Review: Summer in February

(Dir. Christopher Menaul, 2013)

(Originally posted at Take One)

Twigging the success and popularity both fictional and factual tales of the upper classes amidst pre-WW1 equanimity have been on British television of late, writer Jonathan Smith adapts for the screen and presents Summer in February, based on his own original novel. Directed by Christopher Menaul, who, tellingly, comes from a lengthy career in made-for-television productions, the film is a rigid glance into the fraught emotions and relationship antics that ran amuck in the Newlyn School artist’s colony in Cornwall, 1911. Steering away from the socio-political contexts of a Britain on the brink of a major war, Smith’s screenplay instead focuses on a bland love triangle based on actual events, yet the film desperately lacks the turbulence necessary to make this romantic quandary remotely engrossing; the type of turbulence expressed by the crashing waves that surround these vapid character’s picturesque locale.

Not an actor of particular subtlety, Dominic Cooper plays the painter, poet and self-confessed womaniser A.J. Munnings, whose vernacular is as eloquent and sharp as his brush strokes. Alongside his good friend Gilbert Evans, a local land agent (played by the stuffy Dan Stevens, who also acts as producer), Munnings enjoys a carefree life amongst the bucolic shores and shapely maidens of the Cornish coast, enjoying the fruits of his arrogant travails uninterrupted by responsibility or artistic interference. A simple existence of painting and poetry is scuppered, however, with the arrival of Florence Carter-Wood (Emily Browning), an aspiring artist who joins the group and immediately charms both Munnings – who initially schools her in painting – and Gilbert, whose unrequited passion grows. As the three friends embark on a cautious and discrete love triangle, events conspire to take a toll as their individual futures become darker and altogether more unwelcoming.

Taking its various dramatic cues from heated tea parties and characters gazing, woefully, into the beautifully captured middle distance, Summer in February is a triumph of antiquated posturing and quite unimaginative storytelling, marrying Smith’s stilted and mostly limply spouted dialogue with Menaul’s elementary directing style. Marking his first post-Downton Abbey role – a soapy perusal through post-Edwardian aristocracy that, despite being not dissimilar to the contexts of Smith’s story, is largely more guiltily enjoyable – Stevens effectively channels his past role as fusty Matthew Crawley into his portrayal of Gilbert, a man defined by pent-up emotion. Though it isn’t that much of a stretch, Stevens – whose time on set was split with the filming of ITV’s televisual behemoth – brings relatively little to a part that is already thinly sketched. All Gilbert is is an opposition to Munnings’ seething egotism, an everyman who audiences are meant to root for when Florence’s indecision begins to semi-drastically unravel.

That isn’t to say any of the characters are particularly well rendered. Quite the contrary in fact; Smith’s story languishes in stock characters trapped in a conventional portrait of adultery and conflicted emotions: Munnings the deceptively charming man governed by his art; Gilbert the lovable dote, and Florence an artistic novice with a vulnerable disposition. Each actor brings little to their parts or even challenges their stilted characteristics, instead collectively settling for evocatively dressed blobs of colour sat on a palette, refusing to comingle.

As a depiction of bourgeois artistry in a pre-war period, Summer in February has some interesting angles. Yet Menaul does nothing with already staid material, and the result is almost unbearably dull.

Review: Before Midnight

(Dir. Richard Linklater)

(Originally posted at The Hollywood News)

Nine years after sating the impassioned fans of modest 1994 indie darling Before Sunrise with its more heart-breaking counterpart Before Sunset, director Richard Linklater and stars Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke return to the franchise with Before Midnight, a natural, inevitable progression for this most magnificent of cinematic series. Set, just as the narrative spine, eighteen years since Sunrise, Midnight revisits the characters of Celine (Delpy) and Jesse (Hawke) for another excursion in walk-and-talk existential intimacy, as these now-fully recognisable people muse about life, love and togetherness under the scrutiny of the pervading Greek sun.

