ARMED AND DANGEROUS
This tale of two gun-runners is witty, scary and, shockingly, true
Todd Phillips’s War Dogs boasts unusual subtlety of character for a film about gun-runners. The Night Manager made us imagine arms dealers as smooth sophisticates with toff pals, this shoves the image downmarket.
In a smartly written, deftly directed rendering of a true story we meet two stoned Miami dudes barely into their 20s who — thanks to a Pentagon procurement policy of letting small businesses get government contracts — win a massive, semi-covert U.S government contract to arm allies in Afghanistan.
Underbidding, tangled up with cleverer and nastier big-fry and devious Albanian tricksters, they trip over their own swaggering feet and end up in court.
Rather unexpectedly, I loved it. You learn a lot, all pretty unsavoury, about what supplies these overseas American wars, and are unwillingly drawn in to the excitement and risk of business, even while shuddering and snorting with brief surprised laughter.
david Packouz (Miles Teller) is the more innocent of the pair, a babyfaced school dropout failing to make a living by selling bulk bedsheets.
His judgment addled by strong weed and his girlfriend’s shock pregnancy, he starts working for the stocky, blue-eyed and marginally psychotic Efraim, who has moved on from the simple trade of buying seized automatic weapons from police and flogging them online to gun-nuts.
He is now bidding for the smaller but lucrative contracts off the Pentagon website to fleece the ‘free-spending, overfunded U.S. military’.
JoNAH Hill as Efraim is fantastic: a nightmare big buddy with a high giggle, travelling from youthful larky affability to dangerous crazy greed. His shoving through Amman airport with ‘I have ta go first, I’m American’ is perfect.
Teller gives us a young man who, from a naive ‘I’m against war,’ position is sucked in by money and unable — though he lets us sense some unease — to connect his murderous trade with the youthful sweetness he feels for his girl and baby.
Some jump-cuts are breathtaking: night-feed baby on shoulder, he surfs absently with his free hand to target a huge deal online: 68,500 crates, several millions, of AK bullets for Afghanistan. A suspiciously helpful chap in a Vegas casino tells them how to source them in Albania. What can possibly go wrong?
The script by Stephen Chinn and Phillips is great: deadpan, harsh lines hitting home; it has the sense to let us join the dots between the seediness of arms procurement and the nightmare destination of these cratefuls of death.
There’s a terrifying cameo from Bradley Cooper as the wilier dealer and Alin Georgiou Popa as the Albanian they forget to pay.
And as an 11-year-old Jordanian interpreter,
hustling the baffled, out-oftheir depth Americans onto a lorry ride through the Fallujah ‘triangle of death’, Mosa Omari is a star in the making.
ADOLESCENTES son misteriosos: teenagers are mysterious. so sighs the heroine’s friend in Pedro Almodovar’s new film Julieta; it’s a point we would get easily without the subtitles.
He makes it as exquisite as always to look at, with tender shots of faces, seascapes, city streets, sex, and in one case a significant omelette, whose very sizzle is a mournful sigh.
The story, a good one, is a melancholy tapestry of love, passing years, unresolved guilt, family tension and deaths.
We meet first the middle-aged Julieta (emma suarez) abruptly cancelling a plan to travel with her lover to Portugal. Her face, chic and composed at first, sags into shock on casually meeting her long-estranged daughter’s schoolfriend: as she says later, an addict’s relapse can be fatal. For she falls back into her ‘addiction’ of looking for, and lamenting the loss of her vanished daughter, Antia.
Older Julieta writes her a letter, and suddenly becomes once more her 25-year-old self, confident and bright, teaching classical literature, thrilled by sea and legends and love and heroes. Adriana Ugarte, who plays young Julieta, is an uncannily credible lookalike: a beautifully expressive hoyden. We see her blossoming young life undergo love, change, guilt, delight: there is a casual word, a suicide and a shocked, impassioned embrace with a stranger (the lovemaking is tastefully filmed reflected in the winter landscape beyond speeding train windows). Then comes a long partnership, a cherished child, and the daughter’s resentful and mysterious desertion. Never do we lose loyalty to the troubled mother, but in Almodovar’s delicate beautiful moments share her slow-burn longing and resentment, subtly interwoven with layers of guilt from elsewhere.
The strength of the storytelling is in the width of its web: we see her lover’s dead wife, Julieta’s own father’s treatment of his ailing mother, and the lover’s artist friend, who makes stark little bronzes with stylised phalluses.
There is even the Mrs Danvers-like presence of the housekeeper Marion (rossy de Palma, an unforgettably filmable face of harsh coastal granite).
Life is, for all of them, complicated: but the story’s elegant, troubled arc is clear and somehow, unquestionably beautiful.
It’s like an opal, darkly glistening with points of pain and pleasure.