Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

To start inventing you need something real first. Grenoble, France. In an isolated mountain chalet novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) decides to reschedule her interview with a female literature student Zoe Solidor (Camille Rutherford) because her husband, university lecturer and aspiring author Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) plays music loudly on a loop in their attic, disrupting the interview, making recording impossible. After the student drives away from the chalet, Samuel and Sandra’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes a walk outside with his guide dog Snoop (Messi). When they return home, Daniel finds Samuel dead in the snow from an apparent fall. Sandra insists that the fall must have been accidental. Her old friend and lawyer Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) suggests the possibility of suicide while Sandra recalls her husband’s attempt to overdose on aspirin six months earlier after going off antidepressants. After an investigation, Daniel’s conflicting accounts of what happened shortly before his father’s death, combined with the revelation that Samuel sustained a head wound before his body hit the ground and an audio recording of a fight by Samuel and Sandra the previous day, Sandra is indicted on charges of homicide. A year later, during the trial, Sandra’s defence team claims Samuel fell from the attic window and hit his head on a shed below; the prosecution suggests that Sandra hit him with a blunt object, pushing him from the second-floor balcony. During a courtroom argument with Samuel’s psychiatrist Jammal (Wajdi Mouawad) Sandra admits she resented Samuel due to his partial responsibility for the accident that led to Daniel’s impaired vision: he should have collected him from school but called a babysitter instead so he could stay home and writer. In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity and exerting control over his life before their argument turns physically violent. The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra but she points out that they’d been having conversations and disagreements that he’d recorded for six months as a substitute for writing and his transcriptions when presented by him were not accepted by a publisher in lieu of a novel … I don’t believe in the the notion of reciprocity in a couple. Written by the married couple Justine Triet & Arthur Harari (who appears as a literary critic) during the COVID lockdown, director Triet’s film sustains its mysterious premise right until the conclusion which may prove disappointing – perhaps a European take on the customary bittersweet Hollywood ending. it’s a Choose Your Own iteration of the murder procedural with flashes of Hitchcockian wit throughout. There is a re-enactment and a single flashback but the eccentric courtroom presentation is very different to the Anglo-Saxon convention with witnesses for the prosecution and defence talking over each other, a low threshold for evidence and an equally bizarre concept of the burden of proof (opinion-led, apparently). Sandra’s bisexuality and her affairs are brought up as a reason for her husband’s violent arguments with her, his use of anti-depressants rooted perhaps at her contempt for him when their young son was blinded because he should have been picking up from school, her relentless output still not sufficient to pay the bills while he is at home, renovating, homeschooling Daniel, having no time to write outside of his teaching job. At the heart of the story is a blame game between husband and wife – an accident that caused Daniel’s sight loss and a burning envy of a wife’s success whose latest plot is largely ‘borrowed’ from a passage in a novel Samuel abandoned, a writer wannabe now reduced to transcribing daily home life as a form of autofiction. As the USB recording from Samuel’s keyring is re-enacted he accuses Sandra of stealing his time and ‘imposing’ her worldview upon him despite his having forced the family to relocate to his hometown where she speaks English and the use of language becomes an issue in this French-German union where nuance, suggestion and meaning are potentially lost in translation – English is the no-man’s land resort of communication. Sometimes a couple is a kind of a chaos. The discursiveness masks the fact that it is their blind son and his dog who are the sole witnesses to the accident, spicing up the issue of court appearances and compounding the ambiguous nature of the crime and the lack of compelling evidence. Triet and Harari wrote this with Huller in mind (following an earlier collaboration) and she is a very modern heroine, word-smart, intellectually able, psychologically penetrating and completely at ease with herself to the point of lying easily. She is superb as this take no prisoners character, taking nonsense from nobody and while profoundly concerned with her son’s well-being she also boasts a terrifically charismatic nonchalance. Nevertheless, she is obviously unnerved by the courtroom experience in a language not her own. A sidebar to the exposition is the frank admission by Vincent that he has long thought highly of her. This is of course about writers and what happens when one half of a couple is more accomplished and successful than the other and how envy can eat like a cancer through a relationship. Samuel is destroyed by what he has done to his son, Sandra has dealt with it through adultery while also cheerfully churning out novels and doing translations on the side. She is pragmatic above all. Does Samuel commit suicide and are the recordings made in order to frame Sandra for his alleged murder? Maybe. Did he fall or was he pushed? Is the flashback from the visually impaired son true? Does Daniel lie? Why did he make a mistake in his first account? Rage does not exclude will! Guilt, jealousy, blame, language, meaning, all suffuse this tension-filled narrative which asks questions about how writers make their work and how much it plunders their private lives. How and why the story turns unexpectedly marks out the forensic narrative style. Rightly lauded, the exceptional screenplay was awarded at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards among others and the film won Cannes’ Palme d’Or with the Palm Dog going to Messi! The first 9 minutes of the film are dominated by that appalling music which frankly would drive anyone to murder, if you want to know the truth. We won’t even name it such is its earworm potential for homicidal triggering. Gripping. A novel is not life! An author is not her characters! #700daysstraightofmondomovies! MM#4547

