From the Archives: The Hoax

Another dive into the pre-Talking Movies archives finds Richard Gere ghostwriting Howard Hughes’ autobiography, but as he’s actually faking it all dealing with his publishers and Hughes’ lawyers is going to require a lot more ingenuity than his usual plotlines.

“The book of the century!” is what Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) promises his publishers after they reject the manuscript of his latest novel. Sure enough once he’s had time to construct an outrageous lie, he delivers the sensational goods in the shape of the authorised memoirs of Howard Hughes, as ghosted by Irving…

Set in 1971 this comedy-drama sees Clifford and friend and fellow writer Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina) keep on digging ever deeper holes for themselves as they try to write the explosive memoirs of a man they’ve never met while simultaneously fabricating evidence that Hughes really has been spilling his life story to them to convince the lawyers to hand over outrageous amounts of money to them. This film should have been a hilarious 90 minute comedy. Its best moments belong to the hi-jinks of that grifter sub-genre, as Gere and Molina steal files from the airforce and illegally photo Senate testimony to nail Hughes’ speech patterns and business tactics. Director Lasse Hallstrom though, for some reason best known to himself, decides to attempt dark and dramatic. Gere becomes increasingly paranoid and delusional as he immerses himself in the character of Howard Hughes to write the ‘memoir’.

And that is where the wheels fall off the wagon. Lasse Hallstrom is almost the text-book example of a talented European director who goes to Hollywood and settles into a career of unremitting mediocrity. Following on from such fare as The Cider House Rules and Chocolat Hallstrom once again produces a film that is offensive by dint of its sheer blandness. There’s nothing wincingly wrong with this film, it just screams of a lost opportunity, it could have been so much better. It’s at least half an hour too long and becomes increasingly uncertain as to whether there’s meant to be any laughs at all. Richard Gere is, you guessed it, bland…as is the usually reliable Alfred Molina. Julie Delpy is incredibly irritating in a ‘sexy’ cameo as Gere’s mistress while Marcia Gay Harden’s role as his wife is weakly written and her wavering accent (I think it’s meant to be Swedish but it keeps hitting British) only adds to the sense of drift of the film. Down the credits Eli Wallach is criminally wasted, his great talent thrown away on just one scene, but at least the godlike Stanley Tucci gets to have some fun playing the arrogant chairman of McGraw-Hill publishers.

Scorsese at his worst is better than Hallstrom being bland, and the shadow of The Aviator hangs heavy over this film. Hoax seems to assume we know nothing about Howard Hughes but we’ve seen Leonardo DiCaprio (however hamfistedly) portray his descent into reclusive paranoia. Hughes, by being humanised, has become tragic. The fate of the cardboard characters in this film aren’t tragic at all, it is only the comic machinations that hold the attention, and once they’re ditched so is our interest.

2/5

Safe Haven

Lasse Hallstrom directs his second Nicholas Sparks adaptation after Dear John, but this film about a fugitive  combines some thriller action with its soppy romance.

The movie opens dramatically with blood-soaked Katie (Julianne Hough) running  from a stabbed body to a neighbour for help. Some quick dyeing of hair and  changing of clothes and she’s on a bus out of town, despite the frantic attempts  of cop Tierney (David Lyons) to find her at the terminal. At a brief stop in  small town coastal North Carolina Katie decides to ditch the bus and take a job  as a waitress at a seaside restaurant. The presence of hunky widower Alex (Josh  Duhamel) in the general store being a major factor in her thinking, not that  she’ll admit that without some prodding from helpful neighbour Jo (Cobie  Smulders). But even as Katie bonds with Alex’s children Lexie (Mimi Kirkland)  and Josh (Noah Lomax), and embarks on a relationship with Alex, dogged detective  Tierney is on her trail…

Another year, another awful Lasse  Hallstrom movie to review; although in this case I suspect he may have had  considerable help from Nicholas Sparks. I excoriated Hallstrom’s disastrous  adaptation of Salmon Fishing in the  Yemen but this underwhelming flick offends less because nobody’s ever  accused Sparks of writing wonderfully. Hallstrom traffics in sentimentality;  and, this somehow being my first Sparks adaptation, that seems to fit well with  what I assume here is Sparks’ approach to romance – which is distinctly Mills & Boon in its major set-pieces. Except that this plot, as Hallstrom has  boasted, incorporates a strong thriller element into the usual sappiness. I’m  not sure that’s something to boast about as this feels like uncannily like Tess  Gerritsen’s novel Girl Missing, her  final entry in that horrible sub-genre of suspense romance, where each intrudes  on the other’s turf irritatingly.

