading which was good-humoured, thought provoking and inspirational. In fact the reading is remembered for those qualities rather than the nonsense which preceded it. And it is a memory which is particularly poignant now after his death in September.


A good man and a great poet gone.  

A meditation upon time and ageing in the sonnet form kicks off this collection from Ian Whiteley in classical fashion and it bodes well for the reader that the poet finds, not shock, but beauty in the "seasons that lack colour in their eyes" For this is the pattern the collection will follow using a variety of form where the author constantly looks to the "flip side" for his conclusions.

Do not expect the ordinary or banal here; these are hard-hitting poems as titles like Class Action and Vermin would suggest. But the poet's engagement with form always comes to the fore: haikus intersperse the collection and repeatedly the poet returns to the sonnet. Composed at Braunau (April 20th 1889) pays homage to Wordsworth in its opening line but thereafter takes a bleakly ominous line as befits its subject matter:

"...when I look into his eyes,
I see premonitory flames of hell
and hear the deaths that echo in his cries." 

And it is the sonnet which rounds off some fifty two pages of poetry. A Step Towards Summer is an obvious bookend to the opening poem and is a rallying call to the reader to gird a fearless heart in the face of the passage of time.

Ian Whiteley refers to himself as a "hardcore troubadour" and it is a fitting title for one with such a hard-hitting edgy style. His reference to size zero models for instance, "Ribs poking out of white flesh/the colour of dead fish." But don't be fooled as this volume also demonstrates a craftsman at work, one who fashions his words in the most appropriate form for what he has to say. One who utilises the repetition in the villanelle for maximum effect in Gathering Winter Fuel: "Return to me and bring your loving flame."

My feeling is that readers will return to this collection and be rewarded with each visit. 

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.

Pour your favourite drink, sit back in your most comfortable chair and settle back to enjoy this book. Crossing by Pete Lancaster, his second book, following his Blue Bridge in 2009, is a collection to savour.

On the face of it the same themes are evident, most prominently memories and philosophical musings prompted by wanderings in the watery edgelands of Wakefield, like in the title poem for instance:

"I crossed to the ice-laced washlands edge,
searching paths made strange by snow."

Wanderings which often lead to a final image or an event of subtle significance,

"...There was the frozen lake,
and there, as the sun held fast at noon,
the fox aflame quickening across the pane
of trackless white, never to look back."

But beyond these themes and pre-occupations there's a greater determination to explore the fullest extent of metaphor and symbol, and like the blackbird in In Ambleside Churchyard, Pete Lancaster is opening his throat and giving it all he's got, which he does to great effect.

How to Draw an Apple begins prosaically, "First sharpen your pencil," and develops with a typically tender simile, "Caressing gently as an approaching kiss/ the cheek of it." and then finally blooms with three lines which suggest that this poem is about much more than an art class:

"And then you'll capture it,
expose the sin deep under the skin,
discover the deep sad heart at its core."

This confidence in the way he handles his material is evident in New Year which lists observations around the trip to to an airport and eventual flight. But its conclusion:

"...the beds of cloud below us

On This Day…Forgive Me, Forgive Me, Stevie Smith

 

Forgive me, forgive me

Forgive me forgive me for my heart is my own
And not to be given for any man's frown
Yet would I not keep it for ever alone.

Forgive me forgive me I thought that I loved
My fancy betrayed me my heart was unmoved
My fancy too often has carelessly roved.

Forgive me forgive me for here where I stand
There is no friend beside me no lover at hand
No footstep but mine in my desert of sand.

Stevie Smith

Best known for her lines: “I was much too far out all of my life/and not waving but drowning,” Stevie Smith died on March 7th in 1971.

She had been awarded the Chomondeley Award for Poetry in 1966 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969 but perhaps the sense of isolation in her poetry foreshadows the obscurity which would follow for her and few lists of influential English poets of the mid to late twentieth century include her name. Fellow poet, Jeni Couzyn remembers her, “standing in all of her loneliness as one standing on a great height.” Robert Graves also recognised her sense of isolation but said that she wrote “the purest poetry of our time.”

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.