film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Mark Goodyear

  • The Midnight Sky: Another Review

    The Midnight Sky: Another Review

    The Midnight Sky: Another Review – The best space films tell us more about ourselves than anything else. Space itself is too unknown, too incomprehensible to completely absorb through a screen. The worst of the genre tells us nothing, and for all it’s staggering beauty, and a handful of poignant moments, George Clooney’s “The Midnight Sky” tells us nothing, and despite a vast reach, leaves you wanting for any semblance of depth and perhaps just a dash more hope. 

    The year is 2049, Augustine (Clooney) is the last man left behind on Earth’s final outpost in the Arctic, three weeks after “The Event” saw the beginning of our planet’s demise. He elects to remain in his isolation due to his terminal cancer, which he regularly treats through dialysis as he goes about his remaining duties. Those being contacting any remaining NASA agents still in space searching for humanities next bastion, of which there is only one team, the crew of spacecraft Aether. Led by their captain Adewole (David Oyelowo), Aether’s mission was to survey a potential new home for humanity, specifically, a moon of Jupiter known as K-23. Cutting to them we greet Sully (Felicity Jones), Maya (Tiffany Boone), Mitchell (Kyle Chandler) and Sanchez (Demián Bichir) and, buoyed by their discovery that K-23 is a perfect match for life, we find them in mostly good spirits. There is one problem though; they have had no contact with Earth, no contact from anyone anywhere, leaving them utterly ignorant of their home’s decay. 

    Augustine’s goal becomes clear, warn Aether not to return to keep the flickering candle lit on the human race’s existence. Yet he finds his own hiccup in the form of Iris (Caoilinn Springall), a young girl seemingly left behind in the evacuation of his outpost. Making matters worse his satellite isn’t powerful enough to contact Aether, leaving him no choice other than to pack up the medical technology he needs, and head to a distant weather station with a more powerful satellite alongside the continually mute Iris. 

    So it’s safe to say the stakes are pretty high, and as the tension builds, we periodically go back in time to a much younger Augustine falling in and out of love. He becomes so obsessed with charting space he forgets actually to live his life and ends up alone. Now the hardened scientist has to protect the young girl against the fiercest of snowy conditions as the crew on Aether battle space doing all it can to destroy their ship. All in all, it sounds like a perfectly mixed concoction, and in some ways it is, and yet the more you drink it in, the more you realise how much everything is lacking. 

    What is possibly the film’s largest issue is that throughout it’s hard to feel for the crew as individuals, despite Clooney’s efforts to amass empathy, we don’t get to spend enough time with them. Yes, there are brief and touching moments between the peripheral characters (Maya, Sanchez and Mitchell). However, they are so fleeting that when the complications begin to grow, and their situation becomes dire, you still struggle to care. It’s not just the sensation that they are strangers either; their fate is also just too predictable. The little trauma they go through amounts to an overlong music-driven repair sequence entirely off-tone with the rest of the film. Eventually, they do take us through one of the few genuinely moving moments, but everything remains, if you’ll pardon the pun, weightless. Not once do they generate any glimpse of thrill, their plight is to be the last form of life in the galaxy, but the film doesn’t let them know it until its ready to take us to the ending. 

    And here is precisely where everything goes amiss. The film isn’t about the crew of Aether, it’s about Augustine and Iris risking it all to save them, and Clooney tries his darndest to make this enough. In front of and behind the camera, he delivers some excellent work, the visuals stun, and his performance is one of his best in years, but the story and the pacing let him down. For all the grit and drive the dying Augustine offers, he only catalyses the moment you realise Midnight Sky’s lack of scope. Here a whole planet is dying, the only human’s left to carry the torch are returning to it, and Augustine is the only one who can save them. To me, this speaks to the grand theme of how one man can chart the destiny of forces far beyond his existence, but that’s not where we go. Instead, we get Augustine’s story and how he wasted his life and how it’s sad that he did. On top of this, life doesn’t seem to have any hope. There’s a small emotional payoff at the end and nothing grander bar a tragic realisation that all of humanity will perish. 

