Daily Archives: Friday, January 22, 2016

  • A War

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Krigen

    Tobias Lindholm (2015)

    A War has been nominated for an Academy Award for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film.  In the first part of the movie, the juxtaposition of life at home and abroad and description of the various difficulties of both are reminiscent of Susanne Bier’s In a Better World, Denmark’s 2010 winner in the same Oscar category.  The writer-director Tobias Lindholm moves between scenes of warfare in Afghanistan, where Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) is an army company commander, and on the Danish home front, where his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) holds their family together, though she and the Pedersens’ three young children miss Claus badly.  The Helmand Province sequences were filmed in Spain and Turkey but the members of the company, except for Claus and the other larger characters, are played by Danish soldiers who have actually served in Afghanistan.  Tobias Lindholm makes clear that military service in Helmand is gruelling – sometimes tedious, occasionally confusing, often on a knife-edge between life and death – and that these different aspects can quickly collide.  In an early scene, a young soldier called Anders (Alex Høgh Andersen) is one of a group on patrol.  He wears the look of sulky boredom that Ian Lavender sometimes gave Private Pike in Dad’s Army.  That makes it all the more shocking when, moments later, Anders is fatally injured by a landmine.  There’s camaraderie among the men too, of course, and Lindholm and his cast do a good job of showing the senior soldiers as sensitive but trained to keep a lid on feelings that will be unhelpful.  We’re shown, in particular, Claus’s admirable qualities.  He’s organised, compassionate, able to think on his feet, ready to lead from the front.  He shows skill and sympathy in dealing with Lasse (Dulfi Al-Jabouri), a soldier traumatised by his mate Anders’s death.

    These well-done sequences are a persuasive representation of the reality of twenty-first century warfare but, in dramatic terms, they’re little more than that. The same goes for the sequences back in Denmark, which are credible and unsurprising.  But as soon as Claus makes the snap decision on which Lindholm’s story pivots, A War acquires a new, gripping focus.  Claus’s instruction results in fatalities in ‘RS Compound 6’, a civilian rather than a military zone.  The plethora of code numbers and acronyms that have kept appearing in subtitles on the screen – it’s hard to get a handle on these – now take on a new and urgent meaning.  What information was transmitted, what got ignored in the moments leading up to Claus’s decision to attack?  He is immediately relieved of his duties in Afghanistan.  He goes home to Denmark to face trial for his actions and the virtual certainty of a prison sentence if he’s found guilty.   Claus was as keen to get back to his family as they were to have him back.  In the event, the circumstances of his instant return from Helmand disfigure the homecoming.  Maria’s welcome is muted:  she’s deeply relieved to see him again but puzzled and anxious as to why it’s happened so suddenly.  Once the children are in bed, Claus explains the situation to his wife.  Their conversation is shot through a picture window at the family home, and Claus and Maria’s words are unheard.  It’s a cinematic cliché but effective here in concentrating your attention on the couple’s body language.

    Does Claus tell the truth or lie for the sake of his family’s future and because, as Maria tells him, he’ll continue to feel guilty about what happened in Compound 6 even if he goes to jail?  Tobias Lindholm’s dramatisation of his protagonist’s crisis of conscience compares favourably with how moral dilemmas tend to be handled in mainstream Hollywood movies – even reasonably good ones, like Robert Zemeckis’s Flight (2012).  Claus – unlike the Denzel Washington character who eventually does-the-right-thing – isn’t compelled to admit he didn’t have the required notification that events occurring in Compound 6 had rendered it a military zone.   Following the ambivalent evidence given by his second-in-command (Dar Salim), Claus is given a lifeline through the testimony of another of the soldiers, whose admiration and loyalty he continues to command.  The eleventh-hour witness who changes everything is a familiar screen figure:  he seems less so here thanks to the trial proceedings being so distinctive.   In spite of having watched a fair amount of Scandi-noir on television, I don’t recall having seen Danish courtroom scenes before.  In A War, it’s almost amusingly different from what British audiences have come to expect that nearly everyone present at the trial, the judges included, wear casual dress.   It’s refreshing that neither the prosecutor (Charlotte Munck) nor Claus’s lawyer (Søren Malling) goes in for theatrical grandstanding, although both the actors concerned build good characterisations.   Because the trial isn’t conventionally melodramatic, it feels really dramatic.

    Claus is acquitted.  He’s much relieved, of course – like his wife and colleagues (and this viewer) – and, no more unexpectedly, is left with a guilty conscience.   Even so, you find yourself remembering his wife’s insistence that he would have had that behind bars.   The ‘happy ending’ for Claus is qualified also by the fact that his honourable military career has finished – not in conviction for a war crime but in defeat, nevertheless.  There are some wobbles in the closing stages of A War.  Søren Malling’s emphatic look of satisfaction at his vanquished courtroom adversary strikes a false note.  Lindholm’s cutting the sound again, when the presiding judge delivers the grounds for the verdict, seems merely an effect this time, and evasive.  When, back home, Claus says goodnight to one of his children and notices their bare toes peeping out from under the duvet, it rhymes with an earlier image of a dead  child whom he saw in Helmand.  The cue is unnecessary:  Tobias Lindholm has already, and more subtly, encouraged us to compare the Afghan children with Claus’s own.  In a generally strong cast, Pilou Asbæk is outstanding.  (He and Lindholm have worked together before, most recently in the director’s previous feature, A Hijacking.)  Asbæk is emotionally expressive and charismatic without ever resorting to histrionics.  He’s well supported by Tuva Novotny.  (The careworn Maria is strikingly different from Puck, the lead character Novotny played in the daft but enjoyable Swedish TV series Crimes of Passion, screened on BBC4 in 2014.)  Both main actors are especially good in a family outing to the seaside, shortly before the court’s judgment is delivered.  The fine hand-held camerawork in the Helmand Province sequences is by Magnus Nordenhof Jønck.

