ROMANCE/THRILLER
DEATH DEFYING ACTS (12A) 97min .0 Freely mixing historical fact with fictionalised biography, this Brit-Aussie co-production turns on a fascinating premise: a battle of wits and wills between world-famous escapist and sceptic of all things supernatural Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) and a Scots conwoman posing as a psychic. When Houdini arrives in Edinburgh on the European leg of his world tour. still grieving over the death of his beloved mother, and announces he'll pay a small fortune to anyone who can put him in touch with her. Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her daughter Benji (Atonement‘s Saoirse Ronan) sense a soft touch. But Mary's scheme looks like coming undone when the scam artist and the escape artist fall for one another.
Co-scripted by Tony Grisoni (Tide/and. Brothers of the Head) and directed by Gillian My Brilliant Career Armstrong. the film‘s got some creditable talent attached to it. And for Scottish audiences there's the added attraction of seeing Edinburgh locations used as a handsome backdrop to a tall tale set in the capital in 1926. interesting as all that sounds. though, Death Defying Acts is surprisingly dull. While it's decently acted, neither the scam nor the romance is developed and Armstrong’s direction is strangely flat. Co-funded by the BBC, it feels like an underachieving Sunday teatime drama. (Miles Fielder)
I Selected release from Fri 8 Aug.
FAMILY/ADVENTURE THE FOX AND CHILD (U) 92min 0..
Luc Jacquet's follow-up to March of the Penguins has a title which sums up the film's content precisely. The Fox and the Child is the simple story of a giggly eight- year-old French child (Bertille Noel-Bruneau) who strikes up a friendship with a fox she meets on the way home from school. Over the course of the following year, their friendship develops as the child successfully befriends. but fails to domesticate the animal, accompanied by luscioust shot footage of various furry
and photogenic forms of nature.
Re-dubbed from a French box-office hit from 2007 and recalling the back-to- nature spirit of Jean-Jacques Annaud‘s 1988 film The Bear. Jacquet's film is an often beguiling account of how mankind and animals can exist in harmony. While environmentally conscious parents should relish a story unadorned by pop—culture references and crude jokes, The Fox and The Child's sweetness sails perilously close to cloying before its brief time is up. Compared to March of the Penguins. where Jacquet re-interpreted the behaviour of the penguins according to middle class profiling, The Fox and the Child marks a step forward in narrative storytelling. depicting the fox as a wild and uncontrolled force in a non-Disney manner.
(Eddie Harrison) I Selected release from Fri 8 Aug.
22 THE LIST 7—14 Aug 2008
DRAMA/ROMANCE MARRIED LIFE (PG) 90min 0..
Suburban America, 1949. President Harry S Truman has just unveiled his Fair Deal plan and the People’s Republic of China is in the process of being born. As befits his business class status, mild-mannered Harry Allen (Chris Cooper) keeps a childless wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson) and a much younger mistress in the shape of blonde beauty Kay (Rachel McAdams). When he introduces his longtime bachelor friend, Richard (Pierce Brosnan) to Kay, Richard is smitten. As Richard goes about trying to secretly win Kay, Harry has more diabolical plans.
The writer/director of Married Life, Ira Sachs, is an undeniably gifted 40-something Jewish boy from Memphis, Tennessee whose precise, achingly realised character studies The Delta and 40 Shades of Blue have been among the best film works to come out of the confederate states in the last decade or so. His new film is a slavish replication of Hitchcock’s more Iugubrious noirs, most notably 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt (the rarefied influence of Thornton Wilder who
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Part black comedy, part old-fashioned potboiler, Married Life looks great. It is impeccably and meticulously produced and designed (vintage clothing fans will enjoy the costume detail) and the performances, as one would expect from this cast, are faultless. The problem here is with Sachs’ script. Clearly working to templates laid down by the Coen brothers in their near-perfect 2001 noir pastiche, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and to a lesser extent Todd Haynes’ 2002 Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven, Sachs’ effort is just too Tigger-ish. While directed with an admirable maturity and control, the overly verbose (Billy) Wilderean voiceover, the farcical to-ing and fro- ing, the hints of sexual liberation that lay ahead and the far too knowing tone (not really helped by the casting of Brosnan, arguably the most self conscious actor of his generation), is all just a bit too much. Sachs can’t seem to work out whether he wants to be Victor Borge or John Cheever. (Paul Dale)
I GFT, Glasgow and selected release from Fri 8 Aug. See profile, page 26.