Happy 90th Birthday Shirley MacLaine 24th April 2024!

Hollywood legend, Academy Award winner, gifted actress, brilliant comedienne, dancer, singer and all-round star, the irrepressible Shirley MacLaine is a magnificent 90 years old today. What a career she has had, from her debut with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry, through an astonishing collaboration with Billy Wilder with The Apartment – one of the all-time great films – and the perversely charming Irma la Douce, a chance to return to her musical theatre roots in Sweet Charity and more than one alleged comeback in the 1970s with The Turning Point (another dance film) and later with Terms of Endearment and much more besides. That auburn pixie cut, those elfin features and the cunning impishness have always belied astonishing dramatic depths. Never mind those legs!! She was quite brilliant in Some Came Running and ran with the Sinatra crew for a spell. As well as being an author and spiritual seeker she and her younger brother Warren Beatty have always been immersed in Democrat politics, somewhere her commitment found a ready home. She has written autobiographies and directed too, a documentary and a feature, and has remained a vital part of the culture from her TV appearances in drama – her Downton Abbey role was an international incident – and in interviews: she made memorable appearances in the UK with Michael Parkinson on his chat show. Passionate, wickedly funny, smart and sensitive, she has crafted some of the most immaculate performances on screen. We salute you, Shirley! Many happy returns!

Happy 59th Birthday Robert Downey Jr. 4th April 2024!

The actor who can do anything has had a banner year. The extravagantly talented Robert Downey Jr. finally got an Academy Award (and a Bafta) for his supporting role as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer after being acknowledged but not taking home the main prize for his astonishing embodiment of Chaplin more then three decades ago. Let’s not forget he was also nominated for his howlingly funny turn in Tropic Thunder fifteen years back. We’ve been fangirling him since his early days in eye-catching comedy roles on the fringes of the Brat Pack, from Back to School to Weird Science. When he did Less Than Zero his Julian was simply unfathomably addictive as a screen character. Since then he has done every kind of part – singing and dancing too! – and no matter the genre he’s the one we watch. The son of independent filmmaker the late Robert Downey Sr. (commemorated in 2022 documentary Sr.), who gave him his infant debut in Pound and who worked with him consistently through his Hollywood years in his own peripatetic career, his celebrity gained a different taint when he found himself in prison after a drug-related incident in which he slept in his neighbour’s bed. A longtime friend of Mel Gibson who was his biggest support at that time and with whom he co-starred in Air America, he spent the Nineties making all kinds of films with standout performances in everything from Natural Born Killers to Two Girls and a Guy. Stunning turns in Wonder Boys and Zodiac brought him into the new century with mainstream hits which ultimately led to his being cast as Marvel’s own Elon Musk-a-like Tony Stark aka Iron Man, making him Hollywood’s highest paid star in 2013-2015, a remarkable turnaround. With Team Downey, the production company he founded with wife Susan, he produced and starred in a wonderful drama (which had an admittedly odd incestuous subplot) The Judge, opposite Robert Duvall. It was a reminder that he was so much more than a comic book superhero. He made a very amusing speech at the Baftas in which he described his career in 30 seconds. As he said, his success has been bookended by two British directors, Richard Attenborough and Christopher Nolan, but the awards just confirm what we have always known: Robert Downey Jr. is the most exciting actor in the world. Many happy returns and congratulations to Robert Downey Jr.!

And The Oscar Goes To … The 96th Academy Awards 10th March 2024!

