Film Review: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

Here's who I really want to see this film: Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg. The pair should be strapped into chairs, have their eyelids locked open a la Clockwork Orange, and be made to watch it over and over again until they begin screaming, "I get it! I get it!" The former will have learned that the history of American slavery is not a suitable subject for an action-comedy wankfest, and the latter will realize that a historical film about a grave and serious subject doesn't need to be buried under a pyroclastic flow of sentimentality, melodrama, bombastic music, and overripe production design.

12 Years a Slave is a harrowing true story about Solomon Northrup, a free black man living in Saratoga, New York, in 1841 who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. Northup's story (the film is based on the book he wrote about his experiences) is filled with the historical tropes of American slavery--beatings, separation of families, sexual exploitation, rape, lynchings, and backbreaking labour. All of these crimes have been shown before in films about the pre-Civil War South, so don't be expecting to see something new on the subject of slavery. What makes this film so exceptional is its artistry.

Director Steve McQueen has made the brilliant decision to let the facts speak for themselves. The horrors of slavery are presented without undue emphasis or sentimentality. One scene early in the film shows a black mother being sold and thereby permanently separated from her two small children. It would have been easy to go the Spielberg route and turn the scene into something overblown, like an aria from a tragic opera, but McQueen lets the scene play out sans editorial comment, and it becomes all the more ghastly because it's underplayed. The director's restraint is even more evident at the end of the film when a single scene encompasses both Northrup's salvation as his white Northern friends find him and secure his release, and his parting from Patsey, a female slave who's the tormented concubine of her demented owner, played brilliantly by Michael Fassbender. Any other director would have dragged this sequence out for maximum emotional value, but McQueen positively whips through the scene and captures that bolt from the blue feeling Northup must have experienced. McQueen clearly made the decision that the facts of Northrup's enslavement needed no dressing up.

This is also a beautifully shot film. There's no sweeping camerawork, no overuse of filters to create gaudy sunrises and sunsets, there's just one beautifully composed shot after another. Like the script and the direction, the cinematography isn't trying to manipulate our emotions or hammer home plot points. And the same can be said for the music by Hans Zimmer, which sometimes has a jarring, almost science fiction-y sound to it that emphasizes Northrup's transition from freedom to slavery. The actors are all top-notch, although Brad Pitt's cameo felt more like a movie star doing a cameo than an actor tackling a role. And yet more credit for McQueen for his choice of Lupita Nyong'o as Patsey. She's beautiful, but most directors would have chosen a more conventionally attractive actor for the role, and they certainly would have played up her looks to explain why she becomes her owner's sex slave. So, needless to say, this is my choice for best film of the year, and I might have to rate it as one of the best films of the last ten years. That it should have to face off against trash like American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street for Oscars is a tragedy of another kind.

Film Review: A Dangerous Method (2011)

Keira had an allergic reaction to an ill-fitting costume

The credits say that David Cronenberg directed A Dangerous Method, but I'm pretty sure at some early stage in the production he was kidnapped by the set decorator and the head of the costume department. They allowed him to jot down brief notes on directing the actors, which they handled in his stead in a perfunctory manner, but mostly they just took the opportunity to run amok in their respective fields. Imagine David's horror when he was released from his spider hole and saw that his idea for a steamy, kinky, dramatic look at the birth of modern psychology had been turned into the cinematic equivalent of a Sacher torte: sweet, terribly attractive and full of empty calories.

I know period pieces like to wallow in historical detail, but this film takes it to the next level. Every interior is stuffed with period bric-a-bric, all of it in pristine condition and looking like everything had just been walked over from an episode of the Antiques Roadshow. The period cars and carriages are just off the showroom floor, their brass fittings gleaming like the sun. And the costumes, my dear, the costumes! The most imaginative designs! The finest materials! Perfect fits for all! Not a stain or a wrinkle or a loose thread anywhere! Even the exteriors in Zurich and Vienna are buffed up, their streets only occupied by immaculately dressed burghers and burgheresses, all of them moving slowly in the background so that their finery can be appreciated. These streets aren't sullied by horse manure, urchins, beggars, dogs, street vendors or smoky chimneys. You could eat a Sacher torte off those cobblestone streets.

Starring Jeff Goldblum as the Sacher torte

The ridiculously glossy, Vogue magazine look of A Dangerous Method stuck out for me because the story just couldn't get any traction. The problem is that trying to cram in multiple storylines about the birth of psychology, the conflict between Freud and Jung, and an affair between Jung and one his patients is simply way too much. None of the separate stories are handled well, and there's the additional problem that a film about a long-running intellectual debate is just going to be way too talky. Not to mention that trying to do a film precis of a subject as complex as the birth of psychology is just asking for trouble. I think this is what explains the Better Period Homes & Costumes approach Cronenberg took. He realized that if he was going to make audiences sit through scenes of people having calm discussions about the Ego and the Id, he'd better provide some ravishing eye candy to relieve the tedium. Unfortunately, the film's look becomes what the film's about.

The acting is very good, although Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortenson aren't required to do much more than look serious, thoughtful and concerned. Keira Knightley has to do the heavy lifting in this film, and she's very good, but her role as a woman gripped by hysteria and a sexual obsession is very shouty and showy. The woman she's playing was undoubtedly like this, but she's such a contrast to the placid performances of Fassbender and Mortenson that her scenery-chewing becomes somewhat distracting. Cronenberg may have intended to place her hysterical character in stark contrast to the academic calmness of Jung and Freud, but it ends up making us concentrate on her acting rather than her character.

A Dangerous Method isn't outrageously bad, just dry, dull, cloyingly pretty, and unimaginative. It's like an episode of Downton Abbey with an added dollop of nudity and kinky sex.

Film Review: X-Men: First Class

Here's the odd thing about superhero/CGI movies: they lack visual style and artistry. It's odd because, in theory, a director can create any kind of image he wants these days. So many of these films stuff themselves with visual effects, but almost none of them have any kind of visual artistry. Shot composition, the use of colour, lighting effects, and camera movement seem to be alien concepts in most of these films. In many ways these films are a throwback to the silent era of a Cecil B. DeMille, when the camera's only purpose was to act as a recording device for the sight of thousands of extras milling around on grandiose sets. The X-men movies and their ilk achieve a similar result; we end up seeing what the CGI boffins are capable of, but not what the D.O.P. and the director can do.

And this is at the heart of what's wrong with X-Men: First Class. The film has some energy and interest when James McAvoy (Dr. Xavier) and Michael Fassbender (Magneto) hold centre stage, but once the CGI action starts, things get very dull, and I mean visually dull. The director, Matthew Vaughan, stages the action with less flair than a Saturday morning cartoon, and the cinematography in all scenes is flat and lifeless; a sitcom can look like this, but not a film.

Other complaints: Michael Fassbender's English accent goes on hiatus at times, to be replaced by a flat American accent, and, on a few occasions, by his own Irish accent. January Jones as Emma Frost is so wooden you'd get splinters if you saw her in 3D. And, finally, the various subsidiary mutants are a pretty sorry bunch of actors with lame mutant skills to match. The worst has to be Banshee, who flies around through the power of shrieking, which, by my reckoning, would make most 14 year-old girls mutants.