BEST OF THE REST
Geoffrey Macnab checks out Steven Soderbergh’s iPhone thriller, Ava DuVernay’s Disney adventure, Liam Neeson’s turn as whistleblower, and a fashion icon under the lens
Unsane ★★★★☆
Dir. Steven Soderbergh, 98 mins, starring: Claire Foy, Juno Temple, Aimee Mullins, Amy Irving, Jay Pharoah, Joshua Leonard
Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane was shot on the iPhone 7 Plus. That may make it sound like a gimmick as much as a movie. It’s not generally a good sign when audiences and critics discuss the type of camera used rather than the film itself.
Early on, you can’t help but think that the film has been done on the cheap. This certainly isn’t a glossy, big-budget Hollywood affair. In its lesser moments, it looks like a big screen version of a FaceTime video.
Thankfully, once the story hooks you in, you quickly forget the technology behind it. This is a chilling, darkly funny and ingeniously scripted thriller in the same spirit as Sam Fuller’s classic B movie, White Corridor. It benefits from a wonderfully fiery performance from Claire Foy in a role a very long way removed from the regal trappings of The Crown.
Foy plays Sawyer Valentini, a white collar businesswoman who has taken a new job at a financial company in Pennsylvania. She is smart and self-reliant. Soderbergh quickly establishes that she is single.
She goes on dates but has anxiety issues which prevent her from establishing meaningful relationships. Only very slowly do we learn why. She has been a victim of stalking. She is alone in a strange city and never feels safe.
Soderbergh tells her story in a matter-of-fact fashion which makes it seem all the more disturbing. Sawyer books herself an appointment with a therapist at Highland Creek Behavioural Centre. She patiently explains what she is going through and admits she has very occasionally had suicidal thoughts.
The therapist asks her to sign some papers. She does so unthinkingly and, before she knows it, discovers that she has just agreed to allow herself to be committed to the asylum. The centre runs its own scam, institutionalising “sane” people for profit and keeping them locked up until their health insurance runs out.
The more Sawyer protests, the easier it is for the hospital to manipulate her and to suggest she really isn’t sane. The filmmakers deliberately confuse the audience about her state of mind. One moment, she appears rational and sympathetic – the victim of a ruthless stitch up.
The next, her behaviour is so erratic, violent and neurotic that we begin to suspect that maybe she really is crazy. She makes seemingly wild allegations that one of the hospital warders (Joshua Leonard) is the stalker who has been tormenting her for two years.
Elsewhere on the ward, the other patients are just as deranged as we might expect. Sawyer’s bed is next to that of the vengeful and extremely malicious hellcat Violet (Juno Temple), who starts threatening her the moment she arrives.
‘Unsane’ is a satire about an aspect of American healthcare that feels frighteningly real
Other inmates drool or walk around like zombies, their faculties dulled by all the medications they’re given. Sawyer’s one friend and ally is a recovering drug addict called Nate (Jay Pharoah), who tries to tell her how to play the system and get back her freedom. She is able to contact her mother Angela (Amy Irving) but the police are unsympathetic to her pleas.
Foy plays Sawyer not so much as a victim but as a warrior, determined to survive at all costs. She can be impulsive and violent but she is also resilient and cunning. The film stands as a cautionary tale about stalking. Sawyer has become so accustomed to it that she now thinks nothing of re-arranging every aspect of her life to keep away from the man terrorising her.
In one dryly humorous sequence, a private investigator type (Matt Damon in a cameo) blithely explains what she needs to do to stay safe. He essentially advises her to live like a paranoid hermit. Her light reading is a book called The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence.
Unsane is also a satire about an aspect of American healthcare that feels frighteningly real. If there are profits to be made by committing “sane” people to asylums, then institutions like Highland Creek will do
so with alacrity.
Aspects of the screenplay (by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer) are very far-fetched. In its latter scenes, Unsane veers off into serial killer territory. Soderbergh includes gruesome torture sequences and lots of unseemly goings-on in padded basements.
It is hard to believe that men and women would be put in the same wards, with no distinctions made between placid patients and the violently deranged. What Unsane does portray brilliantly is the nightmarish world in which Sawyer suddenly find herself.
The more she fights to get out of it, the deeper she sinks into it. Lazy, overweight cops are too busy flirting with the receptionists at the hospital to notice the abuses happening under their noses.
Unsane isn’t the first film to be shot on a smartphone. Sean Baker’s Tangerine, about two “trans” prostitutes in Los Angeles, was bolder in its use of colour and its aesthetic choices. This film is far harsher in the way it looks. The cinematography is functional rather than eye-catching.
It’s hard to give a stripped down, dimly lit ward in an asylum much in the way of vivid pictorial detail. What Soderbergh proves is that if the storytelling is dramatic enough, the technology fades into the background. We are far more concerned with whether Sawyer can keep ahead of her stalker than with the quality of the 4K resolution.