Here at Mondo Movies we contrarians always get it gloriously wrong. In this year of Barbenheimer, we give you our predictions for the evening’s ceremony, held an hour ahead of Bat Time and on another Bat Channel due to the US Springing Forward and Sky finally dropping the UK ball. That means our beloved Wossy is back fronting up a movie show for the first time in two decades and there’s an early start for Academy Award Bingo and drinking games. What was it they used to sing on the first season of Big Brother – it’s only a game show, it’s only a game show? Enjoy! Just don’t go spending your spondulix at Paddy Power on anything we think!

Picture: The Zone of Interest

Director: Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon

Adapted Screenplay: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Original Screenplay: Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet and Arthur Harari

Animated Feature: The Boy and the Heron

Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol

Actor: Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers

Actress: Emma Stone, Poor Things

Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer

Supporting Actress: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

International Feature: The Zone of Interest

Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema, Oppenheimer

Editing: Jennifer, Lame, Oppenheimer,

Production Design: James Price and Shona Heath, Poor Things

Visual Effects: Jay Cooper, Ian Comley, Andrew Roberts and Neil Corbould, The Creator

Sound: Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn, The Zone of Interest

Costume Design: Jacqueline Durran, Barbie

Makeup/Hair: Kazu Hiro, Kay Georgiou and Lori McCoy-Bell, Maestro

Score: Robbie Robertson, Killers of the Flower Moon

Song: What Was I Made For? Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, Barbie

Live-Action Short: Wes Anderson, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Illustration: Alex Rhodes, The Los Angeles Times

Joan Crawford Won the Academy Award for Best Actress 7th March 1946!

After being dumped by MGM, Joan Crawford went to Warner Brothers where after two years she was rewarded with the fabulously trashy melodrama Mildred Pierce adapted from the James M. Cain novel. For the first time in her career she was playing a mother and the role transformed her stardom into that of career woman. Then she was presented with the Academy Award at the 18th Oscars ceremony which took place 78 years ago today. What a dame!

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017)

Gorgeous mouth. You knew you’d get sore lips walking her home.  Wannabe actor Peter Turner (Jamie Bell) is rooming in Primrose Hill in 1978 when he’s introduced to the girl next door who just happens to be former movie star Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening). He teaches her disco dancing and they swiftly embark on an affair that takes him to New York and California where she lives in a trailer overlooking the ocean. They split up when her absences raise his suspicions but a couple of years later he receives a call that she’s collapsed while performing in a play and Gloria ends up living in his family’s Liverpool home with himself and his parents (Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham) and it appears she is now desperately ill … Turner’s memoir was published many years ago in the aftermath of Grahame’s death and the almost too good to be true story receives a very sympathetic adaptation to the screen, erotic and poignant, wistful and revealing. Artfully told backwards and forwards with inventive visual transitions, Bening and Bell give marvellously empathetic performances in a film that revels in its theatre and movie references, with particular homage paid to Bogey (Grahame’s co-star in In a Lonely Place) and Romeo and Juliet, which she so wanted to play on stage and whose romantic tragedy proves appropriate for the penultimate scene. Turner knew so little about Grahame he had to wait to see her onscreen at a retrospective watching Naked Alibi as Grahame sat beside him. Their first date is at Alien during which he nearly barfs with fear and she screams with laughter. Twenty-nine years and a lifetime of cinema and marriages (four, plus four children) separate them and their arguments (spurred by her discovery of cancer which she conceals from him) split them up and somehow she wants to spend her final days in the bosom of his loud Liverpudlian family. His parents put off their trip to Australia to see their oldest offspring, while brother Joe (Stephen Graham) objects to her monopolising of the family home. Bening captures her tics – some very good use of her famous mouth in particular scenes, some adept and brittle posing, and great attitude. Her own mother (Vanessa Redgrave) is a true thespian while her sister Joy (Frances Barber) tells Peter the reality of Gloria’s much-married past (he had no idea she’d scandalously married her stepson). That triggers mutual revelations of bisexuality. Both the leads have to play the gamut of emotions, till near death do they part as they are driven by their desire for each other and their fractious situation. Adapted by Matt Greenhalgh and directed by Paul McGuigan, this is a rather splendid look at what could happen to Hollywood stars when the machine spat them out and they were the unemployed victims of rancid rumours spread by way of explanation; but it’s also a deeply felt account of an unlikely relationship which was a true friendship at its core between a vulnerable woman who wanted to be treated decently and the first man to treat her with respect. Elegant.

