The Fugue

A Late Quartet – Yaron Zilberman

Do women marry for passion? Do men? Any simplistic, generalised answer will of course be wrong and do a disservice to the complexity of our emotional relationships with one another: will fail to recognise the uniqueness of each marriage and the bond at its heart.

I guess the natural, and right, riposte is that in our culture both men and women marry for love. But this only serves to re-state the question in a deeper form: what is the relationship between love and passion: between love and desire? Whatever your instinctive or life-driven responses to these questions I think we can agree they are interesting, serious questions, for serious people to contemplate.

A Late Quartet is a film for grown-ups. At its heart is the fundamental question above but placed within the ebb and flow of deep, subtle long-standing interlocking relationships of loving friendship, parenthood and yes, inevitably, desire. Rare enough for a Hollywood film but especially welcome precisely for that reason.

At the emotional, even spiritual core of Quartet is a love its four protagonists share: a life-long, life-enhancing passion for understanding, exploring and performing music – with others. This passion is an implacable mistress: demanding as much, perhaps more, love, sacrifice and unqualified commitment as marriage itself.

This beautiful, quietly understated film is a fugue: musically, emotionally and literally as the internationally successful musical Quartet which is its dramatic context is called The Fugue. It explores the contrasts and contradictions of the personal relationships within the group with the same rigour as they in turn musically express the contrapuntal, counterpoint flow of the great music they play: devoted as much to it, as to each other.

Peter (Christopher Walken – Cello), Juliet (Catherine Keener – viola), Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman – 2nd violin) and Daniel (Mark Ivanir – 1st violin) have been performing around the world for 25 years. Peter, slightly older than the other three, first formed the group and is its unifying ‘father-figure’. He is slowly recovering from the loss of his much-loved wife Miriam and as the group begin to discuss their return to the international stage, Peter is dealt a further devastating blow when a slight trembling in his hands is diagnosed as the very early stages of Parkinson’s disease. We share the tension and the anxiety of the diagnosis and his difficult journey of acceptance. We feel and understand his dilemma as to how he might preserve the Quartet that he created and has devoted his life to, when soon he will no longer be able to form a part of it.

Juliette and Robert are married with a feisty, grown up daughter Alex (Imogen Poots – violin). Alex is herself a talented musician with a rebellious, passionate nature and when she takes one-to-one master classes with the obsessively precise and technically rigorous Daniel she mocks and teases him for his controlling, emotionally repressed approach to his life, to her, and by implication – to his music.

In her passionate impulsiveness we see that Alex feels a closer affinity to Robert than her more restrained, inward, mother Juliette. Hoffman’s bluff emotionally volatile character contrasts so clearly with Juliette’s control they arouse the thought, often posed by couples of one’s personal acquaintance, that they seem an unlikely partnership. We usually rationalize this as the attraction of opposites.

Robert and Juliette have a clear unity of purpose as professional musicians and an easy intimacy as parents trying to present a unified front to a talented, rebellious daughter, now an independent young woman making her own decisions and her own mistakes. This is a long-standing marriage that clearly embraces a deep friendship and unifying force of shared parenthood but in common with many, perhaps most, such long-standing relationships a sense of custom and habit about its sexuality.

Zilberman’s sensitive direction and writing defuses our sigh at the cliché of Robert’s developing affair with the beautiful, talented, inevitably younger, dancer (Flamenco no less) Pilar. However, not only is their attraction mediated by a credible shared, instinctive love of passionate music but when recriminations and betrayal eventually meet in the explosion of discovery, we have seen enough of Juliette to feel there is some truth in Robert’s accusation of her detachment and physical distance that had become embedded in their relationship – within or without sex.

Long-standing relationships married or not, are all about subtext: those submerged emotional hazards which by tacit agreement partners navigate around in a subtle conspiracy of benign denial. Perhaps. Whether the inevitable give and take, forgive and forget, irritation or frustration have reached a critical mass in a relationship, especially when measured against the security and stability of family, parenthood and friendship – is the critical question. This is a real life dilemma resolved, if at all, not by analysis, but by decision, by choice. And none of us know in advance whether we will be able to live by the choice we make. With regard to Juliette and Robert, Zilberman wisely leaves us to decide.

These are deep enough questions on their own but the great strength of Quartet is that Zilberman has super-imposed the matrix of musical passion and commitment over the personal, emotional interactions which both link and conflict with it. Robert has always felt some frustration at being forever consigned to 2nd violin to Daniel’s 1st. Technically it is argued that these are equal but different roles; each with its unique demands and when understood this way Daniel is the better 1st and Robert the better 2nd violin. But inevitably the language of 1st and 2nd belies this and it is clear that Robert has always felt that Daniel and perhaps Juliette and Peter as well think of Daniel as the better player.

Robert in turn feels Daniel’s clinical, obsessive technical perfectionism betrays a fear of allowing passion and feeling into his playing to the detriment of the fullest expression of the music. In a beautifully presaged dramatic moment later, Robert’s frustration and suppressed anger is safely defused by being expressed as a challenge to Daniel’s refusal ever to take the risk of performing without music. This all resonates with extraordinary emotional power when we find that Robert has always believed that Juliette’s sexual passion, her unrestrained, beyond control, physical self has always been secretly aroused by Daniel, not by him. One can see how such a thought would fester given that he, who loves her, can respond instinctively to her passion, wants more than anything to do so, and yet is precisely denied it in favour of a man too controlled and repressed to accept it.

When passion skips a generation and Alex, with her father’s instincts for risk-taking and her mother’s depth of feeling, breaks through Daniel’s life-long reserve things get tangled with the same perplexity, muddle and emotional upheaval redolent of real life – especially of talented, passionate, complicated people confronted by the inexorable passage of time.

Quartet is mercifully free of victimhood. Even Peter’s quietly courageous response portrayed by a superbly modulated performance by Christopher Walken, is without self-pity or metaphysical recrimination. Each of the others too are where they are because of who they are and what they have made of their essential natures and their talent. You may disagree but I find myself feeling more sympathy for the choices each character makes rather than judgmental criticism of their weaknesses or even betrayals. Juliette sits at the heart of all this and while in conventional terms we may see her as more sinned against than sinning it is tempting to feel that from Peter she gets safety and loving fatherly comfort and from Robert friendship and the deep satisfaction of shared parenthood. And perhaps the frightening possibilities of passion, being out of control, enters her life in the only way she can accommodate it – as a memory – cherished but not forgotten. We may hope to satisfy all our needs in a single other but Juliette didn’t. Perhaps we can’t.

Quartet is full of the small domestic tragedies of life, love and relationships: the happiness and joy, sadness and pain of what it is to love and be loved in a world where an enduring passion, overwhelming all else, even the personal – the love of music – provides the one unbreakable thread that draws one’s life together. As a non-musician I can only envy that certainty and stability of purpose.

