Hello and welcome to this week’s film review wrap – the big movies landing in cinemas this week.
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FILM
Twiggy ★★★★
(M) 94 minutes
The most memorable sequence in this documentary biopic of Twiggy features a young and up-and-coming Woody Allen.
It’s 1967, he’s interviewing the 17-year-old supermodel, and in a blatant bid to parade his own intellectual credentials he asks: “Who are your favourite philosophers?”
After looking at him blankly for a moment, she replies with a question of her own: “Who are yours?”
He waffles briefly about the Germans and the Greeks, then he stops. But she persists, wanting to know which ones. At that, Woody gives up, having failed to come up with a single name.
The film’s director, Sadie Frost, has gathered a wealth of archival footage about Twiggy’s life and career, along with the reminiscences of a small army of celebrities, and nobody has a bad word to say about her. This could make for a boring hagiography but there’s something very attractive about candour, and Twiggy herself – now 76 – is still as honest as she was as a teenager with a strong vein of commonsense running through every sentence.
She has always put her early success down to happenstance and the help given by people she met along the way and it doesn’t sound like false modesty because the words are tinged with a sense of wonder.
Her rise to the top in the 1960s helped to hasten a radical change that was taking place in the fashion world in line with all the other shifts in pop culture. Joanna Lumley, who was also modelling at the time, recalls that most of her contemporaries were upper-class girls with a finishing school education. Then came Twiggy with her Cockney accent and youthful lack of inhibition and everything changed.
The photographers who made her famous were weary of static, decorous poses. They wanted action and in Twiggy they found somebody who could delight in speeding along on a pushbike or jump for joy because she felt like it.
Her short hair and lanky figure also fascinate many of her male interviewers, most of whom are just as condescending as Allen. Some want to know what her “statistics” are. Another has brought along his own tape measure. And the young Michael Parkinson asks how she can compete now that the bosom has become fashionable again.
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The condescension also spilled over into her personal life. She and her first boyfriend, Justin de Villeneuve, who became her manager, split after she tired of him sidelining her in media interviews and talks with directors.
She was 19 when she starred in her first film. She and the director, Ken Russell, who had become friends, settled on a film version of the Broadway hit The Boy Friend, and he convinced his reluctant backers to let him cast her in the lead. The fact that she couldn’t dance was a problem solved by a quick series of lessons from the great choreographer Tommy Tune, and she went on to win two Golden Globes – an achievement which doesn’t exactly bear out her claim that her successes were all down to being in the right place at the right time.
In cinemas from Thursday.
FILM
Eternity ★★
(M) 115 minutes
Picturing the afterlife in cinema is like picturing Santa’s workshop: you’re free to reinvent the details, but when it comes to the broad strokes there are some clear expectations.
David Freyne’s Eternity doesn’t go too far off script. The spirits of the departed awaken in a mid-century modern blend of train station and convention centre, surrounded by a hotel complex that evokes a cut-price version of Judgement City in Albert Brooks’ brilliant Defending Your Life.
Unlike in Brooks’ film, however, nobody is being judged. Regardless of their actions in life, everyone is given the chance to move on to whatever version of paradise they prefer – whether the traditional Christian heaven with the pearly gates, or its Jewish, Buddhist or even Satanist equivalents. Or you can just go to the mountains or the beach, or to a version of Paris specially designed for Americans, where everyone speaks English with an accent.
Each separate “eternity” resembles a fancy resort, the catch being you can’t move on to another destination once the novelty wears off. You are stuck there for the rest of time, along with everyone who made the same choice you did.
There’s more than one way to understand this scenario, but what Freyne and co-writer Pat Cunnane have in mind is a metaphor for permanent romantic commitment, dramatised through a literal romantic triangle. As in the finale of a reality TV show, the newly deceased Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) has to choose between two possible soulmates: her beloved first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died young in the Korean War, and Luke’s successor Larry (Miles Teller), who stuck by her side through the decades since.
All of this is meant to be an invitingly old-fashioned fantasy in its own right: Ruairi O’Brien’s warm, grainy 35-millimetre cinematography is a strength, as is Zazu Myers’ production design. But the script has little of the wit of Defending Your Life or the golden-age Hollywood classics Brooks was riffing on in turn (an exchange where Luke has to clarify he’s not a paedophile is a lowlight).
Nor is breezy romantic comedy this cast’s strength. Teller, effectively the protagonist, has to soften his usual neurotic edge to play an endearing grump: the film does something, but not enough, with the idea that all three characters came of age in the 1950s, and Joan and Larry are old fogies restored to youth.
Similarly, Olsen’s mix of perkiness and prissiness hints strongly at some form of repression: it’s more than possible Joan’s life on earth as a suburban librarian didn’t fulfil all her dreams, and perhaps reuniting with her long-ago sweetheart isn’t what she wants either. But again, the script declines to explore the possibilities beyond a certain point.
Turner is the amiable third banana (Luke’s running gag is that he keeps insisting he isn’t perfect but no one believes him). In support, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early have more success updating the Hollywood archetype of the officious heavenly messenger: Early in particular is a natural at this stuff, blending a camp 1940s “floorwalker” stereotype with a twist of early John Lithgow.
Still, there are many lulls, leaving room to wonder if the entire premise should be taken at face value. Could it be that obliging humans to choose one version of “happily ever after” and stick to it is a refined form of torture devised by an unusually creative demon?
If that’s what Freyne and Cunnane had in mind, they’ve kept it to themselves. But nor do they offer an especially strong counter-argument to the thesis that heterosexual monogamy is hell.
