The Herald - The Herald Magazine
PICK OF THIS WEEK’S FILMS
ESCAPE ROOM (15)
Director Adam Robitel and scriptwriters Bragi F Schut and Maria Melnik tap into the craze for immersive and interactive entertainment for the warped premise of a predictable horror thriller. Escape Room is engineered with many of the same parts as the Saw franchise, albeit without the relentless gore and entrails. Set in Chicago, the film throws together six hastily sketched strangers and compels them to play for their lives in a series of diabolically designed rooms where one wrong move could prove fatal. Only three characters are blessed with flimsy back stories, which tips the wink about who is likely to perish first. Playing an escape room in person is far more thrilling and intellectually stimulating than anything Robitel conjures on screen but he elicits solid performances from an ensemble cast, who are meat for the cinematic grinder.
GREEN BOOK (12A)
Inspired by a real-life friendship, Green Book is a life-affirming comedy drama which follows the tyre prints of Driving Miss Daisy to spark mutual appreciation between a chauffeur and his back-seat employer. In the case of Peter Farrelly’s charming picture, the lead characters – an Italian-American bouncer (Viggo Mortensen) and a black pianist (Mahershala Ali) – stand on opposite sides of a racial divide at a time when American motels and restaurants could segregate or exclude clientele based on the colour of their skin. The script by Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga and Brian Currie fine-tunes conflict between the two men during an eight-week pre-Christmas concert tour, which screeches from the bright lights of New York to the Mississippi Delta. Mortensen and Ali are a delightful double act and Linda Cardellini offers compelling support as the bouncer’s proud spouse, who makes her embarrassed husband promise to “write me a letter every chance you get”. Farrelly’s picture writes its own love letter to the endurance of the embattled human spirit that we savour with tears of contentment in our eyes.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD (PG)
The third time’s a bittersweet, crowd-pleasing charm for the computer-animated adventures based on the books by Cressida Cowell.
Directed at a brisk pace by Dean DeBlois, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World soars in the slipstream of earlier films, which tenderly sketched the friendship between a Viking boy called Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and a Night Fury dragon named Toothless. That unshakeable bond between man and beast is tested to (heart)breaking point in DeBlois’ script, which recycles themes of selflessness and devotion to their natural conclusion without sacrificing the tenderness, raw emotion or uproarious humour which have become the series’ trademarks. Admittedly there are scorch marks of deja vu on a plot that pits Hiccup and his Viking brethren against a sadistic villain, who has hunted Night Furies – the alphas of the dragon world – to the brink of extinction. However, if this is the final time Hiccup and co take flight, it is a sweetly satisfying and soaring swansong.
CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? (15)
Based on the book by Lee Israel, Can You ever Forgive me? is a comedy drama set in early 1990s New York about one enterprising forger (Melissa McCarthy) who dug herself out of a deep financial hole by inventing correspondence from Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker and Tennessee Williams. Director Marielle Heller’s picture dramatises the criminal enterprise with warmth and wit, based on a script co-written by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty which provides Oscar-nominated leads with a feast of glittering one-liners. McCarthy milks sympathy for her self-absorbed misanthrope, who boasts: “I can’t get caught. Fools get caught” – thereby ensuring her downfall when the FBI rumbles her scam. Richard E Grant harks back to his glory days in Withnail & I to portray a foul-mouthed gay lush, who lives from day to day on charm and street smarts, and acts as a fence for the letters. In scenes of verbal sparring, the actors light up the screen.
VICE (15)
Written and directed by Adam McKay, whose previous film The Big Short brilliantly dramatised the 2008 global financial crisis, Vice nervously prowls the corridors of power in Washington DC to satirise another true story of malicious meddling and unabashed self-interest. “Or as true as it can be given that Dick Cheney is one of the most secretive leaders in history,” quips an opening title card, which establishes the irreverent tone of a breakneck tour through chapters of recent history including the Gulf War and the 9/11
attacks. For the opening hour, Vice is a briskly paced and engrossing portrait of ambition, electrified by an Oscar-worthy performance from Christian Bale, who gained 40lb to portray Cheney. The actor completes his transformation with more than 100 pieces of prosthetic make-up to replicate the jowls, jaw line and distinctive nose of his subject, who served as vice president to George W Bush.
THE MULE (15)
Clint Eastwood refuses to follow Robert Redford’s lead and glide serenely into self-imposed retirement as he directs and stars in a gently paced thriller inspired by an outlandish true story of opportunistic criminal enterprise. Adapted for the screen with an exceedingly heavy hand by Nick Schenk, who wrote Eastwood’s 2008 drama Gran Torino, The Mule relies on its leading man to inject life into a plodding tale of fractured families and economic strife. The 88-year-old Oscar winner duly obliges, investing his politically incorrect old coot with rascally charm and old-fashioned grit, which allows a fallen family man to ferry hundreds of kilos of cocaine across Illinois without arousing the suspicions of law enforcement. Schenk’s linear script hammers home the lead character’s failings as a husband and father with the subtlety of a battering ram to a rickety wooden door, engineering pointed and frosty conversations between family members. The trickle of bad blood is neatly and conveniently staunched before the end credits roll, suggesting that crime pays to salve deep emotional wounds.
DESTROYER (15)
A tragically flawed Los Angeles police detective seeks redemption on the streets where she fell from grace in director Karyn Kusama’s gritty crime thriller. Written by Phil
Hay and Matt Manfredi, Destroyer opens on the face of a woman, bathed in morning sunlight, regaining consciousness in the front seat of her car. Heavy circles of tiredness hang under her blinking eyes, her teeth are stained, the skin of her dry lips slightly cracked in the scorching heat and tumbles of greying hair frame her haggard features. Buried beneath all that despair is Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, who delivers a fearless and uncompromising performance that elevates and illuminates Kusama’s uneven character study.
BEAUTIFUL BOY (15)
A father’s unswerving love for his drug-addicted 18-year-old son is tested to the limit in Belgian director Felix van Groeningen’s sensitively handled drama. Based on two emotionally raw memoirs – Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and Tweak by his son Nic – the handsomely crafted film is a sobering account of one family’s battle of attrition with a demon that sinks its jaws into a prodigal child and refuses to let go. There are no huge emotional crescendos in a chronologically fragmented narrative assembled by van Groeningen and co-writer Luke Davies. Instead we are silent and tearful witnesses to moments of compassion, aching regret and anguished surrender that leave us in no doubt of the devastation wrought by drugs on the user and everyone in his chaotic orbit. Beautiful Boy is anchored by commanding performances from Steve Carell as the patriarch, who staunchly refuses to admit defeat, and Timothee Chalamet as the teenager with a trembling finger on the self-destruct button.
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS (15)
Trailing in the wake of Yorgos Lanthimos’s riotous royal romp The Favourite, director Josie Rourke’s lavish drama is a restrained affair which drips copious blood on screen but has little running through its veins. Beau Willimon’s screenplay spans 26 years between the return of Mary Stuart to the Scottish motherland and her execution at Fotheringay Castle at the behest of Elizabeth I. The complicity of the English Queen is debated by historians but Rourke’s film takes its lead from John Guy’s book Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart and lingers on the image of Elizabeth adding her signature to an execution warrant in the Privy Council Chamber. A face-to-face encounter between the two women in a secluded barn festooned with lines of drying laundry is another stylish deviation from documented fact but provides this Mary Queen of Scots with a few lip-smacking minutes for formidable lead actresses Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie to spark off each other.
Mary Queen of Scots glosses over Mary’s years of incarceration in England before her beheading for dramatic expediency, concentrating on the period when the two women were pitted against one another despite their best effort to remain “sisters”.