This is a wonderfully rich fugue of a film in which the emotional and musical threads are woven into what for me is an absorbing, touching, challenging and unusually satisfying film rather breezily dismissed by some critical response.

Regarding the emotional spectrum I envisaged above; women may perhaps be far too sensible and wise to follow passion alone. Mere Biology suggests that the inevitable vulnerability of 9 months pregnancy then the total dependence of babies which then changes but doesn’t disappear with children, imposes an inescapable and perhaps asymmetric necessity upon women that men, to varying degrees and never justifiably, can evade. Men are the hopeless romantics allowing themselves the indulgence of believing love will conquer all. Women, it seems to this mere male (and that isn’t mock modesty) are far too sensible not to know better. Because they have to.

Quartet is for me a great little film: sensitively written and directed; and beautifully played. It’s ending is deeply moving as much for the questions it leaves unanswered as anything else. Not least the conundrum of whether Juliette loved Robert when she married him – but didn’t desire him.

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Highbrow eyebrows

Star Trek  Into Darkness – J J Abrams

Eyebrows boldly going where no eyebrows have been before. Deliciously the Latin for eyebrows is supercilia: and there is much superciliasness in STID. Chris Pine’s young Jimbo Kirk sports Healeyesque bushy beetle brackets in an archly arcing style of bifurcated unibrow. Spock’s (Zachary Quinto) perfectly plucked linear pair are inclined at a jaunty angle to give him a look of permanent surprise as if he can’t believe the 3 Stooges helmet haircut he has been lumbered with when he had asked for – ‘just a trim’ please. Not since Javier Bardem’s pudding basin cut…..

As befits an arch-villain, the Bene Cu-Cumberbatch eye-thatches occasionally shoot up on either side like a couple of inverted ? signs ending with a villainous ‘v’ that Cu-Cumber can unilaterally raise and lower depending upon the dramatic need of the moment. The so cool Mr Cumber plays a rogue Star Fleet agent masquerading as one John Harrison until unmasked as the villainous Khan: a super-being with super powers (including super control of his cilia characteristics).

STID contains some of the great eyebrow-actors of this generation. However these mere human beings are eventually eclipsed superciliasly by Klingon fleshy furrows. Cumberbatch has a ball as the malevolent Khan (Can we take over the world? – yes we Khan). Often mouthing some sublimely silly words, I swear the elegantly suave Mr C was on the edge of an uncontrollable fit of the giggles throughout – but we share in his diabolical fun and the sense of tense expectancy that generates.

Mockery aside, STID is all good clean end-of-the-Universe-life-as-we-know-it fun with a breathless, breakneck opening sequence in which we meet one of the stars of Abrams’ movie – a fantastically dramatic score by Michael Giacchino. Like some of John Williams’ best, Giacchino builds to heart-rattling crescendos that superbly enhance the now de rigeur magnificent visual and special effects created by a group of talented people only marginally outnumbering the population of New York.

Add in stunts, Art Direction etc and there are small states in the world with fewer people. The mere 3 writers who fashioned the meaning, sense and dramatic purpose of the narrative which in the end is what makes us want to keep watching and care what happens next, aren’t so much outnumbered as obliterated. There is nothing new in this: but Abrams’ ‘rejuvenation’ is of the Star Trek franchise, not the Star Trek imaginative legacy. We accepted the farcically cheap props and hilariously phoney sets of the original TV series without a moment’s demur because of the power of Gene Roddenberry’s imaginative ability to engage our minds and emotions in the adventures and fate of his faintly ludicrous characters. The Star Trek TV series was intelligent, creative fun, stirring the active imaginations of its loyal viewers in contrast to Abrams’ literal, visual and aural onslaught on our perceptions.

Rodenberry invited us to a great party with lots of fascinating people engaged in intelligent, interesting conversations to listen in to. Abrams’ has charged admission to a rave where the music is so relentlessly loud that no one can hear a word anyone else says so we give up and just abandon ourselves to the beat. It’s fun. It’s a trip. It overwhelms the senses and dulls the mind. And it suffers, like all its effects-driven, comic-book competitors from the law of diminishing returns. The opening half hour grabs us and launches us into a stunning sense of travelling in space; embarking on a adventure. The dialogue, despite its distinctive Star Trek irony and self-mockery, keeps dragging us literally back to Earth and reducing the exhilarating pace to a disappointing plod. Even an actor of Cumberbatch’s ability can’t do much with “I’m going to walk over your cold, dead corpses.” C’mon, I know evil is supposed to be banal but perleaassse.

Following the traditional Spock/Kirk trope of human passions versus detached logic, Kirk saves Spock’s life and a whole planet of a primitive people but breaks a Starfleet rule of exploration by revealing the presence of the Enterprise. He is demoted when Spock’s snitchily accurate report reveals the breach. Before he can head off as 1st Officer to his mentor Commander Pike (Bruce Greenwood) a cleverly planned assault on the gathered heads of Starfleet introduces us to Cumberbatch’s be-cloaked rogue secret Starfleet agent we first know as John Harrison, but soon to be revealed as super-villain, or is he (?) Khan.

Following this attack, Khan flees to hide on the Klingon home planet of Kronos where Starfleet cannot pursue him on pain of provoking a war with the ever-belligerent warrior enemies of Earth. Kirk, re-instated as Captain of the Enterprise and reconciled with Spock, is charged with taking out Kahn’s hideaway in what amounts to a high-tech drone attack – the first of many contemporary ironies, perhaps unwitting, in Abrams’ movie. Kahn has deviously subverted this plan and for a while persuades Kirk to enlist his aid in thwarting an unexpected internal plot.

Much eyebrow arching, beetling, furrowing later, with the quaintly comic assistance of Simon Pegg’s irascible Scotty and a lot of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook, Abrams recaptures the visceral excitement and headlong pace of his opening. In a less-than-heart-stopping moment we wonder whether Jimbo is gonna do a Judi Dench and give up Q-ing for all eternity. A profound dilemma: an end of franchise, end of cash-cow denouement…or not? As the Americans say – you do the Math.

STID, despite its silly moments is great fun; especially if you don’t know or care about the thin vein of imaginative gold that was Roddenberry’s brainchild. It is hard to believe now that when first seen on TV, Star Trek wasn’t regarded as campy parody. Indeed when I was doing Philosophy at Kings in London in the seventies a post-graduate from Berkeley in California said that Star Trek episodes were occasionally used to set up (for context, not content) Philosophical discussions about Personal Identity, Telepathy, Time, even ethics.

I’m not sure how much juice there is left in the franchise which begins to look as dried out, wrinkled and on the edge of oblivion as dear old Leonard Nimoy reprising his role as a kind of holographic Methusala intoning the eternal injunction that he may not help his Spockling younger self in any way that might alter events in the world: an ethical principle so absolute that it takes him about 10 seconds after stating it to break.

