Review: Suffragette (2015)

* *
Director: Sarah Gavron
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff, Helena Bonham Carter

For a story that's all about the tenacity, fervor, and indefatigable spirit necessary to push a social movement towards victory, Suffragette is a weirdly passionless film. Too restrained, too polite, and way too superficial, Suffragette is at best a moderately successful period piece and not at all the searing political piece that it ought to be and wants to be. It's frustrating because there actually is a lot to say about the women's suffrage movement, which isn't just one story but a series of stories about tiered victories in which certain categories of women were granted the vote followed later by women of other categories (these categories determined by class, marital status, age, and, of course, race and ethnicity), but the film ultimately says little of any substance. It touches briefly on a lot of different issues about women's rights, but offers no real insight into any of them, so that the statement it makes is of the most basic kind: inequality is bad and harmful to society. And? The women in the film may gladly call themselves rebels, but there's nothing revolutionary about Suffragette.

Review: Corpse Bride (2005)

* * *Director: Tim Burton, Mike Johnson
Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter

For a film about the living dead, The Corpse Bride is actually pretty sweet. The story of a meek groom and his two brides - one living, the other dead; neither of whom he becomes betrothed to by choice - told through stop-motion animation, the film is reminiscent of Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, but with a little less edge. Fortunately, it still has plenty of charm.

Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

* *
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, Helena Bonham Carter

Is there any more bizarrely specific subgenre of film than the Tim Burton fantasy story where Johnny Depp plays a pale weirdo? I should think not. Dark Shadows is their latest outing, a film which didn't really seem necessary when it was first announced and seems even less so now that it's been made. An adaptation of the soap opera from the 1960s/70s that ratchets up the camp factor to about 110, Dark Shadows is a funny movie, but one which never seems to have a sense of purpose.

Canadian Film Review: Margaret's Museum (1995)

* * *
Director: Mort Ransen
Starring: Helena Bonham Carter, Clive Russell, Kate Nelligan

Helena Bonham Carter is like a Venn diagram that shows the intersection of classy and crazy, equally at home in fare like The King's Speech and her films with the Merchant Ivory team, and as a host of creepy and freaky characters in Tim Burton's films. In Mort Ransen's Margaret's Museum she gets to do both at once, starring in a period piece about a hardscrabble mining town which eventually leads to her going totally insane. Good times.

Review: The King's Speech (2010)

* * * *
Director: Tom Hooper
Starring: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham-Carter

The story of a man who has difficulty engaging with people and the technology that allows him to connect with those from whom he might otherwise be alienated. No, I’m not talking about The Social Network, but about The King’s Speech, the latest in a long line of films about British royalty. Directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler, it manages to combine the best elements of stories about monarchs – men and women born on top of the world – and the best elements of stories about underdogs. It’s a fairly conventional film in many respects, but it’s so emotionally engaging that that hardly matters.

The film begins in 1925, when the man who will eventually become King George VI (Colin Firth) attempts to deliver a speech which quickly becomes marred by his stuttering. The experience leaves him feeling humiliated and he's so frustrated by the failure of various attempts at fixing the impediment that he's all but given up hope. It's his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter in a solid, understated and refreshingly unquirky performance), who decides to make one last ditch effort, engaging the services of Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an Australian speech therapist with unconventional methods.

At first the patient is hostile to the treatment, bristling at the familiarity with which Logue addresses him - calling him "Bertie" - and rejecting the suggestion that his problem is in any way psychological and rooted in some trauma from childhood that ought to be dealt with. Slowly, however, he begins to trust Logue and as a result starts to see some progress regarding his speech - and not a moment too soon, as a series of crises thrusts him into the spotlight and transforms public speaking from a ceremonial obligation to a political necessity. His father dies, his brother abdicates, and war is declared with Hitler's Germany; silence is no longer a viable option.

The key to the success of The King's Speech rests in its ability to take a figure who should be remote to most of us and most of our experiences (after all, who but a King knows what it's like to be a King?) and make him relateable. This isn't to say that he's made out to be just a regular guy - he's always quick to enforce the class distinctions which set him apart and takes formal protocol very seriously - but that his struggles are presented in such a way that we can understand them, that they feel personal rather than general. We want him to succeed because the film manages to form a connection between him and us, because it makes us so invested in his struggle. The big climax of the story admittedly plays a few familiar notes (the moment when it looks like the protagonist may falter, the montage of people in his audience, the moment when he rallies, and the moment when he is flush with triumph) but it plays them masterfully. The finale is moving, sending the film out on the strongest possible note.

But the skill that's gone into the construction of the story is only half the battle; the other half is the performances. Firth delivers perhaps his finest performance to date (though a strong argument could be made for his performance in last year's A Single Man), playing a man of fierce pride and incredible self-doubt. He is not always a nice person, particularly in his dealings with Logue, but Firth (with help, of course, from Hooper and Seidler) is able to contextualize his behavior so well that we don't necessarily hold it against him. Rush more than holds his own as Logue, a man of great endurance and persistence who quietly accepts that many people in British society will never take him as seriously as they should because he's Australian (as a side note, I think it's hilarious that a film that comes back to that theme time and again also cast the English-born but Australian-raised Guy Pearce as Edward VIII). Though their stations are very different, there are some parallels between Logue and the King so that the success around which the finale is built is ultimately a double victory because it's a triumph for both men.

