Reviews

This movie reminded me strongly of Shakespeare's The Tempest, which I am going to see in London's West End this coming week (starring Patrick Stewart as Prospero), so that is probably one reason why. The Tempest is a romance or tragicomic fantasy set on an island ruled by a magician who used to be a duke. Its scenes are disjointed and the plot barely comprehensible, featuring the sorcerer-intellectual-ruler, a spirit he owns, an enslaved man-beast, young lovers and a bunch of shipwrecked politicians up to no good. It was Shakespeare's last play and it took a few centuries for its merits to be appreciated, but some would now say it is his best, being perhaps a satire of colonial empire. The play is Shakespeare-Prospero's ruminations on the art of fiction, showing the mechanics of theater as directing, story-telling, acting, the vanished line between imagination and reality. The web he weaves catches us all in its threads, players and audience alike.

Inland Empire is Lynch's Tempest. He is freed by a mobile digital camera and an improvised shooting script to tell his story as he likes in the medium he has mastered. He may make many more films, but I would bet that this is his masterpiece. He draws us into a primal scenario of marriage and sex, violence and death with a series of Chinese boxes leading into the timeless heart of human fear and suspense. Laura Dern provides the connecting thread as the story takes her and us through all the layers of contemporary society from the super-rich to the homeless via people living in hotel rooms, a sitcom starring rabbits in human dress, a Polish TV melodrama, a Gypsy circus, working girls who lounge, dance and sing and much much else. Part of her achievement is in playing the wide range of classes assumed by her character, each one with a different look and way of speaking. The plot starts out complicated, about an actress getting a film part and being drawn by degrees into into a macabre logic of sex and death, where linear time is erased and reality is the next shot in the movie.

The technique of this film -- the light, the movement, the music, the multitude of references, the symbolism, everything -- is peerless. The final murder scene in Psycho (on the stairs) is echoed again and again. Doors open into corridors into more doors and still rooms. It is true that Dern carries the movie with a performance that must surely get her the next Oscar. But the star is STORY whose dark heart has never been explored so deeply, except perhaps by Shakespeare in The Tempest.

I know that Dern gave Lynch the title from an LA district, but I want to believe that it refers to the exotic empire conjured up by Shakespeare, now ruled by Hollywood at home.

What a well-written and acted film! I loved the fact that is was a spoof of both road movies and the beauty contest theme. All the men suffered a disaster while on the road, while the woman and the girl just suffered and carried on. My favorite shot was when the boy was sulking and the mother then the sister came to talk to him with the bus and the other three framing the closeup on the skyline above. I particularly liked Steve Carrell, the gay suicidal brother, who appears to be a TV star with a very busy movie agenda these days. His resemblance to Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, just adds to the allure. Of course these child beauty contests are truly awful and the other contestants, with their coy mimicry of adult female sexuality, were genuinely pornographic. Olive's strip tease was not because she was just herself. It is a profound commentary on America that one is tolerated and encouraged, while the other is pilloried and banned. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his radical book on education, Emile, said that any child can be trained up to play a Mozart violin sonata on the dining table for an adult audience, if s/he does little else. The trick is to find ways of allowing children to do what they are uniquely capable of at a given age, just be being themselves. I couldn't help think of my four-year-old daughter in relation to Olive. She is so brave and yet as vulnerable as any other kid. Beautiful on the inside and on the outside, like my other, much older daughter. The strength of the script lay in its awful depiction of the nightmare of family life, with the final transcendent unity not forced at all.

I am British and I arrived in Paris to settle here the weekend that Princess Diana died. I spent my first week watching news of the aftermath in the French press and TV. So this movie, apart from anything else, showed me the events through the British media for the first time. Like everyone else, I watched the funeral on television and was riveted by Di's brother's speech which seemed then and now to be Shakespearean in its drama, summing up the tension between her and the royal family's claim on the public's loyalty. "I come to praise Diana, not to bury her..."

Peter Watson and Stephen Frears have made an excellent movie and Helen Mirren doesn't need my endorsement for her spectacular performance. (I saw Penelope Cruz in Volver not long ago and the fight for the actress's Oscar is going to be epic this year). I was struck by the wonderful pacing of the plot and would credit the music score for a good deal of that.

