Author: BRWC

By Fergus Henderson. When we first meet recently divorced Dave Hopper (Stephen Shane Martin), a psychology lecturer at a Christian college, he is a void of passion and energy. He is practically begging for something to kick-start the journey of self-reflection he seems, silently, to need.

Soon enough he is challenged by one of his students, Nate, who asks him why God hates gay people. Dave responds that homosexuality is a choice, and the wrong one at that, but he doesn’t seem too convinced, and tosses it out with the upward inflection of someone asserting something they have barely even thought about. This question, “the issue of your generation” as Dave sees it, forms the crux of dramedy At The End Of The Day, writer/director Kevin O’Brien’s debut feature length film.

Dave’s appropriately villainous boss, dean Gordon Woodman (Tom Nowicki) seems to sense this inciting incident, and sends him to an LGBTQI support group which intends to bid on property that Woodman has plans for. They hope to use it to as a homeless shelter for LGBTQI kids. Woodman simply wants to expand his religious franchise.

Dave is tasked with infiltrating and sabotaging their fund raising, lying about being gay in order to win the group’s trust. Eventually he will have his heart and mind changed by the ideas he must consider, and the sheer force of love and goodwill he finds in this previously alien community. This goodness, he will come to realise, is conspicuously lacking in his own community. How long will he be able to keep up his charade?

O’Brien has crafted a film which probes the hypocrisies and double standards of the church, one which interrogates the real world outcomes of its judgements on the LGBTQI community. It is a calm film, which floats through its run time on a narrative thread that, whilst dramatic, is never played for melodrama.

It is thanks in part to O’Brien’s script that the film never becomes overtly preachy, but is rather gently insistent on what it is saying, gathering cumulative force by slowly upping the ante as it progresses. The more we learn about the characters, the more the emotional stakes increase. Characters that appear first at the periphery slowly make their way into the story’s centre, their stories and experiences adding weight as they emerge.

This gentle quality is perhaps due to writer O’Brien’s own conservative Christian upbringing. The film seems to address people on that side of the political fence, in a refreshingly understated way. It assumes an intelligence and sensitivity in this more conservative audience, and if one doubts its genuine empathy at the offset, by the end we are sure that it has been made by someone who has become fully aware of what it is to be compassionate.

There are still a few moments in which this background hampers the script, certain scenes feeling very much like they are written in order to explain gayness to an unfamiliar audience. Luckily it largely avoids the stereotyping one might fear.

There is a tangible earnestness to how the film makes its case. In one of its most transparent moments it collects a group of people from the LGBTQI community and presents them as talking heads addressing the camera with tales of cruelty from their religious families. O’Brien seems to be addressing similarly conservative people with the fervour of someone who has finally seen the truth, asking them if they can see it too.

It is certainly a noble film with an undeniably righteous message of inclusion and acceptance, but is not a perfectly made film. In the macro it finds a compelling central tension, develops at a fast and entertaining pace, and lands at a happy resolution. Where it falls down is in its tone.

On a scene to scene basis there are broad comedic strokes that do not land. On the surface the film knows which beats to hit, and then curiously does not hit them, leaving moments of dead air. It makes jokes about how scarves are ‘gay’ and features a set piece involving an erotic car wash. The humour is relatively lightweight throughout, never veering too close to satire (lest it become a more polemical film?)

It is much more compelling, and the actors seem more comfortable, when it is solely dramatic. At times it occupies a liminal space with scenes transitioning from drama to comedy somewhat awkwardly, the film and cast appearing eager to return once more to the drama.

Similarly the cinematography, largely workmanlike and understated, finds itself a little lost in these moments, and even with the soundtrack hitting the prerequisite emotional notes you still feel momentarily adrift, waiting for the film to find its footing again.

At The End Of The Day is at its strongest when it is unabashedly serious. It features a lively and realistic ensemble cast who are devoted to the plot and to their characters and who have an easy, believable chemistry. Stand outs include Danielle Sagona as Alyssa, the head of the group who harbours painful secrets, and Chris Cavalier as troubled student Nate. Both actors shoulder the film’s weightiest moments. Tom Nowicki plays his thankless role as villain Woodward with cackling zest.

Most interesting of all is lead actor Stephen Shane Martin, who is somehow both deflated and confident, nonchalant yet deeply invested in his own spiritual awakening. When he does speak he is deeply unsure of himself and what he thinks. Martin is necessarily quiet so that he can be taught

He is really a proxy for the audience that At The End Of The Day will speak to most, those that might need to be reminded of the importance of love and understanding, and of questioning their beliefs if they stand in love’s way. Technical and tonal issues aside, this is a positive film, with a message that deserves to be heard by its audience. It will make its own small change, for the better.

By Fergus Henderson. “Love has limits” proclaims Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz). “It should not” replies Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman). This playful aside, early on in Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film The Favourite, sets the tone for the rest of its crazed, raging runtime.

