Forsyth & Pollard: 20 000 Days On Earth (2014)

Now that pretty much every major musical celebrity has an active Twitter, Instagram and Facebook presence, there’s something a little bit quaint about the idea of a music documentary, which is perhaps why the genre has tended to devolve into straight concert films (often amplified by some kind of post-cinematic flourish, such as Katy Perry’s 3D extravaganza Part of Me) or metafictive outings along the lines of Mistaken For Strangers, Tom Berninger’s anarchic anti-documentary about the National. In fact, online media has more or less usurped the role of the music documentary full stop, in its quest for ever more highly cultivated illusions of the musician’s immediacy and intimacy with their most dedicated and devoted fans, to the point where traditional musical documentary can seem overwhelmingly stylised, remote and antiquated by comparison. To its credit, then, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s documentary about Nick Cave’s 20 000^th day on earth doesn’t aim to outdo the latest wave of cultivated celebrity intimacy, but instead falls back upon a highly stylised, self-conscious version of Cave, imbuing him with just enough reserve to preclude the faux-intimacy, or apparently transparent intimacy, that social media tends to engender. To some extent, they’re assisted by Cave himself, who narrates the film in an extended interior monologue that alternately feels like nascent song lyrics, novels or reflections for his next session with his psychotherapist, whose sessions anchor the rambling, ruminative drive around Cave's adopted home town of Brighton that makes up the film. As Cave’s day takes him in and out of his memories and reflections, he’s visited by a whole host of figures from his past and present, including Ray Winstone, Kylie Minogue and Mick Harvey, as he reflects back over a life driven, like the film itself, by counterpoint: “putting disparate elements together and seeing which way the sparks fly.” Within that ceaseless contrapuntal ebb and flow, Cave’s verbosity feels like a drive towards self-annihilation, as he circles around a past that becomes ever more indistinguishable from the mythologies he’s created about it, until watching him is a bit like witnessing a musician at the very peak of a transcendent live performance – the only moments in his life, Cave observes, when he can really forget who he is, and the moments he lives for. As a result, Cave never quite feels present, or, when he is present, the world around him seems to dim as Brighton recedes to a low-tide murmur, haunted by picaresque echoes and carnival memories that are not its own. Against that backdrop, Cave feels more mystic, but also more laconic, more Australian in the way he settles into his visions, his taste for how the unpretentious, vernacular observation can speak multitudes. By the end, it feels more like we’ve visited the outer limits of Cave than Cave per se, the places where he has to collaborate or else discover the end of himself, “the feeling of a song before you understand it…wild and unbroken, when the song is still clear.” And that makes it feel right - but also poignant - that the recording sessions for Push The Sky Away hover around the fringes and comprise the soundtrack, since, as the first Bad Seeds album recorded without Warren Ellis' lyrical touch, it haunts the film with an inchoate sense of Cave's incompleteness, the shifting point at which his nightmares end and something softer and capable of satiating them begins.

Trevorrow: Jurassic World (2015)

Jurassic World is the fourth film in the Jurassic Park franchise, but it isn’t really a sequel, at least not in a traditional sense. Where The Lost World and Jurassic Park III were keen to build upon the original and deliver ever greater special effect-driven thrills, Jurassic World is more of an elegy for and reflection upon the original, revisiting it as a way of contemplating a media landscape in which images have more or less lost their power to scare us. It feels right, then, that this is the first film to return to the original island, which has now been made over, some twenty years later, as “Jurassic World” – a massive theme park that makes the 1993 version look pretty quaint by comparison. At the same time, the marketing department of the park has swelled, with genetic engineering and brand management dovetailed into the continual search for the next big asset, the next big scare for a clientele that seem to get less and less impressed with each new dinosaur. Where the first film had its feet firmly planted in the dusty, dirty world of palaeontology, here we’ve moved completely into the realm of gene splicing – and it really clarifies how much gene splicing was an analog art in the first film, an actual, physical, manual cutting, pasting and editing of genes that has now been well and truly taken over by computers. As a result, most of the types that populated the original film – the elder scientist, the researcher, the lawyer, the security expert – are here more or less conflated into the figure of Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), the park’s operations manager, who has to deal with the fallout when the latest asset escapes and runs havoc across the island. In some ways, that’s too many roles for a single actor to play, with the result that Howard doesn’t have much to do except play a blank foil to Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady, a Velociraptor trainer whose advocacy for extinct animal rights forms a kind of counterpoint to Dearing’s asset management. As might be expected, their rapport doesn’t really work, except when it’s more or less procedural, subsumed into how they navigate the architecture and security of the park. And that’s one thing that’s very different from any of the previous films – or at least what the conclusion of The Lost World was trying to do – since this is the first time we’ve seen the dinosaurs coming up against such an extensive, man-made infrastructure. Sometimes it’s physical (monorails, aquariums, gyroscopes), sometimes it’s digital (the island control room often feels a bit like the gaming spin-off has been inserted into the movie itself), but it tends to be around those hi-tech thresholds and barriers that the dinosaurs tend to become scary again, if only because it’s where they vanish to the edges of perception, the best space for digital horror, even if it’s the fairly unimaginative CGI horror on display here. Nevertheless, despite those scary moments, the overall tone is a kind of wistful sadness – occasionally cloaked or concealed in ironic self-awareness – and a longing for futuristic spectacle even as the film’s own assets – its set pieces – seem to yield the same exponentially diminishing returns that all the characters seem to be fearing from the park itself. Even its imminent collapse quickly fails to impress all the patrons who are trapped there, and that’s the final sadness: even destroying the park quickly feels passe, inadequate, uneventful, or at least less eventful than the memories of the first film, which haunt every space and character with a melancholy that Trevorrow never quite manages to satiate or quell. 