My emotional engagement with the movie was unusually high. I was close to tears a lot of the time, especially towards the end. This leads me to speculate about why. I think the key is something Shakespeare and Walter Scott knew well, that the audience will be on the edge of their seats when the drama concerns events in recent history they have lived through themselves. (The best movie example of this I know is Oliver Stone's Nixon.) Society is very mysterious to us and we don't normally have access to its effects on us. But when the actors are Princess Di the most famous woman in the world, Queen Elizabeth and her dysfunctional family, Tony Blair and his power crazy New Labour henchmen (a withering portrayal of press secretary, Alistair Campbell), we see society as we lived it a decade ago personified through them and it gives us a window on ourselves.

To take one scene, the Queen returns to Buckingham Palace to find crowds of people and flowers (some with very unkind messages attached). A little girl gives her some flowers of her own and a line of women curtsy in traditional deference as she walks along. I found myself snuffling at this point. Why? I am not a monarchist, far from it. I want the whole lot out. But I have absorbed so much of British society in intangible ways and that scene showed me what I must struggle against if I want to change it.

There is no question that Queen Elizabeth is immensely reinforced by this movie. She wins, in a manner of speaking. But the future of the monarchy after she goes is uncertain. It becomes clear that she personifies the refusal of the British people to come to terms with their loss of empire and indeed lost greatness. She is the hair of the dog for their long post-imperial hangover. The British people have changed in her lifetime. They are more sentimental, less stoical than before. Maybe one day soon they will wake up from the nostalgia she represents. Maybe Blair's fall from grace, foretold by the Queen at the end of this movie, will be one catalyst for that.

This is just about the most stylish film I have ever seen. It is not driven by plot or even by the action, but by a moral aesthetic. The leading character reflects the director's overall vision in microcosm. The assassin is such a beautiful man, both sensually and spiritually. He projects an amazing stillness into explosive action that he seems to orchestrate whenever he is in it, bringing the qualities of the artist as hero to a stock role. We don't need the Catholic sets to know that this man is religious. He doesn't believe in God, but he sits in the chapel for the quiet. There no doubt he reflects on his life quest, for the freedom to be both human and himself, learning to embrace universal morality (truth, love, faith and friendship), while doing his job superbly well. No wonder everyone loves him -- the singer he blinded, the cop who wants to catch him, the friend who betrayed him, John Woo who wrote and directed him, the camera of course and the rest of us who are spellbound by his charisma. Chow Yun Fat achieves here a graceful power that evokes Maggie Cheung, the compelling star of In The Mood For Love.

How could so much gratuitous violence be beautiful, even morally uplifting? I had a clue to the answer by accident. The last time I watched the video, I cut back to the main TV for the rewind and dropped into the climax of a spaghetti western with Eastwood and Van Cleef (I am not sure which one). There the villain is taken out with one bullet delivered by a sleight of hand too fast to see and with invisible, but mortal bodily effects. Woo's film has dozens of killings in it, often in substantial batches. Here most of the victims take multiple bullets with gruesome consequences and some of them carry on fighting after that. The violence is brilliantly choreographed, but it is also brutally realistic in ways that few westerns are. Our killer confronts a vicious society on its terms in a way that enhances, rather than detracts from his own humanity.

The achievement of The Killer is to reveal human possibility in the most degraded of social settings. The message is that goodness can be found in unlikely people and places. Goodness is also beautiful.

I didn't think that John le Carré's novel worked all that well. He is the best English prose stylist of our generation and the first 100 pages or so, a wicked satire of life in a British embassy which he knows intimately, were worthy of Jane Austen. I also share his detestation for Tony Blair, for the dog-like attachment to Bush's imperialism, especially the Iraq war, and for his government's sell-out to the corporations. But The Constant Gardener unraveled when the story became an African adventure burdened with a detailed exposé of the pharmaceuticals industry's crimes. Le Carré can draw on his own experience as a bureaucratic insider or latter-day critic, but he remains an English writer with very limited knowledge of African lives to support his sympathy for their plight.