The King's Speech is easily one of my favourite films from 2010. There's really nothing about it that I felt didn't work; it pretty thoroughly accomplishes what it sets out to do and pulls it off with grace. I can't recommend it more highly.

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Maythew #2: Big Fish (2003)

* * *
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Billy Crudup, Albert Finney, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter

If you think of Tim Burton's films as the cinematic equivalent of the Munster family, then surely Big Fish is the Marilyn of the group. Quirky but much more gently so than the rest of Burton's output, the film is something of a departure for the director, who really seems to be reigning himself in here. For the most part it works, though I don't think it quite achieves its ambitions.

Big Fish tells the story of a father (Albert Finney), his son (Billy Crudup), and the stories that stand between them. The son, Will, has grown up to be resentful of his father's storytelling abilities and feels marginalized amongst the large cast of bizarre and fanciful characters in his father's narrative. The father, Ed, insists that his stories are true and has no qualms about telling them over and over again. Now the father is dying and the son wants to seize his last opportunity to really get to know him, to know the truth behind his tall tales.

The flashback scenes, in which Ed is played by Ewen McGregor, unfold in episodic form, detailing his many adventures. He leaves his small town in the company of Karl (Matthew McGrory), a giant, stumbles into a utopia in the middle of the woods, meets his soulmate, joins the circus, goes missing in Korea and makes his way back with a set of conjoined twins, accidentally gets involved in a bank robbery, and so on. Will doesn't believe any of this but slowly finds evidence that, at the very least, his father's stories aren't complete fabrications. The line between truth and fiction becomes blurrier and blurrier until it seems that one can no longer exists without the other. As Will states at the end: "A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him and in that way he becomes immortal."

Based on the novel by Daniel Wallace, Big Fish is a charming movie but one that doesn't entirely work - or, at lest, doesn't work in the way that it wants you to think that it works. It is visually sumptuous and its exploration of the art of constructing a story is well done, but the relationships that should make up the heart of the film get short shrift. Except for Ed, the characters are secondary to the stories rather than the stories being used as a means of developing the characters. As a result the ending doesn't have quite the emotional punch that it could and the film itself doesn't resonate that much.

Matt's Thoughts: I really want to like this picture, but there's just something about it that I can't quite identify that's putting me off. I think that part of the problem is the fairytale aspect of the plot. We're lead to believe, at the beginning, that Edward is just fabricating insane lies, but it's when Sandra confirms that he had gotten lost during the war that we begin to think otherwise. It's only a little later when William is cleaning the pool and the big fish surfaces in the water, that he has this moment of realization that either his father has been telling the truth all these years, or that he has started hallucinating. The truth seems confirmed later still when Helena Bonham-Carter tells a story involving the giant tilting her house back to its original position.

It's the fact that, as the film closes, we're told that he was, indeed, exaggerating his tales for entertainment purposes, that you wonder if Helena's story was truly as majestic as it appeared, or if William had just exaggerated it in his mind's eye to fit it into the mold of his father's usual stories.

I think my problem is that I wanted it to be all or nothing: either full-out fairytale, or just insane lie after insane lie. But I can't really fault the movie for this, because, at it's core, it's the tale of a father and son; like Field of Dreams, but with fewer dead baseball players.

I didn't hate the movie, I just didn't love it either. But that might be because I find Miley Cyrus kind of irritating; although, in this role, she was still Destiny Cyrus...which is kind of more irritating.

Review: Alice In Wonderland (2010)

* *
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway

Oh, man. I'd been looking forward to Alice In Wonderland for months and even after reading a few less than favourable reviews, I still held out hope. I was prepared to be a bit disappointed in Tim Burton's rendering of the classic story, but instead I find myself feeling apathetic. I've tried to start this review about a dozen times over the past couple of days but when I try to articulate my feelings about this movie all I can think is... *shrug*.

After a brief prologue in which we meet the young Alice, haunted by memories of Wonderland which she believes to be nothing more than dreams, the film flashes forward 13 years to the teenage Alice (Mia Wasikowska), who is on the verge of being married off to a less than desirable (from her perspective) suitor. She flees from his proposal and, chasing after a rabbit, falls down a hole where she enters a strange new world. There she meets a wide variety of characters who are willing to acknowledge that she's an Alice but are convinced that she's not the Alice. Meanwhile, she's convinced that it's just a dream, despite all painful evidence to the contrary.

Alice's return is of interest to both the benevolent White Queen (Anne Hathaway), who needs her to slay the Jabberwocky, and the tantrum prone Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), who wants to cut off her head because cutting off heads is her favourite past time. When the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is taken prisoner by the Red Queen, Alice infiltrates the palace as Um from Umbradge in order to rescue him. While she fails at this, she does manage to get the vorpal sword, the only thing that can kill the Jabberwocky, and escape with it back to the White Queen's palace, setting the stage for the great and final battle between good and evil.

