Duvall: The Apostle (1997)

Written and directed by Robert Duvall in the 1980s, but only produced in the 1990s, The Apostle is about Sonny (Duvall), a Southern preacher who assaults his wife’s lover, and is forced to flee his home town. After drifting through the South, he finds himself in the small community of Bayou Boutone, where he starts a new church under the name of “Pastor E.F.” and sets about redeeming himself for his crimes. It’s not redemption in a typical sense, though, since Sonny’s an unusual character – for the most part, he’s moved, rather than motivated; moved by the spirit, moved by the power of the voice, and moved by the need to evangelise whenever and wherever he can. Every moment in his life is a minor revelation, or epiphany, meaning that there’s an extraordinary singularity to every utterance and incident in the film; it's a story composed entirely of small moments or big moments, depending on how you look at it. As a result, Sonny’s often as surprised by his own actions as we are – in fact, he only really does things in the sense that dying is doing something; there’s a sense that he’s born again with every moment, if only because every moment provides a new way to bear witness to the spirit. On the one hand, that gives the film a slightly morbid atmosphere – if Sonny’s reborn every moment, then he dies every moment, in a perpetual alternation between life and afterlife (in one of the most enigmatic moments Sonny’s mother appears to return from death in her living room). On the other hand, if Sonny dies every moment, then he’s also reborn every moment, perpetually poised at the joyous brink of Southern baptism. And it’s music that creates that perpetual movement between life and afterlife, baptism and upbaptism – at least, Sonny only experiences revelations, or is moved to action, while he’s witnessing the music of his own voice; every time he closes his mouth, a revelation ends, and every time he speaks, a new revelation begins. As the film progresses, then, and Sonny gradually builds his new flock, Duvall erodes any real distinction between speaking and evangelising – they’re both the same kind of music, promulgated by a largely non-professional cast that includes country and western singers (June Carter Cash, Billy Joe Shaver), professional evangelisers and real congregations. For all its fictive overtones, then, it plays as something of an aural documentary, a fascination with the camera’s ability to bear witness to the tics and quirks of individiual voices above and beyond their narrative role – voices Duvall had been contemplating for over a decade by the time the film was made, long enough to capture them at their most idiosyncratic and unique.

Wells: August: Osage County (2013)

At one level, the film version of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-Prize winning play feels like exactly what it is: a four-hour magnum opus cut down to two hours. That removes any pretension to realism that the play might have had, as well as creating vast lapses in continuity that add quite a ludicrous touch to this epic disintegration of an Oklahoma farming family, headed by Violet Weston (Meryl Street). At the same time, though, this truncated version opens up a melodramatic possibility and intensity that’s more dispersed in the original play, giving Meryl Streep the opportunity for a no-holds-barred melodramatic masterpiece. And, as might be expected, she delivers, putting in one of her most sublime, ridiculous performances, not least because Violet is high for pretty much the whole film, until, somewhere between the decline of a matriarch and the decline of a drug addict, Streep falls into the role all melodramatic heroines end up playing: survival. Acting as if she has to outlive the film and everyone in it, she obliterates virtually every other actor, with the possible exception of Julia Roberts, who plays her headstrong daughter Barb, and slots right back into melodrama as if she’d only starred in Steel Magnolias yesterday. That might offend fans of the original play, since it’s only a matter of time until Streep’s performance obliterates the play itself, folding it into an interminable melodramatic monologue that leaves nothing but her own performance. But that’s also the obliterative nature of Violet’s character, so there’s something appropriate about the way she turns the director and audience into just one more family she’s managed to outwit, contain and transcend, attracting all the oxygen in the room to her fabulous flame. Early in the film, as she’s approaching the family home – and Violet - Barb comments on the Great Plains as a state of mind, “a spiritual affliction, like the blues." And in this version, there’s no doubt that Violet’s responsible for those Plains – like Streep herself, she’s a scorched earth actress, decimating and levelling everything in her way.

McKay: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)

