Ah, what could be better for the lunchtime film-slot than catching up with Obi-Wan, Monneypenny and Bootstrap Bill? Perhaps only doing it at the ear-splitting volume normally reserved for crap horror movies? (That's your call, Cineworld, but it's not like there's mumbled dialogue to make up for in this film)
So, director Susanna White manages to do what Tomas Alfredson apparently couldn't all those years ago, and brings a John Le Carré thriller to the big screen without it being a complete, stilted mess. And at no point is a tent-based live entertainment facility identified in the script as having a Talpidae-infestation in its uppermost reaches…
University lecturer Perry (Ewan McGregor), his barrister wife Gail (Naomi Harris), Russian Mafia informant Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) and British Intelligence operative Hector (Damian Lewis) lead the story of corruption and money laundering through Marrakech, London, Paris and Bern, in a surprisingly tense thriller that never feels over-egged, somehow.
Harris, Skarsgård and Lewis are fantastic as the core characters for the film, sometimes leaving Ewan McGregor struggling to keep up. He struggles well, but you can see the strain. Meanwhile, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle comes through his desaturated colour-palette and subdued lighting, and manages to conjure reflections and lens-flare as if by magic. It's a striking combination, but it works well. Visually, the film is definitely glossier than a made-for-TV thriller, but its content wouldn't be out of place at 9pm on a Sunday evening*1 (although this says more about the quality of modern TV than it does about cinema, admittedly).
With its 108 minute runtime, the film rolls at a very measured pace, with White neither rushing nor dawdling, allowing the plot to unfurl organically. And there's little-to-none of the double-cross twists you'd expect of the genre, if only because the audience don't fully trust any of the characters to begin with.
The film may not pick up too many awards (or even that much recognition), but Our Kind of Traitor is an example of a film succeeding in a genre which should be more than overcrowded by now. An intelligent thriller which never feels it has to be needlessly confusing or obscure in its storytelling.
Come for the writing; stay for the performances.
And massive props go to screenwriter Hossein Amini, who gives Mark Gatiss the best acerbic (and utterly deadpan) quip of the film with "…I don't like the c**t any more than you do". Unless your name is Guy Ritchie, you do not drop a line like that lightly.
The second-best dialogue exchange comes in a car-scene, as Stellan opens his shirt to Ewan, revealing a chest inked in symbolic mafia ephemera. "Do you know what this is?", he asks, pointing to an illustration over his solar plexus. "Is it a clearly fake tattoo…", Ewan replies, "…drawn on less than ten minutes ago in blue felt-tips by the work-experience kid who's heard of Russian Mafia tats, but has never seen one?".
Stellan looks out of the window awkwardly as the scene fades to black…
Only if you want to appreciate the cinematography on a massive screen.
It does.
Not best, but deserving of a place on the CV, certainly.
Nope.
Nope.
Level 1: Obi-Wan Kenobi's in this.
*1 Although it's also worth pointing out that director Susanna White has helmed relatively few cinematic features, but has a lot of solid TV work under her belt.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Infinity may be referenced in the title and the script, but this film is anything but, positively constricted by its 109 minutes. There's the feeling in the opening act that this is a story which has been butchered to fit a standard run-time as we meet Ramanujan (Dev Patel), a lowly clerk for a British-run firm in Madras, shortly before the first world war. His intellect is anything but lowly, of course, although we only learn this by having almost every other character openly refer to him as a genius, without actually showing us how or why he's so special. Because how do you break things down to a potentially "non-mathematical" audience without losing them completely? Well, in TMWKI's case, you don't, really.
By which I mean that it's largely not demonstrated, not that the film loses its audience with complicated explanations of numerical brain-aches. Now I'm no rocket-scientist (no, you shut up), but even I was wanting to 'see the working out' as much as Ramanujan's mentor in old Blighty, Hardy. The main problem (for me) is that the prodigy's early schooling isn't even mentioned, much less shown. I bought that he was an intuitive mathematician, and I accepted his frustration at being 'slowed down' by the establishment wanting to fully test his theories. But the fact that his apparently self-taught skills manifested themselves in the Western form of written equations, that the staff at Cambridge University could understand at a glance yet still not fully comprehend? Not explained. Even a duck has to be taught to swim.