Like one of the heroines in Hitchcock melodramas like Notorious or Suspicion, Sawyer doesn’t know who she can trust or whether she can rely any longer on her own judgement. Foy makes us root for her, even when she is at her most paranoid.
A Wrinkle in Time
★★☆☆☆
Dir. Ava DuVernay, 110 mins, starring: Storm Reid, Levi Miller, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, Oprah Winfrey, Zach Galifianakis
Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel, A Wrinkle In Time, is regarded as an American classic. The book is far less well known internationally than in the US, one reason why Ava DuVernay’s new movie adaptation hasn’t created such fevered expectation on this side of the Atlantic.
As the advance publicity has reminded audiences, this is the first $100m (£71m) blockbuster to have been directed by an African American woman. It marks a radical change of direction for DuVernay after her rousing civil rights drama, Selma, and her Oscar-nominated documentary, 13th.
Sadly, the film turns out to be as soft-centred and treacly as any of the countless other similar fantasy adventures made by Disney over the years.
Oprah Winfrey gives a striking performance as Mrs Which, a benign sorceress whose blonde wig, silver lipstick and garish costume give her the look of a Seventies disco diva. Reese Witherspoon enjoys herself as the flame-haired and very impulsive Mrs Whatsit, and Mindy Kaling is in ingratiating form as the eccentric Mrs Who, the third of the cosmic trio.
They’re not on screen for long, though. The main character here is Meg (Storm Reid), the unhappy, bullied teenager whose astrophysicist father Dr Alex Murry (Chris Pine) disappeared in a puff of smoke four years before.
Previously a model student, Meg has become distracted and hostile. The only one who stands up for her in the school playground is her precocious six-year-old brother, Charles Murry (Deric McCabe).
With toe-curling lines like ‘I wanted to shake hands with the universe, when I should have been holding yours’, any lingering sense of mystery and magic quickly disappears
At Meg’s most miserable moments, someone is bound to be on hand to remind her “love is always there, even if you don’t feel it”. With the help of the three kindly witches, Meg sets off across galaxies and universes in search of her missing dad. Sympathetic school friend Calvin (Levi Miller) and Charles come along for the ride.
A Wrinkle In Time contains its share of half-baked quantum physics. There are continual references to hidden dimensions and “tesseracts”. The special effects when characters travel from one world to another are very nifty.
Everything will become unstable as the “oppressive rules of time and space” will stop applying. The ground will shimmer, objects will lose their edges. Meg and her friends will then be able to move to another part of the universe as easily as if they are walking through a pair of lace curtains.
Some elements here rekindle memories of the wonderful world of Oz. We don’t see any munchkins but we do encounter huge numbers of chattering, multicoloured flowers. (They are the biggest “gossips in the universe”, we are told, and “they speak in colour”.)
There’s some pantomime-style clowning from Zach Galifianakis as the “Happy Medium”, who provides guidance to the travellers. Chaos and evil are represented by the forces of “it” (voiced by David Oyelowo). The film itself is a bit “blah”.
The further reaches of the universe are depicted through Tron-like effects, with lots of computer graphics. The film is trying so hard to provide an uplifting message that dramatic tension is in very short supply.
In one disturbing scene, Meg and co land up in a nightmarish version of American suburbia where they are surrounded by sinister moms and their blank-eyed, basketball-bouncing kids. This, though, is the only moment in which there is any real sense of threat.
Too much of the dialogue sounds as if it comes from a book of motivational speeches. We know right from the outset that Meg will be able to “face the darkness” and “bring the best of herself” to the world.
When characters utter toe-curling lines like “I wanted to shake hands with the universe, when I should have been holding yours”, it is little wonder that any lingering sense of mystery and magic very quickly disappears.
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
★★★☆☆
Dir. Peter Landesman, 103 mins, starring: Liam Neeson, Diane Lane, Marton Csokas, Tony Goldwyn, Ike Barinholtz, Josh Lucas
The Watergate scandal has been covered exhaustively in books and films over the last 40 years, most notably in Alan J Pakula’s classic movie, All The President’s Men.
Peter Landesmen’s Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House at least offers a fresh perspective on a very familiar story. Events here are seen not from the point of view of journalists and politicians but of the senior FBI officer Mark Felt (Liam Neeson), who became the “Deep Throat” source
for the press.
Neeson’s character shares some traits with the action heroes he plays so often. Mark Felt has “integrity and bravery”. One of his colleagues likens him to a “golden retriever”. The key difference to Taken and The Commuter is that Neeson can’t rely on guns or on his fists to sort matters out. Instead, he turns whistleblower.
