Drive

There is a curiosity at the centre of Drive. The main character, the protagonist, ably played by Ryan Gosling is never referred to by name throughout the film. He’s listed as Driver on the end credits. It’s as if he’s almost a non-person, certainly not a fully rounded character. This is not helped by him hardly saying a word and even showing any emotion on his face during the first half of the film. It’s as if he’s an unemotive Gary Cooper, making sure that he gets the job done.


We see him acting as a getaway driver in a heist where acting without emotion and taking cold logical decisions is a distinct advantage. Especially when avoiding police cars and helicopters. His lack of character makes it very easy for him to melt into the background when he delivers the criminals to safety and he disappears into a crowd.

After this escapade we see him work as a Hollywood stunt driver on film set. He executes a roll in a car and does this in an efficient manner, doing exactly what was asked of him. He shows great restraint when performing these tasks and employs a steely, decisive persona to ensure that he makes his choices in an unemotive and logical manner, as every driver should do.

Driving and cars seems to be his life. He has another job working as a mechanic. We don’t see him take part in any recreational activity, his apartment seems pretty bare. Things change though when he meets a woman who lives down the hall from him with her son. It soon becomes apparent that she’s waiting for her husband to be released from prison, which really limits their relationship. The connection with the woman and her son, however tenuous, leads him to make different choices and to act in a different way. This may be the nub of the piece, but it would be sad if the moral was; beware of emotional attachments, they’ll bring you down.

His problem with emotion, as it were, may be emblematic of him not being a fully rounded character. It may be as well that he ends up fulfilling the role of The Man With no Name, as if he’s driven to take up this role. The irony being that he’s called the Driver, but he loses control of where’s he going, what he does and therefore what happens to him. That’s life though, I suppose, that’s what eventually leads him towards the road to becoming a fully rounded character. Although he does end performing incredibly violent acts as well, and I do mean incredibly.

Hotel

Deep in the woods, in Austria, is the Waldhaus hotel where Irene starts a job as a receptionist. She soon discovers that the girl she replaced, Eva, has disappeared. She finds Eva’s glasses in her room and after hers are broken she begins to wear them. Around her a number of unsettling events take place; on occasion it’s like when you see something out of the corner of your eye.


This film owes a lot to what has come before; there are references to Little Red Riding Hood and Alice in Wonderland. There are nods as well to Twin Peaks at times as well. It is a film that reveals clues and secrets that gradually fall into place throughout the piece. There are a number of symbols as well; doors, crosses, alarms and darkness.

There is as well a brooding malcontent in the hotel. No one seems to get along, which is evident right from the beginning. This may be due to the disappearance of Eva which would have left a pall over everyone. Poor Irene is parachuted into the middle of all of this and works hard to fit in. She tries this making friends and going to a club. This doesn’t save her from a general sense of isolation, in the hotel and in the woods.

I love the way this film slowly reveals what has happened and in a way what will happen as well. It is a story of great stillness, there is a lot said in looks and glances. It is an ambitious film in the way it deals with narrative, in that it doesn’t rely on dialogue to tell the majority of the story, it relies on the visuals. It also reminds you that if you go down to the woods today…

The 400 Blows

This beautiful film explores the fortunes of Antoine, a schoolboy in late fifties Paris. He lives with his parents in an apartment and sleeps on a camp bed in the kitchen, every night he has to deal with the dustbin before getting into his bed. It soon transpires that all is not as it seems when his father complains about his behaviour and goes on to say about he gave him a home and his name. For this and a number of other reasons Antoine slips into truancy from school.


He would like to leave school and to learn a trade, but his mother sees the benefit of an education and offers Antoine 1000 francs if he does well in writing a composition, as she recognises the value of French more than that of Algebra or Science. Unfortunately Antoine’s zeal causes him to plagiarise Balzac which leads to him eventually being expelled from the school.

This film was one of the first of the new wave, one of those directly reacting against le cine de papa. It shows Paris as a depressed city finding its feet after the Second World War. Overall the film is a plea for freedom from the constraints of society that turn poor Antoine into truant from school and then into a criminal.

I love the brutal honesty of this film. It does not flinch from telling and exposing truths and reaching natural conclusions without sentimentality. As I’ve said before this was a pioneering film, a film that showed how life was then. It was about real people encountering real issues. It is also quite interesting to see the directors that were influenced by this and how it shaped film to this day.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

A remarkable achievement, this film beautifully explores the ins and outs of a hideous occurrence and thoroughly looks at who was responsible for what actions. The story is about the upbringing of the eponymous Kevin and how this leads to his zenith and nadir. Tilda Swinton is glorious in the role of his mother Eva. For most of the film we see her solitude and the pain on her face and behind her eyes.

Plaudits also need to go to the actors who play Kevin; Ezra Miller, Jasper Miller and Rock Duer. They give performances at such young ages which portray such beautiful menace and transform themselves into such a hideous creature. Lynne Ramsay’s direction encourages her actors to reveal their vulnerabilities. She also shows great skill in adapting unsettling texts to the screen, as she showed before with Morvern Callar. Also, I’m sure that this is the only film that credits a Guinea Pig Costume Designer, unless someone can contradict me of this.