Hallstrom pulls out all the stops visually for the climactic 4^th  of July showdown, with fireworks in foreground and background, and some  efficient suspense. Footloose star Hough  on auto-cute makes less of an impression though than Smulders, despite having  acres more screentime as the heroine. Duhamel is a reliably endearing presence,  but he can’t carry a romance solo, while Lyons’ performance as the pursuing cop  decays throughout the film from subtle obsessiveness to pantomime villainy. Red  West as Uncle Roger essays some nice comic gruffness, but one-note  characterisation is far too prevalent, and is incredibly grating in the case of  Kirkland (adorable kid) and Lomax (sullen kid). Indeed the shallowness of the  writing is such that it allows an infuriatingly connived third-act reveal,  infuriating because it relies on one particular shallow characterisation without  realising that hiding it behind shallow characterisation all around hurts the  film.

Safe Haven is a competently made  film, that has some amusing moments and a memorable ending, but it’s impossible  to say that it’s good.

2/5

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Paul Torday’s acclaimed comic novel is brought to life by a top British cast, but screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and director Lasse Hallstrom sabotage the comedy.

Ewan McGregor is Dr. Fred Jones, a humdrum fisheries scientist who is whisked out of his quiet existence in London by an implausible fishery project in the Middle East on the insistence of his superiors; themselves bullied by Kristin Scott Thomas’ terrifying spin-doctor Patricia Maxwell, who sees an opportunity for a rare good news story about British involvement in the region. He begins working for a Yemeni Sheikh of such quiet assuredness and obviously good intentions that Fred’s misgivings slowly melt away. As he becomes more committed to the success of the scheme Fred also steadily becomes more besotted with the Sheikh’s English project manager Harriet (Emily Blunt), to the increasing displeasure of his icy wife Mary (Rachel Stirling). Harriet, however, is pining for her MIA soldier boyfriend Robert (Tom Mison), and Fred is equally oblivious to Al-Qaeda’s murderous objections to the Sheikh’s westernising dream…

There is some wonderful comedy in this film, a highlight being Fred’s patronising doodling on a whiteboard to explain to Harriet how ridiculous the whole project is. But there aren’t enough jokes to really make this work as a comedy. McGregor is on subdued form as the straight man, with irritating references to Asperger’s thrown in to make his awkwardness part of a new cliché zeitgeist. Blunt effortlessly moves from casually charming to emotionally raw, and Amr Waked is on fine form as the charismatic Sheikh who equates fishing with universal brotherhood, but the best scenes come from Scott Thomas’ domineering Press Secretary. All her scenes are delightful; whether she’s harassing the P.M. with IMs re-shuffling his Cabinet for him, terrorising her minions with an instruction to find a good news story from the Middle East in 60 minutes, or verbally abusing her own children.

A bad adaptation sends you scurrying to the book in frustration or bewilderment – looking for more depth or to discover if the original story was poor. Beaufoy’s script made me read the book, which he’s infuriatingly reversed in many respects; just as he ‘adapted’ Vikas Swarup’s brutal Q & A into Slumdog Millionaire. Torday’s dry comedy and political satire is sacrificed at the altar of Beaufoy’s insistence on characters not getting what they want, but instead getting what (they didn’t know) they need; which delivers only clichéd rom-com relationship drama. Fred’s wife is hilariously self-involved in the novel, but largely absent here; a synecdoche of how the realism of the novel and its blackly comic conclusion are all completely reversed. Beaufoy’s reversals culminate in the introduction of a romantic obstacle in the third act which should elicit groans…

This is a prime example of a film that is structurally as sound as a bell, and therefore excruciatingly predictable viewing.

