Fifty Dead Men Walking (UK/Canada 2008)

This co-production has a Canadian director, Kari Skogland. It deals with what the British quaintly call ‘The Troubles’, the British occupation of northern Ireland. Unfortunately, distance does not lend detachment, and the film recycles the stereotypes of earlier British films that purport to deal with the conflict.

The film’s story is ‘inspired’ by a recounting by a republican informant (Martin McGartland) for the northern Ireland Special Branch. The ‘inspired’ indicates that the film deals fairly freely with the events recounted in the book. Certainly the film has a number of serious factual errors. Most bizarre, an end title claims that the British Army has now left northern Ireland. The director cum scriptwriter clearly has not been watching the news recently.

The film is engaging, mainly due to fine performances by Jim Sturgess as the informant Martin McGartland and Ben Kingsley as Fergus, his intelligence handler. However the style of the film rather gets in the way of their characters. The film opens in Canada in 1999 as McGartland is shot by a masked assassin, [this actually occurred in the UK]. There follows an extended flashback of his earlier activities. By the end of the film we discover that he actually survived the shooting. I was puzzled as to what an audience was meant to draw from the flashback structure. It does help provide a noir feel, but does not add to character or development. There seems contemporary tendency to use flashbacks without necessarily adding to the story experience. There are also frequent passages of rapid editing, presumably designed to give the feel of a thriller. However, much of the film is closer to a noir story and the changes give a discordant feel. This is accentuated by an amount of over-the-top music tracks.

But the serious problems with the film are political, or to be exact the absence of politics. Unfortunately this is the norm for this subject. Typically there is hardly any engagement with the actual political relations of the conflict. And the characterisation offers over familiar stereotypes. Martin and Fergus are fairly sympathetic, but this is mainly due to the negativity of the characters that surround them. Fergus’s Special Branch and British Intelligence are presented as manipulative and more concerned with intelligence turf wars than the enemy. But that is fairly positive compared with the republican characters, who are violent and tend to the psychotic. Martin’s IRA friend, Sean (Kevin Zegers), reminded me of Cal’s friend Crilly (Stevan Rimkus) in the earlier film (1984), both treating the violence as ‘fun’. The IRA organiser, Mickey Adams (Tom Collins), is reminiscent of Skeffington (John Kavanagh) the IRA leader in the same film. John Hill’s analysis of that and other films set in Northern Ireland (Cinema and Ireland, Routledge, 1987 Images of Violence) is applicable to this film. Hill comments on the sexuality and repression in the earlier films. In Fifty Dead Men Walking we also have a female IRA intelligence officer, Grace (Rose McGowan), who seems pre-occupied with both ‘guns and cocks’. Revealingly she is listed fifth among the cast, ahead of performers who appear more often on screen. This character is reminiscent of the psychotic Jude  [Miranda Richardson) in The Crying Game (1992). In what I take to be a sub-Freudian twist Martin plants her with an unloaded gun and she is seized by the British intelligence.

The film recycles noir style and northern Ireland stereotypes with depressing familiarity. I found it did not really maintain a strong interest, what kept me watching was checking out how it recycles the old and now tired representations.

Manufactured Landscapes (Canada, 2006)

Manufacturing people

This visually astonishing film starts with a Godardian 8-minute tracking shot of a factory at work. Unfortunately that’s as close as the film gets to politics as photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose work is the focus of the film, takes the naïve liberal position of letting people decide for themselves. The decision they need to make is whether global capitalism is a good thing as Burtynsky’s images show the immense scale of manufacturing in China; as well as the minutiae of checking whether the ‘squirter’ works in a steam iron. If Burtynsky stays neutral the images of dehumanisation and exploitation leave no doubt as to the destruction, to the planet and souls, wrought by our consumer society.

So the film’s message is clear why criticise the photographer whose images are truly stunning? Well his occasional voice over is a limp soundtrack that suggests that we need not worry too much about what we’re seeing. It’s as if all he cares about is the opportunity for a good photograph; we do see him choreographing hundreds of Chinese workers.

