Bright Star is the fictional rendering of the love affair between the English Romantic poet John Keats and a remarkable young woman named Fanny Brawne. Keats is already sick with the tuberculosis that will cut his life short, but he cannot stop from developing feelings for the extraordinary Fanny. As played by the gifted Abbie Cornish, Fanny is a strong woman possessed of a keen intellect and a talent for making herself into an artistic creation through her needlework. Directed by Jane Campion, Bright Star deserved greater attention than it received, and if there were any justice, Cornish would be nominated for Best Actress (and deservedly win) for her portrayal of a woman who has to come to terms with the potential loss of the love of her life. Kudos also to Ben Whishaw, who was also good in the completely unnecessary remake of Brideshead Revisited, as the doomed poet and to cinematographer Greig Fraser. Bright Star is simply one of the most beautiful films of the past decade thanks to Fraser's camera work. I will never forget some of the visuals of this film, including a field of lavender flowers and a moment when Fanny lies on her bed allowing curtains to billow over her body--extraordinary moments in a great movie.
The Messenger takes as its subject the difficult work of informing family members of the death of a loved one in the military. It's a serious movie about a formidable task, one that you'd expect few soldiers want to have. Ben Foster stars as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, who has been injured in Iraq and is now assigned to work with Woody Harrelson's Captain Tony Stone delivering the bad news to the next of kin. We watch as Montgomery slows learns the nuances of the job and even becomes skilled at going around the military's protocol when dealing with the grieving parents and wives and other family members with whom he and Stone come into contact. He also develops a genuine affection for a young widow played by Samantha Morton, and their friendship almost becomes too much for both of them. It could have been played for cheap emotions, but thanks to a solid script and talented actors, viewers instead sense a tender connection between two lonely people. Anchored by three strong performances, especially the luminous Morton, The Messenger is a complex study of the emotional impact that the current war can have on the people back home.
I found Sherlock Holmes to be typical blockbuster fare, and that's too bad. The potential was there with the inspired pairing of Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, and perhaps the best part of the movie is their verbal sparring, especially when they are squabbling over such matters as the cleanliness of Holmes' rooms in the house they share. However, the plot seemed unnecessarily complicated, maybe in an attempt to get the crowd to stay until the end of the film so that Holmes could explain all of the connections that we could never have made ourselves, thanks to the stinginess of the script. The stories by Arthur Conan Doyle were frequently action-oriented, but they also had a cerebral quality to them with Holmes figuring out clues and piecing together motives. The movie version goes almost exclusively for action, with one big, expensive sequence after another. Having read "A Scandal in Bohemia," the Holmes story that includes the character of Irene Adler and how she outsmarted Holmes once, I had hoped that more could be done with the character being played here by Rachel McAdams. No such luck, though, because she's really secondary to a plot about a cult of magician types led by Mark Strong's Lord Blackwood. This film really is a mess, but at least, we know there will be a sequel, so maybe there's a chance at redemption yet.
A Single Man has justly received praise for the performance of Colin Firth as George, the college professor attempting to come to terms with the death of his long-time partner. Firth is a revelation here, particularly in the scene where he learns of Jim's death in a car accident and that the family doesn't wish him to attend to funeral. Taking place over a single day in George's life, a rather fateful day when he has chosen to commit suicide, A Single Man does a nice job of evoking the mood of the early 1960s when then film is set, but I did feel director Tom Ford was a bit too obsessed with the appearances of everything, actors included. There's a hypersheen to the visuals that makes them seem somewhat unrealistic, especially in the black-and-white sequences that serve as flashbacks for moments of Tom and George's life together. And I never quite understood what Ford was trying to accomplish with all of the images of eyes that appear throughout the film; I'm sure there's meant to be some symbolic weight to them all, but I couldn't figure it out thanks to how numerous and seemingly random they were. It was a delight to see Julianne Moore as Charley, George's long-time friend, an aging party girl who wishes he were attracted to her. It makes me want to see her and Firth in movies more often, just ones that are less concerned with how people look and more interested in how they think and feel.
The Young Victoria is a visual feast of a movie. It concerns the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria of England, when she was little more than a teenager. As played by Emily Blunt, Victoria is inexperienced but clever, a very fast learner in the ways of the monarchy. She meets a Belgian prince, Albert (played by Rupert Friend), and begins to fall in love with him. However, her mother (Miranda Richardson) and her mother's chief advisor (Mark Strong again, cornering the market on English baddies for the Christmas season) have other plans for her future. She also has to face conflicting political advice from such men as Paul Bettany's Lord Melbourne and Michael Maloney's Sir Robert Peel, the two prime ministers who serve during the start of her historic reign, still the longest in English history. However, the political intrigue tends to become of secondary importance when Victoria and Albert begin to express how they feel for each other. Blunt and Friend are very good together. They have a very natural chemistry, and the film does a fine job of depicting the strength of the bond Victoria and Albert had for each other. This is another film that has been sadly underrated. Perhaps moviegoers are just not interested in historical dramas these days unless there are going to be some explosions along the way? That would be very sad if it were true.
I'm pleasantly surprised by how many good performances I saw in the last couple of months. It's an impressive list just from the five movies described above: Abbie Cornish, Ben Whishaw, Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, Jude Law, Robert Downey Jr., Colin Firth, Julianne Moore, Emily Blunt, and Rupert Friend. Heck, I'll even add Mark Strong to the list; he's actually guite good as a bad guy, and I enjoyed the gusto with which he portrayed Holmes's nemesis. And that doesn't even include a lot of supporting cast members such as the children in Bright Star, especially Edie Martin as Toots, Matthew Goode as Jim in the too-few scenes in which he appears in A Single Man, and Jim Broadbent as King William and Harriet Walter as Queen Adelaide (and Richardson, too, as the Duchess of Kent) in The Young Victoria. Great performances, all of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment