Even Keoghan can’t save this rehashed Brideshead
MATTHEW BOND
Saltburn
Cert: 16, 2hrs 7mins ★★☆☆☆
May December
Cert: 16, 1hr 57mins ★★★☆☆
The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes
Cert: 12A, 2hrs 37mins ★★★☆☆
The Mission
Cert: 12A, 1hr 43mins ★★★★★
Emerald Fennell is primarily known for two things: taking over from her friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge as showrunner on TV’s Killing Eve and promptly winning an Emmy nomination, and swiftly following that by winning an Oscar for her first feature film, Promising Young Woman. Given that the former revolved around a psychopathic female assassin and her screenplay for the latter could be summarised as ‘rape-revenge’, we can safely say that Fennell has both talent and a particularly dark imagination.
It is the latter that eventually comes to the fore in Saltburn, a film that sets off looking so like an updated version of Brideshead Revisited that it eventually has to acknowledge it itself. Oxford college setting? Check. Impossibly handsome posh boy? Check. Boy from lower class, in this case working-class Liverpool? Check. Invitation to stay at posh boy’s big house in the country? Ah yes, that’ll be Brideshe…, I mean Saltburn. Check.
‘Gosh, it sounds like something from a novel by Evelyn Waugh,’ someone eventually says, and you wonder what new insights Fennell can possibly have about Oxford, its perennial bright young things and the unbreachable class divide, particularly as her story is set about a decade-and-a-half ago – about the time she was there, of course.
Things do brighten up a little as we reach Saltburn, where handsome, rich Felix (Jacob Elordi) has invited poor, grateful Oliver (Love/ Hate and The Banshees Of Inisherin star Barry Keoghan) for the summer. Rosamund Pike, channelling her inner Joanna Lumley, is a hoot as Felix’s beautiful, former Chelsea girl mother, as is Paul Rhys playing Saltburn’s intimidating butler.
But as the mood darkens, another much-liked film – The Talented Mr Ripley – soon comes to mind. Despite Keoghan’s best endeavours, Saltburn is all style and precious little substance, a film you think you’re enjoying, until suddenly you realise you’re not. Shame.
May December is the latest picture from Todd Haynes, whose past successes include Carol and Far From Heaven and who is a film-maker with a reputation for providing great parts for women. That certainly continues here, with Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore trading nomination-grabbing scenes like they are going out of fashion.
But deep down this is the oddest film, with Portman playing Elizabeth, an actress who has come to stay with Gracie’s complicated, blended family to research her latest role.
Gracie (Moore) seems flustered by Elizabeth’s arrival at her chaotic lakeside home but is defiant too, barely batting an eyelid when her guest’s arrival coincides with a gift-wrapped box of something nasty left on her doorstep. What on earth is going on?
Well… it turns out that 20 years earlier, the already married Gracie seduced an underage schoolboy. She went to prison but, two decades on and with Gracie long released but still something of a pariah locally, the pair are still together – married in fact, with children about to head off to college. What ensues is less the moral tale we might expect, more a psychological drama as Elizabeth, clearly the sort of actor who believes in becoming the character they’re playing, delves deeper and deeper into Gracie’s complex life. It’s beautifully acted but confusing too.
If he hadn’t been played by Donald Sutherland, I’m not sure I’d even remember the duplicitous President Snow from The Hunger Games trilogy. But here he is getting his very own and very long prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, set some 60 years before Katniss Everdeen entered the arena.
For almost two hours this is solid, four-star film-making, with a dark tone, pleasing production design and charismatic performances from Tom Blyth as the teenage Snow and Rachel Zegler as singer Lucy Gray Baird, the games participant he’s supposed to be mentoring. And then it goes on… and on… and all but franchise completists will lose interest.
Five years ago, John Chau, a 26year-old missionary from America, travelled to North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal to preach the gospel to the Sentinelese, one of the world’s few remaining ‘uncontacted tribes’. As he staggered through the waves towards the beach, he was cut down by a hail of arrows. He died on the spot, his body left on the beach and never recovered.
It’s an extraordinary story and brilliantly told in The Mission, one of the best documentaries you’ll see all year.