Old Yorker

  • The Captor

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Budreau (2018)

    A would-be droll dramatisation of the 1973 bank robbery and hostage-taking that gave rise to the term ‘Stockholm syndrome’, the Canadian writer-director Robert Budreau’s film was released in North America as Stockholm.   Its British release title is not only less than distinctive.  Given what Stockholm syndrome necessarily involves, it’s insufficient too – why no mention of the captive?  The weak title may have helped depress audience numbers for this screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.  The fact that The Captor was being released in cinemas the following day couldn’t have helped either.

    Advance knowledge of the film’s subject precludes surprise about what happens in The Captor and Budreau’s decision to preface the action with the words ‘based on an absurd but true story’ amounts to something of a tonal giveaway.  Almost as soon as Kaj Hansson (Ethan Hawke) appears, he puts on a wig, a false moustache, shades and a cowboy hat.  He looks inept even as he constructs his disguise, and its effect is nearly comical.  Kaj, who’s preparing to rob a Kreditbanken in Stockholm, is evidently not a sharp-minded, cold-blooded professional criminal.  When the heist goes wrong, he takes three hostages, including bank employee Bianca (Noomi Rapace).   He also negotiates the release from prison of his friend Gunnar Sorensson (Mark Strong), with whom Kaj means to escape once he gets the cash he came for, and who is brought by police to the bank.

    Like another charming-bank-robber movie of 2018, David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun, Budreau’s has a screenplay based on a New Yorker article:  in this case, one by Daniel Lang, published the year after the events in Stockholm.  (Budreau nevertheless alters plenty of the historical facts, including the main characters’ names.)   As a piece of cinema, though, The Captor more obviously invites comparison with Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – and comes off badly.  Budreau clearly wants to convey, as Lumet did, the accumulating chaos arising from the botched robbery, the fallibility and desperation of the main players.  That combination generates the black comedy, as well as the human drama, of Dog Day Afternoon.  In contrast, the zany, absurdist register of The Captor feels imposed.

    More oddly, the film also imposes a justification from outside the bank vault – where Kaj, Blanca, Gunnar and the two other hostages (Bea Santos and Mark Rendall) are holed up – of the growing rapport between captors and captives.  Budreau looks only superficially at what develops within the vault.  In order to explain how the people there have more in common with each other than with the authorities presiding over the crisis, he stresses, as an objective fact, the unattractive qualities of the latter – the police (Ian Matthews, John Ralston), the bank manager (Vladimir Jon Cubrt) and the government – in the person of prime minister Olof Palme (Shanti Roney).  Palme’s presence in the story is somewhat distracting:  it keeps reminding you that his assassination in February 1986 had a greater impact on the Scandinavian psyche than the events reconstructed in The Captor.

    In a similar way, Budreau accounts for Bianca’s increasing attachment to Kaj largely by showing her husband Christopher (Thorbjørn Harr) in an unfavourable light.  Allowed briefly to visit the bank vault, he volunteers to take the place of his wife but from there it’s all downhill.  When Bianca phones home and pleads to speak with their daughter, Christopher refuses:  he’s just got the little girl to sleep.  While he’s in the vault, Bianca gives him detailed instructions on how to prepare the fish she’d intended to cook for supper.  On the phone, she asks how the meal turned out.  He says he didn’t bother with the fish – he took some meatloaf from the fridge instead.  Budreau is at a loss how to handle the impact on Bianca’s family of reports emerging from the bank that she has been killed during the siege, so he ignores them.  Her husband and their two children eventually learn from the television news that she’s safe and well.  Christopher’s reaction suggests this comes as a mild relief rather than a bewildering miracle.

    The international cast – Americans, Canadians, Scandinavians and Mark Strong – are all competent enough.  Ethan Hawke expresses Kaj’s vulnerability well but overall this is one of those performances that lurch between emotional extremes.  That’s mirrored vocally:  if Hawke isn’t shouting, he’s mumbling and hard to make out.  The role of Bianca is relatively underwritten but Noomi Rapace, also in big glasses, is alert and appealing.  As in The Guard, Mark Strong gets onto a criminal wavelength with impressive ease.