Just two nice little ironies: I wonder how many Americans identify with Kirk’s acceptance of Spock’s ethical demand that Kahn must not be taken out as he, villain or not, must be accorded the right of due process and a proper trial. Yeah – pull the other one pointy ears.

The other one is visually sublime and makes me wonder whether Costume Designer Michael Kaplan is a closet anarchist. During the obligatory patriotic platitudes delivered by a chastened Kirk, matured by the humbling necessities of command and leadership to the assembled serried uniformed ranks of Star Fleet, the camera tracks along the lines of fresh faced idealists. There is something unsettlingly, oddly familiar in the images. I am no expert in these things but it suddenly struck me that in their uniform, uniformed chilling homogeneneity these patriotic paragons of virtue and the American way, looked for all the world as if they were clad in the chic khaki hessian of the North Korean military.

Now that’s what I call irony.

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Apprentices - Class of 2013

The Apprentice (1) – Mission (sadly) Possible

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to scour the land to find: irreducible egotists with a delusional conviction of their superior abilities and talent, devoid of any objective evidence to justify it and which is disproved by every self-aggrandising word that escapes their lips.

It is essential that you select individuals so manically self-obsessed that they are congenitally incapable of productive cooperation or any kind of shared enterprise teamwork.

They should be willing to sacrifice any independence of thought or personal ethics or honour to the overwhelming priorities defined by the producers of this sedulously promoted media product: the highly profitable world-wide franchise known as The Apprentice.

Women should be comfortable as Boardroom eye-candy, vindictive and either openly or better still, passively, aggressive to anyone threatening their ludicrously inflated conception of themselves, especially other female contestants.

The men should be intelligent, shrewd and unremittingly stupid in practical, common sense activities. Men and women should be oblivious to their own limitations or weaknesses and immediately employ their intelligent articulacy to avoid personal responsibility for anything that goes wrong with a passionate commitment to blaming someone else for their own deficiencies and mistakes.” Cowardice rocks.

This nasty, vindictive, mean-spirited farce will, as ever, be presided over by its Hobbesian (nasty, brutish and short) Chairman Alan ‘Call-me-Lord’ Sugar. His sycophantic side-kicks Karen Brady and Nick Hewer will deliver, as ever, post hoc, ad hoc business nostrums of banal obviousness that will suck up to what they know to be the Lugar’s uncompromising prejudices – about women, about intelligence and about dissent, however intelligent and soundly argued: Lugarian FIFO Management – Fit In or F*ck Off.

Yes folks the schadenfruede show returns for another disreputable season: dedicated to the proposition that customers are fair-game mugs to be conned into paying over-the-odds for crap goods and services inflated by hubristic, cynical, aggressive selling. The ‘make-money-at-all-costs’ Lugarian business philosophy is a perfect match with venal bankers and equally self-serving politicians who have kept them in place, in charge, and free of the shamed conviction for criminality they justly deserve.

I have had a bit of fun in the past taking the well-deserved piss out this demeaning, ethically bankrupt, bitchy (and that’s just the men), media product. But in a world where criminal bankers go unpunished; incompetent politicians are promoted rather than sacked for their culpable failures; and businessmen can effectively ‘buy’ peerages and undeserved recognition – the joke now falls flat. Because: real people are struggling to raise families and make ends meet. A strong, healthy economy founded upon honest, ethical, honourable fair profit for quality goods and services needs commitment and articulation to bring about. In these circumstances, the Lugarian business philosophy of buy-it-cheap, flog-it-dear creates precisely the kind of toxic business and ethical climate that corrupts intelligent young people, like the current batch of Apprentices, into selfish, self-obsessed, greed-driven behaviour that will not sustain the planet and certainly not a healthy, honestly conducted economy.

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The Place Behind The Pines – David Cianfrance

The paradoxes of cool. If you think you are – you aren’t. If you try to be – you won’t be. Worst of all: if everyone tells you are and you believe them – you never could or will be. Cool is impossible to define: partly because it is culturally relative and changes with time and context.

Ryan Gosling, for me, isn’t cool for most of the reasons above. Not only is he, in recent movies, especially Drive and The Ides of March, directed to be cool; but he tries so hard to live up to this image that his, over-praised performance here is for me arch, and frankly a bit ‘posey’. Gosling’s ‘cool’ is all style – no substance. His motor-cycling, free-wheeling Luke seems laconic more because he’s pretty thick and has nothing interesting to say than self-contained with an inner strength that needs no one else to sustain it. There simply isn’t anything going on behind the eyes: even less than ‘Driver’ in his other ‘Mr Cool movie’ – Drive. Poor old Ryan isn’t much helped by the conceit of the assumption that his sheer magnetism can overcome risible tattoos and at one point what look like a pair of remaindered M&S JimJams.

Does it matter? Who cares if he’s ‘cool’ or not? All a bit esoteric isn’t it? Well no I’m afraid. All the publicity and the whole tone and feel of the movie, is trying so hard to be stylish and detached; resonant and atmospheric, that when it fails in that – there is nothing of substance left to lean on. Sparse, elliptical dialogue has become a self-indulgent aesthetic cliché of modern Hollywood thrillers. This has one of two equally damaging possible consequences – either the plot is totally incomprehensible like say A Good Day to Die Hard or the execrable Paperboy; or as here, the characters remain flat, uninteresting and unconvincing.

Luke is a County Fair wall-of-death cage-rider. When his passing-through, once-a-year, one-night-stand Romina’s (Eva Mendes) mother tells him that Romina’s son Jason, is Luke’s, our much-tattooed anti-hero gets all paternal in a grotesque misunderstanding of what fatherhood might demand of him. First he beats the sh*t out of the good guy who is looking after Romina and Jason for the other 364 days of the year. Then the need to provide for his son and annual lay inspires him to rob banks with an equally dimwit pal using a methodology as dumb as it is simple. Roll up on his motorbike, park it near the door, jump up on a counter shouting a lot (in an oddly unconvincing squeaky voice by the way) and waving a gun, then pick up the bike and zip off to disappear into the back of a truck super-brain 2 has parked nearby.

With no planning, no variation, and surprise up the Swanee after the first couple of times, this monumentally stupid strategy inevitably ends up in him getting caught and trapped by Bradley Cooper’s ambitious beat cop Avery. Cianfrance’s tilt at tragedy here collapses under its own banality.

In the shoot out Avery’s injury makes him a hero which his corrupt fellow officers, led by Deluca (Ray Liotta) turn to their advantage, sucking him in to their felonious ways.