As well as powering through the five-year timespan as if it had invented a time-machine while it was on, the film also has to deal with an Indian academic living in England during a global war, when emotions are at a high and ethnic diplomacy isn't. This delicate subject is addressed rather indelicately, as is the more institutional xenophobia of the 'old guard' of the time. Director Matt Brown's script takes a very button-pushing approach, which would be more forgivable if its resolution wasn't handled with equal naivety in the film's final throes.
The humorous lines intended to lighten the mood don't fare too much better, often feeling contrived. Although to be fair, the largely senior audience around me merrily chortled their way through gags which evoked little more than a wry grin from myself, leading me to think that maybe this film is perfectly fulfilling the task for which it was created, and that I'm just a massive film-snob. But then, I know I'm a massive film-snob, and even accounting for this, the film isn't that funny.
Most typical scene:
INT. Hospital. Day. Hardy (Irons) stands by the hospital bed of Ramanujan (Patel), quizzing a doctor, Muthu (San Shella) on the TB-ridden patient's condition.
Hardy: …is it bad?
Muthu: I'm afraid so, sir.
Hardy: Well, can't we do anything?
Muthu: I'm afraid not, no. This is the worst case of Second Act Screenwriter's Cough I've seen in some time, and with a protagonist as virtuous as Ramanujan here, it's unlikely he'll make the credits.
Hardy: Well, I'm sure his inevitable moral vindication at the film's finale will temporarily remove the conspicuous-looking dark patches under his eyes so that "poorly film-makeup man" isn't the lingering image in the memory of the audience as they file out of the auditorium…
Both Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons give it their all, but they're let down by the kind of script that makes a callback (the "1729" reference) to a setup which occurred less than five minutes earlier, and which is less than five minutes before the end of the film. Either the writer is to blame for this structural faux pas, or the editor.
Where is the wonder, where is the awe? Where is the titularly-implied infinity?
With the best will in the world, this is a poor man's Theory of Everything; a great story let down by an awful screenplay which doesn't do its subject justice. And shoehorning in Stephen Fry and Toby Jones won't change that…
Level 2: Many level 2s to choose from here, but let's go for Jeremy Irons, who starred in 1995's Die Hard With A Vengeance alongside Sam 'Windu' Jackson.
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Okay, quick word of advice for you. Don't go and see this as "Alan Rickman's Last Film", even if that is the promotional blackmail buzz surrounding Eye In The Sky, Gavin Hood's post-911 moral thriller. Don't get me wrong, he's good in this (he's Alan Rickman), but his role itself is very limited and consists mostly of being Alan Rickman In A Chair™. Plus, he's got some voice-work in the upcoming Alice Through The Looking Glass. Just thought it best to clear that up now.
So, Eye in the Sky is a military/political thriller centered around drone-warfare; specifically, the aspect involving collateral damage (ie civilian deaths) in targeted strikes. When a British intelligence unit locate three known terrorists and two soon-to-be suicide-bombers in a house in Nairobi, a pre-approved tactical hit is thrown into disarray when it appears that a young girl will be caught within the damage-radius. Can the joint forces of the UK and US military find the legal and moral justification to strike, knowing that if they miss the opportunity, many more civilians could die as a result?
And that's the film, basically. A little bit of set-up followed by a slew of characters reiterating the question for an hour and a half. Which is where it comes unstuck a little, I'm afraid. With the best will in the world, Eye In The Sky has all the intellectual subtlety of a sixth-form essay entitled "Why war is bad". That said, the screenplay holds up both sides of the argument convincingly enough, but not to the point where it picks a stance itself, and not to the point where anyone in the audience is going to change their outlook as a result of having watched it (I could feel the division in tonights audience, with half reacting audibly to some moments and staying silent at others, and vice-versa).
Rickman, as hinted at above, is perfectly acceptable, but other than a pointed monologue at the end of the film is basically a jobbing actor here. The same goes for Helen Mirren, doing what she does well, but nothing new. Scattered across conference rooms and command centres around the world, the supporting cast fare well, although the script feels at times like it's not going anywhere (which is very much the point, but still).