    The Midnight Sky’s reach far exceeds its grasp, and despite powerful work from Clooney, feels as hollow as the grand themes of space travel could ever feel. – The Midnight Sky: Another Review

  • The Dry: The BRWC Review

    The Dry: The BRWC Review

    Australian cinema is oftentimes its own worst enemy, and it comes down to a multitude of reasons as to why. Primarily Australian cinemas biggest sin is that the largest and most prominent domestic films are shameless tourist advertisements like “Palm Beach” and “Top End Wedding”. Any and all films Screen Australia have produced in this vein have been heavily flawed and barely worthwhile. However, in-between our homegrown misfires, lie a collection of rare gems that prove Australia to be home to stories the rest of the world could never tell. Films like “Picnic at Hanging Rock” or “Lion”, even “The Castle”, these films capture our culture as it is to us, not how Screen Australia would like it presented to tourists. Robert Connelly newest feature “The Dry” is one such gem which displays our culture with pitch-perfect, often unsettling, realism. 

    Based on the New York Times bestselling novel by Jane Harper, The Dry is an unnerving thriller set firmly in the Victorian outback in the fictional town of Kiewarra. There we join Aaron Falk (Eric Bana and Joe Klocek) a federal police officer who was raised there now returning twenty years after his dramatic departure. Unfortunately, it’s tragedy which beckons him home. He arrives to join residents at the funeral of his childhood best friend, Luke (portrayed as a teen by Sam Corlett), and his wife and son, both of whom Luke is accused of murdering before committing suicide. Aaron, plagued by memories of his youth telling of when another one of his three closest friends, Ellie (BeBe Bettencourt), his teenage love, was found dead in a river, must now try to find the truth in a town hiding more than anyone could bear to find out. 

    The dilemma for Aaron quickly becomes clear, he is desperate to prove that his closest friend isn’t a killer, but the weight upon his shoulders becomes much more amplified than that. Luke and Aaron shared a secret, one pertaining to Ellie’s death twenty years earlier. And soon those hidden truths twist themselves into doubt, if Luke could be involved back then, what’s stopping him from being so twisted now. Stuck in an almost literal melting pot during bush fire season Aaron must then convince the town and himself that Kiewarra’s latest horror is not as it seems. 

    This all plays out in the vast and spectacular environment of regional Victoria, which through the lens of Stefan Duscio becomes utterly sublime. The landscapes of The Dry are its greatest asset. It grounds all the high drama in an area so wrought by destructive natural forces that the tragic losses of life are almost just another element of the curse that seems to plague the town. Aaron does plenty of soul-searching in the wilderness, trying to piece together how someone as charming and beautiful as Ellie could die when they seemed so ready to be together, and aching to know if the secret he keeps could solve the mystery.

    Ultimately the harsh environment moulds his visage, he’s hard and stoic, often visibly keeping his emotions withdrawn, leaving only a bleakness. Here is where Connelly weaves his most potent moments, cutting between the adult Aaron grasping for any answers and the teen Aaron hooked on life and enjoying it to the fullest with his three friends unknowingly on the brink of catastrophe. 

    Of course, that means one childhood friend remains, her name is Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly and Claude Scott-Mitchell), and in the years following Ellie’s death she dated Luke on and off before he met his wife and she fell pregnant to another man no longer around. In the present, she represents a living ghost to Aaron, someone he desperately wants to hold onto but can never manage to grasp; a forgotten memory. O’Reilly develops this into a refined and nuanced performance, one that keeps the film flowing across its perhaps very slightly overlong runtime of just under 2 hours. Alongside hers, Bana’s is an interesting performance. It’s never easy to capture a character who wraps everything up inside.