Then in a much-discussed chronological jump-cut we revisit the narrative 15 years later. Avery is now a local DA and running for Attorney General with an estranged wife (Rose Byrne) and obnoxious teenage son AJ (Emory Cohen). Going for an almost Shakespearean ironic fatalism, Cianfrance’s narrative simply rests on a startling coincidence that would make even our illustrious Bard embarrassed. In a sins-of-the-father denouement Cianfrance, like many current Hollywood directors tries to use image, style and tone to substitute for believable characterisation and narrative conviction.

This is where the issue of cool comes in. Steve McQueen once remarked that a man should feel as much as possible and show as little as possible. Whatever one thinks of this as real-life advice; it certainly evokes the existential detachment and impregnable self-assurance and confidence of ‘cool’. Like that other irreducibly self-consciously cool current actor Denzel Washington; Gosling’s fails because he is using tropes and mannerisms looking 10-20 years out of date. A bit of Newman here; a touch of Eastwood there; and God help us, a little touch of Ryan O’Neal (who never was cool anyway), doesn’t play in 2013. Much of the fault here lies with Cianfrance: Emory Cohen’s youthful sub-Brando AJ is embarrassing and the ludicrous druggy argot he shares with the much better Jason (Dane Dehaan), just sounds like it exists solely on planet Hollywood.

These are people we don’t really believe in enough to care about; placed in interesting but palpably contrived circumstances; whose fate is supposed to evoke a sense of tragedy and inescapable destiny that their shallow characterisation cannot remotely sustain.

As ever nowadays in Hollywood – the technical skills of cinematography, powerful editing, evocative soundtrack etc offer much to admire: but equally predictable, the sheer superficiality of writing and concentration on the gloss of style and tone, cool if you will – proves to be an inadequate substitute for genuine substance and characterisation.

Very disappointing.

If you want to see the timelessness of cinematic cool and charismatic performance in a thriller setting, catch up with the re-release of John Boorman’s Point Blank. Nearly 40 years old but still powerful and evocative.

Now that is cool.

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Rosario Dawson - Trance

Trance – Danny Boyle

Not all banknotes can be forgeries. A forgery can only be passed off as real against the background of a viable currency which requires that most notes in circulation are genuine.

Much the same logical limitation applies to the central dramatic device that lies at the heart of the twisty plot that both intrigues and at times irritates us in this high-concept psychological thriller from Danny Boyle. This involves ambiguously false memories and unreliable recollections. Simon, (James McAvoy) is an Art auctioneer at an up-market Sotheby-cum-Christies. In a neatly sparse pre-titles opening sequence which Simon narrates, the sophistication of modern security systems over the good old, blag old days sets up the heist to come. It soon becomes clear that the target is a Goya retailing at a cool 25 million quid: no discounts, nectar points or BOGOF’s available.

The supposedly infallible security procedure which is pretty laughably unconvincing by the way, breaks down and a gang of four led by Vincent Cassel’s Franck, with apparently consummate ease, prevent Simon from posting the Goya down a security shute. Franck whacks Simon into a coma in the process only to have his crest badly fallen when the stolen piece proves to be merely a frame – sans canvas, sans paint, sans Goya.

These early scenes are pacy, tense and intriguing; leaving us engagingly uncertain of who is doing what and why. When Franck and his Chummys find they have in a manner of speaking, been framed, suspicion naturally falls on Simon who was the only person to touch the painting from the moment the heist began.

So far so not-too-bad; but pretty standard fare until we find that apparently Simon’s regained consciousness includes no knowledge or memory of the robbery or indeed of what happened to the painting.

When the gang’s radical manicure involving the removal of nails with a pair of pliers fails to persuade Simon to come clean – about the painting, not his nails – Franck is forced to accept that his amnesia is genuine; thus posing a rather different challenge, the solution to which needs something more subtle than a pair of pliers.

Cue sexy hypnotherapist Dr Elizabeth Lamb operating at the dodgy end of Harley Street. Acting on the ludicrous premise of consulting a Harley street specialist to find his lost car keys; with the gang listening in through a body wire, Doctor Liz tries to unlock Simon’s mind to find out where the Goya’s gone.

So Act I’s pretty good: we don’t know quite what’s really going on or the nature of the relationships leading up to the heist. But Joe Ahearne and John Hodge’s screenplay then starts playing fast and loose with actual events, falsely remembered elements and hypnotically-suggested sequences. We seem to be surrounded by what we might, by analogy call – loads of duff banknotes. The trouble with devices like unreliable narrators, false memories and hypnotically induced illusions is that the over-use of the device sacrifices the great fun of being willingly persuaded to believe something that isn’t true; for the impatient distrust of everything and everyone.

It is true that Boyle manages to extract an absorbing visual tone from these accumulating ambiguities and mis-directions but while atmosphere and tone can enhance our appreciation of a coherent narrative, it is no substitute for one.

Rosario Dawson’s erotically charged performance as Dr Liz is very watchable especially as here too we find that not everyone is what they seem. But both the sex and violence in this middle section seem to be grafted on rather than flowing naturally from the established characters. In fact it is another unsatisfactory consequence of the unreliable narrative that we never quite get to identify, for or against, with any of the characters.

Act III for all its style, atmosphere and occasional tension unwinds into a twist ending the force of which has been undermined in exactly the same way and for the same reasons. It would be very hard, post hoc, to describe what really happened in a way that would make any coherent sense from any of what we eventually discover are the ‘real’ characters and actions in the film.

That said: I enjoyed Trance. Part of the fun of the Thriller, Mystery genre is being persuaded and misled into finally being delightedly surprised; but in the end there is a world of difference between being cleverly encouraged to draw the wrong conclusions and simply being conned by false images and events.

Performance-wise Dawson is marvelously languidly lustful; and McAvoy never very convincing for me, has at least greatly improved from the ludicrous Welcome to the Punch. Cassel is OK but does re-inforce here as in The Black Swan, my argument that actors performing in a second language lose much of the instinctive dynamism and physicality that comes naturally in their own. Franck is a pussycat compared to Mesrine.

Another one of those films which, though entertaining and sort of OK simply doesn’t do full justice to the intriguing idea at its heart. Trance begins by cleverly engaging and intriguing us but then tries too hard to shock and surprise, forgetting that like banknotes, deception, to work must be founded on a certain respect for truthfulness, however ambiguously expressed.

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To The Wonder – Terrence Malik

Joyous. Intimate. Unsettling, Sobering. Thought-provoking. Cinematically masterly: cinematography, editing, musical score. And a mesmerising performance by Olga Kurylenko.

For all the graphic sex that has become an unremarkable, unremarked norm in modern movies, true intimacy is rare. The long opening sequence of Malik’s much under-rated film conveys a palpable sense of the instinctive intimacy Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) share in being in love. Neil’s quiet inwardness offers an air of strength and stability that allows Marina’s spontaneous, intoxicating free spirit full rein. Kurylenko is nothing less than entrancing in these opening scenes: so free, so open and unself-conscious that we fear for her. Rightly perhaps – though Malik in the end leaves this unresolved. Perhaps. Yes it’s that kind of film: allusive and elusive – but engrossing throughout.