Anne and Sarah are secret lovers, encroached upon by Sarah’s fallen cousin Abigail (Emma Stone), their affair set against the lonely echoing halls of a never-ending royal palace. Queen Anne, nominally presiding over England at the beginning of the 18^th century, is lost to the world, motivated only be the intimacy and guidance of Sarah. After taking in Abigail, estranged now from her abusive family, their love will be tested, and its limits found.

Meanwhile, the war with France seethes invisibly in the background, relayed to a bewildered, emotionally untethered Anne by a series of made up fops who exist as comedic oddities on the film’s fringes. Anne herself is beset by gout, wheeled about in an hilariously decorated wheelchair, clearly emotionally decimated by the loss of her many children. We find her, as established by Coleman, at a point of profound emotional alienation and having ceded all power to Sarah who, early on in the film, accidentally introduces herself as the queen to a parliamentary group.

Anne’s desperate state only increases as a love triangle quickly arises, spiralling into power plays and plotting. This, along with the trials of saving face before her court whilst advising it on a war she barely comprehends, pushes her further inward and into suicidal depression. Despite how the enfolding love triangle between them all appears to give Anne some long lost power, it can only last so long, for Abigail has her own motivations. 

Director Lanthimos keeps the film’s atmosphere elevated to an ambiently hysterical pitch at all times, aided by cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s swooping camera and ghoulishly distortive wide angled lenses, enveloping us in this isolated world of Stuart era royalty. He delights, somewhat cruelly, in the utter strangeness of his subject matter. 

One need only look at his past films to see how all-encompassing his preoccupation with the unpredictable, volatile nature of our internal lives is. His filmography seems, up till now, to have charted a course straight into the scariest parts of this alienated humanity – from the unknowable freaks and fantasists of 2005’s Kinetta (a film I could only recommend to completists) through to 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which pitted an unstoppable Greek myth against the immoveable object of a doctor’s will to have his way.

There is something a little different going on here. The Favourite marks a distinct left-turn.

Gone, largely, are the arch and insular performances of his earlier films, replaced now by the awe-inspiring emotional acrobatics of its three leads, all of whom out-manoeuver a script that could have stiffened and anaesthetised them (as has been the case with previous Lanthimos stars.) Make no mistake, of course, tonally this film knows what it is: the verbal sabre rattling one might expect of such a period piece abounds, and the inherently funny spectacle of self-important people in silly outfits remains a constant. Likewise it takes a dim view on our pretensions to authority and hierarchy. 

Now, however, Lanthimos contends with the weighty power of Olivia Colman, who provides us with a forceful, embattled performance for the ages. She is simply out of control in this film, hobbling, lunging, falling, vomiting, screaming. She is sometimes still, rendered inert by her psychic pain and the indignity of being wheelchair bound. She is sometimes salacious and soliciting, pitting Sarah and Abigail against each other with wounded glee. At times she is petulant and childlike, lost amongst the rabbits she keeps as surrogates for her seventeen dead children. 

Weisz and Stone are impressively strong and vengeful, respectively, but this is Coleman’s film, and she is stunning.

Whereas with his previous films Lanthimos seemed to wallow in the cynical, indulging an almost nihilistic view of human behaviour, using his absurdism to hold you at arm’s length, here he seems incapable of preventing his leads from bringing humanity to the film. Their very presence in a shot enlivens it. One suspects that this is the point of the film: these societally repressed women possess a boundless power and interiority the likes of which is never even guessed at by the preening, posturing men who strut ineffectually around the plot’s periphery. They simply have to live in their own, necessarily secret world. 

Perhaps this is why, with women at the centre of his film for the first time, The Favourite pulses with an energy that far surpasses his previous work. 

As with his other films, the cinematography seems focused on making people look small and odd, capturing them in long takes from a distance and forcing us to see their activities as something alien and furtive. It can only be down to the sheer liveliness of the film’s energy that this tactic never becomes clinical or cruel. We are now privy to anachronistically contemporary dance sequences, slow motion duck races, tense mud-bath showdowns, scenes of long-shot visual comedy indebted to director Jacques Tati. There is even a character listed in the credits as ‘Nude Pomegranate Tory.’ 

The Favourite, lit with natural light, is a sensuous thing to behold, somewhere between the baroque compositions of Barry Lyndon and the raw power of a Pasolini film. It is simply much more vital, and much less punishing, than anything he has done before. This is finally a Yorgos Lanthimos film with nothing withheld, one whose absurdism seems generous and egalitarian. One you can really enjoy.

There remains plenty of darkness to be seen and felt. You will still leave with the distinct feeling that Lanthimos finds torment in the callousness and excess of the world. You will feel thoroughly odd throughout. The audience I was in was tangibly disturbed by the searching, hallucinatory note that the film ends on. But you will also finally get the sense that Lanthimos, like someone awakening from a nightmare, is starting to see the light.