Old Yorker

  • Charlie Wilson’s War

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Nichols (2007)

    Aaron Sorkin has a remarkable ability to transmit information through credible dialogue and in Charlie Wilson’s War there’s plenty of information to transmit.  This is the true story of the Texan Democrat congressman behind an operation to support the Afghan mujahideen in their resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.  Sorkin always seems to manage to explain the situation through mouthpieces who speak in character – or in caricature, at least.   You can feel the actors’ pleasure in having lines like these to deliver – that in itself is a pleasure for the audience.  At the same time, it makes you especially aware and admiring of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wonderfully mature judgment.  As Gust Avrakotos, the loose cannon CIA operative who assists Wilson, Hoffman has the confidence to deflate or throw away lines and make them all the funnier.  Wilson is played by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts is Joanne Herring, a Houston socialite and political activist and Wilson’s sort of partner.  Good as they are, Hanks and Roberts are sometimes almost too eager to deliver a witty line.  Hoffman is more skilful:  when he exudes relish in how amusing his words are, it’s the relish felt by the character he’s incarnating.   The sequence in which Gust Avrakotos keeps being sent out of then called back into Charlie Wilson’s office is, thanks to Hoffman, a deservedly famous one.

    I thought much better of Charlie Wilson’s War on this second viewing than when I saw it on its original release.  Mike Nichols’ direction is crisp and alert, and the actors respond to that as well as to the quality of the writing.  There are particularly enjoyable cameos from Ned Beatty, Emily Blunt, John Slattery and, especially, Christopher Denham who plays a young whizzkid in the Defense Department called Michael Vickers.  (The real Michael Vickers is now the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Obama administration.)   Yet Mike Nichols is so taken with the egotistical venality of the principals that the reality of the political situation is made to seem rather mechanical.  When Wilson discovers the grimness of life in a refugee camp in Peshawar that he visits, the sequence is well played by Hanks and Amy Adams, as Wilson’s administrative assistant Bonnie, but the extras are extras.  Nichols is more comfortable presenting, as a piece of comedy, the moment when the mujahideen use American weapons to shoot down their first Russian helicopter.  This made me slightly uncomfortable, though:  while it’s good in principle for the indigenous resistance fighters not to be treated with reverence, playing them for laughs comes too easily to Mike Nichols.  The final moral of the story – by arming the natives to thwart the Soviets, America let in Osama Bin Laden – is a black joke of history.   Nichols’s amused detachment from the motives of Wilson, Herring et al means that he delivers this judgment with too much derision and too little regret.  Still, Charlie Wilson’s War is a trim and entertaining political comedy, and that’s no mean feat.   Tom Hanks seems a bit too cartoonish at first but this approach pays off:  when Charlie Wilson turns out to be capable of doing much more than you’d have believed, it has stronger impact.  Julia Roberts is very enjoyable – she has the confidence to use her beauty for laughs – and Amy Adams has truthfulness as well as comic flair.   Mike Nichols loses no opportunity to fix the camera on young women’s legs and backsides, under cover of Charlie Wilson’s womanising.  It’s lucky that Adams and Emily Blunt both have enough sexy style and humour to transform these moments.

    15 April 2012

  • Certified Copy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Copie conforme

    Abbas Kiarostami (2010)

    Juliette Binoche is a beautiful woman and a fine actress but her face on the poster for Certified Copy is hugely irritating.  It’s a still from the film:  the Binoche character is looking in a mirror, trying on an earring.  The effect is reinforced by the poster’s roguish subtitle ‘An original love story?’  The question mark rhymes with the pixie allure of Binoche’s face:  who is this woman preparing to be?   I saw Certified Copy at the Richmond Filmhouse on a sunny Sunday afternoon and got bored enough to count the audience – a total of eighteen people, until the couple in front of me walked out about twenty minutes before the end.   Perhaps the lovely weather reduced the turnout but I like to think even Richmond may have had a surfeit of French movies this year.  (There was a refreshing absence of French fare from the trailers, which included three films.)  Certified Copy is actually multilingual – English and French in more or less equal measure and some bits of Italian (the story is set in Tuscany) – but that’s almost beside the point.  The film’s cultural cachet for its putative British audience is grade A Continental (French).

    The film is significant because it’s the first made in Europe by the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, none of whose work I’ve so far seen.  Certified Copy is a virtual two-hander for Binoche and William Shimell, a British opera singer in his first cinema role.  It’s another irritation – not least because, given the movie’s themes, it’s predictable – that the woman played by Binoche doesn’t have a name.  The man does:  he’s James Miller, a British art historian, in Italy to promote his prize-winning book, which is called ‘Certified Copy’.  The premise of the book is that a reproduction may have a value equal to that of the original – that our belief it can’t is based on false ideas about authenticity.  We first see Binoche in the audience at Miller’s book launch.   She then gives him a tour of the area; after a drive, they go for a coffee and the woman who serves them assumes they’re married.  From this point on, the relationship between Binoche and Shimell becomes emotionally more weighted.  Are they engaged in some kind of role play as a means of reviewing the marriages they actually have?   Are they really a married couple – and pretending not to be by way of therapy for their own failing relationship?  Whatever the answer, the purposes of the ambiguity appear to be to create a correspondence with the themes of authenticity and imitation in Miller’s book, and to remind us in the audience of the assumptions we make in seeing a man and a woman together.   There’s a moment late on in the film when Binoche and Shimell see an elderly Italian couple, the man holding the woman’s arm, and suppose they’re husband and wife.  By this point, we’re primed to wonder:  how do they know the old people aren’t, say, brother and sister?

    Certified Copy is made by an international auteur, moves with remarkable fluency and raises intellectual points saliently.  The combination will be more than enough to satisfy many people that it’s a work of art.  Yet I found the film uninteresting – the questions about authenticity don’t progress beyond Miller’s opening statement of them as themes in his book.  This is because the interaction of the two principals is inextricably schematic and has no life of its own.  Kiarostami develops ideas through his characters only by having the characters talk about the ideas.  This goes for much of the conversation between Binoche and Shimell, at least in the early stages of their time together, and the few minor characters who get to speak start philosophising as soon as they open their mouths:  an elderly man (the celebrated screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière) with whom Binoche and Shimell chat in a village square; the patronne in the café (well played by Gianna Giachetti).  An uncomfortable, perhaps not inadvertent illustration of the film’s fake vs genuine article thesis is the pairing of Shimell and Binoche.   Kiarostami may be highly experienced in working with non-professionals but why cast an opera singer in the role of James Miller?  Shimell isn’t bad – or not bad in the way you might expect an operatic actor to be bad – but he looks very stiff alongside a screen performer as fluid as Juliette Binoche.   Sally saw an interview with Binoche about the film in which the actress said she hoped audiences wouldn’t think she was anything like the character she was playing.  There’s no danger of that because she doesn’t create a character at all – nor, as far as I can see, is she expected to.   Binoche is meant to be continuously beguiling and make the woman she’s playing hard to pin down, and she has the resources to do this.  She’s never less than highly watchable, shifting moods as easily as she switches languages.  But once you get the sense that her job in this film is to fascinate, the fascination wears off.

    12 September 2010

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