 After having witnessed the pair meeting – and quickly falling in love – as young adults wandering the streets of Vienna in 1995, and again seeing their belated reunion in Paris, 2004, where the spark of their initial encounter still rigorously lingered, Linklater (who once again co-writes the screenplay with his leading compadres) here confirms their union. Since Sunset left on an elegant cliffhanger, with Jesse anxiously twiddling his wedding ring as Celine bashfully, seductively mimicked Nina Simone in her apartment (“Baby, you are gonna miss that plane”), this third instalment finds the pair married and parents to two young girls, holidaying in Greece and at something of an impasse.

 Jesse, who enjoys the fruits of his worldwide acclaim as a successful writer (his two previous novels fictionalised the events of the two preceding films), finds it increasingly difficult to maintain a long-distance relationship with his teenage son, and ruminates about a possible relocation for his new family to Chicago to be closer to him. Celine, on the other hand, finds herself struggling both with Jesse’s narrativised treatment of their longstanding relationship and the expectations of her as a woman and depended-on mother, all the while considering a major career change. Whilst the beatific surface of their relationship remains intact, its beating heart grows weary and cracks start to materialise, and the couple find themselves contemplating their marriage and its rickety, unknowable future.

 Where Sunrise was a more formalist excursion within the romance genre – though its inventiveness and enclosed, one-day progression stopped it from being too conventional, and Sunset took on a real-time approach to the depiction of Jesse and Celine’s meeting, Before Midnight is its own beast; its effectively five long, glorious scenes of the protagonists breaking down their life together and considering its numerous ups and downs. One of many jewels in the series’ crown is the searing, incredibly attuned and humanistic writing and delineation of its characters, and Midnight upholds this and remains as true to its own canon as it is to life. Jesse is still the buzzingly sanguine writer constantly thinking of outlandish stories and concepts; Celine remains the slightly pessimistic intellectual, irritated by a constantly diminishing world. Yet, whereas the opening two chapters were entrenched in illusory romanticism, the tone here is faintly darker as the simmering themes and various contexts of Jesse and Celine’s conversations take on restless, even drastic edges. Mature topics such as sex, parenthood and careers are explored, as are the permutations that lay in between.

 There’s a reason why the film’s closing scenes – and, indeed, its title – are staged at the twilight of the day, where the sun gives way to darkness; its pivotal sequence, staged in a hotel room, charts the anger and frustrations of a prolonged argument. It is insular and claustrophobic, contrasting with the open-aired, flowing dialogue scenes before it, and building to an aching and beautifully organic climax that could lead to a fully justified fourth instalment. At a time where cinema is constantly being held up against television and accused of lacking the intricacies and intimacy of long-form storytelling, it’s invigorating to know that Linklater and co continue to break the mould by shaping and kneading their outstanding creation. Before Midnight is, of course, powerfully acted and extraordinarily well judged; a worthy successor to two perfect entries.

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Review: Stuck in Love

(Dir. Josh Boone)

Following in the footsteps of Josh Radnor’s Liberal Arts (2012) – a soft-core ditty that met Woody Allen-esque cross-generational romance with an insatiable attempt to make literature sexy, director Josh Boone makes a similar stab at making the romantic tribulations faced by a family of writers remotely interesting in his feature debut Stuck in Love (2013). Binding together a cast of able and likable stars, writer-director Boone takes a comparable approach to storytelling made popular by such long-form TV ‘dramadies’ as The OC (2003-2007) and One Tree Hill (2003-2012) in that he draws as much emphasis on his teenage characters as he does on their parents by mapping their various frictions and allegiances. Yet, as tenderly rendered as these imbalanced relationships are, they engulf a film that resembles an overly long novel whose dense pages far outweigh its meagre spine.

 The reliably affable Greg Kinnear plays Bill Borgens, the head of this outré precocious and rigorously well-read family. He is stifled by a bout of writers block founded on his obsessions with his ex-wife Erica (Jennifer Connelly), who left him three years ago for a younger, tighter man who owns a gym (and whose sole characterisation is a rippling torso). The two share different relationships with their ferociously independent daughter Samantha (Lily Collins), who arrives home from college with the news that her first novel is being published. Bill – who endures excitable sporadic sex with a married neighbour (played by Kristen Bell) – is delighted by the news whilst Erica uses it at yet another opportunity to reach out to her estranged daughter, to frosty avail.