Dobkin: The Judge (2014)

The time is about ripe for a lush Grisham tribute, and The Judge dlivers on all fronts, offering up an intricate, tightly crafted story about a hotshot lawyer, Hank Palmer, played by Robert Downey Jr, who returns to his home town in Indiana for the first time in years, after hearing that his mother has passed away. At first it seems like it’s going to be a homecoming film, a reckoning with the past, but that’s quickly channelled into a legal drama, as Frank discovers that his father, Henry, a local Judge, played by Robert Duvall, was involved in a hit-and-run on the night of his mother’s funeral, and is being brought before the local courthouse where he usually presides on murder charges. The stage is set for the kind of regional legal drama that Grisham did so well, except that in this case the traditional Grisham narrative of the small-town ingenue arriving in the big city is somewhat inverted, with Frank arriving back home to confront why he was disillusioned enough to seek out the city in the first place. From the very beginning, that makes him more volatile and neurotic than the typical Grisham lawyer – or at least more willing to wear his volatility on his sleeve - as Downey sinks into one of his best performances in years, embracing a role that gives him full rein to deliver the skittish, dodging kind of charisma that he does so well. In fact, it’s probably Downey’s presence that prevents the film ever feeling too rigid in its genre tribute, or ever really stabilising into one single genre – deflective and appealing in a single breath, he manages to keep the film on its toes, although he’s helped by a perfect sparring partner in Duvall, as well as an object lesson in how to assemble and orchestrate a cameo cast, with Vera Farmiga, Grace Zabriskie and a Fargo-esque Billy Bob Thornton appearing in a mere handful of scenes but nevertheless critical to the film’s momentum. Still, it’s very much Downey’s film, partly because the specificities of the narrative – and the way they both artfully and tactfully sync up with his own backstory – play perfectly to his fidgety restlesness with his own muscularity and masculinity, his ability to exude a barely concealed shame consciousness that’s quite queer, reminding you why he’s so often found playing characters who are perpetually running away from themselves. In particular, Downey has an uncanny way of bringing out his inner kid without resorting to kitsch – vulnerable, flighty and a bit immature – that might be more acclaimed in the Iron Man franchise, but is perfectly attuned to what it needs to divest this film, and his relationship with Duvall, with any of the ponderous gravitas it might have had, since, whatever terrible thing the “Judge” has done to warrant Frank staying out of his life for over a decade, it’s clear that Frank needs to be petted and managed a little bit as well, which leads to some of the most touching scenes in the film. Thick with Midwestern atmospherics, it’s an old-fashioned, modest exercise, but for that very reason content to let all its actors deliver stalwart, intricately plotted performances without overwhelming them with the need to be high concept, a breath of fresh air that Downey, in particular, needs as his charisma is squeezed tighter and tighter by Marvel universe-building, which doesn't tend to have much time for the skittishly sentimental Downey on display here.

