A World of difference
A CRACKING TRUE STORY OF SEXISM, BIGOTRY AND REVOLUTION
MISBEHAVIOUR (M)
Director: Philippa Lowthorpe (Swallows & Amazons)
Starring: Keira Knightley, Jessie Buckley, Rhys Ifans, Greg Kinnear.
Rating:
Beauty queens met with an ugly protest
Misbehaviour has a cracking true story to share with us: one that took place five decades ago, but is just as relevant today.
Why the movies took so long to get around to telling it is immediately apparent. What occurred at the 1970 staging of the Miss World beauty pageant in London requires some nuanced explanation, and a lot of information to be fired at the viewer.
That is, if the movie is to be done right. And for the most part, Misbehaviour conveys the political turmoil, the sexism, the racism and the utter absurdity of the event in all its garish glory.
If you don’t know the full details of what transpired at Miss World 1970, keep it that way until you see the movie.
All you really need to know is that a prototype version of what would soon become the Women’s Liberation Movement had a certain form of protest in mind for the live global telecast of the Miss World Pageant.
The chief organisers were divorced mother and aspiring academic Sally Alexander (a fine anchoring performance by Keira Knightley) and fulltime rabblerouser Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley).
As a worldwide audience of over a billion looked on, these pioneering feminist agitators executed something that remains more audacious, daring and kind of silly than anyone would dare try today.
Among those mortally embarrassed by the stunt were the special guest star, famous comedian Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear), and notoriously sexist Miss World supremo Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans).
Though Misbehaviour is a bit slow to warm up, its heated finale proves well worth the wait.
Same goes for a superb closing credits sequence, where we get to see what became of both the protesters and the contestants in the decades that followed.
Now showing in general release
HILLBILLY ELEGY (MA15+)
Rating:
Whew. This is what can only be described as a hot mess. It feels as if as it has been made by people who assume that multiple Oscar nominations will be coming their way, simply by virtue of the socially conscious raw material they are working with. While Hillbilly Elegy will probably draw a little awards heat — there is one stunning performance on its books — there is no doubting its contents are going to leave a lot of viewers cold. The movie is adapted from the best-selling 2016 memoir by JD Vance, which told of the author’s struggle to rise above a poverty-stricken background to get into Yale Law School.
Unfortunately, a tone-deaf script offers little insight as to how the teenage JD (Owen Asztalos) was able to endure a hardscrabble upbringing without any lasting impairment. Instead, bad stuff happens on a consistent basis – usually because of his drugaddicted mother (Amy
Adams) — and the movie just glides from one unlucky break to the next.
Worth a look only for the witheringly on-point support work of Glenn Close as JD’S tough-as-teak grandma.
Selected cinemas. Screening on Netflix from tomorrow
DAVID BYRNE’S AMERICAN UTOPIA (M)
Rating:
David Byrne was front and centre for one of the greatest music concert movies of all time, 1984’s Stop Making Sense. In those days, he was the driving force behind Talking Heads. Now, Byrne works in a selfdefined space where the lines between recorded music, performance art and cultural commentary are erased, moved or blurred as he alone s sees fit. It is in this space his most recent crossmedia project ended up enjoying a short sellout run on Broadway in 2019.
Luckily, just before its close, renowned director Spike Lee (Blackkklansman) was tapped to film Byrne’s show for posterity. The end result? A brilliant music concert movie in the same exalted company as Stop Making Sense itself.
All you see is multi-tasking musician-dancers working through a repertoire of Byrne’s solo output and his time with the Heads. However, what you feel is a total sensory overload, with Lee’s cameras moving through, around and above the activity onstage with an exemplary eye for detail. Magnificent stuff.