One of Malik’s great qualities as a director is his ability to intimate the inner lives of his characters through what he shows but does not explain; reveals but does not describe. He demands much of his viewer: and with little action and an impressionistic narrative he doesn’t make it any easier. But if you engage with his characters they become very real to the imagination: you feel with them.

To The Wonder is an elegiac exploration of love and its many forms. Seventy years-old this year, there is an wistful tone to Malik’s depiction of what it is to be in love. It is tempting to feel that the thrill and all-encompassing experience of being in love is the exclusive prerogative of our youth. And one feels that a sense of loss adds an air of melancholy to his treatment of the passion and tenderness, the innocently impulsive intimacy of Neil and Marina’s love for one another.

First seen amidst the breath-taking natural beauty of the rocky tidal island that is Mont St Michel, threatened daily by the incoming tides, Neil and Marina’s relationship blossoms further in Paris where her 10 year-old daughter by a disastrous early marriage is the first of a number of fundamental changes to their inner emotional dynamic.

Neil takes Marina and Tatiana with him to an anonymous, almost featureless small town in the US where he appears to be conducting ongoing testing of industrial pollution of the environment. Marina’s spontaneity with Neil persists; but whereas before this seemed to draw its life and energy from the world around her, which she then expressed to Neil: it now seems confined to her time with him and constrained by a social environment in which she is ill at ease and from which she can draw no strength. Tatiana is also unsettled.

In a parallel storyline we meet Javier Bardem’s Father Quintana who is possessed of perhaps the truest but most perplexing form of religious faith: one constantly questing and questioning with a clear-eyed understanding that faith is a grace that must be renewed every day in the light of the inevitable tragedies and sadnesses of the human condition. Doubt strengthens true faith: it only undermines weak faith.

Here I think is Malik’s central theme: faith is also one of the many kinds of love and that all forms, romantic, physical, spiritual, always require something of us – courage to dare to love; and determination to constantly renew it. To love is not just to risk loss: it is, given time and our mortality, to guarantee it and the desolation that entails. Loss is part of our journey. Through Quintana Malik appears to approve the redemptive power of Christianity but in the priest’s struggle of faith as with the loss of innocence in Neil and Marina’s feelings for one another – one senses as much doubt as conviction. Malik’s initial question: are Quintana’s love of God expressed as faith; and Neil and Marina’s love expressed in emotional and physical spontaneity – of the kind strengthened or undermined by the doubt and uncertainty life brings?

There is a quote in George Eliot’s Middlemarch that always struck me:

1st Gentleman: “Methinks our chains are fetters that we forge ourselves.”
2nd Gentleman: “Aye, but methinks ‘tis the world that brings the iron.”

For Quintana, Neil and Marina – truly it is the world, the uncontrollable, randomness of events, that changes how they are able to feel, the one about his vocation, the couple about each other and the world they share.

All the descriptive power Malik has always displayed as a director is here to see. But as with the Tree of Life here again he appears to me to have abandoned one of his most fundamental strengths: from Badlands to The Thin Red Line this was his absolute refusal to be judgemental, especially in contexts almost screaming out for it: whether the gratuitous violence of apparently motiveless crime or purposeful violence of war.

In both recent films Malik appears to skew our response towards a traditional religious metaphysic which undermines the aesthetic detachment that made his earlier films so resonant. To the question above one feels he decided at the outset that only the love in religious faith can be sustained. The weakness of To The Wonder, as with Tree of Life is that while once he rigorously left us to decide between contradictory possibilities: now he makes a choice which by implication he invites us to share. And he skews the evidence on the way.

As I remarked in my review of Tree Of Life – while he is clearly drawn towards women and revealingly descriptive in his portrayal of them – they seem a mystery to him: like a puzzle he can neither solve nor give up. OK so with all of us men I guess: but having first entranced us with Marina, as his emotional narrative proceeds she seems to become more and more inscrutable. We lose her. Worse: at one point he seems to express his own perplexity about her in a form of explanation. She tells us in voice-over that she feels she has a second woman inside her: the one who flies heavenwards (who we have seen) and the other who is drawn ‘earthwards’. As this self-observation coincides with a less than convincing betrayal of trust Malik seems perilously close to the clichéd polarities of woman as Saint and whore; the Eve of Adam’s downfall etc. Not only does this undermine the detached, non-judgemental power of all that went before but can be seen as pandering to the very machocentricity that distorts current attitudes in the major Christian Churches, especially the Catholicism in which Malik was raised.

Re-inforcing the distortion this introduces is the fact that the quiet strength of Affleck’s Neil in the early part of the movie, as the film progresses strikes us as having become a detached taciturnity; a withdrawn incapacity to respond, develop and deepen the love so equally shared at the beginning. Malik seems to me to be inviting us to see the causes underlying Marina’s later behaviour and the emotional difficulties between her and Neil as lying within her – rather than as seems pretty clear as having more to do with Neil’s emotionally withdrawn nature that observes rather than any longer participates in her spontaneity and freedom of spirit. One almost feels that Malik does not see or value the most poignant loss in his film – the gradual erosion and destruction of Marina’s spontaneity and freedom of spirit – ground down before Neil’s emotional constraint. We lose the Marina of the opening and Malik doesn’t convince us that this was the only possible outcome.

In this Neil seems to perfectly replicate in his response to Marina, Malik’s own response to his film: the stunning, thrilling truthfulness we felt at the beginning, towards the end becoming ill-at-ease, uncertain and muddled.

That said this is a film of aesthetic aspiration: Malik is trying to explore important, complex, deep issues and in an industry where these qualities are conspicuous by their absence much of the time – he is to be congratulated.

Much better than critical response suggests even if, like Tree of Life it doesn’t somehow make a coherent whole.

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Oscars Postscript – Zettel

There was a pivotal moment, totally unremarked in this marathon, 3-hour Feast of Narcissus. A geeky little Swedish Director and a chubby American Producer picked up the Swede’s first and the American’s second, Oscar. Malik Bendjelloul’s English did not survive his excitement and the tiny delay that ensued led poor Simon Chinn to suffer the menacing opening bars of the Jaws theme as he tried to thank his wife. In the fashion stakes if there were 1000 people present, Malik and Simon were about 997 and 998; just ahead of Anne Hathaway and Kristen Stewart.

Why pivotal? These two appropriately modest gentlemen were receiving the Oscar for 2012/13’s best Documentary Feature – Searching For Sugarman. Niceties observed, Chinn told the assembled Glitterati that the humble, working class man whose incredible story their extraordinary film documented –Singer Songwriter Rodriguez, now 73 years-old – “isn’t here because he didn’t want to take any of the credit.”