2/5

2012: Hopes

 

Shame
Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s second film as director sees him again collaborating with his Hunger leading man Michael Fassbender. If Hunger was an installation about bodies in decay this is a study of bodies in motion, as this stark drama sees Fassbender play a successful businessman in NYC who has carefully constructed his life around his secret sex addiction. His routine falls apart and his life disintegrates under the pressure of his compulsions when his wayward sister (played by Carey Mulligan) arrives to stay in his apartment. It may just be that one of the first releases of 2012 sets a high-water mark for excellence that no other will reach.

 

The War Horse
JG Ballard dubbed Steven Spielberg’s works ‘Cathedrals of Emotion’ and even the trailer for this is upsetting, so God knows how tear-jerking the whole movie will be. Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s beloved children’s book, which is currently wowing the West End in a puppet-heavy interpretation, follows a teenage boy’s journey into the hell of World War I in an attempt to rescue his beloved horse. Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch are the upper-class officers while Jeremy Irvine plays the young farmer who swaps rural England for the hell of a traumatically recreated Battle of the Somme after his prized horse is summarily requisitioned for the front.

 

J. Edgar
Clint Eastwood, who by virtue of his physical and artistic longevity is old enough to both actually remember Hoover in his prime and to still creatively interpret it, directs Leonardo DiCaprio in a biopic of the once feared and now derided founder of the FBI. Ordinarily this is the kind of Oscar-bait that I despise more than anything else, however, all evidence is that this is not the usual inane drama with a platitudinous message and showy Act-ing. Instead Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black employs constant flashbacks, with undercutting switches of perspective between DiCaprio and Armie Hammer as Hoover’s FBI Agent lover, to explain the neuroses that drove Hoover.

 

A Dangerous Method
David Cronenberg directs Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of his own play about a pivotal 20th century clash. Michael Fassbender is Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen is Sigmund Freud, and Keira Knightley is their patient (and alleged muse) Sabina Spielrein in a riveting drama about the conflict between two great founding fathers of psychoanalysis that split the medical movement at its founding. The S&M is what will get talked about most, as the obvious starting point for locating this in the Cronenberg canon, but attention should focus on Fassbender’s assured turn as Jung and Knightley’s startlingly alien performance as the hysterical Russian who slowly transforms herself into an equal to Jung.

 

 

The Hunger Games
Jennifer Lawrence headlines as heroine Katniss Everdeen in what’s being touted as the new Twilight, and is, according to Google, the most anticipated movie of 2012. Adapted from the wildly popular trilogy of books by Suzanne Collins, an apocalypse has left a new country called Panem ruling North America, and every year as punishment for a quelled rebellion against its authority the new government in the Capitol chooses one teenage boy or girl from each of its 12 districts to fight to the death against each other in the televised Hunger Games – in the end only one survives. As an unusually vicious YA media satire this sounds promising.

 

Anna Karenina
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Joe Wright and Keira Knightley reunite for an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s classic 1870s tale of infidelity in snowiest Russia which William Faulkner once described as the perfect novel. Knightley is never better as an actress than when under Wright’s confident direction, and this is a welcome return to his period-setting comfort zone after the misfiring disaster that was his existential action movie Hanna. Other returning Wright regulars Saoirse Ronan and Matthew Macfadyen form part of a strong ensemble led by Aaron Johnson as Anna’s lover Count Vronsky and Jude Law as her cuckolded husband.

 

The Amazing Spider-Man
I mocked this last year, but once I saw the trailer in a cinema I started to reconsider my stance. The colour-scheme alone indicates a move away from the day-glo japery of Raimi to the moodiness of Nolan. Prince of Hurt Andrew Garfield is an emotionally raw Peter Parker opposite Martin Sheen’s ill-fated Uncle Ben and Emma Stone’s scientist Gwen Stacey. Raimi’s gleefulness was increasingly sabotaged by his crippling affinity for angst. Director Marc Webb, who helmed the glorious (500) Days of Summer, can hopefully replace pre-packaged moping with genuine vulnerability, while stunt guru Vic Armstrong’s practical magic makes this Spidey’s heroics viscerally real rather than wall-to-wall CGI.

