Morrissey is a passive presence; the women push him on
This month: Moz gets the biopic treatment, plus ghost, a ghoul and a real-life romcom
ENGLANd is MiNe Early on in England Is Mine – an unauthorised biopic of Morrissey’s pre-Smiths years – the hopeful singer places an advert in his local record shop asking for potential collaborators. Among his list of ‘must like’ artists, Morrissey includes Kenneth Williams. The year is 1976, when, incidentally, Williams was starring in Carry
On Behind – a late entry in a series bent on recapturing a bygone sort of Englishness. In his own way, director and co-writer Mark Gill is trying to evoke another peculiarly English cultural landscape: that of the music scene of the industrial North-West.
We meet Steven Patrick Morrissey as a socially awkward, waspish teenager fumbling through his parents break-up, writing pithy letters to the NME and enduring futile attempts to find gainful employment. It is here that Gill’s film comes closest to
Carry On Morrissey. Working for the Inland Revenue, Morrissey finds himself surrounded by sitcom staples: the exasperated boss, the alluring secretary, the boorish co-workers. The gags are plentiful: “Do you like audit work?” “I have a long list of people I hate.”
But Morrissey is a passive presence; the women push him on. Initially, his mother; then Anji Hardy (Katherine Pearce), a lesserknown figure in the Morrissey creation myth, who encourages him to meet Billy Duffy and kickstart his musical career. When not bantering Wilde quotes with Morrissey on a cemetery bench (yes, yes), Jessica Brown Findlay’s Linder Sterling helps him embrace life and its myriad potential.
It’s a likeable enough film – well paced and warmly disposed towards its idiosyncratic subject. Findlay and Pearce are both strong actors (even if Findlay is playing a Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype); but as Morrissey, Jack Lowden is essentially called upon to do an impression, all surface tics and mannerisms, so Gill, despite his undoubted fondness for the subject, never quite shows us why Morrissey is Morrissey. Unlike recent biopics Control and Nowhere Boy, England Is Mine struggles to bring its subject clearly into focus.
A GhOst stOrY In 2013, director David Lowery made his debut feature, Ain’t Them
Bodies Saints, a Texan melodrama set in the 1970s, with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as a young couple on the run. Following his remake of Pete’s Dragon, Lowery reteams with Affleck and Mara for A Ghost Story, another lyrical piece that discretely tackles questions of a cosmic, spiritual nature played out on an intimate level.
Affleck and Mara, a couple identified only as C and M, are in the process of moving in to a new house. One night, there are odd, unexplained noises; the next morning, C is killed in a car accident. In the morgue, his body is draped in a white sheet; in one of the film’s make-or-break moments, the sheet sits up. Lowery frames C in a beautiful wide shot as he heads across a field at sunrise, a forlorn little phantom trailing the hem of his sheet, heading home. There, he silently watches over his bereaved partner (in the film’s second make-or-break moment, M sits on the kitchen floor grief-eating an entire pie in one static, five-minute take). It is the kind of film where a character might look pensively out of a window, where the only sounds are the rain falling outside and the mournful wheeze of violins on the soundtrack. It is, essentially, an arthouse take on Ghost. Affleck does an amazing job, managing to be hangdog while buried under a bedsheet for most of the film. How different would the film be if he just hung around moping, without the linen? Mara meanwhile gives a powerful turn, internalising her grief, conveying deep loss while remaining outwardly inscrutable. As time loops back on itself, Lowery reaches for something profound and moving. “We build our legacy piece by piece,” explains a cameoing Will Oldham. “And maybe the whole world will remember you, or just a couple of people. But you do what you can to ensure you’re still around after you’re gone.”
the GhOUL Director Gareth Tunley is an alumni from Ealing Live!, a character comedy lab that also hothoused Alice Lowe, Steve Oram, Simon Farnaby and Katy Brand.
The Ghoul is Tunley’s first film and stars Tom Meeten – yet another Ealing Live! veteran – as Chris, a police officer investigating an unusual murder case in which two bodies continued to move after being fatally shot in the head. Chris identifies a main suspect, who it transpires is obsessed with crime scenes, but “it means he’s a ghoul, it doesn’t mean he’s got anything to do with this.”