Meanwhile Samantha’s younger brother Rusty (Nat Wolff), an ardent Stephen King devotee who aspires to be just as successful, attempts to win over the girl of his schoolyard dreams but faces an uphill battle with her chequered history with substance abuse. As Samantha begins to challenge her stern views on love and companionship – brought about by the pangs of her parent’s separation – by considering the advances of fervent romantic Lou (Logan Lerman) (a fellow King enthusiast), the romantic situations surrounding her begin to blossom, paving the way for various life lessons to be learnt and emotional barriers lifted.

Clearly attempting to be a turning point for the sort of contemporary teen-specific film that bathes in sex and frivolity, Stuck in Love has far too much going on in its variety of spikily plotted sub-narratives to make it anything other than annoying and unfocused. Boone shows a knack for teasing out the charms of his attractive cast but fails at juggling his characters and their occurrences, sacrificing an initially light timbre to wildly melodramatic and soft-edged tonal turns that amount to formulaic conclusions and generic, even totally predictable, resolutions. Similarly overegged are the director’s desires to create a notch on the belt of timeless romantic-comedy-drama by attempting to do something a little different, but his over-soundtracked film and its Über-cultured, ultra-modern inhabitants prevent it from being just that. Scenes of characters fawning over Bright Eyes CDs and sobbing to Elliot Smith’s Between The Bars in the pouring rain are as close to a director forecasting what’s cool and what’s not as cinema gets, even if his pop-culture proclivities are a little dated.

Speaking of cool, and re-referencing Liberal Arts, books are working their way back into cinematic consciousness as examples of the attractiveness of individuality and the importance of articulacy. And though Boone contrives obvious oppositions to the static process of simply reading a book (seen with Bell’s fitness fanatic bigamist and Erica’s six-packed and brain-dead gym bunny hubby), he ceaselessly reminds you that literature is imaginative and fashionable despite his film being anything but.

Interview: Michael Shannon on ‘The Iceman’

(Originally posted at The Hollywood News)

Richard Kuklinski, the protagonist of The Iceman, is a loving husband and devoted father; a man fiercely protective of his own handcrafted version of the American dream. He lives with an affectionate, sympathetic wife and two doting daughters in the New Jersey suburbs, socialises with friends and throws endearing birthday parties, all the while keeping a steady lid on his true and uncanny persona. Lurking behind this carefully constructed – though believably rounded – front is the real reasons for Kuklinski’s ascension from modest and lowly blue-collar warehouse worker: he is in fact a ruthless hitman for the mafia, and has carved both a lucrative career and a ruthless notoriety out of carrying out the deadly deeds of various mob linchpins. As the number of victims (apparently) enters into triple figure territory, Kuklinski finds it increasingly difficult to continue under his Wall Street magnate-shaped pretences as the murky days of the sixties and seventies roll into the treacherous and unsteady eighties. When the various crime families begin to look inward instead of out and the dark clouds amass, Kuklinski has to decide whether to adapt and keep his family intact, or face the corrosive wrath of total exposure.

 The Polish-American Kuklinski is played by Michael Shannon, marking his first collaboration with Israeli director Ariel Vromen, who, in turn, makes something of an introduction into more notable filmmaking after two relatively unknown features. Since a Best Supporting Actor nomination in 2009 for his small, but pivotal, role in Sam Mendes’ adaptation of Revolutionary Road, Shannon has been thrust into the public consciousness as an actor who has a particular penchant for performances of intense and agitated magnitude. From characters such as the restless Curtis in Jeff Nichol’s stellar Take Shelter and as the rancorous Nelson van Alden in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, via several significant others, Shannon has gained infamy for parts both supporting and main that are infused with a tangibly penetrative sense of disquiet. His speciality is playing men coming undone, and distinguished filmmakers – from Scorsese and Stone to Herzog and Lumet – have done well in teasing this quality out and making him an on-screen force of caged rage. His next substantial role is the big bad General Zod in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, transposing Terence Stamp’s physically composed previous rendering for something altogether more gruff and threatening.

