The Grouchy Editor

Critic Roger Ebert describes the world on display in Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974 as an immersive experience, and I can’t disagree with that assessment.  But this is not the England filmgoers have grown accustomed to seeing.  There are no by-the-rules Scotland Yard inspectors, no Sherlock Holmes, no Jane Tennison.  There is nothing “feel good” in this crime drama, period.

Director Julian Jarrold, in this first installment of a televised trilogy based on novels by David Peace, has expertly crafted a noir that depicts 1970s Yorkshire (in northern England) as a place of unrelenting evil and despair.  This hopeless atmosphere, punctuated by acts of violence, is the movie’s strength.  But I also think it’s a weakness.

The protagonist of the film is young Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield), a hotshot reporter who is arrogant and mouthy, but also a bit naïve.  When Eddie investigates a string of serial killings targeting young girls, he stumbles upon a web of corruption among city officials and businessmen.  He also falls in love with the attractive mother of one of the murdered girls.

My problem with Red Riding: 1974 was my sense of detachment.  The character of Eddie, as written, is no doubt realistic, but it’s difficult to empathize with him.  The kid is a jerk, and no matter what horrors he uncovers, I don’t particularly care about his fate.  His romance with the mysterious Paula (Rebecca Hall) is abrupt and uninvolving, and he seems to have no other social life.  In a narrative this downbeat, and which offers no comic relief, it should be a requirement that viewers be given some character – any character – with whom they can relate.

What results is a film I admired, but didn’t much like.  As Ebert observed, Red Riding: 1974 is a directorial triumph, a dark and bleak world successfully recreated. But this fairy tale was too grim for my taste.      Grade:  B-

Director:  Julian Jarrold  Cast:  Andrew Garfield, David Morrissey, Sean Bean, Rebecca Hall, John Henshaw, Anthony Flanagan  Release:  2009

 

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A Prophet is a tough film to criticize.  It boasts a whopping 97 percent approval rating on rottentomatoes.com, so other critics are obviously impressed.  It’s a serious crime drama that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

I thought the movie was compelling – but not riveting; good – but not particularly memorable.  It’s always watchable, but never as sensational as Scarface, nor as epic as The Godfather, and it has fewer colorful characters than GoodFellas.   Do I recommend it?  Sure.  Is it a “great” movie?  I don’t think so.

A Prophet follows the career of prison inmate Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), a young convict who gets recruited by Corsican crime boss Luciani (Niels Arestrup) and then offered protection from other inmates.  This presents a problem for Malik, who is drawn toward the Arabic prisoners because of their shared ethnicity.  As we watch Malik progress from the Corsicans’ gofer to polished criminal, we realize it’s just a matter of time before he and Luciani will clash.

All of this is well-acted and directed.  But we learn nothing new about criminals or incarceration.  Prison is hard on young men:  check.  Prisoners segregate themselves by racial or ethnic identity:  check.  Men who enter penitentiaries are not rehabilitated, but simply learn how to become better criminals:  check.

Will you like this movie?  Probably.  Will you remember it a year from now?  I’m not so sure about that.      Grade:  B

Director:  Jacques Audiard  Cast:  Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen  Release:  2009

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My eyelids were drooping, and my chin was resting on my chest, when suddenly someone barked, “You talentless little shit!”

I jerked fully awake, and swiveled round to see if anyone else was in the room.  No, I was quite alone.  The shout had come from the TV screen, where actor Christian McKay was chastising his young co-star,  Zac Efron, on a city sidewalk.   “I hope you enjoyed your Broadway career, junior, because it’s over,” McKay admonished Efron. I blinked.  Was this some out-take from a “behind the scenes” confrontation during the film’s production?  Could it be that McKay shared my disdain for Efron’s performance in the movie, and somehow the DVD people had allowed this candid moment into its “extras”?

Wrong again.  The film, Me and Orson Welles, was still in progress.  I was seeing Orson Welles, McKay’s character in the movie, berating an aspiring actor played by Efron.  It was clearly an example of art imitating life.

It’s probably not fair to peg any one performance for the success or failure of a film, but in this case it’s tempting.  Me and Orson Welles dramatizes the days leading up to Welles’s triumphant Broadway staging of Julius Caesar in 1937.  But the movie makes the fatal error of focusing on the bland and humorless Efron, rather than McKay, who absolutely nails the bombastic genius Welles.  Had the film been more like a superior movie with a similar plot – My Favorite Year, starring Peter O’Toole – it could have worked.

“Jesus that’s all we need, a dozen critics with wet asses,” Welles harrumphs at another point in the film.  But the trouble with this movie is not critics with wet posteriors; it’s a young star who is still wet behind the ears.        Grade:  C+

Director:  Richard Linklater  Cast:  Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Christian McKay, Ben Chaplin, Zoe Kazan, Eddie Marsan, Kelly Reilly, James Tupper, Leo Bill, Imogen Poots  Release:  2009

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