Carol

As in almost every love story ever shown on screen, there is a moment in Todd Haynes's Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt, when the eyes of two strangers meet across a crowded room. Against the bustling backdrop of a New York department store at Christmas, Rooney Mara's shop-girl, Therese, catches sight of Carol (Cate Blanchett) lingering by a toy train set. Carol is older, wears expensive fur coats, and drinks martinis at lunchtime. These women are worlds apart, separated not only by the desk between retailer and customer, but also by age, class, and the quietly shifting social conditions of the 1950s.

This decade is sumptuously rendered in a cocktail of drowsy interiors, jingling piano refrains, and Sandy Powell's impeccable selection of costumes. It is one of the best-looking films I have had the pleasure of watching at the cinema, its colours and textures magnified by Edward Lachman's measured cinematography. The camera closes in on fussing hands and plaintive looks, little details that speak volumes about the two women's burgeoning, forbidden attraction.

Cate Blanchett is imperious as Carol. She slinks and prowls across the screen, redolent of a watchful lioness as she pursues the doe-eyed Therese. But she is by no means without her vulnerabilities, caught in the midst of a painful divorce, and on the cusp of a traumatic custody battle. Haynes could easily have created a definitive power imbalance between these two women, but this is a trap he avoids. At times, Mara's Therese reflects the image of Carol's daughter, with the same neat bob and chequered dresses. But she also resists the pitfalls of such a dynamic. Therese has her own ambitions: she wants to be a photographer, and, living alone in New York, she has a certain independence that eludes her older lover.

These are the subtle nuances of character that make this adaptation so compelling. As Carol's estranged husband Harge, Kyle Chandler could have been a stock villain, jealously berating his wife for her infidelities, and threatening legal consequences. Yet our sympathies lie in part with him, as with Therese's hapless boyfriend Richard (Jake Lacy), who confidently reels off half-baked psychoanalysis when Therese tries to talk to him about homosexual love. In Carol, Haynes shows us how the historic persecution of gay men and women has left only victims, scapegoats, and a trail of broken hearts.    

Thankfully, a lot of the cliches associated with lesbian fiction and films are avoided. It's not giving too much away to say that the conclusion is not entirely miserable. What is undoubtedly a difficult love is not fetishised into impossibility, and neither woman sheepishly crawls back to her man. The affair between Carol and Therese, although passionate and convincing, is a slow-burner, shadowed by a tentative uncertainty that feels true to the period. Carol is a masterpiece: deliciously crafted, beautifully acted, and singing with details that furnish its characters with the desires and frustrations of real lives.

Macbeth

Scotland herself is the main character in this blood-soaked reimagining of Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. So enamoured is director Justin Kurzel of his Highland landscape that it becomes his focal point: a gaping maw of brutal heights and contours before the poor players. This is a cold pagan place, where the respite from war and rain is never very long.

From the opening scene-- a child's funeral --we discover a country of hope murdered in its infancy. Power is wielded by a clutch of men, whose in-fighting has led to continuous conflict for Scotland's people. Michael Fassbender's eponymous hero is gladiatorial: a fiercely rugged and committed Thane (of Glamis, Cawdor etc.) whose noble spirit turns sickly with untamed ambition. This is very much a Macbeth about men-at-war, a reading that Kurzel follows through effectively, albeit at the cost of some of the play's best and strangest elements.

The 'weird sisters' are not so very weird at all. They appear on the fringes of the battlefield as wandering mothers, accompanied by their children and whispering prophecies that always sound closer to prayers than incantations. Indeed, the famous coven scene with its fabulous potion-brewing is sliced from the text; instead, Macbeth wanders through a field of ghostly soldiers, whose deaths haunt him throughout the film.