Then any actual sense of ambiguity the film does manages to build up is more or less wiped clean by the placement of 'finger-on-the-trigger', Aaron Paul; essentially a potato on a stick with a sad face and a single tear drawn on in marker pen. He's the brightly coloured subtitle saying "But… but this might be WRONG!". Y'know, just in case the audience hadn't been listening to the actors reciting the script and had already worked out what was going on. Seated directly next to him is Phoebe Fox in much the same role, but she manages to carry it off more convincingly (if no less annoyingly)*1.
Deliberately confrontational, deliberately contrary and at times deliberately mawkish Eye In The Sky is like one of those heated philosophical arguments in a pub: Overly earnest, thoroughly circular and without any firm conclusion.
But you will have an opinion. And you will believe yours is right.
Well played, Mr Hood. Well played...
[ UPDATE (18 Apr)*2 ] It's also worth pointing out that we, the audience, see a broad overview of the home-life of Alia, the little girl that the story revolves around before we meet any of the film's other characters. Being raised in a hardline Muslim area but by progressive parents, Alia is educated at home (which she relishes), away from the disapproving eyes of many of the locals (we're shown this). Her father runs a bicycle-repair business while her mother bakes loaves of bread which the girl goes out to sell throughout the day. Even at her young age, she works as part of the family unit and spends her free-time playing in the back yard as children are wont to do - again, out of the sight of 'traditionalists', as we're also shown. Now normally this depiction would be a bit of simple character-building to give the central dilemma a bit of weight. But bear in mind that none of the military or governmental characters involved in the story know any of this.
The film clearly paints the family to be "The Good Ones Rather Than The Bad Ones", a streak of simplistic emotional blackmail which is so unnecessary that it's insulting to the audience, as if everyone in the cinema automatically assumes that 'all the brown people must either be bigots, terrorists or sympathisers until proven otherwise'. If the writers were as convinced of the sanctity of civilian lives as they'd like to appear, then a little girl selling bread by the roadside would be enough, surely? Having slept on the movie, this has bothered me far more than the actual premise of the film.
It hasn't changed my opinion of the movie, quite the opposite, which again mirrors the problem Eye In The Sky faces from a 'hypothetical' point-of-view: it's just annoyed me into agreeing with what I already believed. [/UPDATE]
It's at empathetically ambivalent as Zero Dark Thirty, although it's slightly less nihilistic.
To be honest, you wouldn't lose anything by watching this at home on a Sunday night. Although it looks very cinematic, the story itself is very televisual.
It certainly does.
Cast? Probably not.
Director? Well, this is the man who brought us Ender's Game and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so you can decide that for yourself.
Nope.
Nope.
Level 2: This film stars Alan Rickman, of course, who played Ronald Reagan in The Butler*3 along with Forest 'from off of Star Wars Rogue One' Whitaker and David 'Agent Kallus' Oyelowo.
*1 Erm, yeah. In case you were still wondering, I freely admit to being in the half of the audience who wanted to punch Aaron Paul's character in the mouth and bellow "Are you going to fucking cry every time you're asked to do your job? Pull the trigger or pull a sickie; we don't have time for this bullshit. NO WONDER WE'RE LOSING, YOU BELLEND!". I say this as an unashamed wooly-liberal, and the fact that his simpering, vocationally-unrealistic performance brought me to that point only underlines that this is indeed a well-constructed film, if an incredibly manipulative one (I'm not normally a 'shouting at the telly' kind of person).
*2 Yeah, I've been doing this quite a bit, recently. Updating posts the next day, I mean. On one hand it tells me that I should probably leave a bit more time between watching a movie and expounding about it online. But on the other I know that if I wait until the next day then I'd have forgotten all the minor niggles which I enjoy complaining about so much. I just want to get the detail down while it's fresh, y'know? I mean really, most films are "alright", but that's no basis for a blog, is it?
3 No, it's called "The Butler", mate. Just "The Butler". In the story, director Lee Daniels isn't a character who employs the eponymous servant, so it's just called "The Butler". In the same way that Phoenix Nights is called "Phoenix Nights". Putting your own name as part of the title is egocentric at very best, and until the day that Lee Daniels (or "Lee Daniels' Lee Daniels" as I believe he likes to be known) comes knocking on my door with an apology and an explanation, that's the way it's fucking well staying, capische?
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