The film plays fast and loose with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, taking elements from both stories without strictly adhering to either. The film also tries to incorporate a bit of feminism to guide its narrative arc, essentially making the story about how Alice learns to stand up for herself. This element both does and doesn't work. As nice as it is to see a film about a heroic female lead, particularly one that emphasizes the importance of her making her own choices rather than blindly following a script imposed on her by outside forces, Alice's moment of triumph at the film's end is somewhat lacking in impact because she holds a position of disadvantaged advantage in society. She's disadvantaged because she's a woman but her class and wealth make it possible for her to take a defiant stance that a woman of lesser means wouldn't be able to afford. The last scenes are less "score one for womankind" than "score one for rich women" - it's nice for Alice, but kind of empty in the greater scheme of things. Not that I expected Alice to be a political symbol, but if the film is going to play at rooting itself in certain politics, it should do so in a less shallow, more nuanced way. And I don't even want to get into the ideological implications of the war between the Red Queen and White Queen and the ways that that undercuts what the film is trying to do through Alice.

There are things about Alice In Wonderland that I liked - anything involving the Chesire Cat, Depp's melancholic Hatter, Tweedledee and Tweeldedum - but ultimately I found the film so unrelentingly dour that it was hard to enjoy. I didn't expect it to be happy and peppy (this is Tim Burton, after all) but I did think it would be a bit more, I don't know, magical. There seems to be no joy to this particular cinematic exercise which leaves the product rather hollow.

Review: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has all the hallmarks of a Tim Burton film: it’s visually stunning, it’s dark and ghoulish, and centers on an outsider. It’s also curiously soulless and kind of disappointing. There’s a lot of dramatic material that could be mined here, but it’s all glossed over and the result is a film that is lacking in depth.

Sweeney Todd is probably the goriest musical you’ll ever see - it’s actually more like a horror movie that happens to have music in it. As for the music, I enjoyed the numbers “A Little Priest,” where Todd (Johnny Depp) and Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter) devise their plan to turn the residents of Fleet Street into meat pies, “By The Sea,” where Mrs. Lovett imagines herself and Todd getting married and going to a sea-side resort, and “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir” which sees Todd pitting himself against rival barber Pirelli (Sacha Baron Coen); but otherwise found myself fairly indifferent to the soundtrack. Admittedly, this isn’t meant to be a toe-tapping, sing-along musical, but I do find that musicals, by and large, are more effective when the songs move you as you’re watching the film, and stay with you after you’ve left the theatre.

I think my problem with the film is that I didn’t believe in the characters’ relationships with each other. It’s hard to really grasp the full tragic potential of the last act when you don’t really believe in the characters feelings about it. After being falsely imprisoned in Australia, Todd returns to London to exact revenge on the man who sent him away, Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), and supposedly to avenge his wife and daughter, both of whom Turpin has ill-used. However, Todd seems more intent on punishing Turpin than on rescuing his daughter, obsessing more on when he’ll get to kill the former, than on wondering about the safety of the latter. I know that the point of the story is that Todd is so blinded by hate that he can’t see the bigger picture, but we have to first believe in his adoration of Lucy and Johanna before we can feel the force of the tragedy he brings about when he finally gets his revenge. Johnny Depp does what he can with the role, but the film ultimately limits it to one dimension. Sweeney Todd is angry. Sweeney Todd will have vengeance. Sweeney Todd is ridiculously self-centered and kind of tiresome.

Mrs. Lovett, as played by Helena Bonham-Carter, fairs a little bit better. Bonham-Carter brings a shade of humanity to the role, especially in scenes with Toby (Ed Sanders), the ward she takes in. She’s just as bad as Todd in terms of murderous misdeeds, but she still comes across as sympathetic. It’s perhaps because Bonham-Carter is allowed to play her character at various levels – she gets to be happy and sad, devious and regretful, lonely and later fulfilled in a pseudo-familial relationship with Todd and Toby – while Depp is limited to playing Todd as bitter/angry throughout, that she seems to come out better. Sacha Baron Coen is also good, adding a brief burst of color and life to the dark and drab world of the film, before becoming the first victim of Sweeney Todd’s blade.

Visually speaking, the movie is very effective. If there’s one thing you can say about Tim Burton, it’s that he fully conceptualizes his worlds before committing them to film. His vision of London is dark, full of dirty, narrow streets where vermin run free. There’s a running visual motif of Todd not being able to see clearly through glass – his mirror is broken, the windows of the shop are dirty and make the people outside look blurry – it’s the visual representation of his being blinded by fury. But, again, it lacks depth. It’s there, but it isn’t explored. There’s a lot of subtext to this story – the residents of Fleet Street avoid Mrs. Lovett’s shop until she starts baking her pies with her new secret ingredient; it literally demonstrates the figurative concept that not only are people willing to eat their own, they secretly want to – but it just lies there underneath the story, touched on then forgotten.

All that being said, Sweeney Todd isn’t really a bad movie, it’s just not the movie that it could have been. It’s mostly entertaining, it’s just not very filling – a snack rather than a feast.