Felt, when we first encounter him here shortly before the 1973 US election, has already served 30 years in the FBI. The agency’s old boss J Edgar Hoover has recently died but Felt isn’t the type to jostle for Hoover’s job. “You’re the next in line,” a senior politician in Nixon’s White House tells him. “There is no line, Mr Mitchell,” he responds.
The FBI veteran remains a shadowy figure. His identity as Deep Throat was confirmed only in 2005, three years before his death. Landesman’s film about him works well enough as a character study.
It has an added resonance now, in a period when there is as much tension between President Trump’s White House and the FBI as ever existed between President Nixon and the agency. Where the film stutters is as a conspiracy thriller. “How high, how does it go?” the Washington Post journalists ask of the Watergate cover-ups. We already know that it goes right to the top.
Landesman shoots lots of scenes in darkened rooms where Nixon’s cronies are shown in sweaty close-ups desperately plotting to try to keep in power. He captures the corruption and paranoia that characterised the final days of the Nixon administration. This, though, is ancient history.
Neeson plays Felt in the way that Gary Cooper portrayed the marshal in High Noon. He is doggedly loyal to the agency. The central irony here is that he has to resort to subterfuge (meetings in underground car parks, rushed calls to journalists from phone boxes) to demonstrate that loyalty. He doesn’t want the agency he has worked for over the last three decades to be tarnished.
It’s not as if the agency has treated him well. As his chain-smoking, hard-drinking and very unhappy wife Audrey (Diane Lane) keeps on reminding him, “they don’t deserve us”. They’ve moved home countless times and she has sacrificed friends and opportunities in order to support Felt’s career, seemingly for little reward.
Elements here are similar to the fictional story told in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (made into a film in 2016 by Ewan McGregor). Felt is an all-American patriot whose daughter has rejected his values entirely and joined the counterculture. In the period in which the film is set, leftist group the Weather Underground is engaging in low-level “terrorism”.
Anti-Vietnam war protests are at their height. “Goddamn Russian revolution out there. Why aren’t we arresting anyone?” the White House officials complain, and don’t seem at all reassured by Felt pointing out that protesting isn’t a crime.
The film might have worked better if it had taken a more nuanced view of its own central character and concentrated as much on his flaws and contradictions as on his heroism. Felt’s FBI career ended eventually in ignominious circumstances.
The man renowned for his integrity was himself convicted of conspiracy for ordering unlawful break-ins against the Weather Underground. The film doesn’t explore this episode in any depth. Nor does it deal with Audrey’s story. (We get an intertitle on screen at the end, telling us of her physical and emotional decline, but she quietly disappears from the film.)
The suspicion remains throughout that Felt’s story is far more complicated than Landesman wants to acknowledge. He was a tragic figure as much as a heroic one.
Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
★★★★☆
Dir. Lorna Tucker, 83 mins, featuring: Vivienne Westwood, Ben Westwood, Andreas Kronthaler, Peppe Lorefice, Bella Freud, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Christina Hendricks, Pamela Anderson
Vivienne Westwood is so closely associated with Malcolm McLaren that the fact her career far outstripped his still isn’t always acknowledged.
Lorna Tucker’s thoroughgoing documentary deals with the punk years, the opening of the famous World’s End shop and the Sex Pistols, but also offers a far broader perspective on its subject. The fashion designer can be very caustic. We see her getting angry with employees who don’t match up to her very exacting standards. “I don’t like this at all … I don’t know if I want to show any of this shit,” we hear her complaining about a collection that hasn’t turned out as she hoped.
At the same time, she is perceptive, searingly honest and still has the anarchic spirit which made her reputation in the first place. Westwood is also engagingly eccentric. She sees herself as a crusading “knight” whose mission is to prevent “people from doing terrible things to each other”. She regards everything from her designing to her eco-activism as part of this ongoing quest.
The film makes it very clear how shabbily she was often treated by the establishment. We see her being openly ridiculed by the audience members on a BBC chat show hosted by Sue Lawley, who laugh at her designs.
The bigwigs of fashion are sceptical about her too. “Oh dear,” exclaims a presenter when at the British fashion awards when he realises that Westwood has won “designer of the year”.
Westwood’s husband, Andreas Kronthaler, features prominently. The Austrian-born designer is devoted to her. He’s her business manager, her sounding board and her biggest fan. He is also the one figure interviewed here who’ll tell her when she is out of order. Tucker captures some comic moments. We see Westwood introduced backstage to rapper Tinie Tempah when it is very clear she has absolutely no idea who he is.
These days, Westwood is feted. She has long since achieved national treasure status, even if she retains her subversive attitude towards officialdom. She famously turned up to accept her OBE without wearing any underwear – and posed for the pictures to prove it.
As model Kate Moss says of her in the documentary: “She’s a rebel, isn’t she … coming from Croydon, we wanted to get out and she was our queen”.