BEST OF THE REST
Geoffrey Macnab gives his verdict on Ken Loach's latest I, Daniel Blake, plus Queen of Katwe, Trolls, Keeping Up with the Joneses and Ouija: Origin of Evil
I, Daniel Blake
★★★☆☆
Dir: Ken Loach, 100 min, starring: Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Dylan McKiernan, Briana Shann
Ken Loach’s latest feature (unveiled in competition in Cannes) is a story of an eminently decent man being ground down by an uncaring British welfare state. Scripted by Loach’s regular collaborator Paul Laverty, it is a melodramatic and sometimes very didactic film but also an intensely moving one.
Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) is a Newcastle joiner in late middle age who has had a heart attack. Warned by the doctor that he is not yet fit to return to work, he is obliged to sign on. He is dignified, self-reliant and full of compassion for others. To have to rely on benefits is deeply humiliating to him.
Early on, the film is perceptive and funny in its account of Daniel’s quest to receive the allowance he needs to live. We’re in a Kafkaesque world in which claimants who aren’t fit to work have to spend more than 30 hours a week applying for jobs they can’t take in order to qualify for support. We see characters queuing for a small eternity to use food banks. Many of the people working in the job centre are casually cruel to applicants, seemingly oblivious to their desperation. When Daniel sees a young mother (Hayley Squires) being denied basic support for her selfand her two young kids because he is a few minutes late for her appointment, he intervenes on her behalf. This sparks an unlikely friendship between the 59-year-old Geordie and the young Londoner (who has come north in search of housing.)
The film doesn’t shirk from mawkishness. At times, with its references to prostitution, illness and homelessness, it has the air of a Victorian morality fable. Dave Johns gives a wonderful performance as Daniel, showing us the character’s humour, mischief and resilience as well his determination never to feel sorry for himself or to provoke pity in others. Loach ends the movie a little awkwardly with a set-piece speech that feels contrived. At 80, though, the director hasn’t lost his knack for telling stories about marginalised characters with wit, anger and humanity.
Queen of Katwe
★★★★☆
Dir: Mira Nair, 124 mins, starring: Lupita Nyong'o, David Oyelowo, Madina Nalwanga, Martin Kabanza
Chess is a very obvious metaphor for life in Mira Nair’s uplifting new drama. If you know how to fight and can plot several moves ahead, you can thrive whatever your background. The game can help you to find the “safe square” in which you’re out of harm’s way. It’s also a means of righting social wrongs. In chess, “the small one can become the big one.”
The “small one” here is Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga), a kid growing up with her siblings and her protective and moralistic mother (Lupita Nyong’o) in Katwe, a shanty town on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda. The father is gone and the family ekes out a living by selling maze. The children can’t even play football.
They know that if they injure themselves, there will be no money to pay the medical bills. That’s why local coach Robert (David Oyelowo) encourages them to take up chess. Phiona can’t read or write but she is a natural at the game.
This Disney-made film is based on a true story. We know from the very first moves how the game is going to end. There will be adversity and heartache along the way but the little pawn with nothing will turn into a great queen. It is a thoroughly heartwarming story in which you’re rooting so hard for the heroine that you scarcely notice how contrived some of Nair’s dramatic gambits really are.
As she has shown in many previous films, whether low-budget affairs like Monsoon Wedding or big costume dramas like her adaptation of Vanity Fair, Nair has a flair for ensemble dramas full of energy, conspiracy and comic incident. There are large dollops of sentimentality in the storytelling. Before the endgame can be reached, Phiona and her family endure many reversals. She has a beautiful older sister whose way out of poverty is to run off with a flashy man on a motorbike. (We know the affair is going to end badly.) The mother can’t pay both the rent and her injured son’s medical bills.
On trips abroad to Sudan and Moscow, Phiona has the inevitable crises of confidence. She questions her
right, as a kid from the slums, to be playing with all these affluent city slicker types, some of whom are even given stipends to support their chess careers. The film follows in a similar groove to that of Million Dollar Arm (2014), an equally upbeat and wholesome sports yarn also produced by Disney about cricketloving Indian kids trying to make the grade in US baseball.
Whatever setbacks Phiona faces at the chess board or at home, we know that not too much harm will befall her. She will always find the right move in the end. The storytelling may be schematic and predictable but that doesn’t make it any the less rousing.
Trolls
★★★☆☆
Dir: Mike Mitchell, Walt Dohrn, 92 mins, voiced by: Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Zooey Deschanel, James Corden
Made in iridescent colour, Trolls is a wondrously zany and inane animated feature. Watching it in 3D is like being submerged in candy floss. The main characters are fluffy little gonks who live in a rainbow world of singing, dancing and hugging. They are preyed on by the “Bergens”, a race of slobbering, bogeyman-like reptile misanthropes with bad teeth who think the only way they can achieve happiness, even if only briefly, is by eating Trolls. On “Trollstice”, they come hunting for their prey.