But what is ‘this’, exactly? A murder mystery with supernatural undertones? A psychological thriller? Or something darker – closer in spirit, perhaps, to the earlier films of The Ghoul’s producer, Ben Wheatley? Indeed, the way The Ghoul shifts from genre to genre recalls Wheatley’s earlier films, in particular Kill List, especially with talk of “magic, the occult, weird science”. Gradually, the edges of the film begin to unravel. Tunley introduces a cheerfully sinister psychotherapist, Alex Moreland (played by Geoffrey McGivern, who some may remember as the voice of Ford Prefect in the original radio series of The Hitchiker’s Guide
To The Galaxy). “You’ll find I’m quite open to woolly ideas,” he says, before referencing witch bottles, John Dee’s Enochian magic and William Blake’s Book Of Thel.
Like Wheatley, Tunley’s strength lies in his ability to summon dread in the everyday; to imply that there is something unholy lurking just beneath the surface. With his gaunt, beaten-down looks, Meeten looks very much like he is wrestling with knowledge of some darker truth. “We’re all in hell,” Chris says. “We just can’t remember how we got here.”
the BiG siCK
In June, the Pakistani-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani took to Twitter to outline his love for Richard Curtis’ film Four
Weddings And A Funeral. “I started stand-up ’cos of Hugh Grant’s best-man speech in the beginning,” he gushed. It transpires that a chance meeting with Curtis snowballed to the extent that Curtis sent Nanjiani four frames from his personal reel of Four Weddings. Such a big-hearted gesture is worthy of one of Curtis’ films; but it is also true of The Big Sick, an autobiographical meta-comedy charting Nanjiani’s courtship of his future wife, Emily V Gordon, starring Nanjiani and co-written by Nanjiani and Gordon.
“The Big Sick” is a mysterious illness that suddenly strikes Emily (played by Zoe Kazan) after she and Nanjiani have split up. Their courtship had been smooth and exciting, but Nanjiani develops commitment issues: marrying a woman of his choosing from outside his religion and community would be an unforgivable slight. “I can’t lose my family,” he tells Emily. Now she is seriously ill and Nanjiani finds himself waiting around intensive care in the company of Emily’s bemused parents, Beth (Holly Hunter) and Terry (Ray Romano).
Working with director Michael Showalter and producer Judd Apatow, Nanjiani and Gordon have crafted a deft, appealing film that addresses subjects ranging from cultural change to the unhappy lot of the Uber driver. Nanjiani is likably geekish, while Kazan is smartly understated. Hunter and Romano, meanwhile, bring dramatic heft to what could otherwise be generic supporting roles. QUest
In 2006, Jonathan Olshefski was teaching a photography class to adults in North Philadelphia when one of his students told him about a collective of local hip-hop artists clustered around a small recording studio owned by Christopher ‘Quest’ Rainey. Over the course of the next 10 years, Olshefski filmed Rainey, his family and their neighbourhood. We learn that Quest supports his studio by working odd jobs while his wife, Christine – ‘Ma Quest’ – is employed at a local homeless shelter. They live with their daughter, Patricia – ‘PJ’ – though both have older children from previous relationships. Through the Raineys perspective, Olshefski strives to illuminate the dynamics of an extended community in an American inner city. Quest is a wonderful film, deeply human and compassionate as it follows the Rainey family going about their daily business, articulating their hopes and fears to Olshefski’s ever-present camera.
But Olshefski is also not afraid to tackle bigger issues – particularly gun crime and poverty. PJ is shot in the eye by a stray bullet. It is a horrible accident that the family bears with astonishing stoicism. There are other testing times. Christine’s eldest boy, William, himself a new father, has a brain tumour, but in a moment typical of the film’s enduring optimism, he hopes that when he has recovered he will become a fireman or nurse.
For the most part, the film is content to linger on intimate passages – the tenderness of Christina braiding PJ’s hair on the stoop or later phoning William to check whether he’d voted. It is moments like these that give Quest its quiet triumph. Michael Bonner