The reason you should do everything you can to see this fascinating, absorbing, inspirational film is that when you’ve seen it you will understand why Chinn’s unlikely, hard to believe remark was in fact almost certainly true.

Amidst 3 hours of mock modesty, cringingly insincere self-deprecation and Olympic Gold Medal sucking-up; this single, throw-away remark was sincere, salutary and true. The calm, quiet, peaceful eye at the heart of a hurricane of adulation, self-love and insincerity.

If you catch up post-hoc with any of the Oscar winners – make sure this is one of them. I saw it again tonight and it was even more moving than the first time I saw it a few months back. If you can’t get to see the film, check out the twenty or so poetically evocative songs at its heart – as powerful and affecting now as when they were first written and recorded 40 years ago: and hardly heard anywhere in the world save Apartheid South Africa, until last year.

It might add to your motivation to know that the first Oscar Simon Chinn won as a Producer was Man On Wire. By your deeds shall you be known.

Of the rest: if the Oscar leads you for the first time to Argo you will see an excellent, well crafted, tense movie whose Best Picture Oscar success depends to some extent on the fact that of the two films about conflict in the Middle East, Argo was the one that made Americans in general and Academy voters in particular – feel better about themselves and their government’s actions abroad.

Don’t allow this popular and comfortable movie put you off seeing Zero Dark Thirty – it’s not such an easy watch; it poses genuine moral dilemmas and grittily gets much closer I suspect to the reality on the ground. Zero was clearly not going to win anything because it bravely disavowed the instant mythology with which America likes to clothe its darker moments. The People’s approval that currently embraces the stoical, courageous non-violent flair that rescued 6 American Diplomats from revolutionary Iran, at the time, and ever since, mocked, pilloried and character-assassinated then President Carter for not invading and rescuing all American hostages from Iran – whatever the cost in human life – American or Iranian. Oh if only they had had a Bush and a Blair instead of that pussy Carter.

Argo and Zero Dark Thirty should be seen together: so we can see how far we have come in the space of years between the events they depict. It is no small challenge to decide in which moral direction that journey has led us.

On a lighter note: even if you don’t really like Musicals still go and see Les Miserables – it has passion and commitment and is better than we dared hope. Apart from Daniel Day Lewis and some other fine performances Lincoln was for me a disappointment thanks to a screenplay that left one of the most eloquent and quotable politicians in history sounding more an LBJ homespun hack than a JFK inspirational leader. My review argues that here again is the triumph of comfortable myth over racial reality.

Thanks for your support these last 12 months. I wonder what 2013/14 will bring?

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Django Unchained – Quentin Tarantino

Django contains the many strengths and several weaknesses of Quentin Tarantino. As with all his best movies, he takes a well-established generic form, here the Western, and develops its elements to farce; to absurdity; even finally to destruction. With scabrous dialogue, scandalous amorality and an almost childish determination to shock, he repeatedly follows the internal logic of the genre to often funny, sometimes disturbing reductio ad absurdum conclusions that first fascinate, then alienate and finally leave us confusedly high and dry: like being taken on a wonderful, thrilling ride to somewhere we don’t want to be and wouldn’t have willingly set out for. He is also the ultimate ironist of contemporary American movies. Django is a natural companion piece in tone to the recent Seven Psychopaths.

However much Critics love the game, it can become tedious to pick out the cinematic references and homages that Tarantino delightedly exploits in every film he’s ever made in order to riff on generic themes and conventions we all recognize to varying degrees. But it is almost impossible to make sense of his movies without acknowledging some of their internal references.

Django unerringly plays to the dramatic truth that no emotion drives a narrative more certainly or satisfyingly than revenge, bringing to mind of course among other Westerns, The Searchers; and like Peckinpah’s revisionist conception in the Wild Bunch, Tarantino delights in rejecting the worthy herioc stoic moralism of Westerns like Shane and High Noon with an orgy of graphic, violent imagery. There are no high-minded nice-guys in this movie, laconic or not; even Jamie Foxx’s eponymous Django is forced into choices rigorously driven by the triumph of might over right. In this Tarantino, like Peckinpah, with contempt, literally explodes the myth that reverses these conflicting imperatives.

It is hard to take seriously Tarantino’s hints that Django is merely a victim of ethnic circumstance and Schultz a bounty-hunter with a sense of honour exercising his dubiously legal power of execution purely to rid the West of bad guys. Even (Dirty) Harry Callaghan wasn’t making a tidy profit from punks who felt lucky.

An American truth: first win – then discuss the rights and wrongs afterwards. (A sentiment by the way that not only drives American sport but also e.g. that other Oscar nominated film – Zero Dark Thirty about the search for, and assassination of, Osama Bin Laden).

Much of this is very good: at times wickedly funny bordering on farce; at others funnily wicked extending into explicit violence so graphic and extreme that only its ludicrous, fantasy excess rescues it from being pornographic. Tarantino stirs into this Western mix a central theme of slavery, 2 years before the Civil War to end it, with Foxx’s Django rescued from a group of manacled slaves by the eccentric Dr King Schultz (‘Dr King’? C’mon Quentin – really?) played by the incomparable Christoph Waltz. Schultz is a dentist who found bounty-hunting more lucrative and a great deal more exciting. Hunting for a trio of nicely priced little Outlaw earners, Schulz enforces his own version of compulsory purchase of Django because, he, unlike his emancipator, knows what the lucrative trio look like. Schultz simplifies the objective of his quasi-legal trade by reducing the disjunction ‘dead or alive’ to a single term.

Talking like a bearded Hans Landa (Inglourious Bastards – 2009) Schultz reveals a courteous but ruthlessly lethal negotiating style leaving one white guard dead with the other soon to follow. In Django, Tarantino over-uses and abuses the ‘n’-*gger- word to the point where it loses any shred of meaning and therefore power to offend. Well almost. But if it’s all right with Jamie Foxx and Samuel L Jackson – who am I to complain?

With an insouciant incredulity, the ‘colour-blind’ Schultz takes great delight in riding straight over any and every Southern racist cultural law, rule or custom with a slightly bemused Django in tow. These conventions and the racist assumptions driving them are expressed in Tarantino’s controversial but Oscar-winning script in graphic, repeatedly racist language that constantly makes our modern sensibility inwardly recoil.

When the intrepid pair catch-up with the original fugitive trio, Django dispatches two, leaving the third to the sneakily hidden Derringer of Schultz. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, the German angel of judicial death invites Django to partner him. In return he offers to help Django first track down then rescue his wife who, like him, was whipped and sold off separately some time before when their master objected to their marriage.

With typical Tarantino playfulness Mrs Django (Kerry Washington) is named Broomhilda Von Schaft and taught to speak German by a previous mistress who wanted someone to talk to with the bonus of having a slave a cut above the ordinary. Thanks to some ‘camp’-fire story-telling Quentin thus casts Django as a Siegfried to ‘Hildy’s’ Brunehilde – fabled hero without fear having to cross the fires of hell to rescue his love.