Hallström: The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

Given that Helen Mirren is about the only venerable British actress who doesn’t appear in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel franchise, it was perhaps only a matter of time before she appeared in a film that was more or less targeting the same niche – in this case, an adaptation of Richard Morais' novel about an immigrant Indian family who set up a restaurant across the road from a Michelin-starred restaurant in a small, picturesque French village. Tensions immediately arise, and a great deal of comic subterfuge transpires, until the two parties realise that their shared love of food is greater than anything keeping them apart. Similarly, it’s only a matter of time before Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), the manager of the Michelin restaurant, realises that young Hassan (Manish Dayal) is prodigious enough to propel her into the two-star stratosphere she’s been aiming for ever since receiving her first star some thirty years before, and offers to bakroll his formal culinary education. As a result, most of the film takes place as a kind of experiment in French-Indian fusion – at first combatively, as the two restaurants deliberately buy up each others’ ingredients at the local market, only to be forced to find a way to incorporate them into their own menus, but then more generously, as Hassan, in particular, sets about reinventing the Cordon Bleu canon in the light of his own heritage. If that sounds somewhat predictable, that’s because it is, but part of what makes the film work is that the combative element never quite goes away – there is a continual, if affable, jostle for supremacy in the kitchen, just as it’s the tension and dynamism between Indian and French ingredients that defines the particular brand of French-Indian fusion that Hassan pioneers upon moving to Paris in the third act to become a celebrity chef in the vein of Ferran Adria. For all the cosiness, then, there is room for Hallstrom to cloak a whole lot of fixations in contemporary, competitive, combative food culture – reality cookoffs, charismatic chefs, sourcing fresh ingredients, molecular gastronomy – in the MOR magical realism that he does so well (along with Chocolat and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, it almost makes for something of a  loose trilogy), until it feels as if we're dealing with a quite contemporary food sensibility despite all the nostalgic period trappings – a sense of fine dining as mouth orgasm or direct brain stimulation that perhaps explains why every romantic or erotic encounter is so pointedly oral or olfactory, or why there’s such a libidinal fixation on feeding sauces and spices to the beloved. For these characters, the centre of the nervous system are the taste buds, and, as in Chocolat, the film poises us, time and again, at the seconds just before and after they’re stimulated, until even the safest and most respectably arthouse conversations brim with a pregnant mouthfeel that can only be satiated by eating or feeding someone something delicious as soon as humanly possible. 

Schlondorff: Diplomatie (Diplomacy) (2014)

The latest film from Volker Schlondorff is a tight, taut chamber drama set in Nazi Paris on the eve of the Allied victory. Shot mainly in real time and almost entirely within the confines of German Headquarters at the Hotel Meuriel, it’s a dramatisation of the relationship between General von Choltitz (Niels Arestrup), who was commissioned with destroying the city before the Allies arrived, and Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling (Andre Dussolier), whose supreme diplomatic skills prevented it from happening. Most of the film takes place as an extended negotiation between these two men, with interludes depicting the preparation for the destruction, which pretty much involved rigging every historic or significant site in Paris with explosives – Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Invalides, the Opera, the Parliament and the Place de la Concorde are just some of the targets – so as to flood the inner city until the foundations collapsed. That’s a pretty catastrophic prospect, and it’s a smart move on Schlondorff’s part to minimise our actual experience of Paris – it’s set mainly at night, although there’s still less of the city than there might be – so as to abstract and dissociate us from the familiar postcard pictures that are still available today, plunging us back into the gloom that settled over the city on what might have been its last night before it went the way of Mannheim, Hamburg and Berlin. At the same time, though, Schlondorff shoots everything within Choltitz’s room with a kind of heightened architectural awareness, from the secret passage and two-way mirror that Nordling uses to get in and incept Choltiz’s plan, to the long, lingering shots on details of décor, from doorknobs to dishes, as if to restrict his camera to the only spaces and fixtures that, for the Nazis, were totally above destruction, the heart of German Paris. Within those stifling tableaux, a purely diplomatic drama would already be highly atmospheric, but there’s a real art and grace to the way in which Choltitz and Nordling’s roles – the infinite obedience of the good general and the infinite flexibility of the good diplomat – allow little glimpses of character as well, as flexibility and obedience both start to lose their meaning under such extraordinary circumstances, until it’s as much of an interpersonal drama as a diplomatic one, especially once Cholitz discloses the recent announcement of the Sippenhaft, a Nazi dictum that makes him as much a captive of the situation as the Parisians. The result is a film that feels as if it might be made into a play, but that doesn’t feel adapted from a play – spoken almost entirely in a language that is not the characters’ or the director’s own, it is theatrical but never stagy, and that’s perhaps the best way to describe Nordling’s diplomacy as well, which Schlondorff waits for the last perfectly poised shot to capture in its quintessence.