The story is one of nature versus nurture, the answer sensibly lies somewhere in between of course. The film also questions maternal loyalties and how far they could and should stretch. The trouble is that it’s not really until something majorly hideous happens that all the cards stack up and that the real nature of Kevin is known. I suppose that the story is about Eva’s hindsight as she searches for clues in his upbringing and her interaction with him to see how she could have changed things. She also recognises and takes responsibility for her son’s actions and we know very early on that his fate changing actions effected the fates of all those around him and not just his.

Wuthering Heights

This is not really an easy film to watch. Time needs to be invested to tune into to what’s happening before your eyes. Andrea Arnold utilises her naturalistic style to tell this classic tale. It is said that the mark of a great film director is that you can watch a random portion of one of their films and know by the style and feel who has directed it. This is certainly true here as you can see the technique she’s honed making Wasp, Red Road and Fish Tank.

In making the character Heathcliffe black as well has given something new to this well-known story of obsessional love and the filthiest of tempers. This is partially explained by Heathcliffe’s ethnicity and the reaction and racism to this that shapes his character. These reasons, as well as a bleak and inhospitable landscape, would make most people look at life in the least optimistic of ways.

His is the tale of an immigrant taken in by one who shows him kindness, but who insists on Heathcliffe’s baptism, which he resists. As is a recurrent theme the benefactor dies leaving Heathcliffe adrift and at the mercies of those less tolerant people who inherited the house. This gives Heathcliffe and entrepreneurial spirit, which enables him to succeed in the future.

I love the way Arnold as well portrayed the young Heathcliffe and Cathy. They show their touching playfulness by playing and rolling together in the mud and scratching their names on the walls. When they didn’t have a care in the world they were able to express their true emotions to one another before the realities of the grown up world impinged on them.

In contrast to most costume dramas Arnold’s vision has little or no music; there are no great speeches in the film. There is just an intensity of character and the actions of the characters being portrayed in a naturalistic manner. We are not given the normal clues of how we should feel about the events; we have to work it out for ourselves, which makes the rewards greater at the end of it all.

The Rum Diary

Hunter S. Thompson was known, through his work and the adaptations of these, for the consumption of many substances and for the glorious description of the effect they had on him. This film doesn’t stray too far from this position. It tells the story of the journalist Paul Kemp played by Johnny Depp. He finds a job working for a newspaper in Puerto Rico in 1960 and meets the editor who wears an outrageous toupee that no one is to refer to. He rumbles Kemp, almost immediately, as an alcoholic and as a novelist who is slumming it as a journalist until he’s published. He doesn’t really say which is worse.

Kemp is befriended by two people when he starts at the newspaper. There’s Sal who recognises Kemp as a man who appreciates a drink as much as he does. He also keeps a fighting cockerel with which he supplements his income. The other befriender is a property developer who is looking for someone to write a brochure about the development he is planning on the island. He has a very friendly girlfriend who Kemp falls for and spends most of the film coveting.

One of the joys of this film is the details in the characterisation. There is also a Swedish religious correspondent on the newspaper who introduces Sal and Kemp to an hallucinogenic drug in return for $50 and a check-up to see if he has the clap. Kemp tells him he has a standing ovation. The Swede also has a liking for recordings of Adolf Hitler as well.

In this story Kemp, really Thompson drinks a lot and is chemically enhanced. The director Bruce Robinson said that you can play a drinking game with Withnail and I, but this film will kill you if you try that. The real story in this film is that the bastards are identified and that an antidote to them is identified as ink. This is the beginning of his crusade of writing about them and exposing them.

I like this film, it is sentimental but its heart is in the right place. Sal and Kemp get up to antics in Fiat Cinquecento that sometimes seem like they may have been influenced by Last of the Summer Wine. Albeit the episodes where they drank industrial amounts of alcohol including some incredibly flammable spirits. They do it though in a far more likeable manner, and boy, could Hunter S. Thompson tell a story.

The Ides of March

There is no great surprise that George Clooney has made a political thriller. With a title like the Ides of March we know from the outset that all is not right here. Throughout the film we’re introduced to different presidential influences the most obvious being Obama and the usage of the primary colours poster design used to great effect in 2008. There is also the spectre of Clinton’s peccadillos here as well.


The film tells the story of a Democratic Primary in Ohio, there are two men in the running and both of their teams believe that they can win. We are mainly concerned with Governor Morris’s (Clooney) team and the meeting of the head of media strategy (Ryan Gosling) with a much younger intern (Evan Rachael Wood). They begin a sexual relationship during which he discovers that the intern has slept with the governor and that she is now pregnant. Furthermore the team of the other candidate make overtures to Morris’s media director.

The film more than ably explores the nature of political allegiance and how this is based as much on trust as is it on like-minded individuals forming groupings together. It is as well quite a cynical outlook on the American political system. At times I was reminded of the film True Colors at times which was a portrayal of how much the lure of power can seduce and corrupt. Clooney as well has assembled a magnificent cast, to have Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti together in the same film is a treat indeed. The biggest treat though is witnessing a production that forms part of what could be a zenith of many years defining the grand career of George Clooney.