Youth (December 26)
Academy Award and Cannes Prix du Jury winner Paolo Sorrentino directs one of the year’s strongest casts in this sprawling but ultimately rewarding meditation on achievement, love, and the ineffable. Sorrentino might’ve told Michael Caine, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, Harvey Keitel, and Jane Fonda what Youth is really all about, but he certainly isn’t telling us.
The aforementioned play rich and successful artists thrown together at an opulent Swiss resort; the sort of place a travel agent might mention to make you choke on your claim that “price isn’t a concern”. Caine wanders the resort in a collage as visually appealing as a Wes Anderson tourism ad and as impenetrable as a Terrence Malick first draft.
Caine’s retired composer is the emotional core of Youth, and it’s his strained love for daughter Weisz and repartee with confidants Keitel and Dano that cuts through the film’s disorienting tone. Caine is also in frame for cinematographer Luca Bigazzi’s most inventive moments: fantastical dream sequences and a few unexpected suspensions of reality. There are some great visual gags throughout, and for all the weight of Sorrentino’s themes Youth is not without real joy.
Raw emotion winning out over the intellectual is one of the film’s central ideas and Sorrentino approaches it in a way we all should this summer – gazing out over an open landscape and blasting some Godspeed.
Spotlight (Thursday January 28)
The Boston Globe’s investigative team won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their exposé on child abuse within the Catholic church. The current worldwide scandal of priestly abuse and associated cover-up flowed from the Globe’s work, starkly depicted here in a sure-fire contender for Best Picture.
Such subject matter might sound unappealing, but Spotlight is really a film about work (and an urgently engaging one at that). Michael Keaton continues his resurgence as the head journo with support from Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo. The team go from tentative to combative as more victims come forth and the Church’s resistance solidifies. Liev Schreiber and Stanley Tucci lend gravity to an already hard-hitting plot, though it never strays into the melodramatic.
Writer/director Tom McCarthy respectfully treats the abuse victims and the weight of the crimes against them. The Globe team struggle to balance journalistic zeal against the sheer horror of what they’re uncovering, and the audience is invited to feel both Keaton’s apprehension and Ruffalo’s fury as the breadth of the scandal becomes clear.
Spotlight is an expertly crafted and vital film; it is a clear mirror to our collective handling of a generation-defining revelation.
Suffragette(December 26)
Although it’s a period drama, Suffragette does its best work in the grey areas of the ongoing fight for social progress. Carey Mulligan leads as laundry worker Maude, falling into as much as joining the burgeoning movement for women’s suffrage in King George V’s England. Dour visuals and predictable plotting dampen the production, but the marching, stone-throwing fighters in Suffragette deliver plenty of ammo for post-viewing discussion.
Screenwriter Abi Morgan has chalked up several affecting portraits of the grindstone at the heart of social and political struggle (Brick Lane, The Iron Lady) and she works the same magic here. The forthright advocates of voting rights for women (Helena Bonham Carter, Meryl Streep) are at the fringes of a story more about the price of standing up than about the act itself.
Maude takes tentative, then bold steps into the suffrage movement in the face of mounting personal cost: jail time, beatings, and a disintegrating family life. Mulligan wears these burdens convincingly and Sarah Gavron’s direction turns the viewer’s gaze towards questions often glazed over in popular accounts of momentous historical shifts. Is keeping one’s head down an instinct to be scoffed at? How should the family be weighed against the movement? Is it ever OK to feel dirtied up and implicated by association with the right side of history?
A holiday release with more substance than style, Suffragette is one to discuss at the summer dinner table.
The Belier Family (December 26)
French feel-good The Belier Family has been screening since early November and cleaned up critically in both domestic and English-speaking markets. Director Eric Lartigau deftly balances quirk and sincerity working from a script that occasionally lurches to the wrong side of sappy (and, possibly, insult to the deaf community), but the real strength of this film is the acting.
High school underdog Paula (Louane Emera) discovers a talent and passion for singing that she struggles to square with her demanding family life. Louane’s deaf parents (a hilarious Karin Viard and Francois Damiens) and brother (Eric Elmosnino) want her on the family farm rather than on stage, especially during her father’s mayoral run. There are also plenty of the coming-of-age jokes you’d expect in a film like this: boys are impossible, teachers are weird, and little brothers are embarrassing.
What’s presented is largely well measured and executed, but The Belier Family never swims in particularly deep waters. Lartigau is shooting for the heartstrings rather than the head cogs, and from that angle The Belier Family works just fine.
The Belier Family is a safe bet for getting some happy tears from your mum before you skip out on visiting her again until her birthday in June.
Trumbo (December 26)
The drawcard of Trumbo is Bryan Cranston. The Cranston. Though many fans of Breaking Bad would be happy to watch him star in a solitary performance of Man Reads Phonebook, Trumbo is meatier material for an actor at the top of his game.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten: directors and screenwriters jailed for alleged Communist sympathies at the height of the Red Scare in 1940’s North America. Cranston’s Trumbo is obstinate in the face of professional and personal disaster in a way that warms the principled heart. Director Jay Roach (Dinner for Schmucks, The Campaign) pulls no punches in lionising the writer and his associates (Louis C.K., Alan Tudyk); indeed he may be guilty of massaging the truth with regard to the darker side of his protagonists’ politics.
Slightly comical courtroom scenes and the involvement of John Goodman lend the film something of a pantomime feel, keeping the energy up and giving Cranston some range to explore.
Historical questions aside, Cranston has plenty of screen time to scowl and grumble through a haze of cigarette smoke which, let’s be honest, is a damn treat.
BY MICHAEL BIRD
