www.list.co.uk/film Reviews Film
DRAMA IVUL (15) 100min ●●●●● COMEDY TAMARA DREWE (15) 109min ●●●●●
Just because a film is based on a newspaper comic strip does it have to feel like a crass pantomime? If you happen to be usually dependable British director Stephen Frears, apparently so. His relentlessly jaunty adaptation of Posy Simmonds’ Guardian offering Tamara Drewe is like a Carry On . . . version of The Archers, where obnoxious characters scramble through the leafy lanes of rural England behaving in ways that defy logic or edification.
Tamara Drewe is (allegedly and lazily) a modern-day reworking of Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd. Gemma Arterton’s Tamara returns to the sleepy Dorset village of her childhood with old scores to settle. Now a successful journalist with a striking nose job, she is the ugly duckling who has been transformed into a vengeance-seeking swan. Men drop at her feet, including former boyfriend Andy (Luke Evans), smug thriller writer Nicholas (Roger Allam) and rock God Ben (Dominic Cooper).
There are certainly plenty of comic possibilities here but everything feels so exaggerated that there is no emotional involvement in the arbitrary events that transpire. Only recommended if you are starting to miss Last of the Summer Wine. (Allan Hunter) ■ General release, Fri 10 Sep.
DRAMA/COMEDY CYRUS (15) 90min ●●●●●
Sibling writer/directors Mark and Jay Duplass are figureheads of the Mumblecore movement – ultra-low budget, largely improvised films featuring non-professional actors – and after earning praise on the American indie circuit for their films The Puffy Chair and Baghead they’re bringing their sensibilities into the mainstream. Cyrus is the brothers’ first studio film and the first chance for UK cinema audiences to find out what the fuss is about and, on this evidence, the buzz is justified. Cyrus is (in this writer’s opinion) the best comedy of the year so far: unique, surprising and featuring a brilliant lead performance from eternal support player John C Reilly, it’s fresh and funny in ways that a traditionally-scripted comedy could never be.
The story centres on John (Reilly), a composer whose life has come to a
standstill, a fact rubbed in by his ex-wife’s (Catherine Keener) announcement that she is remarrying. Hope arrives in the form of beautiful and inexplicably single Molly (Marisa Tomei), but then John meets Cyrus (Jonah Hill), Molly’s 21-year old son, and discovers a co-dependent mother-son relationship that the word ‘unhealthy’ doesn’t begin to describe. In the hands of conventional filmmakers, this would be just another high-
concept comedy bearing no resemblance to real life, but the Duplasses focus on drawing believable characterisation from their actors in even the broadest comic scenarios, resulting in supremely awkward but breathtakingly truthful comedy. Reilly shines, and Hill’s performance is also brilliant, unsettlingly poised between scheming and vulnerable, so that even the film’s apparently neat conclusion is undercut with ambiguity. (Paul Gallagher) ■ General release, Fri 10 Sep.
Artist, writer and occasional filmmaker Andrew Kötting (Galivant, This Filthy Earth) returns to cinema with Ivul, the story of Alex (Jacob Auzanneau) who is caught by his father playing a sexualised game with his sister. In a state of rage the father sends the boy away with the words: ‘I never want you to set foot on my land again.’ Alex takes his father’s words literally and retreats to the treetops that surround the isolated family home. In the months that follow he negotiates his way around the land without ever setting foot on the ground, while his family left behind gradually falls apart. Kötting creates a distinct poetic
world for this narrative to unravel within. Footage of trees being felled and slow-moving ice floes is interspersed throughout the film, accompanied by a discordant ambient soundtrack. Together they create an otherworldly atmosphere both mysterious and ominous, which lingers long in the mind. There’s a romanticism at play here that jars with the natural style that Kötting uses to document the family, it is a dichotomy that is by turns distracting, fascinating and engaging. A curious and beautiful oddity. (Gail Tolley) ■ GFT, Glasgow, Mon 20 & Tue 21 Sep.
THRILLER/DRAMA WINTER’S BONE (15) 100min ●●●●●
With its all too familiar theme of familial collapse and undercurrents of social disgrace and fear of the local customs, Debra Granik’s excellent second feature could be a British colonial horror from a distant age, and in some ways it is. Granik’s film is indefinable – part film noir, part fairy tale and an exercise in heritage meditation that evokes the ghosts of America’s greatest underclass chroniclers: Eugene O’Neill, Nelson Algren and Pinckney Benedict. The sins of a father have come to rest on Missouri backwoods resident Ree
(Jennifer Lawrence, amazing) when the local sheriff announces that drug addict dad has used the house she lives in with her mentally ill mother and two young siblings as bail bond, which he has now skipped out on. Ree must find her father – dead or alive – in one week to ensure they can remain living there. From here it’s dead ends and cul de sacs, secrets and lies and ultimately some kind of grisly closure in the dirt poor white trash environs of the Ozark Mountains. Adapted from Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Winter’s Bone is really a recession era morality play underpinned by the odd rhythms, strains and poetry of the Ozarks’ French/American slang (an inheritance from the industrial immigrants that once flowed into the area).
Marshalled with rare intent and skill by Granik and steered by a remarkable professional and non-professional cast, Winter’s Bone is a unique, unsettling and memorable affair. (Paul Dale) ■ Selected release, Fri 17 Sep. See feature, page 53.
9–23 Sep 2010 THE LIST 55