The substitution of the witch for the apparition is a crucial one. Shakespeare's supernatural solicitings get short shrift here, and this is nowhere more evident than in the characterisation of Lady Macbeth. It ought to be one of the very best roles in the entire canon, and the ever-impressive Marion Cotillard does what she can within the confines of the direction. But this is a wraithlike portrait of a grieving mother, not a guilt-ridden murderess, for whom the 'damned spot' is an infant's smallpox rather than a bloodstain. The raven himself is silent as Kurzel foolishly crops her stunning first soliloquy, a move symptomatic of the broader effacement women suffer in this film.

Visually, however, Macbeth is magnificent. The country's storm-tormented glens and verges are a topology of the play's bitter and hallucinatory psychology, forming an apt counterpoint to Macbeth's frenzied decline. Fury builds through the slow-motion scenes of slaughter, and an attention to the rituals of war: the application of paint, and the assembling of weapons. In his soldierly interpretation, Fassbender is an outstanding Macbeth. His readings are underplayed and natural, yet full of ire beneath a hardened countenance. The final scenes of grief-stricken madness are particularly powerful, as he prepares to fight again with the ashes of a fiery Dunsinane blowing through the battlements.

As a war film, and a study of men and power, Kurzel's adaptation is both well-acted and engrossing. But so much of the original play is framed by the plotting and prophesying of women, and the supernatural summons Cotillard's Lady Macbeth whispers in her bedroom ought really to be cackled from the ramparts.

Still Alice

Loss is something we all fear. Losing time; losing out to others; losing things or people we love. Being at a loss for words. Being simply at a loss. If modern experiences are defined very much in terms of accumulation -- of money, friends, tweets and retweets -- how does one go about living whilst operating at a deficit?

Still Alice is a film that attempts to answer this question. It takes a look at how people measure their lives in moments, which can slip away without warning. Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, who discovers at the age of fifty that she is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. For a woman whose vocation is language, semantics, the taxonomies of the mind, the looming prospect of a total mental disconnect is particularly appalling. What her neurologist calls her 'resourcefulness' in accounting for her memory deficiencies up until this point may even make her inevitable decline more rapid. Her ability to outwit herself must come to an abrupt end. 

As always, Julianne Moore is a luminous on-screen presence. She elevates what could have been a maudlin and sentimental study of mental illness into something that has a bit more weight. In the early scenes at the hospital, she deftly captures the attitude an intellectual like Alice adopts towards any kind of exam: a steely competitiveness fuelled by a desire to impress. Her realisation that this is not a test she can hope to pass is a moment of sickening finality. 

That is not to say that Still Alice is unbearably depressing. There is an undercurrent of quite dark humour that could have been better exploited. The occasions when Alice uses her Alzheimer's for the purposes of manipulation offer refreshing antidotes to the prevailing sense of deterioration. There are ways for a person who has lost so much to get back in the game. But the film quickly settles into a predictable and quite uninventive rhythm. It's not as hard to watch as it should be; nor is its emotional kick well earned. Everything feels far too sanitised: the glossy middle-class lifestyles; the nuclear family with the not very problematic 'problem' child; the milestones of crisis and catharsis. Perceptibly, we move away from the real horror and complexity of what is unfolding. Unless you count the very real horror of watching Kristen Stewart attempt a scene from Chekhov's Three Sisters. Someone, somewhere, must stop her.

It is highly likely that Moore will win an oscar for this performance, and it is absolutely impossible to begrudge her the success. She is one of the very best at what she does. Still Alice is not, however, up to the standard she sets. When the last word of a script is 'love,' you know the screenwriters have become lazy. A film committed to one woman's experience of loss should know better than to go for such easy victories.

The Theory of Everything

A new year; another biopic. After the disappointment of The Imitation Game, I was a bit worried that James Marsh's chronicle of the life of Stephen Hawking might fall into some of the same traps. Here is another study of a brilliant but troubled Cambridge academic, an awards-bait vehicle for its young male British star. But thankfully, that's where the similarities end. The Theory of Everything is a surprisingly wonderful take on Hawking's first marriage, a relationship extraordinary in its rarity yet all too painfully human.