    20 June 2019

  • Gloria Bell

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sebastián Lelio (2018)

    There are two audiences for Gloria Bell:  those who haven’t seen Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria (2013) and those who have.  If (like me) you’re in the latter category, it’s impossible to clear your mind of the earlier film and puzzling as to what impelled Lelio to retell a story he’d told so recently in a Chilean setting and with a Chilean cast.  The action has shifted from Santiago to Los Angeles but the characters and plot are virtually unchanged.   (Lelio now shares the screenplay credit with Alice Johnson Boher rather than Gonzalo Maza but you wonder if the new co-writer’s job amounted to translating rather than creating dialogue.)  Gloria Bell doesn’t reveal significant differences between the circumstances of a late-middle-aged American divorcee with grown-up children and those of her Chilean counterpart in the original film.   Gloria was an international succès d’estime:  it’s hard to see a good case for a Hollywood remake except that it promises commercial success in the Anglophone market on a scale inevitably beyond the foreign language version.  That promise is greater now than it was when the Americanisation of Gloria got underway in early 2017 because this is another tale of male weakness and villainy that leads, through female victimhood, to female empowerment.

    The new film has Julianne Moore in the title role and the Wikipedia article on Gloria Bell quotes Lelio (at the time the remake was announced) as follows:  ‘As one of the greatest actresses in the world, Julianne giving her interpretation of the character is not only a huge honor, it’s irresistible. It’s going to be like jazz, you’ll feel the spirit of the original story but it’ll be re-invigorated and vital’.  Lelio probably didn’t mean to but his words implicitly disparage Paulina García, who gave a powerful (and memorable) lead performance in Gloria.  Julianne Moore is deft and emotionally fine-tuned but her casting throws into sharper relief the shaky premise of the story, which came through strongly enough in the original.  Paulina García managed to be both plain and attractive; Moore is incontrovertibly beautiful.  When the man with whom Gloria gets into a relationship lets her down, she decides to give him a second chance after she happens on a street entertainer with a dancing skeleton puppet – a memento mori that reminds her to seize the day.  But why does Moore’s Gloria think Arnold (John Turturro) is the only possible way of doing that?   There’s nothing to suggest that she doesn’t realise she looks great.  She’s very sociable.  She could have her pick of men at the clubs where she and they regularly go to dance and chat.  García’s spectacles in Gloria arguably increase her attractiveness, as well as signal symbolically that the character isn’t seeing things clearly.   The glasses in Moore’s case virtually revive the venerable Hollywood cliché of the romantic heroine whose specs supposedly disguise her beauty.

    Gloria Bell is not like jazz.  That would normally be no bad thing but the prevailing tone of the narrative is muted, verging on glum.  You shouldn’t judge a film by its trailer but this one is a good deal less animated than its two-minute summary promises:  what energy there is, is thanks mostly to the selection of well-known pop songs on the soundtrack.  John Turturro has nothing of the deceptively paternal quality that Sergio Hernández’s Rodolfo had in Gloria.   (The American leads are much closer in actual age than the Chileans were.)  Perhaps Lelio uses the same shot to introduce Arnold as he used to introduce Rodolfo and the effect is different only because Turturro is a familiar face as Hernández wasn’t:  whatever the reason, the first appearance of Arnold sitting at a club bar feels too emphatic – here’s the main male character, it announces.   From an early stage, Turturro’s Arnold is edgy and shifty.  He rarely seems to offer Gloria the possibility of short-term, let alone long-term, happiness.  In one of their more relaxed moments together, he reads aloud to her an English translation of a poem by Claudio Bertoni.  I’m revealing my own prejudices here but it’s a bit surprising that a Second Amendment-supporting American businessman has a taste for Chilean poetry.

    18 June 2019

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