I can understand why he was delighted by Fernando Meirelles' film of his novel. The Brazilian director shifted the focus of his story from the circumscribed world of English society in decline to Africa itself. This is today's Africa of city slums, AIDS and aid, luxury hotels and predatory elites. Only later are we exposed to the wide-open vistas and to Africans living on the land, where most perspectives on 'the dark continent' normally begin.

One scene near the end was particularly striking. The inhabitants of a remote settlement in the Southern Sudan are visited by a UN aid relief plane and by marauding bandits at more or less the same time. Horsemen with guns terrorize the people, torch the huts and carry off children along with stolen food supplies. The only alternative to this kind of vulnerability is the imprisoned security of one of the huge refugee camps nearby. Allowing for the fact that this episode would be more plausibly set in Darfur than in the war zone across Kenya's border, it evokes centuries of slave-hunting in Africa, but also comparisons from not so long ago elsewhere: memories of America's Wild West, the Japan of Seven Samurai and Sao Paulo raiders who once enslaved the Guarani in the director's homeland.

In contrast with the relentless pessimism of a film like Hubert Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare (2004), Meirelles's Africa is violent and violated, for sure, but its people are full of life and cultural resilience too. Brazil also has a brutal past and present, but Brazilians generate tremendous popular culture and optimism for the future. Perhaps before long Africa's cities will find ways of harnessing the vitality of their people to support more rewarding economic forms. The terms of world trade are changing and not in a direction favourable to Americans and Europeans. In the meantime we cling to the idea of a dying Africa reproduced in images like those of Sauper's nightmare.

Both the British protagonists die alone as a result of their quixotic struggle against corporate power. The uncomfortable lesson of this film is that Africans themselves will have to take on western imperialism in their own land. Their sympathizers may come from anywhere, but Meirelles's vision has an energy that Le Carré's original lacked.

I once saw a Quebecois movie made in the early 80s. It was called La Guerre du Feu (Quest for Fire). It had a similar plotting problem to this movie: how do you compress hominid evolution over thousands of years into two hours or less? A lot of my friends, who had a professional interest in the subject as anthropologists, were down on it for being inaccurate. It's alright to have fire discovered suddenly, but the nuclear family? In any case, the idea of the last as a human universal is a western myth.

I rejected their analysis on the grounds that it was unfair to judge a movie by the best current knowledge. Rather it should be judged in relation to previous examples of the genre and, in the case of Quest for Fire, that was caveman movies like One Million Years BC starring Raquel Welch. By that standard, this movie was a great leap forward – intelligent, realistic and humane, even if its anthropology was, well, dodgy. It just had a plotting problem and so does The Day After Tomorrow.

How do you represent the coming of the next ice age as a human interest drama? Well, it has to take place in a couple of days. Who cares if this is implausible? Griffith invented close-up and panorama to represent the individual in society. The panoramas in this movie are breathtaking -- it simply couldn't have been made five years ago -- and the plot has to take liberties to put people in them. It opens with a spectacular tracking shot of the melting polar icecaps and, if a piece the size of Rhode Island breaks off while we watch, it is more dramatic than implausible for some American scientists to fall down the crack. Panorama and close-up.

The human interest is vintage Hollywood kitsch, featuring the nuclear family, of course – in its broken, reunited and adolescent forms. The movie's political line is quite subversive and well-realized, with a Cheney look-alike as Vice-President and Americans streaming South across the Rio Grande for refuge in the Third World. I also liked the cod symbolism of western civilization going down the tubes while doughty survivors hid in the New York public library and burned the books to keep warm. An original Gutenberg bible was rescued by helicopter... But the harsh reality of having to forget SAT scores and explore other career possibilities in a frozen world was at least acknowledged

Another plotting problem reminded me of The Pianist. The first half of the movie is taken up with the sheer momentum and drama of the Disaster, but the second half resolves into a chase whose successful outcome is known in advance, since this is a Hollywood movie. Emmerich succeeded better than the Polanski in this respect and he has now replaced Robert Zemeckis as my favourite director. I thought this was the best disaster movie ever and a great advance on Quest for Fire as a thrilling commentary on the process of human evolution – or should that be devolution? It had integrity because it knew itself and was not ashamed.