Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • The Impossible

    Old YorkerFilm review

     J A Bayona (2012)

    At the start of The Impossible a legend explains that this is the true story of one family caught up in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.  All the words of the legend then disappear except for two:  ‘true story’.  In telling how the Bennetts, a British family holidaying in Thailand, are separated by the tsunami, survive, and are reunited, J A Bayona and the screenwriter Sergio G Sanchez face the problem that the impossible in real life verges on the inevitable in movies.  It’s hardly surprising they want to encourage the audience to keep remembering that what they’re seeing really happened.  The Bennetts – father Henry, mother Maria, and their three sons Lucas, Thomas and Simon – arrive in their luxury coastal hotel on Christmas Eve.  You know what’s going to happen on Boxing Day and you’re therefore impatient for Bayona to cut to the chase.  Although the prelude to the disaster doesn’t occupy much screen time, it lasts long enough to be irritating – especially as Bayona favours obvious, ominous atmospheric touches:  except for a brief conversation between Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) just before their lives change dramatically, you learn next to nothing about the family’s character and concerns.  (Henry, who’s based in Japan and presumably works in the corporate sector, reveals to his wife that he’s worried about the security of his job.  Maria, who has interrupted her career as a doctor to raise the three boys, suggests that she might return to work and the family return to England.)

    After the tsunami hits Bayona concentrates for some time on Maria, whose injuries include a serious leg wound, and Lucas, and the movie becomes involving.  The mother survives thanks to her brave and resourceful teenage son, who’d seemed a pain in the neck in what we saw of him earlier.   They hear a child crying; although Lucas at first insists they must look after themselves and ignore the cries, Maria persuades him to do otherwise and the pair takes a traumatised but physically uninjured infant boy called Daniel under their wing.  Some Thai peasants eventually rescue the trio and Maria, with Lucas, is subsequently driven to a hospital; once they’re already on their way, they realise that Daniel is not with them.   The roadside seen from Lucas’s point of view during the truck ride provides one of the strongest sequences in The Impossible – the continuing straggle of corpses and lost, dazed, more or less naked tourists has a surreal quality and is more powerful for being presented matter of factly.  However, the sequence is also a reminder that Bayona focuses almost exclusively on the Westerners in the area (the raison d’être of the salt of the earth locals seems to be to help the tourists); and this isn’t the only respect in which The Impossible is commercially calculating.   The film was made by two Spanish production companies and the technical crew, as well as the director and writer, are Spanish.  A closing legend on the screen reveals that the Bennetts are based on a Spanish family called Belón.  (Perhaps turning the Belóns into an English family is meant to make the change less crude than Americanising them would be.)  These eager-to-please-the-market decisions are probably understandable, given the state of the Spanish economy, but they put the true story on which the filmmakers insisted in a rather different light.

    So too does the narrative development of the movie, once Bayona leaves Lucas – distraught that his gravely ill mother has disappeared from her hospital bed while he, at her encouragement, was elsewhere in the hospital, trying to help others find their missing loved ones.  From this point, when it’s revealed that Henry and the two younger boys have also survived, the mechanics of The Impossible become more exposed.   This is immediately frustrating:  Lucas is so horrified that Maria’s been taken away that you don’t believe he would be pacified by the kindly nurse who intervenes when he goes crazy by what had been his mother’s bedside:  Lucas calms down simply to allow Bayona to switch focus for a while.  Henry’s search for his wife and eldest son is relatively uninvolving:  Ewan McGregor clambers around hazardous locations shouting their names.  Henry decides to leave the two younger boys in the care of others as he continues his search – with the result that he then gets separated from Thomas and Simon too.  As the cross-cutting between the Bennetts’ locations intensifies, the film feels increasingly false to the events on which it’s based.  Once all five of the Bennetts are in, or in the street outside, the same hospital, their intuitions or glimpses of one another’s presence are tantalising and dramatically effective yet the context of the drama – a natural disaster which (according to Wikipedia) killed 230,000 people in fourteen countries – makes this kind of suspense offensive.   All the Bennetts survive; as a bonus, Lucas sees Daniel again, with a man who we assume is Daniel’s father.  The family enjoy the perks of being the principals in a mainstream movie.  The closest we get to confronting bereavement (as distinct from seeing dead bodies) in The Impossible is through a man of Henry’s age searching in vain for his wife and daughter, and who lends Henry his mobile so that he can phone Maria’s father in Britain.  The fact that this man’s loss matters is a tribute more to the actor who plays him (Sonke Mohring) than to the script or direction.