This is a transformative moment for Eddie Redmayne, perhaps best known until now for his work in Les Misérables and My Week With Marilyn. He excels in the daunting task of playing the world-famous physicist, from his early days as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge to the later stages of his career, when his body had been ravaged by the effects of Motor Neurone Disease. It is his performance in this latter part of the film that is truly remarkable: anger, frustration, and sharp bursts of humour are rendered with the simple lift of an eyebrow, or the wry raising of a hand.

But this is not just Hawking's story; in many ways, it belongs here to his wife Jane, portrayed by Felicity Jones. Marsh's film tracks their relationship from its awkward inception at a university party (Cambridge has changed little in fifty years) to the marriage that finally cracked under its own unique strain. The early scenes, shot largely in the beautiful grounds of St John's college, are bathed in the glow of a youth that looked certain to be cut short. Hawking's crushing diagnosis handed him a two-year life expectancy, a prediction Jane staunchly refused to see as a death sentence.

It would have been easy for this film to go down the 'love is a cure' route. Yet it is a much better and more honest film for resisting it. Because love is also weak, and jealous, and has really bad days. If Redmayne is outstanding as a man essentially fighting against his own body, Jones is more than his equal as the wife who is both his partner and his carer. Her struggle for an identity of her own in this relationship is as much the film's concern as Hawking's odds-defying survival and illustrious career. Jones's performance is a masterful exercise in restraint; it hints at underlying despair yet is alive with courage.

Without resorting to sentimentality, Marsh's biopic weaves a narrative of ordinary joys and frailties from its exceptional subject matter. What finally emerges is a hope that the world in its infinite variety has space for countless ways of living, with the many kinds of happiness they might afford.

The Fall: Season 2

When a television series has a really excellent first run, it's always an anxious wait to see if the follow-up will repeat the success. Quite often, it cannot help but fall short. Homeland is one of the more high profile casualties of this sequel sickness. Once an example of how to make gripping, politically astute drama without resorting to cliche, it became lost in a mire of Dana-based plot lines and Clare Danes cry-face memes. 

The Fall is an interesting case study because it arrived in 2013 looking a lot like things we'd all seen before -- Silent Witness, Prime Suspect, The Killing -- and yet managed to do something new with the 'murder mystery' genre. It gave us our killer on a plate. Paul Spector, played by the unreasonably handsome Jamie Dornan, could not have been more unlikely (save, of course, his suspicious surname). Apparently devoted to his family, and highly respected as a grief counsellor (BBC does irony), he unleashed wells of sexual rage in a murder spree that lasted most of the first season. His targets, with one unplanned exception, were of a kind: young, attractive, female.

Following his traces throughout was D.S.I. Stella Gibson, a performance of icy composure from the magnificent Gillian Anderson. The psychology of Spector and Gibson's mutual obsession was the compelling centrepiece of a show tautly conceived and teasingly played out across five impeccable episodes. Both characters were evidently plagued by childhoods that remained (and still remain) only half-spoken. They also share a tendency to use their sexuality to manipulate others, each possessing an allure that disturbs and excites in equal measure. In another fictional set-up, theirs would be a love story, which, I'm sure, is the point.

Season 2 marks a change in pace and direction. The Belfast police now know that Spector is the killer, and most of the episodes revolve around his abduction of Rose Stagg (Valene Kane) and the subsequent rescue effort. Well, I say revolve, but one of the problems with this season is that it doesn't strictly revolve around anything. Side-plots sprawl from the main action in increasingly ludicrous number and content. Minor characters, whom we are led to believe are important, are introduced then hastily dropped. The dialogue veers between the mundane and the ridiculous. Fuseli's Nightmare becomes the focus of some pretty painful art history analysis. Oh, and Rose Stagg is all but forgotten for three whole episodes. I like to think abduction investigations are performed with a little more energy, particularly when the known culprit is taking a jog through the Botanic Gardens.