Taking into account his previous work, it would seem that Shannon has naturally gravitated towards a role such as Kuklinski; a real life figure only an actor such as he could really bring the relevant levels of heft to. That Vromen became obsessed with winning over his desired star is a testament to the ripples of significance Shannon has enjoyed since his breakout role in William Friedkin’s feverish 2006 film Bug. Though not a method actor as such, Shannon gained a wealth of insight into who Kuklinski outwardly was by watching “over and over again” the 1992 HBO documentary The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Hitman, a detailed series of one-on-one interviews with the renowned contract killer who remorselessly details how he committed the numerous murders yet shows absolute compassion when speaking about his family. Taking advantage of the full, twenty-hour unedited version, Shannon was able to shape his mannerisms and fully get into the role, an authenticity the film fully benefits from.

Though there was, of course, no residual desire to entertain the notion of getting to know the business that had such an influence on his latest character – no matter how alluring Kuklinski found it, Shannon was able to tease out the essence of the man solely through deep research and, simply put, trying to understand him on a human level. “I found him very relatable”, he says, “If you didn’t know what he had done, I don’t think anybody would dislike the guy. He’s very sharp and charming in his way, and you kind of enjoy listening to him talk. He doesn’t seem like an intrinsically rotten person”. In a film filled with intrigue, violence and gritty deception, the most fascinating aspect of its protagonist is the highlighting of his tortured dual personality, which Shannon went some way in attempting to figure out: “I do feel like I sorted out, at least for myself, the kind of paradigms of [Kuklinski’s] existence, which was that he had a huge amount of rage inside of him based on, I think, a very traumatic childhood. I think both of his parents were pretty sadistic in their own way so he had these demons, and this job of being a hitman gave him the opportunity to try and do something constructive with them, or at least something for monetary gain”.

It would be all too easy for an actor to play someone as objectively malignant as Kuklinski with straightforward malevolence, yet the jewel in the film’s crown is the way Shannon takes this multi-tonal man and makes him somewhat likable; a man governed by what he deems to be an inevitable means to a more fulfilled end. Kuklinski longed for a normal life, yet found himself unable to resign to the generic meaning of the word, no matter how hard he strove for it. Shannon found a line taken from the original interviews and included in the film – where Kuklinski, realising that if his life’s path were entirely up to him, intones: “This would not be me” – very telling about the man’s inner psyche in that in points to his inner, inherent immorality, whilst alluding to debates regarding humanity’s dormant capacity for evil and wrongdoing. Of Kuklinski, Shannon reckons that many found him callous and insensitive in his pursuits, but he always found him to be a picture of self-realisation: “I think at the end of the day he knew who he was and what he had done and he could just never figure out how to stop it”.

In what he believes is a semblance of a Grimm’s Fairytale version of people profiting from the misfortune of others for the sake of upholding domesticity, Shannon attests to the film’s relativity in the way the parable of Kuklinski’s dichotomous existence “merited consideration and contemplation”. It’s a film of heated conflict presided over by Vromen and his leading man’s desire to consciously move away from the sort of quintessential mob pictures that have already been made and, according to Shannon, will scarcely be bettered. For all of his subtle protestations, there exists an anonymity with Shannon’s fans for the fervid and now somewhat commonplace roles he takes on, which all have a through-line typified by fraught anxiety. “I don’t have a thesis or anything in what I do. It’s kind of randomly lined up that way, I guess”. Yet this is an unfair assumption; he finds himself lucky to get work and approaches each role differently, completely untarnished by previous incarnations and rungs on a career that rarely interlock “like Lego”. “Every one’s a journey you have to start from scratch, particularly if you’re playing a real person. You owe it to them to not approach it as if you’re using something you did in some other part. You have to figure them out”.

