Last night I dreamt we went back to Cornwall...
(wish we hadn’t bothered)
REBECCA
(12A, 122 mins)
Director: Ben Wheatley
Stars: Lily James, Armie Hammer, Kristin Scott Thomas
In cinemas now, Netflix on Wednesday
(NR, 81 mins)
Director: Garrett Bradley On Amazon Prime now
(12A, 102 mins) Director: Nathan Grossman In cinemas now
AFTER swallowing up 20th Century Fox, Disney has hammered another nail into the once vibrant art form of film by announcing it is to o concentrate on “streaming”. ng” Thankfully, it looks like streaming platform Netflix is making some tentative steps in the opposite direction.
After the excellent courtroom drama The Trial Of The Chicago 7, it’s giving Rebecca a run in UK cinemas.
Sadly, this is the latest film from Ben Wheatley, a British director who in recent years has been far more popular with the folk who dole out the lottery funds than the paying public.
Over the past decade, ball watchers and ticket scratchers have splurged on the pretentious A Field In England, the plotless High-rise and the shameless Tarantino rip-off Free Fire.
For Netflix, he’s moved to the pointless – an instantly forgettable adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel.
Wheatley wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted this to be very different to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Oscar-winner. He has stripped out all the chills to create a cosy costume drama that would slip right into a slot on late afternoon ITV3.
Set in the mid-1930s, this accidentally topical yarn sees Lily James’s young innocent catch the eye of a posh celebrity (Armie Hammer) with a complicated personal life.
The curiously-accented Maxim de Winter (Hammer) is a fabulously wealthy English aristocrat who refuses to talk about the death of his wife Rebecca a year earlier.
After falling for each other in Monte Carlo, James becomes the new Mrs de Winter and is whisked off to his ancestral pile in Cornwall.
Sadly, the house is haunted by the memory of the dead wife and by its creepy housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas) who keeps floating into doorways as if she is on casters.
Wheatley plays the mystery straight, downplaying the gothic subtext of both the novel and Hitchcock’s classic.
To the jury at the Sundance Film Festival, the documentary Time is another monochrome masterpiece. Here director Garret Bradley splices together new footage with grainy home movies to create an impressionistic account of the life of self-styled African-american “abolitionist” Sibil Fox Richardson.
When Bradley met her in 2016, Sibil had spent nearly 20 years fighting to reduce her husband Rob’s 60-year jail sentence for his role in a botched armed robbery they both took part in. Across an artfully scrambled timeline, we see her badger officials and speechify at meetings in the exalted tones of a preacher.
We get a sense of the time but, for this ex-news reporter, we don’t see nearly enough of the crime. It seems Barrett’s artistic vision left no room for heists or the voices of victims.
But by reading local news reports on my phone as I watched, I found Sibil a far more challenging heroine.
After their first business failed (a hip-hop clothes shop), the Richardsons were broke with four mouths to feed.
With their quasi-religious belief in the American Dream shattered, they decided to knock off a local bank. Sibil was the driver and Rob was the gunman.
After the robbery went wrong, a pregnant Sibil cut a deal that saw her serve just three and a half years. But her clearly guilty husband took his chances in court and was sent down for the maximum sentence.
Uninvited visits to two jurors the night before the trial can’t have gone down well with the judge but Sibil believes a white offender wouldn’t have been given such a draconian sentence.
The stats back her up, but I would have appreciated the opportunity to make up my own mind.
ECO-WARRIOR Greta Thunberg, below, has never flinched from speaking truth to the powerful. Sadly, Swedish documentary maker Nathan Grossman doesn’t share that conviction in the timid I Am Greta. Grossman caught this story early, filming the then 15-year-old in 2018 when she was a lone protester sitting outside the Swedish parliament. While his camera catches her dizzying rise to the head of a global movement, it always keeps a tactful distance from his subject.
I understand his reticence. For much of his film, Thunberg was a vulnerable child, but by adopting an observational stance as he follows her around the world, it feels a little short on revelations.