Zen behaving badly
Benedict Cumberbatch is a levitating surgeon trying to stop a Buddhist baddie ruling the world — and it’s all VERY strange
THE clue is in the title. The team behind the latest outing in what is so grandiosely known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe evidently decided that their new film, Doctor Strange by name, should be deeply strange by nature.
Of course, superhero movies are nothing without imagination but here, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing along enthusiastically in the title role (and energetically staking a lucrative claim for parts in future Avengers movies), it takes flight in downright hallucinogenic fashion.
A series of druggy-style trips are enabled by an overdose of computergenerated imagery, almost as if director Scott Derrickson was determined to use his own superpower, deploying all the CGI bells, whistles, knobs and levers at his disposal.
Behind the CGI is a straightforward story, or as straightforward as Marvel ever gets. Stephen Strange (Cumberbatch) is a brilliant but incorrigibly arrogant neurosurgeon, certain of his own godlike status in New York society. But his charmed life is ended abruptly by a near-fatal road accident, in which those precious hands are damaged, seemingly beyond repair.
After rejecting the sympathy of his colleague and sometime lover, Dr Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), Strange spends the rest of the film being rebuilt and rehabilitated, learning humility along the way.
True, he also learns how to levitate, bend time and grapple with the forces of evil, but without all that the basic narrative could be the framework for a standard hospital melodrama, along the lines of the 1991 film The Doctor, in which William Hurt played the high-handed surgeon.
Anyway, with his glittering career in pieces, Dr Strange talks to a chap whose devastating spinal injuries were miraculously cured by a guru in Nepal.
So off he heads to Kathmandu, where he finds himself ushered into the preternaturally calm presence of the Ancient One, otherwise known as the Sorcerer Supreme, otherwise known as Tilda Swinton with a shaven head.
This is where the really trippy stuff begins. The Ancient One runs a Buddhist monastery that is effectively (and a trifle derivatively) Hogwarts for grown-ups.
It is Zenwarts, if you like, where there are no invisibility cloaks or wizards’ wands, but there is a ‘cloak of levitation’ and a kind of fancy knuckleduster, imparting special gifts.
Overcoming Strange’s scepticism by pushing ‘your astral form out of your physical form’, the Ancient One sends him on the kind of nightmarish journey that would once have been powered by too much LSD. This convinces him that he is in the right hands. With the help of her disciples, Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Wong (Benedict Wong), the Ancient One turns the Strange One, now for some reason wearing a Victorian frock coat, into an expert in both martial and mystical arts.
BEST of all, he learns how to manipulate time and space by using his knuckleduster to step through what looks, with nice seasonal timing, like a fizzing Catherine wheel. The big question, as he flits in and out of these fiery portals, is whether he can now outgun another of her proteges, who has turned seriously rogue and stolen
some pages from a hallowed book in the hope of finding the secret to everlasting life. This is Kaecilius, played by Mads Mikkelson in Halloween eye make-up.
So, with Strange’s arrogance never too far from the surface, we now have a match-up, effectively Kaecilius v Supercilious, the latter supported by the Ancient One, the former by ‘the Dark Dimension’, a kind of malevolent, space-dwelling hologram who yearns for control of the entire ‘multiverse’.
With Manhattan inevitably the backdrop for their clash, Derrickson goes CGI-crazy again, folding buildings in on each other in sequences that don’t look even vaguely realistic. Digital trickery is all very well, but surely, even in the overblown superhero genre, it has to look as if it might actually be happening. Still, for all that, Doctor Strange is mostly a blast. As always, it’s fun to look out for nonagenarian Marvel Comics founder Stan Lee making his traditional Hitchcockian walkon, which here boldly underlines the druggy sub-text.
The old boy pops up as a New York commuter scoffing at the book The Doors Of Perception, in which Aldous Huxley wrote about his experiences with the hallucinogen, mescaline.
Cumberbatch gets plenty of witty lines, too, which he delivers with characteristic aplomb, although actually it is Ejiofor’s Mordo who gets to deliver the best one-liner after handing the newly arrived Strange a small scrap of parchment bearing the word ‘Shamballa’.
‘What’s this, my mantra?’ asks Strange.
‘No, it’s the wifi password,’ comes the reply. ‘We’re not savages.’
PUTTING together the funding for small, independent British films is never easy, but if a pair of releases this week are anything to go by, it’s easier when you have a Downton Abbey stalwart in a leading role.
Starfish has Joanne Froggatt (Anna the lady’s maid in Downton), while Burn Burn Burn (reviewed below) features Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith). Both are splendid.
Starfish tells the harrowing true story of Nicola and Tom Ray (Froggatt and Tom Riley), a young East Midlands couple who were pootling along quite happily in life, awaiting their second child, when suddenly he contracted sepsis, the form of blood poisoning that can lead to multiple organ failure.
Tom ended up having both lower arms and legs amputated, and with severe facial disfigurement.
The film gets its poignant title from a bedtime story Tom tells his little girl, before sepsis strikes, about a starfish that regrows its limbs. Riley is terrific in an extremely demanding role, as Tom wakes up from a coma to find that his life has changed profoundly.
And Froggatt, also the executive producer, is similarly strong as the wife who overcomes the challenges of sticking by her man and raising the funds needed to manage their new existence. Being married to poor, lugubrious Mr Bates in Downton was a breeze, by comparison.
Bill Clark’s film pulls no punches in its depiction both of sepsis and the emotional fall-out. It is gruelling to watch. But all the more important for it.