    So rarely does Aaron emote that his one burst of anger at the lack of water running from his shower comes as quite a shock. However, I do think there is one scene Bana ties all his work together. There’s a moment where Aaron has nothing left to do but to soak in a particular revelation, and the sheer weight of it is masterfully captured in his eyes as he gazes out to the natural wonder that surrounds him in his isolation. He is left only with his memories, and instead of running from them or breaking down, he simply sits and breaths and stares into the infinite. It may not be the flashiest performance, but during this moment, it is a powerful one.

    The Dry is a film that perfectly encapsulates what gritty Australian storytelling should be, bound to nature and wrapped in secrecy, and thanks to an abundance of each, it’s well on its way to becoming an Aussie classic.  

  • Mank: The BRWC Review

    Mank: The BRWC Review

    There’s a universe out there where the name Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) means very little to anyone, and we were dangerously close to living in it. Had Mank himself not come forth and demanded Orson Wells give him credit for his own work then his name would be only an unread footnote in the expanse of film history. Instead, Mank did confront the wunderkind, and now David Fincher tells his story, a story which mixes the alcohol-induced creation of Citizen Kane with the life lived that drove the man to write the classic tale.

    This film is a complex mind map approach to capturing the life of a genius and Mank the man is witty, endearing, and undeniably talented. Mank, the film, on the other hand, is almost a war. A war both within the title character and amongst the forces surrounding him. Primarily Mank is a studio hack, bound to MGM by contract and expected to do everything Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) asks of him.

    Yet concurrently, he is a budding socialist witnessing a time where the United States, and Hollywood in particular, was in desperate need of some fairness. This comes to a head when it becomes clear MGM will be the cause of the Democrat’s undoing by releasing propaganda starring paid actors, all by command of the infamous William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance).

    Most of the film revolves around these two in one way or another, often indirectly, but consistently. Mank is almost the justification for lampooning Hearst with Citizen Kane. Their relationship plays as an analysis from every angle throughout, from its unassuming beginning to a drunken rage that sees their relationship finally sour. However, as mentioned it isn’t Hearst who takes centre stage, it is his long-time mistress, and friend of Herman Mankiewicz, Marion Davies.

    Played by Amanda Seyfried with enchanting poise, Davies is utterly swoon-worthy as she flutters her charms and matches wits with Mank. Ultimately, she becomes a tragic character, an unfair victim of Mank’s scorn for Hearst, but her friendship and kindness glow. And whilst Fincher continues the line that Davies is not depicted in Citizen Kane, as many believe she is, he nonetheless offers her a glorious revival and catharsis in this film.

    All of the above is shown to us in flashbacks removing us from the room in which an injured Mank wrote his magnum opus. Unable to walk and needing an in-house nurse and an assistant to type up his diction Herman, restricted from his vice, is given 60 days to provide Wells with a script. He spends most of this time befriending Rita Alexander (lily Collins, his assistant) and Frieda (Monika Gossmann, his nurse) as they slowly but surely become gateways to reveal a truly tender and loveable man who rises above his alcoholism as best he can, only truly needing it to write. Of course, this is a deeply romanticised view of Mank’s drinking, even for a clearly very high-functioning alcoholic it cannot have been this pretty.

    In fact, according to the film, the hiccups in his life don’t even come from alcohol, bar a particularly dramatic stoush with Hearst, which results in him winning an Oscar in the long run. Strangely it is mostly good moments that are marked with alcohol, like his entire relationship with Davies and his ability to finish the script by the deadline, it makes for an odd sensation when the closing text reads that his alcoholism was the death of him.

    Regardless Fincher has created something exceptional with his efforts here, and while it won’t be for all tastes, it will be delightful for lovers of cinema, thanks to an abundance of references that with soar over the heads of the general audience. Oldman’s performance alone is worth the price of admission and will see him firmly in contention at the academy awards. Together they have worked to resurrect a long-since-forgotten name, and I think they have done so better than anyone else could.