In fact, he is considering straying away from formula and embracing – as soon as the correct ingredients converge – comedy, after giving a remarkably dark and extremely humorous turn in Funny or Die’s short film Michael Shannon Reads the Insane Delta Gamma Sorority Letter earlier this year. This, along with his embracing of big budget, mainstream fare with Man of Steel – which he couldn’t fathom turning down – may allow audiences to begin to witness a more or less dialled down Shannon in more psychologically uncomplicated projects. Although he doesn’t want to take on small-minded limitations for his future career, this would no doubt be a noteworthy segueing to similarly remarkable future roles. However, the longer he stays away from material like Kangaroo Jack, the better.

Review: The Iceman

(Originally posted at The Hollywood News)

Director: Ariel Vromen

Starring: Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta, Chris Evans, David Schwimmer, James Franco

Running Time: 105 mins

Certificate: 15

Synopsis: Inspired by actual events, The Iceman examines notorious American hitman Richard Kuklinski, who, in 1986, was convicted of murdering over 100 men for various crime organisations around the New York area. The twist to Kuklinski’s reign as an untarnished assassin is that he was a devoted provider to a family who had no idea about his profession.

Charting the rise and subsequent fall of Richard Kuklinski, one of the most notorious and prolific contract killers in American history, Ariel Vromen’s latest, The Iceman, sees the director realising actual events through various genre prisms and conventions, telling the true story of a man torn between a devotion to his family and the pangs of a frustrated inner psyche. Playing Richard ‘The Iceman’ Kuklinski is Michael Shannon, who, after a string of deeply conflicted characters – from Jeff Nichols’ superb Take Shelter (2011) to TV’s Boardwalk Empire – brings his proclivity for stone-faced intensity to a character few others could justifiably convey. Surrounded by an abundance of excellent support, Shannon carries the film and saves it from the run-of-the-mill biopic it teeters on becoming, delivering a performance of blinding magnitude.

The Iceman follows Kuklinski during a period that spanned from the 1960s through the late 1980s, and goes about attempting to examine how his attempt to exempt his family from a secret profession ultimately leads to his undoing. The film starts with Kuklinski – a mild-mannered, stoic blue-collar porn warehouse drone, courting and eventually marrying his first and only love Deborah Pellicotti (an outstandingly on-form Winona Ryder) and quickly establishing a family he is determined to keep as far removed from his volatile childhood (under the rule of an abusive father) as possible.

However, when local mob boss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta) coaxes Kuklinski into embracing the darker sides of his outwardly passive demeanour whilst exploiting his knack for remorseless assassinations – to lucrative results, Kuklinski begins on a downward path he finds increasingly difficult to walk away from. As the fraught lines between providing for and protecting his family and sculpting his career as a prosperous hitman become evermore difficult to balance, Kuklinski learns that having everything comes at a fateful price.

Brought to gritty life by cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, Vromen’s film is an impressive distillation of a man caught in the crossfire between intense unrequited rage and a palpable commitment to keeping his assembled version of the American dream alive, unspoilt by the sins of his parentage. In a role seemingly tailor-made for his style of brooding hostility, Shannon deftly handles the tonal shifts between pent up aggression and genuine sentimentality, portraying Kuklinski as a man governed by what he deems is the right thing to do for his family. Each side of his persona – the loving family man and the compassionless killer – are equally compelling, yet Vromen ultimately fails to find and identify a through line to fully join the two together, settling for a result that is more imbalanced and hurried than overly memorable.

Effectively a film of two distinct halves shared between a conformity to the forms of two genres, The Iceman works best as a thriller about a submissive man consumed by his thirst and simultaneous penchant for criminality. Yet, as it stands, Vromen’s film is a strongly acted, Goodfellas (1990)-esque portrait that is as plagued by the various cliché’s of the gangster genre as its protagonist is by a dark and frighteningly rendered appetite for flurries of violence.