 

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
HAHA! Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance sees the lunatics behind the Crank films finally properly get their hands on a blockbuster after their script for Jonah Hex was rewritten to make it vaguely ‘normal’. The plot is, well, immaterial really when it comes to these guys. The prospect of Nicolas Cage, whose brush with Werner Herzog proved he’s still got some game, being encouraged to again find his inner madman while the two writer/directors shoot action sequences from roller-skates besides his flaming bike is indeed an awesome one. We must all pray that some stuffed-shirt empty-suit in the studio doesn’t freak out and bowdlerise this insanity.

 

 

Dr Seuss’ The Lorax
The impossibility of making a decent live-action Dr Seuss adaptation finally hit Hollywood on the head with an anvil after The Cat in the Hat and so we got former live-action Grinch Jim Carrey lending his voice to the sublime Horton Hears a Who. Its screenwriters have now tackled The Lorax and, it appears from the trailer, again succeeded in taking the canny route of expanding Seuss’ slight tales to feature length with delightful visual comedy while retaining the hilarious rhyming dialogue and narration that make Seuss’ work so unique and loveable. Danny DeVito is the voice of the slightly irritating guardian of the woods the Lorax.

 

Prometheus
Ridley Scott’s long-awaited Alien prequel has finally been written by LOST show-runner Damon Lindelof, and original Xenomorph conceptual artist HR Giger has even returned to the fold to whip up some creepy designs. It seems safe to say this will therefore probably be very entertaining, genuinely scary, and then completely disintegrate in the third act when the audience realises that Lindelof really has no idea where he’s going with this. Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace star, which is itself a promising start for a blockbuster that Scott could badly do with being a hit; just to remind him what it feels like after his unwisely extended co-dependency with Russell Crowe.

 

Seven Psychopaths
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Martin McDonagh, the celebrated playwright and writer/director of In Bruges, returns to cinema screens with another unpredictable dark comedy starring Colin Farrell. Farrell this time is a struggling Hollywood screenwriter bedevilled by writer’s block who has the misfortune to fall in with the real devils of the titular seven hoodlums in the course of some ill-advised research for his gangster script. Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell, who starred in McDonagh’s between-film-projects play A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway, are also in the cast; something which speaks volumes about how much actors relish the chance to deliver McDonagh’s caustic, profane and theatrical dialogue.

 

 

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
I have high hopes for this absurdist comedy starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, not least because Blunt is always a superb comedienne and McGregor did a very good baffled straight man in similar territory with The Men Who Stare at Goats. This is of course an adaptation of Paul Torday’s acclaimed (indeed Wodehouse Prize-winning) 2007 comic novel about a Sheikh’s improbable dream of introducing salmon fishing to, well, the Yemen, and the poor sap of a British expert hired to pull off this ludicrous proposition. The only problem is that the reliably dreadful Lasse Hallstrom is directing it; can script and actors overcome his dullness?

 

Skyfall
The studio has finally sorted out nightmarish legalistic-financial difficulties and so the awesome Daniel Craig returns for his third mission as 007. But Paul Haggis’ delightful rewrites are no more! Frost/Nixon scribe Peter Morgan now has the job of making Purvis & Wade’s gibberish action script legible to thinking humans before Sam Mendes directs it. Mendes has a flair for comedy, oft forgotten because his films have been so consistently and inexplicably miserabilist in subject matter, and he’ll draw top-notch performances from his stellar cast which includes Javier Bardem as the villain, Ben Whishaw as Q, Judi Dench as M, and Naoime Harris as Moneypenny. This might just be wonderful…

 

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Peter Jackson, having been kicked like a dog with mange for The Lovely Bones, returns to Tolkien. Martin Freeman brings his trademark assets of comic timing and understated decency to the titular role of Bilbo Baggins. Returning from LOTR are Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Elijah Wood, and a presumably very grateful Orlando Bloom; he didn’t make any blockbusters between Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and The Three Musketeers. You should worry about Del Toro’s nonsense infecting the screenplay, and the opportunistic decision to make two films, but then hope that returning to his meisterwerk will rekindle the combination of flair and heart that Jackson’s lacked since.