Reviews

Many on IMDb have already made the points an ordinary review would cover, so mine's going to be a bit different. Like some more publicly recognisable critics, I'm going to write about how the movie affected me on a more personal level.

This is the thing. I have clinical depression and was on anti-depressants for a long time. I gave them up when I realised the problem was that I wasn't being true to myself and letting myself be sad. For as long as I needed to be. That's an incredibly short summary of a much longer process than I can go into here.

There had been a number of severe life shocks, all unrelated to each other, that knocked me off my pedestal several times in a row in my 30s that induced a horror of sadness that took some years to lose. That's what depression is, folks, basically. Of course it's a chemical imbalance... but the cause of the chemical imbalance is not easy to polarise from its effect. It's a feedback loop, and one of the steps in the loop is refusing to accept sadness.

I resigned my job and started making little bits of income here and there with no defined career path, no state assistance but enough to live, to get by. Slowly, after lots of deliberate wallowing my capacity for Joy returned. I'm still "unemployed"... on days when I'm not gardening for money. I love it. My life is tiny and manageable. Does it bring me Joy? Well... yes. And other things, of course. But at least the console *£$%$$&!!* works now.

After giving up antidepressants I internally vocalised an observation about Sadness - "No, you idiot, sadness isn't trying to hurt you, it's trying to get you to take yourself seriously. If something's sad, it's sad! There's nothing alien or wrong with being sad..."

****MASSIVE spoilers after this sentence...****

So, I knew that Sadness would be a major feature in this movie, because I know Pixar and they are emotionally literate, developed, honest and decent. They like to make movies that mean things as well as entertain. I pretty much knew what Sadness would do in the end... not that that's any kind of boast. It wasn't particularly difficult to spot what was coming. It was obvious where the movie was going from the minute Joy stuck Sadness in that little chalk circle (Beautiful metaphor! And so simple and obvious and, uh, well, in a *kids* movie that I think people haven't yet realised what an important thing it's saying...) My having taken Riley's emotional journey myself over the two years prior to seeing this film (in my forties!!! Please, Universe, can we do something about society's engagement with male emotional development?) left me kind of insulated me from its impact (...so I told myself...), though I was nodding throughout it, very impressed, with a slightly smug sense of my own wisdom, thinking: "yup, called it... called it". I didn't cry during Riley's first day at school, though I should have done as I have school memories every bit as painful as that sequence, I didn't cry when any of the islands collapsed, or when Joy found the old memories and what happened to them, or when Bing Bong has his most important scene... I didn't even cry at the end when Riley opened up to her parents...

I didn't cry until the very end.

I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready for that little marble coming down the chute. I saw everything coming except that.

I sat, in transcendent rapture. My jaw dropped as it trundled along the rails, found it's place and ignited the next stage of Riley's life. I'm not joking, I gaped like a monkey and tears started rolling down my face as my entire soul was completely engulfed by an explosion in my chest, in exact resonance with this ridiculously simple metaphor in front of my eyes.

"YES! YES! YES!" howled all of my own little guys, punching the air, watching as a little marble, the same colouring as that last one in the movie, with a little picture inside it of me watching a movie, trundled along it's own rails inside me, rolled up to the altar and settled next to the spheres which, if you peer into them, would show my resignation, red, gold and green, the day some months afterwards when my old workplace told me I couldn't temp for them after all, gold, blue and purple, the day I finished laying my first lawn... gold and purple (what if I got it wrong and the grass died...?) So.

I could go on and talk about how lovely and sweet and kind the character of Sadness is in the movie and what a wonderful friend she is, or how loving and truthful it is to show the inner workings of a child's mind with all that spectacular candy-coloured grandeur and how adults would need that cuddly roundness every bit as much to make this movie work for them... or how one of the major themes of my depression was my disconnection from mainstream media and it's inability or unwillingness to talk to me about my journey, though fiction had been my closest companion with me in my emotional life prior to that period of emptiness, and to find a storyteller who will tell the truth means something to me that I can hardly explain to them... Unless this review is good enough.

My hard drive is stuffed with unfinished short stories, half-drawn comics, digital artworks, ideas for games, two-thirds of an illustrated children's book. "Why bother? They'll never make us rich..." says one. "Pah! So what?" says another, standing next to the new marble on the altar...

Here comes the new island...

Ahhhh, Pixar. You and your timing...

I hated it... I sighed and tutted and moved around in my seat... and then about a third of the way through it won me over. In that respect (and in many others respect) it's actually a lot like a Turner.

The initial scenes of the movie, which are very irritating to sit through, set the rest up well, lots of loud stomping on wooden floorboards, dry interiors in Turneresque palettes Timothy Spall making more grunting noises than any actor should be able to and still be taken seriously... stomp stomp stomp bang bang bang, hoarse shouting instead of dialogue, character introductions so perfunctory and stark they're almost parodic of the cinematic vernacular. The movie just screams with the kind of self-absorbed worthiness and obsession with human frailty that gives 'art films' a bad name... The wife shows up and harangues Turner at a volume that would transcend satire... there's an extended sequence during which a contemporaneous artist's career is commented on, vociferously and cruelly, by a group of critics/artists/patrons as he stomps off over the fields, this scene plays nothing like a conversation, but rather as if the script writer had typed out a series of quotes from a biography...Turner molests his housekeeper in the gruntiest, unsexiest way possible but it's SO clumsy and awkward the scene burns itself out and it just looks totally lifeless...actors expending effort poorly...

But the movie carries on like this with such gusto and wholeheartedness that it eventually became quite difficult (for me, at any rate) to remain cynical and detached. I did find myself immersed in the life of the man.

Timothy Spall's performance is completely over the top, and actually rather unpleasant to experience. Grunt, bash, bang, smash, grunt, growl, stomp, bash, grunt... it's almost a cartoon. You certainly can't come away from this movie liking the man you've just watched. He's an extremely annoying man. But as the movie progresses new flavours enter the character and it becomes clear that this movie isn't really a story at all, it really is primarily a portrait (rather as Turner's landscapes often seem more like portraits... so moody and full of consequence and meaning). Should I be disappointed at that? Perhaps I should, but I wasn't. Judging the movie on how it achieves it's intentions I should probably give it a 10... (Only I think it went on too long).

The scene that made me realise that the film-maker was fully aware of how I felt about this man I was watching came near the end when Turner's popularity is waning and he attends the Academy exhibition to be confronted with the Pre-Raphaelites. He starts sniggering. Nowhere in the movie is any attempt to explain his art or his theory of his art or the theory of any of the art contemporaneous with his and yet the scene makes perfect sense.

Very nicely done.

It is like his art. I don't like Turner, but I can't really *dismiss* Turner as I might someone more widely "respected" like Mondrian or Lichtenstien... or...(eyeroll)...Rothko.

There's a scene with an elephant. Mike Leigh spends some time on getting this scene right. I think it might mean something... Such a long time it's been since a movie made me actually *ponder* on whether or not I liked it... That's got to be worth something.