All this aside, The Fall could still have worked as a fairly entertaining and well-acted thriller. More difficult to swallow is its portrayal of women. I was initially ambivalent about criticisms of the show's gender politics. The first season was truly horrifying in its depiction of Spector's assaults on his defenceless victims, but it managed to serve a dramatic purpose without glamourising sexual violence. The second, however, shifts the balance perceptibly from representations of women as victims of masculine power, to the intricacies of feminine sexuality (these two issues are, of course, far from exclusive). It runs into problems because its approach to this topic is predictable and, at times, tasteless.

The first and worst example is Katy Benedetto (Aisling Franciosi), whose involvement in the whole affair is a travesty of storytelling. A teenager infatuated with Spector, she becomes increasingly embroiled in his twisted fantasies, first by offering herself to him, then by concocting alibis, briefly kidnapping his daughter, and breaking into his house. Whilst it is not impossible to believe that an otherwise apparently stable adolescent might conceivably risk so much for a man she thinks is a murderer, it is certainly difficult. It is made more difficult by the fact that the show's writers make little attempt to expose her motives, anxieties, or personal circumstances. There is also a highly disturbing scene in a hotel room where Spector ties her to the bed, a sequence the seedy hotel owner captures on his surveillance system. It is a scene overlaid with aggressive misogyny and male voyeurism, and Katy's apparent compliance, aside from being unbelievable, desperately needed to be further unpacked.

The other women, unfortunately, don't always fare much better. DC Gail McNally (Bronágh Taggart) is reduced to yet another one of Spector's fantasies, sent in to arrest him in his cell with her hair tumbling loosely over a thin blouse. Dr. Reed Smith, played by the wonderful Archie Panjabi, is seriously underused, save for a brief gay kiss with Gibson that has no purpose other than to titillate and ends in possibly the most cringe-worthy line of the season: 'I can't. I'm from Croydon.' Kalinda Sharma would never say that. And who knew sexuality was a postcode lottery? Even Gibson is rendered in more shallow terms this season. With some of the show's original urgency lost (Spector doesn't actually kill anyone this time), the glacial precision of Anderson's performance had less to counter, and sometimes meandered from the calm to the soporific.

This all sounds pretty damning, and I was disappointed by The Fall this time round. It ducks some of its responsibilities in terms of its treatment of gender and sexuality, and the plotting, at times, is nonsense. But given the strength of its opening season, my expectations were higher than usual, and it is still very watchable stuff. It just suffers from the maladies that so often afflict the follow-up. In an effort to recapture the old formula, shows sometimes get lost in manic methods of narration, and forget how to be curious about their characters. 

The Imitation Game

I had a discussion with my housemates the other night about what constitutes a biopic. Is it just the dramatising of a personal history, or does that person need a certain level of fame and historical proximity (or distance)? Is, for instance, The Social Network a biopic? Lawrence of Arabia? Andrei Rublev? All these films have deeply individualised narratives, and yet each reaches well beyond this remit to offer critiques of art, war, and modern technology.

These questions and definitions matter because The Imitation Game both is and is not about Alan Turing. It also seems unsure of just how much it wants to be about Alan Turing. I sense it would prefer to be about the Second World War, which offers a safe vantage point from which it can explore Turing's breaking of the Nazi Enigma Code. In fact, there is a moment where one of the coders frets about the comfort of their position compared to the soldiers risking their lives on the ground. Oddly, this film finds similar refuge in Bletchley Park, the setting it uses as a hiding place from its own subject.

Turing, played here with wonderfully emotive discomfort by Benedict Cumberbatch, is a man at once applauded and erased by history. He was a war hero who helped to shorten the conflict by approximately two years, and a criminal, chemically castrated on the orders of the British Justice system after his homosexuality was discovered. Morten Tyldum's film struggles to come to terms with the full ugliness of the latter. In a brief, galling postscript, viewers are reminded that Turing was granted a royal pardon in 2013: just one victim amongst 49,000 to receive an apology abhorrent in its inadequacy.