    Mank is a tribute to a man history almost forgot. For all its many wonders, its true gift is allowing people to know that while a genius did direct Citizen Kane, it’s a completely different one who wrote it.

    Mank
    Mank
  • On The Rocks: The BRWC Review

    On The Rocks: The BRWC Review

    The sins of the father so often become the sins of the son, it’s a tale that has graced the silver screen countless times, from The Godfather to The Place Beyond the Pines. Yet, something very similar to this premise is rarely touched upon; the sins of the father becoming sins of the daughter. Sofia Coppola’s latest work “On the Rocks” is a quirky, often charmingly hilarious, look at how fathers influence their daughters, and how it can be so hard, yet so essential, to let go. 

    Laura (Rashida Jones), is a published author working on her next book, which she’s already sold to her publishers. She’s married to Dean (Marlon Wayans), the father of her two daughters. Dean is the head of a nondescript start-up which is beginning to boom frequently taking him out of town with his attractive co-worker Fiona (Jessica Henwick), which serves to build tension in his marriage when Laura finds Fiona’s toiletry bag in Dean’s luggage. Suspicious and confused, Laura makes like Alice and tumbles swiftly down the rabbit hole of spying on her husband, all with the help of her sly and charismatic father Felix (Bill Murray).

    From the instant they take the screen together Jones and Murray have a connection, like in another life they shared some kind of benevolently tortured parental relationship. It all comes from this sort of resigned acceptance that Laura has for her father’s behaviour. He hits on every woman we come across, from a waitress to his granddaughter’s ballet teacher, and it is all entirely respectful, but still not something you would generally do in front of your daughter, from whose mother you’ve split. Yet Laura always greets Felix with a constant love, something like a, “I know you shouldn’t do that, but I know that’s who you are”, kind of love, borne from superficial apathy perhaps. Thematically this boils and evolves throughout the film, but early on it becomes very clear that these two are very close despite their tumultuous past. 

    It is this connection that throws Laura into a crisis of consciousness, seeing her torn between her husband and her father as the choice of the prominent male figure in her life. Possibly through a sense of betrayal or to make up for lost time with her father, who was not there for large parts of her youth, Laura begins to follow Dean around New York. Felix starts the process on behalf of his daughter and, whilst she resists, she’s always a little too eager to find the spoils of his efforts. Laura comes to realise her participation in this unwitting game of tug-of-war and ultimately confronts her father in what is a genuinely moving moment and then before you know it the film is done. 

    So fleeting and straightforward is On the Rocks that it almost goes without saying that this is Coppola’s most digestible film, and yet, it is still so far above the calibre of many other directors. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Coppola was showing off how easily she can create a touching, hilarious and cathartic tale all within 96 minutes without a single dull moment. To top it all off, her talent for making every shot as evocative as possible remains almost unmatched as well, with nearly every frame being a poem on paternity and doubt. The brief moments of self-reflection in the chaotic life of a mother become moving pieces of art taken from the simple act of walking along a gorgeous New York street.

    Every film of Coppola’s plays in such a fashion, but the joy of this one is that you can take everything in upon one viewing and be overrun by its beauty without having to take time to contemplate its meaning. In saying this I don’t mean to insinuate I don’t adore spending time thinking about the wonders of Lost in Translation or the puzzles of The Virgin Suicides, but I do adore enjoying art for art’s sake and On the Rocks delivers that in spades. 

    On the Rocks is a wonderfully approachable film that arouses hearty laughter while garnering moving insight into the relationship between a daughter and her father.

  • Rebecca: The BRWC Review

    Rebecca: The BRWC Review

    Directors can be quite stubborn sometimes, often to a fault. Many of them who endeavour into the realms of remakes renounce the term. They’ll say “I am not remaking that film, I’m re-adapting the book on which that film was based” as if that somehow makes the two resulting films impossible and unfair to compare. The Coen Brothers did this with True Grit, but of course, their efforts were far greater than that of Henry Hathaway’s some 40 years earlier, and as such, it is a rousing success story. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca was the only film directed by the maestro to win best picture; in many ways, it is his greatest gift to cinema. Now somehow someway Netflix have deemed it not worthy of standing alone because once again Daphne Du Maurier’s novel is being adapted by Ben Wheatley. 