Trumbo (2015)

You talk like a radical but you live like a rich guy.  In the early Forties in Hollywood Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) is the highest paid scriptwriter but he’s also a member of the Communist Party. In a 1947 purge led by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne (David James Elliott) Trumbo and several of his fellow writers are hounded into appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington where they go off-script and ten of them wind up being imprisoned and their careers are ruined. When they get out they have to rebuild and face down their betrayers as they scrabble to write for the black market … Adapted from Bruce Cook’s biography of the blacklisted screenwriter, this is so good on so many levels. It takes a relatively complex history of the Hollywood anti-communist campaign and makes it understandable and it comprehensively names all the people who were behind it as well as communicating the terrible fear that descended upon the creative industries when what America was really fighting was creeping liberalism (which it learned decades later and which was also feared by the communists). It accurately portrays the documented differences among the Hollywood Ten and how they were perceived by their peers (not entirely positively especially following their self-aggrandising performances at the HUAC hearings) and the terrible compromises and betrayals between friends:  Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) didn’t work for a year and gave names of those men already behind bars. How to win against the oppressive Hollywood machine drives so much of their post-prison experience – sue them like the composite figure of Arlen Hird (Louis CK) wants to do? or do what they’re good at and beat the bastards at their own game? like Trumbo does – and how apposite that Trumbo was selected to rewrite Spartacus after winning the Oscar for both Roman Holiday and The Brave One under a front and then a pseudonym. What raises this again above other films dramatising the same situation is the sheer wit and brio with which it is written and performed – which you’d frankly expect of anything with Trumbo’s name attached:  kudos to John McNamara. It also clarifies the extent to which this was a self-administered situation – these guys were screwed over by the studios voluntarily, not Government decree. Cranston is perfect in the role which is suffused with sadness and smarts and he embodies the writer we all really want to be – smoking like a train, drinking like a fish, tranked up on benzedrine and writing in the bathtub. A wonderfully ironic touch for a man who didn’t wallow. It’s wonderful to watch him deal with his daughter Nicola (Elle Fanning) become as politicised as him and he must assume a different parental role as she matures:  he admires her but he can’t be disturbed to get out of the tub and celebrate her birthday because he’s got a deadline.  There are great scenes:  when Trumbo notices that Robinson sold a Van Gogh to pay for the writers’ legal defence;  the writing of the cheapie scripts for the King Brothers. This is a complicated portrait of a fascinating and contradictory individual. Diane Lane has a thankless and almost dialogue-free part as his brilliant wife Cleo but her charismatic presence transforms her scenes:  she is duly thanked by Trumbo in the film’s final scene in 1970 during a Writers Guild ceremony. John Goodman is fantastic as the Poverty Row producer Frank King who meets a Motion Picture Alliance thug with a baseball bat and leaves him in no doubt as to what will happen if he gets the way of his hiring Trumbo because he’s in the business for money and pussy and doesn’t care about politics.  There’s a fantastic scene sequence that illustrates the different working methodologies of Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger:  Trumbo played them off one against the other to get his credits restored. The best tragicomic moment is perhaps in the clink when Trumbo encounters his nemesis J. Parnell Thomas who’s been imprisoned for a real crime – tax evasion. Trumbo was however convicted of one thing – contempt. He was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and this film does not shirk from that fact.  Directed sensitively and with panache by Jay Roach who has made a film that is literate, eloquent and humane. I am Spartacus.

