Roads to nowhere
CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S Tenet is still selling plenty of tickets but cinema workers are desperate for a big crowd-pleaser to fill those socially-distanced multiplexes. While Sally Potter’s dementia drama The
Roads Not Taken is heartfelt, I can’t really recommend it as a post-lockdown night out.
Javier Bardem is Leo, a writer with a brain disorder. He’s confused, inarticulate and a source of constant worry for his saintly daughter Molly (Elle Fanning). But, perhaps selfishly, he has refused to move out of his Brooklyn bachelor pad or welcome in a professional carer.
Potter, whose brother suffered from early onset dementia, sets ts her film over one relentlessly y grim day that begins with h Molly arriving to take him to the dentist and the optometrist.
As she has a career-defining meeting at her sketchily-defined workplace, they need to be quick but her plan quickly unravels. Leo is too unwell. After he wets s himself, snatches a stranger’s dog and jumps out of a moving taxi she realises she was being foolishly optimistic.
Between the disasters, Potter throws us into Leo’s mind as he imagines living with his first girlfriend (Salma Hayek) in his native Mexico and lolling around the Greek island he ran to after abandoning his wife and child.
On paper, this probably looked devilishly clever, an arty way to dramatise a final surge of regret before a rational mind loses its moorings.
But the execution is dreadful, it’s never clear whether these are dreary flashbacks or glimpses of grim parallel universes.
Fanning and Bardem give their all and Laura Linney livens things in a brief appearance as Molly’s mother and Leo’s bitter ex-wife. But Leo is stubbornly unsympathetic and Potter refuses to let a chink of light into her one-note script. Leo simply needs to be in care. As that is painfully obvious in the first five minutes, the film has nowhere to go.
Gritty Kiwi drama Savage isn’t a laugh a minute either but at least it’s educational. To those of us who aren’t keen on 24 24-hour flights, New Zealan Zealand conjures up images of m misty mountains, plucky Ho Hobbits and enviably co competent politicians.
But in his debut feature, director Sam Kelly shows us the dark side of this faraway idyll with a tale inspired by the t true story of one of the ca capital’s street gangs. It opens in 1989 in the We Wellington headquarters of t the Savages, a tes testosterone-drenched hell hole where burly thugs swig beer and trade threats. With their rituals, rules and uniforms they are a bit like a giant Scout troop who have swapped Baden-powell for Mad Max.
We meet the film’s rather challenging hero as he flattens a fellow gang member’s hand with a hammer – the regulation punishment for a minor misdemeanour.
This is Damage (Jake Ryan), the feared “sergeant” of the Savages’ boss/akela figure Moses (John Tui). Perhaps because he’s the only white man in the Pacific Islanders gang he has decided to wear his loyalty on his face – the word “savages” is tattooed on his forehead and the Maori word “poneke” is splashed across his mouth and nose. Kelly then unfolds two long flashbacks to explain what led this chap to make such a florid commitment to bicultural violence.
In 1965, he is fresh-faced Danny (Olly Presling), a frightened borstal boy who is sexually abused by a teacher and taught how to fight back by his room-mate
Moses (Lotima Pome’e).
In 1972, the pair (now played by James Matamua and Haanz Fa’avae Jackson) get out and form their own gang, which leads Danny to turn against his own family.
When we return to 1989, we know there’s a sensitive soul hiding behind those dreadful tats.
It’s an engrossing build-up, but Kelly never quite lands the emotional gut punch he’s aiming for in his final round.
With rom-com The Broken Hearts Gallery we finally have a new release that wants to make us smile. Although I suspect only those too young to have heard of Sex And The City will succumb to its charms.
This is the hit 1990s sitcom retooled for “Generation Y” and shipped across the East River to a hipster enclave of Brooklyn. If that sounds like your worst nightmare, then I’m guessing I can’t tempt you with a break-up montage set to Billie Eilish’s Everything I Wanted.
Before we get to the rom we have to sit through a large helping of quirky com as we meet motor-mouthed wannabe artist Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan) and her two best friends – gay, “stay at home model” (me neither) Nadine (Phillipa Soo) and wise-cracking law student Amanda (Molly Gordon).
The trio pipe down a bit when Lucy falls for brooding Nick (Dacre Montgomery), an everyday sort of 20-something who is opening his own boutique hotel.
For the most part, it coasts along on mildly amusing dialogue and the occasional spark between its two leads.
Although, when we got to the cringeworthy finale, I was considering the legality of repurposing a face-mask into a blindfold.