A DICKENS OF A TIME AT THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
THE London Film Festival (LFF) has been a triumph so far, and is set to end on a high note on Sunday with a screening of Martin Scorsese’s epic Netflix production The Irishman.
But it’s Disney’s story of an Englishman that has most beguiled me at the LFF so far.
Ken Miles was an enigmatic racing driver from Sutton Coldfield, whose genius behind the wheel helped the Ford motor company beat Ferrari at their own game in the mid-Sixties.
Le Mans ’66 (more simplistically titled Ford v Ferrari in the U.S.) tells the tale of how Miles (Christian Bale, nailing a Brummie accent) did it, in cahoots with car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon).
You don’t have to be a motor-sport nut (I’m not) to be swept along by the high-octane verve and occasional comic flourishes of the story-telling (the screenplay is by British brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth). There’s a scene in which Shelby persuades the patrician Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) to go for a spin that is worth the price of admission alone. (HHHHI, release date November 15.) I had high hopes for the festival’s opening film, Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History Of David Copperfield, with Dev Patel (left) in the title role. They were largely satisfied, and I think the ghost of Charles Dickens would smile down at
Iannucci’s use of a multi-ethnic cast, which makes a very Dickensian society of rogues, vagabonds, charmers and ministering angels look pertinently modern. (HHHHI, January 10.)
The King is another, even less faithful, adaptation of great British literature, in this case William Shakespeare’s Henry plays.
Timothee Chalamet stars as the young Henry V, up to his eyes in palace intrigue on inheriting the throne, and with the wily French to deal with, too.
Perhaps director David Michod intended The King as a Brexit film? Whatever, he and co-writer Joel Edgerton play pretty fast and loose with Shakespeare’s ‘Henriad’, for instance denying us Hal’s great ‘band of brothers’ speech on the eve of Agincourt.
Moreover, Falstaff (played by Edgerton) is not presented in the usual way, as a dissolute old soak, but as a canny military strategist.
Edgerton does a fine job, though I was less convinced by Chalamet, a wonderful actor, but entirely lacking the heft that Laurence Olivier and later Kenneth Branagh brought to the role. Rather weedy and a bit flat-footed, he’s nobody’s idea, except perhaps Michod’s, of a fearsome young warrior. (HHHII, limited release today, then on Netflix.)
The Aeronauts reunites The Theory Of Everything co-stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones (above left) in the true-ish story of a record-breaking ascent by balloon in, or rather over, Victorian England.
Jones plays the flamboyant Amelia Rennes, a kind of Annie Oakley of the skies, with Redmayne as James Glaisher, a scientist who believed that weather patterns could be predicted, and whose flight revealed momentous new information about the atmosphere.
In fact, only Glaisher existed. Rennes is a fictional creation, and has, therefore, nudged out of the basket (as in an old-fashioned balloon debate) fearless real-life aeronaut (and Glaisher’s usual co-pilot) Henry Coxwell.
Still, it’s easy enough to see why the story needed sexing up a bit. It’s nicely done by director Tom Harper, with wonderful cinematography, but somehow feels more suited to a Sunday afternoon in front of the telly than a visit to the flicks. (HHHII, November 4.) I was disappointed by Greed, Michael Winterbottom’s comedy about obscenely rich, morally delinquent retail tycoon Sir Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan, left). Any resemblance to Sir Philip Green, by the way, is entirely deliberate. The film even lifts some of his lines, more or less verbatim, from his appearance in front of a parliamentary select committee. Greed has some hilarious moments, for sure, and a scenestealing performance by Shirley Henderson as ‘Greedy’ McCreadie’s Irish mum. But this is satire by blunderbuss rather than rapier. A subtler film could have been much funnier, and more devastating. (HHIII November 22.)