    J A Bayona, although he seems not a particularly sensitive or imaginative filmmaker, does a competent job.  He’s good at including details that will come in handy for later, more resonant effect (the can of Coca-Cola that Lucas wants to drink from the minibar in the Bennetts’ hotel room, a brief shot of Maria’s naked breast as she gets changed, and so on).   An image of floating lanterns released into the air by the hotel guests on Christmas night isn’t subtle but it’s very beautiful; a later panoramic view of corpses and coffins, revealed as the camera pulls back, is likely to stay in the mind.  The music by Fernando Velázquez keeps cuing us to be choked up, unnecessarily so.  There are too many heartwarming moments in the story – so that the primary reunions don’t stand out in the way you feel they should – but it’s very hard not to be affected by these, whatever you think of Bayona’s manipulation.

    The Impossible is mostly very well acted.  While it’s true that much of what Naomi Watts has to do as Maria is play someone physically in extremis (Maria hardly has the time to think about her situation), Watts’ sustained intensity is impressive.  Ewan McGregor is moving when Henry breaks down during his first phone call home.  The two younger boys (Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast) are both good:  Thomas’s caring for Simon for the first time in their lives supplements Lucas’s larger discovery of responsibility for others.  Lucas’s experience is more richly convincing than might be expected – for example, when at first he finds his mother’s semi-nakedness and her wounds unbearable to look at.   Sixteen-year-old Tom Holland gets this across strongly; while you’re often aware of his acting, Holland carries a large part of the movie, and successfully.  He’s particularly good at suggesting how bolshiness and bravery may be somewhat related, and at expressing Lucas’s discovery of how elating it can be to help other people (and how much it can subdue your own problems).  The growing sense that Naomi Watts gives us that Maria’s relationship with her eldest son is in some ways stronger than the one with her husband is confirmed in, and gives an edge to, the film’s final scene.  Geraldine Chaplin is vivid in her cameo as an elderly woman who watches the night sky with Thomas and talks about the death of stars.  It’s hardly surprising when the boy asks her age:  she says nearly 74 but Chaplin’s beautiful, deeply weathered face suggests someone centuries if not light years old.  (She is in fact 68.)

    1 January 2013

  • Tyrannosaur

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Paddy Considine (2011)

    In their interview in this month’s Sight and Sound, Paddy Considine and Peter Mullan, who plays the lead in Tyrannosaur, disparage social realism in film-making, Mullan more aggressively than Considine.  Mullan illustrates the potential falsity of realism not with any example of dramatic screen fiction but with TV ‘reality’ shows that he rightly sees as skewed and manipulative.  Mullan goes on to remind the interviewer Nick Bradshaw, that any choice he (Bradshaw) makes in conducting the interview is a ‘political act’.  Using something like Big Brother as a stick with which to beat cinematic realism doesn’t do a lot for Mullan’s argument but this is something he clearly feels strongly about.  As Bradshaw notes, this latest interview picks up where the S&S piece with Mullan on Neds at the start of the year left off.  In Neds, Mullan uses social realism as a take-off point for imaginative unrealistic elements.  That’s not what happens in Tyrannosaur, the first feature directed by Paddy Considine and which Considine also wrote.

    This unhappy story – set in present day Leeds, about the lives and relationships of Joseph (Mullan), a middle-aged widower who struggles to control his drinking and his rage, Hannah (Olivia Colman), a practising Christian who works in a charity shop, and James (Eddie Marsan), her physically and psychologically abusive husband – stays rooted in reality, in the sense that the film depends crucially on the audience’s believing that everything we see happening on screen might really be happening.    In the first half of the film, Considine sustains this belief very well.   But as the dramatic climax of Tyrannosaur approaches, you become increasingly aware that he’s pushing things too far in order to intensify the misery of the characters’ situation and the emotional power deriving from that.  In the S&S piece, Considine and Mullan emphasise the primacy of ‘emotional truth’.  (In Neds the fantastic sequences enriched the emotional truth that developed in the realistic ground of the film.)  But what kind of truth is it that’s conveyed through situations which you know to be contrived for emotional effect?  There’s no doubting the fine, often moving performances in this film or that Paddy Considine directs the actors with a sure and sensitive touch, or his skill in writing incisive naturalistic dialogue, but Tyrannosaur is too determinedly grim.