The intrepid odd couple track Hildy down to Candie-land, one of the biggest plantations in the South run by pretentious Calvin Candie (Di Caprio) whose unexplained Francophilia demands he is addressed ‘Monsieur’ but to whom one mustn’t talk French as he doesn’t speak it. The tyrannical overlords of the Western genre were all cattle Barons: just for fun and perhaps to maintain the dramatic claustrophobia of his tale, Tarantino’s villain loves ‘Mandingo’-fighting (slaves who bare-knuckle fight to the death) and trades in slave-fighters.

Knowing Candie wouldn’t be interested in parting with Hildy, worth only a few hundred dollars, to strangers, Schultz and Django arouse his interest with a mouth-watering offer for Candie’s best Mandingo. This subterfuge is picked up by Candie’s trusted life-long house-slave Stephen (another stock figure in films of the South) played with relish by an aged-up Samuel Jackson.

The unmasking of the scam is the trigger for Tarantino’s classic Western showdown: his being so violent and bloody that it puts Peckinpah’s excesses in the Wild Bunch in the shade. Even here Tarantino displays his characteristic trope that nothing succeeds like excess. Gallons of manifestly fake blood spurts and gushes from whichever part of the body the hail of bullets hits. As ever with Mr Tarantino it is touch and go in these set-piece bloodbaths whether participants are more likely to drown than be shot to death.
Tarantino is as exasperating as he is impressive. Like the Monty Python sketches we don’t remember now, he tends to let scenes go on too long; to the point where diminishing returns sets in. Although a critical cliché, Django would be a much tighter, better film 20-30 minutes shorter.

Tarantino should also take a vow of absence: he pops up at the end in a brief speaking part; and I’m sorry but he really sucks. Quentin – you can’t act: accept it. Even Hitch knew that walk on, walk-off was as much as he could get away with.

It’s always hard to know whether to take Tarantino seriously: we know he loves movies and rejoices in their conventions and relishes replicating their simple style and innocent panache. But with Django as with his other movies, we get no sense of what he cares about; what he thinks is important. This is no accident: he likes nothing better than to frustrate expectations, shock and surprise us. It’s like he knows a secret joke and the real secret is – there is no joke. Which of course is the joke.

Django is in my view his best for some time and is more consistent than the often very funny but for me, uneven Inglourious Bastards. Foxx, Jackson and Di Caprio along with an unrecognizable bunch of well-known names, are predictably very good and Waltz is just a slightly campy delight – worth every penny of his Oscar.

Django is a great ride: and if you end up at times in an uncomfortable place – well I guess it’s just movie. Isn’t it?

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A Good Day To Die Hard –  John Moore

Don’t. No, seriously – don’t.

At last I can shed my secret shame – I’ve always enjoyed most of the Die Hard series. But this latest crass, meritless, ear-splitting drivel finally emancipates me from this affliction.

I like trashy films; good trashy films: and Die Hard (1988), Die Hard With a Vengeance, and even the last Die Hard 4.0 were good, honest, exciting trashy films. This latest franchised rip-off can’t trouble its exploitative a*se with anything so challenging as a plot; dialogue that is intelligible still less intelligent; or even the most rudimentary Directorial understanding of how to build tension and suspense through variations in pace and tone, drama and humour. Good Day as an experience is like going into a room full of unpleasant people who shout at you at the top their voices non-stop for 97 minutes while a 150 decibel recording of the demolition of an industrial site plays in the background.

Good Day abandons every small merit its predecessors possessed: an arch-Machiavellian OTT villain e.g the Gruber Boys – Hans and Simon (Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons) – or even an intelligent feisty protagonist foil like Samuel Jackson. Willis doesn’t even turn up as the hitherto self-mocking, sarcastic, rebellious John McClane; lazily relying here on that never endearing and deeply irritating smirk – the only human being on the planet able to match Dubya Bush with such an infuriating facial expression.

There is zero chemistry between Willis and his supposed son Jack played by Jai Courtney with all the animated charm of a Channing Tatum with narcolepsy. An endless series of utterly pointless car, truck and armoured vehicle-crashing chases alternating with an equally meaningless sequence of shoot-anything-that-moves battles, suffers the law of diminishing returns well before 30 eardrum-thumping minutes have passed. Our initial irritation that this knuckle-headed assault on our senses is so loud that we cannot hear half the dialogue, transforms itself into a sense of gratitude when we get to actually hear the monosyllabic, posturing inanities these so called characters drone at one another.

Supposedly holding together this witless, manic demolition derby of guns and cars, is a ‘back-of-a-fag-packet’ narrative, little more than a pitch, something to do with two Russian ne’er-do-wells one of whom is now President and has imprisoned his former collaborator in some tosh about flogging weapons-grade Uranium out of Chernobyl before it suffered a meltdown as a consequence of their earlier nefarious activities. In a series of ‘plot’ twists about as much fun as a strangulated bowel much death and mayhem is meted out to people we don’t know or care about. Meanwhile our insouciant pair swap smirks and arch little bon mots about whether McClane senior is to be called ‘John’ or ‘Dad’, and appear to bond in a ‘don’t-touch-me’ kind of way while they defy gravity, all the other laws of Physics and the normal response of flesh and blood to endless lethal assaults upon it.

Good Day is moronic, macho mayhem without a shred of the style, panache, ironic humour and tongue-in-cheek self-mocking edge that made its predecessors such slightly guilty fun. In terms of Direction, ‘screenplay’ and performance it is a cynical, bean-counter spirited, exploitative product whose only merit is the technical ability to capture the relentless, pointless destruction of motor-vehicles on film.

I can’t help wondering why, now pushing 60, with over 30 years in the business, over 100 films and making shed-loads of money, Bruce Willis has so little aspiration to put his several talents, including a sometimes nicely judged sense of comic timing, to better use. Good Day fails for many reasons but the main one is that Willis himself appears to have lost any respect for the always ludicrous, but usually entertaining, rebellious S.O.B. scourge of authority that once was John McClane.

To paraphrase Monty Python – this is a dead Franchise: and nailing it to the perch as here in Good Day, doesn’t make it look any more alive.

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Where is he?

Zero Dark Thirty – Kathryn Bigelow

Lincoln could be described as portraying the unprincipled pursuit of a principled objective, in conflict with the principled pursuit of an unprincipled end. It is a tragic lesson of history that when old men possessed of power talk with passion about principles – young people die.

No such moral ambiguities, ethical disputes or manipulation of legality and due process clouds the stark, brutal, unquestioned and unexamined realities that drive Kathryn Bigelow’s brilliant, extraordinary, deeply disturbing film. Zero is a totally ethics-free zone: the State assassination of an enemy on foreign soil is taken as a given: no specious claim to legitimacy here; no queasy efforts to morally justify the ethically indefensible.