The film also mixes in the ‘self-reflexive’ documentary mode that sit uneasily in the film as most of it’s a montage of images and image-making. It feels as if director Baichwal is padding an already short film.

I shouldn’t be so irritated as this is a fine film conveying the idiocy of consumerism in staggering and surreal beauty.

Battle in Seattle (US/Canada/Germany 2007)

Here is something unusual – an American independent (albeit a co-production) with a political narrative and some frontline stars, shot in a convincing docudrama style. Catching the film on release in France, I was able to enjoy it without any of the hoop-la (good or bad) that might usually surround it. Not yet released in any of the three producing countries, it will be intriguing to see if it makes any impression in the hands of small distributors. It doesn’t yet have a UK distributor listed, but I would hope that it finds one.

The title refers to the street battles between protestors and the police at the World Trade Organisation conference in Seattle in 1999. What was planned as a carefully orchestrated peaceful protest eventually became a running battle and the film suggests that the reasons for this are varied with blame cast in several directions.

As a piece of entertainment, the film works well and I was swept along by the action, never bored and generally wiling to ignore some of the more clunky lines of dialogue and predictable scenes. As a piece of ‘political cinema’, I’m not sure what to think. The film opens with a set of titles which economically set out the issues related to the WTO in 1999 and at the end a similar set tell us what has happened since. In between, the film tries to balance its presentation of political arguments with the (outlines of) personal stories from both sides of the barricades. As an audience member more or less completely behind the politics of the film, I might want to argue with how they are handled, but for a general audience, I can see the film as both accessible in presenting important issues and potentially irritating to more conservative audiences.

The most intriguing aspect of the film is that it is the product of a first time writer-director, the Irish actor Stuart Townsend. My only previous glimpse of the actor was as a particularly cold-hearted character in Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland (UK 1999), but IMDB tells me that Townsend has appeared in a number of Hollywood films and TV series (as well as some UK independent work that I have seen, but not remembered). More importantly, perhaps, Townsend is the partner of Hollywood star Charlize Theron and this presumably helped him both work with producers to raise the reported $8 miilion budget and to augment his own contacts book. The cast includes Woody Harrelson as a cop (married to Theron as an upmarket sales assistant), Ray Liotta as Seattle’s Mayor and Martin Henderson and Michelle Rodriguez as activists. These performers offer the film the opportunity to appeal widely, but arguably the most important production decision was the choice of Barry Ackroyd as cinematographer. Ackroyd created something of a splash in America with his work on Paul Greengrass’s United 93, but in the UK his reputation has been built up through consistent work with Ken Loach over many years. If you want someone to shoot a political demonstration in an observational but ‘involved’ style, Ackroyd is the best there is and for me this would be one of the main reasons for seeing the film. (Townsend would have met Ackroyd on the shoot of Carin Adler’s Under the Skin in 1996, if not before.) The film was shot mainly across Puget Sound in Vancouver, standing in for Seattle, in November/December 2006.

The limited number of reviews from festivals (beginning with Toronto in 2007) tend to say the same things. Stuart Townsend had mentioned Haskell Wexler’s classic 1969 film, Medium Cool (based on a journalist’s experience of the ‘battle’ at the Democratic Convention in 1968) as his touchstone and critics have generally praised the production for approaching Wexler’s achievement and even to some extent the Paul Greengrass Bloody Sunday. They have been less kind to the ‘personal stories’ and in retrospect, Townsend might have felt that he tried too hard to be ‘even-handed’ in his choice of stories. Most discussion will be around the Harrelson/Theron story. I would lose this and beef up some of the others which have insufficient time to develop, but I can also see that for some audiences, this particular ‘personal story’ might be a way in to the overall narrative.