    Considine’s previous film as a director was the prize-winning short Dog Altogether (2007), which introduced the character of Joseph (Mullan played him there too and Olivia Colman played a different role).  According to Wikipedia, the phrase ‘dog altogether’ comes ‘from an Irish expression that Paddy’s father used to use when situations got really bad’.   It’s the culmination of the canine part of the story in Tyrannosaur that shows in its most blatant form Considine’s tendency to force the material in order to pile on the grief.  At the start of the film, in his first outburst of fury, Joseph takes his anger out on his dog, kicking it so hard in the ribs that the animal dies.  Joseph’s neighbours have a pit bull; this dog, like Joseph (and like the man who owns it), is always straining on its leash, looking keen to take a bite out of someone.  After the death of Joseph’s own dog (and with his only human pal terminally ill), the young son of the neighbouring family is the only person with whom he has friendly conversation.  In the epilogue to the film, which takes place a year after the main action, Joseph writes a letter to Hannah, who’s now in prison for killing the husband whose abuse she could no longer stand.  Joseph explains that he too has been inside in the meantime – for unlawfully (and savagely) killing the neighbour’s pit bull.  He was driven to do this by the fact that the animal had attacked the little boy Joseph had befriended – the boy’s face was left badly scarred as a result.  But surely the boy had to go to hospital for treatment, surely the cause of his wounds became clear, and surely the dog would have been humanely destroyed as a result?  That both these things should happen is implausible and the only emotional truth here is that Paddy Considine wants to have his cake and eat it:  he wants the child’s damaged face and Joseph’s lethal attack on the dog.

    It’s her upmarket address which allows Joseph to inform Hannah, in one of their early exchanges in the charity shop, that she knows nothing about how hard life can be; but he’s wrong, and one of the strongest elements in Tyrannosaur is how Considine dramatises the democracy of unhappiness and isolation.  Perhaps that’s the justification for none of the neighbours noticing the lack of activity at the house in the period between Hannah’s escape from it and Joseph’s eventual discovery of James’s dead body, a fly buzzing round it, in an upstairs room.  But we’re led to believe James has a good job – does no one at his place of work notice or question his absence?   Is Hannah a Christian on her own?  It’s possible but it also clearly suits Considine’s purposes that no one from church wonders where she’s got to.   Nor do any of the people who work at the charity shop (she surely can’t run it that on her own).  But then we never see them or indeed any customers, apart from Joseph – and James, who comes in one day to check up on Hannah and leaves with his paranoid suspicions confirmed that the ‘slut’ is being unfaithful to him with Joseph.  We do, though, hear the voice of a woman who comes in with some clothes to donate.  Olivia Colman is wonderful in that scene as she switches with great but unseen effort from weeping in the back of the shop to brightly affable performance as she talks with the unseen woman.

    The bleakness of the world of Tyrannosaur is enhanced by how unbelievably few people there are in it – the depopulation goes with the landscapes both man-made and natural, especially the dark, leafless trees.  It’s no coincidence that the only sequence in the film with any sense of joy comes when Joseph and Hannah are drinking and dancing along with others (albeit at Joseph’s friend’s wake!)  Hannah’s Christianity is a potentially strong element which gets lost in the story.  Her politely resilient defence of her faith, when Joseph derides it, is very truthful.  He’s so impressed that he asks her to pray at the bedside of his dying friend.   This prayer is exceptionally well written (‘We know that life is just a part of existence, and death is eternal’ is thought-provoking), and beautifully delivered by Olivia Colman.  It’s a strong moment too when, at the end of her tether in the charity shop, Hannah hurls something at a picture of Christ hanging on the wall, and yells, ‘What are you staring at?!’   Having introduced this distinctive theme, Considine doesn’t seem to know what to do with it.  He doesn’t even have Hannah discover that her faith is useless, or a delusion that allows her to cope with her unhappy life.   He’s careless about other details in the script and their conflict with what we’re watching on screen.   When Joseph asks Hannah why she can’t tell her friends and family about what her husband’s doing, she says that no one would believe her, that James knows how to turn on the charm and they all think he’s perfect.  With Eddie Marsan in the role of James (although he’s very good), this is impossible to believe.

    Peter Mullan is very fine at showing Joseph’s fear of getting close to Hannah, or to anyone, after the death of the wife he loved – but who, he tells Hannah, he treated badly.  It’s also amusing and touching that, dressed in the charity shop suit he got for his friend’s funeral, he looks so distinguished.   Olivia Colman is still best known for her television comedy work with Mitchell and Webb but her performance here should change that.  She and Mullan make the most of the crumbs of humour in Tyrannosaur but Colman goes way beyond what we’ve previously seen of her.  She’s marvellous at putting a brave, smiley face on things – the habit seems to run so deep in Hannah that Colman gets us (almost) to believe that this woman could kill her husband, leave the house, and think she could put what she’d done behind her.  Tyrannosaur majors on different strands of inherent masculine violence so the explanation of its title comes as a pleasant surprise.  It’s the meant-to-be-affectionate name Joseph called his heavily-built late wife:  her footfall upstairs reminded him of a something in Jurassic Park.  It’s a pity that, by the time you come out of the film, you feel a more apt title would have been As Bad as It Gets.

    11 October 2011

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