Moral philosophy and political theory naively used to debate the ethics of the hypothetical assassination of Hitler early in the war – before millions had died. Zero expresses the almost universally held view, clearly shared by President Obama, that the murder of Usama Bin Laden by military forces of the United States was a simple undeniable necessity created by the events of the 11th of September 2001. Standing in no need of further justification.

The sheer, in-your-face unapologetic directness of Bigelow’s film is in my view both brave and chillingly honest: ‘this man had to die; and this is how we first found and then killed him’. It is deeply ironic that the controversy the film has generated is so irrelevant: if you accept without demur the principle of State assassination as an end why get in such a prurient tiz about a little ‘enhanced interrogation’ – or torture as we simple souls call it – on the way? The widespread tacit acceptance around the world of these hitherto rejected means and ends of policy, formally and unequivocally barred by the United Nations, is amply demonstrated by the just published list of over 50 countries which actively co-operated with the US CIA policy of extreme rendition whereby kidnapped, uncharged suspects were imprisoned, detained and/or tortured at the behest of the United States in an effort to glean information that might help the unspeakable George Bush in his personal Crusade to wage his self-justifying ‘War on Terror’.

Zero Dark Thirty depicts an unswerving, implacable hunt to the death of a single human prey. Simply as an objective, relevant fact Bigelow shows us that this 10 year journey was regularly mile-stoned with further post-9/11 terrorist outrages including the London Bombings of the 7th of July 2005. She draws us deeply into the profoundly amoral world of Intelligence where every lethal event is pathologised to yield fragments of information which are assiduously assembled in the hope of finding a thread of connection that might lead towards the whereabouts of the most hated and most wanted human being on the planet.

Jessica Chastain plays Maya: based apparently on a real figure, a CIA agent committed to the point of obsession with finding Usama Bin Laden, or ‘UBL’ as he is efficiently abbreviated, so that she can have him killed. Maya is a bit like a female Jason Bourne – who didn’t need the brainwashing to be unquestioningly committed to the cause. How true is Bigelow’s sub-text of Maya and senior colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) constantly being thwarted and under-estimated by the political and operational indecisive wariness of senior CIA men above them? I don’t know – but it plays. Bigelow’s CIA is machocentric, political, incestuous and distinctly ‘corporate’ in its operational style; it kidnaps, bribes, detains and yes, tortures with the alacrity of established practice unrestrained by law or operational procedure. However, whether through guilt or reluctant sensibility, prisoners are driven out of their minds, out of sight.

Sorting apparently unconnected little beads of information Maya threads them together into a narrative that she believes leads to one of the many couriers who helped to sustain UBL in his overall control of Al-Qaeda networks around the world and to guard the secret of his whereabouts. Convinced that UBL could not actively control from a cave, a terrorist network with all the demands of communication that implied, when her tenuous trail of events leads to a secret compound in Pakistan visited by her suspected courier, her belief that they are closing in on UBL becomes an absolute conviction. But it takes over 100 days to convince her bosses to persuade the President to authorize an attack. Only here and solely by implication, do we sense any thought that the mission to assassinate UBL within the borders of an ally they dare not trust, is in any sense problematic. Mind you, as Bigelow shows it; this seems more a fear of the monumentally embarrassing cock-up that would ensue if UBL wasn’t there, than any doubts about the justification in killing him if he was.

Bigelow’s austerely edited build up through the process of assembling and investigating the clues to UBL’s location is as tense and absorbing as any detective story, all the more so because we know most of the facts and events depicted actually happened. Maya’s inference that apparently innocuous patterns of behaviour by her suspected courier were so excessively methodical that they suggested intelligence ‘tradecraft’ rather than innocent actions is convincing and exciting.

Knowing the facts of history does not detract from the pace and suspense of the hunt. The actual attack is simply a tour-de-force: a bravura display of restrained film-making evocatively lit by infra-red head lamps and all the sinister profiles created by the high-tech equipment the modern special ops soldier carries. It is the quiet stealth and shafting laser lights with which the assault is conducted that chills the soul and races the heart. In the obscene terminology of modern warfare we see the ‘collateral damage’ of unprovoked death and cries of terrified women and children during the attack and desperate search to locate Bin Laden. Whether this graphically honest film cheats at the critical point I suppose we’ll never know but we only become aware that Bin Laden has been killed after the event – there is an ambiguity about the precise moment and circumstances though responsibility is immediately attributed to a particular individual. One also wonders whether the quiet restraint of the soldiers is true to the facts – but certainly this way of depicting the events does credit to Bigelow’s sensibilities.

Zero Dark Thirty is a superb, thrilling film that convinces us not least through its quasi-documentary style, that if this was not exactly what things were like, it is very much like how they must have been. It has an air of authenticity hard to doubt. Performances, especially from Chastain and Jason Clarke are scarily convincing. To what extent Zero is a kind of visual form of what used to be called in literature ‘faction’ I don’t know.

If Zero Dark Thirty is recognised at this year’s Oscars, my instinctive view that such subjects are better dealt with through a genuine documentary treatment may be reinforced. But this moral and aesthetic ambivalence; the blurring of fact and fiction; and especially reality and myth – is aesthetically endemic to Hollywood – it’s what they do; just as it is politically to the way the American people like to think of themselves. In this Zero is not in spirit and intent, as far away from Lincoln as it might at first seem.

Controversially, Usama Bin Laden was code-named ‘Geronimo’ in the operation to kill him.

“Justice Has Been Served”
(President Obama on the killing of Usama Bin Laden)

Vengeance is mine
sayeth the horde
Revenge is sweet
so sweet they cry
Other-blind, their Jesus tears
must be avenged
for them alone mere justice
will not satisfy

Outnumber, outgun, cast out
a virtual mythology
dispenses real-blood death
No Jedi here, nor Samurai
the overwhelming Force
is with them and
honour, truth, their faith in law
bends to expeditious lie

In its blood-stained birth
This Achillean state
was, is, will ever be
deaf to Hector’s plea
Just because you can
does not demand you must
in Kabul, Baghdad and Saigon
or even Wounded Knee

When faith is blind
in any name or creed
to the blood of innocence
or turns its deafened ears
to the unsolaced truthful cries
of other hearts, of other minds
their pain will go unrecognised
and echo down the years

‘Not in my name’ Jesus weeps
‘nor mine’ the Prophet says
force of arms democracy
is just Manifest Destiny
in another guise
‘Kill the Indian to save the soul’
was, is still, in present form
a manifest obscenity

So as they whoop in glee
at a single, well-earned death
a grey-haired wise man’s face appears
chanting to the drum of time – no, no
What do you know of such things
they scream at him – just go!
Listen to the spirit of the earth he cries
Live, don’t kill, in the name of Geronimo

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