    12 January 2016

  • Dallas Buyers Club

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Marc Vallée (2013)

    There’s nothing much wrong with Dallas Buyers Club except that it’s all about one thing and that this seems to reflect less a single-minded intensity than a thin screenplay (by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack). The film is based on the life of a Texan called Ron Woodroof who, in 1985, was diagnosed with AIDS and given thirty days to live. Ron is an electrician and part-time rodeo cowboy, outraged not only by the death sentence but also that he’s got the ‘gay disease’. (Promiscuous but definitely heterosexual, he remembers having had unprotected sex with an intravenous drugs user.) Ron learns from a doctor at the Dallas hospital where he’s treated about an antiviral medication called AZT, the only AIDS drug approved by the Foods and Drugs Administration (FDA) for testing on humans. Ron gets hold of some AZT. His health worsens but he thinks he therefore needs more of the stuff. When he drives to a Mexican hospital to get it, he’s told there, by a doctor who’s had his American licence revoked, that AZT itself is a killer. The doctor prescribes instead ddC and the protein Peptide T, neither of which is FDA-approved. Ron’s health improves – he survives beyond thirty days. He begins selling ddC/Peptide T on the street, in partnership with a transgendered man called Rayon (formerly Raymond). They set up the Dallas Buyers Club for the benefit not only of themselves but of other AIDS sufferers too. Rayon eventually dies, after being hospitalised and given AZT while Ron is in Mexico getting new supplies of Peptide T. By now, Ron is no longer homophobic – in the company of gays, he’s become positively sympathetic. As Peptide T gets increasingly difficult to acquire, Ron takes the FDA to court, seeking the legal right to take the protein, which is still not approved. He loses the case but wins a moral victory – and an expression of compassionate regret by the presiding judge that he doesn’t have the legal tools to do more to help. A legend at the end of the film explains that the FDA subsequently allowed Ron to take Peptide T for his personal use. He died of AIDS in 1992, seven years later than predicted.

    There are few changes of pace or emphasis: this may express the confidence in his material of the director, Jean-Marc Vallée, who shows self-discipline in keeping obvious emotional highlights to a minimum. But the effect is oddly unexciting and because this is, after all, a movie formula – the tale of a crusader and his moral development through the embrace of his cause – the carefully unadorned treatment is rather futile. There’s common ground with Erin Brockovich and, rather more curiously, with Milk – although Dallas Buyers Club isn’t as good a film as either of those. Ron Woodroof takes on the PDA as Erin Brockovich did an energy corporation. In Milk, the gay characters’ talk and mannerisms made their political crusade distinctive and supplied an antidote to its potentially pompous aspect. Ron’s homophobia, unpleasant as it is, does something equivalent in Dallas Buyers Club: it’s a counterpoint to the nobility of the struggle against AIDS at the heart of the story and it makes for some sharp one-liners. According to the Wikipedia article on the film, its characterisation of Woodroof makes him ‘rougher than he actually was’. The real Woodroof, ‘according to those who knew him’, was ‘”outrageous, but not confrontational” and not as obviously anti-gay earlier in his life’. He liked rodeos but ‘he never rode any bulls himself’. If all this is right (although the article doesn’t make clear in what ways he was ‘outrageous’), the dramatic licence is to be welcomed. Without the characteristics that the script invents or exaggerates, Ron Woodroof would risk becoming as undernourished dramatically as Matthew McConaughey had to be actually in order to play the role.

    You have to look beyond the weight loss to decide whether McConaughey’s performance is as astonishing as it’s cracked up to be. There’s no doubt he’s visually extraordinary. He lost forty-seven pounds and the resulting image – thanks to the sleek, perma-tanned way McConaughey used to look – is that of a wasted Marlboro Man. I found myself particularly admiring some of the quieter bits in his portrait of Ron Woodroof – like a dinner with Eve Saks, the sympathetic woman doctor from the Dallas hospital, or Ron’s reaction to the news of Rayon’s death (a light goes out in McConaughey’s eyes) or the guttural sounds that come out of him at one point, as Ron sits alone in his car. His playing of the homecoming scene after Ron has lost his law suit against the FDA is very fine, even if this kind of heartwarming lost-the-legal-battle-but-won-the-moral-war climax feels too familiar. More largely, Matthew McConaughey is highly effective at suggesting someone whose life acquires a new focus and energy through adversity. A bit like McConaughey’s own career: you’re always conscious not only of his acting but also of his excitement at playing a role that neither he nor the audience could have imagined his doing until very recently. He’s now clear favourite for the Oscar (although I wouldn’t rule out Leonardo DiCaprio).

    Jared Leto is sweeping the Supporting Actor awards board in America for his playing of Raymond/Rayon. This could be for the wrong – spectacular casting against type – reasons but Leto shows plenty of emotional variety and has absorbed the gestures and personality of Rayon very fully. You’re never so aware of this as in the scene in which Raymond is dressed in men’s clothes for a begging-for-funds interview with his disapproving father. Raymond is a reduced human being here; he’s realised as a woman in a way he can’t be as a man. Jennifer Garner does well as Eve Saks, although the writing of the character – who’s an invention – is uninspired. There are good performances in smaller roles from Griffin Dunne as the struck-off doctor in Mexico and Steve Zahn as Ron’s police officer friend.

    8 February 2014

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