In cinemas from Thursday.
Nuremberg
★★★½
M, 148 minutes
Filmmakers take a risk when they cast a movie star as somebody famous or notorious and I had a moment of amused disbelief when Russell Crowe made his first appearance as the Nazi war criminal, Hermann Goering, in Nuremberg.
In full uniform with chest puffed out, he looked – well, like Russell in a funny getup.
But that impression fades as he sinks into the role and you become caught up in the effort to understand the nature of someone who could perpetrate such atrocities while projecting an air of affability and common sense.
The story of the Nuremberg trials was first brought to the screen in Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg and a two-part TV series came along in 2000, but this version takes a new tack. The screenplay written by the film’s director, Jack Vanderbilt, is based on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, a book by Jack El-Hai which focuses on the relationship between Goering and Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a young US army psychiatrist who is called to Nuremberg, where Goering and 21 other members of the Nazi high command are in prison. He’s assigned to analyse each of them to see if they are fit for trial but he’s also determined to find out if there is anything in their psychological profile which makes them innately evil.
Kelley wastes no time in introducing himself to Goering, whom the prosecution believes to be the key to their case. As the highest-ranking Nazi left alive, he is the one they need to crack if the whole command is to be brought down.
Kelley can see the point, but his rapport with Goering develops so fast and he’s so intrigued by him that the ethics of doctor-patient confidentiality start to conflict with the prosecution’s desire to know more about the line Goering will take in trying to defend himself. Kelley has got too close to him. While he recognises him as a power-mad narcissist and a remorseless pragmatist interested only in his own advancement, he’s disarmed by his tender regard for his family and by the undeniable fact that he finds him entertaining company.
There are plenty of dubious assumptions in this scenario but fortunately it’s not just a two-man show. Michael Shannon brings a lot of gravity and toughness to the role of the US chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, who’s struggling with a challenge that’s never been attempted before – the trial of a nation’s entire leadership.
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We also get beyond the confines of the prison to range through the bombed-out centre of the city where the specially built courtroom is rising from the rubble, and the cast is packed with big names in cameo roles as prosecutors and army officials. Up-and-coming British star Leo Woodall, recently seen in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, plays Kelley’s German-speaking interpreter, Sergeant Howie Triest, who delivers one of the film’s best scenes – a heartfelt but delicately restrained monologue in which he confides in Kelley about his family’s experiences during the Holocaust.
The film has only one flaw worth worrying about – but it’s a big one, almost derailing the whole narrative. It’s the casting of Malek. Kelley may not have been the safest – or the smartest – choice for the job he was hired to do, but Malek invests him with such naivete and so many distracting tics that he often seems twitchier than some of his more paranoid subjects.
Nuremberg is in cinemas from November 6.
Bad Shabbos
★★½
PG. 84 minutes
Family gatherings can be tough to get through at the best of times – so if it became necessary to dispose of a dead body, would that really be more of a nightmare than usual? At least everyone would be forced to focus on a shared goal.
In Daniel Robbins’ erratic but sometimes horribly funny Bad Shabbos, this emergency arises during the run-up to a ceremonial dinner at the Manhattan apartment of elderly parents Richard (David Paymer) and Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick), held on Friday night to mark the start of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. Over this period, activities such as driving are traditionally off limits, which is important to the plot, though not everyone in the family is equally observant.
While the cultural details may be specific, the characters are types familiar the world over. Richard is a well-meaning bumbler, Ellen is fiercely controlling but will do anything for her kids. Younger son Adam (Theo Taplitz) is a resentful shut-in with improbable power fantasies, which in his case involve joining the IDF.
Adam’s elder brother David (Jon Bass) is the sensible one, or thinks of himself that way, in the manner of Jason Bateman’s character in Arrested Development. But there’s only so much he can do to defuse the tension between his mother and his fiancee Meg (Meghan Leather), who’s converting to Judaism but remains clueless about her new faith, blithely referring to the Torah as a “prequel”.
Rounding out the family is middle sister Abby (Milana Vayntrub) whose obnoxious boyfriend (Ashley Zukerman) bites the dust early on – thoughtlessly leaving everybody else to clean up the mess, with Meg’s stuffy Midwestern parents (John Bedford Lloyd and Catherine Curtin) due to arrive at any moment.
It’s a tried-and-true farce set-up, allowing nearly everyone in the adept cast the chance to be funny one way or another, with Method Man unexpectedly stealing much of the second half as a smooth-talking concierge who harbours some peculiar notions about Judaism.
But the brisk pacing doesn’t wholly mask the fact that Bad Shabbos is technically one of the clumsiest films to make it to the big screen for a while, especially in the weirdly edited group scenes, which hop around between the characters while making it hard to tell when their eyelines are supposed to meet.
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Perhaps the visual chaos is meant to parallel how the situation spirals into disaster, with the family’s moral compass swinging all over the place. Or perhaps that’s giving Robbins too much credit. In truth, even the actors don’t seem sure of the intended tone: are we meant to sympathise with these people despite their foibles, or view them from afar as monstrous cartoons?
Robbins started out making horror movies before pivoting to black comedy, and he and co-writer Zack Weiner could be imagined as drawing inspiration from the adage “The family that slays together, stays together”. Still, to echo Mark Twain’s warning at the start of Huckleberry Finn, anyone attempting to find a serious moral should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Bad Shabbos is out on Thursday
Read more on The Sydney Morning Herald