    Starring Lily James and Armie Hammer in the roles once occupied by Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, Rebecca is the story of Maxim de Winter (Hammer) and his two wives. The first, the now deceased, Rebecca, a supposedly perfect woman in every fashion, whom one character describes as, in so many words, someone annoyingly impossible to dislike. And the second, known only as Mrs. de Winter (James), the woman Maxim remarries after a not so discrete love affair in Monte Carlo. 

    It is said love affair which takes up the opening portion of the film, and whilst it is well filmed it is triflingly strange. What is supposed to be the glossy romance preceding the oncoming melodrama plays out oddly Woody Allen-like. Not in his sort of pretentious intellectual romance style, but more in the way of presentation. The beachy colour pallet, the sudden and un-foreshadowed rain, the twinkling guitar fluttering in and out of certain scenes, which flies a little too far from the music of the second half of the film. It all feels dreadfully modern, and very much like something from, say, Midnight in Paris, a wonderful picture in its own right, but not a product of the same thematic intensity of Rebecca. 

    Though when life threatens to tear the duo apart, the film must shift to continue on its way. With no family to talk her out of it, and nothing and no one as enticing to follow, the nameless young woman is soon the ‘new’ Mrs de Winter. She travels with her husband to his estate, Manderley, a beautiful house on a charming piece of land along the English coast. Here she meets many people, mostly Maxim’s staff, and naught but one of them is of real importance that being the cold and mysterious Mrs Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas).

    It is under her eerily constant gaze that Mrs. de Winter attempts to make Manderley her home, a task much easier said than done. Around every corner, almost literally, lies a reminder of Rebecca. Rooms are barred off as the mythical woman simply once used them, handkerchiefs with her embroidery are given exclusively to the new mistress of the house, and the personal artifacts that made up her existence litter seemingly every cupboard and draw. And whilst I understand this is the exact point of Rebecca, to generate this ghastly ghostly presence of a woman existing beyond the grave haunting her replacement, it all becomes a bit much. There’s only so many times you can take a bludgeoning over the head with how great this woman was while already knowing the inevitable twist. I’d say even for those of whom this is their first tussle with Rebecca’s mysteries it’s overly repetitive. At one point a hallucinatory sequence dissolves into complete self-parody when all the guests of the house begin to dance around Mrs. de Winter chanting “Rebecca” over and over. 

    The film follows as unevenly as its first half and ultimately just begs the question of, why? When the original was of such grand quality, why make this film? I may be called too harsh for asking this question, but when the product is so haphazard, I can think of no other avenue to approach this discussion. Where Hitchcock was inclined to thrill Wheatly is all too willing to brood and stylise and it simply doesn’t work, neither in comparison nor generally. 

    Though its very existence is baffling, there are some positives to this Netflix effort. First and foremost is the cinematography and production design overseen by Laurie Rose and Sarah Greenwood, respectively. Their efforts are undoubtedly overdone at points, but overall they combine to produce some wonderful shots that prove to be the only true and memorable highlights. Kristin Scott Thomas is too an exception to my scorn, she stuns at times and is the only performer of the main three who keeps up with the material, and she does so with a wretched poise borne from the dread-inducing capabilities of her character. James and Hammer are admirable throughout, but neither managed to strike me as Fontaine and Olivier did. I don’t think they were miscast; I just think they suffered from an unfortunate style over substance approach, and perhaps they would have found themselves more at home in roles such as these later in their careers. 

    All in all, Rebecca never justifies its existence. The effort is admirable at points, but for the most part, this is an uneven attempt at adapting something that was already so brilliantly done.