I do hope the film gets a wide release in as many countries as possible as it explores a truly global issue that should be of interest to all. It is not untypical of a first time production, having a real passion which makes up for weaknesses in the script. There are some interviews with Townsend, Rodriguez and also André Benjamin (a very enjoyable performance) on the Moving Pictures Magazine website. The film also has its own website with photos, cast etc. as well as the beginnings of a campaign (demand to see the film in your city).

Helpless, helpless: Away From Her

“There is a town in North Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.”

k.d. lang sings Neil Young’s words for ‘Helpless’ at the end of Sarah Polley’s wonderful film Away From Her (a recording taken from her album of Canadian songs entitled ‘Hymns of the 49th Parallel’). Young’s words are powerfully suggestive of the emotions in the film and the cover of k.d. lang’s album could be a still from the film.

I was certainly helpless from about twenty minutes in when I began to weep (possibly as the strains to ‘Harvest Moon’ started on the soundtrack) and couldn’t stop throughout the rest of the film. I had approached the screening with much trepidation. Like most people my age I’ve had some experience of Alzheimer’s disease in the family and the prospect of Julie Christie gradually deteriorating was worrying to say the least. But what I watched was a sensitive and moving story of a marriage which was not sentimental or romantic, but nevertheless optimistic.

On reflection, this is a film in which a quartet (or possibly a quintet) of women effectively help a man to come to terms with being parted from his partner of 44 years (i.e. being ‘away from her’). Some of the women help with compassion, the care home manager is coldly (and irritatingly) efficient, another woman is ‘plain talking’. The chief nurse is the compassionate one – but is also to the point in her criticism of him. And at the centre is Fiona (Julie Christie) devastatingly beautiful and knowing, even as her hold on memory unravels. The man, Grant (a great performance of bewilderment by the veteran Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent), worries that she may be putting on an act — and perhaps she is because she does manage to get him to question what he has done during the marriage.

I’ve read some interesting reviews, including one on the Village Voice website by Ella Taylor. I haven’t see too many comments about the style of the film, except to suggest that it is ‘conservative’. I think it is probably a good idea for a first time director to be cautious in presenting a story, so that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The overwhelming sense is of whiteness, blankness and cold, which seems appropriate. The only visual flourish I remember is the series of cross-fades which removes the visiting relatives from the dining tables in the care home — an appropriate and effective device.

I don’t think I’ve read any of Alice Munro’s short stories (this film is adapted from ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’), but this reminds me of other Canadian women writers. There is something of Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood in it — and also something older and more Nordic (perhaps it’s the landscape). Fiona is supposed to be from Icelandic stock and Grant reads to her from Auden and Louis MacNeice’s book ‘Letters from Iceland’. Trying to research those Canadian stories I’ve read (and regrettably forgotten) I came across Marjorie Anderson, an academic and author whose bio explains that she is of Icelandic fisher stock from a community on Lake Winnipeg — a background which is presumably common in Manitoba and Ontario. There is something about the landscape of Ontario , the Protestantism, the Northern European culture, that creates a tone that you just don’t find in American movies. It’s evident in this film (in the landscape seen through the car windows and in the “brand spanking new” facility that is Meadowdale (or similarly horrible name for a care home)). I’m nudged to think of Cronenberg films like Crash, eXistenZ and A History of Violence (filmed in Canada). Anglophone Canadian Cinema is usually ‘weird’ — but in a good way! This film is simply very good. I must watch more Canadian movies and I’ll certainly be looking out for Sarah Polley, who sounds rather like Jodie Foster in beginning as a child star and making it to respected indy star and now acclaimed director at 27.

(The film was actually shot in Paris and Kitchener in Southern Ontario. My research turned up a literary genre which was new to me — ‘Southern Ontario Gothic’. This includes Munro and Atwood and also my favourite, Robertson Davies. It includes the elements I listed above and tends towards themes of moral hypocrisy according to Wikipedia. Isn’t the internet wonderful? But why isn’t anyone making movies based on Robertson Davies? I guess they would just be too ‘weird’.)