Successes as effortless and unexpected as the original Anchorman film are often the most difficult to replicate. Add to that the fact that the original film effectively contained its own sequel – the collection of out-takes that were pieced together to form Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie – and the current trend for late 70s/early 80s period nostalgia and there’s something overwhelmingly exhausted about Anchorman 2. Set at the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, it sees Ron and the gang travel to New York, where, under the auspices of GNN – the Global News Network – they manage to restart their careers with a revolutionary idea: give the people what they want to hear. Not only is the result as heavy-handed as it sounds, but there’s something about the GNN agenda that’s too close to the film’s own – every single moment is too anxious to recall and outdo the original, too anxious to give us more of the intense quotability and memorability that was originally the result of Ferrell’s brilliant improvisation rather than any master plan (and it feels like Ferrell improvises less here than in any of his recent films). That’s not to say there aren’t some great one-liners, or that it’s not comforting to see these old characters again – even if Steve Carell’s meteoric rise over the last decade means that it’s a bit more Brick-heavy than it needs to be. Nor is it to say that it’s any less distinctive than the original film, since, about two-thirds of the way through, it finally collapses under the burden of its ambitions into something quite different: a miniature film, or film-within-a-film, in which Ron’s struck with blindness and retreats to a rocky New England lighthouse. Of course it ends happily, and of course it’s partly played for laughs, but it’s also a brilliant, affectionate parody of such 1970s weepies as Love Story, The Way We Were, A Star Is Born and The Champ - melodramas that fused the sublime and the ridiculous, discovering the most extravagant depths of emotion in the extravagances of 70s fashion, décor and mise-en-scene. Not that far removed from Will Ferrell's affectionate parody of the 70s melodramatic miniseries in The Spoils of Poynton, it’s the perfect register for a film that’s lampooning the late 70s but also somewhat melodramatic in its desperation to reach out to a Frat Pack audience that’s not quite what it was a decade ago. And so its playful nostalgia for the 70s conceals a quite painful nostalgia for the 00s – even if it ends with Ron Burgundy triumphing once again, it’s suffused with an overwhelming, bittersweet acceptance that his decade has passed.

Wexler: Medium Cool (1969)

Shot primarily on televisual cameras, Medium Cool takes its title from Marshall McLuhan’s concept of hot and cool media. According to McLuhan, television is a cool medium because it demands a high degree of participation from its audience to separate fact from fiction. It’s appropriate, then, that this portrait of Chicago in 1968 converges unstaged footage with a series of miniature narratives revolving around the media industry, until it’s impossible to distinguish one from the other. At one level, that places the onus on the audience to separate fact from fiction, but it also gestures towards a more radical McLuhanite principle – namely, that the content of a medium is completely irrelevant in terms of its impact upon its audience. From that perspective, it doesn’t really matter whether or not we regard the film as fictional, just as it doesn’t really matter whether or not we become involved in its narrative or politics. Instead, it’s the sheer fact of watching the film that’s most significant, as Wexler doesn’t dramatise or document so much as simply demonstrate the televisual camera’s mediating power. And it takes a cinematographer’s feel for all the places a camera can be situated to truly envisage the sheer proliferation of portable televisual cameras that flood Chicago in this buildup to the 1968 Democratic Convention, as Wexler revives the city symphony films of the 1920s for a televisual age, and televisual citizen. Yet where the camera-citizens of city symphonies were rare and unusual beings,  the most striking thing about Wexler’s vision of Chicago is that televisual cameras seem to equal televisions in number, or even outnumber them. Representation quickly exceeds its object, until there’s no real distinction between spectators and participators – by merely watching the final riots, we’re a critical part of them. And it’s in that odd moment that the film’s most memorable and radical affirmation lies. To simply watch television, Wexler suggests, is to demonstrate to ourselves that we are part of history, even or especially when its narratives fail to hold our attention or sustain our interest.

Losey: Time Without Pity (1957)

Time Without Pity was Joseph Losey’s first English film released under his own name, and it brims with the visceral intensity of his trial and excommunication from the United States, restarting his career like a tightly wound coil. Based on Emyln Williams’ play of the same name, it’s about an alcoholic, David Graham (Michael Redgrave), who’s released from a sanatorium to discover that he has twenty-four hours to save his son from being executed for murder. Screenwriter Ben Barzman stays pretty close to the original script, with one critical exception – the real murderer, industrialist Robert Stanford (Leo McKern), is shown committing the crime in the first frame. As a result, all the suspense is channelled into the narrowing time before the execution, making it a masterpiece of pace. And Losey directs in thick brushstrokes, as if trying to envisage the film as a totality before the paint dries – the murder takes place in an apartment crammed with modernist process painting – until it feels more like a live performance than a film adaptation. It’s no coincidence, then, that Robert is a specialist in automotive acceleration, or that the key witness collects alarm clocks – the film breaks time into smaller and smaller intervals as the execution hour draws near, warping any sense of a stable or continuous timeline. Among other things, that makes for a peculiarly powerful vision of addiction – as someone who’s barely escaped from the final throes of alcoholism, David’s also grown used to a life lived in smaller and smaller micro-intervals, from drink to drink. Even as his son’s case requires him not to drink, then, it forces him to think like an alcoholic - and so, whatever else happens, it’s clear from the very start that this is also, somehow, about the last day of an alcoholic; Losey's version of The Lost Weekend. In some ways, the late 1950s camera hadn’t evolved to meet that vision, which cries out for the abstractions of a handheld, frenzied camera, just as it yearns to fuse Redgrave’s twitching face with the screen, to infect the lens with delirium tremens. Yet there’s also something poetic and prophetic about the way Losey embraces his camera's limitations, pairing it with static, staid tablueaux that render it as impotent as David, as he strives – and fails – to envisage his utter intoxication with his son’s innocence.