The man's hidden life is largely documented through flashbacks to his time at school, where he fell in love with a classmate, Christopher, whose name is immortalised in Turing's universal code-breaking machine. Aside from these brief childhood moments, Turing is emotionally constrained and socially impossible, grating on his colleagues with regular displays of apathy, arrogance, and contempt for their abilities. As the louche Hugh Alexander, Matthew Goode is a striking antidote to Cumberbatch's pained discomposure, whilst Keira Knightley is surprisingly restrained as Turing's sole companion, Joan Clarke. In a glib attempt at thematic unity, the film spells out the correlations between mathematic and social codes, as a young Turing admits that he does not understand why people never say what they mean. As an adult, he is puzzled by human interaction, finding solace in the cold logic of the machine.

The various strands of this history are too complex to be neatly tied together, which is unfortunately what this film attempts to do as it progresses. Particularly jarring is the repetition of its tagline: 'sometimes it's the people no one imagines anything of that do the things no one can imagine.' Horribly twee, it bizarrely ignores that fact that a prodigious Cambridge mathematics fellow is precisely the sort of person of whom you might expect brilliance. This line's tone reflects the dialogue as a whole: clunky, mawkish, and poorly considered. It's a shame because the acting is generally excellent, and there are glimpses of a better film amongst the softly-lit flashbacks and predictable set-pieces. The real problem is its half-hearted probing of the issues it raises. Where it can be saccharine and sentimental it lingers; where it uncovers real horror, it retreats.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I

'Part I': two words that chill me to the bone where any 'trilogy' is concerned. My mind makes a swift and painful return to the fateful first chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That dance. That kiss. With their eyes firmly on the profits, film studios are increasingly using adaptation as a means of turning reasonably structured texts into bloated cinematic non-sequitors. There was no need for the last Potter film to be cut in two; nor, I'm sure, was the world well served by yet another Twilight. I haven't seen it. I'll make the claim nonetheless.

So it was with trepidation that I approached this third instalment in the Hunger Games franchise. Its predecessors are slick, well-crafted additions to the teen adventure genre, and they successfully counteract the inevitable cliches with nuanced insights into the moral and political ambivalences of Suzanne Collins's dystopia. It also helps that Jennifer Lawrence is really very good in everything all the time. People often talk about teen heroes and heroines in fairly unimaginative terms: they are 'likeable' or 'sympathetic.' Katniss Everdeen is better than that: she is interesting, and complicated, and not always that nice.

Following a second brutal run in the sadistic reality show that is The Hunger Games, Katniss finds herself esconced in District Thirteen, a concealed military base preparing for revolution. She spends a while being quite stroppy, largely because her rescuers failed to save fellow volunteer Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the clutches of the Capitol. President Snow, played with malignant intensity by Donald Sutherland, delights in dangling Peeta in front of the rebels via a series of staged interviews, hosted by a dentally luminescent Stanley Tucci. This is the real thematic focus of the film: the relationship between media and power. Both sides embark upon elaborate propaganda campaigns, creating an uneasy symmetry between state and rebel force. Katniss is the reluctant face of a war fought with screens; a revolution that begins to look curiously like the teen adventure genre it finds itself in.

There is certainly a real seed of interest here in the way conflict is mediated by modern technology, and there are some provocative if unpalatable overlaps with contemporary footage from Syria, not to mention the recent report on torture practices in the C.I.A. But the film drags in places. Boy two in the obligatory love triangle, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), is once again trapped in a personality-free zone. His generic 'pained' expression does not vary -- perhaps he had heartburn all through shooting? This is annoyingly at the expense of other characters: the fascinatingly tattooed filmmaker Cressida (Natalie Dormer) and the always entertaining will-they-won't-they pair, Effie (Elizabeth Banks) and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson). The film is dedicated to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who resumes the role of Plutarch Heavensbee with a performance that showcases his usual combination of gritty charm and integrity. 

It is no surprise that this third instalment feels like a disjointed accompaniment to its predecessors. Without the rapid but formulaic pace of things in the arena, director Francis Lawrence has to really delve into the story's knotty ethics, with the odd explosion thrown in for good measure. The result is good but not great; an unsettling and uncertain half-of-a-film.