For all its hyper-cheerful humour, the film has some surprisingly macabre elements. The Bergens pursue the little Trolls with a genocidal fury. The Trolls are so distressed that some of them become incontinent (and start defecating cupcakes).
Pink-featured Princess Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick) is the most optimistic of the Trolls. Whenever she’s around, cheesy disco songs play on the soundtrack and fireworks go off. Branch (voiced by Justin Timberlake, who also oversaw the music) tries to warn her that there’s trouble ahead. He is the greyest, gloomiest character in Troll-land, never singing, never dancing, hiding out in his underground bunker and always expecting the worst.
Alongside the disco, Trolls is aimed at a very young audience but contains plenty of in-jokes and nostalgic references to keep the parents happy. Timberlake’s choice of music includes some very cheesy Simon and Garfunkel and Lionel Richie songs as well as a blast of “Total Eclipse Of The Heart”.
Trolls combines eye-opening visuals with plenty of frenetic chase sequences involving tunnels and roller skates. Alongside the story about Princess Poppy venturing to the kingdom of the Bergens to rescue her friends, the film includes a touching Cinderella-like romance about a buck-toothed scullery maid called Bridget (Zooey Deschanel) besotted with Gristle, prince of the Bergens. There are also some surprisingly grown-up meditations on life, love and the meaning of happiness which may leave the kids scratching their heads.
Keeping Up With The Joneses
★★☆☆☆
Dir: Greg Mottola, 105 mins, starring: Isla Fisher, Zach Galifianakis, Gal Gadot, Jon Hamm
Keeping Up With The Joneses is a misconceived comedy-thriller that can’t work out whether it’s spoofing spy movies or making fun of suburbia. Zach Galifianakis and Isla Fisher play Jeff and Karen Gaffney, a jaded middle-class couple whose kids are away from home. They live in a suburban cul-de-sac alongside
other equally conventional, equally jaded middle-class families.
Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot are their improbably glamorous and very worldly new neighbours, Tim and Natalie Jones. Tim claims to be a travel writer. Natalie says she works in social media. In fact, they’re both spies. They’re strangely obsessed with goings-on at MBI, the secretive company at which Jeff works as a human resources manager.
Director Greg Mottola keeps the pace brisk, combining suburban barbecues and scenes of shopping expeditions with shoot-outs, explosions and high-speed chases. Michael LeSieur’s screenplay yields a few funny one-liners. There are some good jokes about British dentistry and Galifianakis can’t stop making feeble puns which work by sheer force of attrition. The hitch is that the film is pulling in opposing directions.
On the one hand, it is trying to be a character-based comedy about two very different couples who have far more in common than they could have anticipated. On the other, Mottola wants to make an Austen Powers-like farce. The improbabilities mount and the action scenes become ever more random. Assassins on motorbikes turn up from nowhere, houses explode.
The performances are fine. Galifianakis has some funny moments as the empathetic HR guy who loves to listen to other people’s stories. Fisher shows comic flair as the bored married woman who turns out to have a natural instinct for espionage. Hamm and Gadot are playing one-dimensional characters, both of whom seem to have stumbled out of a Bond movie, but at least they do so with a certain charm. It’s the premise here which simply doesn’t hold together.
Ouija: Origin Of Evil
★★☆☆☆
Dir: Mike Flanagan, 99 mins, starring: Elizabeth Reaser, Lin Shaye, Annalise Basso
The title of Mike Flanagan’s horror film, released in good time for Halloween, is misleading. The Ouija board features prominently enough but this is a good, old-fashioned tale of a haunted house and of demonic possession at heart. Set in the late 1960s, it is stylishly shot but not quite as scary as might have been anticipated. Its trump card is the precocious child actress Lulu Wilson, who manages to look wideeyed and innocent even as she channels all the forces of darkness that the special effects department can muster.
Wilson plays Doris Zander, the youngest daughter of Alice Zander, a single mum who makes a precarious living by staging seances in her sitting room. Doris and her teenage sister Paulina hide in the wings, making noises and blowing out candles to convince Alice’s gullible, grief-stricken clients that their loved ones really are getting in touch from the other side of the grave.
When Alice buys a ouija board as a “new prop for work”, matters begin to become properly creepy. In no time at all, Doris starts rolling her eyeballs and writing long letters in Polish, dictated to her from “the other side.” Alice, meanwhile, is desperate to communicate with her late husband, who died in mysterious circumstances.
The overloaded screenplay by Flanagan and Jeff Howard throws in elements of everything from The Exorcist to The Amityville Horror. There are references to a Mengele-like “devil’s doctor” from the Nazi era who made his way to America and whose pet trick was to sew victims’ mouths shut. Skeletons are in the woodwork. Kids speak in adult voices. Kindly priests talk about getting the Vatican involved.
There are hangings, stabbings and nightmarish visions. The basement is one part of the house you most
certainly don’t want to visit. With so much going on, it is little wonder that the film seems so sprawling and unfocused. A simpler approach might have chilled our blood more effectively – but there are a few moments here that should jolt you out of your seats.
These reviews appeared in yesterday’s Independent Daily Edition