Manchester By The Sea (2016)

I can’t beat it. Casey Affleck is Lee Chandler, a janitor in Boston, permanently hunched and haunted and beset by half-dressed female tenants who want to have sex with him and complain to his boss when he evinces no interest whatsoever and just fixes their toilets. He barely speaks. When he gets a call that older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died suddenly he is forced back to his titular hometown where people refer to him as ‘the Lee Chandler’ and he finds out from his brother’s lawyer he’s been named guardian to his irritating, underage, sexually voracious nephew Patrick (goofy ginger Lucas Hedges). It takes us a long time and a lot of repetitive scenes to get to the reason for his devastation:  the death of his young family for which he feels incalculable guilt. Patrick has no reaction to his father’s demise and just gets on with getting it on with whatever nasty teenage girls have sex with him, plays hockey and generally acts like dumb teenagers do when confronted with intimations of mortality (I was recently at a funeral when the teenage son of the woman whose death was being commemorated left midway to smoke cigarettes with several girls. This shit happens.) So much  of this is low-key and true that when these guys eventually drop their protective masks it is both surprising and shocking and explosive in terms of the situations  in which they finally let loose as much as anything else. Michelle Williams has one wonderful scene as Lee’s ex-wife (pictured in the poster) and it is of such delicacy that it elicits pure emotions not just from Affleck but the audience, otherwise her role is mainly confined to flashbacks of their marriage and its unfortunate and tragicomic ending (that ambulance scene is literally killer). So paradoxically despite its overlength the unsentimental narrative focus is somewhat diverted to the wrong situations and some scenes are consigned to montage underscored by rather obvious and ill-chosen music when we would prefer to hear the dialogue.  The flashback structure works brilliantly however. The rarely seen Gretchen Mol (the Next Big Thing, according to Vanity Fair circa 1998  when she co-starred with this film’s producer and intended star Matt Damon in Rounders) shows up as Patrick’s alkie mom, long estranged from the family. Affleck is simply masterful as this man who desires punishment but nobody wants him to suffer any more, except for a few women who believe he killed his kids. However it’s a long time getting to the point about how people deal differently with bereavement and even if we agree, such is real life, a playwright, screenwriter (and director) as smart as Kenneth Lonergan should and could have got there quicker.

Birdman (2014)

How rare is it that a Best Picture Academy Award winner can actually be watched more than once? I give you Crash, The King’s Speech and 12 Years a Slave, to name an intolerable few. Would you willingly sit through one of those again?!  This audacious, formal take on the unadulterated insecure narcissistic exhibitionistic actor (is there any other kind…) Riggan Thomson is an exception. His attempt to stage a Raymond Carver play on Broadway to try to recalibrate his career and be more than ‘one of those people awarding each other for cartoons and pornography’ (as hatchet woman theatre critic Lindsay Duncan snarls) is beset with difficulty. He tries to escape his populist reputation as the titular superhero but the grand irony is of course that cinema offers a far more fertile illusion than does the stage of realism trading as fantasy and to paraphrase R. Kelly, you will believe you can fly. Keaton is wonderful in a screenplay that trades on his definitive performance as Batman way back when, and it is a work that is replete with sharp references and allusions, written by director Alejandro G. Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo. This is a far greater film about heroism than those streamlined cookie cutter comic strip types Hollywood is now throwing up at us every time May rolls around:  this is a real flight of fancy, proceeding from earthbound and complex emotions and reality to actuated existence, expressed by a roving camera (that of Emmanuel Lubezki) that must have been a nightmare to act around by a game ensemble. Yes, this appealed to the Oscar voters’ vanity, but they got it right. And how fantastic was it to see Keaton mouth the words, ‘F’in A!’ at this years Oscars when his latest movie, Spotlight, also won the top award?! Hell yeah!

Ordinary People (1980)

Ordinary people played by extraordinary actors directed by 70s superstar Robert Redford in his debut behind the camera. All in cripplingly good taste, said the critics, who certainly weren’t happy that he won Best Director at the Academy Awards and the film picked up Best Picture. The Judith Guest novel was adapted by Alvin Sargent and it concerns the upper middle class Jarrett family after suicidal son Conrad (Timothy Hutton) returns from a mental hospital. Turns out he’s guilty about the death of his older and favoured brother in a boating accident. He’s sent to psychiatrist Dr Berger (Judd Hirsch) for help while Mom (Mary Tyler Moore) gradually reveals the true character behind that brittle facade as Dad (Donald Sutherland) tells her how tough she is when he pays a visit to the shrink himself. Seeing TV’s much-loved MTM as a tough cookie who seems to wish it was her younger son who died is a revelation. However it’s hard to pick out the best performance among the ensemble, which also includes Elizabeth McGovern, better known from TV’s Downton Abbey nowadays. Hutton also won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and he offers a perceptive and touching characterisation. It feels like an autumnal sonata, in a minor key.