Bitter sting of betrayal
In Judas and the Black Messiah, Shaka King delivers a refreshingly intelligent dramatisation of the story of murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and FBI informant William O’neal
Judasandtheblack Messiah sees Get Out stars Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield deliver raw, brilliantly nuanced performances as, respectively, murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and William O’neal, the FBI informant who betrayed him. Using O’neal’s only television interview about this chapter in his life as a framing device, director and co-writer Shaka King drops us into Chicago’s civil rights struggle amidst the tumult of 1968 and proceeds to show how the FBI sought to neutralise the charismatic Hampton as J Edgar Hoover (an ironically cast Martin Sheen) declared the Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”.
Though the interview interludes bring us up to speed on a few key events, this is a refreshingly intelligent dramatisation of a complex political situation. That King’s film takes a clear position on the fallacious and downright illegal activities of the FBI helps, not least because it doesn’t preclude the film from trying to understand O’neal without demonising him. Indeed, Stanfield is very good at conveying both O’neal’s selfishness as he begins to enjoy the perks of his Fbi-funded position and the guilt that starts eating him up as he’s selling Hampton and the Panthers out.
If there’s a quibble, it’s that both Stanfield and Kaluuya are at least a decade older than the characters they’re playing, which robs the film of some of the tragic power of seeing such young lives shaped and destroyed by forces much bigger than they are. But as a hard-hitting and gripping political drama that speaks to the current moment, its urgency and importance is plain to see.
From its 1990 setting and opening homage to The Silence of the Lambs, the new Denzel Washington movie The Little Things feels very much like a tribute to the heyday of the serial killer thriller. Washington plays Joe Deacon, a former hotshot detective working his way to retirement as a sheriff ’s deputy. When he’s dispatched to his old precinct in LA to collect some evidence for an upcoming trial, though, he’s drawn into the hunt for a killer whose slipperiness is making Rami Malek’s zealous detective look bad. What follows is a solidly crafted, no frills procedural, with writer/director John Lee Hancock getting plenty of mileage out of both Washington and Malik’s maverick mentor/young gun dynamic and a coolly unhinged Jared Leto as a true-crime obsessive who becomes their prime suspect.
As the title of Locked Down indicates, this British-set collaboration between screenwriter Steven Knight (Locke) and director Doug Liman (Mr & Mrs Smith) is set against the backdrop of Covid restrictions. Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a separating couple forced to stay together. What follows, though, is not another Malcolm & Marie-style relationship drama, but a caper movie in which fate provides the protagonists an opportunity to break the monotony of their existence by stealing a £3 million diamond from Harrods. Though the film is far from good, Hathaway’s cabin-fever-induced irrationality is weirdly involving.
Unlike Disney’s dreary live-action update of Mulan, the studio’s latest animation epic Raya and the Last Dragon makes a virtue of its femalefronted cast of characters by using them in service of a wonderfully witty, beautifully designed, narratively immersive martial arts movie. The Last Jedi’s Kelly Marie Tran does nice work voicing the unsure-of-herself heroine as she embarks on a quest to overturn a curse that’s destroyed her homeland and turned her father to stone, but it’s Awkwafina’s turn as Raya’s shapeshifting dragon counterpart that steals the show.
Playing a drug addict has become a rite of passage for young movie stars intent on demonstrating their range. After recent efforts from Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges and Aaron
Taylor-johnson, Spider-man star Tom Holland gets all shivery and pukey in Cherry, an over-stylised melodrama that conflates the opioid crisis in America with the post-9/11 War on Terror by casting Holland as an aimless student who joins the army and returns home from Iraq to become a junkie bank-robber. Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo (Avengers: Endgame), it’s an oddly boring endeavour, interesting in intention but not execution thanks to a dully conceived protagonist whose life doesn’t really warrant a movie of such epic sweep.
Based on the Andy Mcnab bestseller, SAS: Red Notice is a laughably bad vehicle for Outlander star Sam Heughan to prove his mettle as a movie star. He plays Tom
Though Locked Down is far from good, Hathaway’s cabin-fever-induced irrationality is weirdly involving
Buckingham, a ruthless “posh boy” SAS officer on a romantic Parisian getaway with his doctor girlfriend (Hannah John-kamen). When mercenaries hijack the Eurostar they’re travelling on, he finds himself on a cut-price Die Hard/under Siege 2-style mission to derail their plans. With action scenes as inept as the plot is illogical, the film does Heughan no favours.
Kazuo Ishiguro is the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature since William Golding scooped it in 1983. The Nobel judges in their citation called him one “who in novels of great emotional force has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Whether there is indeed such an abyss and whether our sense of connection with the world is indeed illusory may be matter for argument or dismissed as merely pretentious Nobel-speak. More to the point, however, I wouldn’t describe Ishiguro’s novels as having “great emotional force.” The emotion in his fiction is rather delicate and restrained.
As for our sense of connection with the world, Klara, the narrator of his new novel, is a robot, of a variety classified as an Artificial Friend (AF). She is powered by the sun and when the novel begins she has been placed by her manager in the window of a department store in an unnamed American city. She is on show to attract a buyer. Given that Klara has evidently been programmed to have feelings and be capable of empathy, the uncomfortable shadow of the slavemarket lies over this, even though a robot, not being human, may properly be regarded as only an expensive piece of merchandise. Nevertheless Klara says, “I believe I do have feelings.”
Certainly when she is bought as an AF for a troubled girl called Josie, who has indeed aroused her interest from the first day she came windowshopping, she quickly adds affection for her to the sense of responsibility for which she is programmed, and
the developing friendship provokes the enmity of a Mrs Danvers-type housekeeper who had previously acted as Josie’s carer. Fortunately Josie’s teenage boyfriend is more welcoming to the AF, and hopes that Klara’s tender care can cure Josie of the mysterious condition that afflicts her.
The novel is an uneasy hybrid. It is partly about teenage uncertainties, anxieties and aspirations, all seen through the AF’S eye which is both sympathetic and puzzled. This, once you have accepted the device of a robot-narrator, is generally
good. Ishiguro has always written well about young people.
Yet by choosing a robot as narrator Ishiguro is also announcing that his ambition goes beyond writing the sort of domestic coming-ofage novel that Josie’s character and circumstances seem to call for.
There must also be public themes, questions for our time. Do, for instance, the rapid strides made in the development of artificial intelligence and robots call into question what it means to be human? Is there something “irreplaceable” in each of us, what
indeed we have been accustomed to call a soul? Is society falling apart? Is some variety of fascism taking root in America? All these things are discussible on the comment pages of newspapers. To be brought effectively into a novel they have to arise from the dramatic situation of the characters; and this doesn’t happen here. Perhaps the choice of a robot as a narrator who is an active character as well as an observer made this too difficult to be successfully brought off.
Ishiguro has always been a novelist and short story writer who came at things from an unusual, sometimes agreeably surprising, angle. He has always written with intelligence
He has always written with intelligence and charm. He still does
and charm. He still does. But over the years he has moved ever further from the novel of character and social observation towards writing about Big Themes: cloning, harvesting of human organs, artificial intelligence – all, as I say, matters for discussion, leader-page articles, blogs, lectures, debates.
It is ridiculous of course to ask that a novelist should retrace his steps and go back to writing the sort of things he used to write, but it is not ridiculous to regret the move away from the merely human. It is not ridiculous to find comedy disappearing from a writer’s work. There are still things to enjoy in this novel, and I guess that many of Ishiguro’s admirers will lap it up. But for me there is an emptiness here, too much also that is merely discussible.